The Mutual Broadcasting System in cooperation with Family Theatre Incorporated presents Mr. Birthday, starring Jean Lockhart and Jean Raymond. Anne Blythe is your hostess.  Isn't it true most of us have moments of discouragement? And sometimes they come when we have tirelessly done our best, only to see our efforts misjudged and criticized. Oh, I don't mean we should begin to feel sorry for ourselves. I'm talking about the unnecessary misunderstandings and criticisms that happen in a home. You know, a good home is a place where there is mutual trust and encouragement and forgiveness. These are the things that make for a full life, for happiness and success. And family prayer brings trust and encouragement and forgiveness into a home. Why? Well, when a family joins together to express their faith and trust in God, when they ask His help and forgiveness and family prayer, there's a new spirit of faith and trust in one another, a new spirit of mutual encouragement and forgiveness. You'll find that family prayer brings these things to a home. It happens that way. Yes, a family at prayer is a family at peace. A prayerful home is a happy home. Ann Blythe, your family theater hostess for this evening, will speak again following tonight's presentation, Mr. Birthday, starring Jean Raymond and Jean Lockhart. I'm Tom West. I'm a reporter for the Evening Dispatch. And I guess I have the softest newspaper job in the world.  Well, maybe it doesn't sound exciting to you, I've been in a spin ever since I met the old fellow about six months ago. You see, it happened this way. I was out on the story for the dispatch talking with a Mrs. Varga in her dingy three-room apartment in the Tenement House district. It was a hot and sticky day. I don't see why your paper is interested in me and my children, Mr. West. Now, we're interested in doing these articles to see if we can improve the crowded Tenement House condition. I am not complaining. I know. We have a roof over our heads. There is enough to eat for all of us. Oh, it is not nearly so good as this in the old country where my sister still lives. Well, my newspaper thinks conditions like this can be made better. Should be made better. And so weird. I saw him. I saw him. I saw his auto. Oh, he won't come here. He doesn't know about me. Well, that's what you think. He didn't know me either, but he did. Boys, boys, don't you see I have a collar? Oh, I'm sorry, Mom. But the kids said that's enough, Teddy. Go back outside. I'll call you when something to eat is ready. Can I stay in here just until he... just for a little bit, please? I'll be quiet. They don't bother me, Mrs. Barger. Are these your children? That is. Villy lives upstairs. I have two other boys and one girl. A fine family. And they're fine children, too. Oh, it's always that way. No, no, all day long. Oh, that's him. Well, I'll betcha. Say, maybe... Yeah, that's the way he knocks. Always is a salesman, all day long. Excuse me. Mrs. Barger. Mr. I don't want to buy anything. That's what everyone says when they see my bundles. But I'm not selling anything. I came to see Teddy. May I come in? Teddy? Is he in trouble, Mr.... I'm Teddy, Mr. Of course. So you are. Shake hand, sonny. Happy birthday to you. What? Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Teddy. Happy birthday to you. She was. His birthday. He's nine today. Oh, that's why I'm here, Mrs. Barger. There are lots of people who have so many other things to worry about. They forget their children's birthdays. So I drew the remembering for them. Here, Teddy. Some presents for you. Gosh. Oh, that for me? All for you, Teddy. He's a fine boy, Mrs. Barger. Well, I'll be off. This is my busy day. Hey, Teddy. So long, everyone. Well, let's see what you got, Teddy. Yeah, open them up. Oh, here, let me open them. Boys, please. I wouldn't have missed that for anything. I'd like to have met your funny friend. You see, one of your neighbors. Friend? Neighbor? I never saw the man before. Really? You mean he's a stranger? Oh, he's around this neighborhood lots of times. He brings presents to the kids. You mean he's a kind of birthday man? Yeah, I guess so. Say... I want to talk to him. Yeah, I'll be back later. Oh, boy, what a yarn this is. An interview with Mr. Birthday. Well, I missed him that day. And the next. In fact, it was nearly two weeks before I ran across him again in the same neighborhood.  And he never seemed to walk. He bounced. He was bouncing out of another tenement building and driving away. I had a little luck grabbing a taxi. Yeah, mister? Follow that green car and step on it. You cop, mister? No, I'm a reporter. And there goes the biggest news story of the year. Don't let him get away. But you okay, but if you was a copper chasing that old geezer, well, I'd let him lose us in a hurry. He's okay, see? Maybe he acts crazy, but take it from me, but he's got a heart as big as a... I've been hunting him for two weeks. Don't worry, I'll stick to him like a bloodhound.  He took a couple of packages from his auto and scooted into the building. I paid off the cabbie and then I got an idea. I jumped into the old fellow's car and waited. And when he came back... Oh, I beg your pardon. I thought this was my... Why? It is my car. Young man, what are you doing in my automobile? Waiting for you. I'm Tom West, evening dispatch. Oh, well, glad to know you. Now, if you won't think I'm rude, I three or four more calls... I just want to talk to you for a couple of minutes, Mr. Birthday. Huh? What's that? What did you say? What did you call me? Mr. Birthday. I don't know your real name. That's great. Yes, that's wonderful, Mr. Birthday. Oh, I like that. What is your name? That's it. You just said it, Mr. Birthday. Now, but please, I do have to get along. Now, wait a minute. Can't we talk just a little? There are so many things I want to know about you. Why? Well, I told you, I'm a reporter. I need more facts from my story about you. A story about me? Sure, I want to know more about what you're doing and why and what you expect to get out of it. What I expect? Young man, look me straight in the eye. Now, tell me, my lad, do you honestly think I profit out of what I'm doing? Do you? Well, maybe I didn't exactly say it the way I meant it, but now look, Mr. Birthday, let's be practical. What's your racket? What's the pitch in this birthday gimmick? I can't talk any longer. Now, wait a minute, Mr. Birthday. I'm sorry if I spoke out of turn.  Well, provided you don't ask me to do any talking for publication. Okay, let's go, Mr. Birthday. I will write a thing against your wishes.  No publicity. I'm running some kind of a racket. Well, my boy, you just keep your eyes and ears open for the next hour or so, and then you will know the whole story and you will realize why it would be wrong to print anything about it. Mr. Birthday, I'll bet you at dinner tonight that you are wrong. I'll bet I get your permission to write a story. That's a fair bet. Oh, isn't it a glorious day? Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday... Not exactly, but I've never climbed so many steps as I've done in this past hour. I suppose you had to live on the top floor in one of these ten minutes. I'd rather not think about it. How many more calls to make? Just one. Jimmy's the last one today. I've gotten a terrific wallop out of all this. Watching the kids' faces light up when you're handing their presents. Sing you a little song for them. Yeah, it's wonderful. A while ago, you asked me to apologize for that question. Forget it, Tom. Forget it. Here's Jimmy's plate. I hope he's home. Jimmy, may I come in, please? Hello, Jimmy. Nobody's home but me. If you want, Mommy, better come back tomorrow. No, Sonny, I came to see you. Why? Why, you've been crying. Yeah, let's get rid of some of those tears. Huh? For me? Yes. I ain't been crying. What do you want, Mr? Listen, Jimmy. Listen. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Jimmy. Happy birthday to you. She... How'd you know that? Why, Jimmy, I make it my business to know. I know your mother's working tonight and I know, at least I suspect, she's been so busy trying to earn money from the rent. She didn't remember your birthday today. Am I right? Yeah. Yeah, only... I just figured she forgot. I never thought why she didn't remember. Come here, Jimmy. Sit down on this sofa. Yeah, beside Tom and me. There. Do you see this box? That's your birthday present. And this one, and this. Mine? Uh-huh. Oh, gosh, Mr. Wait, that's the most I ever got on my birthday. I always had it sort of imagined like I was getting lots and lots of things. I'd pretend I was having a big party with ice cream and cake. Jimmy, before you get too absorbed in those boxes, I want to tell you a little story about a boy I knew, at just your age, too, and who had the same disappointments you've had. Is it some kid I know? Hank Peters, maybe? Oh, I know Hank, too, but that's not who it is. As a matter of fact, he isn't a kid anymore, I'm talking about. But when he was, his mother was poor. She did dressmaking when she could. She counted her pennies very carefully to make sure that this young fellow would have enough to eat. And it wasn't easy for her, either. I'll tell you that. My mom's always had to work, and work hard. I know. And just like this young fellow I'm talking about, I guess you've had a pretty lonesome time when your mother's away working every night, huh? Yeah. Well, my friend used to see other kids as they had gifts, but, well, he just never had anything like that at all. And that's why it hurt so much when nobody remembered to say happy birthday to him. And each year he'd wait, and nobody'd remember. And then at night, he'd crawl into bed and pray that next year somebody would think of it. And he'd say to himself, happy birthday. And cry himself to sleep. Gee, I know how he felt all right. That's why I was crying when you came in. But I didn't want to say so. Oh, it's nothing to be ashamed of, Jimmy. Why, even grown men cry. A little bit. Now then, I wouldn't give you two cents for a man who couldn't cry. It felt like doing it. I guess I was just sort of lonesome or something. That's it, sure. Well, anyhow, this boy made up his mind that when he grew up, if he had enough money, he'd try to see to it that other boys and girls with forgotten birthdays would be surprised from him. He'd remember them, and he'd drop in to see them just for a minute and let them know that at least he remembered. Just like you did tonight? Well, yeah, just like I did. Well, Jimmy, when your mother comes home from work tonight, you give her a great big hug and thank her for being your mother. Well, that's even more important, I think, than having her tell you happy birthday.  Well, she already did, Jimmy.  Come on, Tom. Good night and lots of luck to you, Jimmy. Well, Tom? Dinner's on me, Mr. Birthday. You win. Fine dinner, Tom, and I was pretty hungry, too. So was I. Waiter, check, please. Just a minute. Waiter, I'll take that. Oh, you mean it's mine. I lost the bet. I'm not going to write the story. Tom, I'll be disappointed if you don't. What is all this? I'm just a batty old man exercising a woman's prerogative, the right to change her mind, and I've changed mine. I don't get it. Back there at Jimmy's house, I sold myself on a story. You mean the story you told the kid? Were you just trying to make him feel a little better or was there really a boy like that? Both, Tom. And that boy's a pretty old boy now, isn't he? Knocking himself out, hustling around to see youngsters on their birthdays. It's funny about most people who've grown up, Tom. They forget so easily what it was like being a kid. Is that why you decided to change your mind about the newspaper story? Oh, that. I'm sorry. I guess I was wandering a little. I started to say that as things are now, I only see 20 or 30 youngsters a week because I don't have any more birth dates than that. Now, maybe if you wrote a story saying that your paper wanted to know the birthdays of all the children in town, we'd get lots of new names, we'd get addresses. Say, that's it. That's it. Mr. Birthday Only. Now, wait a minute. There's got to be more to the story than that. We've got to tell about you. Oh, you just try to keep out of it. Well, at least let me stay in the background. I'll write the story. And if the people who read it are satisfied to let you stay in the background, fine. Otherwise... You write the story, Tom, and we'll see what happens. Okay. Now, may I have the check? It's the first bet I've ever enjoyed losing. Well, sir, the editor of the dispatch hopped right on Mr. Birthday's bandwagon and gave the story a big spread on page one. Of course, we didn't expect any mail the first day, but we did think we might be a few letters a second. Well, there were a few, but not as many as I'd hoped for. I was feeling low, but not Mr. Birthday. Tom, I think it's fine of your editor to give you this assignment. He said I wasn't allowed to get out of my sight. But frankly, I'm disappointed in getting only 12 letters. Well, I'm not, because I've found that when you try to do something for people, it's awful hard to convince them you're sincere.  Don't rub it in. I'm not. Oh, here we are. Is this Pinky Fisher's place? Uh-huh. He's nine today. I think I hear someone coming. Yeah, what do you want? Mr. Fisher? What's it to you? Well, nothing exactly. I want to see Pinky. May we come in? Oh, no you don't. I see guys like you before work your way into the house and flop down and start selling something. But we aren't selling anything. Oh, you guys bill collectors, huh? Beat it, but I am interested. You want I should hook you down the stairs? I said beat it. Why that big luck? Control yourself, Tom. Poor fella, maybe he's bothered by a toothache. A toothache.  I hate that. There's going to be any slugging that gets started. I told you to beat it now. I'll wrap you around the old goat's neck. Now, wait a minute. Now, wait a minute. He means business. Hurry, Tom. Yeah, well, I guess he decided not to follow us. He's probably standing outside his door laughing. Oh, well, it takes all kinds of people to... Excuse me, Mr. Huh? Oh, hello, Sonny. You're Mr. Birthday, ain't you? That's right. I'm Pinky Fisher. Oh. I slipped out the back way when I heard Paul giving you the business. You did? Well, good for you, Pinky. You got to excuse Paul. He ain't feeling so well since he got laid off here. Oh. I want to apologize for him. Now, Pinky, you just forget about it. And say, now that you're here... Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Pinky. Happy birthday to you. Guy, that sure is well-singin'. Thank you, Pinky. Oh, wait a minute. Here, I'm getting awful tired carrying these presents of yours. Suppose you just take them. And happy birthday, son. And tell your dad I hope he finds a job real soon. Yeah, you bet. Thanks a lot, Mr. Birthday. Now, there's a kid who'll get along in the world. Any kid will, if he gets half a chance, Tom. It's just a few inches difference between a slap in the face and a pat on the back. All of a sudden, it happened. It looked like every kid in the state had grabbed a pencil and started writing letters to Mr. Birthday. Tom, it's wonderful. All I need now are about a hundred helpers. Not only birthday cards, we've never had an order this large. A hundred thousand birthday cards. Well, it's amazing. It's those crazy people from Hollywood, the picture people. They want to make a picture of my life while they're offering $50,000 for the rights. It's different, you have to grant that. Well, I won't have to endorse any more serials. No, I simply want you to run as candidate for the presidency. But I don't get it. It can't be the Republican or the Democrat, so there's... No, they're starting a new party. They're calling it the birthday party. Believe me, those were hectic weeks for Mr. Birthday. At times, he used to say that maybe he'd just run away from it all, but he never did. He just kept going along, and the way things were arranged, it wasn't possible for him to call on all the children in person. Instead, he sent greeting cards, presents, and a record of the happy birthday song. Of course, he went to see as many youngsters as he could. Then one day something went wrong. He was returning to the new offices we had opened. I met him as he was entering the building. Tom, this has been a bad day. Ever since I got up, I've been bothered by something. Something I should remember, and for the life of me, I don't know what it is. A new address, maybe? I don't know. My mind's a complete blank. Well, don't worry about it. You think of it. Just take it easy. You know, there's something else I don't understand today. What's that? I called on 15 youngsters, and none of them was at home. Now, this is the first time that that has ever happened. Oh, look now, Mr. Birthday. There are a couple of cops standing alongside your car.  Say, I know them. That's Ed Pierce and Joe Rogers, cruiser men. Hi, Joe. How are you, Tom? We're looking for this birthday guy of yours. The chief said to pick him up. I'm Mr. Birthday. Oh, so you're the guy. I don't think we'll need the straitjacketed. He don't look dangerous. Dangerous? Well, I don't understand. Now, remember, Grandpa, anything you say can be used against you. And if you don't want to come along nice and quiet, I'll arrange it. Nice going, Joe. What was that, Tom? I said, let's go on. Let's get going. We got to go along with them now, but we'll find out what's behind all this later. We most certainly will. This is most embarrassing. It's outrageous. Come along, Grandpa. We'll take good care of you. We have a special little place for you. Tom, do you think I'd better see if he has any dangerous weapons? No, no. I believe Mr. Birthday is on arm today. What? Today? You know I never carry a gun, Tom. When I see the chief, I'll give him a thorough tongue lashing. I'd better make a note of that. It's rather than the chief. No, this is really one of your bad days, Mr. Birthday.  How can I think clearly with these men and their high-handed methods? Well, I'll try to think of something to straighten out this little mix-up. Well, thank heaven one of us can still think. I've passed the stage of calm coherence, and I'm rapidly entering at a frantic frustration. Ah, thank goodness you got them to turn off that siren. It was a little raucous, wasn't it? Tom, it doesn't seem to me we're going in the direction of police headquarters. Oh, you're absolutely right, Mr. Birthday. Joe, yes, turn in here. Maybe we can talk this thing over. Here? All the way inside, Tom. Yeah, right, all the way in. Good heavens, Tom. All these people, the municipal stadium. There's the chief, Tom. I better stop right here. Where's the chief? I want to see him. I demand my rights as a citizen. No, no, no. Keep quiet, Mr. Birthday. You better stay in the car. Joe, isn't that the microphone for the stadium's public address system? Now, what do you know? Shoot at his, Tom. Here you are. Perfect. Tom, what are you going to do? Now, quiet. Now, do you just hang on for a moment? Now, quiet, everybody, please. Quiet, please. May I have your attention? Thank you. Now, here in this police cruiser with me is the man you've been waiting for. Tom, please, be careful. Do you know what you're doing? It's Mr. Birthday, and he's in a very bad predicament. All day long, he's been worried over something he thinks he should remember. Tom, of all people to think that you... So, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, we have brought him here for one special reason. Will you tell him what he's forgotten? All the things to forget. This is Anne Blythe again. You know, we all like to feel we can be useful and helpful. One of the great joys in life is knowing that we're useful and helpful in an undertaking that's worthwhile. None of us can be happy if we live only for ourselves, because the job of living comes from giving. Yes, giving ourselves to something we know is bigger and better, worthier and more enduring than we are. That's why the greatest joy in living is giving ourselves to God. And you know, when a family joins together to give themselves to God and family prayer, we're excited in a joy and happiness that only family prayer can bring. I guess we all know from experience that it's true. Whatever we give to others comes back to us in some way or another, and whatever we give to God comes back a hundredfold. So let's give God a little time in our homes each day, and let's take a little time out to join together with our family for family prayer. Then we'll really know how true it is that the family that prays together stays together. Before saying good night, I'd like to thank Jean LaCarte and Jean Raymond for their performances this evening. Our thanks to Jack Price for writing tonight's play and to Max Tehr for his music. This production of Family Theatre Incorporated was directed by David Young. Others who appeared in tonight's play were Nina Barra, Harry Lang, Jerry Farber, Johnny McGovern, Bobby Ellis, Phillip Bernard and Bob Shannon. Next week, our Family Theatre star will be Ronald Reagan in the tin whistle and your host will be Lloyd Nolan. This is Anne Blyde saying good night and God bless you. This series of the Family Theatre broadcasts is made possible by the thousands of you who felt the need for this kind of program and by the mutual broadcasting system which has responded to this need. Be with us next week at the same time when our Family Theatre star will be Ronald Reagan with Lloyd Nolan as host. Merrill Ross speaking. This is the Mutual Broadcasting System.


All right, good morning. I'm Matt. I'm the CEO of fermion. I'm a light mode kind of person This is radoo. I'm Ralu CTO of fermion Dark mode of course. We all all got our flaws all got our flaws This is apparently my kids inform me this is hollow week that like Halloween is now a week-long thing So I came in costume in case you can't tell if I stand like this. I'm the web assembly logo Fortunately, that's also the last joke I have for the day It was so great to see you all in person here It is so exciting to a lot of you we've met online a lot of you I've recognized from previous wasm days from open source summit and from you know other cncf events as well And it's just really exciting to get together in person and get to talk about web assembly because we really do Genuinely believe that web assembly is the next wave of cloud computing So fermion started just about a year ago on November 1st. It will be one year for us We started because we really saw a lot of potential in web assembly itself You know that all the stuff that Luke just talked about is stuff that we are really really excited about Because we're going to be able to do things We haven't been able to do before and in the cloud world the kinds of stuff will be able to accomplish It's really gonna push the boundaries once again Now when we got started We thought okay, we need to we need to figure out what problems are important to solve Developer experience is a really big deal to us because we're all a bunch of developers and we said all right Our kind of guiding light of a user story is going to be this one as a developer I can go from a blinking cursor to a deployed application in two minutes or less Okay, so where do we start with that story? Well, we've got to be begin to tell a developer experience story there as Kate said you know And in the the web assembly survey that CNCF did developer tooling is one of the things that's been identified as lacking in this ecosystem So we thought all right. Well, there's something we can tackle. So we built a tool called spin Spin is a developer tool for creating new web assembly microservices and web applications You pick your favorite language you type in spin new pick your language name your project and it scaffolds out the project for you Now this project that gets scaffolded Instantly compilable so you can run spin build which just drops down to the correct tool chain So if you're using rust it's gonna use the rust tool chain if you're using C sharp it's gonna use the dot net tool chain you pick your favorite language You build it and then there's a command called spin up to let you locally test this to make sure that everything is working The way you want and the idea here was we wanted to build tools that were that were amenable to your flow Right it developed once you get in flow and you're you're coding away You don't want to have to do anything that's going to sort of break you out of that experience and spin is a tool designed For the developers so that you can kind of stay focused on what you're working on Now we released this on March 31st because of course nobody wants to release any real software on April 1st April Fool's Day and then on April Fool's Day, of course hacker news weighed in and It was great. We had a we had a great time reading through the comments One of the ones that really jumped out a fairly early comment on the hacker news thread said hey Hey spin looks amazing, but I don't want to run my own infrastructure Just to deploy my web assembly sites We thought all right. There's a clue right there. We know what we need to build so today We are happy to introduce Fermion cloud which is the next piece of this story It is the easiest way to deploy and manage cloud native web assembly applications So now we have a workflow that with just a github account You can get your spin configured to deploy to our cloud services and execute in the cloud Again going from blinking cursor to now deployed application in two minutes or less Again, we wanted to keep that user flow so that as you're in your development process This is just one very quick and easy step for you to do whenever you're ready, right? So we just added we just reused one command. That's already been there spin new Creates your application spin build builds the application and now spin deploy You can use to push directly up into Fermion cloud So with that I'm going to pass it on over to Radu who's going to walk us through an example So this is the first thing you see when you log in with your github account to frame in cloud You'll see the three steps required to create and deploy application Now I already have an app here and I'm just going to run spin deploy and in the meantime While this is building and uploading from in cloud We can look at some of the examples you can use for rust for example We can write a handler function that takes a request and returns a response or go We will write a funk with a response writer and a request or Upcoming work and C sharp where you just write an HTTP Handle request function as well all the three SDK So rust go and C sharp are all built on top of the web assembly component model And I highly suggest you will go watch Ivan and Joel stocks later today about Java and C sharp But you can also use any language that compiles to wazzy with Fermion cloud Using the the waggy model introduced a couple of years ago by the dales labs waggy project You can deploy any language that compiles to the web assembly system interface the fermion cloud This is just a spin application You can see the build command required to build it and then in the meantime our application is deployed I can go to fermion cloud and I see my application was deployed a few seconds ago the website itself is rendered server site on fermion cloud as well and now I can See how my application looks I can from web assembly components. I can connect to other my what HTTP microservices I can connect the databases and other applications running on fermion cloud As I mentioned you can run any language that compiles to wazzy on fermion cloud And we're really excited about some upcoming work in Java and JavaScript as well as C sharp Fermion cloud would not be possible without some amazing open source projects, and I just would like to highlight two of them We're big fans of hashicorp nomad we're using nomad as the scheduler for fermion cloud and Paired with their really cool task driver model and web assembly's compact binary format It means we can be extremely efficient and have about an order of magnitude better than workload density compared to kubernetes and Containers all while still being able to run side-by-side with cloud native workloads such as containers The second project I like to highlight is the wazen time project by the bytecode alliance We are using wazen time to just in time instantiate web assembly modules to handle your incoming requests and then Handle your function your in entry point function and then shut everything down What this means for fermion cloud is that we have no long running processes while not handling actively incoming traffic and For users that means that you have no noticeable cold starts because of wazen times insane startup speeds We're really really glad to to keep using wazen time in the component model and to keep contributing to By code alliance project and I would like to take this opportunity to thank the bytecode alliance for all the amazing work That they're doing on both wazen time and the component model But fermion cloud is not the only place to run spin applications For a few months now you've been able to deploy your own infrastructure and so host fermion platform So you can still continue to do that today using spin deploy just log into another endpoint But as of a few days ago Microsoft announced a preview for their azure kubernetes service where you can run Using their container de-integration with wazen time You can run all sorts of web assembly workloads including spin applications and with spin being built on top of the component model We're really excited about the future that will do just present it on So if you would like to give it a spin you can head over to cloud Fermion calm and get started tomorrow evening. You are all invited to our kind of launch party We're passing out some invitations, but here it is up on the screen. It's at the library at the Detroit Club We'd love to have you there. It's kind of a slanky thing. So it'd be great to see you there With that again, thank you very much It's great to be a diamond sponsor of an event like this because we are just so passionate that those of you sitting here in The room we are Building the next wave of cloud computing and I'm exciting excited to see where this is gonna go over the next few years Thank you very much. Thanks


Today, the United States Court of Appeals has affirmed a simple, fundamental American truth. How we are born and who we choose to love should not be a basis for discrimination in this country. What the court did today affirms that you cannot single out one group of people and deny them the dignity and respect which all citizens deserve. People who are our neighbors, our family, our colleagues and friends, people who fight for, serve our country every day and protect us. We brought this case for them and for the millions of young gay and lesbians across this country in the hopes that they might be the first generation to grow up with full and equal protection of our laws and the promise of a future that isn't just a possibility for some but for all. To those young people, you have a right to feel what is in your heart. You have a right to be who you are and the court today has just taken a big step towards giving you the future and the protections you so deserve.


If you look closely at F-A-8 teams, you'll notice names are stamped onto them. This name belongs to the pilot leaving the cockpit. Lance Corporal Corey Helton wants his name on one of these jets, but first he has to deal with the task at hand. They had something wrong with the landing gear, I believe, and they're going to have to jack the aircraft off the ground. It's got to be below 10,000 pounds, so we're draining the external tanks and getting underneath that waste so they can jack it up. He's a power liner, which means he inspects jets and makes sure they can fly. But he's also working toward becoming a plane captain. Also known as PCs, part of their responsibility includes operating as the pilot's second set of eyes. They ensure people aren't at the wrong place at the wrong time. He'll let you know if he gets in close. It takes Marines like Helton to keep these aircraft in disguise. PCs are also responsible for all of their required pre-flight checks before the pilot gets in. What that basically absolves the pilot of doing is a completely, a very detailed check. That way a pilot can just do a walk around, check a couple of things we look for, and then jump in the cockpit. By the time we get in the cockpit, everything's set up. The PCs got it. I mean, without them, we wouldn't be flying. I mean, it's the bottom line. I mean, to the paperwork, in the S shops, to the maintainers downstairs that work again, they work those 12-hour shifts, too. Just like many of the jobs on this flight line, being a PC is a heavy responsibility. Multi-million-dollar aircrafts and the lives of the Marines in them, why would anyone want that kind of pressure? Being asked to the shop, be able to help out, it's a pride thing, being a PC. Everybody's got to come to me before they can go up to the jet, and I think it would be cool. The name at the bottom of the aircraft honors the PC, like this one, and one day Lance Corporal Corey Helton's name will fly just as high as the rest of them. Marine Staff Sergeant Jason Price enters an Air Force Base in Guam.


Hey Psych2Goers, do you sometimes have a hard time telling whether or not someone likes you? It can be pretty difficult sometimes, but there may be a few subtle ways you can tell. To help you out, here are six psychological ways to tell if your crush likes you. Number one, they act flustered, silly, and sweat when they're around you. How nervous do you get around your crush? Odds are, if they like you too, they may just be as anxious as you are. Most people tend to get a bit flustered when they're around someone they're attracted to. Stammering, breaking out in sweats, and clammy hands can be signs someone likes you so much that you make them nervous. Sometimes, attraction can make us a bit silly, or even dumb. Research has found that sexual arousal shuts off parts of the prefrontal cortex of the brain. This region of the brain is responsible for critical thinking, rational behavior, and self-awareness. So next time you're around someone you like, pay close attention. Do they always break out in sweat? Can they not speak as eloquently as they usually do? Maybe they simply have a secret crush on you. Number two, they remove any barriers between the two of you. Do you notice your crush removes any barriers between them as soon as you approach? Do they ever so subtly scoot closer to you when you're near? Do they lean more so towards you than anyone else in a group? Well, according to psychologist Jack Schaefer, people lean towards people they like and distance themselves from people they dislike. Inward leaning increases as report increases, meaning you may first turn your head towards someone and then your shoulders, followed by your torso. Then if you're really interested in what someone has to say, you'll lean towards them. So if someone is attracted to you, odds are they may just lean towards you when they get the chance. Not just to be closer, but because they are deeply interested in what you have to say and who you are. Dr. Jack Schaefer also explains in psychology today that people who like each other remove any obstacles between them. He continues to say that a barrier does not necessarily mean that someone doesn't like you, but it may just show your report isn't as strong as you hoped it to be. Try to get to know them a bit more and share some interests of yours. Your report may just increase. Number three, they mirror your behavior. Have you noticed someone mirroring your behaviors, even to the point that they almost subtly adopt your style of speaking or language? Well, sometimes when someone really likes or admires someone, they'll subconsciously mimic their behavior. You've probably done it too. Think about it. Have you ever found yourself adopting someone else's gestures or movements at a party or social setting? It's not that you consciously intended it, and hey, maybe you did, but yet here you are suddenly acting and speaking like your crush. This psychological phenomenon is called the chameleon effect and was explored in further studies. People tend to subconsciously mimic other people's behavior in certain settings, that is, if we like them. So if you catch someone mimicking you, they either want to be your friend or they may just feel attracted to you. Number four, their pupils dilate when they look at you. Okay, so next time you see your crush, look into their eyes. Yeah, I know, maybe difficult since you get all nervous and sweaty around them and start babbling like a fool, but hey, it's worth a shot. Why do this, you may ask, because you'll want to notice if their pupils dilate. According to body language expert Patty Wood, author of Success Signals, a guide to reading body language, dilation is a brain response that occurs when you like and are attracted to something. So if you notice someone's pupils dilate when they look deeply into your eyes mid-conversation, this could likely be a sign they're attracted to you, and then if your pupils dilate in attraction as well, it's a good thing to be revealed. Number five, their face is flushed when they see you or talk to you. Something else to pay attention to? Along with staring into their eyes the next time you see them, notice if their face becomes flushed when you look at them. When people are attracted to someone, they can become anxious, a kick of adrenaline, and suddenly they're flushing. If you notice someone often flushes around you and their face becomes red when you're talking to them, they may very well like you as much as you like them. And number six, their smile is suddenly genuine when you're near. Do you smile when you slip into the sweet bliss of daydreaming about your crush? If you could only take them to your favorite taco stand and introduce them to your pet turtle larry, ah well, I suppose you'll have to figure out if they like you first. Well, when you're around them, notice how often they smile and what kind of smile they have on their face. Have you ever heard of the Duchenne smile? There are a few common facial expressions that can give way to what someone is really thinking or feeling. A Duchenne smile is one of them. Want to know if someone is genuinely smiling in delight? You can simply look out for this smile. According to Alphine, this occurs when the zygomaticus major muscle lifts the corners of your mouth at the same time the orbicularis oculi muscles lift your cheeks and crinkle your eyes at the corners. Basically it's the type of smile that reaches up to your eyes, causing those wrinkles by your eyes known as crow's feet to appear. This type of smile appears when someone is genuinely happy, as opposed to a polite and kind smile or even a forced smile. Now, are they happy to see you because you're their friend or because they like you? Well, if they have several of the above signs, it looks like you'll be introducing them to larry after all. Tacos in hand. Now ask them out already. You got this, I believe in you. So, do you think your crush likes you? How many signs do they exhibit? Feel free to share with us in the comments down below. Whether you think they like you or not, it's likely worth it to ask them out to find out. Better to know you tried than having a bit of regret not letting them know how you really feel, right? So go ahead, ask them out for tacos. You got this, larry the turtle and I, we believe in you. Yeah, use a turtle. And so what? We hope you enjoyed this video and if you did, don't forget to click the like button and share it with a friend or someone you like. Subscribe to Psych2Go and hit the notification bell icon for more content like this. And as always, thanks for watching.


First, we'll have Chad Post, then Elizabeth Harris, then Jeff Brock, and then Diana Thau will finish up. So, Chad, do I need to introduce you? No. Everyone knows who Chad Post is. He publishes... That's true. Probably. At Alter, right? Publisher of Open Letter runs 3%. The database, and so has a whole bunch of data for us on Italian translations. Yeah. I'll just tell you the story. I've looked at this report in a while since we were in turn, whenever that was, for their book fair, but I'll tell you the story in trying to give you some of this information. I'll contextualize everything that you guys will talk about, hopefully, because it's very data-specific. In 2008, at Open Letter, we run this website called 3%. A lot of you probably are familiar with. That's like a blog and review site. At some point in time, I started keeping track because there's always a debate on how many books are published in translation in America. And where does 3% number come from? There's different people that have come up with ways of saying why, or that there are only 3% of the books published in America are in translation, but they never know what books they are. There's no actual granular data. So I decided that we could try and do this. So starting in 2008, I created a database that tracks every original work of fiction and poetry published in the U.S. for the first time ever. So no re-translations, nothing that was out of that fallout of print, and then came back into print. I was only looking for the first time this work was available to English readers. So we'd be looking at what new voices are accessible to people who read English. And we keep track of still this day, the title, the author, the translator, the country of origin for the author where they're born, what language it was written in, the pub year and month, the price. Who, if there are any other translators that are involved, and now we keep track of whether or not the author is male or female, and if the translator is male or female. So we have an endless amount of data, essentially. It's not endless, but it's a lot. So a lot of the figures that you'll see get referenced by like the New York Times or in various articles will say like, well, according to the 3% database, 540 books were published in translation last year. And that's all coming from this thing that we've been keeping track of. And that, actually, I think 540 is the right number for 2014. And we put it all online. You can download it. It's easily accessible. Well, about two summers ago, the Italian Trade Commission, which includes Italian books in the book office, I guess they call themselves something to that effect, and they're charged with trying to promote Italian literature. And they called me and the woman's like, well, since Italian literature doesn't get translated at all, we need you to do a report in which you analyze this and break it down and show just how many Italian books are getting translated, how many of them are funded, all this information so we can go to the government and say we need more money to be able to improve the translation of Italian literature into English. So I went back and she wanted it for specifically 2012 through 2014. So those three years and wanted to include children's books and nonfiction as well. So I spent a lot of time going back and adding in children's books and nonfiction to get to this. Now, first off, this is where I'm here. Actually, I did my first ever PowerPoint for this report, but I'm not putting it up there because I know I did something wrong. I can't remember what the mistake is right now, but I know the last time I showed it, I was like, oh, shit, that doesn't add up. So we're going to ignore that. But otherwise, I would be able to show this to you. I can email it to you if you want. There's a whole long report with like 25 spreadsheets that explain all of this. We'll start here with just the overview of Italian books. So in those three years, there are 174 books translated from Italian and published in the US, which isn't a terrible number, to be honest. It's much like you said, it's higher than most others. The third highest is you'll see in a second, the third highest country in terms of translation. So it's not bad. However, just to break this down, too, of those 174 books, half of them are fiction. 62 were nonfiction. 14 were poetry. So the poetry was very small in contrast to even the nonfiction. Let's see where I want to go here. There's so much data in this, man. I've got it written on as like how for fiction it's been pretty much the same. There's like 67 books, 62 books, 45. In 2014, that changed. This is out of date. But there's pretty stable. The thing that was most interesting to me about just looking at Italian and not comparing it to other countries yet, just focusing just on Italian, was that the publishers bringing this out, and that's what you were mentioning right before, are that there's only a handful that are doing a significant number of Italian books. And that handful of publishers in no way corresponds to the publishers that are doing the most translations in America. This will become clear in a second. OK, so over the past three years of this three-year period, 81 different publishers brought out at least one book from Italian. So that's a significant amount. The ones that are at the top were Europa Editions to 24, University of Chicago 10, FSG 9, Verso 7, Chelsea Editions 5, which was most of the poetry then, Penguin 5, Other Press 4, Pushkin Press 4, and Rosoli 4. OK, that's which is interesting. The, skip that, skip that. OK, so compared to the rest of the world, here's where this gets, this starts to get more and more interesting. So between, over that three-year period, there are essentially 2,400 books published in translation. And Italian made up 174 of those. So that's not a great ratio, but to put that in context, French had 539 books, German had 385, Spanish 253, then Italian with 174, then Japanese with 105. So they're still on the top when you look at it just by language in the top five. But like one-third of the number of books of French and half of the number of books translate from German. So compared to their counter, when they commissioned me to do this report, they're essentially like, well, our counterparts are France and Germany. We need to know why we're not doing as well as France and Germany. So in contrast in that light, Italy looks really bad. Like they're not even close to the number that are coming up from France and German, or from French and German writers. But you know, there's a lot, there's a, when you look at this, it's like, when you look at all the other countries, there's like 100 countries here that have like two books that came out over that three-year period. So, you know, we're grain assault. Okay. So then this is the part where I was referring to you before. Over that three-year period, here are the presses. I'm just going to name them. The presses that have published the most translations. Delky Archive, Amazon Crossing, Europa Editions, Seagull, FSG, Other Press, North-South, because this includes children's books, Yale University Press, New Directions and Columbia. These 10 presses brought out 482 works in translation over this three-year period. Okay. So they're counting for a sixth of all of the translations that came out were from these 10 presses. Those 10 presses published a total of 41 books from Italian. And 24 of those were by Europa Editions. So you eliminate Europa Editions and it's down to, is it 17? 17 from the other nine largest presses doing translations in America. And this is the thing that I thought was most interesting was that it just, it's such a weird situation that there's a lot of publishers doing Italian but they're not the ones that are generally doing a lot of other translations, which seems to be some sort of weird disconnect that's happening there that you can talk about later too. There's a lot more information in here. I think the other thing that was worthwhile was that of the 174 books, only 26 were subsidized for the translation, which is a very small percentage. And a lot of the conversations that came out after this, I'll just tell you about that part and answer any numbers, questions you guys might have later after everyone else speaks. But we had a meeting with the Italian government and doing this whole report and talking to them about it. There were a couple of things that came clear. One is that Italy does have a translation grant program but the website doesn't work. The information is not distributed to any publishers. The publishers I talked to, the vast majority did not know that there is a grant support available and that does play some role in what gets through because it is useful for a lot of these presses to know that there's some sort of funding to help offset translation costs or promotion costs, which Italy has but no one knows about. They also wanted it because they wanted to be compared to Germany and France, which is not a great idea because they do things much more smoothly. Both France and Germany have systems by which they promote X number of books a year. So there's the New Books from German magazine that comes out quarterly, I believe, that highlights 10 books from recent publications in Germany. This gets sent out to probably 300 different publishers or editors. It has information in there about how to apply for translation funding. It has information about other programs that they have, all of that. The French granting program, they didn't have their information online but they have a series of things in which they have French voices that they help fund and support books, the Hemingway grants. There were almost more Hemingway grants in one year than there were grants for Italian translations over this three-year period and that's only a portion of the French support. So I talked to them and made a whole proposal in which we would do essentially like a 10 books from Italy publication twice a year that would be like a PDF that could be sent out. They would have all this information in it and the government said that they couldn't find the money for it. Everything sort of, they got to the point of like, here's all the information on what's wrong and how to try and address that and then it stopped. So that's part of the reason, I think, for the gem that you're going to talk about. So I'll just turn it over now to you, Liz. Yeah, that's great. Nobody's surprised. Yeah, nobody's surprised. Yeah, the title is so great of the panel. Traffic jam. What is the, when you said the, and what is the resource for translators, what is that site called? It is. I have a whole report on it in here. I can tell you, let me just open it up. It isn't the Ministry of Foreign Culture translation grant. It is the books in Italy, that IT thing. Books in Italy is new, right? So there's a new website. Okay, so it's on there. Books in Italy. I can't connect. Yeah, but it was like, we tried to apply for a grant for your book and it couldn't get it because it wouldn't function and it didn't, it literally didn't work.  So it was really discouraging. There's one that we applied for. Oh, it's a different one. Yeah, they got some funding, but it took two years for, they accepted it two years after the book was published. Yeah. They finally got the money. This whole thing, they cut this addendum that I wrote. They cut it from the final proposal because it's just basically like, all the things that are wrong on your website. There's two different due dates. There's two different places you're supposed to mail information. All of it's like literally factually inaccurate and not what they wanted. So they're like, we can't, that's too embarrassing. Like everything else is fine, but this one's too embarrassing. But anyways. Well, I mean, I thought I'd talk about the first couple of books that I've had published that I translated in some ways that I think might reflect partly what gets through, not with big presses, but with smaller presses. The first book I worked on is actually by a very famous writer in Italy, Mario Rigoni Stern. He's very well known. His Sergeant in the Snow, Sergeant in the Neve, it's an international bestseller taught in the schools. He comes out of the neorealism, he's since passed away, but he came out of neorealism. The book I translated was from the 1990s and it won a prize. It is the Stagione di Giacomo, Giacomo Seasons. Sergeant in the Snow was translated. And I doubt it got very much attention when it was translated. I believe it was in the 1950s. And it was by the man who we were talking about last night and he's got a difficult name to pronounce. It's called... Yes. By Archibald, maybe... Let's see. Yeah, a cauldron or something like that. And I have a feeling that part...  He should have had, I think, that kind of attention, but maybe it's not as much of a grab because it's not Holocaust, you know? But his work, it's very readable and very interesting, but it was translated very badly. That book was translated very badly and it's been... I hope that guy is not living anymore as I say this. That makes me feel bad for saying it, but it really is... It's so stiff and unreadable and that would be a wonderful one, you know, to republish. It has actually that copy, that particular translation has been republished, but I think that, you know, Parley is based on not being the best of translation so he didn't really get any attention in the U.S. So the book that I translated, I love that book and I think it really deserved a U.S. audience, an American audience, but it's not... It's very well written. It's between the World Wars in Italy. I think it has a very appealing subject matter. You know, I think, Parley, it's the subject matter of what gets published in the U.S. I think, you know, books tied to World War II. I think that that subject matter is interesting. But it's not written from a more typical American, you know, realistic, scenic kind of novel. It doesn't have the, you know, the sort of narrative arc of, you know, more realistic. I mean, it is, of course, in this sort of neo-realist tradition, but it's told from the point of view of an entire community. It has this very gentle voice that in some ways makes me think a little bit of some calvino. It's just, it was just sort of on the edge so that I submitted it. I'm kind of embarrassed about this, but I submitted it over a 10-year period to 50 different presses. Yeah, actually I submitted it to 49 and then I had kind of given up, you know. This really, and actually Chad, you turned it down at a Dahlke archive, but it didn't fit at Dahlke archive and you explained that it was a very polite, and he's right, and so I was just learning like what matches where, but I tried it at, you know, a lot of more standard American just presses and people liked it, but they, I don't know how to market it. I don't know how to sell it because it just didn't quite fit, you know, it didn't even fit the sort of definition of what we wanted for international literature. And it was finally published by a very small translation press Autumn Hill, Russell Valentino's Press, and you know it hasn't gotten a ton of attention, but I hope it will continue to live and it's just such a beautiful book and a very moving book, so I was really happy that, you know, that it found a home, and so that was the first one. What's funny is that that came out in 2014. Would you say there were like 40 books in 2014 that came out? Yeah. So I have two of them, which is so funny because one of them took me 10 years to, you know, to publish. The second one was with Open Letter, and that's Julio Mozzi's This is the Garden, which is a collection of short stories. And that one was, I mean, another book that I just adored, very different, metafictional, very spare prose. I thought very philosophical, yet also imagistic at the same time, and right away it started getting just a whole lot of reception, first from literary journals. Every story was published in a major, Kenyon Review, they were published in all these great journals, and I submitted that as a query, again, still not entirely knowing what the presses are. I submitted it to Europa, but that's not the right place for, it's just not their cup of tea. I would imagine maybe there'll be some discussion about what Italian books are actually being put forward. If the 20 of them are Europa, that's a very different, you know, kind of book.  I mean, it's highly literary fiction, and he is known in Italy, he's not as Christina, sorry, Christina, I have to mention your name, but as Christina says, he's known and he's respected as a literary writer, but he's a short story writer. He's not, you know, widely read by the general public, but he's highly respected. And that book, so Europa wasn't interested, but the second press I sent it to was Open Letter, and, you know, it took a while to hear, but, you know, so that was just a much different story with a, so it's, you know, these smaller presses that are interested in the more, which might say high art, you know, literary texts, so I'll stop there. And pass it to me. Pass the batons, the batons to you. Well, unlike Chad, I don't have any data. So I'm not sure, I'm not sure exactly what to focus on. I, in a way, the things about transmission that interest me the most are the things that aren't quantifiable or that you can't put any numbers to and that are kind of mysterious, like, for example, questions of untranslatability, which certain authors are sometimes said to be untranslatable, and that's sometimes offered as an explanation for why they don't make it across into other cultures. You know, this has been said a lot about Leopardi. Of course now, maybe it won't be said as much now that the Galassi's translation has done so well, but it was also said about a poet that I translate, Giovanni Pasculli, who was late 19th, early 20th century, Italian poet who's a, you know, major, major figure in Italian poetry, you know, one of the foundational, you know, modern poets, a hugely influential figure, but doesn't really exist in English. I mean, there have been a few translations of him, but none of them have gotten any traction. He doesn't have a reputation in English. You ask people who know Ungareti in Montale, and they've never heard of Pasculli. So it's a mystery to me, you know, why writers like that get overlooked while, you know, I think, and I think, you know, in Pasculli's case, I think it has to do with the fact that he was sort of, his moment was the late 19th, early 20th century, which was not a particularly exciting moment. He wasn't part of any sort of literary movement with, you know, catchy name.  And he sort of, so he sort of falls between, you know, Leopardi and Montale or something in some sort of no-man's land. And so that's, that may be part of it. Certain kinds of historical periods are, catch the imagination of, you know, other places, and we have a place in our imaginations for futurists and so, or we have a place in our imagination for modernists like Montale and Ungareti, but even there, you know, Umberto Saba, who's another great Italian poet on a par with Montale and Ungareti is not nearly as well known as those, as Ungareti and Montale here in this country. Again, it's just, he's also been translated several times, but they haven't gotten that much traction compared to Montale and Ungareti. So those kinds of, those kinds of things are mysterious to me and there's also another case, another poet that I translated was Pavese and I did his complete poems for Copper Canyon and he's kind of almost the opposite case where he's better known in English as a poet and his poetry is fairly influential in the American context Philip Levine was hugely influenced by him I've had a number of American poets tell me or write about how important Pavese was to them and he's much more his profile as a poet is much larger in this country than it is in Italy where he's considered primarily a novelist who also wrote some popular poems near the end of his life and so that's another strange disparity in the other direction that I don't fully know how to explain in Pavese's case it may have something to do with the fact that he was strongly influenced by American writers and so maybe what Americans respond to in Pavese is a kind of echo of themselves or something I'm not sure about that so there's there's that and another thing that interests me is a kind of maybe what might be called a literary myopia where a tendency of the translation community to focus on contemporary works and if they when they translate older works it's they're always going back to the same older works and retranslating them so that you're not discovering any new voices from if the author's dead and didn't make an impact and hasn't already made an impact in some way chances are they're not going to be you know rediscovered at this point that's something that happens I think with Poscoli as well you know he's you know the opardie at least always had some sort of name recognition somehow despite the fact that his poetry wasn't really available in editions in English that anybody read but he was such a towering figure that somehow that allowed him to sort of have a kind of traction even in the absence of translations I don't know I also my most recent translation was an anthology which is the FSG book of 20th century Italian poetry and so I was thinking a lot about some of these kinds of questions and as I edited that and I was very conscious that anthologies in a certain way are these vehicles that can determine who comes across because I had a chance to include a lot of poets who haven't been translated in in book form and so who are virtually unknown in English but you know it's my hope that by representing them with a small selection of a few poems in an anthology that they will come to the attention of readers who might then go dig up more and translate books so I think anthologies can be an important gateway although anthologies themselves often have trouble getting traction they're hard to, from a publishing standpoint they're extremely hard to do, the permissions are absurd and there's no good reason for any right-minded person to make an anthology so anyway I'll stop there and I'll be happy to answer questions about any of those things My name is Diana Thao and I I've translated for a number of years an Italian poet who has gone from being pretty much untranslated in the States to being pretty recognized Amalia Rosselli and I started working on her as a suggestion from a professor from Larry Benuti actually and I'm interested how translators, because hearing Chad talk it makes me think that especially poetry but I think also with prose and hearing Elizabeth as well I feel like this is such an idiosyncratic it's based on what translators are interested in translating and if they have the time and energy to then get it published and the means and so it seems an interesting question how these choices are made and for me they were made or suggested in the university I studied Italian in college I studied abroad in Rome and now as a PhD student in Italian studies in Complit trying to teach these things to non-Italian speakers that I'm interested in teaching in Leopardi whatever it seems to form how I shape my syllabus and how I shape what discussions I'm having with my colleagues who are not in Italian studies so I'm interested in the role also that the university or other resources are playing in sort of giving translators ideas of what to translate what needs to be translated, what hasn't been translated, what's been translated well poorly but with Roselli I started just because I was fascinated by her and she's one of these poets who's sort of between languages because she had multiple languages and she was as a female poet who was sort of an anomaly in the Italian male landscape of 20th century poetics I was drawn to her as well and it's just been a really interesting passage between her being virtually unknown to having mostly all of her books translated and sort of having conversations suddenly with people who are poets who don't speak Italian come up to me and say I love Roselli like it's amazing that you do that work and yeah so I'm interested in hearing how people find the projects that they find and how we can sort of bolster that network because as Choy pointed out like on the other side of things it's a jungle out there in terms of finding Italian publishers or agents or whatever that are going to help us and actually Jamie you can probably speak to this a lot too so I was interested in talking about that and then also a phenomenon that's sort of complementary but interesting in female writing Italian women's writing in the States has a huge interest popularity success in a way that I think it's starting to in Italy but so the idea of women's studies kind of doesn't exist in the same way in Italy as it does in the United States and so I feel like again you know scholars who have come from Italy to the States to study feminist literature or feminist theory women's writing are then translating this stuff Paolo Mazzino is a great example Oroselli people who are maybe even Italian scholars or you know native Italians who come to the United States because they want to pursue this line of study so that seems to be an interesting phenomenon where now and and I think Farante is actually one of those things too I think in Italy people are like Farante is great but you know what's the big deal I mean maybe I'm speaking out of turn people can correct me but again it seems to be that the US is particularly receptive to female Italian voices in a way that's been kind of exciting and maybe a counterpoint to the sort of negativity of like oh we can't get anything published there's only you know four bucks in translation or whatever poetry 14 published in a year so I wanted to throw that into the mix too and I'd be really curious to hear of people in the audience who want to chime in as well and then I have more questions for people but maybe we can just open it up. Okay thank you guys, Shui so thank you for bringing up all of those examples does anyone have questions I can start with some general issues because two of the things that really come out for me are the difference between publication and readership so there's the struggle to get published and then what happens after you get published and how much of that is a matter of money and financing or not right so that's I don't know if you guys have comments if anyone has comments about that about publishing something and then getting readers how where or how does that work I don't know it's mysterious to me again it's mysterious to me what you never know what's going to get traction and why when it's published you get something published like like the Farante and it takes off in a way that was quite unexpected I'm sure to the publisher and other times things that you might expect to do better don't do so well and it's not necessarily a factor it has something to do with what kind of press is behind them but that's not always predictable either you know yeah it's absolutely not and the Farante isn't actually because it did take a long time I mean the Days of Abundance came out in 2003 maybe something like that and that did well enough I think there was like literary following people I knew brought it and talked about it and then there is The Lost Daughter I think is the second one and there's a third one and then the Neapolitan Quartet which was the first ones that actually were very successful sales wise so it did take some I mean it wasn't like she just automatically caught on so there had to be that perseverance but you never know what's going to work but I do think that it's something strange and I'll try and I'll try and articulate this and it'll probably come out all wrong but might generate part of a conversation about this I remembered as we were talking that about five years ago someone contacted me to get information from the database about Italian specifically because there are some I think it was the AP courses or the AP tests for high school students and Italian had been eliminated and they're talking about different foreign languages that had been cut back on in high school students and Italian was like the main one a lot of the programs were being shut down or just weren't being offered for publishing with French and German and Spanish and not so much German but for French and Spanish in particular there's so many people in high schools and students that are learning that like my kids are learning Spanish and French but they don't even I don't think they have Italian offered in the least and in some ways that does make a difference for your audience because you're familiar with the culture to some degree the ideas of it's romanticized and these courses in high school like all the different foods the different things that go along with that country's language and then when you go to read a book about it or read a book from a French author some of that's kind of implanted you already have certain projections towards it with Italian literature that's not as clear cut if there's not the that sort of language training I don't know what I wouldn't know what my kids would think of Italy or like what their preconceived notions are what kind of fiction would they want how would you market it to them that becomes a little bit trickier Geronimo Stilton that's what they know that's literally that's it Geronimo Stilton and that's fine the most successful Italian author next to Ferrante probably or character at least but there's also so related to that with the editors with people working in publishing there aren't a lot that I know that speak Italian either I mean aside from Europe editions Glossier of course they do so many why they're like right up there I mean there's people who are into that that tended to help promote those books but there's something too about like the tradition like you mentioned a ton of the poets and like there is this very rich tradition of Italian literature but there's so many gaps I think in English that it's hard to like place things in a way that's not as difficult if you look at French or German because a lot of the main the 100 best writers of the past 100 years a lot of those are available in English so when you come to someone new or go back to someone that had previously been overlooked it's easy to like kind of formulate and for a publishing perspective that's helpful editorial wise but also in marketing that you can start to figure out how you're going to pitch this the fact that most of the Italian books that come out are like noir does influence and does shade shade that a little bit but that's the thing that we're most familiar with Colvino, Berto Echo noir Ferrante that's the main and Geronimo Stilton and Dante, yeah don't forget Dante contemporary modern things but yeah I don't have a comment or question it's just a thought, yeah no problem I was curious in terms of the numbers like if that percentage sort of matched out on to others in terms of what gets written it's probably pretty close to be honest or like 20 let's just do it I have a question about that as well are there any presses that maybe don't get considered because there are a few Italian like there are a few micro presses that publish a lot of Italian poetry that I don't know if they have any distribution not a lot but that publish only Italian poetry who are you thinking of it seems like Chelsea was on their list yeah she met a son here yeah but it is quite small yeah there is just to put it in there you go so in 2014 which is like probably the most reliable of the most recent years data because 2015 is still ongoing there was 498 works of fiction and 98 poetry so it's basically a 5 to 1 ratio so it's a little bit extreme for Italian but not that much that's actually got to be a better ratio than the culture at large it is a better ratio it's actually better and the vast majority of the poetry books are coming out from and there's the FSG's the Yale that pops up here but a lot of them are the micro presses that you're talking about that do 3-4 books a year and their distribution goes through SPD or through somewhere that's like not necessarily the most active sales force that's out there but they do exist and they find their audience well enough and like you go on the best translate for Italian translation poetry that helps but I wanted to say maybe this is getting off topic then we can get back to your question if you still have questions but what you mentioned or what Jimmy mentioned at the beginning about Italian being it's still a western language it's still like publishing houses seem to want like more, I don't know like sexier or not I guess Italian is pretty sexy but not mainstream languages right and so I found that submitting to places it's like well an Italian poet that's not news that's not something we already have Montale, we already have Fonarte or whatever and so there seems to be Italians between a rock and a hard place in publishing in that not as popular to publish and yet there is I don't know all this allure and attraction that's being generated culturally, I don't know it just seems like an interesting paradox I've been getting I feel like it's just in some ways talking to the to the right presses so the small international lit presses I think they want to do more, two lines is in communication, they really want to do more, especially women but definitely Italian and Archipelago is right now just putting out to Buki and more and one who's major who has, he's not known at all is Antonio Moretzko he's huge and he's just one book now at Archipelago but so I mean Jill Schoolman at Archipelago is wanting to grow her list if I can put it that way that's promising I think you might be too I hope Other questions? I think something that came up in your comments right now and as well as before it's just the more general question of how do we measure success because one of the really concrete things we can focus on are numbers and data or numbers of what gets published that we really measure and even as a translator like you feel like this book did well or well enough for you sales data some kind of other interaction reviews how do we measure success or failure I guess Yeah I mean reviews is a huge factor and I mean like the best the most successful book I've ever done in terms of reviews and just general attention and probably also sales is the Pabese book that Copper Canyon did in 2002 now and that got reviewed all over the place, all over the world in fact and a book that I thought was going to do better was the FSG anthology which came out in 2012 and with the backing of a great publishing house and Jonathan Galassi is a great editor who had a stake in that book and that just did not do that well and then you start trying to figure out why and you say well the cover price was 50 bucks that's probably a big part of it you know it's just an expensive book and part of the reason it costs so much is because it was a bilingual edition which doubles the size of it and also doubles the cost of it and then you start second guessing that kind of decision you know well maybe it would have done a lot better if it hadn't been bilingual also you know then you start looking at cover designs and things like oh that was it the cover's fault the paperback just came out now the paperback just came out finally and the prices what is it? I'd be interested to see if that gets adopted more in classrooms and becomes more I know a ton of people who want to teach it and I think they just I don't know why they didn't buy it except for the price 50 bucks you can't make your cities buy a $50 book it's hard to just sort of anyway so whereas the Paveza just came out only in paperback it was 20 bucks to start with you never had that barrier to entry so and I don't even follow the sales numbers so much but it's the reviews for me at least the number of reviews that indicate whether it's successful I would feel like that's a better there's not as quantifiable but a better metric of success would be and the reviews are in the mentions and the way that the name enters into the literary culture what we used yesterday the literary ecosystem the way that people are then referred to or know that author since as much better the sales are always going to be bad sales for most books are bad unfortunately and depressingly so they did have me on this thing they wanted to know if Italian books sold better or worse than French and German books so I chose randomly 10 books from each country and got the book scan numbers for them and out of those there are only two out of all 30 that sold more than a thousand copies so it wasn't yeah it was a both front no it was no I left her off in tension because I wanted to rig it so I cheated but they were um it was one was that the truth of the Harry quiebert affair whatever it was the French book that came out a couple years ago that they paid a million dollars for as advanced which is why it was everywhere and then the other was a Jean echinos novel um which was weird but it was like just over a thousand copies but yeah so the sales things are always going to make you sad I think I think the more of the getting into the cultural that that that's more important in the long run is like having those conversations and having the impact of the book because there is a lot of stuff that we said to for like um like we in publishers publishers will always focus on the sales numbers or talk about it because it's the way that you have to survive and a lot of judgments are made upon whether or not a book has the possibility of selling enough copies or not um at the same time and this is why translations in some ways get frowned upon because they don't sell as easily as an American author who tours and knows everyone and you sell more copies of their book whatever but um at the same time those those translations or those books that might not sell a lot of copies at the start tend to have a really high influence like there's a bigger impact sometimes where like the books that we most cherish are books that that may not have sold all that well but are very important to us so there has to be some other way of evaluating this or talking about it where it's like this and this was a very important book and had this great influence even though it sold 400 copies. I had a question based on Stephen Snyder's um keynote talk um a couple days ago when he was talking about how um Murakami or how um Japan after the war was the images sort of curated by the New Yorker and um other other institutions powers that be and I was just wondering what how the Italian questions sort of maps on to that like so you know in terms of politics like a similar sort of transition from um enemy to um you know Fellini and you know Resolte Vita or whatever um and and if you guys have any thoughts about if that plays so you're talking about the cultural cap at all like um like what is what is Italian literature's cultural capitol and how do we measure it or how do how have we measured it um starting with post war I don't know if this is a question and I'll open it up to the audience too I'm sure people here can um look up thoughts about that but um yeah following Stephen Snyder sort of shaping I thought that was his thing was really interesting to me too where you're talking about with like um in the 60s especially it was like everything's peaceful zen like instead of yeah I don't know how that I mean the things that I would think are like um a lot of like the more like film the Italian film be very very I mean important in one of the things that sort of breaks through but also seems sort of um European in that like heavy important modernist sense um within with fiction yeah it doesn't seem like I have a quote from Tim remember he mentioned Tim and so I um I have he's fun to read I have to say this because he so he writes himself and I mean he stopped translating and I really enjoyed this so he talks about that there are um antithetical qualities for translators they have to be very respectful and at the same time dominating and that um and that for me always requires such an effort of suppression of my own desires to do things and at the end it was just too much like giving blood and so that's why he stopped translating but he had this to say about um about contemporary Italian novels he says I must say there are really not many contemporary or very recent Italian novels that I love in the way I love um these books here he's talking about uh Verga Bassani um uh you know some just real classic books there have been some very fine novels of the last 20 years but I remember when I read for the Campiello Prize and that's what Regone Stern's book one one of the big Italian literary prizes 7 or 8 years ago I did feel terribly disappointed at the 7 year 80 books that I was reading on that occasion I think this is a very difficult moment in Italian fiction I think that one of the things that's happening is that writers are less and less writing out of the Italian tradition and more and more writing towards a new international tradition so you know working toward smoothing smoothing it out and I mean I think that that is I mean I hate to make big claims because I just don't feel like I know anything but it does it does seem like um there's like different strands of you know of Italian right and then some are definitely um more TV like more I hate to say more of that sort of American seem by seem but you know less of the fill the philosophical I mean that's definitely a you know a tendency but um but then there are there are plenty of amazing writers you know who are who are much more specifically Italian but they're just not not getting um you know put forward that's something I was alluding to that sort of idea it's really pervasive that it's all crap yeah or a lot of Italian writers who maybe don't read that much Italian fiction themselves or you know say oh you know there's nothing good and there's this idea that's kind of exaggerated I think I think so too perception yeah yeah yeah I mean I just that there's I was just looking through you know writers who would be wonderful to translate I mean there's so many of them I just wanted to try to follow up on Diane's question for a minute I think it's really interesting yeah where Italy is and I think I'm probably about to lead into a bunch of wrong stereotypes I'm just going to try it out as I think about those differences between French and German Spanish translations I think what you said about the just what you're supposed to do in high school certainly has to do with it but as I think about the kind of classic American attitude towards Italy we go there in a very capitalist way to consume culture but kind of like the eating, drinking teach us how to go slow and life culture whereas I think and you know they because they badly need the money are willing to sort of market themselves along those lines as well but I think you know for instance France still has a stake in saying we're more intellectual than you can ever imagine if you have Americans or maybe these heavy books or something so that there's a strange way in which you don't turn towards Italy intellectually the way we turn towards other parts of Europe which maybe also has to do with these gaps that there's no continuous tradition literature to it would be great if we were teaching our children Italian but any books at all one question sort of dovetails to her and thinking about this to me the question isn't necessarily what stereotypes Americans have of these places but how do these folks see themselves in the literary thing so France is the Amazon jungle ecology, German is the Malaysian, lots of stuff going on so how do Italian readers and writers think of themselves and do they feel like they're in a rich period and the problem with the other two countries though their government's held and in this case it seems like the Italians don't so is there a up push from the writers or the enthusiasm in the culture for what is being written talked about or films and maybe somewhere in there our editors or our readers are sort of thinking well we don't hear much about them it's not a jungle with lots of stuff in it something's happening I'm just wondering what you know about your own self perception of the reading I mean I think there's probably different impressions from my own impression is from the writers that I know and I think there's a with at least one of them it's very intense there's actually a lot of readings and small presses but a frustration of not being able to break into the larger publishing houses as he feels are very politically run and yes he does refer to them as the mafiosi and you know but so I mean I think that there's actually a very rich group of writers that you know there's a lot that's going on but but some but frustration I don't know about your impressions from others I think so yeah I would agree yeah that there's a sort of it's almost the opposite problem in Italy and that it seems like there's a cultural dominance of the publishing houses and the parts that be in the prizes that dictate so much of what gets published in NY but yeah the sort of smaller presses seem to be cropping up now a lot more and there's a lot more excitement around little publishing houses in smaller but there is a frustration of feeling trapped I guess but how the general reader sort of approaches that problem I have the impression that Italians read a ton compared to the United States generalizations but yeah that the average person yeah is the other way around so we translate like 75% of our literature so we're very much we want to create international literature we have a lot of literature so except for a few which is we wait for the latest friends haha and that was create a huge gap in readership right? if the Italian readers aren't reading Italian writing and then it's not getting translated there's this sense of what am I writing and who's who's it getting to but one thing that's also interesting is that for instance I would never have thought she would be translatable because I mean I've learned also Italy and I honestly love German although I know where to put them historically but I don't know more of my culture so I never would have thought that internationally somebody would read about that and that brings up another problem that or interesting question that hasn't that we haven't talked too much about but which is like regionalisms and dialect because I think there isn't unlike the French and German there isn't this sort of like monolith institution that's dictating what Italianita is and by necessity like after fascism or whatever you know it's like the opposite even so that the landscape seems very fragmented and necessarily so so there isn't it's hard for a translator from the US to put their finger on this is what the next hot thing is going to be sure I don't know if anyone has translated anybody so migrant writing is just a general term you're referring to writers who write in Italian as a second language or of another ethnicity through the wave of migration and I think that sometimes those writers might not fit in in English because they're Italian they have no like claim to Italianness in the same way so and a lot of their works actually are speaking really directly to an Italian audience where like hello I exist because part of it is about trying to integrate into literary culture but also socially and I translated a book by Nicola Lillin who is a transnistrian writer I mean he writes in Italian he's transnistrian which is this breakaway country in the former Soviet Union and it's about fighting in Chechnya and there's nothing Italian about it other than the language so it's very easy for that to be in fact there are a few instances of books where you wouldn't know it's Italian like and so and I think maybe in other cases those writers don't get maybe there's not a place for them in English I don't know because we've already solved their migration problem and there are some I think that there might be actually some room for considering the world consideration of I think that there's room for some of these writers who have this experience there's an anthology I was taking a look at called Pecare Nero that has a bunch of if you're interested in finding writers to translate I mean there's a lot of I think immigrant writers one who has just got a book out is Ijebo Shago Ethiopian you know I think it's Ethiopian Somali born in Italy and her writing is very interesting so you know there's a number of them seems like that might be a wave of and I think would touch actually American audiences and that's something that's a great consideration worldwide I think some of those have been published by small presses and there are a couple of technologies and they're translated also by academics who are primarily academics and not translators which is another issue of the quality of the translations sort of priorities or interest or technique approach of an academic translator as opposed to a more literary translator not that we can totally make that distinction but sometimes people who don't translate really are professionally or extensively translate differently or not as well maybe in some cases so some of those things and there are these little university presses so very low distribution and maybe for use in university courses I would think for course adoptions so so I would say do you see yes well all of us do here because that's why we translate Italian but absolutely what is it what is it are you talking about in the literature or are you talking about just in general I mean to me it's the very cool is how philosophy intertwines with story how much how much of that there is in the fiction that I've picked to translate I just love it and that's cool and and maybe the plurality of dialects like the regionalism that's such a foreign concept for pretty much everyone right how the Italian states independently became their own places I think that's really appealing and seductive and it's been cool for me I don't I think you're asking about sort of in a broader cultural sense would Americans think have that attitude toward Italian literature and I'm not sure about that I mean I think for one thing a lot of the cool factor does tend to follow for better and for worse you know there are good things about this but tends to follow sort of political hotspots or things that are happening around the world that are in the news and those then of places that are in the news then becomes kind of cool or kind of of interest in a to us and so Italy has not been much in the news lately which is probably good financial collapse and also immigrant considerations right but even that doesn't get pales comparison and so in terms of you know we can talk about Italian literature that's regional or gears like a little spot of the world or culture that you're on a conversation with philosophy just the same way and so do you think that there's one more than the other that seem to take off in America I think something kind of notable is that some of the main genres that are most translate noir not really I think something that any of us has really worked with or is super interested in so there's that too and that's probably going to come back around too because like right now there's a lot of focus on like Scandinavian noir but it'll shift back to like Italian I mean there still is a ton of them that are coming out but like I think a lot of the general reader that goes to their public library and checks out the new book that's a mystery they're doing a lot of like Scandinavian stuff now and they'll probably rotate back around at some point that is like a huge and that's a big part of like what gets translated from Italy and has a community and all the communities are coming out I think that has to do with the question of the image of Italy and the cool factor because I think the mafia is really it's a little bit that and if not I think the south is dominant and the American image of Italy in general so you know Naples has a certain residence that I think is like works and things like that I would say more than the north so in terms of broader regional sense any last questions thank you I want to ask one question do you guys have any recommendations because what was sort of behind this panel is getting ignored so does anyone have anything that they'd like to say you guys should check this out yeah Antonio Morasco but the the trilogy you know and you said Archipelago is publishing something of his one is coming out but it's a later book and it's more of the sort of Archipelago taste it's a sort of whimsical the title do you remember the title it's one of yeah La Luchina that one's just coming out but I mean but that trilogy is really some big books that's a thousand page thing you guys have talked to me about right I might know how to get that funded others I don't know I'm blanking now that you've asked the question I was going to say Yamashigo I'm hopefully going to translate one of her chapters of La Miacase Dovesono which I think actually inspired Adua the new novel which is being translated I contacted her and she says it's being translated oh great I mean she's just wonderful she's such a clear writer and I feel like really accessible like a beautiful person like she's just incredible something actually I want to mention sorry this isn't but just to throw in the mix Jumbo Lahiri just published a book of essays written in Italian she lived in Italy for two years I think and said that she always felt a deep affinity with the language and that's just blows my mind and is amazing so yeah that's I think that's going to get published in a heartbeat but it would be interesting an interesting phenomenon if there were more American writers who live the dream and move to Italy or whatever and then start writing in Italian so that would be a built in one book I would recommend is translated into English recently it was Selected Palms of Patricia Cavalli which came out from FSG a couple of years ago and is a wonderful and Antonina Annette does she have a book? I don't know she's in the anthology of words but as like a full yeah I don't know does anyone else have any other recommendations? I know some of you are Italian my big one I think there are a couple of translations of some of that I don't know because you have these Eva don't you have a response with us? yeah Versa has published some of his stuff yeah I think the sixties are a big gap in the Neovan Guard and a lot of those are a huge gap and even some of that fiction I tried to oh Sanguinetti is another someone just got a pen grant to do a collected works I think of Eduardo Sanguinetti that will come out eventually I think that's been that's been translated yeah that came out a couple years ago one that came to my mind is the birth and death of the housewife which we were talking about a lot of writers who might be considered modernist but aren't really categorized as such don't have very much attention in English I think and that book is really great and I think feminist or someone I forget who published it but that's a really amazing book birth and death of the housewife bad title thank you guys thank you