Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941)
From Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories
A century ago, on May 8, 1919, the small press run by B. W. Huebsch, who had previously introduced American readers to D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and James Joyce’s Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published a debut story collection by an up-and-coming writer. Sales of Sherwood Anderson’s first two novels, Windy McPherson’s Son and Marching Men, and his poetry collection, Mid-American Chants, had been poor, and the editors at the firm that had published his first three books didn’t think much of the new stories, finding them “too gloomy.” So the author traveled to New York in late 1918 to find a new publisher and through a mutual acquaintance he met Huebsch, who agreed to issue the book the following year. Huebsch’s literary acumen once again paid off: by the time he merged his imprint with Viking Press in 1924 Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life had gone through five printings.
Later in life, Anderson remembered finishing the interconnected stories of Winesburg, Ohio “in a few months, one following the other, a kind of joyous time for me, the words and ideas flowing freely, very little revision to be done.” In fact, the composition of Winesburg was neither so rapid nor so effortless, and the extant manuscripts show considerable evidence of rewriting. He arranged and on more than one occasion rearranged the stories before submitting them for publication as a book. All told, he may have taken as long as two and a half years—from November 1915 to April 1918—to complete them.
Still, Anderson’s recollection of an intensely creative “few months” only mildly exaggerates the pace at which Winesburg came into being. He began, very probably, in November 1915, with “The Book of the Grotesque”—a metafictional preamble that gave him a working title for the collection—and the story “Hands.” Both selections were published in early 1916 in consecutive issues of Masses, a little magazine edited by Max Eastman and Floyd Dell. By November 1916 he reported he had written fifteen of these “intensive studies of people in my home town, Clyde, Ohio,” out of the two dozen in the published Winesburg.
“They were all grotesques,” Anderson wrote in the introductory section, which conjured an “old writer” working on a book:
All of the men and women the writer had ever known had become grotesques. . . .
For an hour the procession of grotesques passed before the eyes of the old man, and then, although it was a painful thing to do, he crept out of bed and began to write. Some one of the grotesques had made a deep impression on his mind and he wanted to describe it.
At his desk the writer worked for an hour. In the end he wrote a book which he called “The Book of the Grotesque.” It was never published, but I saw it once and it made an indelible impression on my mind.
Anderson later wrote to a friend, “I think the most absorbingly interesting and exciting moment in any writer’s life must come when he, for the first time, knows that he is a real writer.” That moment arrived for Anderson in late 1915, when he wrote “Hands,” and he often retold his account, with varying details, in the years ahead:
I was ill, discouraged, broke. I was living in a cheap rooming house. I remember that I went upstairs and into the room. It was very shabby. I had no relatives in the city and few enough friends. I remember how cold the room was. On that afternoon I had heard that I was to lose my job.
. . . There was some paper on a small kitchen table I had bought and brought up into the room. I turned on a light and began to write. I wrote, without looking up—I never changed a word of it afterwards—a story called “Hands.” It was and is a very beautiful story.
I wrote the story and then got up from the table at which I had been sitting, I do not know how long, and went down into the city street. . . . It must have been several hours before I got the courage to return to my room and read my own story.
It was all right. It was sound. It was real. I went to sit by my desk. A great many others have had such moments. I wonder what they did. For the moment I thought the world very wonderful, and I thought also that there was a great deal of wonder in me.
As with Anderson’s other boasts about the ease of writing Winesburg, his claim that he “never changed a word” in the story is belied by the manuscript’s subsequent revisions, softening and compressing the phrasing or making the descriptions of Wing Biddlebaum’s “handsy” behavior more ambiguous. But the gist of the story remained intact; Anderson would often refer to it as his “first authentic tale,” and it became the opening story of Winesburg, Ohio.
Note: The details about Winesburg’s publication history have been abridged from “The Note on the Texts” in the Library of America edition of Sherwood Anderson: Collected Stories.
10 Fascinating Facts About Ladybugs by Debbie Hadley
Debbie Hadley is a science educator with 25 years of experience who has written on science topics for over a decade. Updated January 25, 2019
Who doesn’t love a ladybug? Also known as ladybirds or lady beetles, the little red bugs are so beloved because they are beneficial predators, cheerfully chomping on garden pests such as aphids. But ladybugs aren’t really bugs at all. They belong to the order Coleoptera, which includes all of the beetles. Europeans have called these dome-backed beetles by the name ladybirds, or ladybird beetles, for over 500 years. In America, the name “ladybug” is preferred; scientists usually use the common name lady beetle for accuracy.
Although ladybugs (called Coccinellidae) are most often red or yellow with black dots, nearly every color of the rainbow is found in some species of ladybug, often in contrasting pairs. The most common are red and black or yellow and black, but some are as plain as black and white, others as exotic as dark blue and orange. Some species of ladybug are spotted, others have stripes, and still others sport a checked pattern. There are 4,300 different species of ladybugs, 400 of which live in North America.
Color patterns are connected to their living quarters: generalists that live pretty much anywhere have fairly simple patterns of two strikingly different colors that they wear year round. Others that live in specific habitats have more complex coloration, and some can change color throughout the year. Specialist ladybugs use a camouflage coloration to match the vegetation when they’re in hibernation and develop the characteristic bright colors to warn off predators during their mating season.
According to legend, European crops during the Middle Ages were plagued by pests. Farmers began praying to the Blessed Lady, the Virgin Mary. Soon, the farmers started seeing beneficial ladybugs in their fields, and the crops were miraculously saved from the pests. The farmers began calling the red and black beetles “our lady’s birds” or lady beetles. In Germany, these insects go by the name Marienkafer, which means “Mary beetles.” The seven-spotted lady beetle is believed to be the first one named for the Virgin Mary; the red color is said to represent her cloak, and the black spots her seven sorrows.
Startle an adult ladybug and a foul-smelling hemolymph will seep from its leg joints, leaving yellow stains on the surface below. Potential predators may be deterred by the vile-smelling mix of alkaloids and equally repulsed by the sight of a seemingly sickly beetle. Ladybug larvae can also ooze alkaloids from their abdomens.
Like many other insects, ladybugs use aposematic coloration to signal their toxicity to would-be predators. Insect-eating birds and other animals learn to avoid meals that come in red and black and are more likely to steer clear of a ladybug lunch.
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The ladybug lifecycle begins when a batch of bright-yellow eggs are laid on branches near food sources. They hatch as larvae in four to 10 days and then spend about three weeks feeding up—the earliest arrivals may eat some of the eggs that have not yet hatched. Once they’re well-fed, they’ll begin to build a pupa, and after seven to 10 days they emerge as adults. The insects typically live for about a year.
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If you’re unfamiliar with ladybug larvae, you would probably never guess that these odd creatures are young ladybugs. Like alligators in miniature, they have long, pointed abdomens, spiny bodies, and legs that protrude from their sides. The larvae feed and grow for about a month, and during this stage they often consume hundreds of aphids.
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Almost all ladybugs feed on soft-bodied insects and serve as beneficial predators of plant pests. Gardeners welcome ladybugs with open arms, knowing they will munch on the most prolific plant pests. Ladybugs love to eat scale insects, whiteflies, mites, and aphids. As larvae, they eat pests by the hundreds. A hungry adult ladybug can devour 50 aphids per day, and scientists estimate that the insect consumes as many as 5,000 aphids over its lifetime.
Because ladybugs have long been known to eat the gardener’s pestilent aphids and other insects, there have been many attempts to use ladybugs to control these pests. The first attempt—and one of the most successful—was in the late 1880s, when an Australian ladybug (Rodolia cardinalis) was imported into California to control the cottony cushion scale. The experiment was expensive, but in 1890, the orange crop in California tripled.
Not all such experiments work. After the California orange success, over 40 different ladybug species were introduced to North America, but only four species were successfully established. The best successes have helped farmers control scale insects and mealybugs. Systematic aphid control is rarely successful because aphids reproduce much more rapidly than ladybugs do.
You may have personally experienced the effects of one of the biological control experiments that had unintended consequences. The Asian or harlequin ladybug (Harmonia axyridis) was introduced to the United States in the 1980s and is now the most common ladybug in many parts of North America. While it did depress the aphid population in some crop systems, it also caused declines in native species of other aphid-eaters. The North American ladybug is not endangered yet, but its overall numbers have decreased, and some scientists believe that is the result of harlequin competition.
Some other negative effects are also associated with harlequins. In late summer, the ladybug gets ready for its winter dormancy period by dining on fruit, specifically ripe grapes. Because they blend in with the fruit, the ladybug gets harvested with the crop, and if the winemakers don’t get rid of the ladybugs, the nasty taste of the “knee bleed” will taint the vintage. H. axyridis also like to over-winter in houses, and some houses are invaded in each year by hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of ladybugs. Their knee-bleeding ways can stain furniture, and they occasionally bite people.
Near large bodies of water all over the world, massive numbers of Coccinellidae, dead and alive, occasionally or regularly appear on the shorelines. The largest washup to date happened in the early 1940s when an estimated 4.5 billion individuals were spread over 21 kilometers of shoreline in Libya. Only a small number of them were still alive.
Why this occurs is still not understood by the scientific community. Hypotheses fall into three categories: ladybugs travel by floating (they can survive afloat for a day or more); the insects aggregate along shorelines because of a reluctance to cross large bodies of water; low-flying ladybugs are forced ashore or into the water by windstorms or other weather events.
If food is scarce, ladybugs will do what they must to survive, even if it means eating each other. A hungry ladybug will make a meal of any soft-bodied sibling it encounters. Newly emerged adults or recently molted larvae are soft enough for the average ladybug to chew.
Eggs or pupae also provide protein to a ladybug that has run out of aphids. In fact, scientists believe that ladybugs will deliberately lay infertile eggs as a ready source of food for their young hatchlings. When times are tough, a ladybug may lay an increased number of infertile eggs to give her babies a better chance of surviving.
CitationHadley, Debbie. “10 Fascinating Facts About Ladybugs.” ThoughtCo, Jan. 25, 2019, thoughtco.com/fascinating-facts-about-ladybugs-1968120.Hadley, Debbie. (2019, January 25). 10 Fascinating Facts About Ladybugs. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/fascinating-facts-about-ladybugs-1968120Hadley, Debbie. “10 Fascinating Facts About Ladybugs.” ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/fascinating-facts-about-ladybugs-1968120 (accessed April 24, 2019).copy citation
The little orphan girl from my city often stood right outside the local recreation center, looking in through the window. She did not give anyone a sense that she was sad. She would often be heard singing a little tune, one I could not make out. I thought if she could sing, she must not be in that sad a shape. I guess maybe I was not able to understand her situation fully. She never made a sigh when people would just pass her by. She had such charm, as she watched other children with much more than her, pass her way. For me, that would have been enough to make me sad and definitely to have a self-pity moment. She had torn clothes and her hair was a mess. Surely someone would take notice, but they never did. She was covered in the dirt and dust of her surroundings and still outshined others. I myself admired her so.
This one day, I walked to see if she was still there, at that same window, and she wasn’t. I had to take a step back, for I had no idea where she had gone. She was as common to see as the birds in the sky, for me. I contemplated many scenarios in my mind of what had happened to her. She couldn’t have just disappeared. It was as if the world did not even miss her, everyone was going on about their own business, despite. She did not just float away. I just knew it. So I started asking questions. Anyone around, I asked about that little orphan girl. No one had an answer for me. I figured I should stifle my ongoing questions about her, as to not draw attention to her, should she return. I headed towards home with her on my mind.
As I reached the driveway to my home, I saw a red balloon float by overhead. I wondered if that little orphan girl had seen that same balloon. I never saw that little orphan girl again, but her spirit and her way of dealing with life touched me to the core. I bet if you talked to her she would have had so much to say. I will never forget her. I hope wherever she is, she found a home, and love to match her soul.
Just because someone is not like us does not mean they are worthless. We can learn a lot by observing. Everyone is deserving of love and a place to belong. Don’t judge a book from its cover. Some of the best people in life have had the most terrible of situations.
MwsR
I was nominated by Stu, thank you so much. Go check out his uplifting, spiritual journey of forgiveness and enlightenment. He gives his followers good advice and thoughts to ponder.
https://stubaby777.wordpress.com/2019/05/03/the-sunshine-blogger-award-2019/
He gave me some questions. They are below.
The Rules:
Thank the blogger who nominated you.
Answer the 11 questions the blogger asked you.
Nominate 11 new blogs to receive the award and write them 11 new questions.
List the rules and display the Sunshine Blogger Award in your post/or on your blog.
Notify the nominees about it by commenting on one of their blog posts.
Here are my questions for you:
1. What is the weirdest thing you have ever eaten or should I say attempted to eat?
Crawldad. Crayfish.
Yucko
2. What is the hardest thing you have overcome?
Not being loved like a daughter should, from her dad.
3. What is the one thing you have to have every day?
Coffee and diabetic meds and insulin shot
4. Why do you think it is so hard for most men to share their true feelings with the ones they love?
They are afraid of appearing weak.
5. If you are married, what do you treasure the most about your spouse?
He tells me how beautiful he thinks I am, and tells me he loves me everyday. Plus he overlooks my flaws.
If dating, what about the one you are seeing?
If single, what would you are you looking for?
6. Where did the term, without using Google or any other search engine, by the skin of my teeth come from?
I do not know.
I think it refers to having a really tight grip and fearing that you will loose it.
7. What are you passionate about and why?
Animals. They are deserving of our love and appreciate.
Kids. They are innocent and pure.
Family. They mean anything and everything to me.
God. He gives me all of the above and deserves my all.
8. What topics, if any, have you wanted to write about but haven’t because you feel your “fan base” would not approve?
More about my faith. I don’t want to offend anyone but I have so much to share
I will do it more and more, too. I have a little.
9. Someone who has hurt you deeply in the past reaches out to you. They have done so to make ammends because the Lord told them to. Do you forgive or do you tell them to bugger off?
Forgive them but be done with them.
10. Now, let’s flip that question a little. The Lord tells you to reach out to someone you hurt in the past. Do you do so or do you ignore the prompting of the Holy Spirit out of fear?
You should do what he tells you. Regardless of your own feelings. Give it all to God.
11. Oh gosh, you are running late for work, grab a quick cup of coffee, get dressed quickly, slip on a pair of shoes and jet. When you arrive at work people snicker when you walk in because you slipped on two different pairs of shoes. What do you do?
Laugh with them…or take your lunch break going to get a pair that matches.
Or cry…..when they see you crying, they will stop laughing…maybe.
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Good questions. I will keep those for my nominees.
I nominate
CUREJOY EDITORIAL
JUL 17, 2017
Causes bowel problemsMake you chokeCauses allergic reactionWorsen diverticulitisTriggers prostate tumors
The tiny chia seed can help with weight loss, diabetes, and hypercholesteremia. Each serving gives you a healthy dose of fiber, protein, and omega-3 fatty acids. Unfortunately, it may bring on constipation, flatulence, diarrhea, and an allergic reaction. Chia seeds can also cause thinning of your blood. They could even be a choking hazard if you don’t prep the seeds correctly.
Chia seeds, a superfood dating back to Aztec times, are now enjoying a rebirth of sorts. They feature in every nutritional A-list as a rich source of fiber, omega-3 fats, protein, vitamins, and minerals.
Granted, chia seeds are a great source of nutrition as part of a balanced diet and they are also constantly marketed as a weight-loss aid and wolfed down in large quantities by weight watchers, but you can have too much of a good thing, and this superfood is no exception. Here are some side effects of chia seeds you need to watch out for.
Chia seeds are very high in fiber content – at nearly 11 gm per ounce serving, it takes care of a sizable chunk of the American Dietetic Association’s recommended fiber intake of 38 g for men and 25 g for women for the day.
Soak 1 tbsp chia seeds in 1 cup water overnight. Or grind them and use in smoothies.
But a high-fiber diet doesn’t work for every body type. Too much fiber in one go can lead to flatulence, constipation, and diarrhea.
It’s a good idea to eat chia seeds with a lot of water or soak them first. Soaking makes it easier to digest them. It also offers the added benefit of releasing all the nutrients stored inside.
Soak 1 tbsp chia seeds in 1 cup water overnight. Or grind them and use in smoothies.ADVERTISEMENT
Chia seeds have gained notoriety as a choking hazard. As one Time magazine report highlighted, incorrect consumption can lead to complications. When you don’t presoak your chia seeds or eat them without roasting, you run the risk of gagging or choking on them. You may even end up in the ER as a result.
If you eat chia seeds raw, they can absorb water (about 27 times their dry weight) in your food pipe, grow large, and clog up the food pipe, choking you.
Why? Because the seed when dry and unroasted absorbs as much as 27 times its dry weight in water. It turns gelatinous and expands hugely, plump with water. This sticky mass can get stuck in your esophagus, making you choke. Always soak the seeds or roast them.
As they are loaded with omega-3 fatty acids, chia seeds can act as natural blood thinners, preventing your blood from clotting. If you are already taking blood-thinning medication like warfarin, steer clear of chia. For the same reason, avoid chia seeds right after a surgery to avoid excessive bleeding.
People with diverticulitis develop bulging sacs or pockets called diverticula along the lining of the large intestine. These get inflamed and try to push out through the colon wall, causing pain (usually on the left side of the abdomen), bloating, or diarrhea.
While one cure for diverticular diseases is a high-fiber diet, and chia seeds are high in fiber, you should avoid them when an attack is under way. These tiny seeds often get stuck in the diverticula and inflame them.ADVERTISEMENT
If you have a seed or nut allergy, you may be allergic to chia seeds too.
Chia seeds have a lot of protein in them and that’s bad news if you are allergic to the protein in chia. A 100 gm serving has about 16.54 gm of protein. For those with a nut or seed allergy, chia seeds may be off the table.
Reactions can range from skin rashes and hives to watery eyes, vomiting, and diarrhea. Also watch out for repetitive coughing, wheezing, difficulty swallowing, and a hoarse throat. You may also feel dizzy. As inflammation flares up in the larynx, tongue, and mouth, you could find it difficult to talk and even breathe.
If your allergy is more severe, you may go into shock, your pulse may weaken, and your skin may turn pale or blue. Get tested to check anyway.
The case for and against chia when it comes to prostate cancer isn’t closed just yet. While some research indicates it could decrease the risk of prostate tumor growth, other research contradicts this.
Recent research says chia seeds increase prostate tumor formation. Don’t overindulge.
A 2010 study claimed that the omega-3 fatty acid alpha-linolenic acid did not increase prostate cancer risk and that it even marginally decreased the risk.
But a recent 2013 study indicates that eating foods high in omega-3 fatty acids – like chia seeds which contain alpha-linolenic acid – could trigger the formation of prostate tumors. This could imply an increased risk of prostate cancer.
The jury is still out on this one, but you may want to hold off on binging on chia.
Have no more than 1–1.5 tablespoons up to twice a day. Always soak them the night before.
On the whole, the chia seed is a powerhouse of goodness. No wonder every nutritionist loves it. Ayurveda also recommends adding chia to your regular diet, conscious of its high-fiber effects.
But since the superfood is still not fully understood, more studies will be needed before it can be declared safe for those with conditions like high triglycerides and low blood pressure, and even pregnant women.
Just make sure that you don’t rely on just chia seeds for your daily fiber intake. If you are aiming to lose weight, having more of it won’t help you lose much. After all, you will have added on extra calories from the seeds as well.
Typically, 1–1.5 tablespoons taken up to twice a day should be fine for most people. That’s the equivalent of a 20 gm serving that has 139 Cal.
Mws R Writings 