Medical messaging

Amidst all the “concern from the CEO” emails I’ve been receiving around the novel coronavirus, I got one from the surgical practice that performed an operation on me a couple of years ago. This one pissed me off.

Because they made me log in to their portal to get the message that they (like airlines, retail operations, insurance companies and everyone else) are doing everything possible to avoid infecting their customers:

By “logging in” I mean I had to reset my password because it’s been so long. So they made me do all that work to receive a message that involves no HIPAA considerations.

But wait--my current orthopaedic practice goes a bridge too far. They make me log in to their portal (which is singularly craptastic as far as user expedience is concerned)...to link me to their public website for their covid19 statement.

What is wrong with these people? First rule of communications, GW Medical Faculty Associates and OrthoVirginia: don’t make your audience work to get the message.

Markup

I came across this on the twitters-dot-com.

I suspect that what few proofreaders are left in the publishing industry will relate.

An apostrophe too far

Whenever I come across some mailbox with something like “The Johnson’s” on it, I want to park my car, walk up to the front door and ask the occupant “The Johnson’s what?” Because the plural of the preponderance of English nouns is formed by adding an S; it never involves an apostrophe.

But I don’t, because I don’t carry a whiteboard around with me. Also, I don’t fancy getting into a fight over it.

And I know it’s pretty much a losing fight—the barbarians are winning this one, and it’s getting worse.

Viz. this sign found at a grocery store in California:

I hope it’s someone taking the piss, but I fear it is not.

Civic improvement

I’d not been on the W&OD trail for a while, so when I headed out last week, I found something new:

I’d heard of these little popup libraries. The idea is that you take a book you find interesting and, at some point, return it or leave a different book in its place. In fact, “little free library” is an actual thing, website and all. I’d read about them a few years ago, and came across one of them on one of my walking meetup’s walks somewhere in Sunnyvale. (I thought I’d taken a photo, but I can’t find anything now.)

It’s kind of interesting to see it here, and wonder about the location. I mean—the W&OD is used by people seriously interested in getting from one place to another. They’re either commuting (by foot or bicycle; although there’s one maroon with an electrified unicycle who whizzes through on weekday mornings), or they’re getting in their cardio. I find it odd to imagine any of them stopping to browse the book shelves in the midst of this purposeful activity. (As opposed to, say, putting it near a bus stop. But there might be municipal liability issues involved in that.)

Anyhow, I certainly get behind any effort to encourage reading actual books.

O poverini

A couple of weeks ago I was kind of watching the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Così fan tutte. They set it at what looked like Atlantic City in the 50s.

I confess I’m only vaguely familiar with Così; the plot is 18^th Century potboiling guys-brag-how-chaste-their-girlfriends-are-so-of-course-they-test-the-theory.

In other words: the usual.

Because of that, the Met’s 50s Jersey Boys construct seems appropriate.

However, I cannot figure out whether the set designer built the “Hero’s” sign on purpose to underscore the unlettered nature of the food stand’s management, whether it’s ironic, or whether the standards of the Met are so low that no one noticed.

Civil matters

You’ll no doubt have noticed that the party of “Lock her up”, “Rope, Tree, Journalist”, separating toddlers from their parents and tossing them both in separate prisons in their thousands, cutting off healthcare to millions, literally shouting down Democratic colleagues, calling the cops on bar-be-cuers, yelling racial epithets from moving vehicles, and tweeting lies and vile threats to practically anyone from official accounts—they’re suddenly every one of them shocked—utterly shocked and horrified by the incivility they’re encountering from…people who have started pushing back against their affronts to decent society.

Yes, the GOPigs have had their minions pore through the dictionary to find le mot juste, and pulled out their pop-beads to clutch as they use that word. Over and over. With voices shaking in outrage.

The Repugs really understand neither irony nor that whole goose-gander equality thing.

There’ve been numerous instances of this. But the biscuit-taking prince would be David Gergen, who served as a talking head in the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton administrations, and who has been one of CNN’s political talking heads for a while. Because on Monday, Gergen’s mouth went on flapping long after his brain stopped sending any intelligent thoughts its way.

Specifically, he pronounced that there has never been a time in American discourse so divisive as our present one. Not even…not even the Anti-War and Civil Rights movements in the 60s and 70s. No, no—a guy who served in Nixon’s White House said:

“I cannot remember a time—the Anti-War movement in Vietnam… The Civil Rights movement in the 60s and early 70s. Both of those were much more civil in tone.”

And then he doubled down: “Even the Anti-War movement was more civil in tone but certainly the Civil Rights movement among the people who were protesting…”

Dave, Dave—put down the Ambien and back away from the microphone.

More civil? More effing civil?

Back in the 60s and 70s, we went on strike. We took to the streets. We shut down universities. We blocked Army convoys. We poured blood on Selective Service records. We burned draft cards, We burned bras. We went to jail. We went to Canada. We marched from Selma to Montgomery. We rode buses. We took over the National Mall. We rioted outside national political conventions. We were escorted by the National Guard into grade schools.

More civil?

We shouted “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” We sang “We Shall Overcome”.  When they told us to shut the fuck up, we yelled even louder.

They doused us with firehoses. They fired tear gas grenades at us. They set attack dogs on us. They cracked open our heads with truncheons. They used electric cattle prods on us. They fired rifles at us.

More civil?

Our blood was splattered across college campuses, school yards, national parks, draft boards, city streets, lunch counters.

They burned crosses on our lawns. They bombed our churches. They lynched our sons. They murdered us. Our bodies were scattered from Watts to Kent State to Mississippi.

They shot Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, before our eyes.

There was nothing—not one fucking thing—civil about it.

If you doubt me, there is ample evidence from contemporary news reports, written, photographic and film. It was literally in all the papers, and on all the evening news broadcasts, day after day, year after year. You’d think that a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School and a CNN pundit would be aware of that. But evidently you’d be wrong. 

(Upon reflection, I suppose it's possible that our Dave is engaging in wishful thinking, imagining he lived through the pretty time when gallantry took its last bow, that world of cavaliers and cotton fields, where gentlemen like him, sippin' bourbon in the Big House, heard nary a whisper from the womenfolk or the slaves. A world that was so much better than the one that, in fact, was there.)

And no, we will not shut up; we will not pretend that this cattle car of fascists represents American values; we will not be talked over; we will not be shouted down. In the words of one hero of these days, we are reclaiming our time.

And you can stuff your one-sided application of civility up right beside that poker you’re sitting on. Y'all released the Kraken. Deal.

Plurality

You know, given all the mishegoss flying around on Air Force One, I think I’m just going to leave this here for you.

We do need all the laugh’s we can get.

Paschal moon: a brief, dreamy kind delight

Final day of National Poetry Month, so we’ll go out with another heavy hitter.

Like Dorothy Parker, William Butler Yeats loved not wisely, but too well. The main passion of his life was Maud Gonne. He once stated that her (first) rejection of his marriage proposal (in 1891, two years after they met) marked the point at which “the troubling of my life began”. He proposed three more times over the next ten years, and was turned down every time. The man she did choose, John MacBride, was an appalling, abusive human being, but he shared her deep, radicalIrish nationalism, which Yeats did not. After her unsuccessful attempt to divorce MacBride, Yeats—who had supported her in the effort—finally physically consummated the relationship, but even that was…unsatisfying, and their friendship faded after the single sexual encounter.

Even so, when John MacBride was executed following the Easter Rebellion of 1916, Yeats proposed one final time to Gonne. And one final time she said no. Frankly, the proposal was kind of by rote, and he was somewhat relieved by her response. Then, the 56-year-old poet started going middle-age crazy. He developed a fixation on…Iseult Gonne, Maud’s 21-year-old daughter by her pre-MacBride lover Lucien Millevoie. Iseult followed in her mother’s footsteps by rejecting Yeats’s 1917 proposal.

By now he was feeling a desperate urge to produce an heir, so within a few months of being shown the romantic door by Iseult, he proposed to 25-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees. That relationship was a success, and produced two children, though he took lovers throughout his life.

Well, anyway, the Yeats-Gonne relationship really scarred the poet deeply, as witnessed by today’s entry.

“Never Give All the Heart”

Never give all the heart, for love

Will hardly seem worth thinking of

To passionate women if it seem

Certain, and they never dream

That it fades out from kiss to kiss;

For everything that’s lovely is

But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.

O never give the heart outright,

For they, for all smooth lips can say,

Have given their hearts up to the play.

And who could play it well enough

If deaf and dumb and blind with love?

He that made this knows all the cost,

For he gave all his heart and lost.

This is the sort of thing you expect from poets—that thrill-of-victory-agony-of-defeat in love, so it seems appropriate that it should close us out for this year.

Paschal moon: walk not in woe

It’s been a while since we’ve had anything from Dorothy Parker, so we’re due.

She’s the mastery of the stiletto through the intercostals, especially when it came to romance. (Parker was definitely unlucky in love.) Viz:

“A General Review of the Sex Situation”

Woman wants monogamy;
Man delights in novelty.
Love is woman's moon and sun;
Man has other forms of fun.
Woman lives but in her lord;
Count to ten, and man is bored.
With this the gist and sum of it,
What earthly good can come of it?

She was hardly ever sunny, but she could slow down the pace.

“A Dream Lies Dead”

A dream lies dead here. May you softly go
Before this place, and turn away your eyes,
Nor seek to know the look of that which dies
Importuning Life for life. Walk not in woe,
But, for a little, let your step be slow.
And, of your mercy, be not sweetly wise
With words of hope and Spring and tenderer skies.
A dream lies dead; and this all mourners know:

Whenever one drifted petal leaves the tree-
Though white of bloom as it had been before
And proudly waitful of fecundity-
One little loveliness can be no more;
And so must Beauty bow her imperfect head
Because a dream has joined the wistful dead!

Paschal moon: Find the truth

Today’s National Poetry Month offering comes from a young Tanzanian poet, Zuhura Seng’enge. Only out of university for a couple of years, she’s been writing poetry in both English and Kiswahili since she was 12.

The poem I’m sharing is focused on the African experience, but I believe that Americans could well benefit from following its precepts—both as a nation and as individuals. I recognize that what Seng’enge enjoins is in no way easy, but even so…

“Do Not Fear the Past”

Do not fear the past.
It is ugly
but it is ours,
Do not hold on to lies
That you were fed when you were young.
Learn the history of your people
Find the truth
to free your soul from evil
Learn the Qur-an
Learn the bible
Find the meaning of life and religion.
Do not fear the past.
It is painful
but it is real
Blood was spilt and people died
but love and unity had survived.
Learn the tongue of your ancestors
Reconnect with the roots of your blood
Find the knowledge
That was stolen
Find the life that was robbed from us.
Do not fear the past.
Embrace it
Let it teach you the wisdom of your race
Take its lessons and live by them
Own the identity that was erased.
Do not fear the past,
Do not hate it.
Do not fear the past,
Learn about it.
Let it teach you
Let it nurture you
Let it remind you, of who you are

Paschal moon: they shall not break

My friend David and I never discussed poetry—he left a comment on the post a few years ago on Carl Sandburg’s “Shovel Them Under”, and I have a vague recollection of some social media post he made that he labeled as a poem, but consisted of repeating the word god about 30 times. So I know he did read the stuff, but I don’t know how much it appealed to him.

I do know that he did not believe in the immortality of the soul, so he’d probably wave off my National Poetry Month entry for today, but it’s my choice to let Dylan Thomas give me a modicum of comfort when I think of my loss.

“And Death Shall Have No Dominion”

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead man naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

Paschal moon: easily reducible adolescences

It’s true that when we hear the words “Poets of World War I”, we typically don’t think of women. Partly, of course, because women were for the most part kept away from the front, so whatever they wrote about was de facto about their life waiting at home. But because that’s how they experienced the war, that perspective is still valid.

In past years I’ve given you examples from Eleanor Farjeon and Anna Akhmatova. Today I’ve got a little something from the poet-painter Mina Loy, born in 1882 in London, resident of most of the artistic centers of Europe before moving to the United States in 1916. Modernism, futurism, Dada, feminism, surrealism, post-modernism, conceptualism—Loy threw herself into all the major movements of the times.

Loy considered herself more a visual artist than a poet, but she knew her way around a page. “The Dead” was written in 1920, and for someone who didn’t have first-hand experience of the war, she certainly captured its aftermath, using all the modernist imagery then available.

“The Dead”

We have flowed out of ourselves  

Beginning on the outside 

That shrivable skin          

Where you leave off        

Of infinite elastic        

Walking the ceiling          

Our eyelashes polish stars            

Curled close in the youngest corpuscle             

Of a descendant

We spit up our passions in our grand-dams            

Fixing the extension of your reactions             

Our shadow lengthens    

In your fear        

You are so old   

Born in our immortality            

Stuck fast as Life             

In one impalpable            

Omniprevalent Dimension             

We are turned inside out 

Your cities lie digesting in our stomachs                     

Street lights footle in our ocular darkness            

Having swallowed your irate hungers             

Satisfied before bread-breaking    

To your dissolution          

We splinter into Wholes          

Stirring the remorses of your tomorrow             

Among the refuse of your unborn centuries            

In our busy ashbins         

Stink the melodies           

Of your         

So easily reducible          

Adolescences    

Our tissue is of that which escapes you             

Birth-Breaths and orgasms           

The shattering tremor of the static        

The far-shore of an instant            

The unsurpassable openness of the circle    

Legerdemain of God       

Only in the segregated angles of Lunatic Asylums

Do those who have strained to exceeding themselves             

Break on our edgeless contours   

The mouthed echoes of what        

has exuded to our companionship

Is horrible to the ear        

Of the half that is left inside them.

Paschal moon: an infinite and endless liar

We don’t know exactly when William Shakespeare was born, in 1564, but he was baptized on 26 April, and baptisms were typically done back then within a couple of days of birth, in case the infant didn’t survive. So it’s possible that today is the 454^th anniversary of his birth. It is the 402^nd anniversary of his death. And since it’s not possible to get through National Poetry Month without something from the heavy artillery of English letters, today’s a good day for Will.

Technically billed as a comedy, All’s Well That Ends Well is…oh, I dunno. It’s a comedy inasmuch as the stage in Act V is not awash in blood and piled with corpses. But it’s a whole rigmarole of class differences, snobbery, conquests on the battlefield and in the bed, unrequited love, rampant testosterone, craven servants and a lot of stuff that even on my most disbelief-suspending days I still have trouble swallowing.

One of the things I have the most trouble with is the plot point around the notion that in the dark all cats are equally grey, that a man can’t tell one woman from another when he’s in bed. Amongst other things, am I meant to conclude that, in the rush of passion, men lose their sense of hearing? Or is it that virgins being ravished by coup-counting cads are universally silent?

Then there’s the whole idea that any woman with the gumption of Helena (in this case) would want to be married to a cad like Bertram, who can’t even be arsed to bed her because of her “low station” (which doesn’t seem to bother him in other instances, of which she is abundantly aware).

Any roads, that’s the basic plot, but one of the subplots revolves around a loudmouthed, arrogant servant called Parolles, who reminds me of most of the GOPigs, as described here in Act III, Scene vi, by various lords to Bertram:

Bertram:

Do you think I am so far deceived in him?

Second Lord:

Believe it, my lord, in mine own direct knowledge,

without any malice, but to speak of him as my

kinsman, he’s a most notable coward, an infinite and

endless liar, an hourly promise-breaker, the owner

of no one good quality worthy your lordship’s

entertainment.

See what I mean? I'm planning on working some of these into daily conversations.

If that’s not poetic enough for you, we’ll have one of the sonnets. This is one I find particularly comforting at the mo.

“XXX”

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:

Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,

For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,

And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,

And moan th' expense of many a vanish'd sight;

Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,

And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er

The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,

Which I new pay as if not paid before.

   But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,

   All losses are restor'd, and sorrows end.

Paschal moon: Everyday odysseys

Let’s step out of the ordinary for National Poetry Month today. Assuming, of course, that there is such a thing as “ordinary’ poetry.

In the world of creativity, Kate Tempest is a triple threat: poet, musical artist, playwright. Every poet has his/her voice; Tempest’s is gripping, eloquent and very East London. In short, extraordinary. My discovery of her—I don’t even know how it happened—was literally of her voice, as she recited “from Brand New Ancients”, so that’s what I’m sharing with you.

In the old days,
the myths were the stories we used to explain ourselves

but how can we explain
the way we hate ourselves?

The things we’ve made ourselves into,
the way we break ourselves in two,
the way we overcomplicate ourselves?

But we are still mythical.

We are still permanently trapped
somewhere between the heroic and the pitiful.

We are still Godly,
that’s what’s made us so monstrous.
It just feels like we’ve forgotten
that we’re much more
than the sum of the things that belong to us.

Every single person has a purpose in them burning.
Look again.
Allow yourself to see them.

Millions of characters
Each with their own epic narratives
Singing, ‘it’s hard to be an angel
Until you’ve been a demon’.

We are perfect because of our imperfections,
We must stay hopeful,
We must be patient;

When they excavate the modern day
They’ll find us,
The Brand New Ancients.

All that we have here
Is all that we’ve always had.

We have jealousy,
tenderness,
curses and gifts.

But the plight of a people who have forgotten their myths
and imagine that somehow
now is all that there is –
is a sorry plight

all isolation and worry
but the life in your veins
it is Godly, heroic.
You were born for greatness.
Believe it,
know it –
take it from the tears of the poets.

there’s always been heroes,
there’s always been villains,
the stakes may have changed
but really there’s no difference.

there’s always been greed
and heartbreak and ambition.
jealousy, love,
trespass and contrition,

we’re the same beings that began,
still living,
in all of our fury and foulness and friction.
Everyday odysseys.
Dreams vs decisions.
The stories are there if you listen.

The stories are here.

The stories are you
and your fear and your hope is as old
as the language of smoke,
the language of blood,
the language of languishing love,

the Gods are all here.
Because the Gods are in us.

But I think you should hear this in Tempest’s actual voice, in addition to her voice on the page, so have a listen to this.

See what I mean about “extraordinary”?

Paschal moon: purgatorial shadows

One hundred years ago, Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen won his last victory—his 80^th—in the sky above Northern France. The erstwhile cavalry officer had become the most famous fighter pilot of the war since transferring to the air service in 1915, admired by combatants and non-combatants on both sides. Even today, kids who barely know there was a war fought in 1914-1918, would probably have a vague notion of the man known as The Red Baron, and his Flying Circus.

Because Snoopy. And Monty Python.

Richthofen and his ilk must have seemed like true knights-of-the-air to the men who fought semi-underground in the trenches of the Western Front. Airmen lived in fairly posh camps behind the lines, so were not generally in danger of artillery fire. As officers, they were catered to and waited on as befitted their class; outside of actual sorties, it was almost as though they were at a country house shooting party, with hot baths and cold Champagne.

In the air, make no mistake, it was not all cakes and ale; their aircraft were not exactly precision machines, they had no radio communications, they were on their own, with little training or support, just the adrenaline surge and the joy stick. Richthofen was extraordinarily skilled and lucky to survive as long as he did—a tribute to his gifts as a pilot.

But the luck ran out on 21 April 1918, and he was shot down over Vaux-sur-Somme.

Today’s entry for National Poetry Month isn’t about Richthofen specifically, or even about World War I aces. I don’t know of any studies on PTSD for the knights-of- the-air, so I don’t know how they fared post-war in comparison to the trench-soldiers. Was the term lack of moral fiber applied to them? Dunno. Their war was fought in short, intense spurts, not the long, filthy war shared with rats, lice, mud and decomposing corpses. And their war often ended with the LMF diagnosis, and looks of disgust followed them the rest of their lives.

No, today’s entry is from my old comrade Wilfred Owen, whose war was in those trenches, and who experienced the mental breakdown he writes of here. He pulls no punches..

(As we continue engaging in warfare with all the technology at our disposal—because wars are always technological drivers—we continue to learn more about the aftereffects. Seems that much of what has been called over the century LMF, battle fatigue, PTSD is undiagnosed traumatic brain injury. And now that it’s not something that chickenhawks can dismiss as non-physiological, we may get around to finding treatments that will reduce the appalling post-combat suicide rate for our military members.)

“Mental Cases”

Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?
Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,
Drooping tongues from jays that slob their relish,
Baring teeth that leer like skulls' teeth wicked?
Stroke on stroke of pain,- but what slow panic,
Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?
Ever from their hair and through their hands' palms
Misery swelters. Surely we have perished
Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?

-These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.
Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,
Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.
Always they must see these things and hear them,
Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,
Carnage incomparable, and human squander
Rucked too thick for these men's extrication.

Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented
Back into their brains, because on their sense
Sunlight seems a blood-smear; night comes blood-black;
Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh.
-Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,
Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.
-Thus their hands are plucking at each other;
Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging;
Snatching after us who smote them, brother,
Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.