Radical Teaching: Scott and Helen Nearing’s Impact on Maine’s Natural Food Revival

Though today sustainable living and locally-sourced food receive increased attention nationwide, these ideas have been important in Maine for several decades. A key part of the state’s agricultural history is a tradition of self-sustaining homesteads. While subsistence farming and self-sufficiency was often a necessity on Maine’s northeastern frontier, homesteading has remained a lifestyle chosen by many of the state’s residents to this day. In this article, the author discusses the legacy of Scott and Helen Nearing, focusing particularly on the couple’s contributions to the “back to the land” movement in Maine and beyond. The author earned a B.A. in History at the University of Maine. He is a proud army veteran and is now a high school educator, where he teaches his students to read, think and write like historians. He has a wife and is an extremely happy father

Unsheltered Homelessness on Oahu, Hawaii

According to a recent national estimate of homelessness in the United States, between 2016 and 2017, the number of people experiencing homelessness increased by 0.7 %. This study was focused on the issue of unsheltered homelessness in the context of Oahu, Hawaii. There is a gap within the available scholarly literature that directly addresses the unsheltered homeless populations and why it is that they are unsheltered rather than living in a shelter or utilizing other transitional services. Using the generic qualitative approach and a purposive sampling method, 12 service provider professionals who work directly with the unsheltered homeless on the island of Oahu were interviewed regarding their perspectives concerning why the unsheltered homeless populations remain unsheltered and the strengths, weaknesses, and effectiveness of the intervention systems available to assist them. Data analysis for this research consisted of the identification and subsequent exploration of patterns and themes rendered from the interview processes navigated. Findings from this study suggest that unsheltered homelessness on Oahu consists largely of individuals with mental illness, and/or substance abuse problems. Multiple service providers stated that there are adequate services available to serve the unsheltered homeless, but some report that these services are often underfunded and understaffed. Service providers from a variety of separate agencies expressed a desire for a better-informed public and political leadership concerning what the issues of the homeless are. There is a shared belief among many service providers that there is a need to advocate for more long-term solutions to the growing problems of homelessness

The Races of Poetry

The image of racing is endemic to poetry. Homer’s Iliad, the cornerstone of the Western poetic tradition, culminates in a race: at the climax of the narrative, in book 22, Achilles chases Hector three times around the walls of Troy, in a pursuit that Homer specifically likens to a foot-race or a chariot-race. The image then returns in the following book, at the funeral games for Patroclus, which are dominated by actual races. Similar games, again with races as their most prominent feature, appear in both the Odyssey and the Aeneid. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses the same motif – one character running after another – becomes not just an incident in the plot, as in earlier epics, but in a sense the main plot itself: of the different types of recurrent episode in Ovid’s poem, the most conspicuous involves (typically) a male god chasing a nymph across the countryside. And in Dante’s Inferno – to look no further – the motif becomes so central as to be nearly invisible. Almost every canto of the Inferno features sinners running, or trudging, after each other, round and round in a perversely endless, unwinnable race. The racing motif is central to the meaning of epic, just as it serves, at a broader level, as one of the representative tropes of all of poetry

Polyptoton in In Memoriam: Evolution, Speculation, Elegy

The prominent use of polyptoton in In Memoriam is significant both for the way it reflects Tennyson’s deeply held beliefs and, more broadly, for its implications for elegy as a genre. As regards Tennyson in particular, his willingness to register his faith in the value of evolutionary change within the very form of his words has a dual effect: it reinforces our sense of that faith while also communicating a philosophical stance, an implied claim that language is not distinct from the natural world in which we live but fully participates in its processes. More generally, Tennyson’s use of polyptoton to embody his constant imaginative speculation offers insight into the workings of elegy, which derives its effectiveness from its ability, not to end grief, but to reimagine and transfigure it. By demonstrating at the most fundamental linguistic level the possibilities of perpetual variation, polyptoton is able to play an essential role in the adaptive work of mourning that elegy undertakes

Forgetting FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát

Readers have not forgotten the Rubáiyát: by the end of the nineteenth century it “must have been a serious contender for the title of the most popular long poem in English,” and since then it has steadily continued to appear in innumerable (usually illustrated) editions. Critics, on the other hand, seem to have taken FitzGerald at his word. The critical corpus is small; even major recent studies of Victorian poetry scarcely mention the poem. Yet ironically, it is the Rubáiyát’s treatment of forgetting that marks it as a central text not only of Victorian poetry but of a rich and continuing literary tradition. FitzGerald’s poem gives a new twist to a widespread mid-Victorian preoccupation, the problem of striking an appropriate balance between memory and oblivion

Iron and fibroblast growth factor 23 in X-linked hypophosphatemia

Background Excess fibroblast growth factor 23 (FGF23) causes hypophosphatemia in autosomal dominant hypophosphatemic rickets (ADHR) and X-linked hypophosphatemia (XLH). Iron status influences C-terminal FGF23 (incorporating fragments plus intact FGF23) in ADHR and healthy subjects, and intact FGF23 in ADHR. We hypothesized that in XLH serum iron would inversely correlate to C-terminal FGF23, but not to intact FGF23, mirroring the relationships in normal controls. Methods Subjects included 25 untreated outpatients with XLH at a tertiary medical center and 158 healthy adult controls. Serum iron and plasma intact FGF23 and C-terminal FGF23 were measured in stored samples. Results Intact FGF23 was greater than the control mean in 100% of XLH patients, and >2SD above the control mean in 88%, compared to 71% and 21% respectively for C-terminal FGF23. In XLH, iron correlated negatively to log-C-terminal FGF23 (r= −0.523, p<0.01), with a steeper slope than in controls (p<0.001). Iron was not related to log-intact FGF23 in either group. The log-ratio of intact FGF23 to C-terminal FGF23 was higher in XLH (0.00 ± 0.44) than controls (−0.28 ± 0.21, p<0.01), and correlated positively to serum iron (controls r= 0.276, p<0.001; XLH r= 0.428, p<0.05), with a steeper slope in XLH (p<0.01). Conclusion Like controls, serum iron in XLH is inversely related to C-terminal FGF23 but not intact FGF23. XLH patients are more likely to have elevated intact FGF23 than C-terminal FGF23. The relationships of iron to FGF23 in XLH suggest altered regulation of FGF23 cleaving may contribute to maintaining hypophosphatemia around an abnormal set-point

Faithful Likenesses: Lists of Similes in Milton, Shelley, and Rossetti

Lists and similes are both archetypal epic devices; Milton not only was the epic poet closest to Shelley and Rossetti, but he also combined the two devices in a way his classical precursors did not. In this essay, I begin by considering lists of similes in general, arguing that their tendency is to test or strain the reader’s faith. I then examine the very different effects of this tendency in Milton and Shelley before returning to Rossetti, for whom the trope represents in some ways a matter of life and death