Works Cited Page For Quotes

October 16, 2009 Avengers Paintball, Inc. 1778 Industrial Blvd. Lakeville, MN 55044 Esteemed Avengers, This letter recommends Mr. Allen Trent for a position at your paintball emporium. Mr. Trent received a C– in my expository writing class last spring, which—given my newly streamlined and increasingly generous grading criteria—is quite the accomplishment. His final project consisted of a ten-page autobiographical essay on the topic of his own rageful impulses and his (often futile) attempts to control them. He cited his dentist and his roommate as primary sources. Consider this missive a testament to Mr. Trent’s preparedness for the work your place of business undoubtedly has in store. Hoping to maintain a distance of at least one hundred yards, Jason T. Fitger Professor of Creative Writing and English Payne University (“Teach ’til It Hurts”)

At first my father's job was clearing ruins. He had filed a sharp protest, however, justifying his disability over ten pages of closely spaced handwriting, buttressed by statements from witnesses and discharge papers from clinics for nervous diseases. His arguments were irrefutable, particularly if we take into consideration--aside from the actual facts--his polemical tone and his brilliant style. 'I hereby state for the attention of the esteemed Commissarist,' he wrote in his appeal, 'in connection with Item A-2, in which I took the liberty of citing the causes of my total incapacity and proving--if in a very sensible fashion--my abnormality as well as my complete mental and physical worthlessness, the worthlessness of a neurotic and alcoholic incapable of taking care of his family or himself, I hereby state, therefore, with a view to the most specific information possible on this matter, although each and every one of the aforementioned matters is in itself a physical amputation, I am stating that I am also flat-footed, a certificate to which effect I am appending from the draft board at Zalaegerszeg, by which I am exempt from military service by virtue of 100 percent flat-footedness. . .

Like Italian or Portuguese or Catalan, Spanish is a wordy language, bountiful and flamboyant, with a formidable emotional range. But for these same reasons, it is conceptually inexact. The work of our greatest prose writers, beginning with Cervantes, is like a splendid display of fireworks in which every idea marches past, preceded and surrounded by a sumptuous court of servants, suitors, and pages, whose function is purely decorative. In our prose, color, temperature, and music are as important as ideas and, in some cases-Lezama Lima or Valle Inclan, for example-more so. There is nothing objectionable about these typically Spanish rhetorical excesses. They express the profound nature of a people, a way of being in which the emotional and the concrete prevail over the intellectual and the abstract. This is why Valle Inclan, Alfonso Reyes, Alejo Carpentier, and Camilo Jose Cela, to cite four magnificent prose writers, are so verbose in their writing. This does not make their prose either less skillful or more superficial than that of Valery or T.S. Eliot. They are simply quite different, just as Latin Americans are different from the English and the French. To us, ideas are formulated and captured more effectively when fleshed out with emotion and sensation or in some way incorporated into concrete reality, into life-far more than they are in logical discourse. That perhaps is why we have such a rich literature and such a dearth of philosophers.

AUTHOR’S NOTE The First Assassin is a work of fiction, and specifically a work of historical fiction—meaning that much of it is based on real people, places, and events. My goal never has been to tell a tale about what really happened but to tell what might have happened by blending known facts with my imagination. Characters such as Abraham Lincoln, Winfield Scott, and John Hay were, of course, actual people. When they speak on these pages, their words are occasionally drawn from things they are reported to have said. At other times, I literally put words in their mouths. Historical events and circumstances such as Lincoln’s inauguration, the fall of Fort Sumter, and the military crisis in Washington, D.C., provide both a factual backdrop and a narrative skeleton. Throughout, I have tried to maximize the authenticity and also to tell a good story. Thomas Mallon, an experienced historical novelist, has described writing about the past: “The attempt to reconstruct the surface texture of that world was a homely pleasure, like quilting, done with items close to hand.” For me, the items close to hand were books and articles. Naming all of my sources is impossible. I’ve drawn from a lifetime of reading about the Civil War, starting as a boy who gazed for hours at the battlefield pictures in The Golden Book of the Civil War, which is an adaptation for young readers of The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War by Bruce Catton. Yet several works stand out as especially important references. The first chapter owes much to an account that appeared in the New York Tribune on February 26, 1861 (and is cited in A House Dividing, by William E. Baringer). It is also informed by Lincoln and the Baltimore Plot, 1861, edited by Norma B. Cuthbert. For details about Washington in 1861: Reveille in Washington, by Margaret Leech; The Civil War Day by Day, by E. B. Long with Barbara Long; Freedom Rising, by Ernest B. Ferguson; The Regiment That Saved the Capitol, by William J. Roehrenbeck; The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell, by Thomas P. Lowry; and “Washington City,” in The Atlantic Monthly, January 1861. For information about certain characters: With Malice Toward None, by Stephen B. Oates; Lincoln, by David Herbert Donald; Abe Lincoln Laughing, edited by P. M. Zall; Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries of John Hay, edited by Tyler Dennett; Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. III: 1861–1865, by C. Percy Powell; Agent of Destiny, by John S. D. Eisenhower; Rebel Rose, by Isabel Ross; Wild Rose, by Ann Blackman; and several magazine articles by Charles Pomeroy Stone. For life in the South: Roll, Jordan, Roll, by Eugene D. Genovese; Runaway Slaves, by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger; Bound for Canaan, by Fergus M. Bordewich; Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, written by himself; The Fire-Eaters, by Eric H. Walther; and The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, by Robert E. May. For background on Mazorca: Argentine Dictator, by John Lynch. This is the second edition of The First Assassin. Except for a few minor edits, it is no different from the first edition.

Enhancing our memory is just the beginning. When you express an idea in writing, it’s not just a matter of transferring the exact contents of your mind into paper or digital form. Writing creates new knowledge that wasn’t there before. Each word you write triggers mental cascades and internal associations, leading to further ideas, all of which can come tumbling out onto the page or screen.V Thinking doesn’t just produce writing; writing also enriches thinking. There is even significant evidence that expressing our thoughts in writing can lead to benefits for our health and well-being.11 One of the most cited psychology papers of the 1990s found that “translating emotional events into words leads to profound social, psychological, and neural changes.” In a wide range of controlled studies, writing about one’s inner experiences led to a drop in visits to the doctor, improved immune systems, and reductions in distress. Students who wrote about emotional topics showed improvements in their grades, professionals who had been laid off found new jobs more quickly, and staff members were absent from work at lower rates. The most amazing thing about these findings is that they didn’t rely on input from others. No one had to read or respond to what these people wrote down—the benefits came just from the act of writing.

Another recent work, an academic article that described research on a single type of nerve cell in the hypothalamus, was over one hundred pages long and cited seven hundred intricate experiments.

The BCCI has repeatedly shied away from disclosure, citing itself as a private entity. However, it isn't completely private either, especially since it has monopoly rights over something consumed by a large number of people. It earns from franchise owners and television networks. They, in turn, recover their money from advertisers, who ultimately pass on advertising costs to consumers, built into the price products. Thus, the consumers, we Indians, pay for the BCCI. And since it is a monopoly, we have every right to question their finances. How does the BCCI price its rights? Where is the BCCI money going? The media and lawmakers have a chance to go after this completely feudal and archaic way of managing something as pure and simple as sport. Individuals are less important than changing the way things work. What needs to be at the forefront is sport; are we using the money to help develop it in the country? We don't have to turn Indian cricket into a non-commercial NGO, for that is doomed to fail. It is fine to commercially harness he game. However, if you exploit a national passion, funded by the common man, it only makes sense that the money is accounted for and utilized for the best benefit of sport in the country. For, if there is less opaqueness, there won't be any need to make influential calls or petty factors like personality clashes affecting the outcome of any bidding process. If we know where the money is going, there is less chance of murkiness entering the picture. Accountability does not mean excessive regulation or a lack of autonomy. It simply means proper audited accounts, disclosures, corporate governance practices, norms to regulate the monopoly and even specific data on the improvement in sporting standards achieved in the country. If a young child grows up seeing cricket as yet another example of India's rich and powerful treating the country as their fiefdom, it won't be a good thing. Let's clean up the mess and treat cricket as it is supposed to be: a good sport. Game of a Clean-up, page 50 and 51

First, not all the proponents of limited election seem to regard these texts as particularly important. Louis Berkhof, for example, managed to write an entire systematic theology without citing either of the texts in question;129 and though John Calvin did comment upon them briefly in his commentary on 1 John, he evidently did not regard them as important enough even to mention in his Institutes of the Christian Religion. When one thinks about it, this is truly astonishing. Calvin’s Institutes is a monumental work of over 1500 pages; in it he sought to provide an exhaustive summary of Christian doctrine, as he understood it, along with the biblical support for it. In the Westminster Press edition, the index of Bible references alone is thirty-nine pages of small print with three columns per page. And yet, in this entire work, as massive and thorough as it is, Calvin never once found the Johannine declaration that God is love important enough to discuss.

Western knowledge producers or those using Western voices in their knowledge production should ask themselves a few questions: Where do Palestinians fit in this work? Do they have any agency, or are they a tool to drive the point across? Are my filmmaking practices extractive? How can I practice responsible authorship? Have I instilled in my project enough cues to incentivize my audience to consume it critically, or am I patting myself on the back? Am I doing the challenging chore of speaking to my bigoted, acrimonious community, accosting my Zionist aunt at the dinner table, or am I preaching—pandering, really—to the choir? Did I really have to go and “see for myself,” or did I ignore a century of Palestinian literature? Am I cognizant of how that refusal to engage local and grassroots knowledge production continues to undermine its value on the world stage, undermining also the value and authority of Palestinian narration? Do I have a class analysis in my work? Do I acknowledge that I get awards for saying similar things to what the student movement has been criminalized, suspended, and censured for saying? Do I name my institutional backing? What are the material and monetary conditions of those whose voices I amplify? Am I only referencing dead guys? What does my works cited page look like?