Published January 17, 2009 | 
A wonderful artist has died at 91. In his sleep, in his Pennsylvania home. A good end to a good life.
His spare paintings of Chadds Ford and the Brandywine country show the bleaker moments of an often exuberant landscape, the days in March or November when shape prevails over color and the lush Pennsylvania fields take on a Quaker sobriety. His paintings of Maine are equally clear, textured, subtle.
Goodbye, Andrew.
| Pennsylvania Landscape by Andrew Wyeth |
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Published January 16, 2009 | You’ve heard of a heart attack on a plate? This is a heart attack on a cake platter. Plus a brain, a kidney, and a gutful of, uh, liver, stomach, small intestine. . . . Do not click unless you’re a medical professional or a layperson with a strong stomach. Link courtesy ka_crow.
Are your ovaries a choking hazard? These are.
Roger Ebert talks about the emotion of transcendence in film and life. The biology of this emotion is fascinating. Link from the impressive rmjwell.
And in additional news, you may soon be able to get an effective love potion–based on oxytocin, the same hormone that gives us transcendence. The research is being done partly to enable people with Asperger’s or autism to relate better to neurotypical human beings.
The same research might lead to a vaccine against pair-bonding — anti-love shots. Why, yes, this idea showed up in an SF story: the 1938 classic Helen O’Loy.
And to get the sexist taste out of my mouth, guess what else is available on Googlebooks. You can preview The Female Man, one of my all-time favorite books. Most of the book isn’t available to preview, but the beginning and some of the Alice-Jael pages are. Go forth and buy this one new, if you possibly can afford it.
And that takes me to the question of the day. If you could take a pill to permanently and irrevocably improve your brain chemistry, would you do it? Assume that the change would be safe and pleasant, would fix the thing about your mind that has most bothered you, but would leave your personality otherwise unchanged. No more depression, say. Or no more procrastinating. Or no more panic attacks.
If you would take it, what would you want it to change?
If you wouldn’t take the pill, why not?
Do you already influence your brain chemistry with prescription drugs or non-prescription substances? (Caffeine counts. So do alcohol, illegal drugs, tranquilizers, )
Do you already influence your brain chemistry with other practices? ( Such as endorphin-producing exercise, for example, or meditation, or therapy.)
Any other thoughts about changing your brain?
Published January 15, 2009 | A few minutes after takeoff, a USAirways passenger jet with 155 people aboard lost both engines when struck by geese. The pilot made an emergency landing in the Hudson River — without the plane breaking up — and all the passengers and crew got out alive. Given the weather (ungodly cold) and the emergency landing, there are some people in the hospital with hypothermia and other injuries. But it could have been so much worse. I’m not the only person shaking with the memory of other New York plane crashes.
Praise to the pilot, whose cool head and skill (and possibly luck) kept this from becoming a grade-one disaster. To the flight crew, for getting everyone into their life vests and off the plane. To the passengers, who remained calm and got out in an orderly fashion. And to the rescuers who got there so fast with ferries, boats, and inflatable rafts.
Hot chocolate for everybody, and add some schnapps.
PS–The geese are now paté.
Published January 13, 2009 | I got a good bit of work done tonight, because I spent some time today trying to heal recent scuffs and scrapes with solitude, sunshine, reading, and music. It made a difference.
Last night I caught the end of the Elegy for piano and string orchestra by Alla Pavlova. Dear God. She is writing amazing music. I want to hear more.
And today I heard Richard Shindell’s version of “Mercy Street.” Wow. Why have I never heard of Shindell?
Published January 10, 2009 | I am sickened that the murderer of Oscar Grant still walks free. fightingwords alerted me to this petition.
Never Again: Demand civilian oversight of BART police
On January 1, Oscar Grant — already subdued by police and lying face down — was shot in the back and killed by a BART police officer at the Fruitvale station.
Unfortunately, this tragedy is not a first for the BART police force, which has been accused in the past of using excessive and unnecessary force in two other shooting deaths.
Unlike most police departments around the country, BART police are not subject to a civilian oversight board, despite numerous calls for one by community leaders over the years. But BART has refused.
Assemblymember Tom Ammiano and Senator Leland Yee promised to introduce legislation requiring BART to create a civilian oversight board — like the boards that have improved accountability and police conduct in other communities. While this is a significant step in the right direction, we must ensure that the legislature passes a strong bill.
Will you join the Courage Campaign and our friends at Color of Change by signing on to our letter thanking Ammiano and Yee for their legislation — and demanding that the bill provide the strongest civilian oversight possible?
I saw one of the videos. There is no question whatsoever that the BART cop got Grant down on the ground, *then* drew his gun, *then* fired.
This was not an accidental discharge of a weapon already drawn. This cop did not tragically misread an unarmed suspect’s intentions. This was an execution.
And it’s my tax dollars at work. I don’t tolerate, much less condone, official violence and bigotry. I loathe having it done in my name and with my money.
I want justice for Oscar Grant. I want this never to happen again. No more little girls orphaned. No more young men whose skin color makes them a fair target. No more cops who kill people with impunity, knowing they will never even be charged.
The BART police need to be under civilian oversight. Otherwise, they’re just a gang who get paid to wear their colors: the uniform of the BART police,
Published January 10, 2009 | The Sisters, the Mary Lovell bio of the Mitford girls, is wretched excuse for a biography. At first I thought she was just insensitive to certain issues and feelings. Then I began to think she was biased. Finally I decided she was culpably ignorant as well as profoundly biased.
Some of the book it not just provably inaccurate but horrifically irresponsible. I could forgive her saying that Virginia Durr took Decca to “a Democratic convention,” because understanding the role in US politics of each party’s national convention is not essential to understanding her life.
However, when writing of Decca’s involvement with the Civil Rights movement, Ms. Lovell’s ignorance becomes both appalling and distorting. When Decca was covering the Freedom Riders, she spent a terrifying night trapped in a church in Montgomery, Alabama, with white mobs rioting outside. Ms. Lovell explained the violence by saying the trouble was actually caused by the “Freedom Fighters,” groups of roving Negroes who terrorized Southerners by riding motorcycles through town.
Let us pause while the screams of rage and indignation and what-the-fucking-FUCK? die down.
The powerful implication was that the Freedom Riders were violent marauders and that Bull Connor and the KKK were virtuous men defending their homes. Dear Mary Lovell: Watch Four Little Girls and then get back to me. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.
This inaccuracy is devastating proof of her laxness in researching or understanding the context of her subjects’ lives. As an American reader of entirely the wrong class, I am aware that I don’t have the background to understand the assumptions and conditions in the lives of British aristocrats. Therefore, when I have written fiction about them, I’ve always done extraordinary amounts of research to understand their lives, their beliefs, their political systems, the conditions in schools and homes and military service, and the lives of the people around them who were not aristocrats. It’s a thousand times more important to do such research when you’re writing what purports to be nonfiction.
Mary S. Lovell makes no such effort. She just swallows whatever lies and poison the legendarily plausible Diana feeds her. It’s easy to tell how much she relies on Mrs. Mosley as a source, because she portrays Diana as a martyr nobly leaving her husband and sons for a married man who might never be able to be with her. Diana, an active Fascist and friend of Hitler, married Mosley at the home of Josef Goebbels, but Lovell refers to such things as merely “mistakes.” Although God knows Diana never thought or spoke of them as mistakes. Oh, and Mosley wasn’t anti-Semitic – he said so himself! He just thought the Jews were running the world and driving up prices.
Lovell also seems slanted against Decca, who was so rude as to upset her parents by running away, and repeatedly implies that she cannot understand why Decca would wish to leave such a lovely family. After all, Lord Redesdale didn’t mind all the jokes the girls made. Clearly this is someone who does not understand the dynamics of intrafamilial power games, or the stifling effect of repression, conformity, and isolation on someone who craved a meaningful life.
Mary S. Lovell is such a poor historian that I would like to turn her over to Miss DeVine to have her MA revoked. However, this is not possible, as she is apparently an accountant by training. So instead I would like to have her drummed out of the Historians’ Guild: the keys ceremonially stripped from her keyboard, her pen snapped across Barbara Tuchman’s knee, the dustjackets ripped from her books, and her broken and sorry self locked forever out of the library.
This ceremony is inspired by my childhood memories of a TV show called “Branded.”
The opening scene of the series was memorable, with McCord’s epaulets being ripped off, his uniform having its buttons cut off, and his sabre being broken, while a drum played. He was then sent out of the gates of the fort where this occurred, which were then closed behind him.
Failing that, I am proposing that the author be whipped at the cart’s tail with a flogger made of yard-long rubber erasers. I’m sure we can arrange that, at least.
Published January 5, 2009 | Dear trigger-happy BART cops: Maintaining the safety of public transit does not include shooting unarmed, handcuffed civilians.
Some questions for the BART police.
I have every sympathy for cops — my late father-in-law was one. They have a dirty, dangerous job. But that does not give them permission to pull a gun and shoot someone who is already lying on the ground, and not resisting.
The victim was a young Black man, unsurprisingly. I bet that a middle-aged white woman, especially if she was prosperous-looking, would have been much less likely to have been shot.
Then there’s the news that explains why fat women are less likely to survive ovarian cancer. Because the doses of chemotherapy drugs are calculated based on ideal BMI, not actual size. So fat women are likely to be underdosed. When the dosage is corrected, they’re just as likely to live as their thinner sisters.
What both of these stories say is that the way authorities think about your body can kill you. Being a Black man signals to cops that you’re both dangerous and expendable. Being a fat woman signals to doctors that you’re not worth the trouble. Not worth enough medicine to keep alive. Punished for eating too much.
There are plenty of other categories that make you worth saving or worth shooting. Whose life is valuable? Whose doesn’t matter?
Published January 4, 2009 | To an Easterner, the seasons seem curiously blended in northern California. A couple of days after Christmas, I noticed that some deciduous trees were showing brilliant autumn colors, the result of the recent cold snap. (Just imagine, the temperature had almost hit freezing.) With the bright sunlight and clear blue sky, the day felt like fall.
Then I drove past a tulip tree in full bloom.
Spring. Fall. Christmas.
Published January 3, 2009 | YouTube is a time machine that can take us at least a little way into the past to watch and hear some of the greatest performers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These are people I’ve heard about all my life. Now I can see and hear them at will.
Dame Nellie Melba. The legendary voice still shines.
Enrico Caruso. With Melba, singing “O Soave Fanciulla” in 1906. Poor Caruso was in San Francisco on the morning of the big quake. After fleeing his hotel, he sat in the street on his suitcase, swearing never to return. He kept his promise.
The divine Sarah Bernhardt: voice and movement.
Vaslav Nijinsky. Yes, he lived until 1950–but the last 30-odd years of his life he was insane and not dancing.
Josephine Baker. And doing some extraordinary dance moves.