I hope you all had a nice breakfast and things. Excellent. So I'm John Garbert, I'm a principal engineer at StackHPC and I'm here with Matt Pryyer, who also works with me at StackHPC and today we're going to talk to you about self servicing and low key applications for non-technical users. You'll have heard hopefully in the keynote you've heard a little bit about that. We're going to go into a bit more detail on the azimuth side of things. So just a quick introduction to StackHPC and who we are. We've formed in 2016 and based in Bristol, although ironically neither of us are in Bristol with the other peoples in the UK. So I'm over in Cambridge and we've got colleagues in France and Poland. And really we've been looking at how to bring scientific computing and cloud and HPC and bring all these things together and make things work. And the way that we work at StackHPC is always open. We're a big supporter of the four opens and doing most of our work as Apache licensed and a lot of it within the open stack community and related communities. So what do we really do? This isn't just an excuse to have a picture of Lego, that's cool. So we work with our customers really to look at the kind of infrastructure they need, help them pick the right components and how do we put all these things together to sort of get the most from your investment, investment in the hardware, the infrastructure, the people, how do we get the best out of all of that? So you've seen these three pictures before probably, slightly different take on them. I think it's an interesting way of looking what we do with Loki at StackHPC. So you know the Linux open stack and Kubernetes infrastructure. So the first part of that is a reconfigurable kind of conference room. So if you plan ahead, you can build a system where it can be one big supercomputer or it can be lots of little pieces doing completely different things for different people. But you can't do that if you don't plan ahead. Like if you don't actually, when you build the thing, you don't build it that way. So there's a lot of work to try and make that dynamic infrastructure and make the most of the reconfigurable infrastructure that we get from Loki. In addition, this is also done with isolation. I particularly like this picture because those of you who've been to PTGs or you know, all their conferences and this kind of thing, you sort of, I think it's a good analogy for the noisy neighbour problem, like when people are having an argument or design discussion in the other room. So you ought to be careful about how you get that isolation working. So I said HBC in high performance to get the most out of the infrastructure and your, the most value out of what you're doing. Often we need to really try and optimise performance. I've taken a picture of the red arrows here just to show sort of, you know, that it's like a display team to have all the things working together to get the really good performance, get rid of that. Bugger off at App Store. Excellent. It's the great thing if your laptop's still in UK time. It really, the updates in the middle of the day here. Anyway, so yeah, high performance is the most value. Now, all of this isn't very useful if people can't actually use the thing. How do we sort of cookie cutter out these optimised stacks? How do we make it easy for people to just walk up and, you know, use what's required? And that's where Asmouth comes in to help give you a catalogue of these things that you can pick and deploy. And you do that in a way that uses all the optimisations for that local infrastructure. So you can get all of that good practice and make that available to people. So we've been doing this for a while at StackHPC creating reference platforms with people, creating slurm clusters and creating all these things. But in the last year or so, in the last couple of years, getting to the point where there's a level of maturity that you can actually self-service these things, press the button and expect it to actually work every time. So we haven't gone on this journey alone. I said we work open first at StackHPC. That's definitely true. And part of that really helps work in co-development with our customers. So Asmouth started at Jasmine and also in very much ways started with Matt. So I'm going to hand over to Matt who's going to take you through some of the sort of history of Asmouth and then go into the details. Cool. Thank you, John. So, yeah, I was the original developer of the Jasmine Cloud Portal, which was the pre-runner, the forebear to Asmouth now. So I moved from Jasmine to StackHPC a couple of years ago and we've carried on developing with all these people and others as well. But really we wanted to talk about why we're doing this.  People, users used to put apps on their laptops. And you know, the more things you put on your laptop, the more likely you are to get in your dependency hell problem and it becomes a massive support burden on your IT department. And then, you know, you get in especially with research workloads which is what we primarily work with. Some of these require specialist hardware like GPUs or network accelerators. And then, you know, what happens if your application needs a Kubernetes cluster or if you want a slurm cluster or all of these things are really complicated beasts to deploy. And if you leave it up to users to deploy these things, they'll probably get something wrong and you'll get a support request. So we kind of, like John alluded to, we've got OpenStack potentially gives us a better way. So it gives us this shared configurable hardware pool and it gives us APIs that we can use to manipulate that. And then we can build our application stacks on top of that and spanning across all of this is the cloud native automation tooling. So DevOps tool, the DevOps toolkit in this slide. But there's a load of options here. So it's sort of how do you tame this complexity? So this bit's OpenStack, roughly speaking. There's obviously more components than that. But this is the space that Asimuth is trying to fill. So we're trying to do Kubernetes and slurm. And then, but with a focus on the applications on top of that. So like I said, with Asimuth, we're trying to tame this complexity and make sure all the abstractions are in place so that people can do the things that they are good at. So that means users self-service the applications that they need. But they don't need to know how to install those applications necessarily.  And the platform engineers who understand good DevOps practices get to maintain a catalog of optimized applications that include, like John said, again, optimizations for their site. And then, again, this lets us share the good DevOps practices. And all this is enabled by the low-key APIs and the cloud-native automation tools that we've all sort of grown to love. And the benefits of this is that your users become more productive and your support burden on your IT department is reduced. And so we end up extracting the most value from the hardware and from the people. So what does this look like in Asimuth? So this is the Asimuth user interface. This is the deployment at Jasmine. So this is where you come in. So you sign in with your open stack credentials and you come and we support the federated flow as well. And this is the page that you come to and you pick a platform from a catalog. You configure that platform. So I picked a Linux workstation. So I just pick the size. I pick the amount of storage that I want to attach to it. And then it goes away. It provisions it. Eventually it becomes ready. Each platform gets a sort of a details dialogue. And this text is all populated by the appliance itself. And then these services become available for the user to click on and then they take you through to your web console. You'll notice up here we have, I don't know if the laser pointer works. Up here we have a sort of random domain. And this is how we're exposing applications to users. So we have an application proxy that's tunneling. So we don't consume any floating IPs to do any of this stuff. So the applications will punch out and then they get assigned one of these domains and the traffic goes back down to the application that way. And that's what this Zenith application proxy does. Here's the happy user. We take advantage of Ingress in Kubernetes to do this. So Ingress gives us a really simple way to get a reconfigurable HTTP proxy, basically, dynamically reconfigurable. And then this Zenith server is basically a heavily customized SSHD server. The Zenith client is a heavily customized SSHD client and then there's a proxy application underneath. And this is just a bit of glue code around some industry standard software. So open SSH, Kubernetes, nginx console. And the nice thing about doing this is it lets us do, lets us run our applications in private networks behind a firewall and or and or and that. The clients, there's a way of pre-establishing trust for the clients. So you have to be pre-authenticated before you can start a client connection. But at this, at the top here in the Ingress controller, we can enforce SSO and TLS. So that's what we do. There's two kinds of applications you can make available through this catalog. At StackHPC, we provide some reference applications, which you saw in that catalog slide. But anything that's expressible in one of these two ways I'm about to show you can be made available as an appliance in Asimuth. So the first stack we have, and this is how we do the Linux Workstation and Slurm, is a Packer Terraform and Ansible stack. So this can do single machine or clustered applications. We punch out the infrastructure with Terraform, and then we adopt those machines into an Ansible inventory and we configure them with Ansible. If you want to speed up the provisioning, which we do with our Asimuth appliances, you can pre-build images using Packer with all the dependencies on. So we do that for Slurm, for instance. And then any web applications that you want to run, like monitoring, like access to Grafana, or open on demand for Slurm, or the Guacamole web interface that we just saw, those are exposed using the Senate application proxy. And the form that you present to the user is customised using some metadata that lives with your appliance code. We've got a little sample appliance here. Each appliance lives in its own git repository with its own version control. And you can do... And you just tell Asimuth where that git repository is, which version you want to use, and it will pick it up. The second kind of... The second version of apps that we support is apps that deploy on top of Kubernetes. So firstly, we support deploying Kubernetes. And to do that, we use cluster API. I don't know if anyone was in the Magnum talk yesterday, but we spoke about cluster API at length then. It's basically using Kubernetes to deploy more Kubernetes clusters. And it works really nicely. And then on top of that, we deploy applications using Helmcharts. So any application you can express in a Helmchart, you can deploy using Asimuth. And again, we have a way to expose web applications from inside the Kubernetes cluster. They only need to have a cluster IP, and we can expose them out using Zenith. And we generate... In this case, we generate the forms from the Helm values schema that goes with the Helmchart. And the final bit of sort of magic source that we have is that we can actually grant access to these platforms to people who are not OpenStack users. So the pattern we're seeing in our research... In the UK research domain is... There's a big push on these things called research software engineers who are supposed to be sort of more technical people but work with the scientists. And so the kind of... One of the patterns we're seeing is that the research software engineers might have access to Asimuth and then deploy platforms for their group. And then they might grant access to members from their group to the individual platforms as they need it. And another thing we're seeing is things like people who want to run a workshop on Jupyter Notebooks, for example. The person who's running the workshop might deploy the Jupyter Notebook and then grant access to workshop participants without them having to have an OpenStack account. And the way that works is we've integrated with KeyClok. So there's an identity provider page in the Asimuth UI that you click and it takes you through to your KeyClok realm. Each project gets a KeyClok realm and the people who can access Asimuth are realm admins within that KeyClok realm so they can do things like create new users or add new federations. So there's a new user, JayBlogs. There's a link within the Asimuth interface. There's a button to copy the URL and then you can send that to your users. It's not moving on. When they go to that URL, they get redirected to the KeyClok sign-in page. To start with, they get forbidden because they need to be added to the correct group. So this is the group. You add the user to the group and then they can get into there. They can get into the web interface of whatever the platform is that you've given them access to. So we just wanted to run through a few of the ways that our customers are using this. So Jasmine is the first customer, in a way. They operate a community open stack cloud which is primarily used for earth sciences and they're using our standard appliances at the moment. So one of their heaviest use cases is DASCUB. So they're a Python shop and DASC is a framework that allows you to distribute Python applications really, Python calculations really easily. So one of their typical use cases, like I said, is running training courses using Jupyter Notebooks. This is only these guys. And Jasmine funded the development of this application, this external application user capability just so they could do this kind of stuff, basically. And the second customer I wanted to talk about is CFMS. So this is the center for... Basically, they do modelling and simulation, like CFD types things and center for modelling and simulation, I think it is. And they have an open stack private cloud that they use to provide compute services to their clients where they can self-service modelling and simulation applications. These are often Windows-based. And so CFMS actually worked with us to develop a Windows workstation appliance. I think they now, they've carried on using Asimuth since we were working with them and they've actually also developed like an active directory domain appliance that deploys an active directory and a bunch of workstations all connected together. Yeah, it works really nicely for them. So this was a Terraform and Ansible appliance which uses Windows images with RDP enabled and then to do guacamole because it doesn't run on Windows. We have a tiny little Linux sidecar that gets deployed as part of the same application. To the user, it all looks like one application. And then guacamole is exposed using Zenif. So I'm going to hand back over to John to talk about our work with Graphcore. Thanks, Matt. So I'm not going to go through in too much detail what we're doing with Graphcore because actually the next session in the room just over there is all about what Graphcore had been doing, going into the details of how they're using open stack and how they're using Asimuth. You saw some of this in the keynote. But I think let's also talk about... The core use case is really development environments. So how do you quickly spin up a development environment and so people can get going and get working with, in their case, specialist hardware? So this actually is a use case that came up an awful lot in terms of e-infrastructure in the UK for the science research. And one of the phrases that kept coming up is how can I get a bigger laptop? Like my laptop keeps running out of memory and getting hot and I need a real GPU. Like how can I just get one for a little bit to test my code on the bigger system? And there's a big barrier to entry if people just go up to Horizon and go, you're asking me all sorts of questions I have no idea about right now. So this is where Asimuth came in. So one of the things that we did to adapt Asimuth for this kind of development use case is that guacamole access. So one of the things to highlight about that is that if you start asking some users to give me an SSH key, very often, right, they'll give you the private, well they'll send the private key to you in an email and keep the public one and all that kind of thing. And this, like if you're not sure what on earth is going on, it's a perfectly reasonable mistake. So it's kind of, like how do we get that secure? And that's where Asimuth comes in, like there's no SSH keys. We're not bounded by the amount of public IP addresses that are available for this thing because you know you go to the floating IP and someone else has nicked it, like no left. So that's why we've got, that's why Zenith came about is to have that ability to just have lots of little development platforms and getting that infrastructure ready and getting to it and not just getting stuck at the first hurdle if you're asking me very, very difficult questions and I have no idea what you're talking about. That's where that came from and that was a long process of sort of giving users access to a thing and saying, does this help? They're like, yeah, it's great, but I need a volume. I need some more storage than you're giving me in this flavour. So if you saw that dialogue box asking for the volume, that's where that came from. There's another version of that where you actually do get a floating IP in SSH because for some reason people want to r-sync their data everywhere so they needed a public IP, but not forever all the time. So that's the kind of journey we've been going on. So I alluded to this problem with fixed capacity clouds. So when you log into azimuth, we've made a rash assumption that there's resources available for you to go and create something. That's not always true. Actually maybe just a quick survey. Are there people running sort of private clouds that you could call a fixed capacity cloud in the room? Okay, a good few people. So you've probably always, you've had someone squatting on your GPUs, right? They got hold of the GPU and they're like, success! It's mine! Quoters are really good at making sure you can only get one of them. I'm saying that flippantly, of course, because current quotas don't do that very well, but unified limits in yoga do, it's like an advert. But yeah, that's a quota is a very public cloud concept. When I was at Rackspace Public Cloud, the quota was roughly equating to, well, if the credit card bounces, like how bad is it? And generally the way that you got your quota up is you prepaid some credit because you're like, well, got that much. So, and that's not the case with fixed capacity clouds, right? So what's the alternative? The alternative is another pretty picture. So we try to think of an analogy of what this would be like in a nice world. So what's this sort of coal reef cloud where everyone's living together nicely? I suppose being from the UK in a bit British, you know how do you ask permission to sort of have it tomorrow and that kind of thing. So we've been working with a blazar project. So blazar allows you to go up and ask tomorrow, could I have two GPUs please? And it very politely says, no, they're all gone tomorrow too. And then you can ask us some more. So one of the active things we're developing on right now is that when you go to your platform, you request I want a big Jupyter Hub or I want a bigger laptop with 10 terabytes of memory please because I'm doing astronomy and it's a really big image or whatever it is, you pick the platform, you pick the size, then you get another dialog box where you pick where and when, like when is that possible so you can actually schedule your appliances. The first small step of this that we have done is you probably noted in the keynote that we put a minimum lifetime of the appliances. So that's like the first sort of step towards limiting VM sprawl. It's like, well, you've got it, but you've only got it for 24 hours. So, you know, that's good. Naturally people moan that they have to now every 48 hours or 24 hours come back and get another one. But then you get that sort of natural balancing. But if we can do, we can do something better where we have like a concept of credits. So like CPU hours, give people credits and they can when they book a reservation, they can't book a reservation more than their credits. We can take this a step further. One of the downsides of doing reservations is that there's space in your system where it's not being used, right, in between the reservations, the gaps. So that's where Blazar is looking at preemptible instances.  Another piece is looking at changing Blazar so that when you request a reservation, when you request a reservation, you use a existing flavor to say, I want a green one, a blue one, please, rather than I want four CPUs and this amount of RAM and then cause massive fragmentation. So there's a bit of a pivot there. Okay, conscious of the time. So just going through a few of the other plans, I guess one of the calls to action here is if this is a kind of use case that's interesting to you, do get in touch. All of this is open source and by open source, I really do mean like trying to follow the four open stack opens. It'd be great to get more people involved in this. So one of the big pieces of work we're doing at the moment is we have people running this in production now. There's a lot of operational enhancements and getting on that nice loop of, well, we need that extra notification so we can spot when that thing goes wrong and have the run books and things that people use to operate this system at reasonable scale. As I said, we've done the preview of the maximum application lifetime and there's lots of other bits of work in progress. So things like making sure that the environments in those bigger laptops and more batteries included to use the Python kind of terminology. So looking, we've added ESSI in there that can help get L-mod modules, although actually that's journey in the slum right now, but trying to, you know, have an aptaner and podman and these kind of things available. We've done optimisations to make sure that you can have GPU workloads and Kubeflow and OFED using a lot of the operators in Kubernetes. We've just been through a lot of the reservation pieces and generally one of the other things is that there's this onboarding life cycle of people wanting to create science platforms or applications and run them on your system. So what we're looking at here is that people can come into Asimuth, create some platforms and go, well, that's almost what I need and making the flow from getting the almost what I need to being able to use all of those optimisations that you've got on your site, tweaking that and potentially even running that outside of Asimuth, doing things like ArgoCD so that you've got, so we can basically have a set of recipes that says if you've got OpenStack and you want to kind of run these systems on there, this is a nice way in which you can start, start from the ground running, get a leg up there on how to do that. So it's a good way of sharing good practice. They might not be the way that you end up doing it, but there's an awful lot of reinventing the same thing that this is trying to help eliminate. The reverse of that is if you discover a really cool way of doing it, you can contribute that back too. That's awesome. So I'm conscious we're 26 minutes past and we should probably go on to a few questions hopefully. But the call to action here is do definitely get in touch if you've got questions or you want to try it out. If you want to try it out, there's that URL there. Architecturally speaking, Asimuth is very like the OpenStack CLI in that you give it your OpenStack credentials and it makes OpenStack API calls. So you and your project can actually use Asimuth on any OpenStack cloud you've got. Give it a whirl.  It tries to guess really hard based on the access you've got to OpenStack and the kind of things you want to set up. But the documentation gives you some hints on telling it what's actually true. So that's definitely worth a go if you're interested in this thing. There's a whole bunch of GitHub things. One thing that is interesting, I guess here, is that we're using Helm charts to stamp out the Kubernetes resources. So there is actually several people have taken the Helm charts as this is a recipe to stamp out Kubernetes using cluster API and OpenStack. So rather than having to know all the resources, you just give it a set of Helm values and press go. And the interesting thing there, and you should totally listen to the recording of Matt's talk, Matt Muhammad's talk yesterday, there's a lot of add-ons that you need inside that are on top of just vanilla cluster API. Things like the GPU operator and that kind of thing. And a way to get RDMA inside the pods. So you've actually got RDMA working inside those Kubernetes pods as well. That's a whole different talk. Let's not go there. But yeah, thank you very much. Thank you very much for listening. If there's any questions, do you come to the mic? Yeah, do you want to use the mic just because the nice people listening to this afterwards? Yeah, that's fine. I guess whenever I've worked with research computing engineers, I always see like cloud bursting as being kind of a big ask. Have you, do you get a lot of, I guess that solution is probably more at the application layer than infrastructure layer, but are you getting a lot of requests for that? So on the first introduction to StackHPC slide, I skipped over the bullet point that said we're working on hybrid solutions. So it's almost like I planted you to ask that question because I forgot to mention it. So yes. In one level, what we're doing in azimuth is cloud bursting because for a lot of these people, they're using the common infrastructure that's offered to them, not necessarily the home standard thing. For a lot of these people, their home standard thing is a laptop, right? So this is the cloud bursting. That's definitely cheating, right? But the idea here is that when I talked about, you pick the size of your platform and then you pick where or when. I didn't go into the where. I was talking about the when with the reservations. But I think the where is that there may be multiple regions here and one of them might have a blazer reservation, not the other. If you're doing a simulation, then you have to move data and that would be easier, right? And there's also a where might be some other non-open stack cloud, for example. So actually a lot, if you look at the technologies we've picked here, we've picked cluster API because it's fairly cloud agnostic. I say fairly, right? Because everyone's got their own stuff, but you're talking the same kind of thing. It's very similar to Terraform. The Kubernetes looks the same as well. That's the most important thing because whatever infrastructure you deploy on with cluster API, it's Qubadm that's managing it and it looks the same and all the same add-ons will work. Yeah, and like John was about to say, Terraform is similar in that sense. So we've deliberately made infrastructure. We've deliberately made choices with our automation tooling to make multi-cloud easier in the future and we are going to be doing that soon, probably. So yeah, absolutely. It's on our roadmap. Are there any more questions? That's a good one. Actually, we're out of time, I guess. Good. Excellent. Thank you very much, everybody.


Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Wednesday that Britain would be doing more in the coming days to protect Ukrainians. Johnson said Britain needed to carry out security checks on Ukrainian refugees. This was after facing calls to relax visa conditions for those fleeing relentless bombardment by invading Russian forces. Mr Speaker, thank you. Never before has this House listened to an address like the one given yesterday by President Zelensky. And so I want to tell the House that working with our friends and allies across the free world we will be doing even more in the coming days to protect the people of Ukraine. And, Mr Speaker, my right hon. Friend the Defence Secretary will be setting out more details for the House later on. This Government wants to do everything we can to welcome them and that is indeed what we are doing. And the numbers are almost 1,000 as I speak to him today. And they will rise very sharply, Mr Speaker. We understand how much refugees have to give to this country and we understand how much this country has to gain from welcoming refugees. And we will be generous and we are being generous, Mr Speaker. Hello. Hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


This is stock number 7J142B. We are here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, your new and used SUV headquarters. We are checking out this super clean 2009 Ford Explorer. This vehicle has the 4.0 liter V6 motor. From this HD video you'll see that this Explorer is in really nice condition considering the age and miles on it. White suede is the color. Factory alloy rims on this vehicle that are in really nice shape. No major corrosion. It has good year assurance tires with about I'd say 70% of the tread left. These are 245, 65, R17s. We shoot all of our videos in 1080p so if you have HD capabilities on your computer tablet or smartphone device turn them on right now because it's like you're right here looking at the vehicle with me. Didn't want to point out just how nice and clear those headlamps are. How clean the hood is. No dents or dings on that. And the passenger side rim is in nice shape as well. No major scuffs or scrapes. As we go down this side of the vehicle you can see just how clean the body is. How reflective and glass like that paint is. We take these HD videos so if you are far away or even if you're close by and you just cannot make the trip down you can still see the vehicle, hear the vehicle and have confidence in what you're looking at before you even get here. See it does have the nice roof rack. This one does have the third-row seating. Very clean down this side of the vehicle. It does have the factory step bars. Back rim is in nice shape as well. Looks like it has brand new brakes in the rear and these back tires have just as much tread as the front tires. Going around to the back. Rear bumper is in pretty nice shape. No major dents or cracks on it. Does have a receiver hitch which would be nice for like a bike rack or something. The rear gate is in really nice shape. I didn't see any dents or dings on that. Back storage area is very clean as well. These seats do go down completely flat. Ford calls it the cargo mode so they go down like that. So you have a nice flat area and then those second-row seats also go down nice and flat so that you have a full nice flat area to put stuff for extra storage and they come up pretty easy as well. Just put the headrests up like that but you can see very nice and clean back here. It also does have the flipper glass so you go like that and you can still get into the back even if you have a hitch or something or you can't get the gate open. You can still get into the back for access. This is an Eddie Bauer edition and as you go down this side of the vehicle just as clean as a passenger side we want to make sure that you get the most accurate representation of the vehicle as possible so that when you get here there's absolutely no surprises especially on a vehicle with a hundred and some thousand miles that's eight years old almost nine years old. Yes we are entering 2018 so this is almost a nine-year-old vehicle. Inside the Eddie Bauer package gives you the two-tone tan leather interior. There are no rips or tears on these seats. Both of these seats are heated and you have a power driver seat. Factory floor mats throughout on this vehicle power windows power locks and power mirrors. This one also comes with automatic headlamps. You can see that this car does have 102,146,000 miles. You have a compass and outside temperature display as well as a mileage display. You have the leather wrapped steering wheel with cruise controls on that side and Bluetooth audio controls and radio controls on this side. There are no scuffs or scrapes on that steering wheel very nice condition.  Nice wood grain trim appointment. Passenger seat is very clean as well no rips or tears and this one does have side current airbags. Notice just how clean the headliner is. I don't believe this vehicle has ever been smoked in. It has been very very well taken care of and of course the sync system which allows you to connect to your Bluetooth audio device. We'll take a quick look at the back seats and then we will check out under the hood. Back seats are just as clean as the front seats. No rips or tears back here. It does have the latch child safety system very nice and clean. These seats like I said do fold down nice and flat and you can see that the third row seats are just as clean as the rest of the seats in the vehicle and the carpeting is very nice as nice and clean as well as is up here. No major stains rips or tears and we have factory floor mats on that second row as well. We'll take a quick look under the hood. The 4.0 liter v6 motor one of the more reliable motors that Ford ever made. Engine bay is very clean runs very smooth. This vehicle has been fully safe and inspected by our service shop. It has a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and topped off. This Explorer has been fully safety inspected and is 100% ready to go and to see more pictures of this Ford Explorer or one of our other 400 new and used cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, wranglers, you name it we got to go to our website www.summitauto.com full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle on our lot videos of every single used vehicle that we have all at summitauto.com thank you so much for checking out the video if you want to make this Explorer yours give us a call right now<PHONE_NUMBER> ask for one of our sales associates to make this Ford Explorer yours today once again that number is<PHONE_NUMBER> thanks again for checking out the video if you want to check out more go to youtube.com slash summit auto remember to like subscribe and share on those videos and this one in fact in a second you'll see a link to subscribe to our youtube channel on your left a link to more used inventory videos like this one on your right and if you have not been to our website on the bottom a link to this vehicle on our website click those check us out we really look forward to helping you with this super clean 2009 Ford Explorer Eddie Bauer once again that number to call is<PHONE_NUMBER> thanks again


So how good can the Cincinnati Bengals be this upcoming season? We're going to dive into the schedule and we're going to predict just how the ships are going to fall. So I think they start off three and two, their first five games of the season, wins coming from the Steelers, the Jets and the Dolphins. In the next six games, I actually think they go five and one with the only loss coming to Tennessee at Tennessee. Now don't kill me for this Bengals fans, but I think they finish off the year two and four in their last six games with the wins coming from the Browns and the Ravens, which brings them to a silent ten and seven to finish off the year. Now can they have another magical playoff run? That remains to be seen, but either way, Bengals fans should be feeling pretty alright going in the next season. Good luck Cincinnati.


Hey guys, what's going on? It's Andy Elliott in this video. I'm going to show you. Man, you 15 car hand were yet. If you are 15 car hand, I'm going to show you how to sell 50 cars a month. You want to do that?  Let's get to the video. All right guys, here we are, Andy Elliott. Guys, I'm going to show you how to sell 50 cars a month as a sales pro.  Five car hand, 15 car hand. By the way, if you're a 30 car hand, maybe I'll take you to 80 cars a month. Listen to me. I need you to write something down. This is crucial. You have to write this down. All right? Grab a pen, grab a piece of paper. Rule number one, write this down. People need to know who you are. Write that down. Please write that down for me. People need to know who you are. Secondly, people need to know what you do. Write that down. People need to know what I do, who I am, what I do. Number three, how great I am at what I do. Okay? Who you are, what you do, how great you are at what you do. And number four, where you're at. I'm going to ask you a question. Does everybody know who you are, what you do, how great you are at what you do and where you're at? If you have those four things nailed down, you are currently selling 50 plus cars a month. I want to explain something to you. This is what I call a brand. Now a brand is not hashtag Andy's got your keys. Okay? That's a hashtag. The brand is you. All right? So I want to talk about that for a minute. This is you. You're the brand. All right? What's your energy like? I'm going to just talk about it for a minute. What's your passion like? What's your drive like? What's your customer service like? Do you wow your customers? Can I ask you a question when a customer deals with you? Is it infectious and they wish they could buy everything off you for the rest of their life? Because that's who you are. Are you so great at what you do? You make your competition look like amateurs. Is that you? Listen to me. This is your brand. How great you are. What you do, how great you are at what you do and where you're at and do they know how to find you? Hey guys, what's up? It's Andy. Hey, I want to stop the video real quick and show you. I just released my brand new book called The Book of Deadly Scripps. You want to know how to overcome any objection in the world? You want to know how to literally pick up the phone and every single time you do, create a hot end market buyer who wants to buy a vehicle. Do me a favor. Shoot me a text right now,<PHONE_NUMBER>. I don't have this book for sale on the website. If you'll shoot me a text, I'll send you the link so you can buy it. Let's crush it and kill it. This book will change your life. It just got released. Let's get back to the video. Can I ask you a question? Number two, does your face stand out in a crowd? Okay? Does it stand out in a crowd? I started shooting YouTube videos a couple years back. Nobody knew me. There wasn't an audience. Listen, nobody knew me. There wasn't an audience. And guess what? I wanted a YouTuber. I used it as social media platform to start training sales pros because I was great at training. Now, I obviously wanted to get better every single day so I could provide more value, solve more problems and build my business. But do you know what? I wanted my face to be able to stand out in the crowd that if I went somewhere, people like, boom, man, that's that sales trainer right there. I like that guy. Energetic, fired up, always got a great positive vibe to him. My man, is that you in the automotive space, in the sales space? If you sell insurance, if you do anything, are you the best at what you do? Is it undeniable? Okay? So one of the things first when we go into branding, we obviously got to get your name everywhere. But are you ready to get your name everywhere right now? If you want to go to sell them 50 cars a month, are you ready to get your name everywhere? If everybody came in right now and they thought that you were the person to give world-class customer service, serve them at the highest levels that was important to them and their family, if they came in, would they be blown away? Yes or no? If you're answering no right now, well, guess what? You're not going to close 10 for 10. You're not going to talk on the phone and people are going to be like, oh my god, I got a connection with this person. Hey, I'm on my way. People are still like, ah, I don't know. Let me think about it. I'll get back with you. Do you know why that they're giving you these suggestions? Because you're not as good as you think you are yet, which means you need to train. So write this down. I need to train more. What do you need to train on? Say specifically, what would you recommend that I train on? Well, I'm not going to ask you to go train on marketing and get your name everywhere out there because you may not be ready yet. Now listen, if you are ready, I'm going to tell you what to do here in a second. But what I recommend right now is work on the way you speak. Okay? You're a public speaker for a living. Whether you speak to one person or 10,000 people you speak for a living publicly, use your cell phone.  Practice saying it. Record yourself. Listen to how you say it. And think, man, if I was going to buy something, would I want to buy something off that person? Right?  Would I buy for me? Like, do I like me so much that I'm like, dude, I really like me. I definitely buy for me. I like me. I think I'm funny. I think I'm humorous. I think I'm quirky. I think I got good vibes. I think my attitude one to 10 is an 11. I think my skill is on point. I pull all the friction out of the deal. I take all the pressure off the table. Yeah, of course. I'd buy off me. Is that you? If it's not, I'm going to tell you what to do right now. You see the cell phone number right here?   Don't be paralyzed with fear, okay? Right now, the market's hotter than ever.  Lions train lions. Is that you? You one percenter? If you're not, do you want to be? You want to train with somebody who's going to push you to the next level? That's me. Guys, these little baby YouTube videos I put out for you to show you a better version of yourself. The real training you text me, I'll tell you how to get on it. But here's what I want to tell you. How to speak, okay? How to handle objections, how to have an arsenal of closes, okay? And then a really important thing that if right now you are doing really well and you're great in these areas, which by the way, I'm going to tell you this, right? There's no limits. There's no caps in your life. There's always another level. Would you agree? Do you believe you have the potential to make more money? Yes or no? If you're making a million a year, right now, you're like, yeah? Yeah? Okay, cool. Text me. Let's go there. But if you're making 100 or 200 grand, you're in the automotive space, listen, I'm going to tell you, everybody telling you that that's good, that's not good, okay? That's like amateur, okay? You can go to the top, the markets there, the winds in our sales, but you got to know how to do all this. But if you're doing great and you're ready for the next level, I said everybody needs to know who you are, what you do, how great you are at what you do, and how can they find you, where are you at? If you have this brand and you're bad to the bone, then what you need to do is you need to figure out how to get your name everywhere, okay? And that right there to me is the golden rule spreading, it's called reach. Reaching out within 100 mile radius to everywhere around you. Now there's 10 or 15 different ways that you can get your name out there, but what I would recommend is if you're already one of the high achievers and you're killing it and your brand's on point, I would highly recommend go down into the description box below, you're going to see the branding and marketing course by Andy Elliott. I created 60 videos that show you how to literally go out and generate 10 to 20 leads a day hot market, write that down, hot market. In-market leads right now to your cell phone every day. And if you can do that and you're already great, can you pick up the phone? Can you talk on a camera? You take my branding and marketing course? I guarantee 10 to 20 leads a day straight to your cell phone. What does the cell pay you right now? Average commission, if you're a flat, what, four or 500 bucks? If you're on commission, $1,000, just think about it. You could literally increase your income by 20 or 30 grand a month just by your reach, which means reaching more people. So I will show you how to make your face stand out in a crowd if you want to click the link below, but your brand, which is you, in order to go to 15 to 50 a month, you got to make your brand strong.  They are loyal. They are committed because of the service that I gave them, the way that I treated them, the way that I made them feel when we did business together. Okay? All that right there, I can show you how to do all this, you can text me. But right now, if you want the branding and marketing course, you don't have to shoot me a text message. You can, you can and I'll send you a link to it. You can get it, but you can go down in the description box below. You'll see branding and marketing course. Click on it. It'll show you how to generate 10 to 20 leads a day, straight to your phone.  But guess what? You can dominate the space. So if you want to sell 50 cars a month, let's decide who are you right now. You're the best in the world. You got all this down and you're ready for this. Or are you on step number one? Or are you still on step number one? You're still building yourself to become so good at what you do. You make a competition look like amateurs and that's the mission you're on, which I can take you to 50 cars a month doing that. Shoot me a text 918210254. Guys, let's get crazy. The market is hot. It's never going to be this good again. We maybe got about a year left to this. Don't be paralyzed with fear. Take action now. Let's kick butt, guys. Nothing but massive love. Let's go kill it.


Hello and welcome to the session. In this session first we will discuss about angles. Basically an angle is a measure of rotation of a given ray about its initial point. This OA is the original ray which is called the initial side and after rotation we get the final position of the ray which is OB. This is called the terminal side and the point of rotation which is OA is called the vertex. If the direction of the rotation is anti-clockwise then we say we get a positive angle and if the direction of rotation is clockwise we get a negative angle. We can also say the measure of an angle is the amount of rotation performed to get the terminal side from the initial side. Next we shall study degree measure which is another important unit of measurement of an angle. If the rotation from the initial side to terminal side is 1 upon 360th of a revolution the angle is said to have a measure of 1 degree which is written as this. Next we have radiant measure which is also an important unit of measurement of angle. Angles subtended at the center by an arc of length one unit in a unit circle which is a circle of radius one unit is said to have a measure of one radian. We also say that one complete revolution of the initial side subtends an angle of 2 pi radian in a circle of radius r an arc of length l subtends an angle theta radian at the center we have theta is equal to l upon r or we can say that l is equal to r theta. Radiant measures and real numbers are considered as one and the same. Next we discuss relation between degree and radian we have 2 pi radian is equal to 360 degrees or we can say that pi radian is equal to 180 degrees. We also say that radian measure is equal to pi upon 180 multiplied by degree measure also degree measure is equal to 180 upon pi multiplied by radian measure. Let's try and express the angle 36 degree in radian measure. Its radian measure would be given by 36 degrees is equal to pi upon 180 multiplied by 36 radians which comes out to be equal to pi upon 5 radians that is we have 36 degrees is equal to pi upon 5 radians. Next we discuss trigonometric functions we have sin x equal to 0 implies that x is equal to n pi where n is any integer then we have cos x equal to 0 implies that x is equal to 2n plus 1 multiplied by pi by 2 where again n is any integer then we have some other trigonometric functions like cos x equal to 1 upon sin x where x is not equal to n pi where n is any integer then sec x equal to 1 upon cos x where we have x is not equal to 2n plus 1 multiplied by pi by 2 for any integer n then tan x is equal to sin x upon cos x where again x is not equal to 2n plus 1 multiplied by pi by 2 for any integer n and cos x is equal to cos x upon sin x where x is not equal to n pi for some integer n. We also have for all real x sin square x plus cos square x is equal to 1 1 plus tan square x is equal to sec square x and 1 plus cos square x is equal to cos x square x. Now we discuss sin of trigonometric functions this table shows the signs of the trigonometric functions in different quadrants like in the first quadrants all the trigonometric functions sin x cos x tan x cos x sin x and cos x are positive in the second quadrant only sin x and cos x are positive all other are negative in the third quadrant tan x and cot x are positive rest all are negative and in the fourth quadrant cos x and sec x are positive rest all are negative. Next we discuss domain and range of trigonometric functions from the definition of sin and cosine functions we observe that they are all defined for all real numbers and we also have that sin x is greater than equal to minus 1 and less than equal to 1 and cos x is greater than equal to minus 1 and less than equal to 1. Then for the functions y equal to sin x and y equal to cos x domain is the set of all real numbers and range is the closed interval minus 1 1 where we have y is greater than equal to minus 1 and less than equal to 1 for the function y equal to cos x that is 1 upon sin x we have domain is the set x such that x belongs to r and x is not equal to n pi where n belongs to z and range is the set y such that y belongs to r y is greater than equal to 1 or y is less than equal to minus 1 then we have y equal to sec x that is 1 upon cos x for this we have domain is the set x such that x belongs to r and x is not equal to 2n plus 1 multiplied by pi by 2 where n belongs to z and range of this function is the set y such that y belongs to r y is less than equal to minus 1 or y is greater than equal to 1 then we have function y equal to tan x domain of this function is the set x such that x belongs to r and x is not equal to 2n plus 1 multiplied by pi by 2 where again n belongs to z and range is the set of all real numbers the next trigonometric function is y equal to cot x domain for this function is given by the set x such that x belongs to r and x is not equal to n pi where n belongs to z and range is the set of all real numbers this table shows the behavior of the trigonometric functions in different quadrants like in the first quadrant when x increases from 0 to pi by 2 sin x increases from 0 to 1 cos x decreases from 1 to 0 tan x increases from 0 to infinity cot x decreases from infinity to 0 sec x increases from 1 to infinity cos x decreases from infinity to 1 then in the second quadrant when x increases from pi by 2 to pi sin x decreases from 1 to 0 cos x decreases from 0 to minus 1 tan x increases from minus infinity to 0 cot x decreases from 0 to minus infinity sec x increases from minus infinity to minus 1 and cos x increases from 1 to infinity in the third quadrant when x increases from pi to 3 pi by 2, we have sin x decreases from 0 to minus 1, cos x increases from minus 1 to 0, tan x increases from 0 to infinity, cot x decreases from infinity to 0, second x decreases from minus 1 to minus infinity, and cos x increases from minus infinity to minus 1. Then in the fourth quadrant, when x increases from 3 pi by 2 to 2 pi, sin x increases from minus 1 to 0, cos x increases from 0 to 1, tan x increases from minus infinity to 0, cot x decreases from 0 to minus infinity, second x decreases from infinity to 1, and cos x decreases from minus 1 to minus infinity. Let's take sec theta equal to minus 13 upon 12, and we have that theta lies in the second quadrant. Let's try and find out the values of the trigonometric functions. We have sec theta equal to minus 13 upon 12, and we know that cos theta is equal to 1 upon sec theta, so we get cos theta is equal to minus 12 upon 13, and we know that tan square theta is equal to sec square theta minus 1, this is equal to minus 13 upon 12, we hold square minus 1, so from here we get tan square theta is equal to 25 upon 144, hence we have tan theta is equal to plus minus 5 upon 12, now since we have theta is in the second quadrant, so we will take the negative value of tan theta, so we get tan theta is equal to minus 5 upon 12, then we have cot theta is equal to 1 upon tan theta, so we get cot theta equal to minus 12 upon 5, now sin theta is equal to tan theta multiplied by cos theta which is equal to minus 5 upon 12 multiplied by minus 12 upon 13 which gives the value equal to 5 upon 13, so we have sin theta is equal to 5 upon 13, and cos theta is equal to 1 upon sin theta, thus we get cos theta is equal to 13 upon 5, so this is how we find the trigonometric functions, this completes the session, hope you have understood the concept of angles trigonometric functions.


Now let's take a look at a few stars, too far away for Hipparchus, but well within the range of Gaia. Betelgeuse is a very rich, reddish, cool, supergiant star. It is also one of the largest and most luminous stars known. If it were at the center of the solar system, its surface would extend past the orbit of Jupiter. CHCYG is a symbiotic star system in which a white dwarf feeds from the solar wind of a companion red giant star. Rigel is the sixth brightest star in the sky. Since 1943, this star has served as one of the stable anchor points by which other stars are classified.


It's a genuine pleasure to be standing before you, a pleasure that would not have come about if it had not been for the extremely competent and very efficient planning and pursuing of Dr. Haikiman. I would like to thank him personally as well as professionally. I would like to thank SOAS, London Middle East Institute and the Center for Iran Studies. It seems to have quite a hub of activity here. And it's just as it should be because London after all has been traditionally a very strong bastion of Persian studies and Iranian studies, London, England in general. And so it's wonderful to be here, in a way, home away from home of Persian, the study of Persian literature and culture, even though it's home, inside home is not much of a home after all. So in a way, it's not only us who feel in exile, it's also the whole of Persian literature in real ways. I would like to mention that there is a handout. I hope everyone has it and I will be referring to it time and again. So please make sure you have that and take a look at it from time to time as I proceed in this lecture. One of the ideas of these series of lectures comes from, of course, from the fact that I consider myself a historian of Persian literature which really to me means nothing more than an interest in seeing this literature across time along what we call in our lingo a diachronic dimension. And as such, I'm immensely interested in and absorbed by a question of change. How do things change in literature? And I contend and I have written elsewhere that this is a literature in which you can see the evolutionary process, the process of a growing complexity, stage by stage, stage after painful stage of it. And to be able to speak about this literary tradition, this aesthetic tradition historically is to really shed light, not just only on the canon and the culture behind it, but also on certain important questions in articulating and writing about literary history. How can we write literary history without distancing ourselves from the text? Notice that question has not been answered as of yet. How can we keep inside the text and start writing about its changes that come about it from within the text, rather than from an overall contextual dimension looking into the text? That would be the approach that I will take in these two talks as well. And I count on you to help me hone up that approach, how to talk about the movement of the Exilic mode in Persian literature, without distancing myself from the text, which is why you have got the handle that I have requested to be distributed. So let me take you down to where I'm going to cite John Lennon. To contemplate a figure of an original exile in a paradisical scene. One of the first extant Persian poems were fragmented or composed well over a millennium ago, probably in the Plain of Saud, the birthplace of Persian language and poetry, and considered for long one of the four heavens and earth, consists of a single line of uncertain authorship, most often attributed to a late ninth century poet. We know by the name of Abouhaf Saudi, we don't know anything more about it. It concerns the condition of a mountain deer stranded without a mate in the plain. Ahuyi kuhi, dardash, cheguni da bazaar, unadar az yar, biyaar, cheguni bo bazaar. And I have an image for you. I want you to imagine this Ahuyi kuhi. This is the Plain of Saud, and this is our mountain deer, stranded on the desert. And anyone who knows Persian poetry knows that contradictions of this time, of this kind, the binary opposition between kuh and dash, between the mountain and the plain, are the struts and beams of Persian poetry. So you have an Ahuyi kuhi with its lateral hooves very well suited to tell, that's why. I want you to imagine it, please.  Notice the lateral hooves, how it's made to handle the crags, the rocky crags of the mountain, but may weigh upon him heavily in the plain, soft land of the plain. Notice that right knee, slightly bent. And let's talk about the scene. In a real sense Persian literature begins with this image and the idea behind it, and exiling the person of a mountain deer, and the idea of an observer contemplating it. Imagine I would have Surgri standing behind the tree looking in. Think of the dissonance enshrined in the binary opposition between kuh, mountain, and dashed in the first hemi stick. And how that dissonance makes the twin questions that follow poignant, highly suggestive. A simple, stark, black, and white, and as you would say, non-existent image, snapshot of a mountain deer who's well-hoofed, well-developed lateral hooves, enable him to clear the rocky crags, but can hardly support his weight on low lands, concretize the theme of exile in a single snapshot. Ahuikuhi, Dar-dash, mountain deer in the plain. The suggestion that someone observing the animal is asking the question as a degree of sophistication to this simplicity. Is the deer running or trying to run in vain? Look at his right knee, slightly bent. Does this mean he's striding the plane just fine? Thank you very much. To the marvel of our imaginary observer? Or is he beginning to falter, eventually to fall down? Could he be standing still? Some notion of running, taking shape, lurking only in the onlooker's head. Is the deer perhaps fallen or about to fall, provoking a rhetorical question, underlining the idea that, of course, mountain deer cannot continue to run through the plane, and here's the proof. The three perspectives, the deers, the observers, and yours, the modern readers, are still teasing our mind when the notion of the mate, the jar, that precious pearl of Persian poetry, that darling word in the entire tradition, enters the scene. In the second line, it hits us, un ador as jar. What does that wonderfully suggest the word do to the question or to the poem? As her entries announced to our imagination, the question shifts from how the deer runs to how the deer exists, Bovaza, or how he exists really. The presence of the concept, making visible a crucial absence, changes the axis of the poem from one of the deer's function running to the poem's existence. From Davaza to Bovaza stretches the path that the mountain deer must run, but can't, or can he? Let's take a moment to contemplate that question. In all likelihood, the word chagune, or to come closer to the Central Asian pronunciation of the word in classical times, chagun, that word chagun, to adopt a more likely pronunciation of it in classical Persian of Central Asia, where the scene is likely to have been observed, did not necessarily carry the connotation of logical impossibility it now has taken on in modern and modernist Persian poetry. Trace the word chagune in modern and modernist poetry. Chagune, istaud, amodid, am zamin, bezeer, dopay, amizet, hekegah, tohi, mi shavad, bagyar, mi etan, jeof, tam, bein, zevah, yeh, pooch, etan, am, rah, nemi, barat. That's Farukhzad. I can cite many other examples. So the question here becomes completely rhetorical. It's not a serious question. If you want to ask a serious question, say chetor in modern Persian. But that was not the case in the 10th century. And as such, that's one of the things that a historian of literature takes into consideration. These minute differences. The question has been encumbered. The word has been encumbered already after a thousand years of usage. So it is entirely possible that our imaginary observer is seeing a mountain deer doing fine in the plane, not just walking and running all right, but exhibiting a state of well-being otherwise, as well, even without a yard. Then there's the human being, man or woman, contemplating the scene. Who is this observer of the mountain deer in the plane? Asking those simple, terrible questions. Cheguni davazah, Cheguni bovazah. Any element to reading on the animal portrayal, portray animals portrayed here tells us that although the deer usually live in small bands, the male of the species is prone to run solitary. At least in some seasons. Of course, we can ask whether our deer is really male, but what difference does it make? Or whether the observer here may be projecting his or her own thoughts and emotions, fears, and concerns on the scene? After all, we humans have done that for as long as we have shared this planet with animals. Is the observer then possibly lamenting his own separation, his own exile, from his own mountain, without his own companion? Is this verse in the end the record of a lonely, loveless life? Reading about poetic personages like the mountain deer and his absent companion, thinking about the man or woman contemplating the scene and mulling over the things absent from it, or present in it, has been my preoccupation ever since I raised my hand to ask a 13-year-old's version of the same question of our high school teacher. And he invited me to sit down and chat up because it was obvious to him that the line had been there in our textbook in order to tell us the old conjugation of Bovazza and Devazza. So literature, how do we think about it? How do we approach it? How do we examine it? That's the question I'll be asking these two nights. Questions such as the ones, this one-line occasions, have been on the lips of Persian literature for over a millennium. The 10th century epic, the Shahnameh, or Book of Kings, and other early works feature a galaxy of exiles. Salman Tour, those unsympathetic strawmen made necessary by the turn in the mythical narrative from the universal to the national, can be recast as prototypes of exiled men. Their crime of fratricide, the Akili Raj, after all, their crime of fratricide, not so much attributable to the jealousy they felt for the younger brother, having been given the fairest of the lands, Iran, but to a terribly twisted manifestation of their desperate desire to return home. In his infancy, the white-haired Zal cannot but be seen as so different from other newborns that he has to be expelled from human society and exposed at the foot of Mount Alborz. His whole youthful life, an effort to return to the Zabulistan of his human condition. The effort reaches its successful conclusion not so much when his father accepts him back, but when he demonstrates his capacity for loving a woman from a faraway land through W. Zal's grandson, Sohrab, too, wishes to return, not so much to the land of Iran as to the heroic culture of which his deadbeat dad has deprived him so cruelly. Alas, he attains that wish as he breathes his last, making one last-wise observation, Shekari Miekser, Hamepeh Shemak. We all pray before death. And Siobash contemplated that peaceful prince, that prince of peace, archetype of voluntary expatriation, he falls victim to the very violence which he is trying to avoid by choosing to live away from his beloved homeland. Exiling himself to Turan, he is doomed by his very pacific nature manifested in surpassing his fears in war games superseded by his aversion to bloodshed. Finally, to cite a single example from the myth, not from the myths not enshrined in the Book of Kings, contemplate Arash the archer, Arash, come on here. He marks the physical boundary between Iran and the lands outside of it, the un-Iran, not just to the Northwest, but inside the mind of Iranians of all ages. Iran ends where the will of his citizens to defend it by giving their lives collapses. In the process, Arash becomes the other of the exiled hero, the man who claims the land, the embodiment of a territorialized sense of identity worth dying for. So no matter where you go in Persian literature, classical and modern, you see exiles, you meet exiles. The important thing is how to recognize them. What is exiled in each case? The important thing is to imagine the scenes, to intimate the text, not to distance yourself from it, I would argue. The point I'm trying to make here is that to Ferdowsi and all those involved in the Persian epic and narrative traditions, and more importantly to those Iranians in the early centuries of Islamic Iran, who fostered the dream of their culture's resurrection, the idea of Iran must have seemed transposed from the recesses of the individual psyche to the pages of diverse literary works. Contemplate Gorgonis, Visen Ramin, or contemplate Nizami's many romances. So tonight, and to our right, we are going to contemplate this display of experience, this wonderful experience of being an exile that really, in a way, epitomizes the human condition in our time. It must be hard for us, for us, reading classical Persian literature from within modern mythologies of writing and reading of nations and languages and of individuals and collective identities to grasp the significance of such myths to those who were trying to find their way to centers of political power and privilege where the art of poetry faced the task of forging a sense of collective identity at odds with all the rest through language, through the crafting of this beautiful Persian language. Many generations of poets and patrons. It must be even harder to imagine how the theme would be articulated by those who viewed the world in its entirety as a place of exile. This is a few generations later when mysticism, the mystical discourse, takes over Persian literature in general, home being where we were on the day of Alast. To pre, or pre-eternity, up in some paradise, now lost and in the presence of some God, no longer even imaginable. And what if some sort of mist-like concept of exile began to cover the ground and came to us in the form of a plethora of etherealized, mythic manifestations of an eternal wanderer. Not too dissimilar from the wandering Jew in Western literature or the flying Dutchman or the figure of that accursed undying mariner in Coleridge's terrible poem, The Ancient Bairiner. And yet that's exactly the kind of thing that we must do. If we want the past to be meaningful through this magnificent edifice we call Persian literature. So let me begin with a poet who really experienced exile and has left us with a record of it in so many of his poems, beginning perhaps a century and a day after Abu Hafti's observation of the mountain deer in the plain. Nasser Khoso of Kobadyan. Merid's special attention also, not just because he has experienced two centers of culture and spiritual refinement in his life, but more importantly for our project because he provides a link with the mystical conceptions of exile, which we'll be treating shortly. First it is true that while it is Khurasan that has brought him up as a man and a poet, it is Cairo, that wonderful center of faith and culture where he got to meet his master and spiritual guide that beckons to him from the place, his place of exile, the horrible valley of Yongan. To have him a poet and an educated man in the valley of Yongan surrounded by towering peaks is not just an undiscovered gem buried, you know he's known as Laleh Badakhshan, an undiscovered gem buried beneath tons of quarry rock, but like discarding or intentionally burying a ruby that was once mine and whose value was determined and is a proven quality back into the quarry under the piles of rubble, of rubble. And here I want, I invite you to turn to your text number two on the handout please. Here where the above lines constitute the opening, the poet mentions not just the downside of life in exile, but also its constructive impact on the intellectual growth and spiritual development of the individual seeker as well. At one point, and this is not on your handout. So it is by moving away that you grow, it is by experiencing exile, that you work your way towards character completion, perfection. In another passage he asks rhetorically, what will you find in your native town, your neighborhood, except the little that's there in that town, in that neighborhood? So movement becomes part of a human condition, which is why we need to expand our notion of exile, not as just destructive and diminishing, but as a way of growing, especially today when it's so much a part of the human condition. A generation later to Masood Sa'ad Salman, while the court of Ghazneh remains the privileged space where he has grown in power and stature, indeed where his art has flourished, his native city of Lahore emerges as a place of the poet's fondest memories to be recalled with affection only after he has fallen from grace and is exiled. Here's his own excerpt, here's an excerpt from one of his lament poems, the Tristia, and I would invite some young colleague of ours to do a study of Tristia of the Qamnaumiz, of poets and the sorrow of life in Persian poetry, because there too is a wonderful quarry of, to be mined, about his separation, his birthplace of Lahore. Ailavahur, here's handout number three. Ailavahur, Wei haq biman cheguni, bi aaf tabe roshan roshan cheguni, ay baghe tab in az manara astetura, bi gulbi lalevo banaf shavosh susan cheguni, nagah az iz farzand asto jodah shodah ast badar deo benohe wo shivan cheguni, bar pahe mando bande geran aston tanibi jan shodih, toe aknon bitan cheguni, na Fristiaan paya mo naporsi bohas na ah, kandar yehsar basto chobijan cheguni. How many times have we experienced this kind of element from our peers today, in our modern spaces of exile? We know that the early masters of Persian, Qasida and Ghazal, and both of these are excerpts from longer Qasidas. Unfortunately, the Khurasani poets are so long-winded that they think they have to exhaust all the rhyme in the language before they end the poem. They just have not been able to discipline themselves to stop at some point in the Qasida. So Qasida goes on and on and on and on. And that's true about all the Khurasani poets from Nasir al-Khusro and Masud al-Sadr Salman to Bahar and Akhaban and Khoi, your fellow neighbor in this country. It's an alluring genre. It tests because it's such a public means of address. It's such a wonderfully occasional and formal genre that you want to test your craftsmanship in the poetry as well. So we know that the early masters of Persian, Qasida and Ghazal often lamented their separation from their native environments as well as from places where they were allowed to flourish by practicing their art. The nostalgia that oozes from the lines above is not for a lost country, unlike us, we oftentimes give it the name of Iran even though what we miss may be the turn in our own little alley of childhood somewhere. But we generalize that to an abstraction called Iran. For a lost country, not nor for a conventional poetic pose, it is rather for a far more specific and immediate feeling of being away from one's birthplace or some real urban center where the poet's craft was appreciated or rewarded. Notice when you left your provincial town or I did, when I left my provincial town of Mashhad and came to Tehran at the age of 19, I didn't view that as exile. I viewed that as part of my growth. But when it was thrown out of Iran, that became exile for some reason. That's of course because the mythology of nationalism or nationalistic patriotism that I will be discussing tomorrow night. Yet it is obvious that the sense of belonging to Lahore and the feeling of resembling a body without a soul is there in the poem. At times this conception of exile can be expressed in the idea of separation, concretizing images of unpleasant or dangerous animals. Such as we see in Manu Chheri's Raven of Separation, Qorab al-Ba'in, as you know Manu Chheri was a master of Arabic poetry as well. And he has this image of Qorab al-Ba'in, the Raven of Separation that really eats his soul. Or Nasir al-Khutr, the Scorpion of Exile, Qajdome Qorbat. Or Sana'i's Demon of Exile, Diva Qorbat, to cite only a few of the numerous examples that concretize exile as an injurious, as an injurious state affecting the person of the poet as well as the personas he creates in his poetry. It is important to note though that the poetry calling his native city after he has fallen from the favor of an important patron and from the lofty position of a court poet which gave him his power and prestige. Thus in accordance with the public and ceremonial nature of the genre, the Qasidih, the exilic mode in the Persian Qasidih begins to take shape through addresses and apostrophes that picture the grieving poet stuck in some cultural wasteland, recalling the capital where he ought to be present but from which circumstances have exiled and kept him away. In a sense, this is the reverse of the situation. Farrukhih, when Farrukhih is taking his poetry to Ghazneh, Baka Harwanu Holibaraftam Ze Sistan, Baha Holy Tani Dezidil, Baha Fdezejan, he's young, he's an up and coming poet and he's taking his way to Ghazneh. That's where it's at, nowhere else. It's in Ghazneh that someone will buy his poetry. In such works, the apostrophe to the city or court where he would prosper but from which he has been exiled contains his lament against fate and the hunchback heavens that have affected the misfortune of life in effect. Just as some has done Zal wrong by driving him away, the king would be unjust for turning the poet away from the locus of his court or take Nasir Khosroz in his exile in Yom Gan, remembering Khurasan or Masoud in Ghazneh, recalling the beloved Lahore or Sana'i residing in Bagh and remembering Ghazneh. All of these conditions, there's nobody to carry their message to the patron so they oftentimes end up addressing the wind as the messenger. That's how the wind begins its mission as the messenger of Persian poetry. In Hafiz you see the wind, the Zafar, so often taking messages from the lover to the beloved and if there's any message from the beloved rarely of course. So there's nobody to carry their message to the patron, the place or the people who have unjustly and cruelly rejected them. So this scene, this is scene one of the poetry that I'm trying to communicate of exile. Now we come to a section of my talk which I call the progress of the solitary soul. It ought to be obvious how in our search for the exilic mode in Persian literature we're approaching the portal of the mystical tradition. In the mystical tradition, an amazing thing happens and that is the whole world is a place of exile. The poet begins to recall the ahda al-ast, the covenant of al-ast of pre-eternity when God said al-astubarabbakum am I not your lord? Kalu bali, they said yes and that became the beginning of a bala. Sana'i says, as barayyik bali kandar azal guftas jan ta'ababb merdi bali and dar bala after that. So the whole of the world is a place of exile. It's not the city or that place. This we can see in Sayyid al-Abad al-Alma'ad, Sana'i's famous work. You can see this in Manta Qutay. It often amazes me how much we neglect when we distance ourselves from the text. A few years ago I wrote an article comparing the image of Simorgh, that wonderful bird of Persian poetry in the Shah Nameh, contrasting it really with its image in Manta Qutay. And it seemed to be the only thing around that did it that way. We have seen both of them. How in the Shah Nameh, the Simorgh is a real bird, the size of 30 birds, corporeal. When she lands, she raises the dust. She talks to zhal and so on and so forth. And yet in Manta Qutay, it's not a creature, it's a presence, somber and mount guft in some mirror-like surface. So I'm leaving all of that to take you to a very little, very little red text, really. And that is Sohrabardi's Ghissatul Orbatul Qarbiyeh. I often think that Sohrabardi's position in transforming Persian literature from what I call the objective mode of presentation to the interiorizes it from the objective to the subjective. Imagine the struggles and the ordeals of Rustam and compare those with the ordeals of Sheikh Saman fighting his own nafs, his own animal nature, whose struggle is more, is harder, more arduous. Imagine Jame Jam, that wonderful crystal ball. It's a crystal ball in the Shah Nameh, but it's not a crystal ball in mystical literature. Be yagin nankhe Jame Jam dile tost. It's interiorized. No matter where you turn, you see the devices of Persian poetry interiorized because now the challenge is interior. The challenge is inside the human being. It's no longer a diva or demon. It's your own nafs that you have to fight to work your way towards purity. So my choice is dictated really by my desire to find the likes of the mountain deer in the plain. And so here I have, but also I want to show you the movement from the very similar, which is what I call, it's part of the jargon of literary theory, to the allegorical and the symbolic. You'll see a similar transformation tomorrow night as I talk about certain modes of presentation, let's say in Nadirpur and Khoy on the one hand and in Qassemi and Masoudi's novels and the other. So the symbolic depiction of this person, this personage in Ghislatul Ghorbatul Qarbiyeh is wonderful to behold. And here I'm taking you to your hand up, citation number four. Because I traveled with my brother Asim from Diyar to the west of the country, then I arrived in Nagyahan to see that the people of that land are from the city of Ghayrovan. So because our ancestors came and told us that we are the sons of Sheikh Hadi Ibn al-Khair al-Yamani, they took us and locked us in chains and shackles and they imprisoned us in a place that is no end to them and there was a cup of tea for us to drink, so the two brothers are incarcerated. They receive a letter delivered by Hupo. This is where the fortunes of Hupo begin to rise here and also in Mantegotteh where he becomes the Khothodeh Hadi Shadeh, the guided seeker. Delivered by Hupo from their father Hadi in which they are instructed on how to find their way to deliverance and are informed on all that awaits them along the way. It is an arduous path indeed involving sea voyages and shipwrecks, a visit to the island of Gag and Magag and encountered with the skulls of Adan Thamud, sacrifices of their sister and mother and so many numerous other ordeals. In the end the travelers ascend Mount Sinai and again and gain an audience with their father. An old man from the brilliance of his light, the heavens and earth were nearly split open. None of the mystics call this thing God but it is an image of God. So the father addresses the sons and here's what he says, number five on your outline. It's amazing. This is Shahr-Hai-Galib or Bilad-Garib. When Hafiz says, he's really giving his own version of the mountain and the plane. Sohrabadhi's engaging narrative compels the reader to set out on her own journey in search of the parallels that make it meaningful in ways that are relevant to the specific brand of illumination philosophy. In other words, I contend here that really here, Sohrabadhi, the poetic amateur, shall we call him or the literary amateur is really serving Sohrabadhi the illuminationist, the master illuminationist. He is putting the devices of literature at the service of his own ideology of illuminationism. For many, for my purposes, I would like to offer a reading of this tale and by extension of all of Sohrabadhi's tales of initiation. He has got a dozen of those, not just as one of the most comprehensive expressions of the condition of exile in the Persian mystical literature but as one of the most palpable articulations of the longing, the mystic fields in a very real and deeply felt human sense. In Rumi, contemplate the nae. It has been exiled, uprooted, cut away from Nehista and all of that lament is because it seeks to return to the reed bed. An exile representing the whole of human being. Contemplate all of so many mystical texts where the effort, the ultimate effort is to reverse the Adamic cosmic fall and work your way through a cosmic ascent. It was, the moment of Adam's fall was a moment of catastrophe. We were exiled. And so we have to crawl our way back to that mountain once more, once more to meet, to arrive at Laqaa Allah which is a Sufi term for to see the face of God. So our mountain deer has come a long way really come to think of it from the plain of Sogd, all the way to what? The seven valleys, the Haft Vadi in Mantaghutte in the Conference of the Birds to move from Qayrovon to the presence of God. In so many ways you can use the analogy and you can see it grow in complexity and before your eyes grows in complexity. So I know of no such narrative of exile, more beautifully designed or more perfectly expressed at once comprehensive and totalizing and yet completely open to non-mystical interpretations. That's the marvel of Sogd Vadi I would contend. And then I get to the next section of my talk, the city, the world and the soul. And what I say here is of course no survey of Persian literature along the historical dimension is complete if you do not mention Haft Viz. I wish I could skip it because he's so entrapy but I can't. So let's contemplate Haft Viz. The question about Haft Viz is that all of his articulations of the exellent condition must be seen as to be creations of his own lively imagination because we have no cogent reason to believe that he ever absented himself from the city of Shiraz. People talk about the little trip to Yazd but it could have been just a tour that he took of the city and he didn't like it at all. So as such he provides proof if proof were needed that in poetry the most effective is often the most fictive, the most fictional. The more you, which is said in that wonderful Arabic thing, Ahsan Huakzebahu, the more you lie, the closer you get to the truth and you create beauty. That's the function of literature. In historical sense too, Haft Viz closes the circle opened by the masters of the Qasidah and the Qazar. Of all the poets who have shaped the lexicon and imagery of mystical poetry in Persian, he is most consistent in articulating exile as a condition of being away, not from a city, not from a city, but from the beloved. So the balance between Yahr and Yahr which began with the mountain deer being displaced and having been left without the Yahr tilts towards the Yahr. So in the end if you've got your Yahr you're okay. In him, as in Sogdi five centuries ago earlier, the Yahr and Yahr node manifestly gravitate toward the former. For him, the abode of the beloved is the homeland from whence lovers have been separated. So thus in one poem, he has this marvelous line, Notice the word sheen, and it's two meanings, the curl and China. So he's in Shiraz, he imagines his beloved in China, and of course his deal has left him and gone to China or has gone to the turn of the of the tresses. And he feels it, he feels it. And he feels it, he feels it. And he feels it, he feels it. Of the of the tresses and he feels fine at home. Thank you. He's not an exile, he is where he wants to be. It's just that he has been separated from his own Maskan-e-Ma'alouf in the chest of the port. So I have selected a few lines from another Ghazal and here's my text number five from the handout. I heard that Dr. Jahanpur mentioned that he too once sought advice from Hafiz and got exactly the same Ghazal. It's not wonderful, he has done that to others as well. You're in good company. And noticed, he has not traveled, she has, if it's a she. So, in the last line, the speaker defines himself as once again as the inhabitant, inhabitant, not of any physical place, but of the land of the beloved, Diyar-e-Habib, thus making it clear that any sense of attraction, not of the land of the beloved, but making it clear that any sense of attraction, he feels toward a place and rises from the fact that the beloved resides there. Later in the poem, he reiterates both the connection and the hierarchy by calling the air of the beloved abode, Hava'u ye manzil-e yar, and you see phrases like that in Hafiz, sprinkled all over his divan. Diyar-e-dust, Diyar-e-del-bar, Kuya-dust, Kuya-yar, Kuche-e-e-m'ashuq, Kuche-e-e-m'ashuqe, Manzil-e-yar, Manzil-e-janan, and so on and so forth. So, to recap, our mountain deer has come a long way indeed, not just along the way from the plain of Sogd in Central Asia to the southern and western cities, such as Isfahan and Shiraz, real and imaginary, and not just in time from the 10th to the 14th century, but from the simple specific image of a solitary or snapshot of a solitary soul stranded but still having his feet planted on the terra firma of some real geography, having now been transformed from a real creature to a more malleable figure that may or may not be the port caught in a world that is not necessarily the objective world out there. It's an imaginary space, somewhere in the human soul. Our initial impression of him and his abilities has changed as well, of course. It's not just a matter of a single entity in displaced in a simple place. There are so many equations for Hafiz and for us to consider. The reed bed, I mentioned that one. The changing colors and climes of seasons and so on and so forth, and I'm skipping a lot here. But let me get to the penultimate part of my talk and that's the expatriate as explorer and teacher. I argue that the next important shift in the presentation of the Exilic mode in Persian literature occurs in the 16th and 17th century as the Safavids settle and make a court of Isfahan and some of them for their own purposes begin resume patronage of poetry but only of a particular kind of that which now serves the official religion of Shiism. Some more secular poets begin to go to India. And here I'm going to skip quite a number of pages because I know I'm going beyond my time. But at the same time, it is the image of the exile that becomes insubstantial. It becomes more ethereal. It becomes less palpable. It does not have the solidity of the mountain deer in the plain. Notice how when Bashi Bafi of the 16th century says Sha'iri qane am mojarrad gard az hame tshizu az hame kaz fard do jahan pishiman pashiz iniz he tshizan bachash tshiz iniz. aaram az sohbate jahan daaram fakh az khaki aas tan daaram. So belonging not to anything or not claiming anything but really remaining content with a minimum about what you've got. And time and again you see these mythical birds appearing once again. Not just Seymour, but Homa and Anga as well. In one poem, Kaleem, who has this famous qazal about Badnam-e-hayat, he says dar kishema tajarro de Anga tamam nis dar qaidena maand agar az nishan gozash. So even one nishan is too much belonging. You really have to become mojarrad, become abstract, abstract yourself from everything in order to seek proximity to the ultimate source of existence. But there's that dimension as well where India, especially the Northern Indian courts of Akbar and Jahan Shah, of Shah Jahan and so on and so forth become important centers of Persian poetry. So Sa'a-e-Fayyaz-e-Lahiji says habbaza hendikabe-e-aamal, khase-e-yaran-aafiyat-jura. Harkeshod mostati e-fazluhunar, safarehen vajib astura. So the poets begin to make their name rise to fame in Iran, but then make their fortune in India because the patronage has shifted from Iran proper, the courts of Khorasan 500 years previously to the courts of Delhi and Agra and so on and so forth. Or Sa'a-e-16th century, 17th century, he says pishaz-e-narchan shohraddash dar mulke-e-raab, seire mulkehen sa'a-e-raab wal-an-daab al-zikar. And finally, I get to my text number 10, and that's by Bidil. Unfortunately, very few Iranians know Bidil, but he is as important as Hafiz. And Bidil-e-shanasi is an important area of investigating this poet's thought, especially because he comes closest to a secular, hedonistic kind of thought as he articulates in his poetry. So Persian poet of India in the late 17th and early 18th century builds up on the figure of the archetypal lover in the Persian tradition, that's Majnun, to make his point about exile from human society. And here's my text number 10. First of all, I want to thank the people of the world for the day of your visit, it's been a long time. I wish I could have seen someone in the sea, and Bidil in the desert. Some of them were in the pocket of their pockets. I wish I could have seen someone in the sea. I wish I could have seen someone in the desert, and Bidil in the desert. And Bidil in the desert. And Bidil in the desert. In such articulations, these and other poets of the so-called Indian school in Persian poetry depict exile not in any corporeal form and not related to the lives of real flesh and blood creatures, such as the deer or us human beings. But through shadowy figures that inhabit a liminal space somewhere between this world and the next, between the known and the unknowable, between that which is experienced and that which can barely be imagined. From the solitary image of the fratricide cane through the ghost-like silhouettes of Khizr and Gag and Magag, the mythical presences as Homa, Anga, and Simur, we have an extension of the image of exile that connects the real to the fantasized. The history of British rule in India and the decline of Persian there is itself a huge area of investigation. I invite you to look into that. But my main concern is that through the 19th century, inspired by nationalistic feelings of different types and intensities, almost all diverse groups of Iranians began to redefine the relationship between the languages in which they spoke daily and the ones in which they express themselves when writing poetry. So you see a chasm opening up between what we call today the colloquial Persian and the language of literary Persian, especially the classical texts. In their quest for authentic and original identity, different nation states that spoke the same language, let's say, not only Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan, but the courts of Northern India, the Caucasus, and the Ottoman Empire. So these nation states born of such concerns developed divergent perceptions of the origins of their own nations. The waning of Persian and Caucasus and the Ottoman Empire and in the Indian subcontinent in the late 19th century brought about radically new configurations of Persian literature as limited to a few nation states, such as we know today. At the same time, Iran solidifies in the shape that we see today in our maps. One important development arising from this reconfiguration was the development of a literary language in Iran that helped problematic yet very important relations with the language of classical poetry. That's why so many people posit a revolutionary change, a kind of sea change between modern and classical traditions in Persian literature. Whereas I have argued elsewhere that really you can show stage by stage reliance of the moderns and the classical to even change it. In fact, you cannot distance yourself from a tradition, especially such a powerful tradition if you do not assimilate elements of it into your own discourse. Meanwhile, Iranian nationalism was making inroads into the minds and hearts of the country's citizens. Over the rubble of the linguistic homeland, that vast dwelling place of culture, various claimants to the legacy of classical Persian poetry began to build imaginary homes in smaller territories that are now the modern countries of Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, reducing distant memory, to distant memory, the remainder of the civilization once unified or at least in the imagination of its poets and other thinkers. They then had to invent an imaginary padlocks and crossbars, wooden or metal bolts and walls and barriers of all sorts to keep out the other claimants. And that's the unfortunate thing in modern era, how the pieces of that patrimony, that relic of the past is being fought over between Iranians, Afghanistan, of course Iranians because it's the most resourceful and the vastest of these cultures. It has been able more or less to appropriate all of it in the name of Iran. So that now every classical poet that had nothing to do with the land of Iran, such as Mathut Sa'a Salman or Abu Ha'af Sogdi or Udaki or anyone else, is now being named as Iranian. So they began to view the other contributors to this glorious tradition, not as brothers, but as others. At the same time, the demands of literary modernism fostered the new spirit of pilgrimage among the Iranian elite. The young and talented Iranians who traveled to Austria and France in Abbas Mirza's famed Caravans of Knowledge gave us a whole translation movement which really enabled us to build on later on in the century and all over the 20th century. I have a part that I talk about Khaterat Ha'ash Sayyya and Safar Nameh Ibrahim Bey by Zehra Abedin Maraghi. I'll leave that aside, but I'll go to my final paragraph. A generation or two later, men like Qazvini and Taqizadeh Khuda and Jamalzadeh and Hidayat literally went to school in Europe. They viewed Europe not as a site of exile, living or expatriate settlement, but as schools even shrines to be observed, touched and yes, explored for ennoblement, edification and emulation, points of comparison to be explored. And they did some of course in all sincerity for the greater good of the motherland, its people and yes, for rejuvenating Iran's literature. Tormented souls, they were indeed and the reading of the classics most clearly reflects that torment in their soul. They read the transnational and heterogeneous past of Persian literature from an evolving mythology of nationalist Iranian identity that negated the internationalism of Persian classics and erased the hybridized aspects of the literary past. Shuttling back and forth between the need for ever more ancient origins on the one hand and the desire for self origination between departure and return, between the desire for closure and the realization of literature's eternal open-endedness. They resembled nomads upon arrival in the pasture that they had sought far and long found land scorched. What they never realized was that their destination was always simply missing, not there, not existing in the world out there, but inside that tradition. But that's another story and you'll have to wait for it until tomorrow night. Thank you very much. Thank you.