Absolutely. Vacuuming your carpet before your cleaning professionals arrive will allow you to remove any loose dirt that muddy paws and boots have dragged into your home. Vacuuming beforehand also helps loosen the carpet fibers so the cleaner can soak into the deepest crevices and grab those stubborn dirt particles.
Answer: Absolutely. Vacuuming your carpet before your cleaning professionals arrive will allow you to remove any loose dirt that muddy paws and boots have dragged into your home. Vacuuming beforehand also helps loosen the carpet fibers so the cleaner can soak into the deepest crevices and grab those stubborn dirt particles.
Toni Everyway But Loose
"Man on Wire" (2008): In 1974, tightrope artist Philippe Petit walked a rope strung between the World Trade Center towers. This astonishing documentary revisits that August day; a thrilling exploration of one man's mad dream. (Prime Video)
Anna Moschovakis asks questions like that in "Participation," her second novel published by Minneapolis-based Coffee House Press. A translator and award-winning poet, Moschovakis at most flirts with traditional notions of fiction in a fragmented narrative that feels both loose and dense, intimate and distant. She abandons storytelling conventions as she explores human relationships and social dynamics under strain in this era of climate instability, technological oversaturation and political dysfunction.
Behind these phrases lies the recurrent critical wish to find that either organic synthesis or the yoking together of contraries is the essence of art. However, Cather's texts can also be read as inconsistent, disrupted, or fractured. Throughout her major novels there is, if anything, an increasing "gappiness" as the texts move towards ever-increasing formal dis-integration. My Ántonia (1918) employs the inset story of Peter and Pavel, a digression away from the New World to the European folk memory of the immigrants. The Professor's House (1925) is broken structurally by the interpolation of "Tom Outland's Story," a tale that is temporally, geographically, and narratologically separated from the rest of the novel. Increasingly, Cather showed scant regard for preserving unities, whether of place or time or point of view. Death Comes for the Archbishop continues the dis-intergrative process, collating a heterogeneous range of discourses: folk talk, historical detail, anecdotes about Mexican and Indian life, the spiritual biographies of Fathers Latour and Vaillant. The novel eschews a strongly plotted narrative line as Cather juxtaposes one discourse against another within a loose, discontinuous format. Constructing her novel in this way, Cather seemed to have strained the definitions of the novel. In fact, she was eventually to defend the form of Death Comes for the Archbishop, which to many seemed to have no form at all, on the grounds that this was a narrative, not a novel. Her defense, written as a letter to Commonweal in 1927, extrapolated from Hawthorne's account of the historical romance's imaginative freedom. She displaced his plea for speculative liberty into a discussion of narrative form, claiming for herself absolute compositional freedom: "I am amused that so many of the reviews of this book begin with the statement: 'This book is hard to classify.' Then why bother? Many more assert vehemently that it is not a novel. Myself, I prefer to call it a narrative. In this case I think that term more appropriate" (On Writing 12).
Before we reach the episode about Sada, we read passages describing the angelus, the casting of the bell, and the conflation of Christianity and Islam. Cather has already demonstrated how Western faith has been touched upon and changed by the Other. The Sada incident deepens these observations, teasing out the implications of multiculturalism at the level of personal encounters. (The effect is similar to that in My Ántonia, where immigration and assimilation-the so-called Americanization process-are grounded in comic scenes about language learning.) Latour, faced with an enigmatic and alien culture that demands interpretation, is in a position very much like that of Said's Orientalists. But what is notable in the Sada episode is the creation of a discourse, a medium for understanding, outside of European written or spoken language. The symbols of the Catholic Church are by usage European (though Cather shows how even a Catholic ritual like the ringing of the angelus has its origin in the oriental religion of Islam), but the gist of the passage is that these objects can be appropriated by Sada and transferred from Europe to New Mexico. Empathy and cultural transmission reverse the usual trend of European encounters with the Other; Sada masters the presiding language (here, the symbols of Catholic worship), and Latour becomes a passive recipient (it is "permitted him to behold").
Translation was important to Cather as proof that people can transmit their language and literature to other nations and races. For Cather, a much-translated writer, the translation of her work into different languages provided another opportunity to see transmission and cultural reformulation at work. She was, for instance, pleased with the foreign reception of Death Comes for the Archbishop, and she boasted that My Ántonia had been translated into eight languages (Cather, Letters to Carrie Sherwood). Thus, to admit that translation is not possible might at first seem to signal a severe defeat, but Cather makes the hiatus into a form of unspoken communication. She writes, just before the passage quoted above, "They relapsed into the silence which was their usual form of intercourse" (91-92). Tolerant reticence might be a means to communicate (the title of one section-"Stone Lips"-catches this paradoxical sense of mute communication). These silences or lacunae are a way for Cather to explore the gaps in understanding between two markedly different cultures. Writing about silence, Cather faced the problem of how to write about the failure of communication. The pressure of language, as Mornings in Mexico demonstrated, is to keep on, to fill up the silence. Accepting the limitations of the realist text, Cather's solution was to write silences into her prose, dramatizing these hiatuses and fissures in understanding.
Stadialism and savagism would not have countenanced the encounter between Latour and Jacinto; figures from different phases of societal evolution, they would have been kept apart, within their demarcated stages. The new interest in the Southwest and its primitive civilizations loosened this hierarchy, blurring boundaries to allow the meeting of previously polarized cultures. Ironically, though, Americans-anthropologists, photographers, and writers-began to appreciate the Indians just at the point when their culture was dying out, finally extinguished after a century of exterminations and forced removals. The new primitivism focused on a way of life that was, or was about to be, lost. The stadialist had felt a lingering fondness for the outmoded civilization, but this nostalgia now gained a keener edge. Anthropology, photography, and writing became the media to record America's loss of its indigenous peoples. A fundamental question then arose: as civilizations progress, is there an unavoidable loss of admirable qualities (of integrity, passion, community-the qualities often associated with the "primitive")? If there is loss, is it balanced by the gains of entering a more advanced phase of civilization?
The cliff-dweller settlement, like Ántonia's homestead on the prairies, demonstrates Cather's interest in what we might call a fragile or compromised utopianism. In these cultured and harmonious communities she imagined her own version of the American ideal society; but in both cases the utopia is circumscribed. Ántonia's home, beautifully poised between the Old and New Worlds and their languages, is an idealized projection of a liberal Americanization that would accommodate European ways in the New World. Yet the simple fact that this utopia extends to just one house, and not the wider society, shows that the dream was limited. The Enchanted Mesa likewise possessed a doubleness in Cather's imagination: the incarnation of a craft-based, theocratic utopia; the disintegration of that ideal, whether through a combination of insularity and rapacious mobility, as here, or through the community's own cruelties, as in The Professor's House. Cather interlarded the two versions (utopia and dystopia), producing the layered parables of the rock and the Enchanted Mesa. And the reason that the Enchanted Mesa can sustain a variety of interpretations-theological exemplum, progressive dystopia, or nostalgic idyll-is that Cather is caught between conflicting discourses. She is simultaneously drawn toward idealism and disillusion, trying to imagine a progressive ideal even as she turns back on herself and undermines those ideals. The writer's imagination is attracted toward an ideal that it knows cannot be sustained. 2ff7e9595c
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