For The Laughing Heart—Revised Mr Johnson has succeeded in producing a thought provoking epic of family, love, baseball, good and evil. The Laughing Heart Revised challenges one to examine what we believe, what we hold sacred and what we profane. I was surprised how thoroughly I enjoyed this examination as this is not always a comfortable exercise. It is a book I am sure to revisit as the layers of evocative prose deserve further reflection.
This book of twenty-six poems was awarded the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize for 2018. An award well-deserved, indeed, in my opinion. Teicher’s poems here are principally about poetry itself, a literary art based on the line (a perspective with which I wholly agree), a fragment, and—in series even—incomplete. Here’s his way of putting it “ … how the line breaks before the thought is done, how the line, a partial thing, is the measure, and it’s…..
Here I will deal with Chapter 1 only, “Death.” In it Nagel takes up the question of whether anything may be said to be lost—has a misfortune occurred?—when someone has died, since the dead person no longer exists and therefore cannot feel loss of any sort. Why a psychiatrist should take more interest than most people do in this question is immediately apparent when one thinks of the problem of suicide and its contemplation or planning, a problem so…..
From Babel to Pentecost: The Poetry of Pierre Emmanuel By Mary Anne O’Neil I have just been into this work of Mary Anne O’Neil’s, published in 2013. It is an exhaustive examination, translation, and explication of the works of a poet well known in France during and following World War II, one who was a devout Christian and made of his labors and life an exploration of what that faith meant, to him at least. The biographical aspects of O’Neil’s…..
A topic on my mind, as I am re-reading Aristotle’s Poetics after many years. In the Author’s Note of the Inconclusive Rule, I make this comment: “… art—and surely poetry is no exception—has as its very purpose that of inciting an individual experience, experience that embodies the enigma of being an individual, uniquely alive and uniquely mortal. Since this enigma, one from the existential class of enigmatic things, is located upon the commons of humankind, all of humankind is joined…..
Well, I have some excuse for the delay. Immediately on finishing the first draft of the book, I began, then fulfilled, a residency in psychiatry in Philadelphia. Next, I came home to Walla Walla, WA to busy myself for the next decade in a general practice of the specialty I had just trained for. Still, time, as you all know (or will soon enough) … time waits, as they say, for no one: I’m 77 now; it’s time for this…..
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…..
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…..
I’ve been reading Robert Hayden recently. His Those Winter Sundays is especially moving.
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…..
