Monthly Archives: August 2019

An article, “Radical Change,” in the September 2019 Scientific American by Michael A. Hogg is a good read to hold up to my commentary on Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark. Hogg introduces a term, self-uncertainty, to point toward a cause for violent extremism in politics, most especially the white nationalist kind. He is a professor of social psychology at Claremont Graduate University, and unsurprisingly therefore refers to data to support his conclusions and viewpoints. The thrust of the argument is that self-uncertainty…..

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For those of you intrigued by the philosophy of medicine, Tom Davis, philosopher at Whitman College, and I have a book just out from Cambridge Scholars Publishing: “Story by Story: Who I Am, What I Suffer.” Beginning with the “anchor” for our book, the psychiatric condition called catatonia, we examine five stories (four are fictions that I’ve written) of persons suffering from illness. Our process, which amounts to a conversation between us, culminates in the suggestion that a deceptively simple…..

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I’ve been reading Robert Hayden recently. His Those Winter Sundays is especially moving.

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To create fiction is to deal, first and foremost, with identity—of the characters within it more obviously, of herself, the author, less obviously (though more crucially, because therein lies the motive for creating). Authoring shares its dual concerns—self-discoveries and self-creations—with readers, being generous by nature, that they may make use of them in their own ways. Self-ness must be its own therefore and because, a product then of evolution and in Homo sapiens then most apparent (at least to us within Homo sapiens). In human…..

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