Nail-biting events in Venezuela currently being led by a guy who spent time in UD‘s Foggy Bottom. Very exciting. Very scary.
This blog’s Venezuela posts.
In the city of Solidarity, people come together in an ultimately losing battle for the life of their assassinated mayor.
O powerful western fallen star!
O shades of night—O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear’d—
Of course certain things should be illegal, especially as they bear upon the child. Is there anyone in this hall who thinks that religion justifies the mutilation of a child’s genitals? Is there? Good. Well, wouldn’t you like a law that said that non-elective surgery on the private parts of a child should be [illegal]? Isn’t it time?
A lot of us say this, since it’s true. But when it comes from people like this guy, it packs a wallop.
“Just really disgusting.” Just as true; and yet UD begins to think that many Americans love disgusting. No idea why.
In my friend Barney’s obit, the writer, Benedict Carey, not only mentions UD, but links to her.
UD is delighted.
… sex dolls, the composer of the immortal Plastic Fantastic Lover has died.
And now a post at total odds with this one.
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My friend Barney Carroll has died, at 78,
his final view, from his apartment’s
picture windows, the glorious Carmel Valley.
He sent me a picture, last week, of what he saw.
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Allen Frances, a fellow warrior against
corruption in medicine, wrote Barney’s obit.
Barney’s scientific contribution to psychiatric research was to introduce neuroendocrine techniques. He independently discovered the value of the dexamethasone suppression test (DST) as a biomarker of melancholia — the classic, biologically driven subtype of depression. This was the first, and remains one of very few, biomarkers in psychiatry. Barney’s 1981 paper on the DST was among the most highly cited papers in psychiatry. Its impact was immediate, with many replications and extensions.
Another of Barney’s enduring contributions was to educate colleagues in the discipline of proper clinical decision making. He clarified the Bayesian principle that context counts — that is, prior conditional probabilities greatly influence the utility of any clinical feature or laboratory test in making a diagnosis. Throughout medicine, biomarkers and clinical diagnostic features perform with much greater utility in high risk groups than in general populations.
Barney and Allen had both chaired Duke University’s psychiatry department, and they shared an anger at (to quote the subtitle of one of Allen’s books) “Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life.” Both certainly know and knew that, as David Bowie wrote toward the end of his life, “On the whole, this whole world is run by brutes for the common and the stupid.” So they weren’t terribly optimistic that their protest could do much. Once it’s all come down to late-night comedy, it’s a bit late in the day.
But if, as Barney explained to me in a recent email, you’re a hopelessly inner-directed person, you can’t live with yourself if you don’t make a serious daily effort toward de-brutalization. Barney saw in Donald Trump late-stage outer-directedness, and regretted that “I won’t be around to see how it finally plays out with the orange man in the white house.” But he was fundamentally stoic – and typically observant – about the process of dying.
I am watching with detachment as I move along the path to allostatic collapse… What’s allostatic collapse? It’s just a fancy term for the end state of chronic deterioration that comes with terminal illness. We begin to fail piece by piece but we may hang on for years in a new state of compensated but pathologic equilibrium until even that cannot be sustained. Related constructs are chronic life stress and aging before supervening disease appears. My point of collapse is shaping up to be respiratory failure.
I had many questions to ask Barney about allostasis. Can’t ask them now. But he already, in his final sign-off, told me the most important thing.
Be well and be happy.
[September 11] very much conscripted all the things I hate: theocracy, the cult of violence, anti-Jewish paranoia, worship of a leader – a supreme sheikh … I think about it every day. Still.
If someone asks me, “Why do you write?” I can reply by pointing out that it is a very dumb question. Nevertheless, there is an answer. I write because I hate. A lot. Hard. And if someone asks me the inevitable next dumb question, “Why do you write the way you do?” I must answer that I wish to make my hatred acceptable because my hatred is much of me, if not the best part. Writing is a way of making the writer acceptable to the world — every cheap, dumb, nasty thought, every despicable desire, every noble sentiment, every expensive taste. There isn’t very much satisfaction in getting the world to accept and praise you for things that the world is prepared to praise. The world is prepared to praise only shit. One wants to make sure that the complete self, with all its qualities, is not just accepted but approved . . . not just approved — whoopeed.
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I know of nothing more difficult than knowing who you are, and then having the courage to share the reasons for the catastrophe of your character with the world.
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But really I loved him because he understood the greatness of my even greater love, Malcolm Lowry:
When one thinks of the general sort of snacky under-earnest writers whose works like wind-chimes rattle in our heads now, it is easier to forgive Lowry his pretentious seriousness, his old-fashioned ambitions, his Proustian plans, [his efforts] to replace the reader’s consciousness wholly with a black magician’s.
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Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.
… Commonwealth School, has died at 97.
Charles Merrill was the son (as was his half-brother, James Merrill) of the co-founder of Merrill Lynch.
Mr UD likes to tell the story of how Merrill (also school headmaster for decades) gathered some students one day and told them he had a brother who was a poet, and they were all going to go on a field trip to hear him read.
“Eyes rolled,” Mr UD recounts. “Oh yeah, he happens to have a brother who’s a poet… Who knew he meant James Merrill??”
… the wonderful new statue of George Orwell at the BBC.
In lieu of a pilgrimage to it, she will read for the hundredth time, laughing again all the way through, “Down and Out in Paris and London.”
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It seems to be an open question whether that very weight — the strain and tedium and approximation of everyday existence — was a hindrance to Orwell or an assistance. He himself seems to have thought that the exigencies of poverty, ill health, and overwork were degrading him from being the serious writer he might have been and had reduced him to the status of a drudge and pamphleteer. Reading through these meticulous and occasionally laborious jottings, however, one cannot help but be struck by the degree to which he became, in Henry James’s words, one of those upon whom nothing was lost. By declining to lie, even as far as possible to himself, and by his determination to seek elusive but verifiable truth, he showed how much can be accomplished by an individual who unites the qualities of intellectual honesty and moral courage. And, permanently tempted though he was by cynicism and despair, Orwell also believed in the latent possession of these faculties by those we sometimes have the nerve to call “ordinary people.” Here, then, is some of the unpromising bedrock — hardscrabble soil in Scotland, gritty coal mines in Yorkshire, desert landscapes in Africa, soul-less slums and bureaucratic offices — combined with the richer soil and loam of ever renewing nature, and that tiny, irreducible core of the human personality that somehow manages to put up a resistance to deceit and coercion. Out of the endless attrition between them can come such hope as we may reasonably claim to possess.
Christopher Hitchens, Introduction to Orwell’s diaries.
… commission, General “Buck” Mnuchin couldn’t have come at a better time.
… hero of mine. Especially today, with Stone’s release of an email exchange he had with the notorious Richard Spencer.
In an April 18 op-ed in the New York Times, Stone defended Spencer’s First Amendment right to speak at Auburn University.
According to Stone, he received an e-mail from Spencer thanking him for his piece saying, “[he thinks] it will be looked back upon as significant in changing the contemporary free-speech debate.”
In the e-mail, Spencer also expressed his desire to return to his alma mater for a speaking event.
… Stone wrote back, saying that he thought Spencer’s views were not worth discussing, and that he would not extend him an invitation.
“My strong support for the right of students and faculty to invite speakers to campus to address whatever views they think worth discussing does not mean that I personally think that all views are worth discussing. From what I have seen of your views, they do not seem to me [to] add anything of value to serious and reasoned discourse, which is of course the central goal of a university. Thus, although I would defend the right of others to invite you to speak, I don’t see any reason for me to encourage or to endorse such an event.”
More here.
Reed College graduate Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche ’16.
Click on his graduation photograph to see his laurels.
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May he live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.