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 Posted: Mon Dec 22, 2008 4:22 pm Post subject: |
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From Impossible Odds:
Chuck Amuck
The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist
Paperback
By Chuck Jones
| Quote: | With my fascinated nose waffled against the rust-brown screen of our second-floor sleeping porch, I watched him tiptoe through the dune grass and yellow oyster daisies to the foot of our back porch, then look appraisingly up at me and utter a single laconic "Mckgnaow."* (From James Joyce's Ulysses, but Johnson said it first).
He moved into our house that morning, bag and baggage. The bag was that cat bag all cats live in, one of the few characteristics he shared with other cats. He sat fat and walked thin like other cats, but the resemblance to other cats stopped there.
His baggage was what appeared to be a very old, very used tongue depressor, fastened securely about his neck with a bit of tarry string, bearing in violet indelible ink the crude inscription: JOHNSON. Whether this was his name, that of his former proprietors, or his blood type we unable to determine, since he discussed his past not at all and responded to the name Johnson as well as any other, which was not at all...
... Mark Twain said that if you carried a cat home by the tail you would get information that would be valuable to you all your life. Such information could more conveniently be obtained by meddling with Johnson's tongue depressor.
Whatever else it represented, that bit of tongue depressor was Johnson's sole possession: his entire estate, his chattel, his treasure. It was all he had to leave to his eldest son, and he treated it as a sacred object. Any attempt to remove it resulted in what can only be described as a physical threat of the most nerve-racking implications. Touch his treasure and Johnson simply went into a lightning somersault, coupled with a full-bodied, four-footed karate chop, in which the meddler suddenly found his hand caught in an inverted cat vise of sixteen needle-pointed claws, the offending hand flat against Johnson's stomach, his eyes cobra-like, scythe-like slits of pure malevolence - one of Johnson's feline canines caught on his lower lip, its amethyst point devoid of dentine, sharp as a scalpel, blue as a diamond. At this point the disturber of the sacred tongue depressors was unharmed, but the slightest move elicited a corresponding slight extension of those sixteen curved stilettos. It was not unlike having one's hand in a boxing glove full of fishhooks. If one wanted to get out - and one did - it would require the minimal help of four fearless human assistants of fantastic manual desterity. It was possible to escape only if these assistants moved with split-second, simultaneous accuracy to pull Johnson's paws apart. This method allowed one to escape with only minor wounds, but the safest yet most unnerving way was to wait it out until Johnson had made up his mind that you were only kidding. This might take from five minutes to a half hour and few people had that kind of courage or were that free of panic or hysteria. So most unfortunates tried to snatch the hand free immediately upon being trapped, with results too bloodily ineffectual to be described. Only a half grapefruit gently dropped over his face like an ether cone would relax Johnson enough so his claws, like spines of a cactus, could be individually picked from the threatened extremity.
While half a grapefruit would anethetize Johnson, the most interesting way of serving Johnson his passion fruit was to present it to him in its glorious entirety: a whole unsullied, uncut, large grapefruit. ... (-- pgs. 14-19) |
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| Posted: Thu Jan 08, 2009 1:04 pm Post subject: |
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Over Seventy
An autobiography -- with digressions
Hardcover
By P.G. Wodehouse
| Quote: | A writer who is tempted to write a book telling the world how good he is ought to remember the reply made by Mr. Glyn Johns to an interviewer at Fort Erie, Ontario last spring. Ah, Fort Erie, Ontario, in the springtime, with the chestnut tress a-blossom... on the occasion of his winning the raw-egg-eating championship of Canada by getting outside twenty-four raw eggs in fourteen minutes.
A thing I never understand, when I read an item like that in the paper, is how these fellows do it. How, I mean, does a man so shape himself that he becomes able to eat twenty-four raw eggs in fourteen minutes?
One feels the same thing about performers at the circus. How did the man who dives through a hole in the roof into a small tank first get the impulse? One pictures him studying peacefully for the Church, without a thought in his mind of any other walk in life when suddenly, as he sits poring over his theological books, a voice whispers in his ear.
"This is all very well," says the voice, "but what you were really intended to do was to dive through holes in the roof into tanks. Do not stifle your individuality. Remember the parable of the talents."
And he throws away his books and goes out to see an agent. Some sort of spiritual revelation like this no doubt happened to Mr. Johns.
From his remark to the interviewer, "I owe it all to my mother", I piece his story together like this. His, as I see it, was a happy home, one of those typical Canadian homes where a united family lives its life of love and laughter, but he found the most extraordinary difficulty in getting any raw eggs. No stint of boiled, and on Sundays generally a couple poached on toast, but never raw. And all the time he was conscious of this strange power within him.
"If only they would let me get at the raw eggs!" he would say to himself. "There, I am convinced, is where my genius lies." (From Chapter Six, Raw Eggs, Cuckoos and Patrons, at p. 71) |
What, o my Frostback brothers, does this say of us and of our beloved homeland?
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| Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2009 11:12 am Post subject: |
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From Loaded Dice:
Where the Stress Falls
Essays
Hardcover
By Susan Sontag
| Quote: | Nobody looks through a book of pictures of women without noticing whether the women are attractive or not.
To be feminine, in one commonly felt definition, is to be attractive, or to do one's best to be attractive, to attract. (As being masculine is being strong.) While it is perfectly possible to defy this imperative, it is not possible for any woman to be unaware of it. As it is thought a weakness in a man to care a great deal about how he looks, it is a moral fault in a woman not to care enough. Women are judged by their appearance as men are not, and women punished more by the changes brought about by aging. Ideals of appearance such as youthfulness and slimness are in large part now created and enforced by photographic images. And, of course, a primary interest in having photographs of well-known beauties to look at over the years is seeing just how well or badly they negotiate the shame of aging.
In advanced consumer societies, it is said, these "narcissistic" values are more and more the concern of men as well. But male primping never loosens the male lock on initiative taking. Indeed, glorying in one's appearance is an ancient warrior's pleasure, an expression of power, an instrument of dominance. Anxiety about personal attractiveness could never be thought defining of a man: a man is, first of all, seen. Women are looked at. (From A Photograph Is Not an Opinion. Or Is It?, pgs. 240-241) |
| Quote: | Imagine a book of pictures of women in which none of the women could be identified as beautiful. Wouldn't we feel that the photographer had made some kind of mistake? Was being mean-spirited? Misogynistic? Was depriving us of something that we had a right to see? No one would say the equivalent thing of a book of portraits of men.
There were always several kinds of beauty: imperious beauty, voluptuous beauty, beauty signifying the character traits that fitted a woman for the confines of genteel domesticity - docility, pliancy, serenity. Beauty was not just loveliness of feature and expression, an aesthetic ideal. It also spoke to the eye about the virtues deemed essential in women.
For a woman to be intelligent was not essential, not even particularly appropriate. It was in fact considered disabling and likely to be inscribed in her appearance. Such is the fate of a principal character in The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins's robustly, enthrallingly clever novel, which appeared in 1860, just before (Victorian England photographer Julia Margaret) Cameron started making her portraits. Here is how this woman is introduced, early int he book, in the voice of its young hero:
The Woman in White
DVD
Based on the novel by Wilkie Collins
I looked from the table to the window farthest from me, and saw a lady standing at it, with her back turned towards me. The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not fat; her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays. She had not heard my entrance into the room; and I allowed myself the luxury of admiring her for a few moments, before I moved one of the chairs near me, as the least embarrassing means of attracting her attention. She turned towards me immediately. The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from teh far end of the room set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window - and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps - and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer - and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly!
Reveling in the effrontery and delights of the appraising male gaze, the narrator has noted that, seen from behind and in long shot, the lady satisfies all the criteria of female desirability. Hence his acute surprise, when she turns and comes toward him, at her "ugly" face (it is not allowed to be just plain or homely), which, he explains, is a kind of paradox:
Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more flatly contradicted - never was the fair promise of a lovely figure more strangely and startlingly belied by the face and head that crowned it. The lady's complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down her upper lip was almost a moustache. She had a large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw; prominent, piercing, resolute brown eyes; and thick, coal-black hair, growing unusually low down on her forehead. Her expression - bright, frank, and intelligent - appeared, while she was silent, to be altogether wanting int hose feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability, without which the beauty of the handsomest woman is beauty incomplete.
Marian Halcombe will turn out to be the most admirable character in Collins's novel, awarded every virtue except the capacity to inspire desire. ...
To see such a face as this set on shoulders that a sculptor would have longed to model - to be charmed by the modest graces of action through which the symmetrical limbs betrayed their beauty when they moved, and then to be almost repelled by the masculine form and masculine look of the features in which the perfectly shaped figure ended - was to feel a sensation oddly akin to the helpless discomfort familiar to us all in sleep, when we recognise yet cannot reconcile the anomalies and contradictions of a dream.
Collins's male narrator is touching a gender fault line, which typically arouses anxieties and feelings of discomfort. The contradiction in the order of sexual stereotypes may seem dream-like to a well-adjusted inhabitant of an era in which action, enterprise, artistic creativity, and intellectual innovation are understood to be masculine, fraternal orders. ...
In a woman beauty is something total. It is what stands, in a woman, for character. ...
... To be sure, what has done the most to change the stereotypes of frivolity and fecklessness afflicting women are not the labors of the various feminisms, indispensable as these have been. It is the new economic realities that bolige most American women (including most women with small children) to work outside their homes. The measure of how much things have not changed is that a woman earns between one-half and three-fourths of what a man earns in the same job. And nearly all occupations are still gender-labeled: with the exception of a few occupations (prostitute, nurse, secretary) where the reverse is true and it needs to be specified if the person is a man, one has to put "woman" in front of most job titles when it's a woman holding them; otherwise the assumption will always be that one is referring to a man. (-- pgs. 243-248) |
The Male Biological Clock
The Startling News About Aging, Sexuality and Fertility in Men
Hardcover
By Harry Fisch, M.D.
Get this:
Harper's
Magazine Subscription
Findings
March, 2009
| Quote: | | A British study found that London traders with relatively long ring fingers earn eleven times as much money as do men with short ring fingers, and a survey found that female investors' portfolios recently lost only one third as much value as those of male investors. ... (-- p. 84) |
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| Posted: Thu Feb 26, 2009 11:00 am Post subject: |
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Alfred and Emily
Hardcover
By 2007 Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing
| Quote: | So much has been written about mothers and daughters, and some of it by me. That nothing has ever much changed is illustrated by the old saying, 'She married to get away from her mother." Martha Quest was, I think, the first no-holds-barred account of a mother-and-daughter battle. It was cruel, that book. Would I do it now? But what I was doing was opart of the trying to get free. I would say Martha Quest was my first novel, being autobiographical and direct. My first novel, The Grass is Singing was the first of my real novels. ...
I hated my mother. I can remember that emotion from the start, which it is easy to date by the birth of my brother. Those bundling, rough, unkind, impatient hands: I was afraid of them and of her, but more of her unconscious strengths.
I was six when I ran away for the first time. ... I knew that when - if - I got to the station, they would not allow me on to a train. I was afraid and went meekly back home and into bed without anyone knowing. I did it again. This was a cry for help, like cutting one's wrists or taking an overdose. My mother's way of dealing with it was to ring up neighbours and, with fond laughter, tell them of my exploits. 'She got as far as the Matthews turn-off. What a silly child.'
It would never have occurred to her to think that she might be at fault. ...
And then I was thirteen and something very good happened, the best. I got measles, and with ten or so other girls was put into an empty house, without supervision, with medicines, meals brought in from the hospital and a nurse dropping in every day or so to look us over.
In those days quarantine for measles took six weeks. They put us on our honour not to go near any unathorized person.
Towards the end of the time some girls fretted, but if you are covered with a rash and feeling low there is little inducement to be seen by anyone. A couple of girls put on bathing costumes, lay around on the lawns and practised a haughty indifference to the boys who sometimes leaned along the fences, jeering. But all around the garden were big notices: 'Quarantine for Measles, Keep Out.' That was such a good time. Perfect isolation, peace, no pressures. I understood how I could be, how life might be. Letters came in. My mother wrote every day, saying she was arranging tutoring for this, lessons in that. Her letters made me wild with anger. Then she arrived at the perimeter fence, and gesticulated: she was leaving food parcels. We were stuffing ourselves with the good food they sent in, and did not need cake and sweets.
As usual, when I actually saw my mother, a lonely, unhappy, ill-looking woman, and her pleading eyes, I was wild with pity for her, and I wished, oh, wished, she would not come into town, send food, write letters. We were supposed to be doing homework; exercises of all kinds arrived regularly. I don't remember doing any. We sat about, tried on each other's clothes ... We talked, we did nothing, we dreamed. Of all the lucky things that have happened to me in my life, this dose of measles counts as one of the best. (FromPart Two, Alfred and Emily; Two Lives, pgs. 178-182) |
Martha Quest
Paperback
The Grass Is Singing
Paperback
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| Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2009 10:52 am Post subject: |
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From Loaded Dice:
Singing My Him Song
Hardcover
By Malachy McCourt
| Quote: | When Diana and myself searched for the residential facilities for Nina, it was with the expectation that we would find a permanent, loving home for her. A place with the trained people in the facilities to help her acquire ordinary life skills such as feeding and dressing herself. ...
Our next stop was Willowbrook State School for the Retarded on Staten Island, another institution in a bucolic setting. From their very comfortable and spacious houses atop small hills, the director and his senior staff had splendid views of lovely sweeping greenswards on several hundred acres of wooded lands.
They told us there was a two-year waiting list, but if we consented to admit Nina through the hepatitis program, she could be placed immediately. As it was explained to us, they were testing a new vaccine, and it was nearly totally effective, except for a few small glitches. They also told us that as 100 per cent of the residents got hepatitis, it would be advisable to get this vaccine anyway. What they didn't tell us was that the program was totally experimental, and that the residents at Willowbrook were the guinea pigs. Nor did they mention that the U.S. Army was funding the program.
Yes, parents and relatives did give consent, but as the ramifications of hepatitis and the hepatitis program were not explained fully - indeed, obfuscation was the order of the day - it was not "informed" consent. Of course, nobody would believe that the noble and honorable United States government would ever use innocents in a disease-inducing project. When I asked, much later, why monkeys were not used in the experiments, I was told that monkeys were very expensive. ...
Diana and myself were invited to join the Benevolent Society for Retarded Children, Willowbrook Division, a subgroup of the National Association for the Help of Retarded Children. Both of these groups were moribund and resistant to change. Their main function seemed to be having annual lunches and dinners to honor the self-satisfied directors and commissioners of the various institutions that were quietly and systematically destroying the residents of their hell-holes.
But we looked around carefully, and slowly the full savagery and horror of Willowbrook State School began to emerge. We were surreptitiously contacted by some folk who were working at this awful place, and they put us in contact with other parents who had not been brutalized by imposed guilt or fear of retaliation against their kids. Dr. Mike Wilkins and Elizabeth Lee, a social worker, began talking to the press, though forbidden to do so by the director, Dr. Jack Hammond, a dour sourpuss of a man.
Also leading the charge was Dr. Bill Bronston, a dynamic, intense man, so suffused with passion and compassion that there were days he was so emotionally charged he could hardly speak. Bronston was tenured and could not be dismissed except for cause, but Mike Wilkins and Elizabeth Lee were in a precarious position, as they were not tenured employees and were in danger of losing their jobs.
Ira Fisher, another social worker, took us on a tour of the back wards. When he opened the thick, heavy doors, I was assaulted by smells and sights and sounds that were so awful I didn't want to believe what was in front of me. A look at Diana told me she was stunned by the desperate savagery of this pitiliess place, littered with twisted and grotesque bodies, writhing and rocking on floors gleaming with the slime of every excretion a human body can produce. Strange, high-pitched howls and low groans rent the air interspersed with dervish-like leaping and jibbering beings. The hard, spare floors and walls reverberated with a deafening, dissonant symphony. Not only were some of the residents retarded, they were driven totally mad by the conditions of their so-called state school.
These "recreational" areas held as many as 80 residents, with perhaps three attendants to administer to their needs. High in the corners of these dank dungeons, there flickered the everpresent television, showing soap operas with sleek men agonizing over imaginary lost millions and perfect females weeping over imaginary lost loves. Amidst these insane horrors, with soap operas playing out above their heads, the attendants, no less battered by the conditions than their charges, tried to shuttle and cajole the residents to the lavatory, or to lunch or to dinner, which would last all of five minutes.
... Among the co-conspirators was one of the bravest people I've ever met, one Bernard Carabello, a 20-year-old man who had been a resident of Willowbrook for 16 years. Bernard was diagnosed as mentally retarded, and it was forcefully suggested to his mother that she institutionalize him, which she did, when he was four.
As he was considered retarded, the officials spoke openly in front of him, and he fed us information about what was going on inside the facilities. If it had been known he was funneling this intelligence to us, he would have been beaten and put into one of the isolation cells, or they might have designated him a 'biter,' and, as was done with those so designated, pulled all his teeth. Without the benefit of anesthetic.
Bernard would later go on to become a prominent activist in all areas connected with the handicapped. He earns a good salary and travels extensively hither and yon, giving talks and consulting wherever he is needed. (-- pgs. 127-139) |
About the Willowbrook court decisions:
| Quote: | From: "Library Archives" <archives>
To: "editor" <editor>
Sent: Monday, April 10, 2006 7:03 AM
Subject: Re: Malachy McCourt and Willowbrook
Dear L.M. Murray,
As far as I know, the consent judgments are not available online. In some cases, they are unavailable even on Lexis-Nexis. We have print copies of anything that we've listed in our guide, and they are available through some other libraries.
Catherine Carson, Assistant Archivist
Archives & Special Collections
College of Staten Island Library |
Becoming pally with legendary disability advocates, Diana and Malachy McCourt:
| Quote: | From: FAMILY804@aol.com
To: Editor@bcdisabilities.com
Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2006 7:12 AM
Subject: Malachy McCourt's 75th Birthday and Fundraiser
Attached please find your invitation to my 75th Birthday Party and Fundraiser. Pulitzer prize winning author Frank McCourt will be opening the show. Music will be provided by David Amran and Mary Courtney. This should be a great evening. Please invite a friend.
If you cannot open the attached invitation, please visit www.symphonyspace.com and look for the September 20th listing of this event.
Malachy McCourt |
Alas, we must decline:
| Quote: | From: editor
To: FAMILY804@aol.com
Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2006 3:39 PM
Subject: Re: Malachy McCourt's 75th Birthday and Fundraiser
Oh, you mad Irishman! Governor indeed.
I cannot think of anything I'd rather do than kick up my heels with the beloved McCourts of New York at Symphony Space, venue of some of the most memorable literary readings ever recorded. I know this because I have a bunch, which cost a bundle, and they will not let you purchase just one tape even when some villainous wag in a hospital pinches Jerry Stiller (the real one) reading The Anarchists' Convention, but never mind that.
I love all the brothers' books and have purchased all in their various forms, which also cost a bundle. Hied it once in a downpour over to the Chan Centre to hear Frank read from T'is a few years back. (Remember the Irish Times headline? T'isn't! What bounders!)
Unfortunately, I will have to deprive you of my charming company as crossing that border now with the Busher's banditos at the ready scares the bejabbers out of me. I will, however, mark the date on my calendar and play a Pogues CD over a pint in your honor. Quaere whether a pay per view podcast might not allow greater participation. Consider it.
In the meantime, Malachy and Diana continue to enjoy plenty of traffic at my Disability Heroes forum, where I have shamelessly scalped a large portion of of the book describing your good work on behalf of Willowbrook's foresaken inmates:
http://www.bcdisabilities.com/bcdisforum/viewtopic.php?p=285&sid=0d927b60c437dc06bf225c2fa65b25d2#285 . Those of us who are today bringing forward new cases of similar institutional abuse owe you a debt of gratitude, so thanks a tonne!
And a very, very happy 75th! Congratulations! If you guys are ever in Vancouver on the Left Coast of Canada, please look us up and we'll dine you like kings.
With much love and admiration,
L.M. Murray
Editor@bcdisabilities.com
http://www.bcdisabilities.com
Tracking disability justice initiatives worldwide. |
Symphony Space
(Selected Shorts A Celebration of the Short Story, Vol. I)
Featuring Jerry Stiller reading The Anarchists' Convention by John Sayles
Audio Cassette
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| Posted: Mon May 11, 2009 11:47 am Post subject: |
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From Gambles at Law:
A Tale of Two Cities
Paperback
By Charles Dickens
| Quote: | "In short," said Sydney, "this is a desperate time, when desperate games are played for desperate stakes. Let the Doctor play the winning game; I will play the losing one. No man's life here is worth purchase. Any one carried home by the people to-day may be condemned to-morrow. Now, the stake I have resolved to play for, in case of the worst, is a friend in the Conciergerie. And the friend I purpose to myself to win is Mr. Barsad."
"You need have good cards, sir," said the spy.
"I'll run them over. I'll see what I hold. -- Mr. Lorry, you know what a brute I am; I wish you'd give me a little brandy."
It was put before him, and he drank off a glassful -- drank off another glassful -- pushed the bottle thoughtfully away.
"Mr. Barsad," he went on, in the tone of one who really was looking over a hand at cards: "Sheep of the prisons, emissary of Republican committees, now turnkey, now prisoner, always spy and secret informer, so much the more valuable here for being English that an Englishman is less open to suspicion of subornation in those characters than a Frenchman, represents himself to his employers under a false name. That's a very good card. Mr. Barsad, now in the employ of the republican French government, was formerly in the employ of the aristocratic English, the enemy of France and freedom. That's an excellent card. Inference clear as day in this region of suspicion, that Mr. Barsad, still in the pay of the aristocratic English government, is the spy of Pitt, the treacherous foe of the Republic crouching in its bosom, the English traitor and agent of all mischief so much spoken of and so difficult to find. That's a card not to be beaten. Have you followed my hand, Mr. Barsad?"
"Not to understand your play," returned the spy, somewhat uneasily.
"I play my ace, denunciation of Mr. Barsad to the nearest Section Committee. Look over your hand, Mr. Barsad, and see what you have. Don't hurry." ...
"Look over your hand carefully, Mr. Barsad. Take time."
It was a poorer hand than he suspected. Mr. Barsad saw losing cards in it that Sydney Carton knew nothing of. ... (From A Hand at Cards, pgs. 295-297) |
Barsad earlier on the witness stand:
| Quote: | | Had he ever been a spy himself? No, he scorned the base insinuation. What did he live upon? His property. Where was his property? He didn't precisely remember where it was. What was it? No business of anybody's Had he inherited it? Yes, he had. From whom? Distant relation. Very distant? Rather. Ever been in prison? Certainly not. Never in a debtors' prison? Didn't see what that had to do with it. Never in a debtors' prison? -- Come, once again. Never? Yes. How many times? Two or three times. Not five or six? Perhaps. Of what profession? Gentleman. Ever been kicked? Might have been. Frequently? No. Ever been kicked downstairs? Decidedly not; once received a kick on the top of a staircase, and fell downstairs of his own accord. Kicked on that occasion for cheating at dice? Something to that effect was said by the intoxicated liar who committed the assault, but it was not true. Swear it was not true? Positively. Ever live by cheating at play? Never. Ever live by play? Not more than other gentlemen do. ... (From A Disappointment, p. 75) |
Listen:
A Tale of Two Cities
Abridged, alas!, Audio CD
Narrated perfectly by Scottish actor Ian Richardson, who assumes a different voice for each character and with extraordinarily excellent diction throughout!
View:
A Tale of Two Cities
DVD
With screen legend Ronald Colman
A Tale of Two Cities
DVD
With actor/author Dirk Bogarde
Go mad!
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| Posted: Wed Jun 03, 2009 10:10 am Post subject: |
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New York Times Magazine
Newspaper Subscription
A Long Journey in the Dark
My life with chronic depression
By Daphne Merkin
May 10/09
| Quote: | I was sent home on Klonopin, an anti-anxiety drug I’d been on forever, as well as a duet of pills — Remeron and Effexor — that were referred to as California rocket fuel for its presumed igniting effect. As it turned out, the combo wasn’t destined to work on me. At home, I was gripped again by thoughts of suicide and clung to my bed, afraid to go out even on a walk around the block with my daughter. When I wasn’t asleep, I stared into space, lost in the terrors of the far-off past, which had become the terrors of the present. It was decided that I shouldn’t be left alone, so my sister and my good friend took turns staying with me. But it was clear this arrangement was short term, and by the end of the weekend, after phone calls to various doctors, it was agreed that I would go back into the hospital to try ECT.
And then, the Sunday afternoon before I planned to return to 4 Center, something shifted ever so slightly in my mind. I had gone off the Remeron and started a new drug, Abilify. I was feeling a bit calmer, and my bedroom didn’t seem like such an alien place anymore. Maybe it was the fear of ECT, or perhaps the tweaked medication had kicked in, or maybe the depression had finally taken its course and was beginning to lift. I had — and still have — no real idea what did it. For a brief interval, no one was home, and I decided to get up and go outside. I stopped at Food Emporium and studied the cereal section, as amazed at the array as if I had just emerged from the gulag. I bought some paper towels and strawberries, and then I walked home and got back into bed. It wasn’t a trip to the Yucatan, but it was a start. I didn’t check into the hospital the next day and instead passed the rest of the summer slowly reinhabiting my life, coaxing myself along. I spent time with people I trusted, with whom I didn’t have to pretend.
Toward the end of August I went out for a few days to the rented Southampton house of my friend Elizabeth. It was just her, me and her three annoying dogs. I had brought a novel along, “The Gathering,” by Anne Enright, the sort of book about incomplete people and unhappy families that has always spoken to me. It was the first book to absorb me — the first I could read at all — since before I went into the hospital. I came to the last page on the third afternoon of my visit. It was about 4:30, the time of day that, by mid-August, brings with it a whiff of summer’s end. I looked up into the startlingly blue sky; one of the dogs was sitting at my side, her warm body against my leg, drying me off after the swim I had recently taken. I could begin to see the curve of fall up ahead. There would be new books to read, new films to see and new restaurants to try. I envisioned myself writing again, and it didn’t seem like a totally preposterous idea. I had things I wanted to say.
Everything felt fragile and freshly come upon, but for now, at least, my depression had stepped back, giving me room to move forward. I had forgotten what it was like to be without it, and for a moment I floundered, wondering how I would recognize myself. I knew for certain it would return, sneaking up on me when I wasn’t looking, but meanwhile there were bound to be glimpses of light if only I stayed around and held fast to the long perspective. It was a chance that seemed worth taking. (emphasis added) (-- p. 48) |
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editor
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| Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2009 10:25 am Post subject: |
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Back from the Dead:
One Woman's Search for the Men who Walked Off America's Death Row
Hardcover
By Joan Cheever
| Quote: | | In the summer of 1972, the unthinkable happened in the United States. The death penalty was abolished. Voting five to four in a case called Furman v. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment was unconstitutional because it was, among other things, "racist, arbitrary, unfairly applied, wanton and freakish, curel and unusual." Four years later the death penalty was reinstated, but during that interval the killing chambers across America remained empty and 589 inmates awaiting execution were given a second chance to live. 322 members of that group were released when when they completed their sentences or became eligible for parole. |
On witnessing the 1994 execution by lethal injection of her client of nine years, convicted killer Walter Key Williams:
| Quote: | "I had to see what this country does in the dark of night when it commits the most premeditated kind of murder that exists," she explains. "When I talk about the death penalty it's not theoretical." Walter's execution prompted Cheever to track down the 589 prisoners who "represent the largest unexamined social experiment in U.S. criminal history." They, she believed, had "the answer one of the most troubling and controversial questions in the debate on the death penalty. Can convicted killers be rehabilitated? Will they kill again?"
Back From the Dead: One Woman's Search for the Men who Walked Off America's Death Row answers those questions not with rhetoric but with facts. Cheever interviewed more than 125 of the approximately 250 'lottery winners' who are still alive and out of prison, and she kept track of all 589 for eight years (164 Furman prisoners were never released either because their crimes were too heinous or because they re-offended in prison). (From the story, Stay of execution, by Anna Mundow in the Irish Times July 29/06 at p. 10 of the Magazine). |
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Aug 10, 2009 10:28 am Post subject: |
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From Impossible Odds:
The New Yorker
Talk of the Town
Second Opinions
By Hendrik Hertzberg
Aug. 3/09
| Quote: | ... In other free countries, legislation, social and otherwise, gets made in a fairly straightforward manner. There is an election, in which the voters, having paid attention to the issues for six weeks or so, choose a government. The governing party or coalition then enacts its program, and the voters get a chance to render a verdict on it the next time they go to the polls. Through one or another variation of this process, the people of every other wealthy democracy on earth have obtained for themselves some form of guaranteed health insurance or universal health care.
The way we do it is, shall we say, more exciting. For us, an election is only the opening broadside in a series of protracted political battles of heavy artillery and hand-to-hand fighting. A President may fancy that he has a mandate (and, morally, he may well have one), but the two separately elected, differently constituted, independent legislatures whose acquiescence he needs are under no compulsion to agree. Within those legislatures, a system of overlapping committees dominated by powerful chairmen creates a plethora of veto points where well-organized special interests can smother or distort a bill meant to benefit a large but amorphous public. In the smaller of the two legislatures—which is even more heavily weighted toward conservative rural interests than is the larger one, and where one member may represent as little as one-seventieth as many people as the member in the next seat—an arcane and patently unconstitutional rule, the filibuster, allows a minority of members to block almost any action. The process that results is less like the Roman Senate than like the Roman Games: a sanguinary legislative Colosseum where at any moment some two-bit emperor is apt to signal the thumbs-down.
These perverse (if time-honored) institutional arrangements (and the above accounting only scratches the surface of their perversity) are the principal cause of America’s sad health-care exceptionalism. Americans, polling shows, have long been as receptive as Europeans to the principle of universal health care. Six times since 1948, we have elected Presidents committed, at least on paper, to that principle. There have been gains, small (under Clinton, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP) and not so small (under Johnson, Medicare, for the aged, and Medicaid, for the very poor). Yet forty-six million of us—a number roughly equal to the population of half the states of the Union—have no health insurance at all, and, as President Obama noted during his prime-time press conference last week, fourteen thousand more are losing theirs every day. Many millions of us have coverage that is inadequate, and almost all of us live with the well-founded fear that unemployment, a change of job, or striking out on one’s own to freelance or start a business could cost us our coverage and leave us open to medical and financial catastrophe.
Pretty much everybody who believes that health care should be a human right, not a commercial commodity, and who makes a serious study of the abstract substance of the matter, concludes that the best solution would be (to borrow Obama’s words at the press conference) “what’s called a single-payer system, in which everybody is automatically covered.” But, by the same token, pretty much everybody who believes the same thing, and who makes a serious study of the concrete politics of the matter, concludes that a change so sudden and so wrenching—and so threatening to so many powerful interests—is beyond the capacities of our ramshackle political mechanisms. The American health-care system is bloated, wasteful, and cruel. Under the health-insurance-reform package now being bludgeoned into misshapen shape on Capitol Hill, it will still be bloated, wasteful, and cruel—but markedly less so. The House bill, for example, would make basic coverage available to tens of millions who now have none. It would curb the practice of denying insurance to persons with “preëxisting conditions.” (We’re all born with a preëxisting condition: mortality.) It would make insurance coverage portable, which would be a boon for both individual careers and the wider economy. Even one of these things would be a colossal improvement on the status quo.
The most consequential opposition to the reforms now under consideration is coming from a small group of Blue Dog Democrats, who protest that the plan does too little to control costs. To the extent that their concern is genuine, and not just a reflexive deference to wealth (they vociferously oppose a modest surtax on the top one per cent, whose effective tax rates have dropped by fifteen per cent since 1979, while their after-tax incomes have more than tripled), they have a point. But it’s a minor point. The prospective reform has more cost-containment provisions than past attempts, and, thanks in part to those same Blue Dogs, it is acquiring more such elements by the day—for example, the proposal for an independent commission able to set Medicare payment rates, which Obama has also embraced.
But the Blue Dogs are playing a dangerous game of chicken. Even if they’re right that reform would do too little about costs, the alternative—which, as the President has repeatedly pointed out, is the status quo—would do nothing. Ultimately, real cost control will require a strong push away from fee-for-service medicine. In Massachusetts, which three years ago enacted its own version of near-universal health insurance, the cost of expanded coverage has created pressure for just such a push. That state’s experience suggests that the cost problem, too, will be easier to solve under a reformed system, with all its other benefits, than under the one we have now.
As for the Republican opposition to reform, most of it has been, in a word, nihilistic. William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, last week offered the same advice he did sixteen years ago, when he masterminded the death of the Clinton reform effort: “Go for the kill.” Senator Jim DeMint, of South Carolina, elaborated on the theme. “If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo,” DeMint said. “It will break him.” Obama’s Presidency would survive the murder of health-care reform. But he would be greatly weakened, with dire consequences for his ability to meet many other urgent challenges. Whoever needs to be punished for morbidity, it’s not him. And not the rest of us, either. (-- pgs. 19-20) |
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Aug 10, 2009 10:46 am Post subject: |
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Exit Ghost
Hardcover
By Philip Roth
| Quote: | I hadn't been in New York in eleven years. Other than for surgery in Boston to remove a cancerous prostate, I'd hardly been off my rural mountain road in the Bershires in those eleven years and, what's more, had rarely looked at a newspaper or listened to the news since 9/11, three years back; with no sense of loss - merely, at the outset, a kind of drought within me - I had ceased to inhabit not just the great world but the present moment. The impulse to be in it and of it I had long since killed.
But now I'd driven the hundred and thirty miles south to Manhattan to see a urologist at Mount Sinai Hospital who specialized in performing a procedure to help the thousands of men like left incontenent by prostate surgery. By going in through a catheter inserted in the urethra to inject a gelatinous form of collagen where the neck of the bladder meets the urethra, he was getting significant improvement in about fifty percent of his patients. These weren't great odds, especially as "significant improvement" meant only a partial alleviation of the symptoms - reducing "severe incontinence" to "moderate incontinence" or "moderate" to "light". Still, because his results were better than those that other urologists had achieved using roughly the same technique (there was nothing to be done about the other hazard of radical prostatectomy that I, like tens of thousands of others, had not been lucky enough to escape - nerve damage resulting in impotence), I went to New York for a consultation, long after I imagined myself as having adapted to the practical inconveniences of the condition.
In the years since the surgery, I even thought I'd surmounted the shaming side of wetting oneself, overcome the disorienting shock that had been particularly trying in the first year and a half, during the months when the surgeon had given me reason to think that the incontinence would gradually disappear over time, as it does in a small number of fortunate patients. But despite the dailiness of the routine necessary to keep myself clean and odor-free, I must never truly have become accustomed to wearing the special undergarments and changing the pads and dealing with the "accidents," any more than I had mastered the underlying humiliation, because there I was, at the age of seventy-one, back on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, not many blocks from where I'd once lived as a vigorous, healthy younger man - there I was in the reception area of the urology department of Mount Sinai Hospital, about to be assured that with the permanent adherence of the collagen to the neck of the bladder I had a chance of exerting somewhat more control over my urine flow than an infant. Waiting there envisioning the prcedure, sitting and flipping through the piled-up copies of People and New York magazine, I thought, Entirely beside the point. Turn around and go home. (Opening paragraphs, pgs. 1-2) |
More grist to the mill:
The Male Biological Clock
The Startling News About Aging, Sexuality and Fertility in Men
Hardcover
By Harry Fisch, M.D.
By the same author:
Size Matters
The Hard Facts about Male Sexuality Every Woman Should Know
Paperback
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Aug 25, 2009 1:59 pm Post subject: |
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The Villager
My brother Frank: The teacher who walked beside me
By Alphie McCourt
Volume 79, Number 11
Aug. 19 - 25/09
| Quote: | My brother Frank McCourt died on July 19 this year: one month, to the day, before his 79th birthday. The world took notice. Walter Cronkite died on July 17. My wife, Lynn, said that Frank waited a couple of days so that Walter Cronkite could have his moment. Frank McCourt? And Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America? In the same breath? Isn’t this a great country?
Frank’s early miseries are well known, as are his teaching career, his monumental success as a writer and his vast international popularity as speaker and humorist. He has always been a strong presence in my life, along with my brothers Malachy and Michael. I will never speak to him again, nor see him. I can’t believe that. But I will have to get used to the idea. Death comes to, and for, everyone.
As is well known, seven children were born to my parents. Three died and, as Malachy has pointed out, for many years the odds were in favor of the survivors. Three were gone and the four of us still stood. Now the odds have shifted.
Frank was 10 years older and, from my boyhood, I remember him as being serious, austere, even: disciplined, determined and with a sense of mission. Ten years distant from any possibility of an easy relationship with him, I was a little bit intimidated. Until the day I borrowed his bike, crashed it and awaited his wrath. Wrath never came. Frank dismissed the incident without any fuss. In our Limerick, in the bleak harshness of the 1940s and 1950s, no one said I love you. But Frank didn’t chide me, or shout or threaten. No, he forbore and, to a child reared on fire and brimstone, more especially on the Irish Catholic version, such forbearance, in the face of destruction and stupidity, was nothing short of love.
In 1949 Frank left Limerick, the city of his rearing, and returned to New York, the city of his birth. We were left behind: Mam, Mike and myself. Malachy was already away in England. Our hearts broke when he left.
A long 10 years would elapse before I came to New York. And, a couple of years later, in 1961, when I was staying with Frank and his wife in Brooklyn, Frank and I went for a few beers in a bar in Downtown Manhattan. All too soon it is 4 a.m., closing time, with the dawn coming up, too late and too early to take a subway or bus. At Frank’s suggestion we walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. Two men, walking side by side; fat or thin, tall or small, rich or poor; there’s a magic in that.
We are nowhere near drunk. It would be hard to get drunk even on a succession of small 15-cent glasses of beer. But we are cheerful. By this time I am as tall as Frank, my oldest brother. Out of the night and into the day we walk, out of the darkness, into the light and the promise of the future. Only in retrospect, and only after many years, did I see the symbolism. To this day I treasure it. Ever the teacher, Frank didn’t send me or walk behind me. Nor did he lead. The teacher walked beside me.
Eight or nine years later, when I was living in Dublin and attending University College, Dublin, Frank came over to work on a doctorate, at Trinity College. I was sharing an apartment with two friends. Frank lived elsewhere but he had a key to our apartment. One miserable rainy afternoon I came home to find him in the kitchen. Standing, still in his coat, he was eating a soft-boiled egg. One single, solitary, soft-boiled egg, with no bread, no butter, no tea in sight. That was his way. Only what he needed, that’s what he took. He kept the faith.
Twenty-five years later, the success of his first book, a memoir, left him bewildered. Throughout most of his adult life he had been “only the teacher.” “Angela’s Ashes,” a saga shot through with poverty and hunger, became the engine of his success. Now even Gourmet magazine was asking him to write a piece. “Irony is my constant companion,” he would remark as he poked fun at his status as a newly minted big shot.
Frank survived typhoid fever as a boy and endured chronic conjunctivitis. In the 1980s he would survive cancer. Having thoroughly embraced and enjoyed his dozen years of fame, he was now afflicted with melanoma. Treatments and hospital stays would follow, all to no avail.
During his last days, in the hospice, he lies propped up in bed. Two or three other people are in the room. I indicate to him that I must leave and that I will be back tomorrow. Frank raises his right hand, the first and second fingers extended; the middle finger and the pinkie folded back, the thumb lying flat.
Smiling as he is, this gesture means something. I can tell. The others in the room are watching him and they laugh when he raises his hand. With the crinkle of a joke at the corners of his smile he forgives the others their laughter. Still looking directly at me, and with the same wide smile, he moves his right hand: upward, and slowly downward, then left to right, in a continuous motion. Oldest to youngest, fatherless now as we have ever been, in timeless rhythm he gives me his blessing. And without a thought I cross myself.
Next day Malachy and I are with him in the room. Frank’s wife, Ellen, is away, briefly, on an errand. Frank becomes agitated. His shirt is bothering him and we help him remove it. Still he tosses. We can’t settle him, can’t seem to relieve his discomfort. We decide to use the emergency device to call the nurse. “Where is it?” I ask Malachy. “It’s hanging by the side of the bed,” Malachy answers. I look for it, without success, and I continue to search, while Malachy insists. In the end, I get down on my hands and knees. Malachy, with his busted leg encased in the big black boot, begins the search on his side of the bed. Neither of us can find the device.
I have a fleeting vision of Malachy, Mike and myself, all of us under the bed searching for the device, and the nurse arriving in. “Where is everybody?” she would ask Frank. “Where have your brothers gone?”
“Damned if I know,” would be his response. “The behavior of my brothers has always been a mystery to me.” And he would sink back on his pillow, resigned, as always, to our vagaries. That was my imagining.
... Years ago Frank told me that he was strongly attracted to the writings of J. Krishnamurti, to the idea that we should abandon all the grandiose notions and practices of established religion, that we should look with wonder at whatever is before us, and that, toward everyone and everything, we should behave in a just, loving and compassionate manner. He didn’t say this in so many words, but that was the message. Be guided by justice and love. That’s the most practical approach.
I hadn’t seen or sensed any angels at Frank’s bedside. No secular spirit-guides-for-hire, either. I doubt that he would want them. Instead, I believe, he had been getting himself into fighting trim, accepting change as it came, as he always did, shedding all excess baggage and preparing for the trip.
Then the nurses come. With care and tenderness, they move him up in the bed, adjust and plump up his pillows and settle him. Soon he is asleep, and he will continue in sleep. There is talk of seizure, of complications. I think I know better. On his left side, now, and with his left palm under his chin and his chin slightly raised, in the thinker’s classic pose, peacefully he sleeps.
... A few years ago he said to me: “We are all we have, the brothers, the women and the children.” Now, of course, we are one less. But maybe, after a nice rest, and God knows he deserves it, in another 66 years, or however long it takes to reach retirement age, Frank will break away from the mass of the great vibration and, once again, lend his voice to the shunned and the excluded. |
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editor
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| Posted: Fri Sep 25, 2009 2:22 pm Post subject: |
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With Fondest Regards
Hardcover
By Françoise Sagan
| Quote: | | ... Darryl Zanuck was there, as were, I think the Cognac-Hennessys, and Jack Warner, and other giants among the great gamblers of all time. Wisely, I was kept away from this table and, more bewildered than impressed, merely observed the conflict among Titans. I learned the rules of chemin de fer, learned that on a single hand of just two cards with combined value of eight or nine one stood to win fifty million old francs - although one then had to stake those winnings double or quits on the next hand again of just two cards. More than the enormity of the sums involved, it was the speed with which they changed hands that fascinated me. I fancied myself gambling with my destiny, just like that, in two quick hands. I did not realize that in the casino as much as anywhere else, wealth takes the form of checks, that these checks are accepted with greater or lesser willingness by the casinos concerned, and that the often mean-spirited prudence of the manager of gaming clubs acts as a brake, sometimes salutary, sometimes fatal, on the mania of players. (From Games of Chance, p. 19) |
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Nov 02, 2009 4:02 pm Post subject: |
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The Art of the Heist
Confessions of a Master Art Thief, Rock-and-Roller, and Prodigal Son
Hardcover
By Myles J. Connor Jr. with Jerry Siler
| Quote: | On February 27, 1967, I was transferred from the Charles Street jail to the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Walpole. My sentence was twelve to twenty years, though in our last conversation my attorney had assured me that with time credited for good behavior I could be back on the streets in as little as six. In theory, I might be back in the art business by the age of thirty. The only question was whether I would live that long.
At the time Walpole housed some of the most notorious criminals on the East Coast, including some of New England's highest-ranking mob bosses. Since opening in the mid-1950s, the prison had earned a well-deserved reputation for being on eof the toughest maximum-security facilities in the country, a place where inmates of dubious character - skinners and diddlers and snitchers - were routinely beaten and frequently killed.
I was barely twenty-four when I passed through Walpole's gate that first time, five foot six and 120 pounds, still recovering from the physical ordeal of the past ten months with a rape indictment hanging periolously over my head. A betting man would not have wagered on my survival. (From Chapter Seven, pgs. 68-69) |
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