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During the years 1999 to 2005, I retired by stages after a 50 year student-working life from: FT, PT and casual/volunteer work. It was an early retirement at the age of 55. I had come to find the demands of job and family, Baha'i community and society in general with their 60 to 80 hour weeks of nose-to-the-grindstone stuff more than I could cope with. I remember, in the last months of employment taking monthly shots of testosterone. The decline in testosterone levels that ...

JOHN ASHBERY

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Stephen Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English, has compared the now famous poet John Ashbery(1927- ) to T. S. Eliot, calling Ashbery "the last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible." Ashbery's ncreasing critical recognition by the 1970s transformed him from an obscure avant-garde experimentalist into one of America's most important poets, though still ...

JOHN ASHBERY

Part 1:

Stephen Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English, has compared the now famous poet John Ashbery(1927- ) to T. S. Eliot, calling Ashbery "the last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible." Ashbery's ncreasing critical recognition by the 1970s transformed him from an obscure avant-garde experimentalist into one of America's most important poets, though still ...

AN EXPLOSIVE PRODIGALITY

The following prose-poem arose is a result of reading a review of The Book of Disquiet published posthumously in 1982 as I was beginning that portion of my life north of the tropic of Capricorn in Australia. The work is by Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935). It is a fragmentary lifetime project which was left unedited by the author. He introduced his book as a "factless autobiography."1

This volume was reviewed by George Steiner in The ...

SOLITUDE
And The Frenzy of Renown

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Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez(1927-2014) was a Columbian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, arguably the greatest writer in Spanish since Cervantes, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the 1982 the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died yesterday: 17/4/'14.

García Márquez ...