text:
Who should be declared 'the winner'?
...picturing an astronaute (see attached pictures for inspiration) with a fishing rod in the right hand and doing an OK sign with the left hand (see attached picture) 2: under the picture I'd like the brandname: O'KETCH (with a cool font) 3: under the brand name in smaller: Smart Fishing Gear (with a more classic font) Looking forward to see your work
Fishing T-Shirt...Design anything got to do with FISHING...I will be choosing multiple winners if I like the design.. Fishing design to be printed in front of light colour t-shirt. Make sure the design is good to print on the t-shirt. Must be 300dpi & HIGH RESOLUTION. File must be Ai,jpeg or png. Please keep to only 1 to 3 colours.
...illustrated with an animated happy lobster fishing for a macaroni. The lobster should be popping out of a circular logo with a fishing pole with a white and black striped fishing line with a hook going through the macaroni. There should be some persepective to the logo so the macaroni is in forefront and the lobster fishing can be in background. The company
The fishing bobber that has been created has the potential to revolutionize the market. However, the internal mechanisms do not clamp as we would like them to. The 3D design of the bobber with the new internal plastic piece has already been created but we need confirmation on its ability to be manufactured.
The product is a revolutionary fishing bobber that needs to be tweaked in order to act in the most optimal manner. I am looking for a designer that can help to increase the quality of the current design so that we can begin manufacturing the product. The fishing bobber already has a patent but needs a few minor updates. Thanks!
THIS IS ALL THE TEXT From Blue lagoon to the fishing town of Grindavik We start biking from the famous blue lagoon and no matter if you have been in the lagoon or not you will experience it in a complete different way here as we ride through the backyard of the lagoon with amazing sights into it then we head into an awesome single track taking
I'm looking for a Very HQ links from websites on US servres (only in the US) for my website. it's an tourism website, so i need HQ links from HQ tourism / fishing / snorkeling / diving / scuba / flights. only HQ websites links, only from the US. will pay good money for long term link building connection.
My name is Spencer Tooley, owner of Creeks to Peaks LLC based out of Fayetteville, AR. Outdoors-inspired company looking to expand in the fly fishing industry. I'm wanting a print of a fly fisherman that's coming off a heartbeat line. I can explain more if you need detail. Thanks for the help!
...freelance video producer/camera person located in/near Sitka, Alaska. I need someone that has their own HD video camera equipment for taping "instructional content" for a sports fishing web site. Video work will take place May 30 - June 05, 2018. If interested please call (360) 655-7044 and leave a message with your contact information. The video camera
I need an iPhone app. I already have a design for it, I just need it to be...around the city. Sequence of operation by user: 1. Open App. 2. Choose time and location for renting the boat. 3. How many people on boat (boat capacity). 3. Trip type (fishing/diving/etc.) 4. Finally, results come up of boats available according to previous requirements.
I need an iPhone app. I would like it designed and built. I would like it designed and built. I need an app designed for an online based fishing tournament were members can post pictures of there catches to specific categories (15 categories). All posts can be on a single page with just a form that associates the picture to a category and then a separate
I need an iPhone app. I would like it designed and built. I need an app designed for an online based fishing tournament were members can post pictures of there catches to specific categories (15 categories). All posts can be on a single page with just a form that associates the picture to a category and then a separate pages were we can post the
My website - [login to view URL] - is about saltwater fishing in Southern California. I just want to update some of the links in my sidebar widget, but the interface is screwed up. I hit the arrow down and the sections don't expand. I'm looking to do an update of the whole site later this year, but just need this quick fix now
...opportunity for the right candidate. We need you that is: Trustworthy, Hardworking, Efficient, Accurate, Reliable. Knowledge about the outdoor e-commerce market in the US (fishing, hunting, camping) is an advantage, and you need to be fluent in the English language. You must play by the rules and not take any shortcuts just to gain quick results. Google


text:
Is H3O2 a purified version of water? No, that's not true: H3O2 is a temporary, fraction-of-a-second association in water. This short-term association has no effect on the properties of water, the director of McGill's Office for Science and Society told Lead Stories. Joe Schwarcz also noted that, "Any claim that any sort of 'structured water' has health benefits is pure quackery," an assessment made by several academic organizations.
What is the purest water on Earth? The water inside fruits and vegetables is the purest, healthiest, and cleanest water that exists on Earth known as H3O2. Plants are the only thing that can turn inorganic minerals into organic minerals for the body during its self-filtration process. H3O2 water is living enzyme, alkaline, electric water.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Tue Sep 7 17:04:28 2021 UTC)
Schwarcz, of McGill University in Montreal, replied on September 7, 2021, to our email asking about the claim's accuracy. He wrote:
The claim that this species is an extra pure form of water is absolute nonsense. Water always has a tiny concentration of H+ and OH- ions from the dissociation of H2O, but the concentrations are 10-7.
This essentially insignificant. Since water is polar, meaning that in the O-H bond the electrons are displaced towards the oxygen atom, the H is left with a partial positive charge that attracts the negatively charged OH- ion, to form a temporary association. That is very temporary, tiny fractions of a second and has absolutely no effect on the properties of water. Any claim that any sort of "structured water" has health benefits is pure quackery.
The Alabama Cooperative Extension Service, based at Auburn University, lumps structured water with a number of water purity and dynamic water scams in a 2003 report on water scams. Among the sources that the report suggests that consumers consult is retired University of British Columbia chemistry Professor Stephen K. Lower's web page: "Water Cluster Pseudoscience." Lower earned his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley.

domain: chemistry


text:
Don't forget to join our Discord boss!
Modified Land 5 for Player Land. Map contains Aztec land textures Volcanoes and Terrain.
Every Patch(Fan Patch is recommended)
Modified Land 5 for Player Land. That looks like land 3 Norse Land from Battle of the Gods.

domain: game


text:
So something kind of amazing happened the other week. I’ve been rather vocal on the twitters and what not about the portrayal of people with cancer. I'm up to fucking here with the cancer patient dies to teach everyone to love life trope #fuckcancer #ownvoices — Ally Ally Oxenfree Pre-order GHOST GIRL! 👻 (@AllyMalinenko) May… Continue reading Representation Matters for the Diseased, too.
Heelloooooooooooo! I haven’t written a blog post in a really long time so get ready for a BIG ONE. First off, as always, we begin with the thank yous. While I was revising Palimpsest I not only barely sent out any poems but I barely wrote any so it was especially cool to get a… Continue reading From Bowie to Alice to Castles to Cleopatra London/Oxford/Edinburgh

domain: literature


Technology has evolved by leaps and bounds in the last few years. Although it may sound like something out of science fiction, you can get a pretty decent copy written by artificial intelligence today. Yes, we are talking about AI writing and content assistants. These much-needed software tools are disrupting the content creation and copywriting world by generating content ideas at scale and helping writers work through writer’s block. Whatever your content topics or type, AI content assistants are just the thing you need to streamline your content workflow and stick to your content planner schedule.
In this article, we’ll explain how you can make the best use of AI content assistants in your marketing blogs.
What are AI content assistants?
An AI content assistant is essentially a type of AI-powered technology that automates several processes involved in the creation of marketing content. Content creators and marketers can use AI content assistants to generate fresh topics/ideas, content outlines, comprehensive content briefs, and more. These software tools are able to generate human-like text in a matter of seconds, which makes them excellent for any content marketing operation. If you are producing a lot of blog posts, product descriptions, website landing pages, ads, emails and video descriptions, an AI content assistant tool can help you speed up your content velocity.
Shaping the Future of Content Operations: AI Content Assistants
We’ve been seeing AI making inroads into many industries, from manufacturing to finance. But what about the creative industry? Is that at risk? Could AI content assistants replace human writers in the near future? These are some questions often asked by many content writers and marketers. New AI-powered tools, powered by the GPT-3 technology (OpenAI), kickstarted the wave of AI-written content on SERPs. There was also much discussion about the cost and time savings that came with AI-generated content. Now, if you’re wondering if the world of content marketing will be taken over by machines any time soon, the answer is – NO.
According to a ManpowerGroup report, AI automation is, in fact, propelling more employers than ever (almost 87% of employers) to increase their workforce, not reduce it. This means that AI content assistants are not here to replace you, but only to increase your productivity. When you don’t have to spend hours researching content, topic ideas, and working through writer’s block, you can focus your efforts on what you do best – Fine-tuning your content marketing strategy and creating quality content.
AI adoption is going up rapidly in the world of marketing. A Salesforce report found that the adoption of AI technology among marketers has gone up from 86% (in 2018) to a whopping 186% (in 2020). Embracing AI content assistants is important if you want to compete in the current marketing environment.
If you find yourself drowning in your daily or monthly marketing content-related tasks, it’s time to take the help of AI content assistants.
- You’ll be able to boost your productivity
- You’ll no longer feel overwhelmed by the tasks
- You’ll get a chance to invest more time in your zone of genius
- You’ll be able to increase your marketing ROI
At the end of the day, you’ll be empowered to become a better marketer.
How to use AI Content Assistants in marketing blogs?
We’ve talked a lot about AI content assistants, but how do we extract the maximum use out of them? When you’ve been creating content for a long time, you’re bound to suffer from creative burnout sooner or later. An AI content assistant can provide a fresh perspective of looking at things.
Here are some ways to use AI content assistants in marketing blogs:
1. Generate fresh content ideas and topics for your blog
What is the first thing you need to do before you can start creating content for your blog? That’s right, it is coming up with blog topic ideas. And to come up with interesting blog topics, you need to know what the audience is searching for and what is something that will interest them. It should be a topic that grips their attention almost immediately.
Some AI topic generator tools like Narrato’s AI Topic Generator can be quite useful here. This tool automatically generates a list of topics for a search term. For instance, you want to write something around the theme of Christmas shopping for your blog audience. Once you enter the search term ‘Christmas shopping ideas’, the AI tool will provide you with a list of interesting topics related to the search term. If you don’t like the list of topics generated in the first go, you can run the tool again for new suggestions. Whatever topics you like can be picked as is, or you can modify them to your liking too. But think about the hours of creative effort this exercise saves you. Another useful tool for this purpose could be Copy.ai’s Content Idea Generator .
2. Generate content brief and content outline
After selecting the topic, you need to build a blueprint for your content so that you know from the start what you’re going to do with the content piece. The are two types of these blueprints you should consider creating – content brief and content outline. The first (content brief) will contain everything you need to take care of when writing the blog post, including the keywords, brand guidelines and questions that need answering in your content piece. This will form the foundation of your blog post. The content outline, on the other hand, will set the structure of your content piece. This will give the writer a headstart before they get to writing.
Creating a content brief and content outline for every piece of content can be a painstaking task that will take hours of effort. You can make this easier with an AI writing and SEO brief generator tool like Narrato AI. With this tool, you can generate SEO content briefs in a matter of minutes. All you need to do is enter the content topic and the tool will generate a content brief that contains –
- Keyword suggestions
- Competitor links and references
- Questions to include in your content
- Suggested word count, and more.
As for the content outline, the AI writing feature can help. Just enter the title of your article/post, the type of audience you want to target, and the tone of voice you plan to use. The tool will generate a content outline, complete with a list of headings and subheadings you can use to structure your content. This content outline will be based on the structure used by other top-ranking articles on the topic.
An AI-powered content assistant like Narrato can save you a lot of time and effort, which can then be better invested in content creation. But that’s not all this tool provides. Narrato is a complete content workflow platform that you can use to take care of all your content needs, from content creation, optimization, planning and collaboration to team and project management.
3. Getting started with the content piece
Now that you have the content topic, outline and brief, it’s time to get started with the actual content creation process. The one thing that stumps even the most experienced writers is the introductory paragraph. The introduction has to be crafted in such a way that it hooks the audience. When you are battling a creative block though, it can be difficult to come up with those first few lines.
An AI content assistant can be useful here too. It can generate a blog post intro, eye-catching captions or even Instagram hashtags (such as Kicksta), which you can then use to build a more well-rounded introduction. This can be a great way to give yourself a head start.
4. Completing sentences and paragraphs
If you find yourself stuck in the body of the content, the AI content assistant can help you with that too. Some AI content assistants come with a sentence expander or ‘Write for Me’ feature for fulfilling your content generation needs. Once the content writing assistant generates the text, you can then modify and polish it to make it better suited for your content piece.
5. Improve content readability
AI content assistants can also prove to be incredibly useful in structuring your blog posts better by adding bulleted lists. For instance, Narrato AI writer tool has a ‘Paragraph to Bullets’ option, which essentially rephrases the content you’ve already written to change it from paragraphs of text to bullets. There is also the content improver option, which can be used to restructure your content for enhanced readability. Another useful tool for improving the readability of your content is AISEO.
6. Generating blog post conclusion
The AI content assistant can also help you with the concluding paragraph. It works pretty much the same way. You need to provide a brief outline of the content piece, audience and tone of voice, and the AI tool will generate a well-rounded conclusion. This can then be polished and refined if required.
AI content assistants are not here to take the place of human writers but to assist them in writing quality content. As is evident from the above-mentioned points, an AI content assistant can help you improve your marketing blog in a myriad of ways. And you don’t have to compromise on quality either, since the AI-generated content is usually quite human-like. Just use your discretion to decide whether you want to use AI-generated content directly or your want to refine it before including it in your content piece.
About the Author
Akshita Sharma is a content creator, with a penchant for turning complex topics into engaging and informative articles. As a wordsmith with a knack for storytelling, she is constantly looking for an opportunity to create something new.


text:
Prepare for battle! The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III is coming to Steam® and GOG on March 23, 2020! This PC port is packed with various improvements and new features, including:
- Ultrawide screen support
- Fully customizable key bindings
- Enhanced visuals
- Additional High-Speed Mode Options (now up to 6x faster)
- Auto-Save functionality
Check out the announcement trailer for more information about the new features, as well as DLC items that will be available in-game at launch! You can also visit our Steam® page to put this game on your wishlist!
Tune in to the PAX Twitch channel to catch the action!
Social Media Links:


text:
Hundreds of gorgeous models will take to the sands at Eighth Street and Ocean Drive on Saturday and Sunday to compete in the annual Bang Model Volleyball Tournament.
Last year, the friendly competition, created by local entrepreneurs Michael Malone and Olivia Ormos, received an official proclamation from the City of Miami Beach naming February 16 “Model Volleyball Day.”
Ornos remembers the inaugural year of the fashionable event, inspired by Ocean Drive Volleypalooza from the magazine.
“After Volleypalooza had not been produced for several years, we knew it was a special event that the Miami Beach community was looking forward to, so we wanted to make sure it returned,” she notes. “We started in 2010 with a small tournament of no more than 60 models at Nikki Beach and a few sponsors, with no idea of the turnout.”
Now in its 12th year, the event has grown to include over 200 models from 12 agencies, 30 different sponsors and around 10,000 spectators. Proceeds from the event will go to the Angel Watching Over Me Foundation, which supports the community through initiatives such as the AWOM Girls Cluba weekly after-school program aimed at fostering leadership among young girls.
To compete for the 2022 Model Volleyball title, the models compete in a bracket-style tournament in which teams compete in a round-robin format, with the second day a single-elimination format. The prize: bragging rights and trips to undisclosed locations.
“This is an invitation to agencies, who are building their teams to represent them at the tournament where bragging rights, connecting with friends and having a good time are top priorities for the year,” explains Ormos. “The winning agency keeps the trophy for the whole year until the next event. It has become a reunion for many of us and a way to reconnect with friends.”
A constellation of parties and sponsors will revolve around the two-day mixed tournament. The long weekend of events kicks off on Thursday, March 10 with a party at a private home, followed by an official pool party at the Gale Hotel the following day. On Saturday and Sunday, DJs will begin spinning at 10 a.m. on Eighth Street and Ocean Drive, with sponsors providing food, drink and entertainment.
TV personality Brody Jenner will DJ on Sundays starting at 3:30 p.m., and a closing party will close the proceedings later in the evening at Bodega South Beach.
“There’s such a strong volleyball community in Miami Beach and nothing like what we do,” Ormos says. “We’re also lucky to be in Florida, where things are happening every day now. People are excited to get back to normal life.”
Bang model volleyball. 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, March 12 and Sunday, March 13 at Eighth Street and Ocean Drive, Miami Beach; modelvolleyball.com. Free entry.

domain: news


For use with Pocketalker 2.0. Use with hearing aids or cochlear implants equipped with a T-coil switch. 3.5 mm stereo plug, mono, 8 – 16 Ω. Moderate to severe hearing loss.
Safety Breakaway Feature
Integrated safety breakaway device. In the event the neckloop cord becomes entangled with a object in motion, the breakaway device will disconnect the neckloop from the user.
Integrated safety breakaway device
3.5 mm stereo plug
Recommended for PockeTalker 2.0, FM receivers and select IR receivers
For individuals with moderate to severe hearing loss


text:
JOHOR BARU, Jan 23 — The search and rescue operation (Op Carilamat) for the remaining two illegal immigrants still missing in a boat capsize off Teluk Ramunia, Pengerang near Kota Tinggi, ended today.
Johor Maritime Director First Maritime Admiral Nurul Hizam Zakaria said Op Carilamat was called off at 5pm.
“As a result of the assessment of the search situation and the agreement reached with all agencies involved, Op Carilamat ended at 5pm after a four-day search (in state waters) yielded no victims,” he said in a statement here today.
He said, however, Maritime assets as well as other agencies that carry out daily patrols in the zone will continue to monitor and report any findings.
On Thursday (Jan 20) at 4.50am, a wooden boat carrying 27 foreigners from Tanjung Tondang, Bintan Island, in Indonesia, sank about a nautical mile from Teluk Ramunia in Pengerang.
A total of 19 people comprising 10 women and nine men survived the sinking.
However, six victims comprising a man and five Indonesian women drowned, with the male victim found yesterday about five nautical miles southwest of Changi Naval Base in Singapore while two more are still missing when the search was called off. — Bernama


Disc jockeys are an integral part of the music industry, bringing out the best of music by playing a mix of recorded music to their audience. DJs play a fusion of different kinds of songs using their turntables and DJ mixers to simultaneously mix songs to produce the best effect. It’s unarguable that DJs are the life of the party.
DJs are faced with a plethora of limitations in the music industry notwithstanding the key role they have played in relation to the industry’s immense growth over the years. It’s not always common that they are given the recognition they deserve.
Most people think that DJing is just a mere task, probably turning knobs and playing around the turntable, but being a DJ is not always that simple, trying to figure out which track to play next, playing the right kind of mix relatable to your audience, maintain a high level of energy, and would keep them on their feet throughout the event.
DJs are facing copyright problems. In some places, there are restrictions on some songs a DJ can play and certain modifications allowed on the songs. When playing a mix of a song that has copyright, the DJs usually have to pay royalties on the songs. Technology has been a vital part of DJing and the high cost of upgrading to new DJing gears to meet up with the trend is one of the problems faced by new DJs.
Being a DJ has its own downsides, the late hours, lack of sleep, numerous and unhealthy touring schedules, traveling to different time zones, a culture of drinks and drugs and also the long hours working in front of a computer. Then there’s the practical observation by Sally-Anne Gross and Dr. George Musgrave from the University of Westminster stating that a lot of DJs or producers spend so much of their time solitary, interacting only with technology, affecting social interaction and multiple cases of depression. There is also the increased risk of hearing loss and tinnitus from the loudness of the monitor speakers in the DJ booth. For mobile DJs, there is also the problem of frequent setting up and packing up the DJing gears.
The music industry is male-dominated especially the job of a disc jockey, A lot of persons feel DJing is a job solely for the males. There are a few women involved in jobs and activities related to electronics and music production. The sexual bias in the industry makes the job more challenging for the females trying to make a headway in the industry. Although, over the years there have been more females taking up the craft of DJing and making great waves. Some notable female DJ like
- Annie Mac
- Ellen Allien
- Nina Kraviz
These women face problems ranging from being paid less compared to their male counterparts to incessant sexual harassment and generally low acceptance.
DJs, more especially the females in the industry need more appreciation and acceptance. The hard work put into the craft needs to receive more recognition and reward from the public.


text:
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Sweet Tooth Fairy
We finally got around to using the giftcard A's sister gave us for Christmas (thank you!) and picked up 6 yummy cupcakes from Sweet Tooth Fairy tonight. Don't they look delish? Along the top: German chocolate, chocolate peanut butter, and red velvet. Bottom: orange w/cream cheese frosting, grasshopper, and raspberry lemonade.
I've already sampled the German chocolate and raspberry lemonade. Both were pretty good, considering they weren't made by my sister Mary. The German chocolate had nice chocolatey frosting, and the coconut part was even a little salty, in a delicious sort of way. The raspberry lemonade was a little different. The cake part had real raspberries in it, and the frosting was tart lemon. I think I would have liked it better with a lemony cake and a raspberry frosting with a fresh berry on top. But no complaints! It was good.
A is mad at me because he thinks I told him he couldn't get a brownie, but I don't remember saying that... I was pretty mesmerized with the cupcakes though.
Do you think they would hire me? I would promise not to eat too many of the cupcakes...

domain: food


text:
Exklusive Angebote aus der VELVET® Kollektion jetzt -50% bei MYBESTBRANDS! Jetzt bei MYBESTBRANDS Produkte in über 100 Onlineshops entdecken. Shop now Niedrige Preise, Riesen-Auswahl. Kostenlose Lieferung möglic
When you want to say I love you with food, this rich, moist, red velvet bundt cake swirled with a sweet cream cheese filling is the perfect recipe. Top it with a cream cheese frosting and colorful sprinkles for an extra special touch Using measuring cups, place the cheesecake batters intermittently one cup at a time. Take a bamboo skewer and drag it across the top of the cheesecake to create a floral design. Bake for 1 hour at 325°F and then turn off the oven and open the door to let the cheesecake cool for an hour. 5 Whisk melted butter with 1 cup sugar in a large mixing bowl; stir cocoa, red food coloring, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, vinegar, and salt into butter mixture one at a time, mixing well after each addition to avoid lumps. Stir 2 eggs into mixture until thoroughly combined. Step Assemble cake: On a cake platter, place one red velvet cake. Top with cheesecake layer, pressing down firmly, then top with second red velvet cake. Using an offset spatula, frost cake with cream.. Vanilla and red velvet flavors get swirled in a perfectly tender, moist and absolutely decadent pound cake!! If you love red velvet cake or even classic cream cheese pound cake, you will adore this twist on a Marble Cake classic! Also try my Red Velvet Lava Cakes or Marble Cakelettes for a classic marble cake
How to Make Red Velvet Swirl Pound Cake Red velvet is kind of like a chocolate cake, but usually it has a touch of vinegar to add tang, and I like mine with dark cocoa to really get the flavor right. You start by mixing up the plain vanilla pound cake batter, and then taking about 1/3 of the batter and putting into another bowl Prepare the cheesecake filling. Beat the cream cheese, egg, sugar and vanilla with a whisk or with an electric mixer, until fluffy. 3 Pour the cheesecake into the pan, on top of the brownie mixture
In a large bowl, add the cake mix, eggs, oil, butter, and milk. Stir with a spoon until fully combined. Batter will be very thick. Drop in the cubed cream cheese into the batter and gently fold in to swirl Red velvet cream cheese bundt cake recipe food work kitchen red velvet cream cheese swirl bundt cake bunsen burner bakery red velvet swirl bundt cake desserts kitchen divas red velvet swirl bundt cake a beautiful mess layered red velvet cheesecake bundt cake the best. Related
Prepare red velvet cake batter according to package. Spoon batter into a cupcake pan filled with paper liners. Fill each cup ½ full. In a separate bowl whip together the cream cheese, egg, sugar and vanilla until well incorporated. Spoon 1 ½ to 2 Tbsp of the cream cheese mixture on top of each of the cake batter filled cups Preheat oven to 350°. Line cupcake pans with liners. Whisk flour, sugar, cocoa, salt, and baking soda in a large bowl. Add eggs, oil, buttermilk, white vinegar, and vanilla to a large measuring cup or extra bowl and whisk until combined. Add to dry ingredients and mix with a hand mixer until smooth
Cream Cheese Swirl: Add the egg whites, cream cheese, sugar, and beat on high with a handheld electric mixer for about 5 minutes, or until cream cheese is totally smooth and mixture has fluffed up significantly in volume. Add the flour, vanilla, and beat to incorporate. Drop the cream cheese mixture over the brownie batter in heaping. . Add 2 1/2 cups of batter into bundt pan and spread evenly. Pour in the cream cheese mixture. Spoon the remaining batter over the cream cheese layer. Bake for 1 hour or until toothpick inserted comes out clean. Transfer cake to a cooling rack and let cool 20-30 minutes Red Velvet Swirl Bundt Cake is a super moist chocolate bundt cake with a chocolate swirl inside and covered in the best cream cheese buttercream frosting Top that layer with half of the red velvet pound cake batter. Spread evenly. Repeat with remaining vanilla then red velvet batter. Smooth the top. Bake at 325 degrees F for 1 hour to 1 hour 10 minutes. The cake will be done when a wooden pick inserted in the thickest part comes out clean or with dry crumbs
The cream cheese addition adds a nice contrast to the red velvet cake and a really nice flavor on the palate. Next, you'll add half of the red velvet cake batter into the bundt pan. Then add the cheesecake mixture directly on top of batter. Lastly, pour the remaining red velvet cake batter on top. That's it Top with cheesecake layer, pressing down firmly, then top with second red velvet cake. Using an offset spatula, frost cake with cream cheese frosting. Garnish with red velvet cake crumbs before. Red Velvet Earthquake Cake is phenomenal! This luscious cake is made with a Red Velvet cake batter, a cream cheese layer, and a layer of coconut, pecans and chocolate chips. Then it undergoes a shift while baking. Everyone will want seconds and thirds of Red Velvet Earthquake Cake. Here's what I did Next you'll make your batter using cream cheese, sugar, eggs, heavy cream, and vanilla. Mix it until it is completely smooth and creamy. One half you will leave as is and the other you will mix Red Velvet cake mix into it. If it isn't red enough, you can change that with some food coloring. christmassweettreats - TikTok. Once you have.
In a bowl combine the cake mix, melted butter, oil, and eggs. The batter should be very think, but bakes up incredibly moist. Reserve ⅓ cup of batter mixed with 2 tbsp of water for the topping, and spread the rest in to prepared baking dish. For the cheesecake topping, beat cream cheese until like then add sugar until combined Repeat layers. Cut through batter with a knife to swirl the cream cheese mixture. Bake at 350&Deg; for 35-40 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean (cake may crack). Cool on a wire rack. Meanwhile, in a blender, cover and process strawberries until pureed. Serve with cake Cupcakes. Preheat oven to 350° and line 2 muffin tins with 24 liners. Cream together the sugar, butter and eggs and in a large bowl. Add food coloring, white vinegar, and cocoa powder to the mix and blend well. In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, cornstarch, salt, baking soda, and baking powder well Add the red velvet cake mix, water, oil, and eggs into a large mixing bowl. Beat with a hand mixer until incorporated and smooth. Assemble. Divide the red velvet cake batter in half. Spread the first half of the batter into the bottom of the prepared pan. Divide the cheesecake batter in half Red Velvet Swirl Brownies. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Butter an 8 by 8-inch baking pan, and set aside. Brownie layer: Add melted butter to a large bowl and add the sugar, vanilla, cocoa powder, salt, food coloring, and vinegar, in that order, mixing between additions. Whisk the eggs in a small bowl and stir it into the cocoa mix
SWIRL BAKERY CAKE SUGGESTIONS. 10-12 servings. 8 inch - 3 layer round cake. $37.50 ea. Red velvet cake with cream cheese icing. Carrot Cake. Carrots, coconut, pineapple, and pecans with cream cheese icing. Italian Cream. Italian cream cake with coconut, pecans and a cream cheese icing. Old Fashion. White cake with chocolate icing. Coconut Red Velvet Cheesecake. Red velvet desserts are almost a religion in the South. Whether it's a cream cheese frosted red velvet layer cake, red velvet brownies, red velvet ice box pie or a stunning red velvet trifle, it's always met with genuine appreciation.While the red hue makes it a flavor that's typically associated with Valentine's Day and Christmas, it's far too delicious to limit to just.
Instructions. Preheat the oven to 350ºF. Grease a 9×5 inch loaf pan or line with parchment paper.. In a large bowl, or the bowl of a stand mixer, cream together the butter, sugar and cream cheese until light and fluffy. Add in the eggs one at at time, scraping down the bowl between additions . Mix 8 oz. block of cream cheese, sugar and egg white in a separate bowl until well blended. BAKE. Pour half of the red velvet cake mix into a greased 9×13. Drop spoonfuls of cream cheese mixture over the red velvet cake mix. Swirl all over the batter. Pour the other half of the cake batter over this cream cheese layer No Card Sugar Pack (₱70) Sweet Space (₱70) Swish & Swirl (₱70) Add to Cart. Add to Cart. A thick layer of white chocolate cheesecake sandwiched between moist red velvet cake layers and embraced by the silkiest cream cheese frosting. Insanely indulgent
Red Velvet Cheesecake Bundt Cake. Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease a 10-inch bundt pan with baking spray or butter and flour it. Set aside. To prepare the cake, add vegetable oil, eggs, Greek yoghurt, milk, vanilla extract, and vinegar and whisk until well combined. Next, add all of the dry ingredients and mix until well combined In a medium bowl, beat the cream cheese, sugar, egg, and vanilla until completely blended and smooth. Dollop large spoonfuls of this mixture atop the red velvet batter and use a sharp knife to swirl the cream cheese into the brownie batter. Bake 35 - 40 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean Mario Batali: The Chew Red Velvet Swirl Cake Recipe Directions. Start by preheating the oven to 375°F. Butter the inside of a fluted tube pan and dust with flour. Shake out excess flour. Beat together all the swirl ingredients in a mixing bowl until fluffy. Then whisk together the dry cake ingredients until they're combined
How you ever added a swirl to the Red Velvet cake? I think both the marshmallow frosting and a cream cheese swirl would work fantastically! Marie Roffey — December 5, 2020 @ 10:28 am Reply. Thanks Ben. Yes, I have another red velvet cake with a cream cheese filling which is lovely. Not quite a swirl but you could certainly swirl it Fold in the flour until lightly combined. Pour the batter into the prepared baking pan, saving 1/4 cup of the batter for the top. Blend together the cream cheese, sugar, egg, and vanilla in a medium bowl. Gently spread the cream cheese layer on top of the brownie batter in the pan. Dollop the remaining brownie batter over the cream cheese layer
Pre-Heat oven to 350 degrees. 2. Prepare muffin/cupcake tins with foil liners (24); set aside. 3. In a large mixing bowl: beat all the Cake Ingredients on medium speed until all well combined; set aside. 4. In a medium mixing bowl: beat all the Cheesecake Ingredients on med/low until all well combined. 5 Southern traditional red cocoa cake with a sweet cream cheese frosting. Single $3.25 - Dozen $33.00 Vanilla Chocolate Swirl. vanilla cake topped with creamy milk chocolate and cream cheese frosting. Call for Pricing Red Velvet Cake. 9 inch / 3 layer. Topped with cream cheese frosting Red Velvet Swirl Cake. $29.95. Add to Cart. Add to Cart. Reviews Preparation Ingredients. Preparation. Thaw and serve. Ingredients. Sugar, Cream Cheese (Pasteurized Cultured Cream And Milk, Organic Acid Blend [Citric Acid, Phosphoric Acid, Lactic Acid, Acetic Acid], Salt, Xanthan Gum, Carob Bean Gum, Guar Gum), Water, Enriched Flour Bleached. Love will be forever associated with the color red, which is why red velvet is often thought of as a romantic dessert. When you want to say I love you with food, this rich, moist, red velvet bundt cake swirled with a sweet cream cheese filling is the perfect recipe. Top it with a cream cheese frosting and colorful sprinkles for an extra special touch The red velvet bar really is like eating a much denser version of the cake and the cheesecake swirl adds the flavor you'd normally get from a good cream cheese frosting. The bars start off with the brownie batter using melted butter, which helps make them dense and chewy. You'll also find one of the classic red velvet cake ingredients.
Swirl batter gently with a knife. Step 3. Bake at 350° for 22 to 25 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool in pans on wire racks 10 minutes. Remove from pans; cool on wire racks. Step 4. Spread Peppermint Cream Cheese Frosting between layers and on top and sides of cake In a medium bowl combine the flour, sugar, buttermilk, oil, egg. With an electric hand mixer, blend on medium speed for about 2 minutes and set aside. In a separate small bowl, combine baking soda, cocoa powder, salt, red food color, vanilla extract, and vinegar. Mix until well blended. Add this mixture to cake batter and stir until well combined Red Velvet cake has been A Thing for long enough—I thought it was time to turn the tables and experience the cake in an entirely new way! The cream cheese bundt cake has a dense, moist texture and a tangy cream cheese flavor that's magnified by a swirl of cheesecake through the center Preheat your oven to 325°F. Liberally prepare 3 9-inch round cake pans with the nonstick method of your choice. In the bowl of your stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, add the flour. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter an 8 by 8-inch baking pan, and set aside. Brownie layer: In a saucepan on medium heat melt the butter. Remove the butter to a large bowl and add the sugar.
Red Velvet Cake is a luscious red velvet cake ice cream with pieces of red velvet cake and a cream cheese icing swirl. Available in the half gallon and pint sizes for a limited time. pic.twitter. To make the cheesecake swirl: With a hand-held mixer on medium speed, beat the cream cheese, ½ cup of sugar, egg, and ½ teaspoon vanilla in a medium size bowl until completely smooth, about 1 minute. Dollop spoonfuls on top of brownie batter Step 4. Blend cream cheese, 1/4 cup sugar, egg, and vanilla extract together in a bowl. Spread cream cheese mixture over brownie batter in the prepared baking dish. Pour reserved 1/3 cup brownie batter in 2 rows over cream cheese layer. Pull a knife through the batter rows into cream cheese layer to form swirls. Step 5 Red Velvet Cake Mix Brownies with Cream Cheese For the brownies. 1 red velvet cake mix 1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted 3 tbsp vegetable oil 1 egg 1 tbsp water. for the cream cheese topping. 8 ounces cream cheese, softened 1 egg 1/4 cup sugar 1/2 tsp vanilla extract. Directions. Preheat the oven to 350° and spray a 13×9 non-stick pan with.
Preheat the oven to 350°F/180°C. Line an 8×8-inch baking pan with parchment paper. Make the brownie batter: In a large heat-proof bowl, place butter, cocoa powder, and salt. Microwave in 30-second intervals, stirring in between each interval, until melted. Add sugar and whisk until combined Red Velvet Cake. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour three 8 inch pans. Mix together cake mix, 1 box pudding mix, eggs, oil, food coloring, water, vinegar, and cocoa. Pour into prepared pans. Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for 35 to 40 minutes. Cool on baking rack Super creamy ice cream with a swirl of cream cheese frosting. This pink ice cream has a hint of buttermilk, a bit of cocoa and lots of yummm. It is perfect for Valentine's Day or any day. This recipe was originally shared in 2016. At the time MiMi had an ice cream maker but I didn't. I got a. In a separate large bowl, use a handmixer to beat together the butter and sugars until creamy and well-combined, about 3 minutes. Add in the egg, milk, vanilla extract, and food coloring. Mix until even. Pour the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients a bit at a time and mix until a smooth dough is formed
The insanely beautiful and delicious Red Velvet Cake with Blackberry Cream Cheese Frosting from the Grandbaby Cakes cookbook. If you love this cake, you will also love these Red Velvet Lava Cakes.. So I'm continuing the Grandbaby Cakes cookbook fun by posting a recipe from the book today to go along with the Blogger Cake Walk Tour In a stand mixer, cream together the cream cheese, butter, and vanilla. Add in powdered sugar a 1/2 cup at a time, until fully combined and fluffy. Set aside. When ice cream has processed, pour half into a freezer safe container and top with 5-6 spoonfuls of the icing. use a knife to loosely swirl
In a large bowl, cream together sugar and butter until fluffy, then beat in the eggs. (2.) In a separate bowl, mix together cocoa, food coloring, and vanilla extract (or rum) until it's a smooth paste. (3.) Add to the batter and mix well. (4.) Slowly add in buttermilk, water, rum, and flour and mix for another 1-2 minutes Red Velvet Brownies With Cream Cheese Frosting The Anthony Kitchen. Gluten Red Velvet Brownies. Gooey Red Velvet Brownie Cake Beyond Frosting. Red Velvet Brownies From Cake Mix The Typical Mom. Red Velvet Brownies With Cream Cheese Swirl Averie Cooks. Chewy Red Velvet Brownies Recipe. Red Velvet Brownie Fudge Cake How To Make Red Velvet Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Buttercream. Make red velvet cupcakes according to the package instructions for cupcakes. (I use a Betty Crocker mix and get about 24 cupcakes). While the cupcakes are cooling, make cream cheese buttercream (recipe below) Fit piping bag with Wilton 1M tip and fill with cream cheese buttercream The base has hints of cocoa as well as cream cheese. The sweetness does dull it a bit but you do get a red velvet cake vibe. This is only amplified by the mix-ins. Friendly's doesn't mess around when it comes to their red velvet cake chunks because these things are massive and everywhere. Like it's hard to not get some cake in every one. Preheat oven to 325°. Spray a 12- to 15-cup fluted pan with nonstick baking spray with flour. In a large bowl, beat butter and sugar at medium speed with a mixer until fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in vinegar and vanilla
This creamy Red Velvet Cheesecake Recipe starts with a rich cookie crust, then is topped with a delicious layer of red chocolate and a decadent layer of cream cheese. The real secret though is in the swirl bringing together colors in a unique pattern that's sure to wow your guests For the cream cheese swirl you'll combine cream cheese, sugar, an egg, vanilla and a little flour. Pour about 3 cups of your cake batter into a greased bundt cake, spread your cream cheese mixture all around over the cake batter. Spoon the remaining cake batter carefully over the top of the cream cheese and put the pan in the oven to bake Pour half of the red velvet cake mix into a greased 9×13-inch. Drop spoonfuls of cream cheese mixture over the red velvet cake mix. Swirl all over the batter. Pour the other half of the cake batter over this cream cheese layer. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes. Once baked, take out and let cool. For the frosting, mix cream cheese and butter until smooth Cream Cheese Frosting. In a large bowl, cream together cream cheese and butter with a hand mixer until smooth. Add powdered sugar, lemon juice and vanilla. Set aside. Remove the cheesecake from the springform pan and top with leveled red velvet cake. Top with cream cheese frosting and create a swirl pattern on top. Top with cake crumbles and serve Preheat the oven to 350F/177C. Line the bottom of an 8-inch springform pan with parchment paper and spray the sides with a baking spray. Prepare the brownie base first. In a large mixing bowl, cream together the softened butter, sugar and vanilla for a few minutes until smooth
To Make the Cake Preheat oven to 350F. Spray 2 9 cake pans with pan spray. Line the bottoms with rounds of parchment and spray again. Set aside. In a large bowl, combine the cake mix, water, sour cream, mayonnaise, eggs, and yolk, salt, and vanilla. Using a hand mixer, mix on low speed for about 30 seconds Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Grease a non-stick* 10 cup bundt cake with shortening, then dust with flour. In a large bowl, combine the cake mix, sour cream, oil and eggs and mix until well combined. Set aside. In a medium bowl, using either a stand or hand mixer, combine the cream cheese, sugar and flour and mix until creamy
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and flour two 9-inch round metal baking pans (or spray with nonstick baking spray with flour). In a large bowl, whisk together flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt. Add eggs, oil, buttermilk, food coloring, vanilla and vinegar to the flour mixture This red velvet cake roll with cream cheese filling is sweet, soft and just perfect for Valentine's day. Very easy to make, festive and delicious. This Red Velvet Cake Roll With Cream Cheese Filling recipe has been originally posted in February 2015 and updated with a few changes in the ingredients in January 2019 Spread cheesecake filling over top of batter and swirl. 8. Pour in remaining cake batter. Bake at 350°F for 40 to 45 minutes. Note that baking times will vary by oven and pan type. To test cake for doneness, insert a knife into the cake. If the knife comes out clean, the cake is done. Cool cake on wire rack 10 to 15 minutes. Remove from pan
Red Velvet and Vanilla Bean Cake Swirled Together for the Perfect Pairing! The buttercream filling you select for the interior will be the same buttercream on the exterior. *Cream cheese filled cakes are iced with vanilla bean buttercream. This product is available with 48 hours notice. Please note that our order cutoff time is 3pm Cake: Preheat oven to 180°C (350°F). Beat the butter and sugar with an electric mixer on low to medium speed for about 5 minutes. Combine the flour with cocoa, baking soda and salt. Beat in eggs, one at a time. Mix in milk, sour cream, vanilla and food color. Carefully mix in the dry ingredients until just combined
Recipe: Red Velvet Marble Bundt Cake. The trick to creating looping swirls is to gently layer the batter around the Bundt pan with a small cookie scoop. No need to swirl with a knife; it will marble as it bakes. Finish it off with a Snowy White Vanilla Glaze. 4 of 26 Cream Cheese Icing: To begin, make 2 batches of cream cheese icing the night before and put it in the refrigerator so it will be nice and firm. Red Velvet Cake: Next, bake the Duncan Hines Red Velvet Cake according to the directions on the back of the box. Bake in 2 round pans the same size as your cheesecake. Let cool to room temperature How do you make red velvet cream cheese bundt cake? For most cakes, you want to use the muffin mixing method. Also known as the stirring method, or quick bread method, this method of mixing is used for pancakes, muffins, corn bread, and dumplings. The muffin mixing method is used for most quick breads that result in a batter rather than a dough So here's my take on red velvet, with a cream cheese swirl that befits its winding history. Yes, it will bake for an obscenely long time, but it's v v tasty and will keep well on your counter as you nip off a slice here and there. The base is adapted from a Martha recipe, with the addition of a cream cheese swirl and a salty cocoa crunch Place cream cheese, granulated sugar, and salt in a large bowl. Using a hand mixer, eat the cream cheese and sugar on medium speed until combined. Add sour cream, egg, vanilla extract, and vinegar and beat on medium speed until well blended. Remove about ¼ cup of the batter mixture and set aside


text:
April 1, 2021 - April 30, 2021
Take and Make Kids Kit – Poetry Journal
Thursday, April 1, 2021
Each kit includes supplies for a craft or activity designed to engage your child’s imagination and creativity. April’s Kit is a Poetry Journal to celebrate National Poetry Month and will be available via curbside or by stopping by the Children's Desk starting April 1st. Each kit will include all the supplies needed for a child 6-12 to start a journal to collect poetry. Additionally, there are daily prompts for the whole month to help with inspiration for writing ideas. Kits are available on a first come, first serve basis, no registration is required.

domain: library


text:
Interstitial art of any sort—that art which falls between the established boundaries of popularly accepted genres or even entirely disparate artistic media—is and has always been difficult to process for critics and audiences alike. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy—a text some might dub the most famous work in the history of interstitial literature—was, for instance, less than favorably received throughout the duration of its serialized publication. The bulk of Alex Rose’s work—writing which recalls other interstitial masters of the postmodern era such as Italo Calvino and J.L. Borges—blurs the line between not only fiction and nonfiction, but between any number of literary genres: traditional narrative literary fiction, prose poetry, historical research, scientific taxonomy, science-fiction, mythology, ethnology, music criticism, and literary criticism, to name a few. One cannot help but recall Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, a text in which the reader is challenged to distinguish fact from fiction on virtually every page. Where Rose’s body of work is concerned, this syncretic technique is nowhere more evident than in his collection The Musical Illusionist—marketed as a collection of short stories, but downright defiant of even that broad description. Arguably, this collection contains only two actual stories.
Alex Rose’s short story “Ostracon,” first published in the esteemed journal Ploughshares, was not only included in 2009’s Best American Short Stories collection, it was named by The National Book Critics Circle as “best of the best.” This is somewhat surprising because it is in this piece that Rose’s well-executed, ambitious and freewheeling prose is most toned down, most bridled. And it is nothing short of remarkable when it is discovered that Alex Rose has apparently published only four short stories: “Ostracon” in Ploughshares; “Book of Glass” and “The Musical Illusionist” in the aforementioned collection which, significantly, was self-published on an independent press Rose himself started; and “The Plagiarist,” which is available on Rose’s Hotel St. George Press’ website. Perhaps this dearth of well-published work is indicative of nothing more than the fact that, until “Ostracon,” Rose had yet to send the right piece to the right editor at the right time—contemporary publishing is in many ways an industry founded on serendipity, kismet. But perhaps it is, rather, indicative of the industry’s systemic difficulty with and resistance to interstitial literature. Once one has explored Rose’s oeuvre—which does not, as of 2010, take long—it is inevitable that one will come down on the side of the latter. The thread which connects all of Rose’s work is not only his syncretic construction, but also his supposition that the world of writing has hyper-specialized to such a degree that mongrelized texts like Rose’s have come to be regarded as beguiling and problematic at best, and both off-putting and unpublishable at worst.
“The Plagiarist” is the simplest of Rose’s stories, but a close reading reveals an inchoate version of the complexly syncretic texts—both The Musical Illusionist and “Ostracon”—which followed its publication. “The Plagiarist” opens with a telling epigraph stolen from Nabokov’s Dozen. “‘I have often noticed,’” Nabokov comments, “‘that after I had bestowed the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would…[become] more closely identified with my novel than with my former self’” (Plagiarist). Indeed, in suit, “The Plagiarist” is a story about the difficulty of delineations when one fully engages any text.
Told in the second-person, the reader is immediately drawn closer than third- or first-person narration allows. In Book XIV of Odyssey, Eumaeus the swineherd—the ideal citizen—is addressed in the second-person, perhaps propagandistically: as an almost subliminal method of indoctrination by which the reader comes to more closely identify with, thus maybe eventually imitate, that ideal citizen. In Jay McInerny’s Bright Lights, Big City, the second-person is used to disquiet the reader, to make more visceral the experience of insomnia, decadence, and degradation. Regardless of its intended ends, second-person narration goes immediately to work in blurring the boundaries between inside and outside a text. A line of a sort is blurred with the first pronoun of Rose’s story. But this is just the first of many blurrings.
In “The Plagiarist,” the reader is told that he or she works as a typist, inputting classic world literature into an electronic database. This lays the foundation for a typically postmodern work of metafiction, perhaps, but the story subverts that expectation and is more complex than that. You, the protagonist, struggle with the fact that your job has caused you to habitually refer to your own life in literary terms. You mention “a chapter of last night’s dream,” the wording of which, again, complicates matters (Plagiarist). Soon, it becomes clear that, by doing so, the titular plagiarist is you, the reader. “[T]he plot of your dream was itself a pale imitation of Dostoevsky’s novel, The Double, a gloomy book you’d recently uploaded,” the protagonist explains (Plagiarist). The protagonist then boards a train and spots an attractive lady reading a book, and he or she finds himself smitten. “Does she remind you of someone? No one in particular, anyway—more like an archetype or character you’ve come across. Why not give her a name?…Ylajali. It was the name Knut Hansun’s nameless narrator in Hunger gave to the beauty he kept spotting throughout the labyrinthine city” (Plagiarist). Already this story is a fiction (Rose’s text) about a nonfictional individual (you, the reader), who interprets his or her life in the idiom of fiction.
On a third level, one may infer from the story’s epigraph that Rose himself has lent to his characters and his fictional world elements from his own life—elements and characteristics which have perhaps for him, but certainly for his reader, ceased to have their primary significance in Rose’s own memory, instead becoming more closely associated with the world and individuals the story describes. What this boils down to is, by the second screen of type (“The Plagiarist” is only available online), Rose’s story is a fiction inspired by the life of a nonfictional individual (Rose’s own), about a fictional rendition of a nonfictional character (you, the reader), whose life has been hopelessly influenced by too much time spent reading fiction. Ylajali, of course, disembarks from the train, leaving behind the book she’d been reading. This text, entitled The Mystery of Mr. I (and fittingly narrated by the first-person’s “I”), complicates matters further, adding at least two more layers to this already tortuous description.
The tatty red paperback marooned on Ylajali’s seat turns out to be, more or less, a permutation of a pulp noir novel. Most of the text’s elements are staples of the genre: sultry widows, microfilm, skeleton keys, locked closets, broken bodies found in unlikely places, and tramp freighters. Each of these is left to fend for itself, out of context; each of these items or individuals, often described with a single sentence, is the germ of its own fiction—a trait which typifies Rose’s Musical Illusionist. Reportedly, The Mystery of Mr. I is terribly written. More interesting than its own prose, however, is its marginalia. “There are many underlinings and brackets and tiny cursive notes scribbled into the margins…[T]he work of at least three separate inks. Are these cryptic notes-to-self the product of successive readings by a single fan, or do they represent decades of varying ownership?” (Plagiarist). You, the reader, initially picked up the book as a way to maybe penetrate the consciousness of the beautiful woman who abandoned it, with whom you were momentarily tempted to commune. But what Rose’s reader finds is perhaps a plethora of consciousnesses—the notes range from simple inquiries, to literary allusions, to intratextual references, to pseudomedical suppositions.
After extended exposure to the paperback, “[a] strange thing happens as you read. Because you have been following the scrawled margin notes with the story itself, you begin to acquire the sense that you are reading one work; that both the novel and the comments on the novel are a single entity” (Plagiarist). The text within the text—The Mystery of Mr. I—has itself become confusing to Rose’s protagonist. Is it pulp or a more creative sort of literature? Or is it maybe a critical response to pulp literature? Can it be both simultaneously? “You have become suspicious of every sentence…[c]ould an author incorporate his own commentary into the very work?” (Plagiarist). This, of course, calls to mind Borges’ canonical “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”: a fictional piece pretending to be a literary criticism of a nonfictional text, the latter penned by a man obsessed with emulating not Cervantes’ fictional text, but the life of Cervantes himself, as understood by close reading of the original Quixote. It perhaps calls to mind the more recent postmodern work of both David Foster Wallace and Mark Z. Danielewski who both, through the use of extensive footnoting, create at least semi-syncretic texts: self-aware works of fiction or creative nonfiction which are simultaneously works of literary criticism—deconstructing themselves at the same time as they construct themselves. Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, through intertextual marginalia, becomes both a memoir and a critical work.
Before the rather abstract and fantastical ending of Rose’s “Plagiarist,” the protagonist encounters a text within the text within the text. “Scanning the text…there is an intricate and quite technical description of a puzzle—presumably…an excerpted historical treatise of some sort” (Plagiarist). This historical text has something to do with “Algebra, or in Arabic, al-jabr, literally…‘the reunion of broken parts’” (Plagiarist). It happens that, upon examination, sections of this text within the text within the text turn out to be factual. At this point, it becomes difficult to understand if and how this could complicate matters further. Regardless, Rose’s point is made: if fiction, reality, and analysis of either are taken in toto to be broken parts of what was formerly a less-specialized (less genre-defined) literature, then Rose’s “Plagiarist” is certainly a reunion of broken parts. By the end of a story no more than 4,000 words, Rose has seamlessly layered autobiography; traditional literary fiction, pulp noir, and metafiction (some would define “interstitial literature” as loosely as that which spans the gaps between two genres, which would include even the now standard “romantic mystery” novel); and nonfictional commentary about the history of mathematics. “The Plagiarist” is a complex latticework, yes, but it pales in comparison to the inscrutable and enigmatic reunion of broken parts which is Rose’s Musical Illusionist.
The Musical Illusionist is an oddity for any number of reasons—not least of which is the fact that it is marketed by its publisher, on its dust jacket, as fiction when in many places it is certainly not. It cannot be forgotten that this publisher is Rose himself. Obviously, all fiction comprises autobiographical and nonfictional elements and, of course, it’s not always clear what is and what is not fiction—this, in fact, may be the point of “The Plagiarist.” Illusionist comprises twenty-two short pieces, yes, but it is a stretch to call twenty of them “stories.” Rose’s collection is a reunion of broken parts in that it appears to be an unapologetic pastiche of history, biography, medical/microbial taxonomy, music criticism, fiction, anthropology, &c., and it makes little attempt to obfuscate that fact.
Early chapters truncate mostly true stories of ancient cartographers, mathematicians, and theories of cosmogony. “Francis of Gaul” is about the history of Christian distrust for mathematics and sciences—especially once the concepts of both zero and infinity made their way into European Christian usage. Its concluding paragraphs describe a clearly fictional province called Havraska and their reluctance to except time as metered out with consistency upon the invention of the clock—its citizens preferring subjective time, a phenomenon which itself is explored in a nonfictional aside discussing the ancient Greeks, who indeed believed in both objective and subjective time. In the end, “Havraska province had been eroded by surrounding Moravia, forgotten by time” (Musical 16). “Early Strange Loops” details the errors and curiosities inherent to Aristotelian planetary motion theory. It makes mention of early theories of God as the Unmoved Mover who set the planets into orbit and modern scientific knowledge about the actual mathematics of orbit.
The book’s third selection, “The Reunion of Broken Parts,” follows the format of the entries which precede it. There is no shift in tone. However, centering on logical paradoxes and closing with five-hundred words on the mathematician who claimed his destroyed manuscript contained an equation that would put an end to them all, one might be chagrined to discover that it is completely fabricated. Without fact-checking, one would not know this. Discussion of infamous logical paradoxes such as Zeno’s Arrow aside, “Broken Parts” is a fiction, if not a story. But without reading the text’s back jacket, one might not know that the essays which precede it—with the exception of the few sentences on Havraska—are historically accurate, if elegantly poeticized by Rose’s dexterous use of the English language.
The text’s next five selections—“Land of the Xhalal,” “Oaxaxghana,” “The Fifth Island of Japan,” “Fairos,” and “Santanzas”—continue on in that same detached and clinical tone. They do not feature characters or plot, in any traditional sense of either word. They are anthropological studies of imaginary places. Ethnographic treatises on imaginary people. None of the described lands or tribes are or were ever real. Still, one has yet to find a proper character—one who is developed over more than a paragraph—or a proper plot—one with conflict, rising action, climax, and perhaps some denouement. Further into Illusionist, one encounters a chapter entitled “Micrographica Esoterica,” an eight-page zoological treatise on extinct and rare bacteria. Some entries in this treatise describe microbes or biological phenomena that are or were actually real. Some do not. Without a comprehensive microbiology textbook, one would be hard-pressed to tell the difference. Well into the text, there are no stories, per se. Only possibilities.
Again, one might think of Italo Calvino, whose If on a winter’s night a traveler’s central conceit is that the book one is reading—winter’s night itself—is made up of a dozen mismatched signatures, the thirty-two-page inserts which are glued to a spine to create a book. Each signature is the opening chapter of a completely different book; the text is held together and made coherent by a second-person framing narrative which describes your frustration in being constantly confounded by beginnings with no end. Or perhaps one might think of writers’ workshop exercise books like Kowit’s In the Palm of Your Hand, or Bernays and Painter’s What If?, which provide springboards for stories, but leave it to the reader to complete the stories themselves.
So, the question is begged: What is The Musical Illusionist? The book itself barely resembles traditional adult fiction texts. It is interspersed with lush full-color plates bearing lively images of artwork, and photographs of relics; several pages contain mathematic graphs, musical staves, or paradigms for linguistic conjugations. Its format is part-textbook, part-tour brochure—it resembles the glossy-paged minitexts on history and culture and customs which tourists skim before traveling for the first time to a foreign nation. The latter resemblance is certainly not coincidental. Illusionist is set up as a sort of companion text that is to be read during the reader’s subway ride through a secret night gallery called “The Library of Tangents.” In this way, The Musical Illusionist defines itself, but this is of little help for anyone whose objective is to situate the work in any one genre or category, narrow or broad. “It’s said…that unlike a conventional library, it is an archive not of history, but of possibility. You’ve heard it described as a vast catalogue of deviations—improbable histories, oblique paths, scientific anomalies” (8-9). While admittedly intriguing, none of this, however, necessarily implies that one will ever encounter a traditional story, and it prompts questions as to whether or not fiction is more than just the creation of inert phantasms. But Illusionist, if pursued, actually contains two texts which (arguably) qualify as stories. And it is the first of the pair, “Book of Glass,” which allows readers to begin an understanding of the nature of The Musical Illusionist as a whole.
“Book of Glass” is a direct cousin of Arabian Nights’ story of Scheherezade. While still devoid of developed characters or a well-developed plot, its primary subject is the history and description of an anomalous dark ages text. This tome, entitled Lady Makura and the Book of Glass, is described as “[o]ne peculiar narrative, a 1,200-odd page Japanese text” which may have “clairvoyantly anticipated” the evolution of literary form (65). Rose opens the essay by explaining that “[t]he great scope of narrative form has undergone innumerable permutations since its first flickerings in the human imagination” (64). He elaborates on this with a paragraph-long whirlwind history of fiction. The “earliest surviving fictions reveal an overwhelming preoccupation with cosmogony…songs, epics, folktales and myths concerned the origins of the universe and the forces…responsible (64). He then supposes that, after cosmogony and creation myths were sufficiently engrained in human psyches or exhausted of interest, fiction moved to the study of cultures and strange lands. After that, “the next major epoch sought to examine the mind…[t]his fascination with the subjective reached its culmination with the modernists, and was soon followed by an interest in…narrative form itself” (65). This whirlwind history is extraordinarily significant, but this is less than completely clear until one completes the entirety of Illusionist. More on this below.
In “Book of Glass,” Rose lays out a number of ingenious and unusual devices by which the unknown author of Lady Makura chooses to tell his or her stories—tales used to distract and soothe a repeatedly cuckolded husband. The earliest tales in the text within the text are indeed occupied with cosmogony and gods. In one, a monk attempts to climb to the heavens and the reader’s perspective of the tale changes with the monk’s perception of the earth below: the font shrinks until it is illegible. Another talks of a prince’s study of foreign cultures and customs—the reader is told that Lady Makura has been printed on paper pulped from the leaves of a foreign tree which, when examined by a fortune teller, told the story of that prince’s downfall. A later tale, presumably representative of that epoch of fascination with the mind, recalls Wilde’s Dorian Gray, and tells of a woman who has a hand-mirror in which her image remains the same while the world behind her changes. The text of this particular tale must be read with a mirror—it is printed backwards. “One was a murder mystery that only revealed the killer once its final page was folded into an origami pattern. Another was said to have contained only blank pages intended for the reader to imprint his own story” (67). As described, “Book of Glass” certainly sounds as if it anticipates the postmodern era of literature: a chapter of Danielewski’s prenominate House of Leaves requires a mirror to read; a short story in Dave Eggers’ collection How We Are Hungry comprises only blank pages and a title.
First and foremost, with “Book of Glass,” Rose suggests that there is room in literature for the interstitial, syncretic texts: the literary equivalent of griffins, manticores, chimeras, or hippogriffs. The story’s bigger purpose in the collection is only possibly realized (except perhaps by the very clever) once the sections of text which proceed after it have been completed. Illusionist has proceeded from entries on bizarre cosmogonies, to invented ethnologies, and the subway eventually ends up taking a pit stop, so to speak, in a section on mental deficiencies—psychoses and neuroses. Illnesses of the mind.
“Intratextual Confabulation” is a short essay detailing Korsakov’s Psychosis—a very real condition, and one which could make for fascinating fiction if fleshed out. The same could be said of “Dysanimagnosis,” which explores the titular condition, and its sister affliction, Capgras’ Syndrome. Then, as usual, Rose, in this section of his text, gets inventive. “Mnemonic Cartographia” and “Projective Multiple Personality Disorder” are entries which describe maladies nowhere to be found in the DSM-IV guide to psychiatry. Still, neither has plot or characters. Only possibilities. Illusionist concludes with the story “The Musical Illusionist”—a tale with plot, characters, development, and structure.
During the text of “Book of Glass” one comes to realize that the prose’s assertion is correct: Lady Makura and the Book of Glass appears to be a microcosmic version of the history of fiction. But it is also indisputably a microcosmic version of The Musical Illusionist itself: its sections containing confabulations—much like those of Korsakov’s sufferers—which are laid out according to this alleged structure of literary history. Cosmogony and creation; anthropology and ethnography; the mind, non-Euclidean mathematics, and the post-Darwin natural world; and finally, with “Illusionist,” literary form itself. One of Illusionist’s later stories, “Goliijo,” discusses the possibility of a city built like a fractal: each of its streets is a miniature version of its coastline, and each of its houses is shaped like a miniature version of its streets. It is a city of infinite regress. “Book of Glass” contains a miniaturized exemplar of a miniaturized version of literary history and it is, perhaps, the centerpiece of The Musical Illusionist, a text laid out in exactly the same fashion as “Book of Glass”—only slightly larger in scope. The Musical Illusionist and “Book of Glass” are both fractal literature, literature of (potentially) infinite regress, if such a thing is possible. “Book of Glass,” a central tale in the larger book, provides the keys to comprehension for Rose’s work and, perhaps his literary agenda, which is detailed by the book’s final story.
The book’s single semi-traditional story, “The Musical Illusionist,” takes place during the dawn of the modernist era. Its protagonist interstitial (music) composer Phelix Lamarck stands adamantly against the late-enlightenment’s unraveling of physics and metaphysics, astrology and astronomy which the narration calls “[t]he great movement toward specialization, quantification, and precision of measurement” (123). It is this movement toward specialization, represented in Illusionist by the sections on dementia and the late-enlightenment, which will eventually make the syncretic, the interstitial, problematic—taboo. The story’s protagonist Lamarck stages performances which are interstitial phenomena, each innovatively using the nontraditional to create some sort of spectacle. Usually, the theatre itself is an instrument: one performance seems to be a primeval version of surround sound which makes its audience dizzy and queasy; another has invented a method of distorting and amplifying the echoes of traditional instruments until they, the echoes, seem to be playing a completely different song, which sometimes overpowers the actual performers.
Lamarck’s entire artistic oeuvre is a nebulous thing which polarizes audiences and critics. He is entirely motivated by “the infusion of science with theater, illumination with fantasy” (125). His vision is syncretic. He wonders “[w]here [does] noise end and music begin?” (128). His final performances are experiments in synaesthesia—a psychological condition in which the stimulation of one sense triggers a completely different sensory reaction: a noise, for instance, induces the visualization of color. And in fact, that is what his last performance does. It remains unclear to his audience which of the colors they see are being projected by hidden lamps, and which are hallucinated, provoked by the music. The narration says of him that, “None of Lamarck’s creations were meant to belong in any canon or repertoire, as they were all one of a kind events” (131). The fictional Phelix Lamarck does with his musical illusions precisely what Alex Rose does with his writing. Both experiences are reunions of broken parts. Lamarck believes noise and music should remain entangled and, in the end, he finds a way to (re)unite vision and sound. Thus, both “Illusionist” and Illusionist are clear in providing an answer to the question on which both end: “Have we hyper-specialized past the point where it benefits us?” (142).
Also at the end of “The Musical Illusionist,” there is a narrative passage which describes the more negative reactions to Lamarck’s interstitial compositions. “Strangely, it was the elite class, comprised mostly of artists and scientists,”—those most affected by and invested in what Rose calls specialization—“who found Lamarck’s work most disquieting. [B]oth groups were dividing and subdividing…fanning into ever-more specific schools…[while Lamarck] sought the very opposite, a synthesis of disciplines” (134). The phrase “synthesis of disciplines” describes Rose’s collection as well as it does the contents of the Lady Makura and the Book of Glass, and Lamarck’s fictional compositions. This idea, says the narration, was “a conviction which infuriated nearly everyone” (134). This synthesis of disciplines, in our postmodern age—a time during which so much is decided by abstract and decidedly non-artistic criteria such as commercial viability and marketability—when put into action, would perhaps not infuriate so much as it might alienate both publishers and readers (that is, if anyone published such material, allowing such negative reactions to take place).
Commercial publishers need to know what niche a work fills; on which shelf of the local Barnes & Noble will it be displayed? Fiction? Essays? History? Science? Or should it supplant the less-poetic poets, such as Bukowski, on the poetry shelf? Without a clear answer, they cannot market the text as a product to a generation of readers who are used to formulae—the police procedural novel, the tawdry romance, the loss and reaffirmation of faith narrative—and strict adherence to genre—essays, mystery, travel writing, and so on. Publishers do not know how to sell the syncretic, the interstitial; readers do not have a framework by which they can decipher it. Rose’s reunion of broken parts sounds romantic, revolutionary, and to some, ingenious. But perhaps he is right: the world has hyper-specialized to the point where there is no room for something so boldly interstitial as The Musical Illusionist. This is why “Ostracon” succeeded where, otherwise, Rose seems to have so far failed—in the commercial world.
“Ostracon” is neither so ambitious nor anomalous as the syncretic fractal undertaking that is The Musical Illusionist. It’s also not as labyrinthine as “The Plagiarist.” What it is, however, is both Rose’s most traditional story, and his most prestigiously published. Its protagonist—like “The Musical Illusionist,” it actually has one—is Katya: an old Jewish woman suffering from some form of dementia, very probably Alzheimer’s. But despite its restrained nature, the prose is still identifiably Rose’s. Aside from Rose’s trademark attention to assonance and alliteration, the text of “Ostracon” is most definitely syncretic.
“Ostracon” was traditional enough to make the Best American series—with the exception of Best American Non-Required Reading, the series is an institution which rarely embraces the experimental. In fact, in the anthology’s introduction, series editor Heidi Pitlor says specifically of Rose’s story that it “juxtaposes one moment in an elderly woman’s life with snippets about the history of medicine, the Hand Dynasty, and World War I. So much conflict! Too depressing! Doesn’t flow!” (Foreword x). But she then praises it for its “perfect rhythm” (x). Pitlor also says—though not explicitly in reference in reference to “Ostracon”—that it “pushed voice to some limit” (ix). And of its author, she says she was “thrilled to watch [him] quiet [his] years of grammar lessons and writing workshop rules about showing and not telling” (ix). “Ostracon” proceeds in fits and starts, chronologically, but unevenly, and it is accurate to say that it does a fair bit of “telling” where most writers consider anything other than “showing” verboten. Yet Rose’s story manages all of this in a way that alienates neither publishers, nor readers.
“Ostracon” opens with two small sections related to the main story. The first is a picture of a confused Katya searching for her misplaced glasses. The second is a description of an infrastructure-revealing hole cut by repairmen into the ceiling of her old house—by the end of the story, a well-developed symbol for Katya’s brain itself. Even between these sections, both of which are eventually connected and revealed to be part and parcel of the same main narrative, there is a leap. Even the simpler narrative segments of “Ostracon” are abstruse. But even more startling is the interlude which comes after the ensuing asterisk break. “Writes the Russian neurologist,” it clunkily begins, “Alexander Luria: ‘I shall never forget a case in which a man wounded…could easily read his surname “Levsky”…but was completely unable to read the much simpler word “lev” (lion) which was not fixed to the same degree in his memory’” (Ostracon 276). Immediately followed by another asterisk break, the central story resumes. This is jarring and bizarre at first to readers unfamiliar with Rose. What do the obscurer facts buried in back issues of Russian neurological journals have to do with Katya or her repairmen? There are nine of these interludes, each an oblique speed bump of obvious nonfiction in the road of Rose’s more sentimental fictional story.
If diagrammed, “Ostracon” looks like this:
A=Sections about Katya and her husband, in which some are flashbacks.
B=Sections about the workmen repairing the roof.
Interlude #1: Russian neurology
A B A
Interlude #2: The English medical lexicon
Interlude #3: The Han Dynasty
Interlude #4: Italian alchemy and chemical stains to detect degenerative diseases
Interlude #5: Machine guns on World War I fighter jets
Interlude #6: The English medical lexicon
Interlude #7: Electronic brain stimulation experiments
A B A A
Interlude #8: How memory works
A B A
Interlude #9: A gardener’s documented description of losing his mind
A A A A
This looks extraordinarily strange when laid out as such, but Rose does, in “Ostracon,” strike that functional rhythm for which Pitlor credits him. This rhythm, it turns out, is the result of Rose’s fabled reunion of broken parts. After that first medico-historical interlude, a second is interjected, dealing with the entry of the noun “reflex” into the English medical lexicon—a reader willing to suspend disbelief and give the story a fair shake might say that those two are connected. But the third interlude is an encyclopedia-style data dump about the cultural practices of ancient Chinese soldiers. “During the Han Dynasty, Chinese soldiers wore mirrors over their breastplates to ward off wicked spirits. If the mirrors broke, the warriors would grind up the shattered glass and ingest it, so that its magic would protect them from within” (277). This is true, unrelated to the story, unrelated to any of the other interludes and, seemingly, totally out of place. Except that it is not.
Rose’s familiar interstitial method is particularly well-suited to tackling a story about the nature of a degraded memory. Interlude six describes the entry of the word “synapse” into the English medical lexicon and makes it clear that what syncretic structure like this compels the reader to do: he or she is expected to read these interludes as invaluable synaptic connections between the sections which tell Katya’s story. They are, on first blush, astonishingly random and unrelated to the story or each other. But, when one looks closer, there is indubitably a certain rationale which links them.
The story’s titular ostracon—a stone tablet upon or into which a story has been painted or carved—is broken and stored in the couple’s armoire, their own Library of Tangents. Inside the armoire, Rose lays out items a number of odd relics. Within, there are “fragments of pre-Columbian textiles, a beetle entombed in a bulb of amber, a lock of Madame Curie’s hair…a vial of perfume recovered from a sunken barge, an open letter postmarked to a Ukrainian village that no longer exists…a jar of gallstones…[a] bullet from one of the revolvers used to shoot Grigori Rasputin. A diamond smuggled from Kiev in the stomach of a boy who’d swallowed it in a ball of wax” (277-8). In The Musical Illusionist, each would certainly have merited a chapter of their own. Instead, Rose bridles his interstitial style and restrains himself, allowing just this single luxuriant paragraph describing these items. Relegated to decoration in a more traditional short story, they become irresistibly idiosyncratic detail.
Displayed centrally in the armoire is the ostracon. It is old and broken. Rose describes its surface: “There is a narrative of some sort running across the grid of panels, though the events aren’t clear, not with so many sections missing” (279). Here, with the ostracon, Rose has found a traditional fiction writer’s use for one of the curiosities that play protagonist in most of the selections of Illusionist. It reflects the degraded state of Katya’s own synapses—the narrative of her own life is increasingly impossible to descry with so many sections missing. What both Katya’s memory and the ostracon need to be complete is to be rejoined with the pieces they are now missing.
“Ostracon,” though undeniably bridled when considered alongside of the rest of Rose’s oeuvre, still serves to further his agenda of syncretism. It is not as forthright about its resistance to hyper-specialization as is The Musical Illusionist, but perhaps it is, because of this, a more effective way to argue his point. Katya’s memory told an interesting story which, in the end, has become tragically incomplete and, thus, less interesting. The same could be said of the ostracon. But with his award-winning story, Rose demonstrates a method of meliorating the losses which come in tow of the former problem. He can tell Katya’s story because he reunites broken parts. Call the interludes glue, or shims, or grafts—whatever the metaphor. Regardless of one’s desired analogy, what allows the plot of “Ostracon”—a very familiar one for avid readers of contemporary literary fiction—to move forward in a way which feels fresh, uncontrived, defamiliarized is the segments which, according to the unspoken artistic rules against which both Rose and his Lamarck have struggled, don’t belong there. And to do this—to reinvigorate an increasingly hackneyed story (perils of dementia)—Rose has had to farm in help, so to speak, from outside the genre. A specialist’s telling of this story would have been detrimental to its essence. What it required was the synthesis of disciplines ordered by Phelix Lamarck.
With this newfound subtlety of technique, Rose has earned for himself a place in contemporary literature’s fickle spotlight. If he takes advantage of it while it lasts, and keeps producing stories which incrementally introduce marketing departments and the reading masses to interstitial literature, he may yet make some progress in his crusade for anti-specialization. Stories like “Ostracon” open the metaphorical door just enough that a beguiling light is allowed to trickle into a dim and dusty, if well-organized, room. For some of the curious, this will be enough: these bold souls will follow that meager light and discover enthralling texts that bend every rule in the book. But with just a couple more well-published texts like “Ostracon”—gentle nudges allowing more and more of that strange light to flood that fusty room—Rose and others like him might clear the way for a generation of bold interstitial craftsmen. Perhaps that detrimental specialization that picked up startling speed in the late-1800s is not irreversible after all. If Rose succeeds in his perceived agenda, if the syncretic became even marginally acceptable, then maybe, at least, the next author of a collection as adventurous as The Musical Illusionist will not have to found his own press to disseminate his words.
Pitlor, Heidi. “Foreword.” Best American Short Stories. Ed. Alice Sebold. New York: Houghton
Rose, Alex. The Musical Illusionist. New York: Hotel St. George Press, 2007.
Rose, Alex. “Ostracon.” Best American Short Stories. Ed. Alice Sebold. New York: Houghton
Rose, Alex. “The Plagiarist.” HotelStGeorgePress.com. http://hotelstgeorgepress.com/2007/10/ the-plagiarist.


text:
Originally published on May 23, 2017 3:09 pm
The New York Philharmonic is the nation’s oldest symphony orchestra, but it wasn’t until 2014 that it welcomed its first black principal player. While that fact may seem staggering, recent data paint a bleak picture of the state of diversity in classical music: only 4% of orchestra musicians are either African American or Latino.
Organizers of this summer's Gateways Music Festival are committed to improving that percentage. The festival features musicians of African descent and works by African-American composers. Our guests give us a preview of the festival and discuss how to make classical music more accessible to underserved communities. In studio:
- Jamal Rossi, dean of the Eastman School of Music
- Paul Burgett, chairman of the board of the Gateways Music Festival, and University of Rochester vice president and senior advisor to the president of the University of Rochester
- Lee Koonce, president and artistic director of the Gateways Music Festival
- Dalanie Harris, double bassist, and sophomore at the Eastman School of Music

domain: artistic


text:
How can we align these modes of cognition? The usual answer is that we need to impose discipline and rigorously follow a time-tested "process". It turns out that is often misguided advice. To solve the greatest psychological problem affecting investors and traders, we need to clearly identify the source of our cognitive/emotional mismatch.
When Psychological Problems Have Non-Psychological Causes
We often assume that when problems manifest themselves with psychological expressions, they must be psychological problems. That is often not the case. I recall a situation a few years ago in which a young woman came to see me about a persistent bout of depression. She had sought therapy, and she had tried medication. None of those things helped her. Most recently she found herself feeling down because her face had broken out in acne and she didn't like the way she looked. Her history was not remarkable for depression or any other psychological problem and she didn't have a history of skin problems. I suggested a blood workup and, sure enough, she had a massive endocrine imbalance. Once the imbalance was corrected, there was no more depression, no more acne. The psychological problem had a purely physiological basis.
Family therapists are all too familiar with situations in which the psychological problems of presenting patients reflect wider dysfunctions within broader, family systems. One woman came to me with persistent anxiety problems and practically begged for counseling and medication to help with her "negative thinking". As our interview progressed, it became clear that there were emotionally and even physically abusive dynamics in her marriage that she was not acknowledging to herself or others. I encouraged her to take a vacation and visit her sister and, sure enough, the anxiety abated. Her sister shared her own concern about my client's marriage. That led to a more prolonged separation and a realization that the anxiety was not simply her own psychological dysfunction.
When investors and traders become anxious or frustrated and make decisions out of impulse rather than planning, they naturally assume that *they* must have the problem; that the problem is one of impulsivity. They keep journals, make checklists, set rules, engage in behavioral exercises, and desperately try to rein in their fast-thinking minds. The problem, however, does not go away, because it is not a psychological problem.
Why Investors And Traders React Emotionally To Financial Markets
A key to understanding the cognitive/emotional mismatch of market participants can be found in an important paper from Easley, Lopez de Prado, and O'Hara. We typically think of markets as trading in chronological time. Look at most any market chart and you'll find time on the X-axis. When we view markets through the lens of chronological time, every day is the same as every other one, opening and closing at the same time.
Easley, Lopez de Prado, and O'Hara suggest, however, that markets do not actually trade via a chronological clock, but by a volume clock. In other words, Lopez de Prado explains, markets are best captured in event time, not the time captured by the movement of earth around the sun. Because events, including volume, are ever-changing, markets themselves are not stable--and this lays the groundwork for emotional instability.
Recent trading in U.S. stocks provides a powerful example. Consider the chart at the top of this post. It describes the ES (S&P 500) futures contract over a two-day period, Thursday and Friday of August 20th and 21st. The data points on the blue line represent closing prices after every 500 price changes (ticks) in that index. In other words, the X axis of the chart does not reflect uniform time periods; 500 price changes is the event unit being used to capture the market's clock.
Now as it turns out, there were almost 140 event time units for Friday the 21st alone. The prior Friday, in a much quieter market with about one-third the volume, there were only about 40 event time units. As the red line in the chart above captures, the oscillations from "overbought" to "oversold" and back again were very frequent during the recent two-day period. They were much less frequent just one week previous. For all intents and purposes, the market that traded one week was fundamentally different--in volume, volatility, and directional movement--than the week previous.
Imagine a hearing-impaired couple on a dance floor with one slow dance number playing after another. The DJ suddenly changes the music to hip-hop/dubstep and our couple continues their foxtrots. That is the situation of the trader who is event-time impaired. Failing to recognize that the market's music has picked up, the trader finds that the trades that had worked earlier are now grossly out of step with market action. Markets blow through the trader's stop out levels; they continue to move much farther than anticipated after profitable exits.
The hearing-impaired couple, now foxtrotting while others around them are break dancing, feels a complete mismatch. Their sense of being out of step, out of place, leads them to feel uncomfortable and lose any sense of rhythm whatsoever. Similarly, facing far more rapid oscillations between overbought and oversold conditions per the chart above, even the most tone-deaf traders intuit that they are out of step, out of place. They become anxious and stressed, sensing threat. They become frustrated, as what had been working no longer works.
Their problem is not a psychological problem. Rather, it's a problem of failing to adapt to changing markets, which brings psychological consequences. All the behavioral exercises and positive self-affirmations in the world won't help our hapless dancing couple and won't help traders out of step with markets. If you're calibrated to an unchanging chronological clock and markets shift in event time, you're going to be left behind--and that will lead to performance-related stresses.
How To Find Greater Cognitive/Emotional Alignment
If our dancing couple were given hearing aids, they would quickly recognize when waltz music had shifted to contemporary urban sounds. They might not choose to try their hand at hip-hop dancing, but at the very least they could get the hell off the dance floor and save themselves considerable discomfort. Similarly, investors who can amplify their hearing of market rhythms in event time have the opportunity to respond constructively to situations as change occurs.
So how can we function more effectively in event time? Here are a few simple and relevant tools that can be tracked by market participants:
When we are open to shifts in event time and accompanying changes in how markets are trading, we no longer have to dance out of step in our investing. Perhaps most important of all, we can come to recognize that our emotional reactions to markets--from frustration to fear--constitute information, not problems. Very often, we first intuit that we're out of step with markets before we consciously identify the source of our misalignment. That intuition takes the form of a fight-or-flight emotional response: we sense that the environment is no longer as stable or secure as we thought. When awareness of our emotional responses prods us to further and deeper analyses and not impulsive actions--when fast thinking can catalyze better slow thought--we can be as responsive to shifting marketplaces as skilled entrepreneurs are to theirs.
Note: I gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Marcos Lopez de Prado to some of the ideas expressed in this post. His website is a veritable treasure trove of ideas for those interested in applications of quantitative finance.

domain: psychology