Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to get us going here this evening. I want to welcome you. My name is Steve Gold. I'm the president of the board of trustees of the Kellogg Hubbard Library. Welcome to the 13th annual evening at the library. This is an opportunity to recognize a distinguished Vermont author and to raise funds for our wonderful library. We started in 2006, and our first honoree was Catherine Patterson. I want to read you the list of all the honorees that we have had. Beginning in 2006 with Catherine Patterson, in 2007, Reeve Lindberg was our honoree, 2008, Tom Slayton, 2009, Chris Bogalian, 2010, Howard Frank Mosier, 2011, Chris and Nancy Graff. 2012, Mary Azarian, 2013, Archer Mayer, 2014, Howard Norman, 2015, Ed Coran, 2016, Rowan Jacobson, last year, Ellen Brian Voight. And this year we are delighted and honored to have Major Jackson as our honoree. It's wonderful to see so many of you here this evening. I know that virtually everyone in the room in one way or another is a supporter of our wonderful library. We're an independent nonprofit organization. We're extremely indebted and grateful to the six communities that support us with their tax dollars, Berlin, Calus, East Montpelier, Middlesex, Montpelier, and Worcester. And we want to thank you each for participating in tonight's fundraiser and responding as many of you do every year to our appeals. In every sense, we really are a community library. We enjoy taxpayer support, donor support, business sponsorships, and tremendous volunteer support. In fact, with all of the financial support that we get, the library would still not be able to function were it not for the tremendous core of volunteers that work to make this place the wonderful place that it is. So thank you again for joining us tonight. I'm going to turn the podium over to Tom McCone, the executive director of the library. Thank you, Steve. Am I correct that the speaker in the other room is working now? Okay, we didn't have that on the beginning. We were wondering why people were still talking over there on the food. You notice we have a new setup this year. We counted the seats and we can actually fit more people in this room than we could fit before the fireplace there. Those of you who are fans of the balcony, I'm sorry. If any of you are at the balcony right now and you're wondering what's going on, we move down here for the first time in 13 years. But anyway, it is great to have all of you here. I want to start by thanking our sponsors for this event. We thank them in a few ways. And this is quite a list, but I don't read all of them. So, library sustainers are Everett Insurance, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and Kinney Drugs, library patrons, Dennis Ricker and Brown, National Life Group Foundation, Union Mutual, VSECU, Rich Cassidy Law, Gossens Bachman, Washington Electric, Northfield Savings Bank, and Calmont Vedvages. Library Friends, Bear Pond Books, Union River Animal Hospital, Mail W. Johnson, Martha Lang, Century 21 Jack Associates, SNR Services, Broad Lane Financial Management, Father Gil Segali and Valley, Community National Bank, Concept 2, Main Street Dentistry, Main Street Family Dentistry, Bonton Gourmet and Capital Copy. So, those are our sponsors for this event. Also, all of the folks who are working here tonight, all the businesses have given us discounts, which helps us also. And, of course, Greg and Gretchen of Bonton are our caterers. And at the bars, we have Sweet Melissa's. And the musicians are Eero, Sekerra, I got the right thing. And Tom Morse, and Colin McCaffrey did the sound system for us. When Colin left earlier, the other speaker was on. So, somebody must have turned that off for us. So, I also want to thank the Kellogg-Harvard Library Board of Trustees. We really have a wonderful, very hard-working board, 13 members on it. They are extremely dedicated. I've worked with a variety of boards over the years in a variety of places. And this is really an exceptionally strong board. And they do an enormous amount for us. And would you please thank our board of trustees? I also want to thank our staff. A lot of them have put in quite a few volunteer hours to make this happen. As you can imagine, this does take a lot of planning and a lot of work to get this ready. And to clean this up again after it's tonight and get it back into shape for Monday morning. So, we also depend on dozens and dozens of volunteers. We have a lot of volunteers for this event. We have over 90 people who are regular volunteers for the Kellogg-Harvard Library. That makes an enormous difference for us. We'd never be able to do as many things as we could do without all of those volunteers. One more, thank you. And I'm getting close to the end of my list of things here. But also, I want to thank Rachel Seneschal, who coordinates this really large undertaking. Board members are going around selling 50-50 raffle tickets. We'll have the drawing after major's presentation later this evening. If you haven't already visited the non-fiction room, we have the silent auction going on out there. There's a lot of new things this year, very interesting stuff. That will go on until about 9.15. So if you haven't been out there, you still have a chance to go out there afterwards. We also have an art exhibit, both upstairs and downstairs, titled Water Landing. This is photography by Linda Hogan and Rachel Seneschal. So getting close to the major here. So to introduce our honoree this evening, we're pleased to have the award-winning poet in Montpelier High School English teacher, Karen McCann. I guess some of you have heard of her. So Karen, who received an MFA from Warren Wilson College, is the author of Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes, which received both the 2013 New Issues Poetry Prize and the 2015 Vermont Book Award. Karen has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Vermont Arts Council, and others. Please join me in welcoming Karen McCann. So Tom gave me 10 minutes, and I plan to use them, so buckle up. It's not every day we wake to find a Vermont writer in the style magazine of The New York Times. But yesterday, there was Major Jackson, with 31 other impeccably suited men amid stacks and piles of books. The article is titled Black Male Writers for Our Time. It begins, these 32 American men and their peers are producing literature that is essential to how we understand our country and its place in the world right now. He sits in the front row among such luminaries as Cornelius Edie, Yusuf Komenyaka, James McBride, Gregory Pardlow, and Kevin Young. The article celebrates their, quote, extraordinary period of artistry at a moment of significant national divisiveness. If you all in the back could poke your neighbors to listen up, that'd be awesome. I mean, not for me, but pretty soon. You sound plenty loud in here, but in the other room, it's not so loud. So I should yell? Yeah. I mean, I can.  That's true. No. OK. You can't even hear it in the other room. Really? Oh, jeez. All right. Just send a chain of pokes down through the doorway. I know you can. I've taught your children. And while Major Jackson is a luminary figure in our national literary landscape, I want to focus on the bright star he is for us here in Vermont, which is what brings us to the Kellogg Hubbard Library tonight. Where outside the stars bless us with the light similar to that of our men of the hour. The first thing I remember Major Jackson saying to me years ago was, I'm easily distracted. We were talking at a dinner, and I was wearing a charm bracelet that caught his eye. This memory is funny to me, but it also opens a window. I think it's the job of the poet to be easily distracted, to look at the world and see everything at once, to be distracted from a single vision into a vision of multiplicity, into playful ways of seeing. Major Jackson's poems exhibit serious playfulness. His poetry ties us to narrative moments and intermittently opens into the lyric moment. His poems zero in on images and unexpected detail. His language shifts and shifts each phrase fresh and transporting, and musical beyond compare. Major takes seriously his teacher Sonia Sanchez's charge to see the world for what it is. His poetic eye is loving and discerning, lifting what he sees into celebratory prayer, even when his project is to lament. Major's poems report back from everywhere, from city bus stops to the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, from regret to new love, from Greek islands to Cocoa Beach, from basketball courts to mornings in bed, from Philadelphia to Addison County, from disappearance to witness, from regret to utter ridiculous joy. There's his acclaimed brilliance on the page, and there's the work he does behind the scenes as an editor, organizer, and critical friend. I have been lucky to work in community with Major in a writing group that sustains me like family. About our work together, pro-et Kristen Fondal reflects. Major could easily devote all his time to his own craft and his considerable gifts, but instead he nurtures community and connection for his fellow poets and writers as well. Speaking personally, his welcome and editorial insight have made a huge difference in my work. I'm sure this is true for many others. Ultimately, his legacy will not be only his own words, but also the words of many others who found encouragement and each other because Major Jackson believes in bringing people together. Though he is adamant, this is me talking now, though he is adamant that he is just another poet in the group, it is true that it is a gift to watch his mind at work. His longtime friend, poet Elizabeth Powell, adds, Major is a force behind our poetry community, what we lovingly call the Vermont School. His generosity is a kind of sunlight that invigorates, shines his luminous intellect, brings people together to share their best selves. Seeing him makes me smile, his friendship is a joyous feeling, uplifting a blessing as are his poems, his benedictions to the world and life's urgent questions, which as a poet he lives into deeply faithfully. He and his work emanate a musicality of vision that scores the human experience. He lets me know that poetry can save us, that he is devoted to that precious truth, and out of that makes a kind of beauty that is rare and moving and full of an exuberant humanity that reconciles the world to the world and each of us to the other. Poet and novelist Maria Hummel shares this, Vermont likes to celebrate its spokespeople in national politics, but Major Jackson can certainly rival them with his highly regarded, longstanding poetic talent and vision. Not only has he elevated Vermont letters with his own work, but for years he has brought many poets to Burlington, i.e. most recently Sharon Olds, Ed Hirsch, Kevin Young, whom we otherwise might not encounter. He is a keystone figure in our literary community. His reading series at the University of Vermont, the painted word, in 10 years has presented 62 programs featuring 82 poets, intermixing local and national poets as well as students of poetry. Of the series, in celebrating its 10-year anniversary, Major writes, all of the poets helped shape the next generation of literary readers who understand a free democracy is contingent upon a belief in language to express our most profound observations and beliefs and an important means of documenting our lives in language that is fresh, memorable, and generative, but moreover from all parts of the human family. The work of poetry is indeed to save us and to transport us, to bring us into uncharted territory. Two years I brought Major Jackson to read at Montpelier High School. In the capital city schools of the second whitest state in the nation, our black students struggle to see themselves in their schools and community, to see local role models, to see who they can become. They don't feel represented by the curriculum. That day, Sparks flew in the audience as he read and because of his stunning reading, a young girl finally saw herself on a Vermont stage. And because of a racist incident between her and another student in the audience and because all our black students got together at Montpelier High School, our Racial Justice Alliance was formed, the group that worked to raise the Black Lives Matter flag at Montpelier High School and to fly it, yeah, and to fly it in the words of one young woman, until we feel like the American flag alone represents us. After his reading, Major lingered in a packed classroom and shown the light of his life story with my kids. He gave them advice, he told them stories. He met them where they were and elevated them with his warmth and candor and good humor. He remains a legend at MHS. Students regularly say things like, remember what Major Jackson said, or it's like in that Major Jackson poem where, or didn't Major Jackson read a poem about that? Or most recently, hey, Ms. McHaddon, I saw Major Jackson in conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates at UVM. And Major Jackson talked to me after that. You should have seen the light in that young man's face. Major Jackson was born and raised in Philadelphia, where he pursued his degree in accounting at Temple University. In the late 1990s, he joined the Dark Room Collective, an organization that gave greater visibility to emerging and established writers of color. Major Jackson is the author of four books of poetry, including Rural Deep, Holding Company, Hoops, and Leaving Saturn, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. He is the editor of the Library of America's County Cullen, Collected Poems, and Renga for Obama, a book-length occasional poem composed by almost 300 poets under his direction to honor President Obama. Among countless other honors, he is the recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Major Jackson has been awarded a Pushkart Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter-Binner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in American poetry review, Kalalu, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Plowshares, Poetry, Tim House, and has been included in multiple volumes of Best American Poetry. He has distinguished faculty at New York University, distinguished visiting faculty at New York University, core faculty at the Bennington Writing Seminars and teaches at the University of Vermont, where he is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor. Major lives right down the street from me in South Burlington, Vermont. In the life work of a poet, one of the great tasks is to simultaneously keep your voice, but also to reinvent it. I find his third book, Holding Company, to be a work of stunning change. A collection of 10-line poems, the restriction forces him away from story and into moment, into fragment, and the resulting poems feel like sand castles to me. Constructions that are unbuilt and rebuilt again within the arbitrary boundaries of constraint, but resulting in imagined spaces that are for their short moments exactly and only what is real. I'm gonna read one to you. Roof of the World. I live on the roof of the world among the aerial simulacra of things, among the faded, the old tennis shoes, vanished baseballs, heartbreak, gridded with dirt. My mind flickers like lightning in a cloud. I'm networked, beholding electric wires and church spires. I lean forward and peer at the suffering below. Sautre said, man is condemned to be free. I believe in the dead who claim to believe in me, says to the missing and forgotten. Day darkens on, I hear our prayers rising. I sing to you now. Please welcome Major Jackson. I'll take an introduction from Karen McCann over a photo shoot in the New York Times style magazine. Any day. Any day. That's pretty wild. So this is a huge, huge honor for me. It is a stunning, a stunning to be recognized as a member of this community.  I'm gonna let you get to the dumplings and the cheese and the wine. And I just, I thought about this. I'm just going to kind of talk about my gratitude for this community and I wanna talk about the role of libraries in my life and development. And I wanna thank a bunch of people and I'm gonna read a few poems and walk you through. Yeah, that's a good idea. Walk you, maybe read a few poems and then in the night so that you can hear, I think there's music too. So first thanks. I wanna thank Tom and Rachel and the Board of Trustees for this enormous honor. It is definitely coming behind people like Ellen Bryant Voigt and Chris Brogillian and previous other honorees to join that particular list is the honorist in itself. So thank you very, very much. And thank you all for supporting Kellogg Hubbard Library. When I moved here to Vermont, I made a decision of course to live in Burlington. But then when I came down to Montpelier, just on a whim, one Saturday and visited four bookstores in a matter of like, I was like, I moved to the wrong city. I should be commuting north. It's not too late, that's very true. Is there a real estate agent in the house? Several. Five, so at least, right. So I wanna thank the Board of Trustees and Kellogg Hubbard Library stands along with those four bookstores as a pillar of this community. I also wanna thank Karen and my writing community who are here, my wife, Dee Dee and Liz Pau and Kristen Fogdoll is here and Angela Palm and Micaiah and Jeff who are also here and Cliff. Just people who are emblematic of the kind of Vermont ethos of people. I feel like to live in Vermont, there's some sort of secret interview process that happens that brings people who are like-minded here and that's just fantastic. Growing up in Philadelphia and if you are familiar with North Philadelphia, then you have some sort of vision of the community of which I came and for me to my development as a writer would not be for the Columbia branch of the Philadelphia library as well as the central branch when I was in high school, but as a young kid who, and let me just say I'm sure many of us have these particular stories about libraries, but the library for me was the place that I went to because I didn't want to go home and I know libraries serve that function for many kids in America and it hasn't stopped serving that function in addition to other kinds of function. There were people there who I met older and younger who geeked out on certain areas of the library. You can always find them. It also didn't hurt that there was a young girl who went to my school that would hang out there at the Columbia branch of the library. So please continue to do this. Please continue to gather around what I feel to be an institution that is of vital importance. You never know what young writer you are helping to support indirectly by supporting a place like this. I now, as an adult, get to geek out with other people. Montpelier is special to me because it's also the home of two institutions, Vermont Humanities Council and Vermont Arts Council, of which I've served on boards and I want to thank Peter Gilbert, who's been a friend and in a way a bit of a mentor. That dude has a lot of knowledge and I feel like I need to model that people like George, who's here, whose voice I miss on the radio. Someone who, when I came here and listened, found definitely a kindred spirit and we've met over the years to kind of talk about books and poems and music. So, and I also want to thank my son, Romy, who's just starting high school, who's giving up movie night to be here and he's a reader, he's in between books now. He just, I said, what are you reading now? He said, I just finished Beowulf and so we need to, we need to find him another book and so thanks to everyone who's here, Karen Middleman, who's new to the community and Amy Cunningham and my former board colleagues and current colleagues for both VHC as well as the Vermont Arts Council. I'm gonna walk you through some books. Fortunately, I've only published four, so it'll kind of be short. This first book is called Leaving Saturn and I did get a degree in accounting at the Fox Business School at Temple University but we don't have this now anymore. There's something called electives. At University of Vermont, we have students who as soon as they come in, we have them programmed to take a number of classes and maybe they have one or two. But electives allowed me to find my love again of literature. Most of my credits that weren't in the business school were in the English department, so much so that my advisor asked me to, if I wanted to get a double major. In the 90s, that was unheard of, you minor, but you didn't double and having spent six years in undergrad, I was thinking, I think I'm done. I can't stay another year to get a degree. But most of my poems, I found myself as a poet during those undergrad years. And my teacher, important teacher who's still a mentor today, is a wonderful American poet named Sonia Sanchez. So I wanna read a poem from the first collection, Leaving Saturn, about, and this, you can thank Romy for this. I asked him, what should I read? And he said, read the poem about the guy that walks around like he's driving a car. And when I was a kid, there was this guy named Steve who was meticulously dressed in floor shine shoes and he wore them down because he walked around the neighborhood like he was driving a car. And this was a source of amusement for me and my friends who would see him turn the corner and start walking downshifting and speed up. It was really funny. And the guys would ask him what kind of car he was driving and the girls would sometimes ask him for a ride. This is called some kind of crazy. It doesn't matter if you can't see Steve's corvette, turquoise colored, plush purple seats, gold trim rims that make little stars in your eyes as if the sun is kneeling, kissing the edge of sanity. Like a Baptist preacher, he can make you believe. It's there. His scuff wingtips ragged as a mop shuffling concrete could be 10 inch Firestone wheels. His vocal cords fake an eight cylinder engine that wags like a dog's tail as he shifts gears.  Only he knows his destination, his limits. Can you see him? Imagine Steve, moonstruck, cool, parallel parking between a pacer and a pinto, obviously.   That's great. Parking between a pacer and a pinto, obviously the most hip, backing up, head over right shoulder, one hand spinning as if polishing a dream. And there's Tina wanting to know what makes a boy tick, wanting a one-way trip to the stars. Weed the faithful, never call him crazy, crack-brained, just a little touched. It's all he ever wants, a car, a girl, a community of believers. Ooh. So this next book is called Coops, and most of the poems in Leaving Saturns have to do with my childhood in Philadelphia. But this next book, and I wrote that while it was at the University of Vermont, no that's not true, University of Oregon, the other progressive space in the U.S. But then I arrived here, and I instantly started into this book called Coops. And as you can imagine, Coops is metaphorical, of course, and I was fortunate enough to be invited to spend a summer at Robert Frost House in Franconia, New Hampshire. And that was great, it was the summertime, though, and what the board didn't tell me that while you're living at the Frost Place, there might be visitors, because there was a huge sign off the street that there was going to be a Frost House. Off of Route 91 that announced the next stop, Robert Frost House, and it was a bit of a wonderful experience to see people walking on that beautiful porch and walking around the land, and then they went peeking the window and see me. I've arisen to dawn at the Frost Place. I've jerry-rigged the desk by the window, overlooking a trail. I'm the new face of mountain poetry.  The worst is when I munch a bowl of frosted flakes pacing in my briefs, and the right curious family peers in, they visor their foreheads, disbelief creeps across their face. I am the old man's ghost, as were 26 beforehand, summers we come to haunt the porch, as Billy Matthews put it, to scorch off Morning Fog, which I poke with my pen and swirl, it gathers cobwebby-like round thoughts I curled and write to their end. The broccoli-toped trees I see down straight after that to Route 93. Tourists abound this time of year. I wish I could install on deck. I've not the word for what they're called, one of those standing, boardwalk binoculars requiring a quarter that opens a shutter. Then suddenly the ocean's particulars are as intimate as your face. Buttery midday light they see, my mind sputtering to complete these stanzas stacked like bricks or mornings when I am my own exhibitionist, catching me in the mirror, dancing nude or toiling my hands or stirring brown sugar in my tea. In any case, my back rudely to their probing eyes, wide as a rugala.  And then the third book was, well after two books you get tenure and you just kind of chill for a minute. But then the third book was written, not here in Vermont, but at the Radcliffe Institute in Harvard which was formerly the, what's the name of it before then? The name would come to me, but I wrote, decided, I was writing narrative poems and they were pretty long and then I decided to give myself this exercise of only writing 10 line poems and just to kind of figure out how shape and space works. This is a poem called, Prayer. Let me live in the luxury of my friends, like the neatly folded shirt of a carry-on. Look what we've done to the bees, they say, terrorists of silence. They return to the place of battle and aim their show guns. Their handwriting detonates in libraries. They torture the hairless ears of lieutenants. O, my allies, they're valiant songs. I huddle silent and insatiable, like a spider in the corner of their studies. Three more poems and this one is called, Why I Write Poetry and I've been teaching at NYU New York University for 10 years. Every Monday or Wednesday I fly down the first flight on JetBlue.  And then I get on the last flight back to Vermont. That first flight leaves around 5.30, so I'm normally at the airport by 4.30. And if I haven't gotten a good night's sleep, I will sleep on the plane and normally I have a jacket and I normally buy a window seat. Occasionally I'll have a very awoke neighbor sitting next to me and often if that's the case the neighbor will ask, so are you going down for a business? And I'll say yes and then they'll say, what do you do? And if I feel like talking, I'll say I teach. And if I don't feel like talking, I tell them I'm a poet. I can start sleeping that normally shuts down the conversation. But this one morning my neighbor asked me why? Why do you write poetry? And I had no answer for him. I was really mad and frustrated at myself. Something that I dedicated my life to you to think I would have a off the shelf reason to explain why I gave up accounting and all the money I could have made instead of teaching and writing poems. So when I arrived at my office at NYU I started this poem. I didn't finish it there but I started it. Why I write poetry? Because my son is as old as the stars because I have no blessings.  Because the houses on my street sleep like turtles. Because the proper weight of beauty last night, because the proper weight of beauty was her eyes last night beneath my eyes. Because the red goblet from which I drank made even water a Faustian toast.  Because life is ordinary unless you plan and set in motion a war. Because I have not thanked enough. Because my lips moisten whenever I hear Mingus's goodbye pork pie hat. Because I plant winter vegetables in July. Because I could say the morning died like candle wax and no one would question that truth. Because I relished being sent into the coat room in third grade where alone I would run my hands over my cat classmates coats as if plain tagged with their bodies. Because once I shoplifted a pair of Hawaiian shorts and was caught at the gallery mall. Because suit reminds me of the warmth of my grandmother and old aunts. Because the long coast of my dreams is filled with saxophones and poems. Because somewhere someone is buying a Rolex. Because I wish I could speak three different languages but have to settle for the language of business and commerce. Because I used to wear paisley shirts and herringbone sports jackets. Because I better get it in my soul. Because my grandfather loved clean syntax, cologne, Stacey Adam's shoes, Irish tweed caps in women but not necessarily in that order. Because I think that elderly or sexy and the young are naive and brutish. Because a vision of trees only comes to wise women and men who can fix old watches. Because I write with a pen whose supply of ink comes from the sea. Because gardens are fun to visit in the evenings when everyone has put away their coats and swords. Because I still do not eat corporate french fries. Because punctuation is my jury and the moon is my judge. Because my best friend in fourth grade chased city buses from corner to corner. His father could not stop looking up at the sky after his return from the war. Because para-taxes is just another way of making ends meet. Because I've been on a steady diet of words since the age of three. And I'm going to end with this poem called Mr. Pate's Barber Shot, which is back in the first book. And Mr. Pate, this is kind of a crazy story. But Mr. Pate was my neighborhood barber. And as far as I knew, he didn't have any kids. Because a lot of the kids in my neighborhood would, believe it or not, congregate with the old men who hung out in this barber shop to get out haircuts. Mothers would drop off their children because they knew they were good hands in this community's, what amounted to a community center. Anyway, Mr. Pate would occasionally pay us quarters or dollars to sweep up his floor.  And he always had a story about one of the kids in the neighborhood and what happened to them. And this was in the era of the crack era in North Philadelphia. And so normally, the stories wasn't good stories. Normally, and I watched him every visit, he seemed to get more somber and somber telling these stories about kids that I grew up with. And I wrote this poem years ago. This poem is older than my children. And recently, I heard from Mr. Pate's granddaughter, no, daughter, who wrote me, who heard this poem, to say thank you for honoring my father. And I thought, when she said that, I thought he was not alive. Turned out he's still alive. And I'm happy to read this poem in the spirit of community and how places, even if they're not libraries, are very, very important for a sense of civic communion. Mr. Pate's Barbershop. I remember the room in which he held the blade to my neck and scraped the dark hairs, foresting a jawline, stacks of ebony's and jets, clippings of black boxers, Joe Fraser, Jimmy Young, Jack Johnson. The color television bolted to a ceiling like the one I watched all night in a waiting room as St. Joseph's while my cousin recovered from gunshots. I remember the old Coke machine, a water fountain by the door, how I drank the summer of 1988 over and over from a paper cone cup and still cannot quench my thirst. For this was the year funeral homes boomed. The year Mr. Pate swept his own shop for he had lost his best little helper to cross fire. He suffered like most barbers suffered quietly. His clippers humming so loud he forgot Ali's lightning left jab, his love for angles, for carpentry, for baseball. He forgot everything and would never be the same. I remember the way the blade gleamed fierce in the fading light of dusk and a reflection of myself panned inside the razor's edge wondering if I could lay down my pen, close up my ledgers and my journals if I could undo my tie and take up barbering, where months on end a child's head would darken at my feet and bring with it the uncertainty of tomorrow. Or like Mr. Pate, gathering clumps of fallen hair at the end of a day in short, delicate whisk as though they were the fine findings of goat dust. He'd deposit in a jar and place on a shelf only to return saddies, collecting as an antique dealer collects, growing tired but never forgetting someone has to cherish these tiny little heads. Thank you. I'm sorry you stopped. I think I could speak for everyone in the room that would love to hear a couple more if you would grace us. It's early yet. We have plenty of time. Do you think you could find one or two more to share with us? I was giving you guys getting you off the hook. Thank you. I appreciate that. Well, it's winter. And as you can imagine, this is a state full of writers. But winter is probably our most productive time because it's dark and we're by the fire. Here's a poem. This is called, Rembrandt took the best selfies. It's my turn to wrestle light out of this blur of death. It's my turn to dignify a gilded frame with an imperial profile. What has left of me like a cloud? What has left of me drifts like a cloud curling above a village spire? It's my turn to isolate evil like the barbed wire of a fence post. Behind my grim stare is jubilance, which never grows old. Below this feathered hat is the first morning of man. All canvases are temples to my bright exhalations. I welcome your vigils. Think not of looted countries. Think not of the tyrant's clammy grasp of your hand as he guides you to his first pimple, nor his unethical single pill of a hard-boiled egg, which is a faint performance of ego.  That's my political poem for the night. I'll end with this. This is from a series called Urban Renewal and it'll appear in the next book. It's called The Valkyrie. And it is a winter poem. The land nearly erased. The mountains flee. Another arctic blast of snow falls on the peaks, concealing that panorama which first bewitched my breath. Where now and across the valley, wind gusts kick up land clouds, akin to silvery explosions tripwired by some aimless deer whose timid motions break into a sudden sprint across a logging road, then up a gnarled hillside of saplings and dense trees. Slow wars within begin this way, a vaporous fog from which I've sought a path out of the monologue in my head. I've no true friends, my verse mediocre at best, a white captivity of rehearsed caustic thoughts that mist in layers and blinds reason. Then reversing my iceberg mind, always her, with that voice, bright as a cardinal in campfire hands leading me past glacial snow piles. Everywhere icicles collect like daggers. Sub-zero air cuts through, harsh as Wagner's The Valkyrie. I've survived blizzard nights, both of us refunding Earth's stolen daylight. OK, thank you. OK, it's time for the drawing of the 50-50 raffle. And Romy Jackson has the honor of giving us the winning ticket. I'm going to put on my glasses to make sure I get this right. OK, it is a, as you can see, it is a yellow ticket. Sorry, you blue folks, you have the blues now. The winning number is 6-5-7-7-9-7. Once again, the winning number, 6-5-7-7-9-7. Jackson says, what is the winner of our 50-50 raffle? And I have $192 to present to you. Thank you all for supporting the library. So I'm going to wrap things up here. It sounds like I don't really need to do that. I want to thank you once again. Thank you, Major. The auction remains open until 9.15. Enjoy.


Harris Joe the Hornets came out throwing haymakers early in this game What did it take to take control and get this victory? Yes, it's definitely a slow start for us You know, I think we turned it on defensively there in the second half particularly third late in the third early in the fourth And you know defensive stops rebel get us easy baskets offensively you guys had your 20th game where you dished out at least 30 35 tonight. What is that? Unselfishness that we're seeing on the floor a byproduct of I mean, that's just how you have to play You know, we have a talented group across the board and when we share the ball we're really tough to beat and you know, it's the the good to great mentality and you know when we have that or we're really tough to stop offensively You had your seventh game this season with at least six made three pointers you in your bag once again tonight When you're aggressive out there, what does that do for you? What does it do for your teammates? You know, I think the aggressiveness is a sort of a byproduct of everybody else, you know When guys are getting to the lane creating shots Setting good screens. It allows me to get room and rhythm looks and you know If I see a couple go early have a tendency to be a little more aggressive in the later part of the game red hot tonight Joe, thanks so much for your time really


Hello and welcome to yet another episode of Nicola looks at some code and decides that it's mostly useless So he deletes it without losing any functionality in theory in practice It's all to be seen, but I think I did not remove anything. So today we are talking about Spacers and this discussion actually arise from, you know, an actual need an actual bug report that somebody reported That is you might not know this, but if you add Spacers to the panel at least two of them then everything that's in between those spacers like as an example Let's go with just the task manager will be centered It will be at the center the exact center of you know the screen, which is nice Now you might think that if you have even more spacers then what will happen is that You will have wow that looks bad. This is slightly better Okay, so you might think that what will happen if you have three spacers is that the first thing will be, you know 33% of the panel in the second thing will be 66% of the panel in and so on I mean more centering stuff like if you have two spacers The thing in the middle will be in the middle if you have three then you have beginning 33% 66% and then the end and if you add even more space or you know, even more stuff happens However, that simply doesn't happen. Sadly sadly however, I've decided to make a patch to fix it and whilst looking at the code of how this patch of if you have two spacers Then the content in the center will be sent centered. I realized that the code was like much Much much longer than necessary. So I did this. This is my merger quest It's it's a merge request But it has been approved and I think it will land very shortly and you can see that it deletes 207 lines of code and we are talking about a code base that is like 250 lines of code something like that. So how it worked We have three main files the main dot comel file and the panel spacers Yes, we get slightly technical but as always, I think I can explain without boring you too much So the main come out is, you know, how the things look and the panel spacer is the how things behave In the background and this is C++. So whereas this is JavaScript a bit easier to understand So what I did to the C++ files is I basically removed everything that was in them everything So what were they doing and it's actually pretty easy to understand So we actually created these spacers trackers class and every time a new spacer is Created then this spacer is added to a list of known spacers and If this is the crazy part if there is already a spacer then the new spacer is like gets collected Connected sorry to the other space and they become twin spacers and there's a lot of logic about these twin spacers And of course if you remove them they are no longer twin spacers and all of this kind of stuff So the whole thing is about being able to set twin spacers Automatically what it means to have a twin spacer if you have two spacers in the panel One will be the twin of the other and the other will be the twin of the one This is completely unnecessary from my point of view and my implementation doesn't have this at all But let's actually see how this was used in actually drawing the things on the screen. So this is all the Logic and of course we read what is our twin spacers Of course, we check whether there is a twin spacer and we only do like magic things If we have a twin spacer if we do a twin spacer then we have two different properties Which is the left twin and the right twin and of course the left twin left twin is going to be the one on the left And the right between you guessed it is one is going to be the one on the right So what do we do we go into the panel panel layout? And we start iterating Reading all of the outlets that are in the panel and then we count first of all all of the things that are left Left compared to the left twin parent Then we see things that are in the center and then we see things that are to the right of the twin parent and we actually measure the width all of all these three components and When we know about these three widths, which are of course right heat and sink the length of the items to the right of the right twin the middle heat and Hind hint, which is the length of the Uplets in the middle between the two twins and then we have somewhere the left items hint Which is you know the length of the items to the left of the left twin This is crazy when we have these three values Then we can do some math and actually, you know We do a lot of math and then return what we think is the optimum optimal size all of this in my opinion is Completely completely unnecessary. So what do I do which is much shorter? Well, I still go through all of the Uplets in the panel, which is you know kind of necessary and then we actually count how many spacers and are in the panel and We count all the sizes between all those space spacers So we don't know we don't have the distinction left center and right. We just have a list of Dimensions and every time we meet a spacer We had a new item to it and every time we meet something that's not a spacer We had its length to the last element in the list. So at the end we have this list with all of the sizes and We are going to have one spacer between each size. So this menu code is Shorter much much shorter and also agnostic to the amount of spacers that you have in the panel And here's the important thing There's actually no need whatsoever to have a C++ files that tracks every time you add or remove spacers Because since we are going through all of the outlets in the panel anyway We can just read the spacers from there because we meet them and the important thing is that Whenever we meet a spacer which is here if the plugin name is spacer So we know it's a spacer then if this child that we just met this spacer is Us like plasmoid parent means us like these spacers that is drink the logic Then we know which one of all of the spacers in the panel. We are we found ourselves into all of the spacers and At this point we just take the size that of the elements to the right the size of the elements to the left And we do the logic based on that now the logic is actually Nice because I managed to keep it super concise. It's literally just this line slightly more technical I don't think you want to learn and to hear an explanation But this means that after this batch is applied You can have as many spacers as you want in the panel and the things would be kind of centered Like if you have I don't know like four spacers as an example instead of two The thing that are in the middle of those four will still be at the center Which is something that is not to be taken for granted right now so that that works now and also like Almost all of the code is gone, which is always a good thing. So just to end this video I want to say thanks to the patrons and October is almost over and I kind of want to eat some pizzas But pizzas are actually pretty expensive here. So if you feel like a gifting some pizzas that would be appreciated Let's put it like that. Thanks everybody for following along and see you tomorrow with another video


Income Tax 2021-2022 Software Example, Rental Property, Special Situations. Get ready to get refunds to the max, diving into Income Tax 2021-2022. Well, sir, tax software, you don't need tax software to follow along, but you might want to have access to the forms and schedules, which you could find on the IRS website, irs.gov, irs.gov. Starting point, we got the single file or Adam Smith living in Beverly Hills 90210. We've got the W-2 income at the 100,000, the standard deduction 12,050 to get to the taxable income 87,450, page two calculating the tax then at the 15,015. Back to page one, we're going to first think about having the real estate as a principal residence, look at the benefits and the deductibility components, then converting it to rental property, possibly partially rental property or renting part of our home or possibly then moving and renting the home maybe for a fraction of that first year. So first off, if we have a principal residence, note that this is the more unusual situation where you might be able to deduct some things for the federal income taxes that is more unusual because usually when you think about income taxes, the things that you would expect to be deductible are those things you needed to extend in order to generate revenue. Personal items you would think not being deductible. The principal home being that major exception where you might be able to deduct then the interest and the property taxes are the two things that first basically come to mind with it but you'd only get a benefit from it if it was greater than the standard deduction. So if you're moving from a renting situation to a home bond, you really got to take that into consideration because the tax benefit would only be the benefit over and above what you're already getting with the standard deduction. So let's say that we had the rental or that we had our home that we were deducting on the good old Schedule A, the Schedule A. So I'm going to say it was $17,000 for the interest, $6,000 for the property taxes going on over to the Schedule A. You can see here on line 12, we've bumped up from the standard deduction to the itemized deductions which you can see on the Schedule A now. So now we've got the Schedule A calculating the mortgage interest and then we've got the property taxes and then we've also got like the state taxes which are kicking us over the threshold at the $23,879 that's pulling over to page one of the Form 1040. So usually the principal residence is given as a benefit in that instance. Now notice what we're not taking here. If we purchased the home, we're not taking like the value of the home. I'm not depreciating the home. So I'm not really tracking like the adjusted basis of the home although I still would want to do that because when I sell the home that will be coming into play. But it's not like it's something that I'm depreciating over time. So that's something that we don't get as a deduction if it was our personal or principal residence. Now let's say we rent it out like part of our place, part of our principal residence. Let's say we've rented out like 10% of it. Well that would mean then now part of it has become basically rental property and we would then have basically the Schedule E. Now I have a different address but we're going to say imagine this is our same address that we're using here and let's say we've rented out like 10% of our place. Now the income up top whatever we charge for the income will be what it is. I don't need to allocate the income between personal and non-personal because any income I got was on the rental portion. So I don't need to do any kind of allocation method there. But, and so advertising for example would clearly be something directly on the rental property in order to rent the property and so on. So I don't need to do an allocation method for something like that that was spent directly for the rental property. But when we're talking about the things such as the interest here, now I'd have to be allocating the interest between the two. And what did I say the interest was like 17,000. So if I pull out my trustee let's say the I think I said let's do it on the Excel. Interest total we said was let's say the total interest was the 17,000 and then we said let's say we used a square foot method for example to figure the property for the rental. So the rental property let's say was you know 1,000 versus total square feet was 10,000. So then we got a ratio that we would have here and that ratio is what we're going to basically be using to allocate those items that we need to allocate using the ratio. So the interest then we would say would be broken out between rental and personal. So the rental would be this times the 10% and then the personal would be this minus that or you can calculate it as this times the 90%. So we're breaking it out 10, you know 1090. So that would be the interest would be 1,700 let's say. So it's I'd have to say okay this is now 1,700 on the interest and then I can go back to the schedule a and I'd have to say okay I reported on the schedule a 17 let's subtract out 1,700 so that when I actually look at my forms between the two of them I'm still going to get a benefit on the schedule a but now it's the 15 three the 15 three plus what I took on the schedule e now which I can't see yet because I hit it. I hid the schedule e what did I put it. I put this little one there hit it. So I'm going to go back on over now on the schedule e I've got the 1,007 so I still might get a benefit from that one for the personal side and the rental side but you can imagine situations where it might be better on the rental versus the personal depending you know on if you're limited on the standard deductions or if you have a loss for example on the rental property for the for the taxes you would you would do a similar thing you would think for the state tax state taxes let's say we said the total was 6,000 I think so then you would think then the amount that was rental would be 10% of that and the amount that would be personal would be this minus this or 90% so I'd go back on over here and Sarah taxes then I got taxes that I got to deal with so real estate for the rental we said was was 600 600 and you might even you know put like you might say this is the amount for the 1098 for the 1098 per 1098 and put the full amount here which was the 6000 minus the personal personal part or 90% or you might like say 90% rental for example and that would give you the minus the 6 minus the 5,400 and that will give you the rental component of the 600 so you can kind of see it in the detail when you kind of review your tax return and then you go to the schedule a and you might do something similar you might say okay the taxes I had here was the 6 but then I'm going to take out the rental rental component which was 10% which you might mark in there of 600 600 that leaves us with the 5,400 where we have here so then if I pulled that on over to the forms you've got the 600 here and you might still get the benefit from the schedule a and the net of the two of them is something that that might tie out will should tie out to your total wherever you're getting the property tax calculation from your property tax bills for example now then the other thing you got to think about is the actual building and the land which you didn't have to basically depreciate before and that's when you got to think about okay I've got to use the lesser of basically my adjusted basis that I purchased it for or the fair market value and then figure out the portion of that that is allocated to the rental so let's say let's say I figured out that the total amount was the building 264 706 and then the land was the 35 294 for example if that was for the whole property then I got to say well now I'm going to allocate 10% of that would be the general idea to the to the rental so I'm going to say basically 10% is rental and so if I go back on over then you're going to have your depreciation schedules say on the building we talked about the depreciation methods that would be used for real estate and prior presentation so just quick example here we're going to say we acquired it we put it in as a rental on the 1121 the cost is the 264 706 but we're going to say that the portion that we're going to be depreciating at this point is going to be the 10 and so that's going to give us our depreciation basis at the 264 71 it's going to be straight line mid month convention we took the 27.5 so then we got our calculation of the depreciation now other types of stuff if we put it if we put it in place and it was used specifically for the rental like we use furniture for the rental property then then we might have the full amount depreciated for for those items that we applied directly to the rental for example and that would then pull in to the schedule e here so that would be the add so you know added items that we might say so we might have a couple items on the schedule e that that we would have to allocate between the schedule a and the schedule e and some items might be allocated directly to the schedule e and if we had any kind of depreciation of course would also have to be allocated to the schedule e we won't we don't get anything on the schedule a for it and then if we had repairs or things like that to the home in general we might use our same 10% kind of allocation method if we had repairs or something like that specifically to the rental 10% then you would think you'd get the full amount of the 10% for the rental activity in that instance now let's try to mirror this little example they put us together here on on January our taxpayer bought a condominium apartment to live in instead of selling the house we had living in she decided to change it to rental property so now she's moving and she's going to take her old home and not sell it but rented she selected a tenant and started renting the house on February 1st she charged 750 a month so she started in the middle of the year so now you've got the situation where she started she's got 11 month went rental one month of a an itemized deduction she also received 750 security deposit for the tenant so a security deposit that she has to pay back unless something happens therefore we're not going to include that in income so her rental expenses for the year are as follows so she has the mortgage interest the fire insurance the miscellaneous repairs and the real estate taxes so then she must divide the real estate taxes mortgage interest and fire insurance between the personal use of the property and deduct she can deduct 1112 of these expenses so she had to basically break out these expenses and only deduct 1112 of the amount that's going to be allocated between them real estate taxes and the mortgage interest fire insurance she can deduct the balance of the real estate taxes and mortgage interest when figuring the amount she can deduct on schedule A if she itemizes she can't deduct the balance of the fire insurance because it is a personal expense so she bought this house in 1987 for 37,000 her property taxes was based on the assessment of 10,000 for the land and 25,000 for the house before changing it to rental property she added several improvements to the house she figures her adjusted basis as follows so on February 1st when she changed her house to rental property the property had a fair market value of 152,000 of this amount 35,000 was for land and 117 was for the house because she adjusted basis is less than the fair market value on the date of the change she uses the 39,000 so in other words she can't step up the basis in her property when she converted to rental she has to use the lower value because you know it would be a tax benefit to kind of step it up so as specified for rental property she must use the straight line method so we're going to use the 25.5 27.5 years depreciation method she uses the table to figure out the depreciation so basically her income statement comes out to this so we're going to kind of mirror this her total rental income was 750 times 11 we don't have to do any allocation there because it's basically straight forward she's got her expenses which are the mortgage interest which we might get a 10.98 for but we would have to take 11.12 applying it to schedule A and then schedule E the fire insurance we have to take 11.12 and apply it to schedule E but we can't apply it to schedule A because it's personal and then we got the miscellaneous repairs that we apply specifically to schedule E the real estate taxes which we're going to allocate between schedule E 7 months to schedule E and then the total expenses so let's try to figure that part out so if I was to input this into the schedule E we'd say okay they got income of 8.250 that we had I'm going to remove the advertising we have the mortgage interest which she allocated 750 so if I look at my worksheet on the interest she had 750 and now we're not looking at square footage we're looking at rent months versus total months which is 11 over 12 so 11.12 so now my rental component is going to be 11.12 which comes out to that the rental part of so hold on a second the interest the mortgage interest is 18.00 so that's going to be broken out the 1650 versus personal and the state taxes she said was 1200 which we're going to be breaking out thusly 11 months for the rental and the personal for the one month so that's where we're getting then if I go here for the interest we're getting the 1650 for the 11 months and then we go to the schedule A where the schedule A we're probably not going to be itemizing at this point because it's going to be too low but on the personal side for the interest we're going to have the 150 so I'll just do the 150 and the two of those adding up to the total that might be on the 1098 and then we've got the fire insurance would be on this on the schedule E for the portion that we can take so I'm going to deduct this and I've got insurance I'll just put it here that's going to be the insurance of 92 and then we've got the miscellaneous repairs so I'm going to put that under which was 297 which I don't have to allocate in any special way the real estate taxes then the real estate taxes I'm going to say are we're allocating here we said was the 1100 and the amount on the schedule A for the real estate taxes if I was to get a benefit from them we said for the one month or just the 100 now the 100 so there we have that for the real estate taxes so if I go back on over so we got the insurance the mortgage interest the repairs and the taxes and that brings this up to the 313 39 and then we've got the depreciation so the house we said was 39000 so we'll just deal with that because that's the depreciable portion so I'm going to say right now the home if I go to depreciation was cost 39000 but I'm going to say we put it in place on February 1st and it's going to use that mid month convention calculation so we'll use the makers 27.5 years and that'll calculate it out for the depreciation at the 1241 which we could see on our depreciation schedule here so it's the 39 on February straight line mid month convention 27.5 years we're using the rate from the tables of the .0182 which you could see they basically show here in the example and then we're going to say okay well they bought a dishwasher so if we put the dishwasher on here so I'm going to say we got a dishwasher dishwasher dishwasher dishwasher I don't think I spilled it so then she bought a dishwasher at 125 now we're not going to deal with special depreciation here we're just going to use the double declining method and this is half year and so there's the .2 so it was five year property and there's the 85 and then the furnace which were at the 4000 which we're using the 27.5 and basically I may not have used the same dates here but we're basically using a mid year convention for this item and this one up top we would be using a mid month convention but those then pulling in to the schedule E so that's going to give us our items here and we get down then to the net of the 3694 which basically ties out you know to our example problems the 3694 that we saw that we were working through in the prior presentation so that amount the 3694 pulling in to the schedule pulling in to the form 1040 note that we're not itemizing at this point because we only had one month of those expenditures for the mortgage interest and the real estate taxes which if that's all we had if it was that alone wouldn't be enough to push us over although we might have you know 11 months of mortgage interest and taxes for example of our new home as we rented out the prior home in which case those could be items that could basically benefit us in that calculation so those are the two kind of examples where you'd have to kind of do a ratio type of thing for example if you're renting out a portion of your principal residence then you've got that kind of complication between the personal and the rental and if you rent out then your personal residence and you move somewhere else for a fraction of the year that first year fraction is complex and you've got that interplay between the schedule A deductible items versus the rental basically deductible items that you've got to do some allocation and you've got to take into consideration what's going to be the basis of the property at the point in time that you convert it from the personal to the rental use so that you can start to think about the depreciation method where you've got to look at the lesser of the fair market value versus the adjusted cost of the property for example