The “L-Word,” or Turning Fifty

This meditative essay by a writer and professor reflects on the milestone of reaching 50 years of age. The author relates his own experiences and those of his elder literary friends and colleagues who have felt comparable anxieties and coped with similar challenges toward aging and death. He records their own milestones on life’s journey as well as their insightful and often quite hopeful, if not always cheery, responses. Several of them, like the author, admit that turning 50 has entailed for them a coming to terms with the impossibility of realizing some immortality projects.

Taking ‘Big Government Conservatism’ Seriously? The Bush Presidency Reconsidered

This article reflects on the ongoing debate about the ideological direction of the Bush presidency and what it means for the future of US conservatism in domestic policy. The paper considers the dual nature of US conservatism and then goes on to explore the 'conservative promise' of the 2000 presidential election and the debate over what critiques of the Bush administration have come to call 'big government conservatism'. Finally, the article studies two examples of how this alleged 'big government conservatism' has been manifested. First, the article contemplates the administration's fiscal policy. Second it looks at the 2003 reform of the Medicare system. We argue that, although these two cases provide some ground to the idea of 'big government conservatism', in the end this phenomenon does not add up to a coherent policy vision. Overall, beyond tax cuts, the Bush administration has failed to implement a bold conservative agenda.     

'Neither man nor woman'? Female Transvestism,Object Relations and Mourning in George Moore's 'Albert Nobbs'

Heilmann offers a psychoanalytic reading of Moore's narrative of cross-gender impersonation 'Albert Nobbs'. First published in A Story-Teller's Holiday (1918) and later transferred to Celibate Lives (1927), the story features a woman who passes herself off as a man, until a chance meeting with another male impersonator happily equipped with a wife galvanizes her desire for a companion. Her inability to reveal the secret of her body to her prospective bride, however, coupled with the marked absence of any expression of sexual passion, leads to the break-up of the relationship, and Albert dies, a loner hoarding money in order to sublimate her thwarted longing for love. In this text the no (wo)man's land of cross-gender masquerade operates as a psychological marker of Albert's social (hence internal) lack of identity. An illegitimate child brought up by a nurse, she never knew her parents, whose absent presence was embodied by an allowance discontinued after their death. Drawing on Kleinian object-relations theory, Heilmann argues that Albert's (mis)performance of 'manhood' constitutes a subliminal quest for her missing parents, a desire always frustrated and ultimately displaced into the hard currency of material commodities. If Moore's story represents the female tranvestite as a castrated, sexless and depressed 'perhapser', an 'outcast from both sexes', fatherless and yet forever locked into a male-authored, patronymic text, Simone Benmussa, who in 1977 adapted the story for the stage ( The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs ), offers a more subversive reading of the female cross-dresser as a 'figure that disrupts' (Marjorie Garber) cultural categories and binary oppositions. The article ends with a consideration of Benmussa's revisionary strategies.     

übergang der Hauptmietrechte bei Ver?u?erung eines nur in Teilen des Mietobjekts betriebenen Unternehmens – Frisiersalon

Die Ver?u?erung eines von mehreren in einheitlichen Mietr?umen geführten selbst?ndigen Betriebes bewirkt wegen der ohne Zustimmung des Vermieters nicht m?glichen Zerlegung der Mietrechte den Rechtsübergang nicht.     

Abweichender Aufteilungsschlüssel nach § 19 WEG 1975 – Übergangsrecht zum 3. WÄG

Nach stRsp bezieht sich die Rückwirkung eines Gesetzes nur auf jene Tatbest?nde, für die sie ausdrücklich ausgesprochen wird. Das übergangsrecht des 3. W?G h?lt am Grundsatz fest, dass neues Recht (hier: nach § 19 Abs 2 WEG 1975 einstimmig schriftlich zu vereinbarender, vom Anteilsverh?ltnis abweichender Aufteilungsschlüssel der Liftkosten) nicht auf Sachverhalte anzuwenden ist, die vor Inkrafttreten der neuen Bestimmung endgültig und abschlie?end verwirklicht worden sind (hier: Mehrheitsvereinbarung der Wohnungseigentümer gem § 19 Abs 1 Z 1 WEG 1975 idF § 56 Z 2 MRG). Auch § 56 Abs 9 WEG 2002 ?ndert nichts daran, dass die seinerzeit von den Wohnungseigentümern geschlossene Mehrheitsvereinbarung nach § 19 Abs 1 Z 1 WEG 1975 weiterhin wirksam bleibt.     

Die Gemeinschaftsanlage

Seit 1982 erlangt die Frage, ob eine der gemeinsamen Benutzung dienende Anlage, wie eine zentrale W?rmeversorgungsanlage, ein Aufzug, eine mit Ger?ten ausgestattete Waschküche, eine Sauna, ein Schwimmbad aber auch eine technisch ausgestattete Garage denn doch keine Gemeinschaftsanlage sein kann, Bedeutung. Nur wenn es sich um eine Gemeinschaftsanlage handelt, hat der Liegenschaftseigentümer deren Erhaltungskosten zu tragen. Anderenfalls die Nutzer, wenn sie weiterhin nutzen wollen. Denn der Liegenschaftseigentümer kann zur Aufrechterhaltung des Betriebes, wenn es sich um keine Gemeinschaftsanlage handelt, seit 1982 gegen seinen Willen auch nicht verpflichtet werden. Ein Zinsminderungsanspruch bringt dem auf die Benutzung Angewiesenen wenig.     

近代中英关系史上的小斯当东--《小斯当东回忆录》译后余语

小斯当东是近代中英关系史中最具代表性的人物之一,他的商人、外交使节、议员等多重身份,使得他的经历富有故事性。他于1856年完成的《小斯当东回忆录》极具史料价值。从小斯当东的履历、小斯当东与中国、小斯当东与《大清律例》的翻译、小斯当东的英国议员经历等角度出发,可以展现《小斯当东回忆录》一书的主要内容,并勾勒出小斯当东在中英交往初期所发挥的独特作用。     

Computer based testing – Bolls v. W. Scott Street,Sec'y of Va. Bd. of Bar Exmnrs., August 11, 2009, case no. 090915

The most significant change to law licensing in the United States is the recent¹ reliance on computer-based testing for the bar exam in all of the fifty states. The following comment piece is meant to inform the computer and technology law community how the use of testing software must necessarily be accompanied by additional procedural protections and corrective processes that may not have existed previously. Chief among these is the availability of discovery of the item in question, namely in this case the essays in a computer-based bar exam, which constitutes evidence that is essential to vindicating one's rights when a software failure occurs.     

Looking from South Africa to the World: A Story of Identity for our Times

The article is a consideration of the question of identity in South Africa, and also in a global context. Just as South Africa has looked to the world in order to understand its place, so too the world might look to South Africa to illuminate patterns less immediately visible elsewhere. Far from being unrepresentative in the apartheid period, South Africa was the ‘state of exception’ that incarnated and concentrated global realities; equally in the current era the reciprocal relations between the South African and the global evoke haunting concerns. The article begins with a consideration of the ‘classic’ generation of anti-apartheid activists, including figures such as Nelson Mandela and Bram Fischer, as they fashioned a new sense of South African identity. Yet it goes on to consider what happens when the classic period is over, and older definitions and oppositions are no longer available. Here the navigations of fiction, both in South Africa and elsewhere, become significant, and the article examines the work of writers from Gordimer, Coetzee and Ndebele, to Caryl Phillips and W. G. Sebald. It ends with a contemplation of the current period, nearly twenty years after the democratic transition in South Africa. In the era of the Marikana massacre and other pressing developments, both music and fiction open up some of the ambiguities and obligations. Drawing on Agamben, I suggest the intrinsic mutuality of the ‘home’ and the ‘foreign’ in establishing a more promising—and challenging—sense of belonging and identity both in South Africa and the world.