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Review of My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Ottessa Moshfegh, 2018)
Quitting: An admission of personal failure, anathema to the quintessentially American spirit of optimism and self-improvement. Fighting for the wrong side is held more admirable than running from the field of battle. Even anti-heroes are heroic to the extent that they strive in their opposition. A life without purpose is not worth living. Quitting is somehow a betrayal of our humanity. The narrator, a privileged, Art History graduate of Columbia University, is fired from her going-nowhere-fast job at an art gallery and she decides to quit—to spend an entire year holed up in her apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, zonked on anti-anxiety and sleeping medications, funded by…
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Travelogue: Memphis (2017)
6/17 Saturday My son Ken and I made the eight-hour drive from Chicago to Memphis via I-57->I-55->I-40, stopping at the El Toro restaurant in Arcola, IL where I couldn’t resist the “Boss Burrito” with chicken and steak inside, shrimp and cream creole sauce outside. Then one last gas fill in West Memphis, AR. We arrived at six, settled in at the Hampton Inn near Beale Street and then walked to Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken but there were 20 people waiting, so we went down Pontotoc St. to Pearl’s Oyster House for oysters, crab cakes and fried fish, washed down with Yuengling on tap. Walked up and down Beale St.…
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The Story of Dan, Part One
The first thing I remember is my first step. I’ve heard childhood events fade from memory if they happen before age three, but that first step is still as clear as day to me and was corroborated by my mom years later. It was a sunny afternoon in spring, with dust motes swirling in the sunbeams across our living room. She stood me up, held me steady while pointing me towards my dad, and just told me to go. My dad was about three feet away, near the cocktail table (in the 60s all aspiring working-class households had to have one—like a whiskey carafe). I remember exactly how he looked,…
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Review of Factfulness (Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Hans Rosling, and Ola Rosling, 2018)
Rosling was a Swedish doctor, involved in health care in many “third world” regions. His analysis points to data, readily available through the United Nations and the World Health Organization, that proves that overall public health and standards of living across the world have been steadily increasing over the last hundred years, despite sensational news reports of poverty and disease outbreaks to the contrary. Rosling presents the reader with a questionnaire seeking to set an initial level of assumptions that he proceeds to dismantle with truths that challenge the way we digest and understand information. In a world where we are bombarded with “news” sources of wildly different perspectives and…
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The Clutter Guru (written 7/5/15)
In the Sunday paper was an article devoted to the current trend of “decluttering”, a phenomenon complete with its own reality-TV shows, “40 Bags in 40 Days” social media challenge, self-help books, etc. A “pioneering” study by the University of California at Los Angeles in 2001-2005 identified the extent of the clutter crisis our families are facing right now. Darby Saxbe, assistant professor at USC, observed, “They (the long-suffering families in the study) were surrounded by stuff to the point where it seemed emotionally and physically stressful and taxing for them.” It was clear that we have found the enemy, and he is us. What was reassuring was the living…
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The Ides of March
The phrase “beware the Ides of March”, a warning from the soothsayer to Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s play, is as well-known as Caesar’s cry “Es tu, Brute?” when his best buddy drove his knife into his back. In Roman society, Ides referred to the first full moon of a given month, which usually fell between the 13th and 15th. In fact, the Ides of March once signified the new year, which meant celebrations and rejoicing. It was also a band from the inner Chicago suburb of Berwyn that hit the charts in the late Sixties and early Seventies. “Vehicle”, a horn-driven ditty from 1970 about a slimy dude offering goodies…
