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Archive for December, 2011

The French Revolution constituted for the conscience of the dominant aristocratic class a fall from innocence, and upturning of the natural chain of events that resounded all over Europe; the old regime became, in their imaginary, a paradise lost. This explains why some romantic poets born in the higher classes were keen on seeing themselves as faded aristocrats, expelled from their comfortable milieu by a reverse of fortune or a design of destiny. Byron and Shelley are the prime instances of this vital pose. In The Giaour he writes on a vampiric character: “The common crowd but see the gloom/ Of wayward deeds and fitting doom;/ The close observer can espy/A noble soul, and lineage high.”

Byron departed from England leaving a trail of scandal over his marital conduct and since then saw himself as an exiled expatriate. Shelley was expelled from Oxford and he fell in disgrace by marrying an in-keeper’s daughter; he always struggled to reconcile his origin with his political ideas: “Shelley could find no way of resolving his own contradictory opinions” (Cronin, 2000).

This icon of the fallen aristocrat is rooted on another character revered by romantic poets: the fallen angel. As Mario Praz proves, miltonic Satan became the rebel figure of choice among romantic poets. Milton reversed the medieval idea of a hideous Satan and wrapped its figure with the epic grandeur of an angel fallen in disgrace. Many of the byronic heros share with Milton’s Satan this fallen-from-grace condition, such as Lara: “There was in him a vital scorn of all:/
As if the worst had fall’n which could befall,/ stood a stranger in this breathing world,/An erring spirit from another hurl’d” ( Lara XVIII 315-16)

There is another social factor that is behind the formation of the romantic myth of the vampire. In the early nineteen century, the foundations of what would later become a mass society were laid; the expansion of the press and of the reading public produced an increased diffusion for literary works and fostered movements such as the gothic and the sensation novel. Byron himself experienced the event of being turned into a proto-bestseller. The unification of literary taste and preferences that was a correlate to this social changes could not be more alien to the romantic notion of individual gusto and original sensibility. In order to combat this unifying forces, romantic poets revered the individual who stands outside society and is free from common concerns. Many of Byron’s heros look down on the masses from above, even though they walk among them and do not lean towards wordsworthian escapades into nature; they achieve to remain untainted by the masses in a sort of exile within the world akin to that of a ghost or a dammed spirit. This self-definition of Manfred is revelatory:

From my youth upwards
My spirit walk’d not with the souls of men,
Nor look’d upon the earth with human eyes;
The thirst of their ambition was not mine,
The aim of their existence was not mine;
My joys, my griefs, my passions, and my powers
Made me a stranger; though I wore the form,
I had no sympathy with breathing flesh, (Manfred II, ii, 50-58)

Not only Byron’s works contrived to produce the modern image of the vampire in relation to the Male Seducer archetype, but also some odd events in his life and the life of those surrounding him exercised a decisive influence. A critical study bundled with an anthology of vampire tales (Conde de Siruela, 2001) attributes to the short story The Vampire (1819) by John William Polidori the fixation of the “classical images of the literary vampire as a villanious, cold and enigmatic aristocrat; but, above all, perverse and fascinating for women”. Mario Praz, in the same line, also states that Byron was “largely responsible for the vogue of vampirism”. Polidori was the unfortunate doctor and personal assistant of Lord Byron who died half-crazy at 25. The idea for the tale published in 1819 came from the famous meetings at Villa Diodati on June 1816 between Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley and Polidori, in what was probably the most influential gathering for fantastic fiction in the history of modern literature. In order to pass the stormy and ether-fuelled nights, they agreed to write each one a ghost story. Mary Shelley (who was then 17 years old) got during these nights the idea of what later became Frankenstein and Polidori wrote the tale The Vampire that he would publish three years later. The story appeared in the New Monthly Magazine falsely attributed by the editor to Lord Byron (taking advantages of the aura of Satanism that surrounded the poet in the popular view to promote the sales of the magazine). A misguided Goethe hailed the story as the best that Lord Byron had ever written. The tale was, actually, a covert portrait of Lord Byron disguised as the vampire Lord Ruthven, a cruel gambler and killer of innocent girls. Polidori had introduced in the story fragments from an autobiographical and revengeful novel called Glenarvon written by Caroline Lamb, an ex-lover of Byron. The Lord´s reaction was a threat to the editor and the denouncing of a commercial imposture with his name. Eventually Stoker´s Dracula (1897) blended, according to Siruela (2001), this tradition derived from Polidori´s Lord Ruthven with some old romano-hungarian tales of wandering dead and enchanted castles, fixating thus the modern images of the vampire.
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According to information provided by http://www.plan-my-estate.com an estate planning and asset protection resource web site, a Fraudulent Transfer aka Fraudulent Conveyance is a transfer which a debtor makes for the purpose of defeating a creditor’s collection efforts against the debtor. This typically happens when, say, a debtor attempts to “sell” everything to his wife, cousin or business partner for $5 to keep his stuff out of the hands of his creditors. If the court figures out that the transaction is a sham to defeat the creditor, the court will set aside the transaction and make the person holding the assets give them to the creditor. Basically, Fraudulent Transfer Law is this: You can’t do anything which would impair the rights of your unsecured creditors, if you do then the courts will simply ignore what you have done.

There are thousands of individuals and companies that, through e:mails or via internet web sites, offer to help you protect your assets from creditors, ex spouses and or taxing authorities. Many of these individuals and businesses help you protect your assets by having you take actions that can or will put you in violation of the Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act. This could, in the long run, not only end up causing you to lose the assets that you were trying to protect but also cost you additional money in court costs, attorney’s fees or collection costs. Additionally, if you had a family member or friend help you, he or she could end up in court or having his or her credit harmed by having a judgment entered against him or her.

Many of these asset protection schemes involve transfering assets to someone you trust, a spouse, other family member, friend or a business that you form. As far as I can determin, if the creditor can prove that the transfer was done in order to avoid creditors, then under the Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act the creditor has several remedies depending on the circumstances. These remedies can include causing a judgment to be entered against both you and the transferee, causing the property transfered to be attached or levied upon or causing a lein to be placed against the property. There are other remedies set by statute. The one thing that all of these remedies have in common is that you, the transferee or both of you could be held liable for the costs of obtaining and enforcing the remedy.

Note: Another thing to think about. Over the years I have been involved in numerous asset search and recovery matters where the person
that the bank account, collectibles, stocks, bonds, real estate or other assets were transfered to ended up closing out, selling or otherwise transfering or encumbering the assets, leaving the original owner with nothing. No matter how much you trust someone today you never know what the future will bring.

Other services offer to set up a revocable living trust. They state that the assets then will belong to the trust and be protected from your creditors. As any competent attorney will advise you, this theory is completely false. Since the assets placed in the trust are yours and since you control the trust then you and the trust are the same thing and a creditor can go after any assets placed in the trust. While a revocable living trust may not be a fraudulent transfer, neither is it a way to protect your assets from creditors.

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What is an accent? An accent is the carryover of sounds from the speaker’s original language to the second language. When we are infants we literally have the ability to speak any language in the world. We are all born with the necessary speech mechanisms and the capability to learn any language. We end up speaking the language that we do solely by reinforcement. The sounds a baby hears and the speech patterns he is exposed to are the ones that she develops. Soon the baby gains the fine motor skill and control she needs to create sounds herself. The infant will begin by babbling and playing with sounds. Soon she is able to produce simple vowel/consonant combinations which maybe why mama and dada are often their first words, they can make the combination and the big reaction it elicits reinforces their efforts. By 18 months she will be able to produce about 20 words that have meaning and understand around 50 words. Now babies of course have the ultimate immersion experience. In order to obtain any control over their environment they must learn the language and they are surrounded by the language almost 24 hours a day.

Of course the second language learner does not have these advantages. Even if you are now living in an English speaking country, and attending classes to learn English you will still have opportunity to speak and hear your first language with friends and family, this is especially true in America a county of immigrants where finding a community of people with the same language background is possible.

Another challenge is the expectation factor. For many years you have heard a speech pattern and there is an expectation of what you will hear when others speak. You are predicting what sounds will come next based on your subconscious knowledge of language. I call this listening with an accent. It is necessary to break through this barrier, to really hear how others are speaking, to actively listen.

To listen is to learn, and I don’t mean that in an existential way. I really mean that if you can’t hear the way the sounds are produced you cannot learn how to produce the sound. Maybe that is why ETS added speaking and listening sections to the TOEFL. The two skills are so closely linked.
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