tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91755393359410514152024-03-12T20:14:10.277-07:00BibliotekosE♦B - Finding the Uncommon ReaderE♦Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16147875345316321220noreply@blogger.comBlogger118125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175539335941051415.post-34437959967206804172024-02-10T06:50:00.001-08:002024-02-10T06:51:48.893-08:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><b><a href="https://www.ebibliotekos.com/2024/02/poetry-by-vaneshran-arumugam.html" target="_blank">Poetry by Vaneshran Arumugam</a></b></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><b><a href="https://www.ebibliotekos.com/2024/01/letters-to-my-sheep-by-teya-brooks.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Letters to My Sheep by Teya Brooks Pribac - Reviewed by Andrew Taylor-Troutman</span></a></b></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><a href="https://www.ebibliotekos.com/2024/01/new-book-by-jan-deckers-health-care.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>New Book by Jan Deckers - Health Care Ethics and Law</b></span></a></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><b><a href="https://leonardo.info/review/2023/12/defending-animals-finding-hope-on-the-front-lines-of-animal-protection" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Defending Animals by Kendra Coulter - Reviewed by Gregory F. Tague</span></a></b></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><a href="https://www.ebibliotekos.com/2023/10/lunations-by-garrett-mostowski-reviewed.html" target="_blank"><b><span style="font-family: georgia;">Garrett Mostowski, Lunations: Poems - Reviewed by Andrew Taylor Troutman</span></b></a></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://www.ebibliotekos.com/2023/10/ross-gay-book-of-more-delights-reviewed.html" target="_blank"><b>Ross Gay, The Book of (More) Delights - Reviewed by Andrew Taylor-Troutman</b></a></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="https://www.ebibliotekos.com/2023/09/anne-whitehouse-poetry-book-steady.html" target="_blank">Anne Whitehouse poetry book Steady - Reviewed by Andrew Taylor-Troutman</a></b></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="https://leonardo.info/review/2023/06/oppressive-liberation-sexism-in-animal-activism" target="_blank">Oppressive Liberation: Sexism in Animal Activism - book review by Gregory F. Tague</a></b></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0r-HnxYpeM" target="_blank">"</a></b></span><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0r-HnxYpeM" target="_blank">Zelensky's Passion" - Poem by Nina Tassi (video)</a></b></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="https://leonardo.info/review/2023/04/lichens-toward-a-minimal-resistance" target="_blank">Lichens by Vincent Zonca - book review by Gregory F. Tague</a></b></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="https://leonardo.info/review/2023/03/justice-for-animals-our-collective-responsibility" target="_blank">Justice for Animals by Martha C. Nussbaum - book review by Gregory F. Tague</a></b></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="https://www.ebibliotekos.com/2023/02/space-races-by-anne-whitehouse.html" target="_blank">Space Races by Anne Whitehouse</a></b></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="https://leonardo.info/review/2023/02/a-better-ape-the-evolution-of-the-moral-mind-and-how-it-made-us-human" target="_blank">A Better Ape by Victor Kumar and Richmond Campbell - book review by Gregory F. Tague</a></b></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="https://www.ebibliotekos.com/2023/01/tribute-to-dr-kathryn-coe.html" target="_blank">Tribute to Dr. Kathryn Coe</a></b></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv19n01page12.html" target="_blank">An Evolutionary Case for Veganism</a></b></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Is there moral justification to eat meat? Read Gregory F. Tague's answer to that question in the <a href="https://www.ecologicalcitizen.net/article.php?t=is-there-moral-justification-to-eat-meat" target="_blank"><i>Ecological Citizen</i></a></b></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href=" https://leonardo.info/review/2022/11/animal-crisis-a-new-critical-theory" target="_blank">Animal Crisis: A New Critical Theory by Alice Crary and Lori Gruen</a></b></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="https://rdcu.be/cXO6x" target="_blank">Carlo Alvaro, a Philosopher of Virtue Ethics, Comments on Cultured Meat</a></b></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="https://leonardo.info/review/2022/09/review-of-the-creative-lives-of-animals" target="_blank">The Creative Lives of Animals by Carol Gigliotti - book review by Gregory F. Tague</a></b></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="https://www.pdcnet.org/envirophil/content/envirophil_2022_0019_0001_0123_0127?fbclid=IwAR2MyB7_e5-TJWvskk_jheidJ2PC9OR5_a7zy4fsUKb5yJ06qOQjiDo_7PA" target="_blank">Metamorphoses by Emanuele Coccia - book review by Gregory F. Tague</a></b></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="https://paleoanthropology.org/ojs/index.php/paleo/article/view/92/92?fbclid=IwAR28-5-mBFrgYomeFDzkEYm2zN4J1JhvFmgry-yr9af9n-CnDNShDNwKsJg" target="_blank">Growing Up In The Ice Age by April Nowell - book review by Gregory F. Tague</a></b></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>A paper, by Gregory F. Tague and Sintia Molina, on the cultural ecology of food in the journal <i><a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4931/15/1/20/htm" target="_blank">Environmental Sciences Proceedings</a></i></b></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><b><a href="https://leonardo.info/review/2022/02/charles-darwin" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Charles Darwin - a biography by J. David Archibald - Reviewed by Gregory F. Tague</span></a></b></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><b><a href="https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Art-and-Adaptability.php" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Art and Adaptability: Consciousness and Cognitive Culture by Gregory F. Tague</span></a></b></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><b><a href=" https://leonardo.info/review/2021/12/on-the-animal-trail" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: georgia;">On the Animal Trail - Review by Gregory F. Tague</span></a></b></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://www.ebibliotekos.com/2021/11/arrest-fauci-opinion-essay-by-ryan.html" target="_blank"><b>Arrest Fauci? - Opinion Essay by Ryan Ritchie</b></a></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="https://www.ebibliotekos.com/2021/11/ghosts-of-america-novel-by-caroline.html" target="_blank">Ghosts of America - Novel by Caroline Hagood - Reviewed by Mitch Levenberg</a></b></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="https://leonardo.info/review/2021/11/wattana-an-orangutan-in-paris " target="_blank">Wattana: An Orangutan in Paris by Chris Herzfeld - Review by Gregory F. Tague</a></b></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><span class="xydp7fa3c57fs1"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href=" https://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/An-Ape-Ethic-and-the-Question-of-Personhood.php " target="_blank">An Ape Ethic - Extended Abstract Essay - in The Montreal Review</a></b></span></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><span class="xydp7fa3c57fs1"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="https://www.leonardo.info/review/2021/09/bird-cottage" target="_blank">Bird Cottage by Eva Meijer - Review by Gregory F. Tague</a></b></span></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><span class="xydp7fa3c57fs1"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sscJUbQcfynl83iL0OT0cjXFHXCpVY_d/view?usp=sharing" target="_blank">Speak the Word - Music and Lyrics by Vaneshran Arumugam</a></b></span></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><span class="xydp7fa3c57fs1"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="https://www.ebibliotekos.com/2021/08/poems-on-waiting-by-isabel-rimanoczy.html" target="_blank">Patience is a Virtue - Waiting Poems by Isabel Rimanoczy</a></b></span></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin-bottom: 2.25pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt;"><span class="xydp7fa3c57fs1"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="https://www.ebibliotekos.com/2021/08/digging-moose-from-snow-by-skaidrite.html" target="_blank">Skaidrite Stelzer, Digging a Moose from the Snow –
Book Review</a></b></span></span></p></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://leonardo.info/review/2021/08/animals-best-friends-putting-compassion-to-work-for-animals-in-captivity-and-in-the" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Animals' Best Friends - compassionate action - Book Review by Gregory F. Tague</span></a></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://www.leonardo.info/review/2021/05/a-story-of-us-a-new-look-at-human-evolution" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: georgia;">A Story of Us - Cultural Evolution - Book Review by Gregory F. Tague</span></a></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://www.ebibliotekos.com/2021/04/tribute-to-kriben-pillay-by-vaneshran.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Tribute to Kriben Pillay by Vaneshran Arumugam</span></a></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://www.ebibliotekos.com/2021/04/review-of-damian-kims-book-cherish.html" target="_blank">Review of Damian Kim's book Cherish the Invisible Mind</a></span></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://trace.journal.fi/article/view/99538" target="_blank">"Primates are not...." essay by Gregory F. Tague in Trace: Journal of Human-Animal Studies</a></span></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://www.ebibliotekos.com/2020/12/four-remembrances-of-greg-trupiano.html" target="_blank">Greg Trupiano - Four Remembrances</a></span></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://www.litvegan.net/2021/03/natalie-khazaal-profile-by-celine-yarde.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Profile of Author and Vegan Natalie Khazaal on Literary Veganism</span></a></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://www.litvegan.net/2020/12/elisa-aaltola-profile-by-celine-yarde.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Profile of Philosopher Elisa Aaltola on Literary Veganism</span></a></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://www.ebibliotekos.com/2020/10/evan-nicholls-on-poetry-by-anne.html" target="_blank">Evan Nicholls on Poetry by Anne Whitehouse</a></span></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://www.asebl.net/2020/08/the-chimpanzee-chronicles.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Debra Rosenman's book, The Chimpanzee Chronicles - Essay by Gregory F. Tague</span></a></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://www.leonardo.info/review/2020/08/thinking-plant-animal-human-encounters-with-communities-of-difference" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: georgia;">David Wood's book, Thinking Plant Animal Human - Essay by Gregory F. Tague</span></a></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: georgia;"> <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/gftague/an-ape-ethic" target="_blank">An Ape Ethic and the Question of Personhood</a></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LK4iuHAPkc" target="_blank">Vaneshran Arumugam on South Africa - Video</a></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="http://www.litvegan.net/" target="_blank">Announcing a New Venture - Literary Veganism</a></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="https://www.ebibliotekos.com/2019/10/disintegration-by-se-soldwedel-review.html" target="_blank">"Disintegration" by S.E. Soldwedel - A Review by Carlo Alvaro</a></b></span></div>
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<b><a href="https://www.ebibliotekos.com/2019/10/songs-of-story-men-vaneshran-arumugam.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Songs of Story Men - Vaneshran Arumugam and Emmanuel Castis</span></a></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="https://www.ebibliotekos.com/2019/09/tribute-to-toni-morrison-by-divya.html" target="_blank">Tribute to Toni Morrison - by Divya Bhatnagar</a></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2019/08/banning-meat-consumption-book-review-by.html" target="_blank">Banning Meat Consumption? - Book Review by Carlo Alvaro</a></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MVxWKtqLZw" target="_blank">Story of Jimmy</a> (video)</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2019/06/story-of-ethical-vegan-carlo-alvaro.html" target="_blank">Story of an Ethical Vegan - Carlo Alvaro</a></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2019/05/south-africa-by-vaneshran-arumugam.html" target="_blank">"South Africa" - poem by Vaneshran Arumugam</a></b></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2018/12/spirit-ascending-poet-nina-carey-tassi.html" target="_blank">Spirit Ascending - Poet Nina Carey Tassi</a></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><span><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2018/06/long-days-journey-into-night-review-by.html" target="_blank">Long Day's Journey Into Night - Review by Timothy V. Dugan</a></span></b><br />
<b><span><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2017/12/kevin-hughes-on-free-verse.html" target="_blank">Kevin Hughes on Free Verse</a></span></b><br />
<b><span><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2017/09/poems-of-witness-by-james-k-zimmerman.html" target="_blank">Poems of Witness by James K. Zimmerman</a></span></b><br />
<b><span><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2017/07/creation-by-gabriel-guerra.html" target="_blank">Creation - a poem by Gabriel Guerra</a></span></b><br />
<b><span><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2017/03/meteor-shower-poems-by-anne-whitehouse.html" target="_blank">Meteor Shower by Anne Whitehouse - a Review</a></span></b><br />
<span><b><span style="line-height: 115%;"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2017/02/tribute-to-omer-hadziselimovic-by.html">Tribute
to Omer Hadžiselimović by MiloradPejić</a></span></b><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<b><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2016/12/protest-series-david-h-rommereim.html" target="_blank"><span>Protest Series - David H. Rommereim</span></a></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2016/12/protest-series-thom-brucie.html" target="_blank">Protest Series - Thom Brucie</a></b></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2016/12/protest-series-sharon-scholl.html" target="_blank">Protest Series - Sharon Scholl</a></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2016/12/protest-series-more-from-jk-zimmerman.html" target="_blank">Protest Series - 2 more from J.K. Zimmerman</a></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2016/12/protest-series-lauren-coe.html" target="_blank">Protest Series - Lauren Coe</a></b></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2016/11/protest-series-janyce-stefan-cole.html" target="_blank">Protest Series - Janyce Stefan-Cole</a></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2016/11/protest-series-jk-zimmerman.html" target="_blank">Protest Series - J.K. Zimmerman</a></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2016/08/summer-reading.html" target="_blank"><b>Some Reading</b></a></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2016/07/this-human-trait-thom-brucies-story.html" target="_blank"><b>This Human Trait: Thom Brucie's Story</b></a></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2016/07/working-with-words-and-wood-poems-of.html" target="_blank"><b>Thom Brucie's Poems from Wood</b></a></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2016/06/frank-russo-poems-on-human-history.html" target="_blank"><b>Frank Russo and Human History</b></a></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2016/02/finding-light-in-dark-jk-zimmerman.html" target="_blank"><b>Poems of James K. Zimmerman</b></a></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2015/12/refugees-and-runes-of-war.html" target="_blank"><b>Refugees and Runes of War</b></a></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2015/12/four-poems-by-adin-ljuca.html" target="_blank"><b>Four Poems by Adin Ljuca</b></a></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2015/11/flight-of-short-story-writer-andrea.html" target="_blank"><b>Andrea Vojtko: Short Story Writer</b></a></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2015/08/evolution-and-art-book-release.html" target="_blank"><b>Evolution and Art - New Book</b></a></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2015/07/review-of-psalm-sonnets.html" target="_blank"><b>Review of Alexandra Glynn's Psalm Sonnets</b></a></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2015/07/the-philosophical-novelist-ed-gibney.html" target="_blank"><b>Philosophical Novelist, Ed Gibney</b></a></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2015/06/nina-tassi-on-alicia-ostriker-review.html" target="_blank"><b>Review of Alicia Ostriker by Nina Tassi</b></a></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2015/03/standing-next-to-corpse-anthony-lock.html" target="_blank"><b>Standing Next to a Corpse</b></a></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2015/02/poetry-of-caroline-hagood-reviewed-by.html" target="_blank"><b>Review of Caroline Hagood by Nina Tassi</b></a></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2015/02/review-of-kevin-browns-liturgical-days.html" target="_blank"><b>Review of Kevin Brown by Nina Tassi</b></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2014/11/letter-from-poet.html" target="_blank"><b>Letter From a Poet</b></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><span><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2014/09/bibliotekos-is-honored-to-be-first.html" target="_blank">Tongariro by </a></span><span><span lang="HR"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2014/09/bibliotekos-is-honored-to-be-first.html" target="_blank">Milorad Pejić</a></span></span></b></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2014/02/oneills-strange-interlude-review-by-tim.html" target="_blank"><b>O'Neill's Strange Interlude - Timothy Dugan</b></a></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2013/08/flashfiction-from-disturbed-sleep.html" target="_blank"><b>Disturbed Sleep, M. Kaat Toy</b></a></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2013/08/a-way-of-being-in-world-poet-james-tolan.html" target="_blank"><b>Poet James Tolan</b></a></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>More<span><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2013/07/four-additional-poems-by-milorad-pejic_17.html" target="_blank"> Poems by Milorad <span lang="HR" style="mso-ansi-language: HR; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: SV;">Pejić</span></a></span> </b></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2013/06/karl-geary-on-writing-and-acting.html" target="_blank"><b>Karl Geary, Author and Actor</b></a></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2013/06/among-those-characters-gary-guinn.html" target="_blank"><b>Profile of Gary Guinn</b></a></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2013/05/mi-c-h-i-g-n-anovel-by-jeffvande-zande.html" target="_blank"><b>Michigan - Jeff Vande Zande</b></a></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2013/04/getting-inspired-evan-czmola-on-robert.html" target="_blank">Getting Inspired: Robert Bov</a><span><span style="line-height: 107%;"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2013/04/getting-inspired-evan-czmola-on-robert.html" target="_blank">é</a></span></span></b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2013/04/poems-by-miloradpejic-from-hyperborea_13.html" target="_blank"><b><span lang="" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: SV;">Poems by </span><span lang="HR" style="mso-ansi-language: HR; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: SV;">Milorad Pejić</span></b></a></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2013/04/getting-involved-empathy-of-arthur.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: black; font-family: georgia;"><b>The Empathy of Arthur Powers</b></span></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2013/03/night-writer-jeff-vande-zande.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: black; font-family: georgia;"><b>Night Writer: Jeff Vande Zande</b></span></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2013/02/turning-point.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: black; font-family: georgia;"><b>Turning Point</b></span></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2013/02/cape-town.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: black; font-family: georgia;"><b>Cape Town</b></span></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.ebibliotekos.com/2013/01/faith-and-doubt-anthology-available.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: black; font-family: georgia;"><b>Faith and Doubt anthology</b></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
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<span><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><br /></b></span><span style="color: black; font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;"></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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E♦Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16147875345316321220noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175539335941051415.post-65070841632965245972024-02-10T06:50:00.000-08:002024-02-10T06:50:10.624-08:00Poetry by Vaneshran Arumugam<span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>“Freedom...yet incomplete”<br /> By Vaneshran Arumugam</b></span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 8.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><br />
I’m just a tiny piece of the planet <br />
that prays with my eyes closed <br />
while i feel every flutter in the darkness where my prayer is uttered <br />
I am alo preyed upon so that <br />
the whole of my peace is disturbed, my ease is curbed <br />
when you're convinced convincing me that we are two <br />
It is not so true <br />
Every matter only appears outside these eyes <br />
while the real light is inside burning bright <br />
catching glimpses of the primordial dance, the fight <br />
or flight <br />
If I can compose myself again i just might <br />
grow from my mind some runners to root in the dimension that follows... <br />
the what is next. <br />
Maybe then that final peace will come <br />
<br />
But magic spells are incanted syllable by syllable <br />
Great stories stitched together piece by piece <br />
Harmonies symphonised beat by beat <br />
until colours bleed from the dark and a kaleidoscope emerges <br />
like a scent on the breeze <br />
opposite to nowhere<br />
and far from disease <br /></b></span></p><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Copyright©2024 by Vaneshran Arumugam. All Rights Reserved.</span></b></b></span></div><o:p></o:p><p></p>E♦Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16147875345316321220noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175539335941051415.post-3899373719455458292024-01-24T10:47:00.000-08:002024-01-24T10:51:45.316-08:00Letters to My Sheep by Teya Brooks Pribac - Reviewed by Andrew Taylor-Troutman<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b></b></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-size: 12pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Sheep-Teya-Brooks-Pribac/dp/0645374733" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="466" data-original-width="302" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi511drClgmnYME-NpjUpDklj18MdbSSADuXtBuMkQk5q8LeYPvgalJcervtWPpQeroMlPMi0_9_J1ODHp24H8ywFblBT3vstEqjGixTsIlcdVvc-XAm2dzcoXBj4LjBseOeqRww798vzMmiWz60gZv8W0IBEmjSbqd0MbY6_wsMDQUTLR5rmrh4iah2ZtN/s320/61zr3gqjbqL._SY466_.jpg" width="207" /></a></b></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><br />Teya Brooks Pribac, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Sheep-Teya-Brooks-Pribac/dp/0645374733" target="_blank">Letters to My Sheep</a></i>. 2023, Blue
Books. 136 pages. U.S. $16.99, paperback. 978-0-45374735 </b></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: 8.0pt; mso-margin-top-alt: 0in;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Reviewed by Andrew Taylor-Troutman<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #252525;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Even though the title, <em>Letters to My Sheep</em><em><span style="font-style: normal;">,</span></em> suggests a direct address to these
creatures, Teya Brooks Pribac is often writing to her fellow humans. This
writer is at pains to speak against the reduction of animal life into a product
for food consumption. Indeed, it hurts her heart. Those familiar with veganism
will find familiar arguments with which to agree. But the underlying question
for Pribac is: How do we change someone’s mind? How do we, living in a culture
that commonly considers humankind superior to the animal kingdom, change our
worldview? Pribac demonstrates that empathy is the greatest teacher.</b></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><em><span style="color: #252525;">Letters to My Sheep </span></em><span style="color: #252525;">gives voice to Pribac’s companions. Their thoughts are
recorded in italics and provide humorous commentary sprinkled throughout the
book. Pribac is not averse to depicting her sheep as gently poking fun at her
and her understanding. For instance, a sheep muses, <em><span style="font-style: normal;">“</span>Humans have this little obsession with mirrors</em><em><span style="font-style: normal;">”</span> </em>(40)<em>. </em>Pribac is aware that
such writing has an anthromorphic effect on sheep, making these creatures more
humanlike. But in my opinion, these thoughts work because the author is an
astute observer. Much of the book is a narration of her time watching the sheep
be sheep. And she makes the effort to view sheep on their own terms: “It took
me a while to realize that peeing is another sign of happiness in sheep, a bit
like a smile in humans” (41).<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><em><span style="color: #252525;">Letters to My Sheep </span></em><span style="color: #252525;">includes brief descriptions of the relatively new
scientific field of ethology, the study of nonhuman animal behavior. Basic
theories, such as the brain’s categorization of visual objects, are introduced,
including critical analysis (such as how the process of categorization can lead
to prejudice), which are then illustrated with the sheep.<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #252525;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>I was most interested in the “momentary states
of uncertainty” that temporarily resist “closure” or assimilation into known
categories. Pribac thinks of such states as a moment of awe and asks, “Can
sheep have this kind of experience? I believe so” (99). In a pean of praise for
our “delicate and beautifully interconnected world,” she writes, “Every move,
every sound, every smell is worth a thousand human words” (51).<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></p>
<p><span style="color: #252525;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>If awe is one common response between human and
nonhuman animal life, Pribac profoundly demonstrates that so is grief. Her
sheep mourn the loss of their canine friend, and the book closes with Pribac’s
and her husband’s grief over the loss of a sheep. She includes her husband’s
poetry as a means to point to this loss: “When he dies, I will have lost a dear
friend, a co-author, an idiot savant, as hungry for life as anyone I have seen
go out of it” (127). It’s moving, and yet Pribac recognizes the inevitability
of death: “We can’t do much about it. [The cycles of life] steal from us, but
they also bring us gifts.” I think readers will find many gifts between the
pages of this book.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>- Andrew
Taylor-Troutman is pastor of Chapel in the Pines in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
and the author of seven books, including <i>Tigers, Mice & Strawberries:
Poems</i>.<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;"><b><span style="line-height: 107%;">Copyright</span><span style="line-height: 107%;">©</span></b></span><span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;"><b>2024 by Andrew Taylor-Troutman. All
Rights Reserved.</b></span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>E♦Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16147875345316321220noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175539335941051415.post-91811939473098272232024-01-01T13:15:00.000-08:002024-01-01T13:15:41.649-08:00New Book by Jan Deckers - Health Care Ethics and Law<span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWsCZiaL2-4vO0SfmdJwoVFwo_w4daww_Yt5BUbo2F_d3ZYyxKU_g6ytCIDsxjsqV21Jetg4XmdjrN9PYRwWGlVnb91AIEZm5SOfxhsP5zQjaKbVqsKmEypCkBWNIFvv-TOb16XqFbzCClNm4Vj9RwMzHUtQOOyWdOW_qfQmYeBZNYGgA4WDmnmZKuYt4k/s466/Deckers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="466" data-original-width="369" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWsCZiaL2-4vO0SfmdJwoVFwo_w4daww_Yt5BUbo2F_d3ZYyxKU_g6ytCIDsxjsqV21Jetg4XmdjrN9PYRwWGlVnb91AIEZm5SOfxhsP5zQjaKbVqsKmEypCkBWNIFvv-TOb16XqFbzCClNm4Vj9RwMzHUtQOOyWdOW_qfQmYeBZNYGgA4WDmnmZKuYt4k/s320/Deckers.jpg" width="253" /></a></div><br />Deckers, J. Fundamentals of Critical Thinking in Health Care Ethics and Law, Ghent: Owl Press, 2023.<br /><br />Available from various locations, for example from<a href="https://centralbooks.com/fundamentals-of-critical-thinking-in-health-care-ethics-and.html"> here</a>. <br /><br />General information <br /><br />As cutting-edge technologies continue to reshape the landscape of health care, we are faced with profound ethical and legal dilemmas on our journey towards a brighter future. This book invites you to develop your critical thinking skills in relation to a number of themes in bioethics and law, including our duties to care for each other, for nonhuman animals, and for the nonhuman world. While the book engages with the law as a source of guidance and food for thought, unlike most publications in health care ethics and law, the emphasis is on the development of critical thinking skills in ethics. Each chapter ends with a list of questions that act as prompts in your own critical thinking journey. <br /><br />The book is printed on climate-neutral paper. Emissions are offset by supporting a clean drinking water scheme in Zoba Maekel, Eritrea. It supports communities in renovating their boreholes so that people have access to clean water. <br /><br />I provide the table of contents below, as well as a brief summary of each chapter. <br /><br />Table of contents <br /><br />Chapter 1: A short introduction to health care ethics and law <br /><br />Chapter 2: Autonomy and its limits <br /><br />Chapter 3: Duties of care, confidentiality, candour, and cost minimisation <br /><br />Chapter 4: The creation and use of human embryos for human reproduction <br /><br />Chapter 5: When is it acceptable to use non-human animals to promote human health? <br /><br />Chapter 6: Research ethics <br /><br />Chapter 7: Ethics in relation to pregnancy termination <br /><br />Chapter 8: Is genetic engineering justified? <br /><br />Chapter 9: Human embryo research in embryonic stem cell and cloning debates <br /><br />Chapter 10: Ethical and legal issues related to the end of life <br /><br />Concise summary (chapter-by-chapter) <br /><br />Chapter 1: A short introduction to health care ethics and law <br /><br />I argue that there is an urgent need to develop critical thinking skills in health care ethics and law, as the health care needs of a large number of organisms are in jeopardy, in spite of the fact that we have the capacities to address many of them. In order to do so, it is good to reflect upon one’s meta-ethical theory to determine what ethics is about. It is also important to reflect on how one’s values shape one’s principles and theories, and what ethical theory might be best to adopt. While much health care ethics theorising focuses on abstract/formal ethical theories that are applied insufficiently to reality, I argue that it is much more important to reflect upon different axiologies (theories of which concrete things/entities should be valued, and what value each has). <br /><br />I argue for a theory that includes a deontological (duty-based) and a consequentialist element: the duty to promote positive consequences for one’s own health. This is not accompanied by an individualistic axiology. Rather, this theory is compatible with an axiology that ascribes intrinsic value to all entities. A crucial question here is what the intrinsic values of different things are, and how much value one should give to one entity relative to the value of another entity. Our axiologies are influenced by our reflections on what different entities are, which is the subject of ontology (theory of reality). <br /><br />I outline two dominant ontologies, mechanistic materialism and dualism. I identify problems with both and sketch an alternative ontology, ‘panexperientialism’, that might both inspire and be inspired by a different outlook on what matters. <br /><br />The practice of health care ethics is not only shaped by ethics, but also by different health care professions and by the law. This is why health care professionals and patients must take heed of relevant professional guidance and law, while avoiding legalistic approaches to health care. <br /><br />The chapter concludes by providing some practical tools that can be used in ethical reasoning, including the use of logic, analogies, and thought experiments. These tools are applied to different areas of health care ethics in the ensuing chapters. <br /><br />Questions raised by this chapter: <br /><br />1. What are the different meta-ethical theories that have been described in this chapter and why might meta-ethical reflection be important? <br /><br />2. What is your theory of health care ethics? <br /><br />3. What does it mean to ascribe intrinsic value, which entities should be valued intrinsically, and how would you weigh up different entities’ values? <br /><br />4. What ontology do you adopt and how might this inform your ethical theory? <br /><br />5. What is the relevance of professional guidance and law for health care ethics? <br /><br />6. Do you agree with the view that logic is important in health care ethics? Justify your answer. <br /><br />7. Could you provide an example of how an analogy or a thought experiment might be helpful in health care ethics? <br /><br />8. Why might legalism be a problem? <br /><br />9. What is your view on the (ir)relevance of slippery slope arguments? <br /><br />10. ‘Plants are sentient beings. Therefore, plants should be valued intrinsically.’ Do you think that this argument is logically valid? <br /><br />Chapter 2: Autonomy and its limits <br /><br />I argue that the concept of autonomy is relevant in health care and that health care professionals should reflect critically on what the law demands from them when human patients are unable to consent due to a lack of autonomy. I also argue that the need to balance the values of autonomy and beneficence can present great difficulties when health care professionals consider the health care interests of children, including their interests in safeguarding. The chapter ends with a discussion of the value of liberty and how it may need to be limited for health reasons in some situations. <br /><br />Questions raised by this chapter: <br /><br />1. What should health care professionals do in order to make sure that patients consent? <br /><br />2. What should health care professionals do in situations where patients lack capacity? <br /><br />3. Why might it be appropriate for health care professionals to consider advance refusals from patients who lack capacity? <br /><br />4. In what circumstances would you condone restricting someone’s liberty for health reasons? <br /><br />5. Do you agree with the view that there are some aspects of care that patients should not be allowed to refuse? <br /><br />6. How should health care professionals decide whether or not to provide health care treatment to a child? <br /><br />7. What counts as child abuse? <br /><br />8. What should health care professionals do when they think that continued treatment of an infant is not in the infant’s best interests and when the parents insist on its continuation? <br /><br />9. Do you agree with the view that a competent child’s views on medical treatment should be allowed to be overridden? <br /><br />10. How should a health care professional handle a situation where they discover that a child has been subjected to female genital mutilation? <br /><br />Chapter 3: Duties of care, confidentiality, candour, and cost minimisation <br /><br />I discuss the duties of care, confidentiality, candour, and cost minimisation. As health care professionals can fail in these duties intentionally or through being reckless, careful attention must be paid to how these duties can be fulfilled and to how some of these might need to be balanced with other moral considerations. <br /><br />Questions raised by this chapter: <br /><br />1. How can health care professionals ensure that they act in accordance with their duties of care? <br /><br />2. What should be demonstrated to determine whether a health care professional has breached their duty of care? <br /><br />3. What should health care professionals do to safeguard patients’ right to confidentiality? <br /><br />4. In what situations might it be appropriate for health care professionals to divulge confidential patient information to third parties? <br /><br />5. What should a health care professional do if the police ask for information about a patient to investigate a potential offence that took place on a road? <br /><br />6. How can health care professionals ensure that they act in accordance with their duty of candour? <br /><br />7. When might it be appropriate to mislead patients? <br /><br />8. What might be the benefits and disadvantages of using the notion of QALY in decisions about how to allocate funding for different treatments? <br /><br />9. How would you decide between offering a lung transplant to a 75-year-old person who recently stopped smoking and a 25-year-old person who has never smoked when both are clinically equally suitable for transplantation? <br /><br />10. Which criteria would you use to discriminate between patients who may need intensive care due to infection with a coronavirus when not all patients can receive treatment on the intensive care unit? <br /><br />Chapter 4: The creation and use of human embryos for human reproduction <br /><br />I provide an overview of the views adopted in the Warnock Report and in UK law on the use of embryos for reproductive purposes. I show that the arguments underpinning this framework do not provide a firm foundation for legislation. I recognise that, while it is one thing to undermine a range of arguments that have been used to deny high moral status to the young embryo, it is another matter to make a convincing case for why the young embryo should be granted such status. It is important to recognise that people who debate human embryo research often portray the young embryo as if he or she were an abstract, alien entity, the product of those who experiment with substances in test tubes in laboratories. The moral position that young embryos lack high status might be favoured by this mode of representation. At the same time, however, some modern technologies, for example, ultrasound sonography, allow us to represent embryos and foetuses in more concrete ways than has been possible until recently. This might perhaps make it more likely for some to be able to empathise with them, and prompt them to assign a higher status to them than they might have done otherwise. My view is that we should grant equal moral significance to all human beings. I am uncomfortable with the idea that we should value some human beings more than others. I also argue that health care professionals and patients should consider a number of other issues related to fertility treatments, including the use of PGD, sex selection, the creation of ‘saviour siblings’, mitochondrial donation, and issues related to whom should be able to access (information about) such treatments. <br /><br />Questions raised by this chapter: <br /><br />1. What are the main issues associated with the creation and use of human embryos for human reproduction? <br /><br />2. What is the UK legal framework on embryo research, what are its ethical underpinnings, and how has it influenced other jurisdictions? <br /><br />3. What is the position on embryo research developed by the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology? <br /><br />4. How has the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology influenced different laws on embryo research? <br /><br />5. What is the argument from sentience? Is it valid? <br /><br />6. What is the argument from individuality? Is it valid? <br /><br />7. What is the argument from twinning? Is it valid? <br /><br />8. What are the key issues associated with pre-implantation genetic diagnosis? <br /><br />9. When, if ever, should pre-implantation genetic diagnosis be acceptable to diagnose disability? <br /><br />10. When, if ever, should pre-implantation genetic diagnosis be acceptable to diagnose the sex of an embryo? <br /><br />11. When, if ever, should pre-implantation genetic diagnosis be acceptable to diagnose whether an embryo is a suitable tissue match? <br /><br />12. When, if ever, should mitochondrial donation be allowed? <br /><br />13. What should be the conditions for someone to be allowed to receive fertility treatment? <br /><br />14. What should be the conditions for someone to be allowed to donate gametes? <br /><br />15. When, if ever, should those who are conceived with donated gametes have access to genetic information about their donors, and what information should they be allowed to access? <br /><br />Chapter 5: When is it acceptable to use non-human animals to promote human health? <br /><br />In this chapter I grapple with the question of when it might be acceptable to use non-human animals to promote human health. I start with the observation that people use non-human animals in various ways to promote human health, and explore two common ways in which they are used: their use in research and their use for human nutrition. <br /><br />With regard to the research usage, I sketch some laws that legislate the use of non-human animals, highlighting in particular that widespread support for the principle of necessity and the 3Rs questions many projects that use non-human animals, given that such animals are poor models for human beings. In addition, I engage with the question whether non-human animals should be used to model human health and illness, even if they might be good models, where I argue that an account of the moral standing of different non-human animals must be based on evolutionism. In this light, it would be particularly problematic to use non-human animals for research that does not benefit them where the animals are closely related to us. <br /><br />With regard to the human use of non-human animals for food, I argue that, if the underlying reasoning is applied consistently across different domains, EU legislation on the use of non-human animals for research would lend significant support for significant change in laws on the use of non-human animals for food, resulting in a drastic curtailment in the human consumption of animal products. I sketch the moral arguments underpinning qualified moral veganism, which is defended against some challenges. The chapter also considers the ethical issues related to radically novel ways in which animal products could be produced, including the development of lab-grown meat. <br /><br />Questions raised by this chapter: <br /><br />1. What might be the reasons behind the fact that most books on health care ethics and law do not consider the use of non-human animals to promote human health? Why do you (dis)agree with them? <br /><br />2. What moral theory do you advocate in relation to the human use of non-human animals? <br /><br />3. What are the key issues to consider when human beings use non-human animals for research? <br /><br />4. What is the relevant law on the use of non-human animals for research, and what legal change do you advocate, if any? <br /><br />5. What do the positions of Singer, Regan, and Midgley entail for the use of non-human animals for research? <br /><br />6. What would the EU law on the use of non-human animals for research imply for the human use of non-human animals for food, if the law in relation to the latter was made consistent with the law in relation to the former? <br /><br />7. What moral reasons might someone adopt in support of carnism and in support of qualified veganism? <br /><br />8. What arguments could be used to support or undermine the use of non-human animals for human nutrition? <br /><br />9. How would you evaluate the morality of technologies that aim to produce lab-grown meat? <br /><br />10. What useful functions, if any, might be fulfilled by committees that evaluate particular projects to use non-human animals? Justify your answer. <br /><br />Chapter 6: Research ethics <br /><br />In this chapter I engage with generic issues that apply to research projects, as well as with more specific issues that pertain to research that is carried out in clinical health care contexts. I identify the benefits and disadvantages of different types of clinical studies and discuss whether clinical trials should only take place when there is clinical equipoise. A failure to conduct RCTs in particular may be unethical and may result in a stagnation of ideas, a misplaced trust in unsystematised clinical experience, little development in available treatments, and a waste of resources. I also discuss the relevance of complementary therapies, question the use of alternative treatments, set out why research ethics committees play a valuable role in health care research, and how those who sit on such committees might go about evaluating research projects. <br /><br />Questions raised by this chapter: <br /><br />1. Why is consent important in relation to research? <br /><br />2. Do you think research should ever be allowed without consent from participants? Justify your answer. <br /><br />3. What do you think about the view that any research should be allowed, as long as participants consent? <br /><br />4. What are the key ethical features of the relevant laws in relation to health care research? <br /><br />5. Why should many RCTs never take place? Justify your answer. <br /><br />6. What safeguards should there be to make sure that RCTs do not expose participants to disproportionate risks? <br /><br />7. Should people ever be incentivised to participate in research studies? <br /><br />8. What do you explain to potential participants when you want to recruit them to your study? <br /><br />9. Should children be allowed to participate in research? Justify your answer. <br /><br />10. What is your view about the opinion that health care trials should only be allowed if there is clinical equipoise? <br /><br />Chapter 7: Ethics in relation to pregnancy termination <br /><br />I propose how abortion legislation in the United Kingdom should be modified if it was informed by the view that all unborn human beings should be granted a right to life that should be allowed to be trumped in a limited number of situations. I argue that the current distinctions in the legal provisions for ‘able’ and ‘disabled’ foetuses as well as for ‘implanted’ and ‘unimplanted’ embryos cannot be maintained, and that greater protection of all human life must be enshrined into law. I also argue that there should only be a limited right to conscientious objection to participate in the provision of abortion services. There should be no right to object conscientiously to providing abortion services when there is a great risk that a pregnant woman’s life might be lost should the pregnancy be continued, and no right to refuse pregnancy counselling and referral of those who satisfy any of the revised legal grounds. <br /><br />I recognise that, whether abortion law is altered in line with this proposal both depends and should depend on whether a valid democratic process is instigated towards legal reform. It is my hope that, if abortion legislation were amended in accordance with this proposal, health care professionals would provide those services that women should be entitled to, give serious consideration to facilitating or providing abortions that should be allowed, and reject those that should be prohibited. <br /><br />Questions raised by this chapter: <br /><br />1. What are the salient points of the law on abortion in the different jurisdictions of the United Kingdom? <br /><br />2. What should a health care professional consider when a patient requests an abortion? <br /><br />3. Why might abortion pose a moral problem for health care professionals? <br /><br />4. What do you think should be the legal boundaries regarding the right to conscientious objection related to abortion? <br /><br />5. Should abortion be allowed without any restrictions? Justify your answer. <br /><br />6. What shape should the law on abortion have? Justify your answer. <br /><br />7. What is your position on the legality of using medicines that might be abortifacient? <br /><br />8. If one adopts human egalitarianism, would it imply that abortion should never be allowed? Justify your answer. <br /><br />9. Do you think men should have any say in relation to whether or not an abortion should be allowed? Justify your answer. <br /><br />10. Should everyone who wants it have free access to IVF treatments? Justify your answer. <br /><br />Chapter 8: Is genetic engineering justified? <br /><br />In this chapter I discuss ethical issues related to genetic engineering. While there is no doubt that genetics has advanced our understanding about health and illness a great deal, technologies that use the science of genetics can both promote as well as undermine health. Physical health can be improved and undermined, both directly and indirectly, through genetic engineering. The same applies to mental health. With regard to the mental health impacts of genetic engineering, a significant concern that has received relatively little attention in the literature is the concern that we ought to avoid creating unnatural things, and that genetic engineering is unnatural. <br /><br />Although nothing is unnatural in the sense that everything is part of nature, I argue that the widely used distinction between the natural and the unnatural is nevertheless not meaningless. A semantic distinction between the natural and the unnatural can be drawn whereby the latter pertains to that which is affected by human culture and the former to everything else. More importantly, I argue that the fact that human culture pervades many natural events does not eliminate the distinction, but that it is appropriate to situate the natural and the unnatural at opposite ends of a spectrum. Where an entity is situated along this spectrum depends on the likelihood with which its specific essence might have come about counterfactually, which in this case means naturally. I distinguish between three gradations of unnaturalness, in spite of this continuity. <br /><br />This distinction between the natural and the unnatural has moral relevance. While we must adopt a prima facie duty to safeguard the integrity of nature, the integrity of nature should not be protected at all costs. Doing so would stifle all human activity. In order to flourish, Homo faber must alter nature. However, an action that alters a natural entity’s teleology more significantly is, ceteris paribus, more problematic compared to another action. <br /><br />This discussion is highly relevant to evaluate genetic engineering. As genetic engineering projects normally involve type 1 instances of the unnatural, they are morally suspect. In spite of this, the example of Huntington’s disease shows that this does not imply that genetic engineering is necessarily wrong. However, if a type 2 or type 3 intervention existed that could enhance the quality of life of the person in question equally effectively, we ought to prefer it. <br /><br />Questions raised by this chapter: <br /><br />1. Why might the question of what is natural be relevant for a discussion of genetic engineering? <br /><br />2. Do you agree with the view that there are gradations of artificiality? Justify your answer. <br /><br />3. How might differences in degrees of naturalness be morally relevant? <br /><br />4. How might genetic engineering be used to benefit human health? <br /><br />5. How might genetic engineering undermine human health? <br /><br />6. Do you approve of the creation of Herman the bull? <br /><br />7. Would you approve of using genetic engineering on a human embryo to correct the gene that predisposes for Huntington’s disease, if such were possible? <br /><br />8. What do you think of the view that there is nothing new in genetic engineering as nature has engineered itself for a very long time? <br /><br />9. What do you think of genetic engineering projects that aim at making some non-human animals better models to study human disease? <br /><br />10. Would you eat genetically engineered plants or animals? Justify your answer. <br /><br />Chapter 9: Human embryo research in embryonic stem cell and cloning debates <br /><br />In this chapter, I provide an overview of the views that have been expressed by advisory bodies and members of Westminster Parliament in support of legal developments to allow research on young human embryos in the United Kingdom. While UK law has inspired similar legal reform in many other countries, this chapter shows that the arguments underpinning this framework do not provide a sound basis for the current legal position. My view on the status of the young human embryo is at odds with the views underpinning this framework. Rather than denying the embryo high moral status, I adopt the view that we should consider all human beings to be equal, rather than make the question of what value should be assigned to a human being dependent on how many properties, capacities, or experiences a human being might possess. <br /><br />Questions raised by this chapter: <br /><br />1. How would you sum up the moral reasoning underpinning the Human Fertilisation (Research Purposes) Regulations 2001, and what do you make of the arguments that were developed to support these? <br /><br />2. What are the two arguments from potentiality in relation to the status of the young human embryo and do you think that these arguments are sound? <br /><br />3. What is the argument from capacities in relation to the status of the young human embryo and why do you (dis)agree with this argument? <br /><br />4. What is the argument from probability in relation to the status of the young human embryo and why do you (dis)agree with this argument? <br /><br />5. What is the argument from mourning in relation to the status of the young human embryo and why do you (dis)agree with this argument? <br /><br />6. What is the argument from ensoulment in relation to the status of the young human embryo and why do you (dis)agree with this argument? <br /><br />7. What policy would you like to adopt in relation to human embryo research? Justify your answer. <br /><br />8. Would you favour altering the law on human embryo research so that human embryos can be used for research when they are older than 14 days? Justify your answer. <br /><br />9. What is the relevance of the scientific advances that have been developed on the basis of human embryo research for the ethics of embryo research? <br /><br />10. Do you agree with laws that allow the creation of human admixed or hybrid embryos? Justify your answer. <br /><br />Chapter 10: Ethical and legal issues related to the end of life <br /><br />In this chapter I consider when treatment might be futile, whether it may ever be appropriate to withhold or to withdraw treatment from a patient, whether pain relief that might hasten one’s death should be taken or provided, whether physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia should be legal options, and how health care professionals might cater for the spiritual needs of patients. These issues are difficult and emotionally challenging. In a culture where ageism is challenged and where speaking about death and the dying process might be more widely accepted, there is a good chance that people may feel better able to cope with the prospect of dying and with making decisions that promote well-being when it is hard to do so. <br /><br />Questions raised by this chapter: <br /><br />1. How might health care professionals go about determining whether or not a treatment is futile? <br /><br />2. How might a health care professional justify withdrawing treatment from a patient? <br /><br />3. Do you agree with the withdrawal of treatments for patients who are in a persistent vegetative state? How might you try to justify your answer? <br /><br />4. Do you think that there are aspects of care that should never be withheld or withdrawn from patient, and if so, which aspects? How would you justify this? <br /><br />5. What do you think of the view that English law on assisting suicide discriminates against disabled people? <br /><br />6. Do you think assisting suicide should be allowed? Justify your answer. <br /><br />7. Do you think euthanasia should be allowed? Justify your answer. <br /><br />8. If assisting suicide were allowed, what do you think should be the conditions? <br /><br />9. If euthanasia were allowed, what do you think should be the conditions? <br /><br />10. Do you think there may be situations where those who aid in the suicide of a patient should (not) be prosecuted? <br /><br />11. How might the doctrine of double effect be applied to the provision of pain relief to a dying patient? <br /><br />12. Do you agree with the view that withdrawing artificial hydration and nutrition from a terminally ill patient should always be accompanied by terminal sedation? <br /><br />13. What should health care professionals do when the parents of competent children demand life-saving treatment that the child refuses? <br /><br />14. What do you think of the view that good palliative care is always preferable to treating the patient in order to end their life? <br /><br />15. How might health care professionals optimally look after the spiritual needs of patients who adopt Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism, or Buddhism?</b></span><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;"><b>Copyright©2023 by Jan Deckers.
All Rights Reserved.</b></span><o:p></o:p></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span><div><br /> </div></div>E♦Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16147875345316321220noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175539335941051415.post-49095964640231035022023-10-31T07:45:00.003-07:002023-10-31T07:45:34.390-07:00Lunations by Garrett Mostowski - Reviewed by Andrew Taylor-Troutman<p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><i><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Lunations: Poems</span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">, Garrett Mostowski. Wipf and Stock; 71 pages,
2023.<br />
<br />
Reviewed by Andrew Taylor-Troutman<br />
<br />
Wendell Berry asked that his readers speak his Sabbath poems to the trees. I
wonder if Garrett Mostowski envisions <i>Lunations </i>read out loud to the
moon, his muse. Whenever and wherever this collection is read, I recommend an
atmosphere for quiet concentration. <br />
<br />
Mostowski is a poet’s poet. He gives attention to the craft of a poem,
employing literary devices like alliteration, internal rhyme and diction
(choice of words). He cites a number of classical and modern poets, meaning he
is well-versed and generous with naming his influences. That is refreshing. <br />
<br />
Many poems are in free-verse form and use creative line breaks, spacing and
structure. There are also prose poems, including two separate series envisioned
as a captain’s journal and comments “overheard onboard.” He writes a haibun and
several haikus. To give an idea of the range of topics, my favorite poem is a
moving reflection about the relationship between father and son in the context
of riding bikes. <br />
<br />
<i>Lunations</i>, however, is aptly named. Many poems ruminate on that silent
orb in the night sky. The moon’s many phases serve as a metaphor for the
unpredictability, struggle and occasional delight of life. Poems about the moon
are grounded in Mostowski’s earthly life, especially his intimate
relationships. Though this is his first poetry collection, Mostowski avoids the
rookie mistake of trying to say too much at once. <br />
<br />
Like the moon’s surface, many of these poems are concealed with intentional
ambiguity. Readers will have to work to interpret meaning. While a parish
pastor, Mostowski rarely references Christianity. Like the shadow of the moon,
he leaves readers to imagine the contours of their own faith. <br />
<br />
The mark of this book is that such a reader’s effort is rewarded. Mostowski
invites us to live into the paradox: we are moved in our daily lives by higher
forces, if only we stop and look up. Slow down and notice. In “captain’s
journal: final transmission,” Mostowski writes, “Here’s why I’m slow: … It is
because I am away, / but still here with you, / just observing / everything /
in my / time/ with space.” <br /></span></b></span></p><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Copyright</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">©2023 by
Andrew Taylor-Troutman. All Rights Reserved.</span></b></b></span></div><p></p><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p>E♦Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16147875345316321220noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175539335941051415.post-15755887276869018252023-10-30T07:00:00.003-07:002023-10-31T07:42:14.687-07:00Ross Gay, The Book of (More) Delights - Reviewed by Andrew Taylor-Troutman<span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Ross Gay, <i>The Book of (More) Delights,</i> 2023. Chapel Hill, NC, Algonquin Books. 304 pages. $28 U.S. hardback. 978-1-953232-83-8. <br /><br />Reviewed by Andrew Taylor-Troutman <br /><br />The other day, I saw a birch tree and immediately thought of its bark as “curling like pages of old books.” Reading Ross Gay will put his words in your head. <br /><br />The Book of (More) Delights is the sequel to the author’s best-seller. He practiced the habit of writing about one thing that delighted him each day for an entire year. He calls them essayettes. They read to me like a hybrid between a journal entry and prose poem. <br /><br />At one of his readings, I heard Gay claim that he is a “simile guy” and his latest book of prose bears this playful poetic touch. For instance, sweet potatoes are nestled under the ground “like a fluffle of bunnies.” This is delightful. Also, his description of a friend’s laugh as “like a gravelly hot air balloon … sometimes like a tire popping.” <br /><br />When Gay happens upon a squirrel face first in a front porch Halloween pumpkin — “that plump butt, those long-footed rear legs, and that tail, buoyant, flamboyant” — he memorably describes the creature as devouring a seed “like me eating a little pizza.” Delight! <br /><br />When reading these essayettes, I often found myself humming the Shaker hymn, “Simple Gifts.” A gift to be simple, a gift to be free. In Gay’s words, “There are so many simple pleasures, simple delights, and maybe the goal, the practice, is to be delighted especially by them, the simplest of things.” <br /><br />But despite what a reader might think, Gay protests that he is not “some kind of sage of delight.” He also reflects upon “un-delights” such as the Macy’s Day Parade as “a miserable advertisement for global corporate dominion.” He compiles a litany of un-delights: “being the descendent of people who were treated as property; having been driven from your land; having had your neighborhood razed for a highway or industrial park; having had the top of the mountain where you live blown off; having been disbelieved, or brutalized, in a medical setting …” Gay goes on. <br /><br />The paradox about this book of delights is that Gay returns again and again to the topic of death. Anyone who has ever visited someone in Hospice will deeply resonate with the chapter “At the Door.” When Gay’s grandmother dies, he eulogizes her, in part, by delighting at the recollection of the unique way that she said his name. His writing brought tears to my eyes. Might that, too, be a delight? <br /><br />Just as another of his essay collections, Inciting Joy, made clear that joy is not the absence of sorrow, reading Gay helps me realize that simple delight is found among complex realities, including struggles. He refers to a “completely unspeakable difficult time” when “the awful … was really rattling around in my mind like a maraca.” (Note another delightful simile!) Gay then describes a simple spoon, but it occasions this reflection on a profound friendship: “no small balm … to have a friend pointing out, too, what is not only un-awful, but truly beautiful, the truly beautiful human-made, the human made beautiful…” <br /><br />The short chapters of this book can be read quickly. I tried to slow down and savor the words, which I suspect is also a way to look for delight in my life. This book has taught me that curiosity is a close cousin to delight. And reminds me of the deep, abiding delight to contribute to the delight of others: “It is … some delight when a kind who has a hard time becomes a kid who’s having a good time in no small part thanks to you throwing that kid in the air again and again.”</b></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Copyright©2023 by Andrew
Taylor-Troutman. All Rights Reserved.</b></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><b></b></span></div>E♦Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16147875345316321220noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175539335941051415.post-27271926721721585962023-09-06T07:18:00.001-07:002023-09-06T07:18:48.756-07:00Anne Whitehouse poetry book Steady - Reviewed by Andrew Taylor-Troutman<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><span style="font-size: 12pt;"></span></b></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7NeUxoSUSmFGyxf1Hp1HygPSeKkNzZ8iLHvr-qViscCdGYxjhM7N-YedQZyi4DFG4rTeHbxjfg9bqwo9AVG-W6_M1OM26wwJH1G5Eu5ATUZum4cqWu0TOOJJutG68IyifKD32xFNwzLgNDe0DVSQoieFhSP69wWGC3FWIUON66_J-OhC0CvoUqCqrJpLU/s2700/Whitehouse%20Steady%20DMP.webp" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2700" data-original-width="1800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7NeUxoSUSmFGyxf1Hp1HygPSeKkNzZ8iLHvr-qViscCdGYxjhM7N-YedQZyi4DFG4rTeHbxjfg9bqwo9AVG-W6_M1OM26wwJH1G5Eu5ATUZum4cqWu0TOOJJutG68IyifKD32xFNwzLgNDe0DVSQoieFhSP69wWGC3FWIUON66_J-OhC0CvoUqCqrJpLU/s320/Whitehouse%20Steady%20DMP.webp" width="213" /></a></b></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><br />Anne Whitehouse, <i style="font-size: 12pt;"><a href="https://www.dosmadres.com/shop/steady-by-anne-whitehouse/" target="_blank">Steady</a></i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">. 2023. Loveland, OH. Dos
Madres Press. 206 pages. $22 U.S. paperback. 978-1-953232-83-8</span></b></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Though the title poem in Anne Whitehouse’s collection is offered near the end
of the book. I couldn’t help but turn to it first. “Steady” is an elegant, if
simple poem of three stanzas with four lines in each. Lovely, I thought, then returned
to the beginning of the book. <br />
Whitehouse’s book<i> </i>has four sections, each titled for the first poem:
“Morning Swim,” “Signs,” “An Art Story,” and “Blue.” Readers begin this journey
with “Morning Swim,” a short poem that dives deeply into paradox: “What seems
like silence / Is full of sound.” Other poems in this section often deal with
water and death, perhaps another paradox (if one thinks of water as the
necessity of life). The last line of “Morning Swim” references “endless
waters,” which are suggestive of mystery and transcendence, that are
simultaneously (paradoxically) “cold, healing, and bitter.” <br />
<br />
Such complexity is further explored in the second section. This opening poem,
“Signs,” suggests the COVID-19 pandemic (“The enemy is the invisible virus”)
and other poems have temporal markers as well, suggesting the poet wants to
ground us in the particular. In addition, I observe titles make direct
reference to literary giants, Auden and Dante, and one epigraph cites Psalm 23.
Though famous people and texts suggest grandiose topics, many of these poems
center on quotidian subjects (a necktie, a book case) and everyday people. The
idea seems to be that such ordinary people and things point (or signify)
greater truths and realities: “a celebration of imaginary / over the mundane.” <br />
<br />
The third section of <i>Steady </i>is longer than the previous two sections
combined. These poems alternate between first- and third-person narratives of
the lives of Ruth Asawa, Leonora Carrington, Lee Miller, Iris Origo, Imogen
Cunningham, and Frida Kahlo, whose picture is the book’s cover. Whitehouse
writes a kind of historical poetry, obviously well-versed with the lives of her
subjects. Yet in another “celebration of the imaginary,” she blends the
artists’ own quotes with her own imaginative leaps about how they might have
thought and felt. <br />
<br />
I was struck that the lives of the artists highlighted in the third section of
this book are anything but “steady”—they have health crises, accidents,
infidelities, pain, and triumphs. I went back to the title poem, “Steady,” and
its profundity became clear: “Another form of steadiness / is simply not to
fall … change happens to us all.” <br />
<br />
If the third section shows this kind of steadiness in the lives of famous
people, then the fourth section reads as if Whitehouse has applied and played
with lessons of perseverance and paradox in her own life. This short, final
section is filled with simple delights, which remind me of poet Ross Gay. From
Gay, I learned the insight that the prefix de- can entail an absence—“de-light”
could mean the removal of light. This apophatic approach characterizes much of
the poetry of this section. My absolute favorite, “Bridge Over the Nosterkill,”
describes glimpsing a beloved person “out of the corner of my eye,” but instead
of interrupting this person’s singing, “I listen without seeming to.” <br />
<br />
After reading and re-reading the entirety of this elegant collection, I deeply
appreciate the delight and power of Whitehouse’s poetry. <i>Steady </i>is
rarely preachy or didactic. Profound, paradoxical truth about the “change
(that) happens to us all” is communicated through subtle observation—the
sidelong look and overhearing of “Bridge Over the Nosterkill” may be likened to
the “slant truth” that Dickinson described. <br />
<br />
The final poem, “Late Summer, Block Island,” includes a blessing that comes
from the “beloved haunts of my essential solitude.” Whitehouse is clear-eyed
about the difficulties of life, including suffering and grief, yet finds a
reverence and awe worthy of sharing.</b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>- Andrew
Taylor-Troutman is pastor of Chapel in the Pines in Chapel Hill, North Carolina
and the author of seven books, including <i>Tigers, Mice & Strawberries:
Poems</i>.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;"><b><span style="line-height: 107%;">Copyright</span><span style="line-height: 107%;">©</span></b></span><span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;"><b>2023 by Andrew Taylor-Troutman. All
Rights Reserved.</b></span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>E♦Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16147875345316321220noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175539335941051415.post-82106850720235182762023-02-13T08:21:00.004-08:002023-02-13T14:30:26.519-08:00Space Races by Anne Whitehouse<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b> <br /></b></span><b style="font-family: georgia;"></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhes5LV458NMTJfN7QJ5JKaEG7lSjUCksuD4QSYzTLEVjdXSOXOMKexAiuLT8nOdh7M00LQA3hdl7nX2f6HLx9gzQxzwk5ckCrWmZn6b4XgkG5z5-P0slMefMitLL-FduRLuaRXQrCISukyrGwo-RahA02j1Ipabd_Vinq3oQSu5Y91X4Omxg4hIwOH6A/s2736/DSC05923.JPG" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1824" data-original-width="2736" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhes5LV458NMTJfN7QJ5JKaEG7lSjUCksuD4QSYzTLEVjdXSOXOMKexAiuLT8nOdh7M00LQA3hdl7nX2f6HLx9gzQxzwk5ckCrWmZn6b4XgkG5z5-P0slMefMitLL-FduRLuaRXQrCISukyrGwo-RahA02j1Ipabd_Vinq3oQSu5Y91X4Omxg4hIwOH6A/w400-h266/DSC05923.JPG" width="400" /></a></b></div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Every American in my baby boomer generation knows about Cape Canaveral. The early years of manned flights into space coincided with my first years of elementary school. Each rocket launch was eagerly anticipated. On the morning of the launch, our normal classroom routine was interrupted. We sat at our desks, while a portable black-and-white television was wheeled into our classroom on a cart, and its cord was connected to an outlet. First came static, and the teacher fiddled with the rabbit ears antennae, until the picture was resolved just in time for us to see the blast-off. Swiftly, the rocket ascended, trailing enormous plumes of fire and smoke. In a second, it had disappeared.<br /><br />All this preparation for what passed in an instant. Then it was time for us to return to our scheduled lessons. Yet, during the day, my mind would drift to thoughts of the astronauts hurled into outer space and circling the earth. I was a physically fearful child, and the thought of being shot in a rocket at enormous speed past the earth into the unknown filled me with dread. At the same time, I felt excited and intensely curious. What would it feel like to be weightless? How would you sleep? Eat and drink? Pee and poop? What would it be like to look back at our earth, as if it were another planet?<br /><br />Children of my generation lived vicariously through the astronauts. They represented better versions of ourselves—in superior shape and health, with agile minds to match their agile bodies. They received the best training our country could provide. They were universally admired. For children living in Florida, like my cousin who grew up in Daytona, the connection was closer. As an elementary school child, she also watched rocket launches on television, “and then we’d all run outside just in time to see the rocket over our heads.”<br /><br />This January, I felt the same thrill watching the simultaneous launch of two SpaceX rockets outside our rented condo on Cocoa Beach, near Cape Canaveral. Rocket launches remain one of the area’s most popular attractions, and an hour before the launches, Jetty Park was packed, as well as the roads leading into it and lining the causeway. We were lucky we could just step outside our condo for the show. What was unusual about the launch we saw was that it was a double launch, the purpose of which, one of the locals told me, was “top-secret military.” This is how the SpaceX website described it: “On Sunday January 15 at 5:56 pm ET, the Falcon Heavy launched the USSF-67 mission to a geosynchronous Earth orbit from Launch /complex 39A (LC-39A) at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This was the second launch landing of these Falcon Heavy side boosters which previously supported USSF-44.”<a href="file:///C:/Users/admin/Documents/Editions%20Biblioteka/Whitehouse%20-%20Space%20Races.docx#_edn1">[1]</a> <br /><br />We looked north up the beach, beyond the low structures of the Cocoa Beach pier, and beyond it, we spotted the flares of two bursting fires climbing higher and higher in the twilit sky, leaving behind billowing trails of smoke. It was a beautiful sight. The flares burned bright yellow, tinged with iridescent green, and the clouds of smoke unfurled in huge spirals as they dissipated into the atmosphere. When I looked up, I could see the boosters uncoupling. Most astonishing was the rockets’ return, ten minutes later, after they’d discharged their mysterious payloads, right back to the launch pad. How did they land so precisely, from such terrific speeds? The show was brief, from launch to return less than half an hour accompanied by sonic booms, and it filled us with awe.<br /><br />A few days later, we visited the Kennedy Space Center, where the rocket launch occurred. The United States space industry complex began operations on Merritt Island in 1950, when the government established a missile testing range on the land it owned surrounding the Cape Canaveral lighthouse. In 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) began to launch satellites at the site. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced plans to place a man on the moon before the end of the decade. To achieve this goal, the federal government acquired 140,000 acres of land north and west of the Cape on Merritt Island in 1963, where support facilities for the launch complex were established. That year the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service entered into an Interagency Agreement with NASA to manage all lands within the Kennedy Space Center that are not currently being used for NASA KSC operations. These lands, known today as the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, provide habitat for more than 1,500 species of plants and wildlife.<br /><br />The Visitor Complex of the Kennedy Space Center is privately operated by Delaware North Companies and welcomes visitors from all over the world with a variety of exhibits about the space program accompanied by blaring, piped-in music. The Heroes and Legends exhibits are designed to appeal to emotion. Their message, cited by a number of astronauts in video interviews, is that “nothing is impossible.” They present a hagiography of the astronauts, interspersed with videos of children expressing their own aspirations. The space program is portrayed as a quest for greater knowledge, mastery, and expansion—in short, as an idealistic venture.<br /><br />That was the same message being conveyed in my childhood. But back then there was another message as well. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union threatened to break out into real war. The advent of the space race elevated the struggle between the two superpowers representing opposing ideologies and economies. The threat of war was sublimated into a higher, non-lethal quest: which of the two countries would succeed in achieving manned space flights and landing a man on the moon? In 1959, the Soviet Union’s Luna 2 on a robotic mission became the first human-made object to reach the moon. Ten years later, the United States’ Apollo Lunar Module Eagle landed on the moon, and Commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin became the first men to walk on the moon’s surface. The United States won that competition, and twenty years later, the Soviet Union collapsed.<br /><br />At the Kennedy Space Center, the struggle concerning the United States and the Soviet Union is underplayed in favor of a message of cooperation between nations symbolized by the establishment of the International Space Station in 2000, a shared program between Europe, the United States, Russia, Canada, and Japan. The exhibits lead the visitors through a Rocket Garden of actual rockets that were built for the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs and never deployed, along with two replicas. I was struck by the rockets’ smallness. Models of the first two-men and three-men capsules reveal that there was not much more space than in an airplane economy seat. Space travel, particularly in those early flights, was a claustrophobic experience. Astronauts got their first views of the universe’s vastness cooped up in very small spaces.<br /><br />In a video interview, Alan Shepard, who became the first American to orbit the earth in 1961, recollected his sense of awe at his first glimpse of the earth from space. This astonishing sight inspired him to wonder why human beings on this small planet keep on attacking one another. Astronauts that followed Shepard have echoed his thoughts. Yet these lofty sentiments, so often repeated, have not led to any lasting changes in human behavior nor altered our impulses towards destruction.<br /><br />From its beginnings, the space program was not primarily an idealistic quest for greater knowledge. It originated with the military, and military purposes and defense applications have remained paramount throughout its history. Nevertheless, this history, which is crucial to understanding the space program in its entirety, goes mostly unmentioned at the Kennedy Space Center’s Visitor Complex. For every Hubble or James Webb telescope bearing glimpses of interplanetary and interstellar worlds, there are other devices beaming back at us, used by nations to spy on each other. There would be no space program without its military necessity and justification.<br /><br />On the bus ride from the Main Visitor Complex to the Apollo/Saturn V Center, visitors pass the massive Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB). This building is visible from miles away, looming over the marshes, wetlands, mangroves, and inlets of the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. The VAB, its attendant facilities, and the launch pads along the shore are the functioning heart of the Kennedy Space Center, and they are off limits to the public. Launch Pad 39A, where the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rockets blasted off, has a storied history. From here in July 1969, Apollo 11 sent its three-man crew to the moon, realizing President Kennedy’s goal expressed in his Rice University speech in 1962 of landing a man on the moon within the decade.<br /><br />Yet it seemed it might not happen, at least not within President Kennedy’s time frame. The space program’s defining disaster of that decade was the training session fire that broke out in the Apollo 1 command module in January 1967, one month before its anticipated launch at the Kennedy Space Center. The three astronauts were trapped inside and quickly asphyxiated. The ignition source of the fire was determined to be electrical, and the fire spread rapidly due to combustible nylon material and the high-pressure pure oxygen cabin atmosphere. Rescue was prevented by the plug door hatch, which could not be opened against the internal pressure of the cabin. The astronauts had previously complained about the lack of safety standards, the shoddiness of the capsule’s construction, especially the wiring, and the possibility of fire. That this preventable tragedy occurred on the ground seemed especially terrible. Manned space flights were suspended for twenty months, while NASA identified and corrected hazards.<br /><br />If Apollo 1 was the nadir, Apollo 11, just two-and-a-half years later, was the zenith. Yet it was a near failure. The margin of error came down to 17 seconds of fuel. The quick-wittedness and considerable skills of all three astronauts—Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, and Neil Armstrong—as well as the essential role played by NASA’s Mission Control on the ground in Houston led to the space program’s most resounding success. That story is briefly told in a video presentation at the Kennedy Space Center. For those seeking a more in-depth exploration, I recommend Dr. Kevin Fong’s podcast, <i>Thirteen Minutes to the Moon</i>. It expanded my knowledge of the program and its young scientists and engineers, whose average age was 27. The moon landing was one of those rare unifying moments that brought people around the world together. In those years after the moon landing, the astronauts spoke of visiting country after country and hearing people exult, “We did it!” Not “you Americans did it,” but “we, the human race, we did it.”<br /><br />Five subsequent Apollo missions also landed astronauts on the moon; the last, Apollo 17, in 1972. In all, twelve astronauts walked on the moon. Only Apollo 13 was a failure whose success consisted in narrowly avoiding a catastrophic loss of human life. Its planned moon landing was prevented by an oxygen tank explosion, crippling the command space module. The crew barely returned to Earth safely by using the lunar module as a lifeboat on the return journey.<br /><br />The Apollo missions collected 842 pounds of lunar rock and soil, which were found to be far older than rocks on earth, ranging from 3.2 to 4.6 billion years, leading to the hypothesis that the moon was created from the impact of the earth with another planetary body. The space program’s next step was to reduce waste by building a reusable space shuttle with recoverable rocket boosters. After nearly ten years in development, the space shuttle Columbia, known as STS-1 (for Space Transportation System), was launched in April 1981. Manned by a crew of two astronauts, the Columbia took off like a rocket and landed like an airplane. It spent 54.5 hours in flight on its maiden voyage, orbiting the earth 36 times. Approximately 31,000 protective silicon tiles were installed to protect it from the heat of re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The space shuttle changed the way we go into space.<br /><br />In its 30-year existence, the space shuttle program operated 135 space missions. All but two flights returned safely. On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, killing its crew of seven astronauts. Seventeen years later, on February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke up on its return to earth after 17 days in space, killing all seven astronauts on board. As with Apollo 1, these two disasters prompted NASA’s intense soul-searching and detailed investigations of what went wrong. Photo evidence revealed that a fault in one of the Challenger’s solid booster rockets led to its fatal failure. With the Columbia, damaged heat resistant tiles failed to protect the shuttle upon re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere. NASA made many changes in equipment and protocols to improve the safety of its operations. Today all of the launches at the Space Center are closely tracked and photographed, and the resulting footage is carefully studied by teams of engineers and experts seeking to discover any problematic evidence.<br /><br />Daniel Tani, an engineer and retired NASA astronaut, believes that most astronauts are thinking of their predecessors when they go into space. “If you are a mountain climber scaling Mt. Everest, you will be aware of the places where previous climbers met with accidents. The two hardest feats in all of rocket science are starting and stopping. Going into full throttle up, I thought of that moment when we lost the Challenger, and on re-entry, when we hit Mach 19, I thought of the moment when we lost the Columbia. Maybe every astronaut thinks of these moments and feels an intense relief to get past them,”<a href="file:///C:/Users/admin/Documents/Editions%20Biblioteka/Whitehouse%20-%20Space%20Races.docx#_edn2">[2]</a> he confessed in Dr. Kevin Fong’s excellent documentary, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Yud9NHi7pQ"><i>The Final Launch of the Space Shuttle Program</i></a>, about the last flight of STS-135, the space shuttle Atlantis in 2011.<br /><br />Today visitors to the Kennedy Space Center can see the actual Atlantis rotated 43.21 degrees with payload doors open and Canadarm extended, as if just undocked from the International Space Station. For a successful mission, millions of things must go right. Dr. Fong’s film is a surprisingly emotional document. He was granted close access to the astronauts and ground crew during their preparations and simulations. He was at the launch pad when the Atlantis blasted off for the last time, and he was on the tarmac filming the landing. Atlantis’s pilots trained rigorously in an especially adapted Gulfstream 2 business jet adapted to have the same flying qualities as the space shuttle. Each pilot had to complete 1,000 practice missions before operating the shuttle. The flight deck of the training aircraft was modified so that it was identical to the Atlantis.<br /><br />The space shuttle was designed to travel at hypersonic speeds in the upper atmosphere. Its short wings meant that when it came down, it sank like a stone, descending at an angle seven times greater than a commercial jet, with the engines in reverse working to push the plane backwards, and the landing gear deployed at 30,000 feet. Chris Ferguson, who completed 1,400 practice runs before he piloted the Atlantis on its final flight, told Fong, “The first time I went up in a training session, and the pilot showed me the tiny strip of runway under my left arm, I said, ‘There’s no way we can land on that.’ He said, ‘I’m going to show you.’ And he did. You come downhill really fast, but it works.”<br /><br />Fong accompanied Ferguson and his co-astronaut Doug Hurley on a practice run where they rapidly ascended 28,000 feet and even more rapidly descended, roaring, with the engines blasting in reverse. Just short of the runway, not ten feet from the ground, the plane, which seemed in free fall, pulled up, leveled off and began to ascend. It was an astonishing feat, like the dive of a falcon. Fong filmed himself in the plane with Ferguson, as they went down and then up again and down.</b></span><p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><b style="font-family: georgia;">We’re falling 28,000 feet per minute [commented Fong]. I’m looking straight down at the ground. I feel the dead weight and the powerlessness of the <span> </span>shuttle. It feels like we’re falling out of the sky. We’ve come down 16,000 feet by the time we are lined up with the runway, dropping out of the sky like a stone. A few feet from the ground, we pull up and soar back into the sky. Up we go again, and back down. It’s an incredible ride, the most amazing thing I’ve ever done in my life – 28,000 to zero, 28,000 to zero, up and back for ten times in an hour and a half.</b><b style="font-family: georgia;"> </b></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>When Ferguson landed the Atlantis on her final flight, he came down as lightly as a feather.<br /><br />On the launch pad before the final take-off, Fong observed, “It’s peaceful up there, and you’re 200 feet in the air off the coast. There’s some sunshine, the breeze in your hair, and then you see you’re standing next to a hydrogen bomb. And if you’re the astronaut, you’re about to get into that machine and leave the earth at 17,000 miles per hour.”<br /><br />Former astronaut and NASA engineer Daniel Tani recalled, “On launch morning, I got out of the Astrovan, and I stood here and thought how incredible it is that humans could put something so complicated together. Steam was coming from it. It was like a beast awakening, and I had an awareness that this machine, now sleeping in its protective metal cocoon, was going to come alive very soon.” After he was an astronaut, Tani worked in Mission Control. During the space shuttle program, he was asked if the flights ever came to seem routine. He replied, “Putting human beings in that explosion that is going underneath them to get them into orbit is amazing and not even close to being routine. We conduct training scenarios where things go wrong, so we can learn from them. We have very difficult simulations.”<br /><br />Terry White designed the shuttle’s thermal protection system in the aftermath of the Columbia disaster: “Upon re-entry into earth’s atmosphere, the shuttle must be able to withstand temperatures of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit in order for the orbiter, its payload, and the astronauts to get home safely. The polystyrene tiles on the Columbia had a coating like an eggshell. The ones on the later shuttles are so strong that you can hit them against a brick without damaging them. It takes up to two weeks to install one tile. It took two years to install the Atlantis’s 24,000 tiles.”<br /><br />Each launch is photographed, and the footage is closely inspected by teams of specialists in order to ascertain if there is any damage that needs to be repaired in space. Kenny Allen was NASA’s lead instrumentation specialist in the space shuttle program. “I am in this enclosed area with the best instrumentation in the world,” he told Kevin Fong. At blast off, the sound waves come through walls and go right through my chest, while I’m tracking the duration of the flight with my joystick. Then I go to the computers and look at what we’ve done. The imagery is stunning. We look frame by frame in the minutest of detail. Photographic evidence is crucial. When foam hit the wing of the Columbia, it was seen. We’re here to say if the spacecraft is safe.”<br /><br />In <i>The Final Launch of the Space Shuttle Program</i>, Kevin Fong noted that it took five hours to move the Atlantis with its rocker boosters and tank three miles from the Vehicle Assembly Building to historic Launch Pad 39a. Of the rituals associated with take-off, one of the most cherished came about from the discovery that a 1960s-era rotary wall phone on the bridge of the launch pad still worked, and astronauts are invited to make a last phone call to their loved ones before climbing into the shuttle. Another is the order for a sandwich to be stored under their seats before takeoff and eaten after launch. The most popular choice is peanut butter and jelly.<br /><br />“One of the drawbacks of the space shuttle program was its complexity,” said Charles Bolden, the NASA Administrator who regretfully oversaw the end of the program in 2011. The government sought private partnerships to develop a future space shuttle program that would be technologically superior and simpler in design. Today NASA’s most active partnership is with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, founded in 2002.<br /><br />Nine years after Atlantis’s final flight, NASA and SpaceX successfully completed its first joint space shuttle mission on the Dragon spacecraft on May 30, 2020, with a crew of two astronauts.</b></span><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b> A second mission followed on October 5, 2022,
manned by an international crew of four, comprised of NASA astronauts
Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)
astronaut Koichi Wakata, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina. </b></span><b style="font-family: georgia;">NASA’s video, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2AVVXfQ-S4">Expedition 68--NASA's SpaceX Crew 5 Flight Day 1 Highlights</a> gives viewers extraordinary views of outside and inside the spacecraft as it completes its maneuvers, including docking the Endurance spacecraft to the International Space Station in preparation for the long-duration science mission. In the decade since Atlantis, space suits have evolved into sleek efficient machines that connect directly to the shuttle’s seats with an “umbilical cord,” controlling pressure, cooling, air flow, and communications. The control panel of the spacecraft is now operated by touch screens although there are still auxiliary knobs and buttons as a backup. The ambitious plans of NASA SpaceX include ventures to the moon and Mars in the next few years.</b></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><br />An auxiliary benefit of the space program are the inventions developed for space that have been adapted into everyday use on earth. The list includes satellite navigation, scratch-resistant lenses, cordless dust-buster vacuums, ear thermometers, shoe insoles, invisible braces for teeth, memory foam, fire retardant and heat-resistant clothing used for firefighters, space blankets, shock absorbers for buildings, improved solar cells and water filtration, semiconductor electronics, and others. Even the first computer with silicon integrated circuits was developed for the space program in the 1960s.<br /><br />The Kennedy Space Center is surrounded by the vast marshlands and undeveloped beaches of the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. A thirty-five-mile-long barrier island, Merritt Island, between the Banana and Indian Rivers, is on the Atlantic Flyway, a major bird migration corridor. On the day we drove the wildlife trail, we saw over a hundred species of birds, including thousands of American Coots, the resplendent Purple Gallinule, and the shy Sora. The partnership between the Wildlife Refuge and the Kennedy Space Center, is unlikely, but it works. The Wildlife Refuge is a refuge for the Space Center, too, and the Space Center is engaged in efforts to ensure that its practices do not harm the wildlife.<br /><br />Former NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, who is also a former astronaut and a Marine Major General, expressed his view that the importance of the space program lies not only in its science and engineering advances. “It changed the way we see the universe,” he observed. “On a clear night, I can look up at the sky and watch the International Space Station fly over.”<br /><br />Judy Hooper, the Manager of Crew Quarters where the astronauts are quarantined before launch, traces her career back to STS-1, the first space shuttle flight of the Columbia. “I came on board in 1979,” she recalled. “It was the most exciting thing that you could ever imagine. Everybody you ran into—every engineer, every tech, every astronaut—it didn’t matter where they worked, they would have done it for free. That’s how cool it was.” Her worst moment was the Challenger disaster in 1986. “I was up on the LCC watching it. The families were there. And I remember looking up and—somehow you know. You don't know the minute you realize it because I think you kind of go into shock. It was so sad. They were such a great crew.”<br /><br />That twinned sense of excitement and danger persists in the space program today. There is perhaps no riskier job than being an astronaut, other than serving in the military in wartime. Astronauts accept the risks they are assuming, but it is harder for their spouses. Yet they consider the human costs worth the benefits. What of the social and economic costs? Is the space program an expression of human indulgence and escapism, or vital, necessary, and important exploration and discovery?<br /><br />I went to the Kennedy Space Center knowing I would not be able to answer these questions. My visit gave me an opportunity to explore the origins and history of the space program, reflect on its past and current development, and learn more about the efforts of so many dedicated, skilled, intelligent, and fearless people that have resulted in its amazing accomplishments.<br /></b></span></p><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlKVuyk3tJpLSZwwDyFMOj5l4YR2i7AulDXGWyTa5q1E30KI8LDXx3whIeFNivKObuRYCXVjg12BsKKhgnPCQIfgAIb92fBZ8vDuWJsA-0Ta65qvSJWXaEg2zxa6FlF0G6hQNjS348EcEtNdsU57K-43Zzk0ttkQDaj2NsrCn1-4trEx8Dbd2H38N6pw/s2736/DSC05922.JPG"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlKVuyk3tJpLSZwwDyFMOj5l4YR2i7AulDXGWyTa5q1E30KI8LDXx3whIeFNivKObuRYCXVjg12BsKKhgnPCQIfgAIb92fBZ8vDuWJsA-0Ta65qvSJWXaEg2zxa6FlF0G6hQNjS348EcEtNdsU57K-43Zzk0ttkQDaj2NsrCn1-4trEx8Dbd2H38N6pw/w640-h426/DSC05922.JPG" width="640" /></a></b></b></span></div><p></p><p></p><div style="text-align: center;"><b style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Copyright©2023 by Anne Whitehouse. All Rights Reserved.</span></b></div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><b><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="file:///C:/Users/admin/Documents/Editions%20Biblioteka/Whitehouse%20-%20Space%20Races.docx#_ednref1">[1]</a> <a href="https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=ussf-67-pl">https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=ussf-67-pl</a> USSF is the acronym for United States Space Force.<br /><a href="file:///C:/Users/admin/Documents/Editions%20Biblioteka/Whitehouse%20-%20Space%20Races.docx#_ednref2">[2]</a> Quoted in <i>The Final Launch of the Space Shuttle Program</i>, documentary film written and produced by Dr. Kevin Fong with the BBC, 2011. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Yud9NHi7pQ">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Yud9NHi7pQ</a> <br /></span></b></span><br /> <p></p><div style="mso-element: endnote-list;"><div id="edn2" style="mso-element: endnote;">
</div>
</div>E♦Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16147875345316321220noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175539335941051415.post-49185495060389738262023-01-31T06:41:00.000-08:002023-01-31T06:41:24.928-08:00Tribute to Dr. Kathryn Coe<p style="text-align: center;"> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0r57aBtl3chIrEriQYkneQ8_YyP-U8RxbsHl2WdI-zCgbcy9aL0gMNB4TgQcVIGviflzTtxsEXQPYp67sq2It39DAGqHIDwre25ZCGUoN2l0jVhdhH8oj7MQ4x1P-O0rh_b5U-a5zcWmHgqUSZ9JxAHbjTuxLoMw9KakA6wCNIG8rZQSZQJN_DGaCEw/s2016/Kathryn%20Coe.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2016" data-original-width="1512" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0r57aBtl3chIrEriQYkneQ8_YyP-U8RxbsHl2WdI-zCgbcy9aL0gMNB4TgQcVIGviflzTtxsEXQPYp67sq2It39DAGqHIDwre25ZCGUoN2l0jVhdhH8oj7MQ4x1P-O0rh_b5U-a5zcWmHgqUSZ9JxAHbjTuxLoMw9KakA6wCNIG8rZQSZQJN_DGaCEw/w300-h400/Kathryn%20Coe.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-add-space: auto; vertical-align: baseline;"><b><span style="font-family: georgia;">Dr. Mary Kathryn
Coe Ph.D., aged 78, passed away on September 19, 2021 in Mesa,
Arizona. Kathryn was born at home on November
18, 1942, in Boulder City, NV. Her paternal grandfather, C.H.
Ellis, MD, delivered her at home with maternal grandmother Lizzie LouKate
Wilson Jackson RN, who assisted. Her father Percy Ellis Coe was
working as an engineer on the Boulder Dam project, and her
mother, Mary Ernest Jackson Coe, supported his efforts by creating a
loving home away from home during war time. Kathryn grew up in
Wellton, AZ as well as in Scottsdale, AZ. Attending both Antelope Union,
Camelback and Arcadia High Schools. She was the third
generation to study at Arizona State University, where she earned her
degree in English, with minors in philosophy and history, in 1965. <br />
<br />
She married shortly after graduating and they lived
overseas and traveled the world. She had two children, Blair and
Trentham. Kathryn partook of many adventures, she studied at universities
in Colombia, Spain, and Ecuador. She studied Roman horseback riding with
the Ecuadorean military and traveled the Amazon River by dugout
with her children. She was always up for an adventure. After a divorce,
Kathryn returned to the United States with her children to
be close to family. Kathryn worked for the Heard Museum, The
Arizona Republic, COMPASS, The Arizona Health Department, and
Arizona State University. Undaunted as a single parent she
pursued her Ph.D. in Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology at Arizona
State. Her thesis was on the importance
of Ancestors, from her field research in the lowlands of Ecuador. Kathryn was
a professor at the Phoenix College, University of Missouri,
Colombia, University of Arizona, and Indianapolis University Purdue University
Indianapolis where she mentored many students in Anthropology and Public
Health. She published extensively, her CV is 24 pages long, and authored two
books, (<i>The Ancestress Hypothesis</i> and
another one due in March). She felt that teaching was a sacred contract with
her students and devoted as much time to them as she could. She was an
exceptional listener. Just before she retired, she met the love of her life, Al
Waitz, who cared and loved her as she so richly deserved. She and Al spent
their time at home in the foothills of Gold Canyon when they were not traveling
more of the world together. <br />
<br />
Kathryn was a quiet yet fierce woman – holding fast to her beliefs, defending
those she loved, and always seeking to better herself and those
around her. She was an amazing listener and had immeasurable patience. She
was full of surprises and had a wide variety of talents. She loved her
family and enjoyed her close relationship with her sister, Anne Coe. Her
children and grandchildren were her greatest love, and they were extremely
fortunate to have her as their mother and grandmother. <br />
<br />
She was preceded in death by her parents, Percy and Mary
Coe, and her brother Jack Coe. She is survived by her loving husband,
Al Waitz, her sister, Anne Coe, her daughter Blair Coe Schweiger, her son,
Trentham Coe, her son-in-law Christoph Schweiger and her grandchildren Samuel
Coe, Jacob Coe, and Josef Schweiger as well as by her cousins Judi
Adams, Bill Adams, Kim Evangelist, and Dakota Adams. She is also survived by
the students she so faithfully served over her years
of teaching; they were family too. <br />
<br />
</span><span style="font-family: georgia;">- Testimonial written by Blair Coe
Schweiger</span></b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>E♦Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16147875345316321220noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175539335941051415.post-30144079058010198372021-11-22T10:23:00.002-08:002021-11-22T10:23:59.316-08:00Arrest Fauci? - Opinion Essay by Ryan Ritchie<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Arrest
Fauci?</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Opinion
Essay by Ryan Ritchie</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>It
took me less than a minute to find a picture of South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace standing
behind a dead fish. The shot was posted July 25 on Facebook and shows the recently
elected United States Representative smiling as she looks into the camera standing
behind what moments earlier was a sentient being.</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>This
photograph matters because it proves Mace is a hypocrite, the kind who bends
rules for political gain. We shouldn’t be surprised. She’s a politician.</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Mace
isn’t alone. The hashtag “ArrestFauci” trended Sunday on Twitter after multiple
media outlets reported that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health
provided a grant to a Tunisian lab where dogs were reportedly tortured and
killed — some had their vocal cords removed so they wouldn’t bark during the
testing. According to some outlets, the supposed research involved injecting
beagles with parasites that cause diseases.</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>If
you are like Mace and the thought of dogs being tortured bothers you — good. It
should. But where is Mace’s consistency? Why is she smiling in a picture of a
dead fish yet killing dogs is an act that caused her and 23 colleagues to pen a
letter to the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases? That fish didn’t want to be pulled from the water to sit for a photograph
just like those beagles never volunteered to participate in something posing as
scientific experimentation.</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>The
answer to those questions is, of course, money. Specifically, the fact that
American taxpayer dollars were spent to fund this supposed “research.”</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Mace
is correct. No government and no person should ever torture animals. The
countless others who made “ArrestFauci” trend are also correct. If the
allegations are true, Fauci should face serious consequences if he knew animals
would be tortured (and if he didn’t know? That’s an equally serious offense.)</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>But
Mace, her 23 colleagues and anyone else who made “ArrestFauci” trend have some
explaining to do. What did Mace, her colleagues and those social media users
have for Sunday breakfast? And for lunch? A snack? Dinner?</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>I’d
love to think everyone involved in “ArrestFauci” is vegan, but they’re not. I
know this because I’ve been vegan for approximately 18 years (vegetarian since
Thanksgiving 1997) and can count on both hands — not including the thumbs
— the amount of ethical plant-based eaters I consider close friends. I
know plenty of pescatarians, vegetarians and whatever-atarians, but the number
of people who intentionally forgo animal products because they know (emphasis
on “know”) animal cruelty in all of its heinous forms is wrong is
infinitesimal.</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>For
years, research has suggested that one percent of the world’s population is
vegan. It’s a start, but imagine would what happen if everyone upset about
Fauci’s allegations today woke tomorrow and eschewed all animal products
forever. Imagine if those same people tweeted about the well-known brands in
their cabinets, dresser drawers and linen closets (do people still have those?)
that do the exact horrible thing about which they are tweeting in regard to
Fauci.</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>One
good thing about “ArrestFauci” is that the hashtag has created a discussion
regarding an often-overlooked part of the animal rights conversation. Last week
<i>Los Angeles</i> <i>Times</i> ran eight stories about fake meats and how they
are changing what’s on our plates. I’ve yet to find a vegan who doesn’t
ethically support these food innovations, but anyone who tweeted “ArrestFauci”
should be as upset about Clearasil, Clinique, Clorox and Comet are tested on
animals — and that’s just a portion of the “C” category from People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals’ “Beauty Without Bunnies” website — as they
are about Fauci.</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>You
want more? Try Kiehl’s, L’Oreál, Listerine, Pine-Sol, Prada, Revlon and
Swiffer. And there are, sadly, <i>plenty</i> of other recognizable brands that
do what Fauci is accused of doing.</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>This
argument isn’t a what-aboutism. Instead, let’s ask ourselves how some people
can get so upset when dogs are tortured yet days later sit in a
too-long-for-fast-food In-N-Out Burger drive-thru. If you’re mad about Fauci
and the dogs, be mad about all animal suffering. Tweet about the horrific ways
in which cows, chickens, fish, pigs and other living creatures are exploited
for human consumption, “enjoyment” and science. Look at Mace’s fish photo and
stare into the dead eyes. Now look down at your plate and envision the eyes
that used to be attached to whatever you’re calling a meal.<o:p></o:p></b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>If
you’re one of those people, it’s time to face a harsh reality — animal
cruelty is always wrong. The good news is that you have an opportunity to stop
engaging in deadly acts. Animal testing should bother you enough to take to
social media and post about the horrors, but don’t be a hypocrite. There is a
way to avoid these products. That way?</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Go
vegan.</b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>- Ryan Ritchie is a writer from Lomita, CA. His work has been published in Rolling Stone, Vice and Los Angeles Times. He went vegetarian on Thanksgiving 1997 and has been vegan for approximately 18 years. Follow him at <a href="https://twitter.com/RyanLRitchie">https://twitter.com/RyanLRitchie</a></b></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b></b></span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><b style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> Copyright©2021
by Ryan Ritchie. All Rights Reserved.</span></b></b></span></div><p></p>E♦Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16147875345316321220noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175539335941051415.post-10970333206671747642021-11-19T07:38:00.006-08:002022-01-27T14:53:34.465-08:00Ghosts of America - Novel by Caroline Hagood - Reviewed by Mitch Levenberg<p><b><i><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; line-height: 107%;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/GHOSTS-AMERICA-Caroline-Hagood/dp/1934909718/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=hagood+ghosts+of+america&qid=1637339277&qsid=135-9196822-3757825&s=books&sr=1-2&sres=1934909718%2CB08TTQZS38&srpt=ABIS_BOOK" target="_blank">Ghosts of America</a></span></i></b><b><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; line-height: 107%;"> by Caroline
Hagood. Hanging Loose Press, 2021. ISBN: 978-1934909713. $18.00. 200 pages</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; line-height: 107%;">Reviewed
by Mitch Levenberg<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">Caroline Hagood’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ghosts of America</i> is profound, witty and entertaining. I’d call it
a page turner except I never wanted to turn the page. The narrator of the novel
is Norman Roth III, Herzog to his friends, great American novelist,
masturbator, voyeur, writer of “literary academia, the “overweight ugly balding
white guy’s tenured ticket to young tail.” Herzog represents a long line of
male writers, writers like the country itself, “formed from the dusk of
masculine language, language that has skewered and slighted, misrepresented and
misconstrued the role and importance of women since this country’s inception. Who
better then to be visited one night, a la Ebenezer Scrooge, by the ghosts of
Jackie Kennedy and Valerie Solanas? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Herzog
himself is a contradiction. He will gladly “jack off” to Marilyn Monroe but at
the same time see something greater than the whole, greater than, as Jackie
Kennedy later observes, the “blonde-haired breasts that launched American
cinematic romance, but also “as complete as the end of something,” someone the
“universe might transfigure her at any time.” Herzog can think about “the
fluidity of existence” yet, at the same time admit “how solid it can get in the
pants region.”</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">Herzog’s first visitor is Jackie Kennedy, his
muse, his “pixie dream girl,” wife of JFK, president, Womanizer Laureate of the
U.S., the man who, in his own words, “accompanied Jacquelyn Kennedy to Paris,”
and later, of course, to his own assassination. Indeed, it is Jackie’s powerful
narration of JFK’s assassination that sticks with me the most, that twists my
own gut memory, that is rendered so terrifyingly beautiful, so painful yet
poetic. The scene explodes in our minds like JFK’s own glorious mind “exploding
onto Jackie’s skin.”</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">The writing here is truly “blood writing” at its
best. According to Herzog, it’s the writer Denis Johnson, who believes that all
writers should write in blood and that the more blood you write in, the more
you put your life on the line. “What better way to build sentences,” Herzog
states earlier, “than with our own “jets of blood,” again not his own idea, but
one taken from Sylvia Plath, one of the greatest blood writers ever.</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">It’s truly amazing how in this gut-wrenching scene,
one of the most beautifully gut-wrenching scenes I have ever read, Caroline
Hagood becomes Jackie Kennedy, in both mind and body, as if she herself were in
that car, as if her own life were on the line, her words, her incredible
imagination evoking both the horrible and the exquisite. Here, Jackie Kennedy
becomes the poet laureate of the great American Tragedy, the symbol of the
blood-soaked American Dream, of Camelot, not only “deconstructed, (see the
title of Herzog’s book on the Kennedys) but destroyed. JFK is Lancelot, his
brain bleeding out in the back of that “midnight blue” limo, dripping on a pink
dress which only a few hours earlier glittered with hope and promise in, of all
places, Love Field. As Jackie says, “That part of his head that wasn’t blown
away was so exquisite. I tried to hold it all together. If I could just reclaim
the bits of him, all would suddenly be whole.”</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">Herzog’s next visitor is the ghost of Valerie
Solanas, famous for shooting Andy Warhol, but not for killing him. “I’m going
to teach you,” she says to Herzog, “how to write a woman.” For sure she is the scarier
of the two ghosts, the bad one as in good ghost, bad ghost: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>loud, brash, unapologetic, wild-eyed, sloppy,
soiled, hungry, (she raids Herzog’s fridge) a “crazy pants,” a “bimbo
psychopath,” and in Norman Mailer’s words (see “Norman” as in Norman Roth III)
“The Robespierre of Feminism.” She’s also the author of the SCUM Manifesto and
the play “Up Your Ass,” titles that don’t exactly roll off the tongue, but who
needs tongues? Solanas tells Herzog Ovid’s story of Philomela, imprisoned,
raped and tortured by King Tereus who rips out her tongue so she can never tell
her story, yet she does anyway by weaving it with purple yarn into a tapestry. She
becomes the artist weaving her words, her actions, her very existence into the world.
Tongue or no tongue, she cannot and will not be silenced.</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">This is not a linear book; it is not plot, but
premise. It is a tapestry of plots and subplots, a concentric circle of stories
within stories. Valerie Solana telling Herzog her story vis a vis Ovid’s story
of Philomela and Tereus so flawlessly weaved by the author into this crazy
quilt of a novel, “crazy” in this case meaning parts or isolated fragments of
things comprising the whole of something. Indeed, this novel reflects the mind
itself broken up into many minds. I often felt as if I were not only
experiencing what was happening outside a character’s mind, that is by words
and actions, but inside it as well. In Jackie’s mind, I am tormented; my heart
breaks, I feel the burden of history, its violence and brutality, its poetry
and beauty, its possibilities for redemption. I feel sad and frustrated. I feel
beautiful and bloody. I like the feeling of haunting Herzog with dignity and
class. I like this mind and want to stay for a while. I want to keep trying, haunted
still by childhood memories of Humpty Dumpty, to put JFK’s brain back together
again.</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">Inside Valerie Solanas’ mind, I feel pissed and
anxious and vengeful but knowing I’m a bad shot, instead of a bullet, I try out
my poor swollen tongue, my <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>against that
bastard Herzog. As for Herzog’s mind, I am in it from the very beginning of the
novel. At first, I must step over empty whiskey bottles and look lustfully through
women’s legs; mirrors are only to look at bodies, to pleasure myself, my mind is
only to misconstrue and degrade others, especially women, my heart is to
deceive, to hide, to secretly despise myself and others. I enter a room where
the floors and walls are sticky, filthy and dark. There is loud, cacophonous music
piercing my ear drums. There are shelves lined with decaying books, all
containing distorted, misleading words about women. Then, suddenly I turn into another
room, clean and bright and filled with blank canvases, with art waiting to be
created, with empty shelves waiting to be lined with books dripping with truth
and historical accuracy. Finally, and most refreshingly, there are new, blank
notebooks waiting to be filled. I feel hopeful. I sense change, redemption.</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">Herzog’s is the representative mind, the
Motherboard where in the end all the other minds will merge to form a new and
enlightened mind. We can’t help wonder if he’s willing to take in all these
other minds, to change, to experience a metamorphosis. He certainly has a long
way to go but he’s willing to do it, to plunge finally into a woman’s mind
rather than her body. Now in this new incarnation of his mind he has wild,
uncertain dreams. He speeds through women’s bodies turned into tunnels. He goes
on a Mecca to Coney Island where he rides the Wonder Wheel and observes a
hungry three-legged dog, a final, symbolic descent into the underworld, perhaps
before his ultimate transcendence.</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">For Herzog, this is not just a physical Metamorphosis
where he wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into an insect, or a
butterfly and still thinks like a man or a caterpillar, but it is a
Metamorphosis of the mind and spirit, where Herzog must turn the world upside
down, as Jove does in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, where” the Dolphins climb trees, and
mermaids stare in wonder at cities now underwater.”</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">Indeed, Caroline Hagood’s ability to merge the
real and the imagined is remarkable. This novel is so well balanced, so
flawlessly navigated in what seems to be an unbalanceable, unnavigable world.
It is rich in language, in metaphor, it blends, mixes, merges almost
everything, the living and the dead, mythology, history, and contemporary
culture. At times it can be heavy and dark, but just as often can be funny and satirical.
And then there are the ghosts, wonderful, enlightened, beautiful ghosts I can
listen to forever. And as for the novel ending in a bang or a whimper, there is
neither, but instead there is a “sharp inhale, the heart flutter, then a shot
of warmth, then some kind of quiet.” <o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------</span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"></span></b></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><i>Ghosts of America: A Great American Novel</i>. Author: Caroline Hagood. Hanging Loose Press, 2021. Paperback, $18. IBSN: 978-1-934909-71-3. 147pages.<br /> <br />Reviewed by Alexis Winters<br /> <br />Caroline Hagood’s novel <i>Ghosts of America: A Great American Novel</i> returns the narrative to women and in doing so gives them the chance to tell their own stories. The main character, Norman Roth III, referred to as “Herzog,” is a professor, Vietnam veteran, and a famous American author. The novel tells the story of a night wherein Herzog is visited by the ghosts of the women he writes about in his novels. Herzog is a perfect depiction of the stereotypical white male professor and author who thinks very highly of himself and doesn’t take women seriously. The two women that visit him are Jaqueline Kennedy and Valerie Solanas. Both novels received great praise and in the words of Hagood, “gotten him laid since the 1980s.” The bottom line is that Herzog is not a character that you root for, or even like.<br /> <br />Throughout the novel, Hagood holds a mirror up to the literary world as her female characters are able to take ownership of their stories and traumas. The weight of the stories is not lost in translation and is even emphasized in the way it’s written. When each woman visits Herzog and has a chance to tell her story it’s captivating since these points of view have largely been ignored in history.<br /> <br />Possibly the most frustrating aspect of Herzog’s character is that he is not misinformed or unaware of the plight of women. He’s only interested in himself and doesn’t deem the women he used in his writing as worthy of his time. He’s only interested in how they can be used to his benefit.<br /> <br />Jackie Kennedy is a woman who rose to power through her husband but kept her power after his death. Rather than a supporting character in her husband’s story, Jackie has a chance to share her own trials and tribulations. Jackie’s story takes up the majority of the novel unsurprisingly.<br /> <br />Valerie Solanas has more anger towards Herzog, as you would expect from a radical feminist. Solanas has little to no interest in helping Herzog as much as she wants to berate and punish him.<br /> <br />One might expect a grand transformation for Herzog or some form of redemption, and he does gain an appreciation for women and what they have dealt with. His big revelation comes from an acid trip at the Museum of Modern Art. I have to wonder if the entire experience of speaking with Jackie and Valerie was the result of a drug induced trip. Regardless, he finds comfort in the last few pages of the novel when he and Jackie Kennedy are sipping tea together. Two characters who have carried heavy weights find solace in each other.<br /> <br />Hagood’s novel critiques the male gaze by telling the story from a man’s point of view and writing women who take back their narrative from men. Hagood has created a novel that contains real history and tells it in a way that it hasn’t been before. Although the ending was a big dissatisfying, I was expecting a more dramatic transformation, the novel is written well, and I believe accomplishes what Hagood had in mind.<br /> <br />- Alexis Winters is a senior at St. Francis College majoring in English and minoring in Communications. She hopes to use her degree in the publishing or editing industry once she graduates. </b></span><p></p>E♦Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16147875345316321220noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175539335941051415.post-18761734036521550632021-08-16T09:06:00.004-07:002021-08-16T09:11:52.990-07:00Poems on Waiting by Isabel Rimanoczy<span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>“The Wait” By Isabel Rimanoczy <br /><br />The wait <br />is a sacred time <br />magic, outside of time. <br />It’s a parenthesis <br />sketched with our hands <br />(the hands of the soul). <br />It’s funny, the wait… <br />Because it’s a space we fill <br />with void, <br />and it’s time we empty <br />of content. <br />It’s just that: a wait. <br />The silence between two events. <br /><br />Certainly, sometimes <br />it’s anxiety, impatience, <br />uncertainty, angst and pain. <br />But this happens because <br />we aren’t able to see <br />its sacred essence. <br />It’s the denial <br />of the wait’s being: <br />To think that it’s the moment <br />that shouldn’t exist, <br />that should be filled <br />with what will come next. <br /><br />But if you’re able <br />to listen to the wait <br />like you hear the voice <br />of silence <br />you will be able to enjoy it <br />and allow yourself to be <br />in the wait, <br />simply being. <br /><br /><br />“Waiting” By Isabel Rimanoczy <br /><br />Waiting <br />What a wonderful state <br />Where one doesn’t have anything <br />To do <br />Waiting, <br />Is letting life low <br />Letting it come and find us <br />Surround us, lift us up <br />Take us along, rock us, <br />And then drop us <br />In a new place. <br /><br />Ah, waiting, miracle and gift <br />That i sometimes misunderstand <br />When my ego <br />Thinks it has to control <br />Whatever happens. <br /><br />A present from the skies <br />An allowed limbo <br />Time to float. <br />Parenthesis <br />That I want to learn to extend <br />So that my plans <br />And my attempts to control <br />Become, them, <br />The brief parenthesis <br />Between one wait and another wait. <br /><br />- Isabel Rimanoczy, Ph.D. is a professor of sustainability studies and the author of <i>The Sustainability Mindset Principles</i> (Routledge 2021). The poems here are reprinted by permission from her book called <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Exploring-my-soul-isabel-rimanoczy-ebook/dp/B00FKY0RTK/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=exploring+my+soul+rimanoczy&qid=1629130109&s=books&sr=1-1" target="_blank"><i>Exploring My Soul</i></a>. Visit her website, here: <a href="https://isabelrimanoczy.net/">https://isabelrimanoczy.net/</a> <br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Copyright©2021 by Isabel Rimanoczy. All Rights Reserved.</span></b></div></b></span><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div> E♦Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16147875345316321220noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175539335941051415.post-87001212657693303112021-08-09T11:13:00.001-07:002021-08-09T11:13:27.842-07:00"Digging A Moose From The Snow" by Skaidrite Stelzer - Book Review by Tija Spitsberg<p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><span class="xydp7fa3c57fs1">Skaidrite Stelzer, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Digging-Moose-Snow-Skaidrite-Stelzer/dp/1646624556/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Skaidrite+Stelzer%2C+Digging+a+Moose+from+the+Snow&qid=1628532102&s=books&sr=1-1" target="_blank">Digging a Moose from the Snow</a></i>. Finishing Line Press, 2021. $14.99
U.S. 38 pages, paperback. ISBN: 978-1646624553</span> </b></span></p>
<p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt; text-align: left;"><span class="xydp7fa3c57fs1"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Reviewed by Tija Spitsberg<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></p>
<p class="xydp7fa3c57fp1" style="margin: 0in 0in 2.25pt; text-align: left;"><o:p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b> </b></span></o:p></p>
<p class="xydp7fa3c57fp3" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><span class="xydp7fa3c57fs2">In the poetry collection <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Digging a Moose from</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> <span class="xydp7fa3c57fs2">the Snow</span></i><span class="xydp7fa3c57fs2"> by Skaidrite Stelzer, the speaker ultimately draws the conclusion that
we are all animals participating in shaping our shared landscape and seeking
solutions to secure our survival. The opening poem serves as a preamble
introducing the speaker of the poems by recalling a warning she receives from
the “Pirushke lady” – a wise old sage who predicts the “fatal decline, spiraling
toward death...In a few years your arches will fall/your feet grow hooved/toes
become turtles/your husband will leave.” <o:p></o:p></span></b></span></p>
<p class="xydp7fa3c57fp3" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span class="xydp7fa3c57fs2"><o:p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b> </b></span></o:p></span></p>
<p class="xydp7fa3c57fp3" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span class="xydp7fa3c57fs2"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>What follows is a series of poems, each
describing the trajectory from birth to death, linking our demise to the universal
experience of all creatures; but there are glimmers of hope, especially for our
children who approach the world with optimism. In “Cicada Shells,” “the
granddaughters string them into long necklaces before they learn their fear of
bugs, predicting the inevitable end of innocence.” The closing poem, “The First
to Die,” suggests that we are losing the battle, yet also clings to possible
redemption in the next generation, our children. “The forest now a pile of
tender sticks/All color lost, white bone beneath the sea/Still children look
for stars within the rifts/The first to die will be the coral reef.” This,
however, is undercut by the final line, dictated by its form, the Villanelle,
where the repetition of the final line is determined by its form: “The first to
die will be the coral reef.” <o:p></o:p></b></span></span></p>
<p class="xydp7fa3c57fp3" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><o:p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b> </b></span></o:p></p>
<p class="xydp7fa3c57fp3" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span class="xydp7fa3c57fs2"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Death comes to all of us, but we struggle to
evade and delay its reality. In the title poem “Digging a moose from the snow” the
struggle for survival is explored through the personification of the moose who
“now knows we are animal/surviving/all of us/as best we can.” A “moose in a
snowbank” emerges as the central symbol for our struggle to survive. This image
solidifies the position the speaker of the poem takes in regard to the human
condition: “the world is cruel/a world that will kill us (it’s true.)” But
like the moose, “we must move against the snow banks/dig deeper than we
believe…surviving all of us as best we can.”<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></p>
<p class="xydp7fa3c57fp3" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><o:p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b> </b></span></o:p></p>
<p class="xydp7fa3c57fp3" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span class="xydp7fa3c57fs2"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>These poems contemplate death and loss, as
well as displacement and the salvation and pain of memory. Stelzer nimbly
navigates this terrain as she explores these challenges through the use of
fantasy, humor and sudden bursts of surrealism to deftly explore the natural
world.</b></span></span><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp3" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span class="xydp7fa3c57fs2"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><br /></b></span></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp3" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span class="xydp7fa3c57fs2"></span></p><p class="xydp7fa3c57fp3" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;"><b><span class="xydp7fa3c57fs2">Copyright©2021 by </span><span class="xydp7fa3c57fs1">Tija Spitsberg All
Rights Reserved.</span></b></span><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b></b></span><p></p>E♦Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16147875345316321220noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175539335941051415.post-45109983775907881082021-04-18T07:03:00.003-07:002021-04-18T08:31:46.402-07:00Tribute to Kriben Pillay by Vaneshran Arumugam<p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-ZA"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b></b></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKtMA85wH61rkRfE21_HC_OuK_0AZLMVxnAT9VxqyTteiYWOoDNnrSsA_mLGWBcOqZKxi76Ugevwi-ZG3SSX9X1rzjUuUd-y7-y2iKE3mDktkjPoW1pBneHZEBypM8PqLJEDS7y8iMEwD0/s658/kribenkaramadhi.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="658" data-original-width="511" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKtMA85wH61rkRfE21_HC_OuK_0AZLMVxnAT9VxqyTteiYWOoDNnrSsA_mLGWBcOqZKxi76Ugevwi-ZG3SSX9X1rzjUuUd-y7-y2iKE3mDktkjPoW1pBneHZEBypM8PqLJEDS7y8iMEwD0/s320/kribenkaramadhi.jpg" /></a></b></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><br />Editor’s
note: What follows is a tribute to Professor Kriben Pillay, University of KwaZulu-Natal,
South Africa, who passed away in December 2020, from his nephew, Royal
Shakespeare Company actor and Fulbright Scholar, <a href="https://www.sixfacecreatives.com/" target="_blank">Vaneshran Arumugam</a>.<o:p></o:p></b></span><p></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span lang="EN-ZA"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>▬<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-ZA"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>“I
have known Kriben Pillay my entire life. He was a storyteller through his
writing and teaching, an avid seeker through his study, research and spiritual
quest for understanding and self-mastery. He is my mother’s eldest brother and
I have watched him since my own childhood in the 70’s, when South Africa was a
battleground, as a student, as a teacher, as an activist, as a rebel. The rules
seemed to stretch to fit where he was headed. He travelled the world, met with
luminaries such as J. Krishnamurti, wrote books and songs, mounted plays and
productions, mentored artists and academics.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-ZA"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>When days were darkest, with violence in our home, uncle Kriben made it his
responsibility to be present. He was a family man and a connector of people and
stories, which became apparent at any of the gatherings that he would
orchestrate or preside over, a master of ceremony and a Joker extraordinaire.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-ZA"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Articulate and intelligent, his wit belied his consummate readiness to be silly
and to enjoy above all the company of children (I was the first, and my own
daughter the last in the family to know this)<br />
We riffed together on many ideas and worked together on writing and productions
and performances, and I feel that I had a glimpse into every facet of his
diamond personality – vast, containing multitudes. He pointed me to Whitman,
amongst many things.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-ZA"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Let me point you to him now, his award-winning poetry and writings, his legacy
as a teacher and learner, his indelible influence as a father, son, brother,
uncle...friend.”<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span lang="EN-ZA"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>▬<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>“Owed to uncle Kriben” <br /><br />you were always there <br />like how the moon is <br /><br />together we did not grow up <br />though you could play the part quite convincingly <br />you always let me inside the story <br /><br />I feel we were always in mid-conversation, few conversations at a time <br />sometimes few words <br />looking for a laugh with no excuse <br />- that irresistible one - <br />like when a plastic patio chair breaks in super slowmo, delivering a chunky challenger to the ground <br />or a piece of snot pokes impertinently out of a sincere testimonial’s nose <br />or, indeed, when a man of esteemed physical prowess trippingly flails his arms at the edge of a wedding stage like the Warner Bros coyote, very nearly almost regaining balance <br />before taking an almighty backward swan-dive into the grassy deck below, feet in the air. <br /><br />I wish I could see you watch that moment, because watching you really laugh was a pleasure of the most involuntary proportions and the definition of giddy <br /><br />We all laughed when you laughed. <br />by the way, everyone is still amazed by you. <br />Even if they think they knew the punchline. It hasn’t quite stuck yet that you are light years inside of us now <br />eternally close <br />beyond reach <br /><br />you always hinted at that <br /><br />times are hard and the chocolates have gotten smaller <br />and we saw some of the very worst together, arm in arm <br />father and son sometimes brothers sometimes <br />but you snuck magic into the jail and it disappeared in the most impossible times <br /><br />but now is a time for gratitude <br />as the Phoenix <i>durga</i> rides her tiger into victorious battle against the demon lord and all odds <br />as the Twofold Tamil Rule in a just world mind rises <br />as the Cosmic Koeksuster improbably holds to its celestial choreography <br />and we realise our captaincy <br />O <br />great one <br />you introduced me to the harmonica and telling stories and mastering the Forces <br />I do these things now, singing my song <br />they call me uncle someplaces <br /><br />I was once the apprentice to your sorcery, sir <br /><br />seeking and taste for truth we shared <br />that blossoms in me and I’m addicted to its fragrance <br />you still learn me to see <br /><br />Like the moon <br />you are still here even when the sun is out, besieging <br /><br />dispelling the darkness <br />when the cool night comes <br /><br />aum namah shivaya, you’re in our songs <br />aum namah shivaya, you’re on your way <br />aum namah shivaya, your turn to play<br /><br /></b></span></p><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyoopoX6b9b0p39x34wqtbcRCjNkjzpHH0U7SX2kut1SLBJaOrsvwWUn2TNM3W7IoVe7cUwh30D0M4IMBAxOryIQErBdzcE75cossiAlRVrhF3Fnc6wna58pjz8HKQ8OzfWq-gJKCejhVQ/s464/kribenNme.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="446" data-original-width="464" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyoopoX6b9b0p39x34wqtbcRCjNkjzpHH0U7SX2kut1SLBJaOrsvwWUn2TNM3W7IoVe7cUwh30D0M4IMBAxOryIQErBdzcE75cossiAlRVrhF3Fnc6wna58pjz8HKQ8OzfWq-gJKCejhVQ/s320/kribenNme.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div><b style="font-family: georgia; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><p class="MsoNormal"><b style="font-family: georgia; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></b></p><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Copyright©2021 by Vaneshran Arumugam. All Rights Reserved.</span></b></div></span></b><p></p><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p>E♦Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16147875345316321220noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175539335941051415.post-36824353609654855972021-04-17T14:23:00.002-07:002021-04-18T12:04:52.259-07:00Review of Damian Kim's book Cherish the Invisible Mind<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><i><span style="line-height: 115%;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cherish-Invisible-Mind-Defeating-Narcissism/dp/1970063831/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=978-1970063837&qid=1618694526&s=books&sr=1-1" target="_blank">Cherish the Invisible Mind: A Plan to Heal Humanity by Defeating Narcissism andNeurosis</a></span></i><span style="line-height: 115%;">. Damian B. Kim, M.D. Braugler Books. ISBN:
978-1970063837. $19.99US. Paper. 142 pages.</span></b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Dr. Damian B. Kim is a healer, and his words of
wisdom in his new book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cherish the
Invisible Mind</i> offer sound guidance in our age of mental health crises. The
book is excellently written, engaging, and well organized. Drawing on a number
of scientific studies and psychological theories, as well as his own vast
clinical experience, Dr. Kim tackles a range of problems and offers a number of
solutions. For instance, narcissism and ego-centrism found among many younger
Americans is leading to high expectations unfulfilled, competitiveness, and
hence loneliness, depression, and even acts of suicide. Overall, Dr. Kim’s book
is a succinct but commanding appraisal of and relevant response to a host of
mental health disorders, ranging from anxiety and depression to drug abuse and
violence, plaguing the American mind today.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>As a highly-trained psychiatrist, Dr. Kim sees that
some neuroses can be cultural; that is, mental health can be negatively
affected or triggered by social conditions immersing people, often unwittingly,
in a materialistic and power oriented society. This predicament is then compounded,
Dr. Kim goes on, by professionally trained counselors who miss the cues or
provide a failing treatment. With a focus on millennials, Dr. Kim’s head and
heart are in the right place: he cares about the future of Americans and the
U.S. This honest approach has not, of course, been embraced by all his peers,
as he is the first to admit.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>In an age of rampant psychiatric medications, Dr.
Kim believes the source of people’s problems should be treated using
psychotherapy whenever possible. A major concern of Dr. Kim is the rise of
suicide rates in the U.S., perhaps because, not to oversimplify, the comfort of
the body (using medicines and technology) has taken pride of place over the
health of mind (using talk therapy). So Dr. Kim, as implied in the title of his
book, seeks to penetrate and renew the unconscious mind which can often take a
pernicious grip on one’s life with baneful results. This is more of a
qualitative rather than a quantitative approach and hence, today, often ignored
by many professionals though quite useful. At the same time, the unconscious
mind can be a wellspring of sustenance if properly recognized, gently cared
for, and ably negotiated. That’s the area of Dr. Kim’s expertise.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Dr. Kim rightly draws an analogy between the
deteriorating and widespread harms of neuroses to a pandemic virus spiraling
out of control, also unseen and destructive. Oddly, part of the cause for the
spread of neuroses, he suggests, is capitalistic technology meant to make life
easy and enjoyable, since it draws people apart and distracts them away from
mindfulness and empathy. This book is a profound assessment of the current and
at times superficial practices of psychiatry and yet an eloquent antidote to
this profession’s shortcomings. Dr. Kim’s emphasis on character (using theory
from Karen Horney) and interpersonal relationships correctly asks that
contemporary people, especially the younger generations who will eventually be
in control of government and the economy, engage in self-discovery. Some people
might require professional therapy to do so, but the investment in
self-understanding in a community of others is of paramount importance to Dr.
Kim. <o:p></o:p></b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>How do we solve these individual and social
problems? There are some remedies that don’t require medication: education to
increase knowledge of neuroses; meditation to help one come to grips with the
self and comprehend the inner experience; psychotherapy, if required. In other
words, answers to these problems are not necessarily in technology, more
possessions, or competition among others but in acceptance and understanding of
the unconscious mind. I found this book easy to read, enjoyable, and
informative; it provides valuable guideposts to the future, and I recommend it
to all students of psychology.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>- Gregory F. Tague, Ph.D., professor, departments of
Literature, Writing and Publishing / Interdisciplinary Studies, St. Francis
College, Brooklyn, N.Y.</b></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>E♦Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16147875345316321220noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175539335941051415.post-79053197908795789252020-12-03T13:46:00.000-08:002020-12-03T13:46:42.207-08:00Four Remembrances of Greg Trupiano <p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKX4U-dIe5qPgYo5y2pwYlmvgPU5BwT4vUvzveZW6VXKscx7_AUt9ImNzaQOFaeWiC2XOZbjj7k9Tz6UJY0CxZk-b-fOiLmzkCwIeUUlQr4Hwd3ti_6ZyEfVI-F0Sz3rEBmgR4Qt4RDttH/s1280/Trupiano.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="853" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKX4U-dIe5qPgYo5y2pwYlmvgPU5BwT4vUvzveZW6VXKscx7_AUt9ImNzaQOFaeWiC2XOZbjj7k9Tz6UJY0CxZk-b-fOiLmzkCwIeUUlQr4Hwd3ti_6ZyEfVI-F0Sz3rEBmgR4Qt4RDttH/s320/Trupiano.jpeg" /></a></span></b></div><b><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br />Gregory Trupiano—December 13, 1955 –
February 18, 2020.</span></b><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Greg Trupiano, born in Brooklyn, New York, passed away suddenly in February,
2020. He was Director of Artistic Administration at Sarasota Opera in Florida.
He worked there for 33 seasons while maintaining his residence in
Brooklyn. Mr. Trupiano made tremendous contributions to the arts community,
especially in New York City. He assisted and consulted with several opera and
theatre companies and worked various theatre jobs around the City from
stage manager to producer to director. Greg’s lifelong passion for and
knowledge of Walt Whitman inspired him to launch the Walt Whitman Project,
devoted to the performance of Whitman’s words to the public. <span style="font-size: x-small;">[Photo credit, Matthew Holler]</span></span></b></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">A man of contrasts. This personality
trait enabled Greg intellectually and emotionally to take in Walt Whitman,
the history of a nation, New York City, and particularly Brooklyn. Juggling
overwhelming concepts?! No problem, Greg fearlessly rushed right into the
middle and then managed to step into the light of truth. Being with Greg when
he uncovered a fact that didn’t fit logically or hearing him tell stories that
on the surface didn’t make sense, Greg would notice my furrowed brow. He would
pause with a disarming, sly smile, eyes wide with pleasure. He radiated
calmness as if to say, life is complex, it’s okay, together we move forward. He
possessed clarity. </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Working with Greg was a joy. He
was cheerful and prepared. Everyone who associated with Greg knew about his
high professional standards and formidable organization skills, skills needed
to bring a new opera to life. When Greg was not immersed in American Opera
Project’s risky ventures, or in a NYC theatre project, he was an expert in
realistic restagings of 19<sup>th</sup> century Italian grand opera.</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Greg taught me about operatically
trained voices. He had a command of the technical aspects and could evaluate
superior qualities in a human voice. When we finished auditions at AOP
headquarters or perhaps after an evening performance, we frequently went to a
diner—Greg was familiar with diners in every dark corner of the city—and it was
fun and illuminating to compare notes and catch up about concerts and operas
that we had attended. For hours we could discuss composers, rising vocal
talents, iconoclastic productions, international opera trends, and on and on. Greg
had the latest news about singers coming onto the scene, operas premiering
around the country (and in Europe), and the gossip about opera powerbrokers,
who was in<i>,</i> and who was <i>out </i>(in every meaning
of the phrase).</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Given Greg’s vast knowledge about
opera’s cutting edge, to me it seemed a mistake that Greg was not employed by
the big NYC opera companies. At AOP, he volunteered on projects for years,
generously returning his small fees to the company. It often struck me as
incongruous that his main work was at a conservative opera company in Sarasota,
Florida, a “snowbird” resort town, known for programming traditional “warhorse”
operas.</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">At AOP, Greg’s
satisfaction came from developing operas from the ground up, for example, Paula
Kimper and Wende Persons’ <i><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Patience
& Sarah, </span></i>which premiered at the Lincoln Center Festival in 1998.
(Anne Whitehouse was part of our team, too.) Through The Walt Whitman Project,
which he founded with Lon Black, Greg established a successful track record of
producing poetry in outdoor settings, finding a home base at Brooklyn’s Fort
Greene Park, a landmark park that lists Walt Whitman among its founders. <o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Greg continued to surprise me after
more than thirty years. There was always new information coming from
him: deeper, more multi-layered understandings of history and tradition,
which bore fruit in Sarasota Opera’s Verdi productions. Greg possessed the
spirit for the clash of opposing forces and shared his passion with anyone who
would listen, in a theater lobby or on a neighborhood sidewalk. His
sensitivity and empathy convinced skeptics of the power of poetry and
avant-garde music theatre. In casual conversations, Greg generously revealed
himself to others and teased out a commonality of interests. Every day I
remember and try to use this tool.</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">-Charles Jarden, Director of Strategic
Planning, American Opera Projects</span></b></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">II</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I’ve never known anyone like Greg
Trupiano, and I don’t expect I ever shall. We met when I joined American Opera
Projects in 1995. The programs Greg conceived for American Opera Projects were
original, innovative, and memorable. Conversations with Greg about
music—genres, compositions, composers, performers, productions—fascinated me.
He helped me to become a more discerning listener. </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of his
character Jay Gatsby, Greg sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. Much
of his learning and expertise was self-acquired. He was the most knowledgeable
person about music, Walt Whitman, and the history of Brooklyn that I have ever
met. He founded the Walt Whitman Project to realize his dream of awakening
today’s readers to the beauty and humanity of Whitman’s writing and to connect
Whitman’s New York to the current metropolis. Greg’s walking tours of Fort
Greene Park and the Prison Ship Monument and Walt Whitman’s Brooklyn are the
best walking tours I ever took, enriched by his encyclopedic knowledge and
enlivened by the inclusion of musical performances and readings and prints and
photographs depicting the sites we were visiting in times gone by. Like opera
singers, Greg eschewed microphones on these tours, and for our edification and
amusement, he corrected the errors on the historical plaques. </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">For decades, Greg kept to a set
routine, dividing his year between Sarasota and New York City. At the Sarasota
Opera, he nurtured many careers and was devoted to the summer opera camp he
began for children. Despite his learning, Greg was never pedantic. He was modest
and disinclined to talk about himself. He had a genuine interest in others.
Aside from his long-distance commutes between New York City and Sarasota, he
rarely traveled anywhere, and yet he was one of the most open-minded and least
provincial people I have ever encountered. </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">He had simple tastes. He liked diners
and Chinese restaurants. Other than books and music, he did not acquire
possessions. His devotions were deep and sustaining. He could be counted on to
be punctual. He showed up and forged connections between like-minded people in
different artistic communities. His programming was diverse before diversity
became a goal. In recent years, he was increasingly committed to education and
young people.</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">As Greg nurtured the careers of many
singers, he helped me become a better performer of my own work. Participating
in his Walt Whitman programs, I noticed that the singers were invariably better
readers than the writers. They came prepared and rehearsed, whereas the writers
winged it, and the results showed. I began to understand the many connections
between singing and speaking, and I tried to think as a singer when preparing
for a reading of my work. When I give a reading, I think of Greg. It is a way
for me to keep him with me as a sustaining spirit. </b><b> </b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">-Anne Whitehouse, writer and former
Development Consultant, American Opera Projects</span></b></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">III</b><b><o:p> </o:p></b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Trupiano. That’s how Greg Trupiano
signed every missive to me, never Greg. As if we were on a high stakes mission
together. And indeed we were. There was a lot to do and time was of the essence.
Trupiano was my comrade on a trajectory to, as Whitman would say, “Unscrew the
locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their
jambs!” </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Trupiano was an Advisory Board member
of Compagnia de’ Colombari and, signing on to that role, he became a rare
friend to me, to Compagnia de’ Colombari and to all the projects including <i>More
Or Less I Am</i>, the opera <i>Judith</i>, <i>The Merchant of Venice</i> and
all the others. He listened hard to all of us at board meetings. Civility and
practical wisdom marked his every contribution to the company, but nothing
replaced his particular joy at witnessing the performances of the actors and
singers themselves. They were the heart of the company and their presence was
paramount to him. </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The Whitman Project was Trupiano’s
“urge and urge and urge, always the procreant urge” in which he single handedly
brought Walt Whitman into the consciousness of New Yorkers as a force to be
reckoned with. In a persistent grassroots movement, he led countless tours of
folk around the many neighborhoods of Brooklyn, freely offering knowledge of
Whitman and New York history. His lucky auditors always left these itinerant
gatherings ecstatic: deepened in their knowledge and renewed in their New York
citizenship. If it were up to me, I would designate Trupiano a New York
landmark.</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Trupiano’s other great love was the
opera: he was Associate Artistic Director at the Sarasota Opera where his
knowledge was indispensable and where he galvanized a great variety of singers.
He was a go-to repository of all things operatic and theatrical. Yet, making
connections and bringing people together to serve shared missions was of
greatest delight to him. A democratic soul, he relished meeting people, more
than anybody I know and, remarkably, kept everyone’s name and history perfectly
unmuddled. </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Words mattered to Trupiano. If we spoke
of something happening, he always kept his word, a surefire bond in a slippery
time. I was a beneficiary of that integrity and attention. When Greg Trupiano
left us suddenly in February 2020, I was struck by the vast resounding silence
his absence carved. Yet just now, <i>now,</i> I begin to hear him challenging
and encouraging us all in this extraordinary American moment—along with his
beloved Walt, “What is known I strip away….I launch all men and women forward
with me into the unknown.” </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">-Karin Coonrod, Founding Director of
Compagnia de’ Colombari</span></b></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">IV</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Two of the most important events of my
life happened in 1981. In May, I moved to New York City. Three months later,
August 15, 1981, I met Greg Trupiano. We were at a theatre party in the East
Village. This wasn’t a love at first sight story, but within a year our
relationship evolved into something beautiful and Whitmanic that lasted 38
years. August 15 became our anniversary date. To Greg, the Ides of August.<br />
<br />
On my first day in New York, I knew I was finally home. Then Greg appeared and
became my custom Welcome Wagon. He was a native Brooklynite, he loved his city,
and he was eager to show it to me. “He was a welcoming presence” wrote a friend
after his passing. What made him so welcoming? These other descriptors used in
tributes to Greg will explain: kind, gentle, respectful, compassionate,
trustworthy, supportive, generous, inspiring, funny, professional, organized,
smart, a treasure, a true gentleman, an incredible human, a true ray of
sunshine, a class act, one-of-a-kind.<br />
<br />
In our early years, we were together all the time, working at the same job
during the day (William Morrow Publishers), rehearsing plays together (me
acting, Greg directing), and seeing performances together (theatre, opera,
cabaret, film). For most of the 1980s, we were in a theatre or opera house an
average of 5 times a week. Broadway, Off- and Off-Off- Broadway, The Met, New
York City Opera.<br />
<br />
We wandered the city together. We visited the popular touristy and sought the
obscure. Many of our jaunts were in Downtown Manhattan and the West Side when
Battery Park City was just landfill. <br />
<br />
In the late 1980s Greg started getting out-of-town jobs in opera so we’d be
apart for up to 5 months in a year. For 33 years, Greg worked at Sarasota Opera
in Florida and was a vital force there as Director of Artistic Administration.<br />
<br />
We managed these relationship fluctuations with ease which was a testament to
the strength of our partnership.<br />
<br />
Greg was a fervent Walt Whitman ambassador. He loved people. He created
community. He had a zest and reverence for life. He embraced Whitman’s words on
democracy and the spirit of America.<br />
<br />
In 2000 Greg launched The Walt Whitman Project. We produced readings, tours and
related events. Greg’s specialty was Whitman during his Brooklyn years. He
created tours of Downtown Brooklyn, Brooklyn Heights and Fort Greene Park. We
commissioned composers to create music based on, or using, Whitman’s words.
Greg’s intention was to bring the words of Whitman, spoken and sung, to the
people. It was an expression of his celebration of life that he shared with
Walt.<br />
<br />
There were some sticky years in Greg’s health story. He almost succumbed to a
subdural hematoma in 2014. In July 2017, Greg began a new chemotherapy regimen
for chronic lymphocytic leukemia that he had been managing since 2004. As a
result, he regained a vibrancy not experienced in several years. His death in
February 2020 was sudden and unexpected.<br />
<br />
It was easy for Greg to bolster people’s spirits. He freely gave moral support
and career guidance. He was a good listener. He could make you feel safe and
quickly garner your trust. It made him a positive force for so many people. I was
a fortunate recipient…24/7. <br />
<br />
I’m still receiving. I was always intrigued by the final, periodless line in
Song of Myself, and after Greg’s passing it has even more significance.<br />
<br />
“I stop some where waiting for you”</b><b> </b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">-Lon Black, Greg’s life partner and
Artistic Director of The Walt Whitman Project<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><br /><p></p>E♦Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16147875345316321220noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175539335941051415.post-22954519318622917372020-10-16T07:33:00.008-07:002020-10-16T14:13:48.371-07:00Evan Nicholls on Poetry by Anne Whitehouse<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><span lang="EN">Review:
</span><span lang="EN"><a href="https://www.dosmadres.com/shop/outside-from-the-inside-by-anne-whitehouse/"><i><span style="color: #660000; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">Outside From the Inside</span></i></a></span><i><span lang="EN"> </span></i><span lang="EN">(Dos Madres Press, 2020) by Anne Whitehouse. Loveland,
OH. 122 pages. $19.00 U.S. ISBN: 978-1-948017-96-1.</span></b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b><span lang="EN">Anne Whitehouse’s new book of poetry, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Outside From the Inside</i>, is a many-legged thing. Maybe, it’s
something like </span><span lang="EN"><a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45473/a-noiseless-patient-spider"><span style="color: #660000; mso-fareast-font-family: Garamond;">Whitman’s spider</span></a></span><span lang="EN">, launching “filament, filament, filament,
out of itself.” Or maybe, that is an overly dramatic comparison. Whatever
description you like, what you need to know is that this book revolves around
the body and its place. Also, the body and its person. Whitehouse explores
these topics through a handful of forms – free verse, the odd cento, more – offering
a generous 95 pages of poetry.</span></b></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Of course, there are plenty of details I found myself savoring
throughout the collection. Always, I love a book with good sectioning
(Whitehouse divides her work into four parts). I also admired <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Outside</i>’s embrace of often-times
clinical language – this occurring in the first section, “Tides of the Body.”
In one poem, the poet lauds the anconeus and popliteus muscles as if they were
Greek heroes. Above all, though, my interest was piqued by Whitehouse’s forays
into persona.</b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>The second section of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Outside</i>,
entitled “It Wasn’t A Hallucination,” (one of my favorite titles) is where the
bulk of this work happens. In the book, Whitehouse inhabits the voices of
Carlos Santana and the prolific sculptor Isamu Noguchi, among others. This last
instance is the title poem of the book.</b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>As someone with a real soft spot for Noguchi’s work, it was a
pleasant surprise to find his voice inhabited inside. Moreover, the poem is an
epistolary gem – a reimaging of a letter from Noguchi to Man Ray. [Editor: Whitehouse explains the genesis of the poem in an <a href="https://www.westchesterreview.com/blog/2020/3/29/wr-interview-series-anne-whitehouse" target="_blank"><span style="color: #660000;">interview</span></a>.] But – maybe this
is of note – I also began reading it with a healthy dose of skepticism. Persona
requires a great amount of care: it is never not a balancing act. Soon enough,
though, I found “Outside From the Inside” to be full of care. It is also
timely, placing Noguchi back in the Poston camp in Arizona during Japanese
American internment, reminding us now of the current detention camp crisis at
the border.</b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Considering Noguchi’s work, too, it becomes easy to draw conclusions
on how the artist’s contemplative style may have influenced Whitehouse in
piecing this collection together. Lines like “Here, there is a memory / of
ancient places, / wind and sun, endlessness, / where I came from, / and where I
will go. ...” align with both Noguchi’s expression of wind, flight and movement
as well as the core mood of the book – a poetics wrapped up in being <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">placed by moments</i>. Emphasizing this
paradoxy – in the sense that moments always seem to pick up and move on – “Outside
From the Inside” ends on a nicely juxtaposed note, placing the small alongside
the large: “Oh, for an orange, / Oh, for the sea.” Whitehouse borrows these lines from the real <a href="https://nationalzoo.si.edu/object/AAADCD_item_11686" target="_blank"><span style="color: #660000;">Noguchi letter</span></a>. It is in details like this where I think Whitehouse is most successful.</b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Other poems worth mentioning from the book include “Salt-Rising
Bread”, which tracks the life of an ancient recipe, and “Koko and Robin”, which
is an imagining of the relationship between the late Robin Williams and Koko,
the gorilla who was famous for her command of American Sign Language (ASL). But,
maybe what will appeal to some readers the most – especially casual readers of
poetry – are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Outside</i>’s quieter, brief
poems (of which there are plenty). “Balm” is one of these.</b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>In the days of Instagram poetry, it’s comforting to come across short
poems that deal their cards quickly but don’t leave you feeling cheated. While
it was not always my <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">specific</i> taste, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Outside From the Inside </i>never left me
feeling cheated. Instead, a little more placed, on “a gray road like a fallen
ribbon.”</b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>- Evan Nicholls is a graduate of James Madison University and has
poetry appearing or forthcoming in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Guesthouse,</i>
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sporklet</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">DIAGRAM</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hobart</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Yalobusha Review, </i>among others. He was
raised in the peach, fox, horse and wine country of Fauquier County, Virginia.
He tweets at @nicholls_evan.</b></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: center;"><span lang="EN"><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;"><b>Copyright©2020 by Evan Nicholls. All Rights Reserved. </b></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>E♦Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16147875345316321220noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175539335941051415.post-57201100756764800252019-10-19T07:46:00.001-07:002019-10-19T07:46:48.597-07:00"Disintegration" by S.E. Soldwedel - A Review by Carlo Alvaro<br />
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>More
than a Story, a Literary ‘Singularity’<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>By
Carlo Alvaro<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">Disintegration</span></i><span style="line-height: 115%;"> by S.E. Soldwedel. Inkshares (2019). Paperback 412 pages, $
14.71.<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_gjdgxs"></a><span style="line-height: 115%;">On
its surface, S.E. Soldwedel’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Disintegration</i>
seems a series of interweaving adventure tales. They take place in an indefinite
future. The adroit narrative leaves the reader free to interpret. To one, it
may be a traditional, hard-boiled sci-fi story that at times is reminiscent of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Aliens</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blade Runner</i>. To another, it may be a perverse hallucination akin
to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jacob’s Ladder</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In the Mouth of Madness</i>. It is both
cinematic and literary at once.<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Soldwedel doesn’t moralize. He
doesn’t indict his own characters. He lets them damn or redeem themselves—often
both, in one order or the other. We could say that we don’t know what he
intended, but it seems a conscious choice to allow the reader to project his or
her paradigm. The way we think affects the way we perceive the media we consume.
Soldwedel understands the subjectivity of perception, and he exploits it to
create a rich, ambitious tale rife with moral ambiguity.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>There is no singular protagonist.
Instead, this is an ensemble drama. Soldwedel skillfully interweaves these
storylines without dropping any threads. The brevity of certain chapters and a
lengthy hiatus of one storyline only add mystery and pique intrigue. This
aspect of the book is the one that I like most. Why settle for a simple,
comfortable story? Rather, Soldwedel’s tale is the literary equivalent of taking
a trip through a wormhole: terrifying, fascinating, compelling! While an
Einstein-Rosen Bridge underpins the entire premise, he sends the reader through
a series of figurative portals to arrive at surprising but satisfying
destinations. We travel these warped paths with the various characters, feel
their discomfort, experience their perversion and, in a few cases, their
redemption.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>In this text, I see subversion. At
the same moment a misogynist might revel in depictions of violence, a more
discerning reader would recognize that the heroes of this book are, in fact,
its women. Soldwedel’s lens unflinchingly examines things from which most
people would prefer to turn away. He seems to be saying that, yes, humanity is
capable of great ugliness but the only way to confront it is to pay dutiful
witness to the evils that we perpetrate. What good does it do us to ignore
them? He posits that our champions should be those who have experienced abuse,
know trauma, and have persevered despite. And who—rather than continue the
cycle—lash out at the engines of oppression that churn out the men and women
who perpetrate such abuse.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>One character, Ada, is a counselor
by trade and she is the most emotionally intelligent of all the players. Even
still, she is averse to commitment, polyamorous, and bisexual. Further, neither
her sexuality nor that of any of the characters is played for titillation.
Instead, Soldwedel uses sex to develop the characters—to reveal how they act at
their most vulnerable, and how they prey upon or protect the vulnerabilities of
others. By some estimations, Ada might be considered a “minor” character, but
her influence upon multiple “major” and “minor” characters is so profound that
I consider her one of the most important figures. She is, in many ways, the
conscience of the book.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Playing with and against Ada is
Carina, an Algerian refugee turned soldier, whose late, French father served in
the same military. Carina smolders with rage borne of trauma, and of resentment
that she had to pretend to be French to join the martial empire that she
reluctantly serves. One of the many striking things about her is her size.
Soldwedel describes her to be over six-feet tall and powerfully built, enough
to dwarf many of the men she encounters. She also presents as a militant, misandrist
homosexual, but is so beautiful that the men around her refuse to withhold
their “appreciation.” It’s a fitting anecdote for where we find ourselves, at
present. It can be read as an endorsement of certain trends, but the author
doesn’t vilify the villains of that paradigm. Instead, the narrator is neutral.
The characters speak for themselves, and even the bad actors are permitted
their moments of nuance, exhibiting even beneficence and empathy.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Though rife with coarse language,
there is beauty and elegance in the prose. The narrator is not just neutral but
erudite, whereas the characters are as aberrant and multifaceted as real
people. Soldwedel’s creations are so credible as to seem real—even those who
are not human. The aliens are allegorical, though not in a trite way. The
author knows the razor’s edge upon which dance such trappings of science
fiction, and he manages to keep them balanced. They neither fall off one side
into the absurd, nor off the other into belabored self-consciousness.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">Disintegration</span></i><span style="line-height: 115%;"> is the work of a writer who understands craft and that all
contrivances are products of ego. Yet, it is rare for a debut author to have
seemingly barred his ego a place in the narrative. At the very least, he’s
prevented it from infecting the book with the sort of obvious wish-fulfillment
that damns the early work of so many writers. As such, the novel appears to be
a labor that has undergone many iterations. Parts of it indicate a certain
brash youthfulness, which might to some audiences seem puerile. Other parts—the
characterizations—boast deep understanding of the human condition.<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>I won’t leave you without a taste of
the plot itself. The back cover tells us of a world in disarray, the victim of
a long conflict that hints at an immortal architect, which imbues the fiction
with an element of the fantastic. It then teases a plan to restore order, but
not before an assassination. There are elements of political intrigue, global
war, and personal betrayals. It’s an ambitious work. But it works. What holds
it together are its well-drawn and eminently relatable characters, even those
whom you may wish not to like. I look forward to Soldwedel’s further output. A
debut of this caliber promises even greater things to come.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><span style="line-height: 115%;">-
</span>Dr. Carlo Alvaro has
been teaching philosophy at New York City College of Technology of the City
University of New York since 2011. He has also taught at St. Francis College
and at Kean University. He’s the author of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ethical
Veganism</i> (2019) and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Raw Veganism</i>
(forthcoming, 2020).</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><b><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Copyright</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">©</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">2019
by Carlo Alvaro, All Rights Reserved</span></b></span></div>
<br />
<br />E♦Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16147875345316321220noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175539335941051415.post-46500329394902918982019-10-08T09:34:00.000-07:002019-10-08T10:31:43.600-07:00Songs of Story Men - Vaneshran Arumugam and Emmanuel Castis<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhno_2ekn4_J8DRncduC5Jv4oyDlSS3yKCBV5iVPL4NP-2Zf9-vrbNg6y6BTq0foKlnY-84Wl5Mh4UyLcEAuymWLNdlyrTi9bLoc5KaQgqX1nPH97-g9uZL4w8GlHY2T499-TfAFMrtdd3c/s1600/DSCN4657.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1238" data-original-width="1600" height="247" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhno_2ekn4_J8DRncduC5Jv4oyDlSS3yKCBV5iVPL4NP-2Zf9-vrbNg6y6BTq0foKlnY-84Wl5Mh4UyLcEAuymWLNdlyrTi9bLoc5KaQgqX1nPH97-g9uZL4w8GlHY2T499-TfAFMrtdd3c/s320/DSCN4657.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Vaneshran Arumugam (left) and Emmanuel Castis (right)</b></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>ON
Saturday, 28 September we held the fourth <a href="https://asebl.blogspot.com/p/moral-sense-colloquium-iii.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #660000;">Moral Sense Colloquium</span></a>, which focused
on cross cultural morality, human and animal. As part of the program, two
seasoned actors and musicians from South Africa, Vaneshran Arumugam and
Emmanuel Castis performed their work, SONGS OF STORY MEN. We witnessed a moving,
multicultural feast that weaved a story of two men and one shared love in New
York. There was tension, conflict, and yet above all brotherhood. Everything
was told through a medley of crisp song and sprightly movement, a sharing of
tones through the textures of a steel-string guitar and a nylon-string guitar.
Every moment of the performance was well orchestrated to achieve maximum
effect. There was Indian chanting and yoga-like rhythms along with light shared
from one man to another. Words consisted of texts from Shakespeare to popular
songs. The audience was engaged in part of the performance, and everyone I
spoke to afterward confirmed having a deeply satisfying experience. I know I
did. The lighting and sound engineer was Guy de Lancey.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Among
the many guiding questions of the Colloquium, here are a few that would have
been addressed by Songs of Story Men: What is cross-cultural morality? What
principles and standards of behavior are shared among cultures? How do values,
beliefs, and practices differ among cultures? And as Charles Darwin says, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Descent of Man</i>, “The following
proposition seems to me in a high degree probable – namely, that any animal
whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a
moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as
well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man.” Today we’d say
“humankind” and not “man,” but the point is that Vaneshran Arumugam and
Emmanuel Castis, through their artistry of words, music, and song, epitomize
the type of universal moral sense, evident even among animal species, Darwin
alludes to.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b><span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">IN
their own words, here’s a bit of what Arumugam and Castis say, put together
especially for the event program by their colleague and manager, Jacqueline
Acres, of Sixface Creatives: “</span><span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Songs of Story Men is an
experiential meditation on cultural relationships and story. It aims to incite
the imagination and evoke the emotions of the audience into drawing together
different musical, literary and performance styles and techniques into a cohesive
“narrative.” The piece aims to present a thinking, feeling platform for
experiencing one’s own reflections and glimmers of memory... The creation and
curation of content is evolving and arises from and in response to the actual
life experience of the performers, as men, as children of immigrants, as
Africans... and as storytellers.”<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>About The Performers.</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Vaneshran Arumugam is a veteran of the South African and
International independent film scene, and a film maker in his own right with
the independent offbeat hit, “Actorholic.” On stage, he has played the part of
parts – Hamlet – for the Royal Shakespeare Company in England, while in South
Africa he has become the very image of Othello gracing the cover of the Oxford
University press edition of the play. Vaneshran graduated with a Master’s
degree in Consciousness in Performance as a Ford Fellow in 2008, which first
brought him to New York where he studied at Columbia University under Kristin
Linklater. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Residence at St. Francis College in
2013, teaching and performing. Vaneshran and his wife Jacqueline have been
selected as a winner in the competitive global social innovation challenge 2019
(Civil Society Academy) in recognition of their innovative vision for the arts
in social design, Living University.<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Emmanuel Castis became a household name through his
character Steve in the popular South African drama, Isidingo. Since then he has
been on film sets and stages all around the world. Having played a role in
major soaps/dramas in South Africa (Sevende Laan, Erfsondes, Scandal) and the
United States (General Hospital, Days of our Lives), Emmanuel is a well-known
star of the screen. Emmanuel started his theatre career in Bloemfontein on the
Sandt Du Plesis stage playing Rocky in the Rocky Horror show (1999). He has
gone on to star in a host of musical and live theatre productions, including,
Jersey Boys and Grease. His other claim to fame is beating Trevor Noah in
strictly come dancing season 4, 2008, proving that white men can dance!
Emmanuel released an album in 2008 called South of Nowhere. He now gigs
regularly with his band, Dalliance.</b></span><o:p></o:p></div>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b></b></span><br />E♦Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16147875345316321220noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175539335941051415.post-59974174009206672502019-09-10T08:46:00.001-07:002019-09-10T08:46:45.260-07:00Tribute to Toni Morrison - by Divya Bhatnagar<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Remembering Toni Morrison<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>By Divya Bhatnagar<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>I feel the pain of losing the one
who gave me a meaning to lead a self-awakened life…the one to whom I owe -
learning, thinking, understanding, and the power to create consciousness in
terms of self with a <i>WE</i> feeling. Yes, she is none other
than Toni Morrison - 1993 Nobel
Prize winning first African-American female author, who left this earthly abode
for heavenly peace on August 5, 2019.<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Late on the evening of August 6,
2019 (as per the time zone), I started receiving calls and messages for the
sudden, sad demise of Toni Morrison, as everyone in my family and circle was
well aware of the love, respect, and admiration I owed for Ms. Morrison. For the
past 19 years, Morrison had become an integral unseen member of the family. It
all started with the thought of pursuing a Ph.D., and Toni Morrison was the
prominent name that struck my mind. At that point of time, I had only read “The
Bluest Eye” and “Sula,” and reading them helped me to understand the thin line of
difference between living in dreams and talking about realism. My Ph.D. thesis
concentrates mostly on “The Bluest Eye to Love,” but the inspiration to read Morrison’s
writing is unending.<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>She is one of the most
influential, celebrated, and respected authors of her time. Her writing is
richly known for epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed
African-American characters. In other words, she’s not a mere one-time reading.
Though her writing ranges for more than 4 decades, still one element that has
always fascinated me in all her writings is that there is something and that
something needs to be addressed even today. Each of her novels explores the
power of self-consciousness that emerges from each individual’s connection with
her roots. Toni Morrison’s progression as a writer can very well be interpreted
from one of her famous quotes:<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>If there is a book that you want to read, but it
has not been written yet, you must be the one to write it.<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Her ideology has worked as a
catalyst to my thought process. It gave me the power to own a meaningful life -
a life full of purpose and hope. If I could boil down my learning from Morrison
in a couple of words it would be,<i> </i>Speaking
the Unspeakable. She had the power to unveil the harsh cruelties and
truths which remain undercover of silence with a face of injustice. It was not
an easy task to talk about Pecola (“The Bluest Eye,” 1970) or Sethe (“Beloved,”
1997). <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Each of her novels reflects the
growing awareness of the common oppression, exploitation, and victimization of
black people in American. “This is not
a story to pass on...” is the concluding statement of “Beloved” (1987)
and suggests that blacks (now used to describe a free man of colour) first need
to know what they have been, where they are, and the significance of what they
are. By renewing this they will get some idea of what they still must be.
Morrison taught me that the idea of freeing oneself from the brutal facts of
inhumanity and injustice not only applies to the black community but to all
those individuals and communities (across the globe) who readily accept
themselves as a symbol of powerlessness - falling in a trap, the web of
victimization. As Morrison says:<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Freeing
yourself was one thing claiming ownership of that freed self was another. (“Beloved,”
1997) <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Morrison’s writing nurtures the
thought of awakening an individual’s sensitivity over the socio-psycho
rigidness of society. The biggest oscillation between “Why” and “How” appears
in “The Bluest Eye” (1970):<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>There is really nothing more to say - except why.
But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.<i><o:p></o:p></i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>This statement suggests that one
needs to find a solution by either retrospecting or introspecting the “how” (as
per a situation). There is no single scene in our daily life that fails to find
a reference from Ms. Morrison’s writing. It reminds me of many such
unforgettable incidents that I came across. Whether it be the incident of a
female soft-skills coach who refused to take up assigned sessions on fear of
being unwelcome by the audience for being dark-skinned, or be it the girl child
of rural areas for being deprived for technical higher education, or be it the
grievance of working women who at many times face sexual atrocities from their
senior male colleagues, or an individual being deprived on grounds of minority
status. Whether I read Morrison’s African-American society, or I talk about my
Indian society, or about any other society across the globe, what really
matters is how you handle “how” instead of “why.” The “how” will help you find
alternatives for constructing a positive approach in society. I somewhere
believe that my thesis would have been incomplete if I could not contribute,
like Claudia, Milkman, Paul D, Mrs. MacTeer, and Baby Suggs, towards the
betterment of society.<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Like, Claudia (“The Bluest Eye,”
1970) and Paul D (“Beloved,” 1987) it was my social responsibility to enhance
the feeling of self worth in the female coach and help her recognize her inner
beauty and potential of knowledge. Characters like Felice (“Jazz,” 1992), Mrs.
MacTeer (“The Bluest Eye,” 1970), Baby Suggs (“Beloved,” 1997), and Pilate (“Song
of Solomon,” 1977) insist that I sustain the feeling of pride for being a
female and that I too am an empowered woman. Taking this as a duty, I worked in
rural areas to educate people to value the existence and the right of each and
every girl child. As a result to this, twenty six (girl) children were able to
attain engineering and pharmaceutical degrees.<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Reading Morrison has given us the
power to contribute meaningfully. Her brilliant writing has taught us to love
one’s own self, to understand the gravity of belongingness, to write about both
the triumphs and also the sufferings. By doing so we create a society where
conscious souls emerge to celebrate ways of survival and hopes of creating a
Paradise through love for race, community building, and emotional bonding. <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>I
tribute my Ph.D. thesis - research based on Toni Morrison’s novels from “The
Bluest Eye” to “Love.”<i> </i>Rest well and in peace,
Ms. Morrison.<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Copyright©2019 by Divya Bhatnagar, Ph.D. – All Rights
Reserved</span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />E♦Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16147875345316321220noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175539335941051415.post-43598954355712324612019-08-03T12:16:00.000-07:002019-08-03T14:15:21.382-07:00Banning Meat Consumption? - Book Review by Carlo Alvaro<br />
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Abolition of Meat<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Animal-liberation-Should-Consumption-Products/dp/1909188840/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=jan+deckers&qid=1564859694&s=books&sr=1-1" target="_blank"><span style="color: #660000;">Animal (De)liberation: Should the Consumption of Animal Products Be Banned?</span></a></i> Jan Deckers makes a
convincing argument for qualified moral veganism. Qualified means that it “does
not demand that human beings abstain from eating animal products in all
situations” (p. 99). In most societies where plant-based food is readily
available, vegan diets should be adopted because consumption of animal products
undermines human health and undermines the health of vegans because animal
agriculture has a tremendously negative impact upon the environment (p. 108).<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>The writing is clear and engaging. This book can be useful to three
different groups: meat eaters can benefit from Deckers’ detailed first-hand
experience on factory farms to help them think about the negative global
impacts that animal agriculture causes; second, physicians who currently
recommend their patients animal products for good health; third, as a college
text since it discusses some ethical theories, environmental, and nutrition
science. <o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>In my view, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Animal (De)liberation</i>
has not received the attention that it deserves. This is rather unfortunate
because it shows convincingly that human health, holistically conceived, must
take center stage in animal ethics. Contrary to most work in this field,
Deckers’ concern with human health leads him to embrace animalism, an extension
of speciesism, which encompasses both a bias in favor of animals and a bias
against eating them (p. 10). By showing that vegan ethics must be grounded in a
concern with human health in order to be robust, Deckers advances animal ethics
significantly. Whilst he makes the valiant point that his discussion may or may
not convince people to go vegan, in the meantime, animal agriculture undermines
human health and is rapidly destroying our environment. Thus, it is now time to
make truly radical changes and consider ways to legally ban the consumption of
animal products.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>In the opening chapter, Deckers suggests that human rights should
include healthcare. Consequently, it is of utmost importance that the food that
humans eat should be conducive to good health and respect for the environment. In
the early chapter, Deckers shows how the consumption of animal products
jeopardizes the human right to healthcare unjustifiably and how diets can
change when this is the case. Also, there is a detailed discussion of the
negative impact of zoonotic diseases on the health of those who do not consume
animal products; and most importantly, Deckers discusses how natural resources
can be used more efficiently if we grow food for human consumption. First of
all, as the world population is growing, demand for animal products is also
growing. To satisfy this demand, more animals must be brought into existence. More
animals means using more natural resources, such as water, fossil fuels, food,
and more. Second, confinement of these animals leads to infectious diseases
that are spread farther and farther as animals are transported around the
world. <o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>To fight diseases, the farm animals’ sector uses drugs, such as
antibiotics, to prevent diseases. Globally, half of the antibiotics that are
produced are used to prevent diseases. This promotes drug-resistant strains of
bacteria. Not to mention that these drugs are consumed by the animals and end
up not only in the bodies of those who will eat the animals, thus compromising
their health, but also in the soil and the waters and polluting them. Speaking
of diseases, vector-borne diseases are caused by infections transmitted to
people by insects. Such diseases are caused and became more severe as a result
of the environmental changes that resulted from the practices of animal
agriculture, such as deforestation and reduction of biodiversity. Deckers gives
the example of the forest clearance in the early 1960s in Bolivia that led to a
viral fever known as Machupo (p. 20). He also discusses the spread of HIV,
influenza, and the Nipah virus. Bottom line, those who consume animal products
contribute more to the emergence of zoonotic diseases that cause illness and
kill people and animals than those who consume plant-based diets (p. 22).<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Another problem is that the farm animals sector uses too much
agricultural land, since 70-75% of earth’s arable land is used to grow food to
feed animals. In North America and Europe only 40% of arable land is used to
grow food for humans (p. 23). Using land to feed animals is highly inefficient.
Vegetarian diets generally require five times less arable land than meat-based
diets. Consequently, meat-based diets contribute more to land use and degradation
than plant-based diets. <o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Farmers apply phosphorus fertilizers to supplement the low quantities
available in the soil. In many cases this has led to the buildup of phosphorus
in the soil, and in turn the potential for phosphorus to become soluble.
Dissolved phosphorus is transported from farms to lakes, rivers, and streams causing
excessive aquatic plant growth, such as eutrophication. Decomposition of algae
leads to hypoxia in rivers and seas, which causes suffocation of aquatic
ecosystems. Eutrophication also generates Pfiesteria Piscicida, literally a
group of fish-killer eukaryotes. Animal farming uses more fresh water than any
other sector. It also pollutes more water than any other sector. Furthermore,
farmers use fertilizers and pesticides that cause the formation of nitrates
that leak into the groundwater resulting in negative health effects. Farmers in
the USA use recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBTS), hormones that pollute
waters. Consider that half of the fish that humans consume are produced in
aquacultures systems.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The points are (a) we could feed more people by using the same amount
of plant protein that is now required to feed the animals; (b) with animal
farming out of the picture, we could use less arable land in a more sustainable
way; and (c) animal agriculture degrades more land and has a more negative
impact u</span>pon the environment than any other agricultural sector (pp.
24-25). Vegan diets, on the other hand, are shown to be more efficient than any
other diets. They consume less <span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">water
and reduce water pollution. Animal farming is a leading cause of climate change
as a result of greenhouse gas emissions. <o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Deckers formerly worked on a farm and so shares his first-hand
experience of the practices. Such practices can be described as cutthroat,
profit-driven, callous, absurd, revolting, and more. There is nothing remotely
fair, just, compassionate – nothing noble, nothing that evinces good intention
or good human character – with such practices. If the practices described in
this chapter won’t make the reader decide to become a vegan, I do not know what
will, at least in my opinion. Consider that most societies have the fortune to
have an abundance of fresh fruit, vegetables, grains, legumes, and more. Yet,
people demand animal flesh irrespective of the suffering of animals and the
negative environmental impacts of animal farming. <o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Although there is a general agreement that farm animals are sentient
beings, some dispute this fact. </span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Clare
Palmer (2010) thinks that many organisms may only be capable of “unconscious responses
to pain” (pp. 14, 18). Her argument is that “research on human fetuses
indicates withdrawal reflexes before the development of the thalamo-cortical
circuits associated with pain perception” (p. 12). But what if a fetus feels
pain before the development of the thalamo-cortical circuits associated with
pain perception? Murray (2008) argues that organisms exhibit pain behavior when
exposed to pain-inducing stimuli. Animals with a more neurologically complex structure
experience first order pain, that is, they feel pain, but are not aware that
they are feeling pain. Only humans, and perhaps other primates, experience
second order pain, which is awareness of suffering, </span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">i.e., they know, anticipate, and reflect upon
their pain experience. <o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Deckers does not find commonly made cognitive distinctions
or distinctions made on the basis of organisms’ interests in the avoidance of
pain convincing. He argues that inflicting pain on sentient organisms should be
avoided in many situations, but not all. Deckers suggests that sentience does
not stop at farm animals, but continues down to clams, insects, plants, and
even bacteria – a position to which he refers as “pan-sentientism” (p. 70). Deckers
addresses the issue as follows. First, Deckers points out that most
philosophers are wrong in asserting that only certain animals have an interest
to continue their existence. All organisms have been “designed” by nature to
have an interest in continuing to exist. Whether the organism can say or think
to itself, “I want to continue to exist,” is ultimately unimportant from a
moral point of view. However, we have to eat, and everything that we eat is
sentient, though in different degrees. Thus, a morally acceptable diet must
take into account that animals like pigs, chickens, and cows, are not human
food, except in extreme or particular circumstances. This is grounded in the
notion that while all living organisms are related, we are more closely related
to animals than to plants. This notion Deckers calls animalism, that is, we
should attribute more moral significance to animals than to other organisms
because we are more closely related to animals biologically (pp. 85, 99). In
other words, Deckers argues that we are morally justified in eating plants but
not justified in eating animal products. Therefore, in most cases we ought to
adopt qualified moral veganism, not on the basis of reducing animal suffering,
but on the ground that consuming animal bodies undermines human health (p. 103).<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Despite these considerations, some meat eaters and
vegetarians may remain unconvinced about the moral necessity to adopt veganism.
However, having documented the negative impacts of animal-based diets upon the
environment and human health, it is clear that diet is not a matter of taste or
personal preference. Something must be done to move in the direction of
qualified moral veganism. Thus, in chapter three, Deckers offers a valiant
answer to this problem, and that is, the political project that includes “political
and legislative reforms to reduce the likelihood that people will not fulfill
their duties when they make choices about what to eat” (p. 107). In other
words, to ensure a human right to healthcare, the next step is to ban the
consumption of animal products. This is of course a gargantuan difficulty in
light of the fact that our society is animal-product-centered. We have been
disciplined by society that consuming animal products is the norm, and that
being vegetarians or vegans is a radical position. It is not difficult to understand
why – blueberries don’t generate money, meat does! <o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>In spite of many social and political obstacles, Deckers
suggests three strategies to move governments and people to promote and
eventually adopt qualified moral veganism. The first option is to educate
people about moral veganism. This may be accomplished by promoting educational
initiatives to encourage discussions on the negative effects resulting from consumption
of animal products and the benefits of qualified moral veganism. In my own work
(Alvaro 2017; 2019) I suggest educating children from a young age through clear
information in the form of lectures, videos, and more, on the impacts of animal
agriculture; moral education emphasizing virtuous actions; and vegan food
preparation and nutrition. The second strategy is to increase the costs of
animal products; and the third is to implement a qualified ban on the
consumption of animal products, qualified in the sense that it would not apply
to all people in all circumstances. The remainder of chapter three is dedicated
to addressing three challenges to the vegan project. <o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The first objection is that people are not ready to go vegan, and
consequently it is pointless to pursue a ban. Deckers shows that in fact it is
quite the opposite. There is evidence that people are ready to make changes.
Anecdotally, the recent interest in veganism may be observed. Non-philosophers
have become more and more interested in veganism because they understand that
animal agriculture contributes to the degradation of the environment; that
eating more fruit and vegetables is more conducive to good health, which is a
no-brainer that somehow has been contested, not surprisingly, by the meat
industry; and that meat-based diets require the unjustified infliction of pain
to farm animals. The second objection is that the vegan project seems to
undermine human food security. This worry seems groundless especially
considering that a vegan scenario would release more arable land that would
allow biodiversity and a greater abundance of plant-based food. Furthermore,
veganism would lead to growing a wider range of vegetables and fruits than what
is available today.</span> <span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The third
objection is that the vegan project may alienate human beings from nature. In
my view, this is quite an extravagant worry. First, there are many human
endeavors that have alienated us from nature. I am reminded of that every time
I go to work on an overcrowded train where every single person stares at his or
her cellphone holding a cup of coffee in the other hand. It is hard to see how the
perpetuation of factory farming and killing animals will bring us closer to
nature. <o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>In chapter four, Deckers discusses what other people think and have to
say about qualified moral veganism. This discussion includes a number of views
of academics as well as non-philosophers, including slaughterhouse workers.
Deckers argues that qualified moral veganism “stands firm in light of the
various problems that beset other positions” (p. 156). Here he reiterates that
more people than we think understand the moral importance of the vegan project
and are willing to make changes. Deckers ends the book with an appendix that addresses
the unjustified fear of many people that vegan diets may not be nutritionally adequate.
I find this issue very interesting because most people know little about
nutrition in general. Meat eaters do not research to find out if their
particular diet is nutritionally adequate. By the same token, without research
people who are interested in adopting a vegan diet cannot possibly know that it
is possible to thrive on vegan diets. To address the question of the adequacy
of vegan diets and conclude this review, I wish to make two points: one is that
there is a massive body of ever-growing scientific evidence showing that vegan
diets are more healthful than meat-based diets, and that vegan diets can
prevent and reverse certain diseases. Thanks to the Internet, nowadays it is
quite easy to learn this information. Second, considering that we live in a
carnist society, and considering that the meat industry and many meat eaters try
to discredit veganism at any possible occasion, were vegan diets nutritionally
deficient, by now we would know about people becoming ill or dying as a result
of vegan diets. Anecdotal or not, the fact is that millions of people,
including scholars, athletes, construction workers, children, housewives, young
and elderly, truck drivers, and more have been strictly vegans and thriving for
decades. After all, it is said that an apple a day keeps the doctor away, not
that a steak a day would do so. <o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>References<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-left: .1in; mso-add-space: auto; text-indent: -.1in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Alvaro,
C. (2017). “Ethical Veganism, Virtue, and Greatness of the Soul.” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Journal of <o:p></o:p></i></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-left: .1in; mso-add-space: auto; text-indent: -.1in;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Agricultural and Environmental
Ethics</span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> 30
(6):765-781 (2017).<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-left: .1in; mso-add-space: auto; text-indent: -.1in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Alvaro,
C. (2019). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ethical Veganism, Virtue
Ethics, and the Great Soul</i>.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-left: .1in; mso-add-space: auto; text-indent: -.1in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-left: .1in; mso-add-space: auto; text-indent: -.1in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Deckers
J. (2016). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Animal (De)liberation: Should
the Consumption of Animal Products<o:p></o:p></i></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-left: .1in; mso-add-space: auto; text-indent: -.1in;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Be Banned</span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">. London: Ubiquity Press.<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-left: .1in; mso-add-space: auto; text-indent: -.1in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Murray,
M. (2008). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nature Red in Tooth and Claw:
Theism and the Problem of Animal<o:p></o:p></i></b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-left: .1in; mso-add-space: auto; text-indent: -.1in;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Suffering</span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">. Oxford University Press.<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-left: .1in; mso-add-space: auto; text-indent: -.1in;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Palmer,
C. (2010). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Animal Ethics in Context</i>.
New York: Columbia University Press.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>- CARLO ALVARO is a moral philosopher and the author of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ethical-Veganism-Virtue-Ethics-Great/dp/1498590012/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1564859593&sr=1-1" target="_blank"><span style="color: #660000;">Ethical Veganism, Virtue Ethics, and the Great Soul</span></a></i><o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>copyright©2019 by Carlo Alvaro – All Rights Reserved<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div>
<br />E♦Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16147875345316321220noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175539335941051415.post-40792856088389685322019-06-02T13:46:00.000-07:002019-06-15T05:58:30.249-07:00Story of an Ethical Vegan - Carlo Alvaro<br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Veganism
is a ubiquitous term today. It is supposed to denote a lifestyle devoid </b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8Db9sytpb6KyxYICeuRaq86usi-s8mZW_VI2yBCh90E9VEvHXqqNFL-KfacG58bT8tXtrmATKmNUUAGkfpVpfIRDmL4nzl93Rnv0GdkMk0tOzeXpieC3U1BruhDF1Pi17qYP56srLnkxl/s1600/Carlo+Alvaro.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="225" data-original-width="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8Db9sytpb6KyxYICeuRaq86usi-s8mZW_VI2yBCh90E9VEvHXqqNFL-KfacG58bT8tXtrmATKmNUUAGkfpVpfIRDmL4nzl93Rnv0GdkMk0tOzeXpieC3U1BruhDF1Pi17qYP56srLnkxl/s1600/Carlo+Alvaro.jpg" /></a></b></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>of
animal-based food and all sorts of animal byproducts, such as leather, fur, and
more. However, many people, for a variety of reasons, like to toy with the idea
of veganism and label themselves as vegans despite their using or consuming
animal products. They might as well call it freeganism. Perhaps, one reason is
that announcing allegiance to veganism gives one a feeling of superiority, a
feeling of being part of some elite group, or makes one feel like a rebel. Many
celebrities promote veganism, for one reason or other, and their fans, often
following blindly their idols, embrace veganism. On March 3, 2018, for example,
Beyoncé had invited her hundred plus million Instagram followers to join her on
a “vegan” journey; a year later a New York Times article appeared with the
self-explanatory title “Wait – Beyoncé Is Not Actually a Vegan” (Oh, what a
surprise!). Many others, confused about nutrition, go vegan on the (false)
promise that veganism will make them lose weight. Yet others are motivated by
some tenuous or ill-understood moral principles. For example, I wish I had a
nickel for every time I heard people parroting Jeremy Bentham’s line “...the
question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”
So, in this age of moral and culinary confusion, many people embark on vegan
journeys. But my journey has been a bit different.<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>One
important difference is that when I went vegan – believe it or not – the Internet
did not exist yet. There were no vegan celebrities, no graphic YouTube videos
showing the horrendous conditions of farm animals, no Instagram, no vegan video
recipes, no magazines talking about veganism, and no vegan aisles in
supermarkets. In fact, when I went vegan the politics and aesthetics of
veganism did not exist. Vegans then were referred to as “vegetarians.” Most
important, my moral attitude toward life was, and still is, closer to
Aristotelian virtue than to Benthamite utilitarian principles. I was more
interested in becoming a compassionate, temperate, just, caring, and
magnanimous person than a person concerned about the greatest good, or the
greatest satisfaction of preference for the greatest number, or animal
suffering or animal rights. <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>But
before I get to the story of when and how I took the “red pill” and became a
vegan, I want to make an important premise. I was not born in the United States
of America; I was born in Italy. I am not mentioning this fact to brag or to
put down the US, but rather to make an important point: the US tops the list of
countries that eat the most meat. To be sure, the US is at the top of many
lists, including the one of countries with the most obese people. Around 80
million adults and 13 million children (36% of the population!) are obese. The
US adopts an aggressive campaign to push consumption of animal products. From
“Got Milk?” to “Beef, It’s What’s for Dinner,” the government has disciplined
people into believing that food equals meat served upon meat. Only in America,
the land of fast food, can you find the most unhealthful food in the world.
Which country in the world could come up with such bizarrely unhealthful ideas
as stuffing the crust of cheese pizza with cheese or to deep-fry butter in
lard? Unfortunately, America’s culinary culture has now spread all over the
world. However, when I was a boy in Italy, before Burger King and McDonald’s
had set foot in the Italic boot, animal products were not omnipresent. Growing
up, I recall, my diet was predominantly based on fruit, legumes, grains, and
vegetables. Meat and dairy products were not an important aspect of my culture.
Yes, of course, when you say “Italy” people immediately think of spaghetti and
meatballs, chicken Parmigiana, fettuccini Alfredo, and other such concoctions
seen in movies. But those are American inventions. Thus, growing up in a
culture that does not literally shove meat down your gullet since birth may help.
<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Now back
to my story: there was a particular event that made me become a vegan when I
was only twelve years old. One day, some girls in my school decided not to eat
lunch during the break and instead use that time to protest against animal
cruelty. I approached them and asked what the commotion was about. They told me
that they were against makeup. I wondered why makeup. Our exchange went
something like this:<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Me:
“What’s makeup got to do with animals?”<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Girl:
“Well, makeup is tested on animals.” <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Me:
“So? Don’t you guys eat meat?” <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Girl:
“Yes, but…”<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Me:
“But what?”<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Girl:
“Well, it’s not the same thing.”<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Me:
“Explain why not.”<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Girl:
“It just isn’t!”<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>I walked
away triumphantly for having exposed those girls, thinking how silly they were.
But seconds later, what I said to them made me pause. I knew that what I said
to that girl did not affect her, but it made a profound change in my life. I
thought that using animals for testing makeup and using animals for food were,
morally speaking, the same thing. However, while it was obvious to me that
testing makeup on animals was callous, I had never connected the dots before.
The following day, I saw those girls in the cafeteria eating ham sandwiches and
caterwauling about makeup – nothing had changed for them. I, on the other hand,
was a different person ever since – I quit eating animals.<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>In
retrospect, what I find interesting is that I arrived at the conclusion that I
had to quit eating animals not on the basis of typical considerations. What I
mean by ‘typical’ is that when people go vegan or vegetarian, typically, do so
out of love for animals or for health-related reasons. This is not to say that
I did not care about the welfare of animals or about my health. I did. However,
they were not my primary goals. My approach toward understanding my ethical
relation with the environment had to do (and still does) with the question of
what sort of person I should strive to become. One of my life’s goals has been
to become a noble person. It is hard, but not impossible. In other words, I was
not worried primarily about animal suffering; rather, I asked myself what kind
of person consumes the flesh and bodily fluids of animals? What kind of
individual supports the practices of raising animals for food? It seemed
obvious to me that the answer is, “Not a noble person.” A noble person is one
who lives simply and refuses to participate in violence or unjust practices. At
that stage, I had no formal philosophical education. However, it was very clear
to me that animal agriculture is a violent and unjust business. I did not have
rigorous arguments to support my ideas of what a good, noble person is supposed
to be. That came later in my life, and I will discuss it in a following
paragraph. <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Naturally,
if the story ended there it would be too easy, but it isn’t easy. At that
tender age, I was not ready to dedicate my life to my new idea. Moreover, my
family members were not exactly supportive. In fact, they did not understand
what I was doing at all. As a result of family pressure and peer pressure,
about two years later, I abandoned my principles and went back to eating what
was considered a normal diet. Forward a few years later, I was in college
taking a course in public speaking for which I had to give a persuasive speech
about anything I liked. I thought about what topic I could discuss and it
suddenly hit me: I decided to give a speech on why we should boycott
McDonald’s. I received an A+ for the speech – and I quit meat again. This time
I knew I would stick to my principles. Perhaps the process of preparing the
speech opened my eyes anew. I realized that animals are, well, animals; they
are playful, angry, cute, fluffy, ugly, small, big, smelly, aggressive, docile –
but not food for humans. I went home that day and trashed animal products that
I had in my apartment, and donated to a homeless man my only pair of leather
shoes.<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>I
realized that our behavior toward animals is morally appalling. Considering our
stage of intellectual and technological development, we don’t need to raise
animals for food. We do not live in the desert or in the Dark Ages. Eating
animals and their byproducts is not necessary. Those like us who are lucky
enough (lucky?) to live in affluent societies do not need to exploit and kill
other beings in order to thrive. We have easy access to plenty of vegetables,
fruit, grains, and legumes. These foods are environmentally sustainable and
healthful. Yet, nowadays-intensive factory farming is considered a normal
aspect of society. But what is normal about killing billions of creatures? Farm
animals are reared in cages, separated from their families, cut into pieces,
packaged, shipped to supermarkets where they are sold and labeled with funny
euphemisms such as beef, pork, drumsticks, eggs, and so on. Sorrowfully, they
are just the mutilated body parts of what once were beautiful animals.<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Egg
farms are horrific too. Since male chicks are not profitable to the industry
because they cannot lay eggs, every year, 200 million baby chicks are ground up
alive. Workers separate male chicks from females and toss the males into a
chute where they are ground up alive in a meat grinder into a bloody pulp.
Speaking of birds, turkeys are artificially inseminated. By “artificially” I
mean that there are people whose job is to collect sperm cells from a male
turkey (I’ll let you imagine how) and manually deposit them into the
reproductive tract of a female. (Try bringing up artificial insemination of
turkeys during your next Thanksgiving dinner!)<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>At this
point, I became deeply interested in the subject. I started wondering why
people eat meat. It is a complicated question. One’s diet, like many other
aspects of life, traditions, beliefs, and customs, is seldom considered or
questioned. I don’t think I am a conspiracy theorist when I say that in our society
we are not exactly encouraged to think for ourselves. Quite to the contrary, we
are taught to always accept and never question the status quo. In most cases,
people eat meat because their parents taught them to do so. And of course,
people enjoy eating meat. However, there are two interesting aspects of this:
first, I often wonder whether it is eating animal flesh that people really
enjoy. Take any mutilated part of an animal, boil it and serve it on a plate. I
am willing to bet that most people would refuse to eat it. Eating meat is not
like eating cherries or mangos. Meat must be prepared with spices, marinated,
cured, smoked, and cooked because, after all, it is rotting flesh. Second,
people enjoy all sorts of things that are unnecessary, such as drinking,
gambling, smoking, and taking drugs. But my question is, “Is that the way a
good and noble human being is supposed to live?” The practices required to
produce animal-based food are less than noble; they involve the worst vices of
which human beings are capable, such as callousness, gratuitous violence,
injustice, intemperance, and smallness of soul.<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Another
reason people eat meat is that they say, it is “natural.” By natural, I take
it, it is meant that human beings are somehow “designed” by nature or by God to
eat animals or that eating meat is the cycle of life. Considering that most
people in affluent societies buy conveniently packaged meat in supermarkets, it
is not clear what they mean by “the cycle of life.” Rather, it is the cycle of
supermarkets. Also, human beings are not animal eaters. I just cannot imagine
how anyone could observe cows, pigs, chickens, lambs, cats, dogs, and other
animals in their natural environment, and find them appetizing. Think of a
chicken scurrying on the grass or a pig enjoying a mud bath or a cow chewing
grass. Such creatures may be considered cute or funny or gross, but not
appetizing. <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>I find
it interesting that animal rights advocates argue that eating animals is wrong
because animals suffer. I agree that animals suffer and causing gratuitous
suffering is wrong. But what if we discovered that animals do not suffer at
all? What if Descartes was right in saying that animals behave like, but are
not, sentient creatures? This is where my attitude toward nature differs from
the attitude of many animal ethicists. I do believe that sentience is
important, but it’s not the principal factor. I would not eat or use animal
products even if it were discovered that animals do not feel pain. Rather, I
would still avoid such products because the actions and practices required to
produce them are bloody, violent, unnecessary, unaesthetic, and deleterious to
our health. <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>My
ethical relationship with the environment made me reflect upon the purpose of
my life on this planet. The world has been conquered and nature dominated by
humans. In so doing, humans have killed not only other humans but also animals
and destroyed the environment. So, I changed my attitude toward animals,
acknowledging that they are not our property or food. I don’t even worry about
whether they can suffer or whether they have rights. I believe it is unvirtuous
to exploit and kill animals or destroy nature. Modern life alienates us from
nature and gives us the illusion that we are here to dominate the world. In my
journey to veganism, I realized that humans are the guests on earth, and not
the hosts. The notion of using animals for food and other purposes became clear
to me. I realized that it is the world’s greatest injustice. Thus I decided to
stop eating animal flesh, to cease using animal by-products, and to shun all
products obtained through animal testing. Those who fail to treat animals and
the whole environment with respect are certainly less than fully virtuous. They
fail to be admirable individuals, and they exemplify a variety of vices. In
particular, using animals for food evinces indifference to the value of nature,
ignorance, and self-importance. It evinces lack of humility, and a sense of
beauty. In short, animal exploitation is a failure at human excellence.<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>In 2015,
I began thinking about my experience and my journey and all the research on
environmental science and the science of nutrition I had done, and began
writing my first book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ethical-Veganism-Virtue-Ethics-Great/dp/1498590012/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=ethical+veganism&qid=1559506303&s=gateway&sr=8-4" target="_blank"><span style="color: #660000;">Ethical Veganism,Virtue Ethics, and The Great Soul</span></a></i> (Lexington Books, 2019), which discusses
in details how embracing an ethic of virtue naturally leads to ethical veganism.
I also discuss how most of the so-called modern ethical systems
(utilitarianism, deontology, rights theory) force us to view the morality of
our relationship with animals in terms of duty, rights, or maximization of
utility. No wonder that typical discussions of animal ethics focus on the
rights of animals or the duty of humankind. What I offer is to reevaluate this
dichotomy and show that the most profitable way to talk about how we ought to
treat animals is to look ourselves in the proverbial mirror first and realize
that the most basic virtues show us that we should be or become vegans.<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Is this
the end of the story? No, it isn’t! For many years, believe it or not, I never
was concerned about the health aspect of veganism. As I said, I went vegan
because I believe that it is the only noble way to live. In 2013, I started
toying with the idea of going completely raw, that is, eating only food in its
raw state, nothing cooked. At first I experimented raw veganism off and on. It
was not until the beginning of 2017 that I went completely raw. Eating directly
the food that nature makes is the best possible diet for human beings. What I
mean by raw may be different for another person. My approach to raw veganism is
to eat only salad and fruit. I do not consume tea, coffee, alcohol, nuts,
seeds, sugar or salt. <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Cooking
food changes its molecular structure – and not for the better. It destroys
nutrients, creates acrylamides and other carcinogenic substances, and denatures
proteins, which leads to many problems. Just to mention one problem:
Leukocytosis is an increase in the body of white blood cells. This occurs as a
reaction to inflammations or infections. In other words, when the body detects
a threat, as a response it produces more white blood cells. This obviously does
not happen when we eat fruit and salad. However, it does happen whenever we
consume any type of cooked food. There is a wealth of scientific research
showing that cooked food – vegan or not – shortens our lives. Another
interesting fact is to consider that humans have been around for about 200,000
years (not to mention that human-like creatures have been around for millions
of years). During this time, no significant change occurred to our digestive
system that equipped us for digesting cooked food. Thus, considering that human
beings are evolved creatures, adapted to their environment, it is obvious that
there is a diet that is specific and optimal for our species. Cooking food is a
relatively new practice for humans. For the longest time, humans have eaten
fruit and tender leafy greens. This is a scientifically documented fact – humans
are frugivores. Consequently, cooking food is in no way beneficial to human
health. The only benefit is that it provides easy calories by heat-processing
food that otherwise would be indigestible. I don’t want to get too technical
here; and I don’t want to reveal too much because this is the topic of my next
book, whose title speaks for itself, and that is, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Human Diet</i>.<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Such is
my journey to veganism. It is a great accomplishment for me to live this way
and having raised three children to be vegans since birth. I have no desire to
eat animal products. Even if in the future scientists discovered that animals
don’t feel any more pain than rocks, I would still not be interested in
consuming animal food. I do not see meat and animal products as food that I
chose not to eat. Rather, I do not see animals as food in the first place.
About being a raw vegan, initially I had the desire to eat cooked food.
However, today I regard cooked food the same way I regard animal-based food – not
for human consumption. <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Finally,
I learned one important lesson from my journey: it takes years of deep
philosophical and moral reflection to realize what I have realized. Those
vegans who condemn meat eaters should think about this. They should be more
understanding because becoming a vegan often requires going against the grain,
against the status quo, against one’s deepest beliefs, against one’s
upbringing, against one’s social life, and against one’s culture. For these
reasons, I do not criticize or judge or attempt to change meat eaters. Rather,
I tell others about my moral journey to veganism by teaching, lectures, writing
articles and books. In other words, instead of telling people what they’re
doing wrong, I tell them what I have done right in the hope that they will join
me in my endeavor to make the world more compassionate and realize that animals
are friends – not food.<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>- Carlo
Alvaro, Ph.D. teaches philosophy at New York City College of Technology, CUNY,
and elsewhere. You can purchase his book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ethical
Veganism</i>, from Amazon <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ethical-Veganism-Virtue-Ethics-Great/dp/1498590012/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=ethical+veganism&qid=1559506303&s=gateway&sr=8-4" target="_blank"><span style="color: #660000;">here</span></a>. Better yet, the book</b></span><b><span style="color: #c00000; font-family: "georgia" , "serif";"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;">is available at a 30% discount if ordered directly from the publisher
with code </span></b><b><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">LEX30AUTH19</span></b><b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><span style="color: #c00000;"> </span><a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498590013/Ethical-Veganism-Virtue-Ethics-and-the-Great-Soul" target="_blank"><span style="color: #660000;">here</span></a><span style="color: #c00000;">.</span></span></b><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEileRCLj_P9TLf4kc4OwZh9zs8LLBE3OEEbXed8QwgLksfiNIdjYSJeP8FR7xTKqhba4rJklanNkVko3KcIdXfs2undW_Oa5WEhp1LRUatTGt4CDjTxZ_gSNSi93w7V4lBzGME4Q8Np0aaf/s1600/Cover+Ethical+Veganism.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="283" data-original-width="178" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEileRCLj_P9TLf4kc4OwZh9zs8LLBE3OEEbXed8QwgLksfiNIdjYSJeP8FR7xTKqhba4rJklanNkVko3KcIdXfs2undW_Oa5WEhp1LRUatTGt4CDjTxZ_gSNSi93w7V4lBzGME4Q8Np0aaf/s1600/Cover+Ethical+Veganism.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Copyright©2019
by Carlo Alvaro – All Rights Reserved<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<br />E♦Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16147875345316321220noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175539335941051415.post-56203576022844046822019-05-04T05:37:00.000-07:002019-05-04T05:37:22.146-07:00"South Africa" by Vaneshran Arumugam<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>“South Africa”<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b> by Vaneshran Arumugam <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>This land<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Cradle of Human<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Kind mother of the richest mine<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Our mind<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Split contents<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Spilt continents<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Her world-womb still nourishing far beyond her shores<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Our Land Mother’s labour flows in our veins,<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>blood rivers,<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Hearts pumping the songs of heroes to the world<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Amandla ngawethu!<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>power is the people<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Herstory is ours<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>with drama and action replete<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>always culminating<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>never complete<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Now we parent the future<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Voicing the possibilities of a woken-up world<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>with wider eyes open<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>and the trill of an impassioned ululation<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Sing the song of Peace<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>of all our prosperity<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>the song of our purpose<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>our Mother<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>if it be not now, yet it will come.<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Copyright©2019 by Vaneshran Arumugam – All Rights Reserved <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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E♦Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16147875345316321220noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175539335941051415.post-22716834591672604452018-12-08T12:29:00.002-08:002019-06-20T11:44:55.201-07:00Spirit Ascending - Poet Nina Carey Tassi<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLzMajaWyMWu8TlPSukqTzkMUtLKqkbirWZgHuLfLfoPQpVXzqEtIZLO6lPLihsvFumlYXvPcko36CKqEYryFArdxezlf4tGYiZDl8N0J_HV3p436-G_DsVjVbvlTuJ1-lG2OHJXbLkdlz/s1600/Nina+Tassi.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLzMajaWyMWu8TlPSukqTzkMUtLKqkbirWZgHuLfLfoPQpVXzqEtIZLO6lPLihsvFumlYXvPcko36CKqEYryFArdxezlf4tGYiZDl8N0J_HV3p436-G_DsVjVbvlTuJ1-lG2OHJXbLkdlz/s200/Nina+Tassi.JPG" width="150" /></a></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">[Go <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9mEOW0LpRc" target="_blank"><span style="color: #660000;">here</span></a> to see a video and hear Nina Tassi</b><b style="font-size: 14.6667px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> reading her</span></b><b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> poem </b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>“</b></span></span><b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Nocturne.</b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>”]</b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>My awakening—the discovery that I belong in this
world as a poet—arrived by a circuitous route, starting in first grade when I dreamed
up wild tales to entertain my three younger sisters. By nine, I wrote and
starred in plays on Joan of Arc, Catherine of Siena, and Hansel and Gretel; at
ten, my sister Patsy sent my story, “Inner Happiness,” to Collier’s magazine
(gently rejected). All my school years I wrote class skits, stories, even a
pageant with a cast of a hundred.</b></span></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">After college and marriage, academic writing consumed
decades as I pursued an M.A. and Ph.D. in English, then slid straight into
college administration and endless stacks of dry reports. Along the way, I became
mother to three children and faced round the clock demands: up at six, down at
midnight, no time for the muse.</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">As the children grew, so did my desire to write
creatively. I tried local journalism, but found it superficial and formulaic. Fiction
drew me, but an agent advised that non-fiction was easier to publish, so I wrote
<i>Urgency Addiction </i>(1991), about time
pressures in America. This book sold well, but left my creative urge untapped. I
began musing about Nathaniel Hawthorne, subject of my doctoral thesis; images
of ancestral sins and passions rose up and led to my novel, <i>The Secret Diary of Cotton Mather. </i>Many
publishers nibbled, but none bit, which helped me see that what engaged me was my
characters’ passions, not their long stories. Yet poetry didn’t come calling.</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">That changed in 1994. Eugenia Collier, English chairwoman
at Baltimore’s Morgan State University, hired me for their new creative writing
program. She sent me, over my protests, to New York University for a workshop taught
by poets Lucille Clifton, Sharon Olds, and Galway Kinnell. Amazingly, they
converted me. I’d plunged into the depths, tasted the sweet darkness, never
wanted to leave it. I seized every possible moment to write poems.</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">My creative energy, though, was needed elsewhere. Morgan
State being an historically black university, my students’ heritage was African
American; that beat was in their souls. Rather than teach them English/American
prosody, I read with them Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, Lucille
Clifton, Alice Walker, listening deeply to the cadences in my students’ lives. I
didn’t choose their subjects, impose rules, but tried to hear their voices, help
them speak their truths. As they bared their hearts, their suffering, unearthed
ancestral memories, a surprising transformation took place in me: I discovered my
own beat, re-learned how to consider rhythm, meter, lines and stanzas; free
verse took on new meaning.</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">In that rich period, I wrote my first real poems. On
a month’s vacation in Rome, I finally had the leisure to open the door to
myself and see what was there. Without conscious intent, I brought to bear my
whole spiritual and literary background. Through the voices of Biblical
characters, medieval saints, and early Puritans, my poetic identity emerged—from
which all my poems have since come to light. “Six Rome Poems” I named them: “The
Tenderness of Jeremiah,” “The Dreams of Joseph,” “Elizabeth and Mary,” “Caterina
and Teresa,” “Catherine’s Tomb,” “Anne Hutchinson in America.” Their themes mirrored
mine—marriage and motherhood, suffering, spiritual aspirations. All were
published, followed by “St. Ann’s Knowing,” in 1999.</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">I’d found my path rather late, but felt sure-footed
now. To my delight, the literature I had loved in college and graduate school sprang
into service: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Keats, Wordsworth, Homer, Sophocles and
Aeschylus, as well as Lucretius and Catullus—searing writers who had waited patiently
deep in my memory. The great novels I’d read when my children were young (letting
laundry and dust mop go) returned like an underground stream:<i> </i>Leo Tolstoy’s <i>Anna Karenina</i>,<i> </i>George
Eliot’s <i>Middlemarch</i>,<i> </i>Charlotte Bronte’s <i>Jane Eyre</i>,<i> </i>William
Thackeray’s <i>Vanity Fair</i>,<i> </i>Willa Cather’s <i>My Ántonia</i>.</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">In August 2000, I proposed for my sabbatical project
a book of poems that would merge my professional, spiritual and creative selves:
<i>Dreamers, Mystics, Prophets.</i> But fate intervened. In November
2000, my husband was diagnosed with advanced esophageal cancer, and died two
months later. Shattered, emotionally paralyzed by grief, I couldn’t write a
word of poetry.</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Needing to flee, I visited my sister in Brazil, where
I walked the streets compulsively day and night until I could accept that my
husband was gone. Yet I couldn’t bear to stay in Baltimore, where we’d raised
our children, where memory assaulted me at every turn. Within a year, I moved
to New York as an associate vice president at Fordham University, and soon got
a chance to go to China for a month. In this vast and beautiful new world, my poetic
self revived. I began to visualize larger spiritual themes, embodied in “Daughters
of Beijing” and “Tibetan Boy.”</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">When I consider how profoundly travel has influenced
my poetry, it amuses me to recall my spur-of-the-moment trip to Antarctica, where
I found myself entranced. Before trip’s end, I asked my friend, Pat Roach, to
collaborate on a book of her photos and my poems. I conceived of <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Antarctic-Visions-Nina-Carey-Tassi/dp/1456858335/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1544299850&sr=1-3" target="_blank">Antarctic Visions</a> </i>(2011) as a hymn of
praise to the Creator for this majestic white continent, and included poems on early
explorers Ernest Shackleton, Robert Scott, and Roald Amundsen.</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">An even closer collaboration developed in Colorado
when a lifelong friend, Myrna Nabors, brought her sister, painter Jeanine
Malaney, and me together for a weekend. As we explored how faith in God and
love of Nature nourished us, an artistic kinship formed; soon Jeanine was
designing <i>The Jeremiah Tree</i> (2011), a
full-color book of her paintings and my poems.</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Then a remarkable poet entered my life—almost by
chance. After an editor noted that my Biblical poems reminded her of <i>midrash</i>, which I’d never heard of, I
found Alicia Ostriker in New York and joined her workshops on poetic <i>midrash</i>,<i> </i>a technique she adapted from rabbinical analysis. Alicia ushered me
into the depths of Moses, Miriam, Zipporah, Sarah, and Naomi, who appeared in
my next poetry collection: <i>Spirit
Ascending </i>(2016<i>)</i>.</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">When <i>Light
& Glory </i>(2018) was published, my daughter Marguerite, a Shakespeare
scholar, wrote to me: “The book
covers so much of your life, even before birth, and carries on through your
travels around the world to the present. The circular image of the eclipsed sun
[on the cover] seems to represent so well your coming full circle through the
dark with light always present. Loved the Odysseus poem—that’s certainly
a full circle epic! It is a
tremendous thing to find the words to make such beautiful poems!”</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">Her </span><span style="line-height: 107%;">praise
delighted me, but even more her insight, which had eluded me. I do have a sense
of having come full circle. In my grief poems of losing the man who had been my
other self since I was eighteen, one part of my life ended. Now I feel newly grounded
in poetry, my spiritual and creative selves united at my core. I imagine the
poems yet to be written as arrows shooting straight toward unknown places. I am
braced, ready.</span></b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The
title of my work in progress, <i>Love Songs
to God</i>,<i> </i>“dropped down on me,” as my
other titles have. I tried to dismiss it as entirely too daunting. Of course, much
of my poetry has risen from religious feeling. What did I expect? I go forward
with what the muse sends me. My new poems continue to spring from characters
who stop me in my tracks. Whether ancient or modern, local or distant, real or
imagined—doesn’t matter. I take on the <i>persona</i>,
move into darkness. While my imagination is realistic in that I’m not
interested in fantasy or science fiction, at the same time I love not being constrained
by facts or chronology, time or space. Only an inner coherence is needed. Maybe
this explains why poetry is my true home.</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Suffering figures largely. Why are we cruel to one
another? Are we getting more depraved through lies, greed, rage? Or do we
simply seem worse, since technology lets us see everything horrible at once? How
can a loving God allow human suffering? Two poems in early form are emerging from
opposite human extremes. “Grace” began as a photo in The New York Times of a
girl severely maimed by soldiers’ machetes. “Annunciation” originated in an
image of the Virgin Mary as a stocky peasant girl in a picture book of roadside
shrines in Italy. What they have in common to reveal remains a mystery—the most
compelling feature of poetry for me.</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Ideas for poems come easily, out of nowhere, on the
wind—as an image, a phrase, an intriguing memory. A genuine poetic idea, as
opposed to a flitting thought, strikes suddenly: a small, insistent spark,
followed by intense, sustained effort. Recently I heard myself say to a friend,
“Your words were like a balm from Gilead.” I knew it signaled a new poem, but
where did I get that? Memory brought up opera stars Kathleen Battle and Jessye
Norman, singing the spiritual, “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” then Jeremiah the
prophet appeared, followed by Joseph and his brothers, all inhabiting the same
space: a hot desert. The poem, as rarely happens, flowed from my mind almost ready-made—
the genre: ancient lament; the theme: slavery in Egypt, Africa and America. The
meters and stanzas move along unevenly, the pace imitating the poem’s internal progress.</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Technique has become an intense focus, a painstaking,
dauntless effort to build the parts of a poem into a whole. I’ve always worked
in free verse (knowing it isn’t free), which means I can consult the entire range
of poetry in English to find the right form for a poem. I’m not a theoretician,
but I think Robert Frost’s expression is perfect: <i>the sound of sense, the sense of sound</i>. I tend to feel my way through
a poem like a blind person. In composing, I’m always listening, feeling, trying
out combinations of words that perfectly match the poem’s action. Rhythm, rhyme,
meter, all the devices, are present, but not in an obvious, traditional pattern.
I also take into account the weight of words, as Latin and Anglo-Saxon metrics
did. Sounds matter not only as rhymes (<i>mate</i>
and <i>relate</i>) but as carriers of
feeling and meaning: <i>care</i> and <i>fair</i> convey different moods from <i>lake </i>and <i>quake</i>,<i> </i>entirely apart
from denotations and connotations. Like a family, every word depends on all the
other words. There’s the challenge.</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">At my best in the morning, I sit down at my desk to
write after breakfast and a workout at the gym, then write on the computer for a
solid three to five hours. I schedule everything else for later. If I miss a
day, or am dissatisfied with a session, I work on weekends. I’m never happier
or more alive than when totally immersed in writing. The world and its cares are
blessedly removed from me, as I am somehow removed from myself, and only the <i>thing</i>,<i> </i>the poem-in-the-making, exists. True bliss! Near my computer I
keep this lyric by my poetic soulmate, although she is at her best in the
evening:</b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>“Muse”</b></span></span></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">When at night I
wait for her to come</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">Life, it seems,
hangs by a single strand.</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">What are glory,
youth, freedom, in comparison</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">With the dear
welcome guest, a flute in hand.</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">She enters now.
Pushing her veil aside,</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">She stares
through me with her attentiveness.</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">I question her:
‘And were you Dante’s guide,</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">Dictating the
Inferno?’ She answers: ‘Yes.’</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">---Anna Akhmatova</span></b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">In
trying to perfect a poem, I tend to over-edit, finding to my dismay that I’ve
squeezed the life out of a fragile creature. As a safety net, I make a list of
“discarded lines,” and often rescue my best lines. My desire to write the best
possible poems calls for fresh language—so difficult, as clichés usually pop up
first. But I want to be accessible too. I don’t write to impress other poets, but
simply to move readers to apprehend truth and beauty. When my sister says, “It
gave me the shivers,” or a friend comments, “That brought me to tears,” I feel
that’s a good sign. What I love most (after the writing) is to read my poems aloud
to others and to feel an electric connection between us.</b></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">My
own favorite poems are those I’ve not yet written. In finding a marvelous new
poem by another poet, I’m inspired to try harder, trust my imagination, believe
that better poems are still to come. If I have any regrets, it is that my novel,
<i>The Secret Diary of Cotton Mather</i>,<i> </i>was stillborn. I’ve re-written the
deathbed stream of consciousness in the last chapter into a long poem and
included it in <i>Light & Glory </i>as “Cotton
Mather’s Last Conversation with God.”</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Much as I love the solitude of writing, I’m happy to
have a support group of two poet-friends with whom I exchange drafts of poems,
which we critique—honestly but not ruthlessly. I also belong to Poets @St.
Paul’s, a group of New Yorkers led by Father Tom Holahan, a priest/poet; we
meet monthly to read and respond lightly to one another’s work.</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">For pleasure and camaraderie, six of us discuss a work
of fiction monthly. Recently we enjoyed Amos Oz’s<i> Judas</i>, Anthony Doerr’s <i>All
the Light We Cannot See</i>, and Jeffrey Eugenides’ <i>Middlesex. </i>On my nightstand is a stack of non-fiction for myself: Amos
Oz’s memoir, <i>A Tale of Love and Darkness</i>,
Jon Meacham’s <i>The Soul of America</i>,<i> </i>Timothy Egan’s <i>The Immortal Irishman</i>,<i> </i>and
Pankaj Mishra’s <i>From the Ruins of Empire.</i></b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Again and again I return to my most-loved poets:
Pablo Neruda, William Butler Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Robert Frost, Joseph
Brodsky, Stanley Kunitz. Now I’m reading poets who stay near me as “spirit
friends” for my poems-in-progress: St. John of the Cross, Anna Akhmatova, Rainer
Maria Rilke, Paul Celan and some mystics (ed. Scott Cairns, <i>Endless Life: Poems of the Mystics</i>).</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">I feel that my poetic identity is prophetic, and was
always so. A prophetic poem doesn’t predict anything, as I understand it. Rather,
such a poem is closely related to the heartbeat, as a child in the womb takes
comfort in its mother’s heartbeat. In fact, the poem <i>is</i> a heartbeat that reflects and is in harmony with the universe. It
has to do with that ultimate movement which undergirds the cosmos. The prophetic
identity of a poem is its pulsing microcosmic imitation of the action that is
being, as I believe Aristotle meant about theater. It is sure of resting in
being. Like a prism, it reflects, all at once, what was and what will be: the
eternal is. The thing is to make that prism into a small gem of a poem. I know
this is an impossible aim for my fragile beings. But why else would I be a
poet?</b></div>
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<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">My website: </span><a href="http://www.ninatassi.com/"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="color: #660000;">www.ninatassi.com</span></span></a><span style="line-height: 107%;">.</span></b></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Poetry books: <i><span style="color: #660000;">The
Jeremiah Tree</span> </i>(2011); <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Antarctic-Visions-Nina-Carey-Tassi/dp/1456858335/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1544299850&sr=1-3" target="_blank"><span style="color: #660000;">AntarcticVisions</span></a> </i>(2011); <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Spirit-Ascending-Nina-Carey-Tassi/dp/1625491662/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1544299850&sr=1-2" target="_blank"><span style="color: #660000;">Spirit Ascending</span></a> </i>(2016);
<i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Light-Glory-Nina-Carey-Tassi/dp/1625492863/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1544299807&sr=1-1&keywords=nina+tassi" target="_blank"><span style="color: #660000;">Light & Glory</span></a> </i>(2018).</b></div>
<br />
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<span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Copyright©2018 by Nina Carey Tassi</b></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br />E♦Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16147875345316321220noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9175539335941051415.post-18481848277355280122018-06-13T07:24:00.000-07:002018-06-13T07:24:34.826-07:00Long Day's Journey Into Night - Review by Timothy V. Dugan<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">LONG
DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT </i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">By Eugene O’Neill; Bristol Old Vic/BAM
Harvey Theater, Brooklyn, New York. Starring Jeremy Irons as James Tyrone,
Lesley Manville as Mary Tyrone. Directed by Richard Eyre. Opening night, May 8,
2018. Performance run: May 8-27. Closed.<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">1<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Eugene Gladstone O’Neill is, arguably, America’s
most accomplished and decorated playwright, equal in stature to redoubtable
modern dramatists such as Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Pirandello and Shaw.
O’Neill’s searing family drama, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Long
Day’s Journey Into Night, </i>is argued in commercial, academic and black-box
theater to be his signature work—a “best play”, so to speak; he is also argued
in the academy (the august Nobel committee, for example) to be commensurate with
American Nobel laureates such as Faulkner, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. O’Neill
was awarded a Nobel in 1936. Accordingly—axiomatically—since O’Neill is our
foremost dramatist, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Long Day’s
Journey </i>his foremost dramatic expression, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Long Day’s Journey Into Night </i>is coincident with (for comparison’s
sake) time-honored masterpieces such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Master Builder, Miss Julie, The Cherry Orchard, Six Characters in Search of an
Author, </i>and the sublimely adapted comedy, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pygmalion. </i>Summative to O’Neill’s place in the cosmos is that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Long Day’s Journey Into Night, </i>as seamlessly
produced and performed on the stage of the BAM Harvey Theater by the Bristol
Old Vic theater company, is <u>the</u> essential piece of dramatic art in the
American theater canon: the best of the best. Viewed holistically then, a
luminous production of an O’Neill magnum opus, by a credentialed theater
company such as Bristol Old Vic, at a legitimate 800-seat art house such as the
Brooklyn Academy of Music/BAM Harvey Theater, is a seminal repertory experience
that Broadway entrepreneurs and even reputable Off-Broadway venues rarely get
the opportunity to underwrite. BAM, as we know it and patronize it, is the
exception. BAM is welcoming to the exclusive, the obscure and the bleeding
edge. As such, the BAM/Bristol production of O’Neill’s definitive play is not a
“limited run” per se, but, rather, a three-week twenty-one performance
anthropological dig that will live on in newspaper and literary archives,
virtual forms, and—perhaps most importantly—oral histories and traditions. To
borrow a familiar coin from the read-guard Paris boulevard critics, this
production of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Long Day’s Journey Into
Night </i>is a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">t<span style="color: black;">éâtre</span>
libre</i>, a “happening”—a formative theater event that raises the watermark
for American, North American [1] and English-speaking repertory evolvement. Over
the course of this guided discussion I will prove or, perhaps, disprove, the authenticity
of this melancholic, if prevailing O’Neill masterpiece in context to the BAM
Harvey/Bristol Old Vic production.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">2<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></i></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Against the wall between
the doorways is a small bookcase, with a picture of Shakespeare above it,
containing novels by Balzac, Zola, Stendhal, philosophical and sociological works
by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Engels, Kropatkin, Max Stirner, plays Ibsen,
Shaw, Strindberg, poetry by Swinburne, Rossetti, Wilde, Ernest Dowson, Kipling,
etc.” </i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">[2] (LDJ 717)<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Farther back is a large,
glassed-in bookcase with sets of Dumas, Victor Hugo, Charles Lever, three Sets
of Shakespeare, The World’s Best Literature in fifty large volumes, Hume’s
History of England, Thiers’ History of the Consulate and Empire, Smollett’s
History of England, Gibbon’s Roman Empire and miscellaneous volumes of Old
plays, poetry, and several histories of Ireland. The astonishing thing about
these sets is that all of the volumes have the look of being read and reread.” </i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">(LDJ
717)<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></b></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Long
Days Journey Into Night </i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">is so well crafted as to seem formless in
this BAM/Bristol rehabilitation. The sine-wave of this convulsive “at-home” cottage
play climbs, dips and prevaricates according to purpose. For example: a
blistering father/son dispute on the gathering detritus of Nietzsche, Swinburne
and Karl Marx volumes in the family library; or a morphine-induced oration by
Mary Tyrone, the high strung family matriarch; or, perhaps, a moribund theater
anecdote by James Tyrone, a self-deluded doyen of the post-Civil War
Broadway-theater movement—a minor doyen, but a doyen nonetheless. The backdrop
and the fulcrum of these rancorous and mood-driven soliloquies and dialogues
are the personal libraries and letters of James Tyrone, the affable Irish stage
actor and family patriarch, and Edmund Tyrone, his handsome, black-haired,
bookish, tubercular younger son. The hue and tenor of their slash and burn
exchanges are histrionic to say the least, but conducted in reasonably good
faith. Malice is not necessarily their forte. Here’s a compression of Old Man
Tyrone’s bombastic and funny tirades in the early-goings of O’Neill’s drama:<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“Morbid filth! Where the
hell do you get your taste in literature? Filth and despair and pessimism!
Another atheist, I suppose. […] It’s madness, yes, if you’d get on your knees
and pray. When you deny God, you deny sanity […] Where you get your taste in
authors—That damned library of yours! […]<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Voltaire, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ibsen! (LDJ 798-799). <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Almost laughably, O’Neill’s
father/son dog fights are so scattered in theosophy as to seem pointless, beyond
recompense; equally, at other moments in this New London family chestnut these vituperative
“dialectics” seem uncontainable, a road to nowhere. Again, for example: the
consumptive Edmund hacking and hyperventilating in the midst of a disjointed card
game with his father; or the yapping, hectoring polluted Jamie coiled
fetus-like on a davenport couch that seems to have no other utility but to pass
out on. Understandably, the couch is Jamie’s asylum and daybed.
Dramaturgically, the first two acts of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Long
Day’s Journey </i>are a compilation of asthmatic interludes, invectives and
well-spoken non-sequiturs. They’re endless and mindless, fascinating to listen
to, but grueling and constricting to watch. And both father and son embrace and
“live-in” their well-timed, well-rehearsed poetry slams. Byron and Baudelaire
are, typically, go-to writers for Jamie and Edmund, Shakespeare, of course, is
the default writer for Old Man Tyrone. Regardless of their vitriol or
cleverness, these literary and theosophical intermezzos have a meaningful
endgame: the reclamation and recovery of tribal and filial piety.
Organizationally and dramaturgically then, incessant quoting, portentous
toasting, consumptive coughing, and artful, if begrudging literary arguments
are dramaturgical strings that O’Neill—a meticulous story-boarder and an
equally meticulous scene designer—uses to tease-out a confining, but
egalitarian literary colony. This grousing, quoting, swilling Father/Son dyad
is the central aspect of the BAM/Bristol production and is sustained with
measured understatement by Jeremy Irons (James Tyrone) and his very able stage
coefficient, Matthew Beard (Edmund Tyrone). Where it would be very easy for
Irons and Beard to shout “tour de force!” in the heat of their quotidian verse,
both performers stay at home and stay the course.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">3</i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><br /></i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“From a lighthouse beyond
the harbor’s mouth, a foghorn is heard at regular intervals moaning like a
mournful whale in labor, and from the harbor itself, intermittently, comes the warning
ringing of bells on yachts at anchor.” </i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">(LDJ 772)<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></b></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Incessant bickering, infernal language,
and the constant din of the Tyrone clan bitch-slapping one another conjures
earlier O’Neill prototypes such as Con Melody of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Touch of the Poet, </i>Hickey of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Iceman Cometh, </i>Eyre Smith of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hughie, </i>and
the delirious, uncouth, fly-ridden Jim Tyrone of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moon for the Misbegotten</i>—to name a few. All of the above-mentioned
alpha males are a point of departure for the five fulminating characters in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Long Day’s Journey Into Night. </i>Habitually,
almost as a point of honor, no one in Monte Cristo Cottage (the elegant, if
ironic moniker for the Tyrone summer home)—not even the whiskey-imbibing Irish
maid, Cathleen, is capable of shutting down, exhaling noiselessly, putting a
damper on the backbiting, the obligatory apologizing, and the unbearable gaffs
that follow-on these family beat-downs. Here’s “stupid” Cathleen (Jessica
Regan) a well-meaning housekeeper and confidante of the maledicted Mary Tyrone
(Lesley Manville) violating the Tyrone family contract by way of a déclassé
faux pas concerning Mary Tyrone’s compulsion issues. Note the redundancy of
O’Neill’s “stupidly puzzled” parenthetical stage note for the purposes of
impressing on the reader/performer Cathleen’s doltishness:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">CATHLEEN—(stupidly puzzled) You’ve taken
some of the medicine [the morphine]? It makes you act funny, Ma’am. If I didn’t
know better, I’d think you a drop taken. (LDJ 772+).<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This is just the beginning of an
impenetrable, fragmented conversation between the low-born, indentured Irish
immigrant Cathleen and the pampered Mary, but is one of the few moments in the
drama where there is no grinding agenda. The word “agenda” is the operative
word because usually for Clan-O’Neill there’s always something boorish to
chime-in, something caustic or highly insulting to add to the mix, or someone
to admonish or “one-up”, but this Master/Servant intimacy is, for the moment,
not one of those moments. Throughout the first 90 minutes of the BAM/Bristol
production the dispirited, shout-out, dialogue spirals downward, never
reversing, retracting, slowing down or correcting itself; like a helical spire
on the precipice, the O’Neill mélange is always in danger of spinning out of
control—of flying off the proverbial handle. Nothing can bring equilibrium to
the Tyrone family settlement because reclamation and recovery are unthinkable
and unobtainable. Oddly, the only firewall separating the brawling Tyrone
family is the opioid-induced night-walking and occasional day-tripping of the
wasted matriarch, Mary Tyrone. Like a family with a colicky baby in the house,
the Tyrone tribe tiptoes around “Mother,” a closeted intravenous-arterial
narcotic injector, until she implodes in her bedroom or settles in for the
night with the syncopated foghorns pulsating and “moaning” off Long Island
Sound [3]:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">MARY— (amused—girlishly) That foghorn!
Isn’t it awful, Cathleen?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">CATHLEEN—it is indeed, Ma’am. It’s like a
banshee (LDJ 772).<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The so-named banshees (mournful feminized
ghosts in Irish myth) are ceaseless and punishing for Mary. They return every
evening with the ebb and flow of the North Atlantic to remind her it’s time to
walk the walk, to fulfill her pact with the devil, to make herself “right” with
her mind-numbing pain killer of choice: unadulterated, legal, pharmaceutically
prepared World War I-era morphine. Again, here’s the contiguous conversation of
Mary and Cathleen in the opening scene of Act III. Mary is waxing philosophic
while in the throes of a morphine rush, and is attended by the tippling
housemaid, Cathleen, who is well into her cups [her liquor]. Mary’s rejoinder
to Cathleen about the side-effects of her nightly morphine fix is blunt-edged
and unapologetic:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">MARY—I don’t mind it [the foghorn]
tonight. Last night it drove me crazy. I lay awake worrying until I couldn’t
stand it anymore.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">CATHLEEN—Bad cess to it […] <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">MARY—(dreamily) It wasn’t the fog I
minded, Cathleen, I really love fog. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">CATHLEEN—They say it’s good for the
complexion.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">MARY—It’s the foghorn I hate. It won’t
let you alone. It keeps reminding you, and warning you, and calling you back. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">CATHLEEN—(stupidly puzzled) You’ve taken
some of the medicine? It makes you act funny, Ma’am. If I didn’t know better,
I’d think you a drop taken. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">MARY—It kills the pain (LDJ 772+).<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Ninety-nine percent of O’Neill’s
withering dialogue, parenthetical stage-notes, and convoluted stage directions
in this elliptical imbibing scene denote foghorns. One percent denotes
morphine. A lesser writer would reverse the numbers, but the focus on mood,
sonic effects and healthy skin instead of malediction gives the scene a macabre
twist that veers straight into Mary’s shocking, but enlightening epiphany: “it
[morphine] kills the pain.” In other words, by avoiding the taboo topic of
arterial drug use, by creating the scene elliptically instead of linearly,
O’Neill sets his audience up for a wallop—a home run of sorts. And Mary, an old
hand, backstage junkie, hits it out of the park. The bemusing aspect of the
Mary/Cathleen dialogue between the conversant, if woozy Mary, and the
undereducated, but unvarnished Cathleen is their psychic disconnect. Mary has
zero inclination to explain to her presumptuous housekeeper the spine tingling,
consuming power of morphine. Her simple riposte: “it kills the pain,” is plain
spoken—everything that Cathleen (a self-appointed novice bedsitter) needs to
know. Conversely, Cathleen, a thrill-seeker and nosey-parker of sorts, has zero
concern over her tactless breeching of the embedded, master-servant,
Connecticut-Yankee compact; her sly interrogation of Mary in this delicately
tricky “consultation” scene is lawyerly: “Ma’am, if I didn’t know better, I’d
think you a drop taken.” Stoned or straight, beer, wine, whiskey or opioids,
Cathleen’s probity is encode for “not that it’s any of my fucking business,
Mrs. Tyrone, but if I didn’t know better I’d think you were dead behind the
eyes…” and, perhaps further, “do you have any more of what you’re taking…?” The
point of the Mary/Cathleen interlocution is that there <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> no point; when Mary is psychically attuned to the syncopation of
morphine, foghorns, banshees and whale music, she feeds the urge—the need—to
proffer utterances, to speak in non- sequiturs, to hover and nod over her
Steinway piano, to tell her drinking buddy and her cagey house keeper how good
her “high” is… and in this case, in this particular morphine rush—to tell
anyone who will listen just what exactly she’s experiencing in the moment:
convulsive pain followed by joy, ecstasy and rapture. Cathleen then, by way of
casual if insidious sisterhood, and for her own somewhat perhaps unscrupulous
inclinations, is shaking the cloying Mrs. O’Neill from her tree. The later
exchange between Mary and Cathleen concerning Cathleen’s run-in with the local
pharmacist over procuring Mary’s daily regimen of morphine is reason enough to
sense that Cathleen is probing Mary about the medical and perhaps (even) legal
implications of the proverbial “monkey” on her back.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">CATHLEEN—The way the man in the drugstore
acted when I took in the prescription for you. (indignantly) The imp[i]dence of
him!<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">MARY—(with stubborn blankness) What are
you talking about? What drugstore? What prescription? […] Oh, of course, I’d
forgotten. The medicine for the rheumatism in my hands. What did the man day?
(then with indifference) Not that it matters, as long as he filled the
prescription. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">CATHLEEN—It mattered to me, then! I’m not
used to being treated like a thief! He [the pharmacist gave me a long look and
says insultingly, “where did you get this?” (LDJ 776). <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The irony of Cathleen’s remonstrance to
Mary is almost laughable it’s so disingenuous. Perceptibly, as Cathleen’s
feigned indignation to the pharmacist suggests—the pharmacist—like a detective
eyeballing an amateur criminal—has <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">made</i>
Cathleen (sized Cathleen up, blown her cover) for the drugstore cowgirl that
she is. Following on this unseemly “skit” in the pharmacy, the subtext of the
offended housekeeper’s line is apparent: “He [the pharmacist] read me like a
book… but then again, I’m used to being read like a book, I’m used to being
treated like a thief…” The deception suborning all parties to this rouse, this
hearsay—Mary, Cathleen and the Pharmacist, is palpable, but Edmund’s assessment
later in Act III of Cathleen’s very murky history as a gossip monger is
unqualified: “For God’s sake, Mama! You can’t trust her [Cathleen]! Do you want
everyone on earth to know? (LDJ 786). “Can’t trust her?” Really? That makes two
people: the Pharmacist and now Edmund. Taking the Pharmacist’s condescending,
belligerent question and Edmund’s malevolent remark at their face value, a
discerning audience is forced to ask a fundamental question about this Act II
moment: from where do these dismissive and insulting questions come from? And
from where does Edmund’s caustic remark derive? In what reality does Cathleen’s
reputation “live”? And further: is Edmund tapped into Cathleen’s subliminal
character in a way that the rest of his family is not? And while we’re on the
subject of subliminal characters: is Edmund fucking Cathleen? Consequent to all
of these questions, there’s much more here in Act III than a simple pow-wow
between Mary and her duplicitous Maid. Mary’s final squelch before careening
into an opioid trance is summative. Her remark to Cathleen concerning her relationship
with the pharmacist is, like Edmund’s remark, unfiltered and revelatory:
MARY—Yes, he [the pharmacist] knows me (776). Again, as with all discerning
readers, actors and audiences the questions dangles: what does “he knows me”
imply? <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The crux of this BAM/Harvey alternative
view of the Mary/Cathleen gathering is not based on something far-reached, but,
rather, a fidelity to the prevailing Act III text. This often undervalued,
sentimentalized scene between the keeper-of-the-house and the keeper of a highly
controlled substance known as morphine, is an axis—the wheelhouse—of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Long Day’s Journey Into Night. </i>To that
end, it should be case-hardened in its reading and highly consequential in
production. Often it is rendered anomalous, as filler of sorts between the imperious
plot-line of Tyrone and Edmund, and the unconscious plot-line of Mary and her
multifarious issues. The final proof of this apposition is, again, text-based,
and is played-out in Mary’s remonstrance to her drug mule/house maid and
confidante (Cathleen) concerning her local drug supplier—the surly pharmacist:
“As long as he [the pharmacist] filled the prescription.” Patently, as borne
out with alacrity by Leslie Manville’s eerie, dissuading performance, “filling
the prescription,” is all that ever matters for Mary. As in all serious
anthropological “digs”, the BAM/Bristol excavation of this deeply complex, but
uncomplicated play is near breakthrough. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Royal Academy Stage-Irish<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The creepy and darkly funny subtext of
this otherworldly drinking <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">scene in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Long Day’s Journey Into Night </i>is communicated shrewdly, cleanly and
knowingly by Manville, an Oscar-nominated Bristol Old Vic veteran, and Jessica
Regan, a Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts alum. Both actresses reveal the
paranormal mood of this imbibing scene with aplomb; obviously, as technically
trained conservatory actresses they know that it’s one thing to “be”
psychically liberated and inebriated, but it’s something totally different to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">convey</i> psychic liberation and
inebriation. The difference between <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">being</i>
and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">conveying</i> is not subtle. Manville
and Regan communicate that difference through nods and winks, and self-possessed
body language. Their exchanges are conducted through eye-avoidance [4],
mood-lifters and contradicting words and signals (for instance, Cathleen
denying an offering of whiskey while deftly reaching for a whiskey decanter).
State-of-mind and “sense-memory” (what they think and how they personally feel)
do not seem to be a part of the Bristol Old Vic acting process. We thank
Manville and Regan for their physical and vocal acuity, particularly Regan who
was assailed by at least one local critic for her “stage Irish” voice [5] and
stage-Irish conception. Nothing regarding her droll performance or her pristine
Irish brogue could be further from reality. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“Stupidly puzzled…”<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">For the actress interpreting the role of
Cathleen, O’Neill’s doubly acerbic stage note—“stupidly puzzled” [Cathleen]—is
a perfect reverse barometer. The tendency for any performer deconstructing this
peculiar mother/maid interlude might be to consider what O’Neill (a copious and
overbearing note-giver) has put on the page, and then, with the temerity and
expediency of a well-informed, well-seasoned repertory performer, consider the
opposite. Here are a few reasonable alternatives to O’Neill’s dramaturgical
overreach: “wryly inquisitive”?—perhaps; slightly or coyly aggressive”?—maybe,
or even “bordering on impudence” or “with brazen haughtiness…” But “stupidly
puzzled,”? —not the most honest or objective stage modifier for a character
probing her employer about her disreputable and even scandalous<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>addiction issues. An experienced discerning
actress such as Jessica Regan might easily subtract the editorial misstep in
O’Neill’s hyperbolic character descriptor. And, in her quintessential moment in
Act II she does, to a delimiting extent. Regan’s “Cathleen” is ever so slightly
roguish for a moment, the door to rumor mongering, mischief, duplicity and,
perhaps, illegality, is cracked slightly… the question hangs: will Cathleen go
through it? The answer, obviously, is no, Cathleen lets the matter—the medical
and scandalous issues—die on the vine… but we—the discerning BAM audience know
that this tiny, dodgy moment of dark comedy and treachery is there for the
taking. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">By way of a careful valuation of the
text, a potential obfuscation for the performer lies not in Cathleen’s
forwardness and presumptuous (those are good things), but, rather, in the
contradictory and heavy-handed stage note: “stupidly puzzled” that informs and
contravenes our shared view of Cathleen. “Stupid”, as character signifiers go,
is unambiguous. But “puzzled,” by inference, assumes a level of curiosity and
probity that is inherently interesting to a performer and, ultimately, an audience.
As such, Cathleen’s negative intelligence quotient as denoted by O’Neill’s
“stupidly-puzzled” stage note is misleading and contradictory to the crafty
insouciance that Cathleen reveals in her soft, but stealth interrogation of her
pie-eyed employer. The slightly tone-deaf author, Eugene O’Neill, and his oily
Irish character, Cathleen, as revealed by Jessica Regan’s very puckish
performance, are not synchronous. If O’Neill’s stage notes are to be believed,
O’Neill and Regan are at cross-purposes. To paraphrase a pearl-of-wisdom of the
immortal social critic, Henry Ford, perhaps O’Neill—Nobel Laureate and
tragedian, should lead, follow or get out of the way. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">4<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As the night closes in at the beginning
of Act III, as O’Neill’s psychically grating sonic effects are calibrated, Mary
Tyrone’s state of mind becomes muddled and somewhat persecuted. The existential
quandary for Mary as she processes her opioid-receptor intake, is not whether
the foghorns are “whaling” again, but, rather, when are they ever <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> whaling? Cosmically, musically, the
bells and horns hound Mary. They hound her by “reminding” her and “warning” her
that her life has become cataclysmic. Now, after 90 minutes of lashing,
torrential, ritualized domestic violence, followed by foghorns, banshees and
pharmaceutically licensed mood lifters, an audience—an exhausted, furrowed, BAM
theater collective—might be inclined to ask some predictable, if impertinent,
questions. Here are a few probable choices: Where are we? Who the hell are these
people? – Why are they here? When will it end? The answers to these
right-minded questions are quixotic: This is an Ulster-tribal funeral and
picnic… these are the “four haunted Tyrones… this is 90 minutes of four + hours
in the theater…and (further) this is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Long
Day’s Journey Into Night, </i>and (still further) this is O’Neill—this is his
final conclave. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">5<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">TYRONE—[…] When I was ten my father
deserted my mother and went back to Ireland to die. Which he did soon enough,
and deserved to, and I hope he’s roasting in hell. He mistook rat poison for
flour, or sugar, or something. There was gossip it wasn’t by mistake but that’s
a lie. No one in my family ever—<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">EDMUND—My bet, it wasn’t by mistake. (LDJ
807)<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">At the epicenter of this tribal harangue
is the patriarch of the Tyrone clan, James Tyrone. Tyrone’s place on stage—his
command post—is as central to the dramatic event as the throne of Arthur. The
living room of the Tyrone family’s summer cottage is by design a cathedra, an
inner sanctum where all family disputations are brought to bear, but never
resolved let alone healed. – Tyrone’s place at the table, a hawk-eyed,
cigar-smoking arbiter of sorts, is a directorial control that holds the familial
gathering (and the theatrical event) together. So sharp-eyed is Tyrone over his
domain that his housekeeper Cathleen refers to him a hawk-eyed: “The Master’s
sure to notice what’s gone from the bottle. He has the eye of a hawk for that”
(LDJ 774). This central conceit—Tyrone as arbiter, as wounded but, able King
Fisher, as all-seeing, but not necessarily all-knowing eye, is a fixed idea
that director Richard Eyre sustains across the near four hour running time of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Long Day’s Journey Into Night. </i>Much like
the geodesic mapping scene of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">King Lear</i>
where Lear provokes his warmongering daughters to a grisly, eye-engorging clan
war, Tyrone is peppered, harangued, interrogated and skewered by his wife and
his booze-addled sons—ad nausea—and with impunity—dawn to dusk, and with no
respite: <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">JAMIE—(staring at his father, ignoring
his explanation) I know it’s an Irish peasant idea consumption is fatal. It
probably is when you live in a hovel on a bog, but over here, with modern
treatment—<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">TYRONE—Don’t I know that! What are you
gabbing about, anyway? And keep your dirty tongue off Ireland, with your sneers
about peasants and bogs and hovels!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(LDJ
732)<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">.</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Regardless of his beleaguered state
Tyrone holds his ground, unflinching and unmovable until the wrong insult from
his discordant family knocks him off his game; when that happens Tyrone is out
of his chair, challenging all comers; and true to form, his ungrateful swarming
tribe—like the beggars in the house of plenty—gnaw and peck at Tyrone’s eyes,
hand, feet and legs, demanding bleeding restitution for some past transgression,
real or imagined. Irrespective of the charges and fabrications hurled against
him by his family, no one in these shameful bear-baiting scenes gets to their
alcohol, their morphine, their books, their diary or the piano without going
through the stalwart Tyrone. Like a tyrant with his back against the wall in
the midst of a palace coup, Jeremy Irons’ James Tyrone is unrelentingly, the
noble squire of his manor, the keeper of the keys. And by way of his dominion, Tyrone
has no dominion at all. He’s a prisoner in his own manor. Admirably and
fearlessly, he welcomes our judgment, but with two of the three family members
in a state of somnambulism or total inebriation—and the third on the brink of
consumptive quarantine—these family tribunals—these show-trials—are a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cul de sac, </i>a false, empty, bottomless
promise for the august Shakespearean actor. In this final conclave of the
Tyrone family there’s never a righteous payback for Tyrone, no moment in the
sun. Old Man Tyrone never gets his just due or a full hearing. It’s always a
dire and tragic circumstance for the man of the house. Willy-nilly to the
carnage, or the bona fides of these war games, he’s forever the bad lieutenant,
the headless King—Arthur without his stuff. As mentioned earlier in this
discussion, Director Richard Eyre unpacks and interrogates this “Roundtable” conceit
very early in the dramatic event, and maintains it throughout. This essential directorial
and scenic idea—the Chair and Table of Arthur—the seat of authority—is the crucial
dramatic value of this enduring, rehabilitated New England legend. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">6</i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">His [Tyrone’s] clothes,
assuredly, do not costume any romantic part. He wears a threadbare, ready-made
grey sack suit and shineless black shoes, a collarless shirt with a white
handkerchief knotted loosely around his throat. There is nothing picturesquely
careless about this get-up. It is commonplace shabby. He believes in wearing
his clothes to the limit of usefulness, is dressed now for gardening, and
doesn’t give a damn how he looks</i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> (LDJ 719)<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Contrary to O’Neill’s unflattering and
very non-bourgeois descriptors of James Tyrone’s “morning” costume in his
initial entrance in Act I, Tyrone’s basic “gardening-look” as conceived by
designer Rob Howell is provincial, but slyly theatrical. Like his books, liquor
and cigars, Tyrone’s accessories are stylish and well manipulated throughout
the production; O’Neill’s as-written “white handkerchief knotted loosely around
Tyrone’s neck” is, in designer Howell’s reinvention, an erstwhile Brooke’s
Brothers scarf replete with white paisleys and crimson patina. Further
contravening O’Neill’s miserly description of James Tyrone is Tyrone’s slightly
indifferent academic look; his knitted summer jacket and vest, and his bundled
scarfs give him the cachet of a pipe smoking mower from (for example) Monet’s
seminal painting, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Card Players; </i>eventually
a panama hat (later a bowler), an Edwardian dressing gown, and a
dark-blue/black professional suit and collar in the later moments of the play
are worn by Tyrone with knack and éclat. As Irish dandies are concerned, James
Tyrone, in the popular, if perhaps apocryphal tradition of Edwin Booth and Ned
Harrigan, is an impeccable stylist. Under Jeremy Iron’s rendering, Tyrone’s
nattiness, his deft story-telling arts, his dexterous use of smoking props, writing
utensils, artifacts, relics, drinking vessels and sartorial accouterments are
his hallmark. Even at home and in his middlebrow, New London neighborhood,
Tyrone carries himself as a clever, if exiled New York roustabout. He is, as
his wont, a truly nifty “poet and sport.” As are his impervious, and somehow
dapper sons. Even at their rabid worst, Jamie and Edmund Tyrone have a sense of
self that is genuine and fairly spruce; their off-white shirts and open dog
collars appear to be somewhat “lived-in” and worn-for-wear, but never too
slovenly. Despite their studied indifference to the external world Jamie and
Edmund remain presentable and even dignified when they need to be. The dark
suit, natty tie and authentic Geoff cap of the lanky Edmund Tyrone late in Act
II are spot-on to the period and the moment. Here’s an example of a fashion
implement shading the attitude and disposition of James Tyrone as he sizes up
his struggling son Edmund late in Act II: <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Edmund enters. He has
changed to a ready-made blue serge suit, high stiff collar and tie, black
shoes. </i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">TYRONE—(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">with an actor’s heartiness) Well! You look spic and span. I’m on my way
up to change, too. </i>(LDJ 767). <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Selflessly, genuinely, and appropriate to
the delicate medical issues that will challenge his beleaguered son, James
Tyrone responds to Edmund’s “blue suit” nattiness with a fatherly perk: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He [Tyrone] pulls out a small roll of bills
from his pants pocket and carefully selects one [a ten dollar bill]. Edmund
takes it. He glances at it and his face expresses astonishment. </i>(LDJ 767)<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">. </i>Edmund’s response is wide-eyed,
angelic: <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">EDMUND—[…] This isn’t a dollar. It’s a
ten spot.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">TYRONE—(embarrassed by his generosity)
Put it in your pocket. You’ll probably meet some of your friends uptown and you
can’t hold your end up and be sociable with nothing in your jeans <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(LDJ 767)<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Despite their ragged, derelict inclinations,
the incorrigible Tyrone brothers somehow always manage to pull it off, to look
“nice,” to act accordingly, to pacify their neighbors, their parents, and even
accommodating women if that’s what is called for. For Jamie and Edmund
accountability and respectability are easily manipulated if carefully
construed. By way of straw boaters, oxford bags, saddle shoes, and preppy
accouterments, Rob Howell’s costumes suggest something uniquely and brashly Connecticut
Yankee about this brutal fraternity. Although Howell’s costumes are
turn-of-the-last-century faithful, there is nothing formulaic about the “look”
of this repertory costume parade. Tyrone, in his innumerable jackets, vests and
dressing gowns is always outfitted according to purpose: a late morning
breakfast, a trip to a local physician with Edmund, an afternoon constitution, ritualized
mealtimes, neighborly gossip sessions, the evening vespers, and so forth.
Ironically, perhaps incongruously, despite his comfort-fitting summer wardrobe,
Tyrone appears to be braced for the perfect storm. His announced exits from his
New London cottage are preempted by a bundling that suggests, perhaps, a point
of no return. It’s as if he’s wrapped for a Winslow Homer Nor’easter. When
Tyrone leaves the summer cottage orbit he returns disheveled and weather-beaten,
ready for a glass of pursers rum and a neatly-packaged-hand-rolled Panamanian cigarillo.
This storm-warning forbearance of Tyrone’s pervades the Monte Cristo Cottage
and is enhanced by the dim, cocker-shell lighting (Peter Mumford, lighting
design) and the opaque, if somewhat anachronistic skylight and panoply that
frame the windswept, gabled house. Late in the play, this affectation of
flickering oil lamps and quasi-musical foghorns echoes the unsettling and
eventually terrifying mood of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moby Dick</i>
and the satanic Ahab. So mood-stricken is lighting designer Peter Mumford’s Tyrone
household that the portending eight-bells ritual of the Imperial and
Continental navies would not be totally out of synch in the final act of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Long Day’s Journey Into Night. </i>Unlike a
number of O’Neill plays that propound an overwhelming seafaring aspect, James
Tyrone’s wicker lamps, his wardrobe, his dressing gown, his smoking utensils,
whiskey cruets, and most importantly—his high-renaissance theater library, are the
prevailing motifs in the BAM/Bristol <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Long
Day’s Journey Into Night. </i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">7<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lesley
Manville > Mary Tyrone</i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Mary Tyrone as mastered by Bristol Old
Vic veteran Lesley Manville is an overstated performance. Her remonstrance to
her husband and sons across the four-hour event is operatic in nature, almost
to a level of melodrama. Invariably, (in a good sense) she blows Tyrone, Jamie
and Edmund off the stage with her diaphragmatic breathing and her inexhaustible
personal pleas. Consistent with her catlike performance, the intensity and
bravura of Manville’s indelicate effort is thoroughgoing and provocative. As celebrated
British, Irish and American Mary Tyrones “go” (Geraldine Fitzgerald, Zoe
Caldwell, Jessica Lange, Laurie Metcalf, Vanessa Redgrave, et al.) Manville’s
sonorous interpolation is one to be contrasted and studied. Manville’s diminutive
stature, moonstone eyes, porcelain mask, elegant form-fitting dresses, shawls
and robes, and her beautifully and intricately quaffed platinum hair bring a
regal Nordic quality to the Mary Tyrone retinue. Although recent archived
Google images of an erstwhile Bristol Old Vic production show Manville’s “Mary”
as a glassy-eyed, cosmopolitan brunette, the Bristol/BAM “Mary” is attuned to
an archaic, almost fabled matriarch. Historically, O’Neill’s plays have earned
mythic stature in Scandinavia, particularly Sweden, with film luminaries such
as Bibi Anderson, Ingmar Bergman and Lars Hanson offering magnanimous
contributions to the O’Neill canon. Hanson created the role of James Tyrone in
the original (the original-original) production of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Long Day’s Journey Into Night </i>in 1956 in Stockholm under the
direction of Bengt Ekerot [6]. Concordant with the provocative experimentation
of the O’Neill oeuvre in Sweden, a pan-Scandia Mary Tyrone is not farfetched.
Just as Mary Tyrone has been defined by her somnambulant night-walks, her
spider-like tendencies and her wispy demeanor, this Bristol Vic Mary Tyrone is
husky, throaty, roguish, and strangely powerful, at times formidable. Manville’s
Viking-Mary doesn’t fear sobriety and the external world as much as loathe it;
inordinately in Manville’s exercised performance she assails her dismissive
husband, her sneering, passive-aggressive sons, and (inferentially) the
low-brow townies and gossipy neighbors she’s forced to abide in the summer
off-season in New London. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">8<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Walter
Kerr>Robert Ryan> Jeremy Irons<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">To bring some historical perspective to
Jeremy Irons’ psychic approach to deconstructing and building a dignified and
knightly character for the enigmatic James Tyrone, herein is included a
retrospective on one of the more visible productions of O’Neill’s play as
produced at the Promenade theater in New York City in 1971, and directed by
Arvin Brown, a highly credentialed director of American repertory drama and
O’Neill enthusiast. In a bold stroke, Brown cast classic Hollywood heavyweight,
Robert Ryan in the role of James Tyrone. Ryan’s reception and reviews were
generous and even magnanimous, departing perhaps from a point of movie cultism.
Outspreading from the karma of Arvin Brown’s theatrical coup de grace is a
Robert Ryan/Jeremy Irons nexus that conceivably could live on in O’Neill
industry memory. This Ryan/Irons nexus derives from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The New York Times’</i> revered drama critic Walter Kerr’s assessment
of Ryan’s performance, and O’Neill scholar Brenda Murphy’s affirmation of that
assessment. Kerr showed Ryan’s “Tyrone” to be equal parts “papist,” gentlemen
and grandee: “He [Ryan as Tyrone] surrenders nothing, not even his stubborn
fatuous certainty that Shakespeare was an Irish Catholic (Kerr 3). In a
scholarly treatise entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">O’Neill: Long
Day’s Journey Into Night, </i>Prof. Murphy concurs with Ryan’s reading of
Tyrone to be “controversial,” “quiet spoken,” and a “gentle figure” (Murphy 66).
Comparatively then, Jeremy Iron’s BAM/Bristol Shakespeare-centric Tyrone is
quiet, gentle, fatuous, stubborn, partisan, and highly impolitic. Although
“controversial” might be too clichéd a 70’s phrase to describe Iron’s herculean
performance, he is provocative to a point of triumph.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">*<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Lawrence
Olivier, Florence Eldridge, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Robert Ryan et al.<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“[Olivier is] beyond criticism and beyond
praise…”[7] (Hobson, Sunday Times)<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“Florence Eldridge plays a shattered
mother—her white hair drifting mistily about the damaged prettiness of her
face…” (Kerr, New York Herald Tribune) [8]<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It [James Tyrone] is a great part, and
Robert Ryan moves into it with care, love and understanding. [Ryan] shows us
the character, little by little, and finally creates a picture of a man,
neither good nor bad, but understanding” (Barnes, NY Times.com) [9]<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Notable interpretations of James Tyrone
and Mary Tyrone can be accredited to English icon Lawrence Olivier, Hollywood
stars, Florence Eldridge (wife and co-star to the inestimable Frederick March,
the original Broadway James Tyrone) and Irish actress, Geraldine Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald’s revival of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Long Day’s
Journey </i>can be argued to be primal because of the classic Hollywood heavy,
Robert Ryan objectifying, taunting, but eventually embracing Mary in his
“leather-tough” “realistic” reading of James Tyrone (Kerr 3). Like Jeremy Irons
in his stealth rendition of the Tyrone patriarch and Lesley Manville in her
catlike rendition of Mary Tyrone, all of the aforementioned performers,
designers, producers and directors have brought meaning and power to the O’Neill
oeuvre. With the exception of film/theater auteurs such as Lawrence Olivier
whose trans-Atlantic James Tyrone is historic, filmic and indelible, the work
of these O’Neill interpreters exists in time and liminal space, not necessarily
in book, film and made-for-TV-movie deals. Although the O’Neill industry is,
apparently, booming and trending, a performer’s half-life in the O’Neill
factory is fleeting. Perhaps Lesley Manville’s diaphragmatic reading of Mary
Tyrone will garnish her a permanent place in the pantheon of experimental and
pioneering O’Neill characters. When assessing Manville’s bearing on the O’Neill
industry, what casting director, artistic director, literary manager or
theatrical agent could deny that her performance will push the conversation
about how to build this affected and disaffected O’Neill voice; collaterally,
Manville’s performance will widen the audition of other moth-like roles in the
tradition of Blanche Dubois, Amanda Wingfield, and the bullied Linda Loman of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Death of a Salesman. </i>Perhaps timeless
lines such as “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers,” “attention
must be paid,” and “I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a
time” (LDJ 828), will be reconsidered for their baldness and emptiness rather
than their eleventh hour desperateness. Considering that alcohol, lemon cokes with
chipped ice, and morphine free-basing are the maledictions of choice of Mary
and Blanche, their need to be heard is existentially consistent with the need
to be vocal, abrasive and insinuating. Unseemly man-cave humor, dysfunctional
sons, and bullying husbands, are the heavy burden of these broken, highly
fetishized female characters. Perhaps, as Manville’s over the bow performance
suggests, it’s time for Mary to blow her horn. Having seen a number of
luminaries in this notoriously “injured bird” role, Lesley Manville’s breakout
performance is a shout-out to the O’Neill industry. As they say in Ireland,
“the likes of Ms. Manville will not be seen again…”<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">- Timothy V. Dugan, D.Litt., Associate
Professor, Department of Communication Arts, St. Francis College, author The
Many Lives of Ajax: The Trojan War Hero From Antiquity to Modern Times
(McFarland, 2018).<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Copyright c. 2018 by Timothy V. Dugan - All Rights Reserved</span></b></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">NOTES<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">[1] I use the phrase “North American in
my discussion of repertory theater to include Mexico, Cuba, Canada and the
Caribbean. For the seminal book on North American theater see Londre and
Watermeier’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The History of North
American Theater. </i>See <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Works Cited.<o:p></o:p></i></span></b></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">[2] For this and all quotations from
O’Neill’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Long Day’s Journey Into Night </i>I
use the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Library of America </i>anthology:
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Eugene O’Neill, Volume III: Complete
Plays 1932-1943, </i>Travis Bogard editor. See O’Neill, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Works Cited.<o:p></o:p></i></span></b></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">[3] <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sound design by John Leonard. See BAMbill, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Works Cited.</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">[4] For more on eye communication, body
gestures and non-verbal communication see Joseph DeVito, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Interpersonal Communication Book, 14<sup>th</sup> Edition. </i>Pearson
Publishing, New York.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">[5] Voice and dialect coach, Penny Dyer.
See <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">BAMbill, Works Cited.<o:p></o:p></i></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">[6] Bengt Ekerot directed the world
premier of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Long Day’s Journey Into Night </i>at
the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm, February 2, 1956. Although Ekerot’s
reputation as an actor and director is well established in Europe and in
theater/cinema biographies, his role as “Death’ in Ingmar Bergman’s seminal
art-house film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Seventh Seal, </i>has
given him a place in contemporary film lore and film scholarship. Academics,
film critics and film buffs identify the white-faced reaper as portrayed by
Ekerot to be iconic. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">[7] Review of Eugene O’Neill’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Long Day’s Journey Into Night. </i>By Harold
Hobson, Sunday Times, London. Reprinted in Brenda Murphy’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">O’Neill: Long Day’s Journey Into Night. </i>See Murphy, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Works Cited.<o:p></o:p></i></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">[8] Review of Eugene O’Neill’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Long Day’s journey Into Night. </i>By Walter
Kerr. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York Herald Tribune, </i>November
8, 1956.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">[9] <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Review of Eugene O’Neill’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Long Day’s Journey Into Night. </i>By Clive
Barnes, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York Times, </i>April 22,
1971. See Barnes, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Works Cited. <o:p></o:p></i></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">WORKS CITED<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">BAMbill: Who’s Who: Long
Day’s Journey Into Night. </i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">BAM Harvey Theater. <o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">May 2018; Winter/Spring Season, Brooklyn
Magazine, Brooklyn, NY. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Barnes, Clive. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rousing ‘Long Day’s Journey’. </i>Review of: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Long Day’s Journey Into Night, </i>by Eugene O’Neill. Promenade
Theater, New York. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York Times </i>22
April 1971.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i></b><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1971/04/22/archives/stage-rousing-long-days-journey-miss-fitzgerald-keach-ryan-naughton.html"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: windowtext;">https://www.nytimes.com/1971/04/22/archives/stage-rousing-long-days-journey-miss-fitzgerald-keach-ryan-naughton.html</span></b></a><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Hobson, Harold. Review of: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Long Day’s Journey into Night. </i>By Eugene
O’Neill. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sunday Times. </i>Reprinted in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">O’Neill: Long Day’s Journey Into Night. </i>By
Brenda Murphy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. </b><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1971/05/02/archives/do-the-tyrones-live-here.html"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: windowtext;">https://www.nytimes.com/1971/05/02/archives/do-the-tyrones-live-here.html</span></b></a><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Kerr, Walter. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Long Day’s Journey Into Night. </i>Review of: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Long Day’s Journey Into Night. </i>By Eugene O’Neill. Helen Hayes
Theater, New York. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York Herald
Tribune, </i>Nov. 8, 1956. </b><a href="http://www.eoneill.com/artifacts/reviews/ldj1_tribune.htm"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: windowtext;">http://www.eoneill.com/artifacts/reviews/ldj1_tribune.htm</span></b></a><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">___. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">One
‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’. </i>Review of: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Long Day’s Journey Into Night, </i>by Eugene O’Neill. Promenade
Theater, New York. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York Times, </i>May
2, 1971.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i></b><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1971/05/02/archives/do-the-tyrones-live-here.html"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: windowtext;">https://www.nytimes.com/1971/05/02/archives/do-the-tyrones-live-here.html</span></b></a><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></b></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Londre, Felicia Hardison and Daniel J.
Watermeier. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The History of North American
Theater: The United States, Canada, and Mexico: From Pre-Columbian Times to the
Present. </i>New York: Continuum. 2000. Print.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Murphy, Brenda. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">O’Neill: Long Day’s Journey Into Night. </i>New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2001. </b><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1971/05/02/archives/do-the-tyrones-live-here.html"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: windowtext;">https://www.nytimes.com/1971/05/02/archives/do-the-tyrones-live-here.html</span></b></a><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">O’Neill, Eugene. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">O’Neill: Complete Plays: Volume I: 1932-1943. </i>New York: The Library
of America, 1988. Print.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />E♦Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16147875345316321220noreply@blogger.com