Over the phone, not long ago, Linda, who is the couple’s only child, described the long conversations between her parents that would precede any decision. Regret seems not to have been an element of their emotional lives at all. In 1969, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection “ Of Being Numerous.”īy all accounts, the decision that the Oppens made in the winter of 1935 was not one they ever regretted. I mean, he did not write,” his daughter, Linda, said at a panel discussion several years ago. “He did not write letters, he didn’t even sign checks. “In a short time, we were no longer thinking. In New York’s Oneida County, the Oppens helped organize dairy farmers in a milk strike. They occupied the apartments of those threatened with eviction they secured rent and food aid from the relief bureau for those who were eligible. They joined the Communist Party and became members of the Workers Alliance. Mary painted, and George had recently published his first collection of poetry, “ Discrete Series,” with a preface by Ezra Pound. Their “interest in the arts,” as Mary calls it, was not negligible. “We said to each other, ‘Let’s work with the unemployed and leave our interest in the arts for a later time,’ ” Mary writes.

This, for George and Mary, was a turning point.

And then, at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International, the Communist Party proclaimed a Popular Front against Fascism. They spoke with the son of the founder of the Socialist Labor Party. Though they had always been leftists, Mary and George now wanted to find an organization with which they could ally themselves. At stoplights, “grown men, respectable men-our fathers-stepped forward to ask for a nickel, rag in hand to wipe our windshield,” Mary recalls in her memoir, “ Meaning a Life,” which was published in 1978. Back in the United States, which they had left in 1929, they were startled by the changes wrought by the Depression. Jews were fleeing Germany in Italy, Mussolini was an object of worship. The young couple had recently returned to New York after several years abroad. Which is better depends on the situation, but as a general rule you should pack your constant-size structures into a single blob while letting your variable-sized fields use the granular encoding.Late in 1935, the artist Mary Oppen and her husband, George, a poet, made a decision. The first, implicitly derived via GHC Generics, will use a granular encoding, indexing fields separately internally, while the second, derived via the StoreBlob newtype, will encode the data as a single unit. You may choose the granularity by which you encode your data types by choosing one of two auto-deriving patterns. To construct, you will need PopKeyEncoding instances. Construction is slow (multiple passes are made over the data to choose a good indexing structure), but querying should be fast, and space overhead should be much lower than Data.Map-on the data set I'm working with, Data.Map has 8.3x more overhead than PopKey-and the raw data transparently lives in an mmap'd region if you use storage, meaning the actual memory needed for usage is very low. PopKey gives you a static key-value storage structure backed by poppy indices.

Alex popkey