Western Dress Quotes

Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out on themselves. Whoever survives the country wins. That would be much simpler and more than just this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting

Watch people when they win, and you will learn something. But watch them when they lose, and you will learn even more.

Also in contemporary Western society the union with the group is the prevalent way of overcoming separateness. It is a union which the individual self disappears to a large extent, and where the aim is to belong to the heard. If I am like everybody else, if I have no feeling or thoughts which make me different, if I conform in custom, dress, ideas, to the pattern of the group, I am saved: saved from the frightening experience of aloneness.

Jesse finishes paying for his drinks and turns. It takes only half a second, but his eyes burn a trail from my dress's neckline to its hem and back again. "The dress'll do," he says.

Religion is, as I say, something universal and something human, and something impossible to eradicate, nor would I want to eradicate it. I am a religious person, although I am not a believer. Religion is at its best when it is a long way from political power. The founder of the Christian religion -- or, the founders of the Christian religion, Jesus and St. Paul -- were both clear about this. "Blessed are the meek." "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." St. Paul is perfectly clear that the highest Christian virtue is charity, not patriotism, not martial valor, not exalting your class, your group, your race above others, but charity. That's the highest virtue. When religion remembers that and acts accordingly, it does good. But religion, at various points in human history, notably the history of western Europe and the history of some parts of the Middle East more recently, has acquired political power, and put its hands on the levers of social authority. It decides who shall live and who shall die. It decides how we shall dress, what we shall be allowed to read, whether we shall go to war, and so on. When religion acquires that power, it goes bad very rapidly.

She's a slinky sort of person, no angles at all; and magnetic - you can't take your eyes off her. She's dressed like a Westerner, but her eyes have a slant to them. They are the eyes of an Easterner. She doesn't walk like our women do, she seems to writhe all in one piece - undulates is the word. ("Kiss Of The Cobra")

Zoe stopped one last time in front of the mirror, adjusting her new American dress. She didn’t see the dress, however. She saw what the big Russian did to her. She saw what al-Qaeda did to her. She saw a person shunned by her Persian village. She saw ugliness. Every time she looked in the mirror she saw deficiency.

No doubt after the emperor was overthrown in 1911, your gardener would have joined the rest of the world in cutting the queue and taking on the laws and customs of his adoptive land. Before that, his assuming Western dress would have been dangerous for his family in China.

Zoe returned by rail to Claremont Village. After the train pulled away, she stood alone, beneath a security camera affixed to a lamppost. She looked up, and its lifeless eye looked straight back. In some uncontrollable fancy she turned and curtseyed, imagining someone wonderful on the other side of the lens would be captivated by her new American dress.

AS A HUNTER I am looked down upon in Western society. I am portrayed as a brute. I am denigrated and spat upon, and thought of as a slow-witted anachronism, the dregs of a discredited culture. This happened quickly when one looks at human history. The skills I possess—the ability to track, hunt, kill, and dress out my prey so it can be served at a table to feed others—were prized for tens of thousands of years. Hunters fed those in the tribe and family who could not hunt well or did not hunt because they weren’t physically able to. The success of the hunter produced not only healthy food and clothing, tools, medicine, and amenities, but a direct hot-blooded connection with God and the natural world. The hunter was the provider, and exalted as such.

It is not true that Islam makes it impossible for Muslims to create a modern secular society, as Westerners sometimes imagine. But it is true that secularization has been very different in the Muslim world. In the West, it has usually been experienced as benign. In the early days, it was conceived by such philosophers as John Locke (1632–1704) as a new and better way of being religious, since it freed religion from coercive state control and enabled it to be more true to its spiritual ideals. But in the Muslim world, secularism has often consisted of a brutal attack upon religion and the religious. Atatürk, for example, closed down all the madrasahs, suppressed the Sufi orders and forced men and women to wear modern Western dress. Such coercion is always counterproductive. Islam in Turkey did not disappear, it simply went underground. Muhammad Ali had also despoiled the Egyptian ulama, appropriated their endowments and deprived them of influence.

Hidden all day in impenetrable black burkas, rich Saudi women transformed themselves by night into birds of paradise with their corsets, their see-through bras, their G-strings with multicolored lace and rhinestones. They were exactly the opposite of Western women, who spent their days dressed up and looking sexy to maintain their social status, then collapsed in exhaustion once they got home, abandoning all hope of seduction in favor of clothes that were loose and shapeless.

When I lived on the Bluff in Yokohama I spend a good deal of my leisure in the company of foreign residents, at their banquets and balls. At close range I was not particularly struck by their whiteness, but from a distance I could distinguish them quite clearly from the Japanese. Among the Japanese were ladies who were dressed in gowns no less splendid than the foreigners’, and whose skin was whiter than theirs. Yet from across the room these ladies, even one alone, would stand out unmistakably from amongst a group of foreigners. For the Japanese complexion, no matter how white, is tinged by a slight cloudiness. These women were in no way reticent about powdering themselves. Every bit of exposed flesh—even their backs and arms—they covered with a thick coat of white. Still they could not efface the darkness that lay below their skin. It was as plainly visible as dirt at the bottom of a pool of pure water. Between the fingers, around the nostrils, on the nape of the neck, along the spine—about these places especially, dark, almost dirty, shadows gathered. But the skin of the Westerners, even those of a darker complexion, had a limpid glow. Nowhere were they tainted by this gray shadow. From the tops of their heads to the tips of their fingers the whiteness was pure and unadulterated. Thus it is that when one of us goes among a group of Westerners it is like a grimy stain on a sheet of white paper. The sight offends even our own eyes and leaves none too pleasant a feeling.

Nobody in Faha could remember when it started. Rain there on the western seaboard was a condition of living. It came straight-down and sideways, frontwards, backwards and any other wards God could think of. It came in sweeps, in waves, sometimes in veils. It came dressed as drizzle, as mizzle, as mist, as showers, frequent and widespread, as a wet fog, as a damp day, a drop, a dripping, and an out-and-out downpour. It came the fine day, the bright day, and the day promised dry. It came at any time of the day and night, and in all seasons, regardless of calendar and forecast, until in Faha your clothes were rain and your skin was rain and your house was rain with a fireplace. It came off the grey vastness of an Atlantic that threw itself against the land like a lover once spurned and resolved not to be so again. It came accompanied by seagulls and smells of salt and seaweed. It came with cold air and curtained light. It came like a judgment, or, in benign version, like a blessing God had forgotten he had left on. It came for a handkerchief of blue sky, came on westerlies, sometimes—why not?—on easterlies, came in clouds that broke their backs on the mountains in Kerry and fell into Clare, making mud the ground and blind the air. It came disguised as hail, as sleet, but never as snow. It came softly sometimes, tenderly sometimes, its spears turned to kisses, in rain that pretended it was not rain, that had come down to be closer to the fields whose green it loved and fostered, until it drowned them.

In historical terms women, black people in general, were very attracted to very bright-colored clothing. Most people are frightened by color anyway...They just are. In this culture quiet colors are considered elegant. Civilized Western people wouldn’t buy bloodred sheets or dishes. There may be something more to it than what I am suggesting. But the slave population had no access even to what color there was, because they wore slave clothes, hand-me-downs, work clothes made out of burlap and sacking. For them a colored dress would be luxurious; it wouldn’t matter whether it was rich or poor cloth . . . just to have a red or a yellow dress. I stripped Beloved of color so that there are only the small moments when Sethe runs amok buying ribbons and bows, enjoying herself the way children enjoy that kind of color. The whole business of color was why slavery was able to last such a long time. It wasn’t as though you had a class of convicts who could dress themselves up and pass themselves off. No, these were people marked because of their skin color, as well as other features. So color is a signifying mark. Baby Suggs dreams of color and says, “Bring me a little lavender.” It is a kind of luxury. We are so inundated with color and visuals. I just wanted to pull it back so that one could feel that hunger and that delight.

Mexico is a lawless place. I don’t care what the UN says, or what the State Department travel advisories tell you. The fact is that Mexico, as a whole, is a narco-state run by powerful regional cartels, with a hollow and largely irrelevant central government that is nothing more than window-dressing to appease the international community. Freedom is for those who can afford it, law is for sale, and what is fair is determined by who is most powerful. That’s the reality of Mexico. Cancun, Playa, Cabo, Puerto Vallarta- they are all much better than the interior of Mexico, but that is only because their survival depends on a steady flow of tourists with money to burn. To protect that, the government does a good job maintaining the appearance of western-style law and order through the direct threat of massive military intervention. Underneath it all, those places are not much different from the rest of Mexico.

We in the West still seemed to believe the old story of how a man transformed an Islamic empire into a secular republic: Atatürk came along, changed some rules, the people followed. Old Turkish textbooks didn’t portray the suppression of Islam as anything other than a liberation. But I began to question for the first time what it was like to suddenly lose your language, your mode of dress, your idea of the world. My assumption had been that any social revolution that resulted in a country becoming more “modern,” in the American sense, must have been a good thing. In Turkey, not only had this revolution been damaging, but it hadn’t worked. It was strange, I was as critical of the United States as I thought one could be. But at that point, I still had no idea that with even those political views came an unassailable, perhaps unconscious faith in my country’s inherent goodness, as well as in my country’s Western way of living, and perhaps in my own inherent, God-given, Christian-American goodness as well.

You look good to me," he said, his eyes raking appreciatively over her. "I think ranch life must suit you." "Thanks. You look good to me too." He was dressed in his customary faded jeans and a worn denim jacket, but Keith would look good in a burlap sack.

Seems a lot of men never saw one such as me. A girl what could keep up and fight and ride and curse with the best of them. A girl what ain’t trapped in some dress or some house or some bed. A girl what ain’t waiting on some man to do what she ought to her own damn self.

Katczinsky won’t budge from the opinion which as an old Front-hog, he rhymes: Give ’em all the same grub and all the same pay And the war would be over and done in a day. Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out among themselves. Whoever survives, his country wins. That would be much simpler and more just than this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting.

Do you think I’m too Westernized?” I asked Leila as we walked back home from the library. “What do you mean?” “This guy, Sufyan, says I’m too Westernized.” “The American guy? You’re letting an American guy tell you whether you’re Arab enough?” “He’s originally Arab —” I began. “Oh please. Arab Americans are even worse than white people. They look at you like they know you, as if they have an idea of what you’re like from stereotypes and their parents’ ancient memories. And when you don’t conform to their image it terrifies them, because they wear their Arab culture like window dressing but underneath they are as white as snow.

Hidden all day in impenetrable black burkas, rich Saudi women transformed themselves by night into birds of paradise with their corsets, their see-through bras, their G-strings with multicolored lace and rhinestones. They were exactly the opposite of Western women, who spent their days dressed up and looking sexy to

A BRAVE AND STARTLING TRUTH We, this people, on a small and lonely planet Traveling through casual space Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns To a destination where all signs tell us It is possible and imperative that we learn A brave and startling truth And when we come to it To the day of peacemaking When we release our fingers From fists of hostility And allow the pure air to cool our palms When we come to it When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean When battlefields and coliseum No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters Up with the bruised and bloody grass To lie in identical plots in foreign soil When the rapacious storming of the churches The screaming racket in the temples have ceased When the pennants are waving gaily When the banners of the world tremble Stoutly in the good, clean breeze When we come to it When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders And children dress their dolls in flags of truce When land mines of death have been removed And the aged can walk into evenings of peace When religious ritual is not perfumed By the incense of burning flesh And childhood dreams are not kicked awake By nightmares of abuse When we come to it Then we will confess that not the Pyramids With their stones set in mysterious perfection Nor the Gardens of Babylon Hanging as eternal beauty In our collective memory Not the Grand Canyon Kindled into delicious color By Western sunsets Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji Stretching to the Rising Sun Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor, Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores These are not the only wonders of the world When we come to it We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace We, this people on this mote of matter In whose mouths abide cankerous words Which challenge our very existence Yet out of those same mouths Come songs of such exquisite sweetness That the heart falters in its labor And the body is quieted into awe We, this people, on this small and drifting planet Whose hands can strike with such abandon That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness That the haughty neck is happy to bow And the proud back is glad to bend Out of such chaos, of such contradiction We learn that we are neither devils nor divines When we come to it We, this people, on this wayward, floating body Created on this earth, of this earth Have the power to fashion for this earth A climate where every man and every woman Can live freely without sanctimonious piety Without crippling fear When we come to it We must confess that we are the possible We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world That is when, and only when We come to it.

As they reached the steps to the house, the door opened. A woman in a gray dress and white apron glared at them. Taken aback, Delia faltered. Mr. Livingston leaned over. "Don't mind Mrs. Graves, my housekeeper," he said in a low voice full of humor, obviously meant to reassure her. "That's her normal expression. She only smiles once a year on Christmas.

Las Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification, a place the tone of which is set by mobsters and call girls and ladies’ room attendants with amyl nitrite poppers in their uniform pockets. Almost everyone notes that there is no “time” in Las Vegas, no night and no day and no past and no future (no Las Vegas casino, however, has taken the obliteration of the ordinary time sense quite so far as Harold’s Club in Reno, which for a while issued, at odd intervals in the day and night, mimeographed “bulletins” carrying news from the world outside); neither is there any logical sense of where one is. One is standing on a highway in the middle of a vast hostile desert looking at an eighty-foot sign which blinks ”stardust” or “caesar’s palace.” Yes, but what does that explain? This geographical implausibility reinforces the sense that what happens there has no connection with “real” life; Nevada cities like Reno and Carson are ranch towns, Western towns, places behind which there is some historical imperative. But Las Vegas seems to exist only in the eye of the beholder. All of which makes it an extraordinarily stimulating and interesting place, but an odd one in which to want to wear a candlelight satin Priscilla of Boston wedding dress with Chantilly lace insets, tapered sleeves and a detachable modified train.

With a Western Kansas contingent was another musician, seemingly from a small town. He carried a mandolin. He wore a green hat and green clothes which had pearl buttons on them wherever they could be put — cuffs, lapels, pocket flaps. In his tie was a small gold vanity pin which looked as if a fluffy-haired 16-year-old girl in a white dress had placed it there the night before the lad had started away for the wars.

The back barn door opened, and in walked a vision in a billowing green dress. As she led in her mare, Mr. McBride’s voice faded away as Tom’s total attention turned to the girl. About twenty-one or two, Tom guessed. Not too tall, nor short. Beautiful heart-shaped face decorated with rosy cheeks and light freckles. Long auburn hair tied back in a ponytail. Perfectly set green eyes. Full-bosomed and hourglass shaped. Breathtaking.

Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out among themselves. Whoever survives, his country wins. That would be much simpler and more just than this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting.

Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out among themselves. Whoever survives, his country wins. That would be much simpler and more just than this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting. The

Later he would tell her that their story began at the Royal Hungarian Opera House, the night before he left for Paris on the Western Europe Express. The year was 1937; the month was September, the evening unseasonably cold. His brother had insisted on taking him to the opera as a parting gift. The show was Tosca and their seats were at the top of the house. Not for them the three marble-arched doorways, the façade with its Corinthian columns and heroic entablature. Theirs was a humble side entrance with a red-faced ticket taker, a floor of scuffed wood, walls plastered with crumbling opera posters. Girls in knee-length dresses climbed the stairs arm in arm with young men in threadbare suits; pensioners argued with their white-haired wives as they shuffled up the five narrow flights. At the top, a joyful din: a refreshment salon lined with mirrors and wooden benches, the air hazy with cigarette smoke. A doorway at its far end opened onto the concert hall itself, the great electric-lit cavern of it, with its ceiling fresco of Greek immortals and its gold-scrolled tiers. Andras had never expected to see an opera here, nor would he have if Tibor hadn’t bought the tickets. But it was Tibor’s opinion that residence in Budapest must include at least one evening of Puccini at the Operaház. Now Tibor leaned over the rail to point out Admiral Horthy’s box, empty that night except for an ancient general in a hussar’s jacket. Far below, tuxedoed ushers led men and women to their seats, the men in evening dress, the women’s hair glittering with jewels.

For example, while new fascism would necessarily diabolize some enemy, both external and internal, the enemy would not necessarily be Jews. An authentically popular American Fascism would be pious, antiblack, and since September 11, 2001, anti-Islamic as well; in western Europe, secular and, these days, more likely anti-Islamic than anti-Semitic; in Russia and easter Europe, religious, anti-Semitic, Slavophile and anti-Western. New Fascism would probably prefer the mainstream patriotic dress of their own in place and time to alien swastikas or fasces.

So we rode through a broken gate in a broken wall into a broken town, and it was dusk, and the day's rain had finally lifted, and a shaft of red sunlight came from beneath the western clouds as we entered the ruined town. We rode straight into the light of that swollen sun which reflected from my helm that had the silver wolf on its crest, and it shone from my mail coat and from my arm rings and from the hilts of my two swords, and someone shouted that I was the king. I rode Witnere, who tossed his great head and pawed at the ground, and I was dressed in my shining war glory.

We see men living with their skulls blown open; we see soldiers run with their two feet cut off, they stagger on their splintered stumps into the next shell-hole; a lance-corporal crawls a mile and a half on his hands dragging his smashed knee after him; another goes to the dressing station and over his clasped hands bulge his intestines; we see men without mouths, without jaws, without faces; we find one man who has held the artery of his arm in his teeth for two hours in order not to bleed to death. The sun goes down, night comes, the shells whine, life is at an end. Still the little piece of convulsed earth in which we lie is held.

Sometimes substituting race for gender also is an interesting exercise. Say a country, a close Western ally and trading partner, had a population half white, half black. The whites had complete control of the blacks. They could beat them if they disobeyed. They deprived them of the right to leave the house without permission; to walk unmolested without wearing the official segregating dress; to hold any decent job in the government, or to work at all without the permission of the white in control of them. Would there have been uproar in our countries by now? Would we have imposed trade sanctions and subjected this country to international opprobrium? You bet. Yet countries such as Saudi Arabia, which deprive half their population of these most basic rights, have been subjected to none of these things. It

Hemingway, pulling up to the Ritz with two truckloads of his French irregulars, told the bartender, “How about seventy-three dry martinis?” Later, after he and several companions had dined on soup, creamed spinach, raspberries in liqueur, and Perrier-Jouët champagne, the waiter added the Vichy tax to the bill, explaining, “It’s the law.” No matter: “We drank. We ate. We glowed,” one of Hemingway’s comrades reported. Private Irwin Shaw of the 12th Infantry, who later won fame as a writer, believed that August 25 was “the day the war should have ended.” To Ernie Pyle, ensconced in a hotel room with a soft bed though no hot water or electricity, “Paris seems to have all the beautiful girls we have always heard it had.… They dress in riotous colors.” The liberation, he concluded, was “the loveliest, brightest story of our time.” *

At first glance, professionalism tries to convince you it’s a neutral word, merely meant to signify a collection of behaviors, clothing, and norms “appropriate” for the workplace. We just ask that everyone be professional, the cis white men will say, smiles on their faces, as if they’re not asking for much. We try to maintain a professional office environment. But never has a word in the English language been so loaded with racism, sexism, heteronormativity, or trans exclusion. Whenever someone is telling you to “be professional,” they’re really saying, “be more like me.” If you’re black, “being professional” can often mean speaking differently, avoiding black cultural references, or not wearing natural hair. If you’re not American, “being professional” can mean abandoning your cultural dress for Western business clothes. If you’re not Christian, “being professional” can mean potentially removing your hijab to fit in, sitting by while your officemates ignore your need for kosher or halal food, sucking up the fact that your office puts up a giant Christmas tree every year. If you’re low-income or working class, “being professional” can mean spending money you don’t have on work clothes—“dressing nicely” for a job that may not pay enough for you to really afford to do so. If you’re a woman, “being professional” can mean navigating a veritable minefield of double standards. Show some skin, but don’t be a slut. Wear heels, but not too high, and not too low, either. Wear form-fitting clothes, but not too form-fitting. We offer maternity leave, but don’t “interrupt your career” by taking it. And if you’re trans like me, “being professional” can mean putting your identity away unless it conforms to dominant gender norms.

One feature of our own society that seems decidedly anomalous is the matter of sexual advertisement, As we have seen, it is strongly to be expected on evolutionary grounds that, where the sexes differ, it should be the males that advertise and the females that are drab. Modern western man is undoubtedly exceptional in this respect. It is of course true that some men dress flamboyantly and some women dress drably but, on average, there can be no doubt that in our society the equivalent of the peacock's tail is exhibited by the female, not by the male. Women paint their faces and glue on false eyelashes. Apart from special cases, like actors, men do not. Women seem to be interested in their own personal appearance and are encouraged in this by their magazines and journals. Men's magazines are less preoccupied with male sexual attractiveness, and a man who is unusually interested in his own dress and appearance is apt to arouse suspicion, both among men and among women. When a woman is described in conversation, it is quite likely that her sexual attractiveness, or lack of it, will be prominently mentioned. This is true, whether the speaker is a man or a woman. When a man is described, the adjectives used are much more likely to have nothing to do with sex. Faced with these facts, a biologist would be forced to suspect that he was looking at a society in which females compete for males, rather than vice versa. In the case of birds of paradise, we decided that females are drab because they do not need to compete for males. Males are bright and ostentatious because females are in demand and can afford to be choosy. The reason female birds of paradise are in demand is that eggs are a more scarce resource than sperms. What has happened in modern western man? Has the male really become the sought-after sex, the one that is in demand, the sex that can afford to be choosy? If so, why?

The global centre of power shifted to Europe only between 1750 and 1850, when Europeans humiliated the Asian powers in a series of wars and conquered large parts of Asia. By 1900 Europeans firmly controlled the world’s economy and most of its territory. In 1950 western Europe and the United States together accounted for more than half of global production, whereas China’s portion had been reduced to 5 per cent.5 Under the European aegis a new global order and global culture emerged. Today all humans are, to a much greater extent than they usually want to admit, European in dress, thought and taste. They may be fiercely anti-European in their rhetoric, but almost everyone on the planet views politics, medicine, war and economics through European eyes, and listens to music written in European modes with words in European languages. Even today’s burgeoning Chinese economy, which may soon regain its global primacy, is built on a European model of production and finance.

Asia so degraded, so corrupted by the colonial era and by its own crowdedness that it can only choose between depravity and the puritan orgy of communIsm. The women of Thailand are so beautiful that they have become the hostesses of the Western world, sought after and desired everywhere for their grace, which is that of a submissive and affectionate femininity of nubile slaves - now dressed by Dior - an astounding sexual come-on in a gaze which looks you straight in the eye and a potential acquiescence to your every whim. In short, the fulfilment of Western man's dreams. Thai women seem spontaneously to embody the sexuality of the Arabian Nights, like the Nubian slaves in ancient Rome. Thai men, on the other hand, seem sad and forlorn; their physiques are not in tune with world chic, while their women's are privileged to be the currently fashionable form of ethnic beauty. What is left for these men but to assist in the universal promotion of their women for high-class prostitution?

Images of people in the Middle East dressing like Westerners, spending like Westerners, that is what the voters watching TV here at home want to see. That is a visible sign that we really are winning the war of ideas—the struggle between consumption and economic growth, and religious tradition and economic stagnation. I thought, why are those children coming onto the streets more and more often? It’s not anything we have done, is it? It’s not any speeches we have made, or countries we have invaded, or new constitutions we have written, or sweets we have handed out to children, or football matches between soldiers and the locals. It’s because they, too, watch TV. They watch TV and see how we live here in the West. They see children their own age driving sports cars. They see teenagers like them, instead of living in monastic frustration until someone arranges their marriages, going out with lots of different girls, or boys. They see them in bed with lots of different girls and boys. They watch them in noisy bars, bottles of lager upended over their mouths, getting happy, enjoying the privilege of getting drunk. They watch them roaring out support or abuse at football matches. They see them getting on and off planes, flying from here to there without restriction and without fear, going on endless holidays, shopping, lying in the sun. Especially, they see them shopping: buying clothes and PlayStations, buying iPods, video phones, laptops, watches, digital cameras, shoes, trainers, baseball caps. Spending money, of which there is always an unlimited supply, in bars and restaurants, hotels and cinemas. These children of the West are always spending. They are always restless, happy and with unlimited access to cash. I realised, with a flash of insight, that this was what was bringing these Middle Eastern children out on the streets. I realised that they just wanted to be like us. Those children don’t want to have to go to the mosque five times a day when they could be hanging out with their friends by a bus shelter, by a phone booth or in a bar. They don’t want their families to tell them who they can and can’t marry. They might very well not want to marry at all and just have a series of partners. I mean, that’s what a lot of people do. It is no secret, after that serial in the Daily Mail, that that is what I do. I don’t necessarily need the commitment. Why should they not have the same choices as me? They want the freedom to fly off for their holidays on easy Jet. I know some will say that what a lot of them want is just one square meal a day or the chance of a drink of clean water, but on the whole the poor aren’t the ones on the street and would not be my target audience. They aren’t going to change anything, otherwise why are they so poor? The ones who come out on the streets are the ones who have TVs. They’ve seen how we live, and they want to spend.

Mike sounded dismissive of Western communication styles, but he admitted that he sometimes wished he could be noisy and uninhibited himself. “They’re more comfortable with their own character,” he said of his Caucasian classmates. Asians are “not uncomfortable with who they are, but are uncomfortable with expressing who they are. In a group, there’s always that pressure to be outgoing. When they don’t live up to it, you can see it in their faces.” Mike told me about a freshman icebreaking event he’d participated in, a scavenger hunt in San Francisco that was supposed to encourage students to step out of their comfort zones. Mike was the only Asian assigned to a rowdy group, some of whom streaked naked down a San Francisco street and cross-dressed in a local department store during the hunt. One girl went to a Victoria’s Secret display and stripped down to her underwear. As Mike recounted these details, I thought he was going to tell me that his group had been over the top, inappropriate. But he wasn’t critical of the other students. He was critical of himself. “When people do things like that, there’s a moment where I feel uncomfortable with it. It shows my own limits. Sometimes I feel like they’re better than I am.” Mike was getting similar messages from his professors. A few weeks after the orientation event, his freshman adviser—a professor at Stanford’s medical school—invited a group of students to her house. Mike hoped to make a good impression, but he couldn’t think of anything to say. The other students seemed to have no problem joking around and asking intelligent questions. “Mike, you were so loud today,” the professor teased him when finally he said good-bye. “You just blew me away.” He left her house feeling bad about himself. “People who don’t talk are seen as weak or lacking,” he concluded ruefully.

This reaction to the work was obviously a misunderstanding. It ignores the fact that the future Buddha was also of noble origins, that he was the son of a king and heir to the throne and had been raised with the expectation that one day he would inherit the crown. He had been taught martial arts and the art of government, and having reached the right age, he had married and had a son. All of these things would be more typical of the physical and mental formation of a future samurai than of a seminarian ready to take holy orders. A man like Julius Evola was particularly suitable to dispel such a misconception. He did so on two fronts in his Doctrine: on the one hand, he did not cease to recall the origins of the Buddha, Prince Siddhartha, who was destined to the throne of Kapilavastu: on the other hand, he attempted to demonstrate that Buddhist asceticism is not a cowardly resignation before life's vicissitudes, but rather a struggle of a spiritual kind, which is not any less heroic than the struggle of a knight on the battlefield. As Buddha himself said (Mahavagga, 2.15): 'It is better to die fighting than to live as one vanquished.' This resolution is in accord with Evola's ideal of overcoming natural resistances in order to achieve the Awakening through meditation; it should he noted, however, that the warrior terminology is contained in the oldest writings of Buddhism, which are those that best reflect the living teaching of the master. Evola works tirelessly in his hook to erase the Western view of a languid and dull doctrine that in fact was originally regarded as aristocratic and reserved for real 'champions.' After Schopenhauer, the unfounded idea arose in Western culture that Buddhism involved a renunciation of the world and the adoption of a passive attitude: 'Let things go their way; who cares anyway.' Since in this inferior world 'everything is evil,' the wise person is the one who, like Simeon the Stylite, withdraws, if not to the top of a pillar; at least to an isolated place of meditation. Moreover, the most widespread view of Buddhists is that of monks dressed in orange robes, begging for their food; people suppose that the only activity these monks are devoted to is reciting memorized texts, since they shun prayers; thus, their religion appears to an outsider as a form of atheism. Evola successfully demonstrates that this view is profoundly distorted by a series of prejudices. Passivity? Inaction? On the contrary, Buddha never tired of exhorting his disciples to 'work toward victory'; he himself, at the end of his life, said with pride: katam karaniyam, 'done is what needed to he done!' Pessimism? It is true that Buddha, picking up a formula of Brahmanism, the religion in which he had been raised prior to his departure from Kapilavastu, affirmed that everything on earth is 'suffering.' But he also clarified for us that this is the case because we are always yearning to reap concrete benefits from our actions. For example, warriors risk their lives because they long for the pleasure of victory and for the spoils, and yet in the end they are always disappointed: the pillaging is never enough and what has been gained is quickly squandered. Also, the taste of victory soon fades away. But if one becomes aware of this state of affairs (this is one aspect of the Awakening), the pessimism is dispelled since reality is what it is, neither good nor bad in itself; reality is inscribed in Becoming, which cannot be interrupted. Thus, one must live and act with the awareness that the only thing that matters is each and every moment. Thus, duty (dhamma) is claimed to be the only valid reference point: 'Do your duty,' that is. 'let your every action he totally disinterested.

Because I have already had a long leave I get none on Sundays. So the last Sunday before I go back to the front my father and eldest sister come over to see me. All day we sit in the Soldiers’ Home. Where else could we go? We don’t want to stay in the camp. About midday we go for a stroll on the moors. The hours are a torture; we do not know what to talk about, so we speak of my mother’s illness. It is now definitely cancer, she is already in the hospital and will be operated on shortly. The doctors hope she will recover, but we have never heard of cancer being cured. ”Where is she then?” I ask. ”In the Luisa Hospital,” says my father. ”In which class?” ”Third. We must wait till we know what the operation costs. She wanted to be in the third herself. She said that then she would have some company. And besides it is cheaper.” ”So she is lying there with all those people. If only she could sleep properly.” My father nods. His face is broken and full of furrows. My mother has always been sickly; and though she has only gone to the hospital when she has been compelled to, it has cost a great deal of money, and my father’s life has been practically given up to it. ”If only I knew how much the operation costs,” says he. ”Have you not asked?” ”Not directly, I cannot do that–the surgeon might take it amiss and that would not do; he must operate on mother.” Yes, I think bitterly, that’s how it is with us, and with all poor people. They don’t dare ask the price, but worry themselves dreadfully beforehand about it; but the others, for whom it is not important, they settle the price first as a matter of course. And the doctor does not take it amiss from them. ”The dressings afterwards are so expensive,” says my father. ”Doesn’t the Invalid’s Fund pay anything toward it, then?” I ask. ”Mother has been ill too long.” ”Have you any money at all?” He shakes his head: ”No, but I can do some overtime.” I know. He will stand at his desk folding and pasting and cutting until twelve o’clock at night. At eight o’clock in the evening he will eat some miserable rubbish they get in exchange for their food tickets, then he will take a powder for his headache and work on.

A large lantern appeared in one of Charun's hands. It glowed, illuminating him, me, and the immediate area. I saw him all the better for it, a tall rangy man, dressed in black jeans and a black and red plaid western shirt. He also wore snakeskin cowboy boots. Never had I imagined Charun, the Ferryman of the River Styx, dressed like that. He should be riding off into the sunset; not ferrying souls to the Elysian Fields.

For the mainly Urdu- speaking migrants from India who abandoned home and hearth to make their futures in a predominantly non- Urdu speaking country, Pakistan was the land of opportunity. Better educated than most of their coreligionists in western Pakistan, they expected to get the best jobs. Some of these muhajirs, as the refugees from India came to be known, had sensibly moved their money before partition in the hope of starting up new businesses in both wings of the country. The idea of material gain encapsulated in “Pakistan Zindabad” was a stretch removed from the other more loaded slogan, defining its meaning in vague Islamic terms. But for all their claims dressed up in religious terminology, the protagonists of an Islamic state too had their sights on power and pelf in the Muslim El Dorado.

Western-inspired changes in everyday life were numerous and often bewildering. From 1 January 1873 the western solar (Gregorian) calendar was adopted in place of the old lunar one, meaning that dates now "advanced by between 3 and 6 weeks. Telegraphs started operating in 1869 and a postal service in 1871. Modern-style newspapers proliferated from the early 1870's, and a testimony to the high degree of literacy in the nation, over a 100 of them were in circulation by 1875. Western dress became fashionable among progressives and in 1972 became compulsory for government officials (including ceremonial occasions) and civil servants such as postman. Western-style haircuts also became increasingly fashionable and popular symbol of modernity.

There can be no greater mistake than to suppose that dress , for example , is something purely "external" and , thus , of no importance to the intellectual and spiritual Self of man . Dress is generally the outcome of an age-long development of a people's tastes and needs. Its fashion corresponds to the aesthetic conceptions of that people, and so to its inclinations. It has been shaped and is constantly being re-shaped according to the changes through which the character and the inclinations of its people are passing. Western fashions of today, for instance, thoroughly corres­pond to the intellectual and moral character of the modern West.

Hammer: Where are u? The chicks at the Gas Station are so hot tonight. It’s like winter doesn’t exist for them. God bless band-aid dresses. Me: Bandage. Hammer: Same thing. Where are u?! Do you think the Christmas break makes these Western girls hotter? I don’t remember them being so fine last semester. Me: How much have u had to drink? It’s only 8. Hammer: Where are u?

He abolished the Sultanate. Then, the Caliphate, the Islamic equivalent to the Pope. He gave women the right to divorce and introduced civil marriage. Laws were passed introducing western dress and western hats. Madrassas, Islamic religious schools, were closed and major universities were made secular. Women were not allowed to wear veils in public buildings, and were given the right to vote. He changed the script of the Turkish language, from Arabic to a modified Latin script still used throughout the country today. Under his tutelage, Turkey shifted from the center of the Islamic world to a nation oriented firmly to Europe and the west for direction. All

Eventually, he felt an overwhelming urge to meld his voice with the notes, and he began to play his ballad for the wind. Jack sang his verses, his fingers strumming with confidence. He sang to the southern wind with its promise of strength in battle. He sang to the western wind with its promise of healing. He sang to the northern wind with its promise of vindication. The notes rose and fell, undulating like the hills far beneath him. But while the wind carried his music and his voice, the folk of the air didn’t answer. What if they refuse to come? Jack wondered, with a pulse of worry. From the corner of his eye, he watched as Adaira rose to her feet. The wind seemed to be waiting for her to move. To stand and meet it. She stood planted on the rock as Jack continued to play, shielded by Orenna’s essence. Twice, he had played for the spirits and had nearly forgotten he was a man, that he was not a part of them. But this time he held firmly to himself as he watched the folk answer. The southern wind manifested first. They arrived with a sigh and formed themselves from the gust, individualizing into men and women with hair like fire—red and amber with a trace of blue. Great feathered wings bloomed from their backs like those of a bird, and each beat of their pinions emitted a wash of warmth and longing. Jack could taste the nostalgia they offered; he drank it like a bittersweet wine, like the memories of a summer long ago. The east wind was the next to arrive. They manifested in a flurry of leaves, their hair like molten gold. Their wings were fashioned like those of a bat, long and pronged and the shade of dusk. They carried the fragrance of rain in their wings. The west wind spun themselves out of whispers, with hair the shade of midnight, long and jeweled with stars. Their wings were like those of a moth, patterned with moons, beating softly and evoking both beauty and dread as Jack beheld them. The air shimmered at their edges like a dream, as if they might melt at any moment, and their skin smelled of smoke and cloves as they hovered in place, unable to depart as Jack’s music captivated them. Half of the spirits watched him, entranced by his ballad. But half of them watched Adaira, their eyes wide and brimming with light. “It’s her,” some of them whispered. Jack missed a note. He quickly regained his place, pushing his concern aside. It felt like his nails were creating sparks on the brass strings. He sang the verse for the northern wind again. The sky darkened. Thunder rumbled in the distance as the north reluctantly answered Jack’s summoning. The air plunged cold and bitter as the strongest of the winds manifested from wisps of clouds and stinging gales. It answered the music, fragmenting into men and women with flaxen hair, dressed in leather and links of silver webs. Their wings were translucent and veined, reminiscent of a dragonfly’s, boasting every color found beneath the sun. They came reluctantly, defiantly. Their eyes bore into him like needles. Jack was alarmed by their reaction to him. Some of them hissed through their sharp teeth, while others cowered as if awaiting a death blow. His ballad came to its end, and the absence of his voice and music sharpened the terror of the moment. Adaira continued to stand before an audience of manifested spirits, and Jack was stunned by the sight of them. To know that they had rushed alongside him as he walked the east. That he had felt their fingers in his hair, felt them kiss his mouth and steal words from his lips, carrying his voice in their hands. And his music had just summoned them. His voice and song now held them captive, beholden to him. He studied the horde. Some of the spirits looked amused, others shocked. Some were afraid, and some were angry.

Vhalla?” She hadn’t even heard Larel stir. “Morning.” Vhalla finished dressing quickly. “Are you all right?” It was annoying how Larel missed nothing. “I’m fine.” Vhalla began breaking down the tent. “Was it another dream?” “Enough, Larel,” Vhalla sighed and straightened. The Western woman was silent. Vhalla should’ve been too, but there was an aching feeling in Vhalla’s stomach that put nastiness in her blood. “Why are you always pestering me? It’s none of your concern what I dream or don’t dream, what I eat or what I don’t eat.” Larel’s face was expressionless. “Just leave me alone for once.” Vhalla grabbed her pack and stormed off, leaving the rest of the tent for Larel. She hated herself for those words. It wasn’t Larel’s fault. The class Vhalla was born into, the Night of Fire and Wind, the prince’s confusing and frustrating hot and cold attitude toward Vhalla. Larel had no control over any of it. Vhalla had just taken her frustrations out on someone who wasn’t expecting it.

In the midst of a grueling all-night march on October 6, the men of the 10th Indiana demonstrated that they had not lost their high spirits. They were taking a brief midnight break, many of them sleeping where they had stopped on either side of the road, when "General" Charles Gilbert came riding through with his staff and demanded that the exhausted troops form up and salute him properly. Colonel William Kise told Gilbert that after marching day and night for a week, "he would not hold dress parade at midnight for any d-d fool living'; the only salute the men offered was to jeer and apply their bayonets to the hindquarters of the horses of Gilbert and his staff, who continued down the road rather more promptly than they had come.

The free world is changing,” Malone began, his voice clear and assured. “Western democracy is lurching toward fascism—from both political directions. The political categories of left and right in this country are window dressing. People in both parties have been more than willing to advance an agenda that grows the state and curtails freedom. The West seems bent on diminishing the liberty of its citizens—and a lot of the citizenry wants it.

One instant in a still light, He saw Our Lady then, Her dress was soft as western sky, And she was queen most womanly– But she was queen of men. Over the iron forest He saw Our Lady stand; Her eyes were sad withouten art, And seven swords were in her heart– But one was in her hand

Gone the glitter and glamour; gone the pompous wealth beside naked starvation; gone the strange excitement of a polyglot and many-sided city; gone the island of Western civilization flourishing in the vast slum that was Shanghai. Good-by to all that: the well-dressed Chinese in their chauffeured cars behind bullet-proof glass; the gangsters, the shakedowns, the kid­napers; the exclusive foreign clubs, the men in white dinner jackets, their women beautifully gowned; the white-coated Chinese “boys” ob­sequiously waiting to be tipped; Jimmy’s Kitchen with its good Amer­ican coffee, hamburgers, chili and sirloin steaks. Good-by to all the night life: the gilded singing girl in her enameled hair-do, her stage make-up, her tight-fitting gown with its slit skirt breaking at the silk­ clad hip, and her polished ebony and silver-trimmed rickshaw with its crown of lights; the hundred dance halls and the thousands of taxi dolls; the opium dens and gambling halls; the flashing lights of the great restaurants, the clatter of mah-jongg pieces, the yells of Chinese feasting and playing the finger game for bottoms-up drinking; the sailors in their smelly bars and friendly brothels on Szechuan Road; the myriad short-time whores and pimps busily darting in and out of the alleyways; the display signs of foreign business, the innumerable shops spilling with silks, jades, embroideries, porcelains and all the wares of the East; the generations of foreign families who called Shanghai home and lived quiet conservative lives in their tiny vacuum untouched by China; the beggars on every downtown block and the scabby infants urinating or defecating on the curb while mendicant mothers absently scratched for lice; the “honey carts” hauling the night soil through the streets; the blocks-long funerals, the white-clad professional mourners weeping false tears, the tiers of paper palaces and paper money burned on the rich man’s tomb; the jungle free-for- all struggle for gold or survival and the day’s toll of unwanted infants and suicides floating in the canals; the knotted rickshaws with their owners fighting each other for customers and arguing fares; the peddlers and their plaintive cries; the armored white ships on the Whangpoo, “protecting foreign lives and property”; the Japanese conquerors and their American and Kuomintang successors; gone the wickedest and most colorful city of the old Orient: good-by to all that.

In the top left you have simmered Nagaoka bamboo shoots and wakame seaweed from Izumo, served in a Karatsu-ware bowl. Next to that, on the long Oribe dish, is grilled masu salmon seasoned with pepper tree leaves. The square Kutani bowl is dashi-simmered egg scrambled with green peas. The next row down is a series of five small Imari plates. Starting on the left: white miso clam gratin; salad of finely chopped cockles and Kujo green onion; tilefish sashimi with a ponzu, miso, and pepper-tree-leaf dressing; slow-cooked Tamba chicken in a salt koji marinade. At the end, on the right, is pickled sweetfish sushi, served whole. The round dish at the bottom is a selection of wild vegetables: butterbur buds, devil's-walking-stick, ostrich fern, momiji-gasa, bracken shoots, and smilax. Normally those would be served as tempura, but I've gone for something a little different and deep-fried them Western-style instead. Sprinkle them with matcha salt if you like, or they go very nicely with this green peppercorn-infused Worcestershire sauce." Nagare produced a bottle of white wine. "Now, will something like this do?" "Hang on a moment," said Kana, reaching for her digital camera again. "My friend in Tamba makes this," continued Nagare. "Hundred percent Chardonnay grapes, fermented in small French casks, apparently. Has an elegant flavor--- perfect for spring, I'd say.

Columbus on his fourth and last voyage, in 1502, left the Southern coast of Cuba, and sailing in a South-westerly direction reached Guanaja, an island now called Bonacca, one of a group thirty miles distant from Honduras, and the shores of the western continent. From this island he sailed southward as far as Panama, and thence returned to Cuba on his way to Spain, after passing six months on the Northern coasts of Panama. In 1506 two of Columbus’ companions, De Solis and Pinzon, were again in the Gulf of Honduras, and examined the coast westward as far as the Gulf of Dulce, still looking for a passage to the Indian Ocean. Hence they sailed northward, and discovered a great part of Yucatan, though that country was not then explored, nor was any landing made. The first actual exploration was made by Francisco Hernandez de Cordova in 1517, who landed on the Island Las Mugeres. Here he found stone towers, and chapels thatched with straw, in which were arranged in order several idols resembling women—whence the name which the Island received. The Spaniards were astonished to see, for the first time in the new world, stone edifices of architectural beauty, and also to perceive the dress of the natives, who wore shirts and cloaks of white and colored cotton, with head-dresses of

Fair or unfair, however, globalization has not been kind to Confucius. The Western ideas that have seeped into East Asian society over the past two hundred years have caused many in the region to rethink the value of their Confucian heritage. Western political and social philosophies brought in very different concepts of family and gender relationships, systems of government and education, and methods of corporate governance. Democracy has taken hold, as have American notions of gender equality, personal freedoms, and the rule of law. East Asian nations are being profoundly altered by these new ideas. Democracy movements have toppled authoritarian regimes across East Asia. Women are increasingly fighting for their proper place in politics and the corporate world. For much of the past two centuries, East Asians have equated progress with westernization, striving to copy its economic, political, and social systems. Capitalism and industrialization became the tools to end poverty and gain clout on the world stage, electoral politics the ideal for choosing leaders and navigating divisions in society. The route to success no longer passed through Confucian academies, but through Harvard and Yale. Being westernized, in language, dress, and social life, has been the mark of being modern and competitive. Politicians and reformers across East Asia have sought to uproot Confucian influence, at times violently, in their quest for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Many East Asians no longer wished to be Confucius, as they had for centuries on end. They wished to forget him.

Secret Stories, which advertised name-brand lingerie at discount prices, had nothing to worry about: the same kind of shops were doing fine in the malls of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. Neither, for that matter, did Chantal Thomass or La Perla. Hidden all day in impenetrable black burkas, rich Saudi women transformed themselves by night into birds of paradise with their corsets, their see-through bras, their G-strings with multicolored lace and rhinestones. They were exactly the opposite of Western women, who spent their days dressed up and looking sexy to maintain their social status, then collapsed in exhaustion once they got home, abandoning all hope of seduction in favor of clothes that were loose and shapeless. All

Tracker Marks was of a different opinion. Though he seemed more white than a white man, he had no time for their ways. For him his dress, his deportment was no different than staying downwind in the shadows of trees when hunting, blending into the world of those he hunted, rather than standing out from it. Once he had excelled at the emu dance & the kangaroo dance; then his talent led him to the whitefella dance, only now no-one was left of his tribe to stand around the fire & laugh & praise his talent for observation & stealthy imitation. The whites have no law, he told Capois Death, no dreaming. Their way of life made no sense whatsoever. Still, he did not hate them or despise them. They were stupid beyond belief, but they had a power, & somehow their stupidity & their power were, in Tracker Marks’s mind, inextricably connected. But how? he asked Capois Death. How can power & ignorance sleep together? Questions to which Capois Death had no answer.

Get out of my room. It's late, and I'm not dressed for company." She knew she should put on her robe, but she didn't move. "I'm not company, and you're wearing more tonight than the last time I saw you. We need to talk, Callie." -Calinda & Lynx

William Brennan did not live to see his son, now a remarkable transformative actor, win his first Academy Award, for Come and Get It, the first time the award for supporting actor was given. Edward Arnold’s superb performance of a less than sympathetic character was not even recognized with a nomination. Walter said he was surprised at receiving the award and had not planned to attend the ceremony, but his studio insisted, giving him evening clothes when he said he did not have a dress suit. As a result, he remembered, “I stepped up to receive that unexpected Oscar in tux Number 34 from the Western Costume Company.

Brennan’s third Academy Award for his performance in The Westerner was announced during the making of Sergeant York. To the actor’s surprise, no one on the set said anything to him when he arrived. “I didn’t expect the gang to fall all over me, but I did anticipate some congratulations,” Walter said. “When nobody said a word I was first surprised, then hurt, and finally mad.” Then he walked into his dressing room packed with flowers; a huge green 3 had been painted on his flower wreathed mirror.

white coats, ties, and stethoscopes, symbols of Western male medical professionalism,

Older women are of less sexual and reproductive, and thus by extension, matrimonial value. This is just biology meets the Catholic sacrament of matrimony, of which its virtues are 1) pleasing your spouse and 2) making children. Older women, being less fertile and less able to please their spouse, thus make for less virtuous marriages. If the excellence of marriage is grounded in the unitative and procreative telos of sexuality, a woman's youth and fertility are virtuous traits and a virtuous man would rightly prize those traits in a prospective wife. Let us perform an empirical investigation. If we compare societies where the norm of marriage is at a younger age (for the girl) rather than an older age, which marriages are more fruitful? That is, which marriages produce more children and are less likely to end in divorce? I'm sure we are equally acquainted with the results of our modern Western norms, are you acquainted with the results of non-modern Western norms? Excusing, rather than excoriating, modern Western norms is mere sophistry, sophistry which our host has held forth as an ostensibly authentic Catholic view. However, it simply isn't; it is a modern view dressed up in Catholic-sounding phrases.

Steldor, maybe you could try to deter your father, you know, from making arrangements for me so soon. Would another year or two really matter?” He responded with a dry laugh. “Deter my father? Shaselle, trying to deter my father once he’s made up his mind is like yelling whoa at a stampede of wild horses.” “Doesn’t stop you,” I muttered, crossing my arms with a huff. Again that cynical chuckle. “I assure you, it does.” “No, it doesn’t.” I pushed off the rough stone to stare at him. Annoyance came to me ever more quickly these days, and now the disagreeable temperament my mother and older sister condemned was emerging. I pointed back up the road. “Explain that scarecrow to me, if you’re so obedient! I know your father was upset with you after you posted your rules, but you went ahead anyway, without his blessing.” Steldor clamped a hand over my mouth, the other holding the back of my neck, then he leaned close to hiss, “I’d prefer if my involvement in both of those incidents remained undisclosed.” My cheeks burned, and I pushed his hands away. “Sorry. That was stupid. But isn’t there anything you can do? You have the captain’s ear.” “What I have is his attention,” he corrected, having accepted my apology and brushed aside our tense exchange. “Not intentionally, mind you, but I’ll be keeping it over the next few weeks. He’ll probably be distracted from you anyway.” “You’re planning another stunt?” He winked. “Would you expect anything less of Galen and me?” “Can I help you?” The up-and-down nature of our conversation persisted, and he shook his head vehemently. “This is dangerous, what we’ve been doing. We laugh, but these aren’t games. If we’re caught, we’ll be arrested. There’s a reason my father disapproves, in spite of his own ambitions.” He let his rebuff hang in the hot air while I again felt color rising in my cheeks. “Just go home, Shaselle. Put on a dress. Be a lady, and stay out of trouble. Understand?” “I hate them, too, you know,” I said, his dismissal and the humiliation that came with it rankling me. “It’s not just your homeland that the Cokyrians have sullied--it’s my homeland, too. And those bastards killed my father.” “And bitches,” he added, catching me off guard. “Wouldn’t want to forget the women.” I didn’t know how to respond, so I gaped at him foolishly until he stepped onto the cobblestone of the thoroughfare. “Come on. Let me take you home.” We walked in silence back to the western residential area where I lived, though he stopped at the beginning of my street to let me traverse the rest of the distance by myself. “I shouldn’t be seen around here. Not where Galen’s assigned--the Cokyrians are trying to keep us apart to avoid plots big and small, and will be suspicious if we’re seen in the same area.” I nodded and turned to go, but he grabbed my arm. “I know how you feel, Shaselle. I know you want to do something, and it’s not even that I don’t think you could. I just can’t let you be involved, for the sake of your safety. And mine,” he added as an afterthought. “My father would kill me if I let you help and you came to harm. Just please, let this go, and I swear I’ll do my best to influence him on your marriage issue.” Now that I was thinking rationally, offering my assistance had been absurd--I had no special skills aside from horseback riding, and certainly no military training , so accepting Steldor’s offered compromise was not difficult.

Growing up I had been ambivalent about being Chinese, occasionally taking pride in my ancestry but more often ignoring it because I disliked the way that Caucasians reacted to my Chineseness. It bothered me that my almond-shaped eyes and straight black hair struck people as “cute” when I was a toddler and that as I grew older I was always being asked, even by strangers, “What is your nationality?”—as if only Caucasians or immigrants from Europe could be Americans. So I would put them in their place by telling them that I was born in the United States and therefore my nationality is U.S. Then I would add, “If you want to know my ethnicity, my parents immigrated from southern China.” Whereupon they would exclaim, “But you speak English so well!” knowing full well that I had lived in the United States and had gone to American schools all my life. I hated being viewed as “exotic.” When I was a kid, it meant being identified with Fu Manchu, the sinister movie character created by Sax Rohmer who in the popular imagination represented the “yellow peril” threatening Western culture. When I was in college, I wanted to scream when people came up to me and said I reminded them of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, a Wellesley College graduate from a wealthy Chinese family, who was constantly touring the country seeking support for her dictator husband in the Kuomintang’s struggles against the Japanese and the Chinese Communists. Even though I was too ignorant and politically unaware to take sides in the civil war in China, I knew enough to recognize that I was being stereotyped. When I was asked to wear Chinese dress and speak about China at a meeting or a social function, I would decline because of my ignorance of things Chinese and also because the only Chinese outfit I owned was the one my mother wore on her arrival in this country.

The weekly news round-up show is on. The well-dressed presenter walks across the well-made set and into shot, briskly summing up the week’s events, all seemingly quite normal. Then suddenly he’ll twirl around to camera 2, and before you know it he’s talking about how the West is sunk in the slough of homosexuality, and only Holy Russia can save the world from Gay-Europa, and how among us all are the fifth columnists, the secret Western spies who dress themselves up as anti-corruption activists but are actually all CIA (for who else would dare to criticise the President?), while the West is sponsoring anti-Russian ‘fascists’ in Ukraine and all of them are out to get Russia and take away its oil, and the American-sponsored fascists are crucifying Russian children on the squares of Ukrainian towns because the West is organising a genocide against Us Russians and there are women crying on camera saying how they were threatened by roving gangs of Russia-haters, and of course only the President can make this right, and that’s why Russia did the right thing to annex Crimea, and is right to arm and send mercenaries to Ukraine, and that this is just the beginning of the great new conflict between Russia and the Rest. And when you go to check (through friends, through Reuters, through anyone who isn’t Ostankino) whether there really are fascists taking over Ukraine or whether there are children being crucified you find it’s all untrue, and the women who said they saw it all are actually hired extras dressed up as ‘eye-witnesses’.

President Vladimir Putin has evolved a “hybrid foreign policy, a strategy that mixes normal diplomacy, military force, economic corruption and a high-tech information war.” Indeed, on any given day, the United States has found itself dealing with everything from cyberattacks by Russian intelligence hackers on the computer systems of the U.S. Democratic Party, to disinformation about what Russian troops, dressed in civilian clothes, are doing in Eastern Ukraine, to Russian attempts to take down the Facebook pages of widows of its soldiers killed in Ukraine when they mourn their husbands’ deaths, to hot money flows into Western politics or media from Russian oligarchs connected to the Kremlin. In short, Russia is taking full advantage of the age of accelerating flows to confront the United States along a much wider attack surface. While it lives in the World of Order, the Russian government under Putin doesn’t mind fomenting a little disorder—indeed, when you are a petro-state, a little disorder is welcome because it keeps the world on edge and therefore oil prices high. China is a much more status quo power. It needs a healthy U.S. economy to trade with and a stable global environment to export into. That is why the Chinese are more focused on simply dominating their immediate neighborhood. But while America has to deter these two other superpowers with one hand, it also needs to enlist their support with the other hand to help contain both the spreading World of Disorder and the super-empowered breakers. This is where things start to get tricky: on any given day Russia is a direct adversary in one part of the world, a partner in another, and a mischief-maker in another.

disparity between Louie and Woody is most pronounced. In Woody Allen comedies, the Woody protagonist or surrogate takes it upon himself to tutor the young women in his wayward orbit and furnish their cultural education, telling them which books to read (in Annie Hall’s bookstore scene, Allen’s Alvy wants Annie to occupy her mind with Death and Western Thought and The Denial of Death—“You know, instead of that cat book”), which classic films to imbibe at the revival houses back when Manhattan still had a rich cluster of them. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, it’s a 14-year-old female niece who dresses like a junior-miss version of Annie Hall whom Woody’s Clifford squires to afternoon showings at the finer flea pits, advising her to play deaf for the remaining years of her formal schooling. “Don’t listen to what your teachers tell ya, you know. Don’t pay attention. Just, just see what they look like, and that’s how you’ll know what life is really gonna be like.” A more dubious nugget of avuncular wisdom would be hard to imagine, and it isn’t just the Woody stand-in who does the uncle-daddy-mentor-knows-best bit for the benefit of receptive minds in ripe containers. In Hannah and Her Sisters, Max von Sydow’s dour painter-philosophe Frederick is the Old World “mansplainer” of all time, holding court in a SoHo loft which he shares with his lover, Lee, played by Barbara Hershey, whose sweaters abound with abundance. When Lee groans with enough-already exasperation when Frederick begins droning on about an Auschwitz documentary—“You missed a very dull TV show on Auschwitz.

On my first trip to Ghana, my long-time colleague Jude Hama of Scripture Union decided to give me the broadest exposure possible to the movements of the church in his country. We visited with Methodist bishops, Baptist leaders and Pentecostal church leaders whose churches were sending missionaries all over the world. We visited Presbyterians, Anglicans and charismatics. This last church was the most fascinating. The preacher, a man who weighed at least three hundred pounds (although he was only five feet, six inches tall), testified that his physical size was evidence of God's poured-out blessings. As the service progressed, people came and laid their money on the stairs leading up to the stage. At several points, beautifully dressed ladies carrying baskets on their heads would collect the money. And the process would then repeat, and more people would lay more money on the stairs. Jude explained, "These people have a prayer request: a job, an illness, a desire to marry, etc. The money is their `love offering' and is designed to let God know that they are serious about their request." Seed faith expressed in Ghana dollars. Jude went on: "You see, Paul, you in America concentrate on the God of love. But here we want the God of power. When you live in poverty or with some incurable affliction or some injustice, you don't want to feel loved. You want God's power to make you prosper, or to make you healthy or to make you free. And they have been taught and they believe that money is the way to release the power.

She eyed him. “What does that mean?” “You know exactly what it means, McKenna. Women who take on the world and never back down. Women whose hearts have so much love, they give even when that love isn’t returned.” He was reminded of what he had in his vest pocket for her—the thank-you gift for his saddle. The gift had since turned into the peace offering for missing dinner that night, and now represented so much more . . . Now that he knew how much she cared for him. Even though she might not be able to voice it, or even want to admit it to herself. But he would forever remember the moment she looked up outside the doc’s office, thinking he was dead, and found him alive. The timing hadn’t felt right to give it to her then, but it did now. He reached into his pocket. “I’m talking about a woman who faces life with a courage and a persistence that astounds me. Who has endured so much difficulty in her life and yet keeps pushing on with stubborn grace, step-after-step, day-after-day.” He softened his voice. “A woman who, at first, didn’t trust me.” He touched the side of her face. “But a woman who might just be beginning to trust.” Tears glistened in her eyes. “And who makes this man want to spend the rest of his life proving to her that she can.” He held out the box. “Not to mention a woman who makes the best saddles in all the western territory.” Her eyes widened. “You know?” Oh how he wanted to kiss her. And if he was reading her right, she was more than open to the idea. “What did I tell you about looking at a man that way when he couldn’t do anything about it?” She grinned, and he pulled her to him and kissed her. He’d meant for their first kiss to be more tender, slow and gentle, but the way her arms came around him, pulling him closer, the way she responded, deepening the kiss, drove the desire inside him. Their bodies touching, he memorized the curves of her waist, the small of her back, how she felt pressed up against him. The warmth of her hand as she cradled the back of his neck encouraged him further— Remembering where they were, Wyatt drew back. “McKenna!” he whispered. Her eyes were still closed, her lips parted. She was wearing a purple dress today, one he hadn’t seen before. But he liked it, very much. Especially on her. It buttoned up the front, and the lacey curve of the bodice revealed her neckline. The dress wasn’t at all improper, but the thoughts he was having about her right now bordered on being just that. She blinked. “Y-yes?” He smiled and ran a finger over her mouth, and put more distance between them. “You need to open your gift.” She gave him an intimate look. “I thought I already had.” Oh this woman . . . It was a good thing they were in church. She opened the box in her hand, and giggled. He didn’t mind in the least. He’d had about the same reaction when he’d first seen it. The woman in the store in Denver had called it a charm bracelet. But it was the tiny saddle hanging off it—among other miniature trinkets—that had gained his attention. She held up the bracelet and fingered each tiny charm. “I love it! Thank you, Wyatt.

t know why I can’t stop being so combative. “Come on. People don’t get butchered in this city every day. And the very night after I free the most powerful murderous ghost in the western hemisphere, somebody shows up missing

Ever watched the crew aboard a commercial airliner discriminate between well-dressed, well-schooled in the English language, passengers and ones that don’t appear as well-heeled? I have, time and again. I particularly remember this one Air India flight from India to Kuala Lumpur via Chennai. When the aircraft stopped over at Chennai, a horde of typical South Indian passengers boarded the plane. Not well-versed in the Western style of living, these passengers were ill-treated by the crew on that flight. I saw at least one crew member openly grimace with distaste at the way an old man (dressed in the South Indian veshti) was eating his meal with his fingers, ignoring the cutlery on his tray. Yes, I know that such eating habits on an aircraft can cause a mess and a cleanliness issue but I doubt that the crew member in question was grimacing for that reason. She was looking down on that old man.

At 5:00 a.m. the clubs get going properly; the Forbes stumble down from their loggias, grinning and swaying tipsily. They are all dressed the same, in expensive striped silk shirts tucked into designer jeans, all tanned and plump and glistening with money and self-satisfaction. They join the cattle on the dance floor. Everyone is wrecked by now and bounces around sweating, so fast it’s almost in slow motion. They exchange these sweet, simple glances of mutual recognition, as if the masks have come off and they’re all in on one big joke. And then you realize how equal the Forbes and the girls really are. They all clambered out of one Soviet world. The oil geyser has shot them to different financial universes, but they still understand each other perfectly. And their sweet, simple glances seem to say how amusing this whole masquerade is, that yesterday we were all living in communal flats and singing Soviet anthems and thinking Levis and powdered milk were the height of luxury, and now we’re surrounded by luxury cars and jets and sticky Prosecco. And though many westerners tell me they think Russians are obsessed with money, I think they’re wrong: the cash has come so fast, like glitter shaken in a snow globe, that it feels totally unreal, not something to hoard and save but to twirl and dance in like feathers in a pillow fight and cut like papier-mâché into different, quickly changing masks. At 5:00 a.m. the music goes faster and faster, and in the throbbing, snowing night the cattle become Forbeses and the Forbeses cattle, moving so fast now they can see the traces of themselves caught in the strobe across the dance floor. The guys and girls look at themselves and think: “Did that really happen to me? Is that me there? With all the Maybachs and rapes and gangsters and mass graves and penthouses and sparkly dresses?

Western Texas was just flat road amid the dusty plains as far as the eye could see. Alexander was driving and smoking; he had turned off the radio so he could hear Tatiana better—but she had stopped speaking. She was sitting on the passenger side with her eyes closed. She had been telling him and Anthony soothing stories of some of her pranks in Luga. There were few stories Alexander liked better than of her child self in that village by the river. Is she asleep? He glances at her, squeezed in around herself in a floral pink wrap dress that comes down to a V in her chest. Her glistening, slightly tender, coral nectar mouth reminds him of things, stirs him up a little. He checks to see what Anthony is doing—the boy is lying down facing away, playing with his toy soldiers. Alexander reaches over and cups a palmful of her breast, and she instantly opens her eyes and checks for Anthony. “What?” she whispers, and no sooner does she whisper than Anthony turns around, and Alexander takes his hand away, an aching prickle of desire mixed with frustration all swollen behind his eyes and in his loins.

We must dress to make other women jealous and to attract men.

Recently, many Western cultures have made progress accepting nonbinary and trans folks (with some obvious major setbacks). I’ve noticed that this acceptance often comes from a reinforcement of gender, which I find worrisome. You should be able to be a man who wears dresses and lipstick and still be a man. Clothing is genderless. Makeup is genderless. So, too, is painting one’s nails. While you can (and should) absolutely identify as nonbinary if the identity speaks to you, you can also be an “effeminate” man and still be just that, a man—and a straight man at that! Everything that falls outside the super narrow confines of “masculinity” isn’t automatically queer. I think if we allowed men to be more “effeminate” without quickly labeling them as queer, we’d have significantly less homophobia/ queerphobia.

Travelling through eastern and central India, Gandhi found the purdah system far more prevalent than in other parts of the country. In western and southern india, women were attending schools and colleges and even participating in public life. The Tamil women he knew in South Africa had raised money for his struggle and even courted arrest. But in Bihar and the United Provinces the situation was altogether different. The women who attended his meetings were dressed in purdah, and sat behind a screen segregating them from the rest of the crowd. In an article for Young India, Gandhi wrote of how the treatment of women had ‘pained and humiliated’ him. ‘Why do not our women enjoy the same freedom we do?’ he asked. ‘Why should they not be able to walk out and have fresh air?’ Purdah was a ‘barbarous custom which, whatever use it might have had when it was first introduced, had now become totally useless and [was]doing incalculable harm to the country

All forms of orgiastic union have three characteristics: they are intense, even violent; they occur in the total personality, mind and body; they are transitory and periodical. Exactly the opposite holds true for that form of union which is by far the most frequent solution chosen by man in the past and in the present: the union based on conformity with the group, its customs, practices and beliefs. Here again we find a considerable development. In a primitive society the group is small; it consists of those with whom one shares blood and soil. With the growing development of culture, the group enlarges; it becomes the citizenry of a polis the citizenry of a large state, the members of a church. Even the poor Roman felt pride because he could say 'civis romanus sum'; Rome and the empire were his family, his home, his world. Also in con-temporary Western society the union with the group is the prevalent way of overcoming separateness. It is a union in which the individual self disappears to a large extent, and where the aim is to belong to the herd. If i am like everybody else, if i have no feelings or thoughts which make me different, if i conform in custom, dress, ideas, to the pattern of the group, i am saved; saved from the frightening experience of aloneness. The dictatorial systems use threats and terror to induce this conformity; the democratic countries, suggestion and propaganda. There is, indeed, one great difference between the two systems. In the democracies non-conformity is possible and, in fact, by no means entirely absent; in the totalitarian systems, only a few unusual heroes and martyrs can be expected to refuse obedience. But in spite of this difference the democratic societies show an over-whelming degree of conformity. The reason lies in the fact that there has to be an answer to the quest for union, and if there is no other or better way, then the union of herd con-formity becomes the predominant one. One can only understand the power of the fear to be different, the fear to be only a few steps away from the herd, if one understands the depths of the need not to be separated. Sometimes this fear of non-conformity is rationalized as fear of practical dangers which could threaten the non-conformist. But actually, people wantto conform to a much higher degree than they are forced to conform, at least in the Western democracies.

All forms of orgiastic union have three characteristics: they are intense, even violent; they occur in the total personality, mind and body; they are transitory and periodical. Exactly the opposite holds true for that form of union which is by far the most frequent solution chosen by man in the past and in the present: the union based on conformity with the group, its customs, practices and beliefs. Here again we find a considerable development. In a primitive society the group is small; it consists of those with whom one shares blood and soil. With the growing development of culture, the group enlarges; it becomes the citizenry of a polis the citizenry of a large state, the members of a church. Even the poor Roman felt pride because he could say 'civis romanus sum'; Rome and the empire were his family, his home, his world. Also in con-temporary Western society the union with the group is the prevalent way of overcoming separateness. It is a union in which the individual self disappears to a large extent, and where the aim is to belong to the herd. If i am like everybody else, if i have no feelings or thoughts which make me different, if i conform in custom, dress, ideas, to the pattern of the group, i am saved; saved from the frightening experience of aloneness. The dictatorial systems use threats and terror to induce this conformity; the democratic countries, suggestion and propaganda. There is, indeed, one great difference between the two systems. In the democracies non-conformity is possible and, in fact, by no means entirely absent; in the totalitarian systems, only a few unusual heroes and martyrs can be expected to refuse obedience. But in spite of this difference the democratic societies show an over-whelming degree of conformity. The reason lies in the fact that there has to be an answer to the quest for union, and if there is no other or better way, then the union of herd con-formity becomes the predominant one. One can only understand the power of the fear to be different, the fear to be only a few steps away from the herd, if one understands the depths of the need not to be separated. Sometimes this fear of non-conformity is rationalized as fear of practical dangers which could threaten the non-conformist. But actually, people wantto conform to a much higher degree than they are forced to conform, at least in the Western democracies.

Tsuyahime rice from Yamagata-extra-big portion of that. Pork miso soup on the side. Plenty of root vegetables in there too, even if they're not all fancy Kyoto specialties. Now, the large platter is a fusion of Japanese and Western cuisine. That there is deep-fried hamo eel with sour plum pulp and perilla leaf. The Manganji peppers are deep-fried too. Try those with my homemade Worcestershire sauce. The small bowl is miso-simmered mackerel with a shredded myoga ginger dressing. The roast beef is Kyoto stock- best enjoyed with a drizzle of the wasabi-infused soy sauce and wrapped in a sheet of toasted nori. As for the teriyaki-style duck meatballs, you can dip those in the accompanying quail egg yolk. Chilled tofu garnished with the minced skin of the hamo eel and, finally, deep-fried Kamo eggplant with a starchy curry sauce. Enjoy!

At 5 a.m. the clubs get going properly; the Forbeses stumble down from their loggias, grinning and swaying tipsily. They are all dressed the same, in expensive striped silk shirts tucked into designer jeans, all tanned and plump and glistening with money and self-satisfaction. They join the cattle on the dance floor. Everyone is wrecked by now and bounces around sweating, so fast it’s almost in slow motion. They exchange these sweet, simple glances of mutual recognition, as if the masks have come off and they’re all in on one big joke. And then you realise how equal the Forbeses and the girls really are. They all clambered out of one Soviet world. The oil geyser has shot them to different financial universes, but they still understand each other perfectly. And their sweet, simple glances seem to say how amusing this whole masquerade is, that yesterday we were all living in communal flats and singing Soviet anthems and thinking Levis and powdered milk were the height of luxury, and now we’re surrounded by luxury cars and jets and sticky Prosecco. And though many Westerners tell me they think Russians are obsessed with money, I think they’re wrong: the cash has come so fast, like glitter shaken in a snow globe, that it feels totally unreal, not something to hoard and save but to twirl and dance in like feathers in a pillow fight and cut like papier mâché into different, quickly changing masks. At 5 a.m. the music goes faster and faster, and in the throbbing, snowing night the cattle become Forbeses and the Forbeses cattle, moving so fast now they can see the traces of themselves caught in the strobe across the dance floor. The guys and girls look at themselves and think: ‘Did that really happen to me? Is that me there? With all the Maybachs and rapes and gangsters and mass graves and penthouses and sparkly dresses?’ A Hero for Our Times I am in a meeting at TNT when my phone goes off.

One of the reasons Japanese culture is so intriguing (and confounding) to westerners is not that it seems so foreign, but that it seems so familiar—at least at first. The packaging registers with our sensibilities, but the actual content does not. Innocent-looking anime characters sprout sudden porno appendages; morning chat shows digress into screaming fits; and musicians that dress like goth metalheads sound like fourth-tier Orlando boy-band members. Shinsaibashi has that same bewildering familiarity. Just as I convince myself that it’s another noisy mall, I’m nearly run down by a drunken bi- cyclist, and then accosted by a fuzzy store mascot.

In the long term,” wrote the English economist John Maynard Keynes, “we are all dead.” The Scottish Enlightenment learned a different lesson from the changes brought by union with England. Its greatest thinkers, such as Adam Smith and David Hume, understood that change constantly involves trade-offs, and that short-term costs are often compensated by long-term benefits. “Over time,” “on balance,” “on the whole”—these are favorite sentiments, if not expressions, of the eighteenth-century enlightened Scot. More than any other, they capture the complex nature of modern society. And the proof came with the Act of Union. Here was a treaty, a legislative act inspired not by some great political vision or careful calculation of the needs of the future, or even by patriotism. Most if not all of those who signed it were thinking about urgent and immediate circumstances; they were in fact thinking largely about themselves, often in the most venal terms. Yet this act—which in the short term destroyed an independent kingdom, created huge political uncertainties both north and south, and sent Scotland’s economy into a tailspin—turned out, in the long term, to be the making of modern Scotland Nor did Scots have to wait that long. Already by the 1720s, as the smoke and tumult of the Fifteen was clearing, there were signs of momentous changes in the economy. Grain exports more than doubled, as Scottish agriculture recovered from the horrors of the Lean Years and learned to become more commercial in its outlook. Lowland farmers would be faced now not with starvation, but with falling prices due to grain surpluses. Glasgow merchants entered the Atlantic trade with English colonies in America, which had always been closed to them before. By 1725 they were taking more than 15 percent of the tobacco trade. Inside of two decades, they would be running it. A wide range of goods, not just tobacco but also molasses, sugar, cotton, and tea, flooded into Scotland. Finished goods, particularly linen textiles and cotton products, began to flood out, despite the excise tax. William Mackintosh of Borlum saw even in 1729 that Scotland’s landed gentry were living better than they ever had, “more handsomely now in dress, table, and house furniture.” Glasgow, the first hub of Scotland’s transatlantic trade, would soon be joined by Ayr, Greenock, Paisley, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh. By the 1730s the Scottish economy had turned the corner. By 1755 the value of Scottish exports had more than doubled. And it was due almost entirely to the effect of overseas trade, “the golden ball” as Andrew Fletcher had contemptuously called it, which the Union of 1707 had opened.

The obituary seemed like a washing of the body. It cleaned Steen up. The existence of the photographs, all the sordid aspects of the man's life were rinsed away by the formalised prose. The Western ritual of death was observed — the obligation to remember the most dignified image of the deceased. Like those ghastly American mausoleums where the embalmed corpse is presented at its best, dressed and smiling, prior to burial.

Cleopatra the Alchemist, who is believed to have lived in Alexandria around the third or fourth centuries CE, is one of four female alchemists who were thought to have been able to produce the rare and much-sought-after philosopher’s stone. She is a foundational figure in alchemy, and made great use of original imagery which reflects conception and birth — representing the renewal and transformation of life. She also experimented with practical alchemy (the forerunner of modern chemistry) and is credited by some with having invented the alembic, an apparatus used for distillation. Her mentor was Maria the Jewess, who lived in Alexandria sometime between the first and third centuries CE; she is similarly credited with the invention of several kinds of chemical apparatuses and is considered to be the first true alchemist of the Western world. In 1964, the great surrealist artist Leonora Carrington painted Maria, depicting her as a woman-lion chimera with breasts exposed and hair wildly flailing around her, as she weaves magical gold-summoning spells. Actually, female alchemists in Greco-Roman Egypt weren’t uncommon, though they were mostly preoccupied with concocting fragrances and cosmetics. In fact, it was a collective of female alchemists in ancient Egypt who invented beer, setting up an unsurprisingly booming business by the Nile. This is all a far cry from the popular image of an alchemist: that of a lavishly dressed and usually bearded man in a medieval laboratory, bending over a fire and surrounded by all manner of arcane contraptions, trying to turn lead into gold.

Grant spent the first part of the night under a tree a few hundred yards from the river bank. His injured ankle was still aching badly, and the cold rain drenched his face and body. The general decided to limp back to the log cabin near the Landing. He reached the building in a few minutes, but found it was being used as an emergency hospital. Several doctors busily dressed wounds or sawed off arms and legs as the case called for. Wounded and delirious soldiers screamed and shrieked in their agony, while orderlies carried outside the amputated limbs. After a few minutes of this, Grant decided he preferred the rain, and he returned to the comparative sanity of his tree.

When we did she said, ‘Freud said that primitives are like Western children. I don’t believe that for a second, but most anthropologists don’t blink an eye at it, so we’ll let it stand for the sake of my argument, which is: Every child seeks meaning. When I was four I remember asking my quite pregnant mother: What’s the point of all this? Of all what? she asked. Of all this life. I remember how she looked at me and I felt like I’d said something very bad. She came and sat beside me at the table and told me I’d just asked a very big question, and that I wouldn’t be able to answer it until I was an old, old woman. But she was wrong. Because she had that baby, and when she brought her home I knew I’d found the point. Her name was Katie but everyone called her Nell’s Baby. She was my baby. I did everything for her: fed her, changed her, dressed her, put her to sleep. And then when she was nine months old, she got sick. I was sent to my aunt’s in New Jersey and when I came back she was gone. They didn’t even let me say goodbye. I couldn’t even touch her or hold her. She was gone like a rug or a chair. I feel like I got most of life’s lessons before I turned six. For me, other people are the point, but other people can disappear. I guess I don’t have to tell you that.

One cannot become a practitioner of Zen just by imitating the way of eating, sitting, or dressing of Chinese or Japanese practitioners. Zen is life, Zen does not imitate. If Zen is to fully take root in the West, it must acquire a Western form, different from Oriental Zen.

L. Wilson, editor of the Chicago Evening Journal; and General Henry Eugene Davies, who wrote a pamphlet, Ten Days on the Plains, describing the hunt. Among the others rounding out the group were Leonard W. and Lawrence R. Jerome; General Anson Stager of the Western Union Telegraph Company; Colonel M. V. Sheridan, the general's brother; General Charles Fitzhugh; and Colonel Daniel H. Rucker, acting quartermaster general and soon to be Phil Sheridan's father-in-law. Leonard W. Jerome, a financier, later became the grandfather of Winston Churchill when his second daughter, jenny, married Lord Randolph Churchill. The party arrived at Fort McPherson on September 22, 1871. The New York Herald's first dispatch reported: "General Sheridan and party arrived at the North Platte River this morning, and were conducted to Fort McPherson by General Emery [sic], commanding. General Sheridan reviewed the troops, consisting of four companies of the Fifth Cavalry. The party start[s] across the country tomorrow, guided by the renowned Buffalo Bill and under the escort of Major Brown, Company F, Fifth Cavalry. The party expect[s] to reach Fort Hays in ten days." After Sheridan's review of the troops, the general introduced Buffalo Bill to the guests and assigned them to their quarters in large, comfortable tents just outside the post, a site christened Camp Rucker. The remainder of the day was spent entertaining the visitors at "dinner and supper parties, and music and dancing; at a late hour they retired to rest in their tents." The officers of the post and their ladies spared no expense in their effort to entertain their guests, to demonstrate, perhaps, that the West was not all that wild. The finest linens, glassware, and china the post afforded were brought out to grace the tables, and the ballroom glittered that night with gold braid, silks, velvets, and jewels. Buffalo Bill dressed for the hunt as he had never done before. Despite having retired late, "at five o'clock next morning . . . I rose fresh and eager for the trip, and as it was a nobby and high-toned outfit which I was to accompany, I determined to put on a little style myself. So I dressed in a new suit of buckskin, trimmed along the seams with fringes of the same material; and I put on a crimson shirt handsomely ornamented on the bosom, while on my head I wore a broad sombrero. Then mounting a snowy white horse-a gallant stepper, I rode down from the fort to the camp, rifle in hand. I felt first-rate that morning, and looked well." In all probability, Louisa Cody was responsible for the ornamentation on his shirt, for she was an expert with a needle. General Davies agreed with Will's estimation of his appearance that morning. "The most striking feature of the whole was ... our friend Buffalo Bill.... He realized to perfection the bold hunter and gallant sportsman of the plains." Here again Cody appeared as the

Smith groused that “the trouble with Ike” was that “instead of giving direct and clear orders, [he] dresses them up in polite language.” He was a conciliator, Smith added, who rarely issued unequivocal orders and never decreed: Do as I command and be silent. If consistent in his views supporting a broad, multipronged assault on Germany, he was “hardly decisive in the way he communicated them to Montgomery,” Stephen E. Ambrose later wrote. “He allowed Montgomery to carry every argument to its bitter end.

The Morioka region of northern Japan is famous for its horses and this festival was originally conceived by horse breeders who wished to pray for long and happy lives for their animals. It now features a parade of colourfully dressed horses ridden by local children with round 80–100 horses usually taking part dressed in konida costumes (worn by the horses of daimyo – feudal lords – in the Edo Period). The name of the festival comes from the noise made by the bells (chagu chagu) on the horses’ harnesses (umakko) and the event is designated as a national intangible folklore cultural asset. At the end of the parade, prayers are offered for a bountiful rice harvest and thanks are given to the horses.

Why do some cultures reserve color only for celebratory moments, while others make it a part of the everyday? It would be easy to conclude that it’s a simple matter of preference: certain cultures have developed an appetite for color, while others prefer a grayscale life. But I think the real answer lies in a cultural bias deep in Western society that runs toward sophistication, away from joy. This bias was forcefully expressed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe when he wrote in 1810 that “savage nations, uneducated people, and children have a great predilection for vivid colors,” but that “people of refinement avoid vivid colors in their dress and the objects that are about them, and seem inclined to banish them altogether from their presence.” We may not realize it, but in most of Europe and America, Goethe’s philosophy permeates our lives. We dismiss color and joy as childish and frivolous, prizing neutral hues as a mark of coolness and mature taste.

German casualty returns did not include the less seriously wounded who were treated in their corps area. All British wounded were included in the casualty returns, even if they were treated in a regimental aid post (RAP) or at dressing stations and then returned to duty.

Arseniev's account of his adventures with Dress Uzala reflects a tendency among many Russian writers to use facts not as inflexible units of information, but as malleable elements that may be arranged, elaborated on, or added to as the author sees fit. Evidence of this can be found throughout the country's non-fiction and journalism. On a practical level, fact checking and the documentation of sources is pursued much less rigorously in Russia than in many Western counties. But there is a more serious problem and that is that the notions of "truth" and "fact" have been so aggressively stifled in Russia since czarist times that its effects have impacted the collective psyche of the country, including writers, who, if they told the truth, did so at considerable risk. As a result, many "factual" Russian narratives should probably be approached as memoirs: subjective interpretations of events that may not have occurred exactly as described. It is by no means unique to Russia, but the most egregious examples of this free wheeling approach to reportage are to be found in the State's representation of itself, a tendency that transcends a regime and political philosophy.

It was an old colonial oil war dressed up as a crusade for Western life and liberty, and it was launched by a clique of war-hungry Judeo-Christian geopolitical fantasists who hijacked the media and exploited America’s post-9/11 psychopathy.

Since moving to New York I’ve learned what the word “geisha” really means to most Westerners. From time to time at elegant parties, I've been introduced to some young woman or other in a splendid dress and jewelry. When she learns I was once a geisha in Kyoto, she forms her mouth into a sort of smile, although the corners don’t turn up quite as they should… This woman is thinking, “My goodness. I'm talking with a prostitute.” A moment later she's rescued by her escort, a wealthy man a good thirty or forty years older than she is. Well, I often find myself wondering why she can't sense how much we really have in common. She is a kept woman, you see, and in my day, so was I.

Said Mr Jefferson: ‘It wd. have given us time.’ ‘modern dress for your statue… ‘I remember having written you while Congress sat at Annapolis, ‘on water communication between ours and the western country, ‘particularly the information…of the plain between ‘Big Beaver and Cuyahoga, which made me hope that a canal ‘…navigation of Lake Erie and the Ohio. You must have had ‘occasion of getting better information on this subject ‘and if you wd. oblige me ‘by a communication of it. I consider this canal, ‘if practicable, as a very important work. T. J. to General Washington, 1787 …no slaves north of Maryland district… …flower found in Connecticut that vegetates when suspended in air…. …screw more effectual if placed below surface of water. Those details at the opening of canto 31 are all, apart from the Latin lines, from the historical record, mostly from the ‘ten fat volumes’ of The Writings of Thomas Jefferson which Eliot had been given by his father and had passed on to Pound.

Eve said if I didn’t wear a dress no one would recognize me.” Sadie laughed. “I would.” Those two words were laced with meaning and her heart swelled. They sat quietly as the sun disappeared over the horizon and they were surrounded by utter darkness and a bright spread of stars. They covered every inch of the velvet black sky.