Dr. Metablog

De Sternuente, or, Of Sneezing

I enjoy fighting off a sneeze. It takes practice and concentration. When the sneeze urge emerges, without warning, the battle is joined. On the side of the sneeze -- dust or some other foreign particles passing through the nasal hairs, reaching  the nasal mucosa, releasing a flood of histamines which irritate the nerve cells and signal the brain to stimulate the trigeminal network and activate the pharyngeal and tracheal muscles, producing a noisy, 100-mile-an-hour blast of microbes and snot. On the side of restraint -- nothing but enormous personal discipline and the desire not to surrender to animal nature. There are some, who are less committed to mind-over-body, who employ the fingertips to pinch the end of the nose, or, alternatively, who press a knuckle against the philtrum, the infranasal depression which Shakespeare, curiously, called "the valley" -- but frankly, when it comes to resisting sternutation, digital success is only half a loaf. It's far more rewarding to think one's way to a rare victory in the lifelong sneezomachia. Not to sneeze is a triumph of the will.

Which is not to assert that a good sneeze gives no pleasure, if a person would give oneself over to it. It's simply that the sneeze, especially one of the window-rattling variety, is so entirely anarchic and inartistic, which might be why there is so slight a sneeze literature. Although hard to believe, it's a fact that Puck is the only character in all of Shakespeare's plays who deigns to mention the sneeze, and even he weakens its disruptive force by employing the archaism "neeze." The best-known literary sneeze (or, at least, the only one that comes to my mind) occurs in Pope's Rape of the Lock, when Belinda, ravished by Sir Plume's "glittering forfex," throws snuff in the baron's nose. Immediately "with starting tears each eye o'erflows,/ And the high dome re-echoes to his nose." Snuff artificially stimulates sneezing, which may or may not be be why Michael, Tsar of all the Russians, proposed amputating the noses of snuffers. Michael's contemporary, Pope Urban VIII, merely threatened excommunication. Some say that the practice of saying "God bless you" to sneezers originated with Pope Gregory the Great, and has to do with the superstition that the soul leaves the sneezing body, perhaps nasally.

Why is it that no one every says "God bless you" to farters, who are as much in need of divine intervention  as sneezers. Society demands that farting, though shameful (and belching, though comic), should be controlled; sneezing is, except for the most determined, uncontrollable.  

Mannahatta

Eric Sanderson's Mannahatta (New York: Abrams, 2009) reconstructs Manhattan as it would have appeared to Henry Hudson when he sailed into the harbor in 1609. The glory of the book lies in its illustrations.  Here's a conjectural reconstrion of old Manhattan island:

And here's a clever juxtaposition of ancient and modern:

In 1609, the island of Manhattan was home to between 400 and 1000 Lenape Indians. They lived on fish, shellfish (leaving behind extensive middens), deer and other wildlife, on fruits and berries.  They practiced some small-scale farming of corn, squash, and beans. Sanderson estimates that the Lenape had lived on Manhattan for 10,000 years, or 400 generations.

Why so few people? The land was fertile, the seas abundant, the weather not particularly harsh. While the Lenape sat still in Manhattan, advanced civilizations were created by the Mayans, the Aztecs and the Incas. Along the banks of the Mississippi, the city of Cahokia rose and fell. And yet the Lenape never domesticated a single animal beside the dog and left behind no pottery, weaving, or metals. They remained stuck in the paleolithic. Why, I wonder. Perhaps things were too good.

On the other hand, the Lenape lived in harmony with the island for a very long time. What are the odds that our present civilization, which has totally transformed Manhattan in 400 short years, or just 16 generations, will last one tenth as long? 

 

February 24:  Still curious about the want of population growth or technological development among the Lenape, I read C. A. Weslager's The Delaware Indians, A History (1972) (Lenapes were called by their Anglo name, Delaware, for many years). Wenslager does not suggest that the Lenape ever achieved larger populations. Nor does he point to any archeological evidence of cultural achievement. Still, I'm mildly suspicious that there may be more to the story.  We know that Verrazzano contacted the Lenapes 90 years before Hudson sailed into the harbor, and who knows what diseases he might have transmitted.

Bird, Bigbird, and Little

One high noon, many years ago, when I was myself barely fledged, and was an undergraduate at a "large Eastern university,"  I spotted three well-known members of the humanities faculty on the hunt for lunch. They were Ephim Fogel, David Grossvogel, and Don Kleine. An unforgettable assemblage!  Fogel, Grossvogel and Kleine, I thought -- sounds like the name of a law firm invented by Tom Pynchon.

I had not reflected on this  -- to me  -- amusing incident until this week, when I was reading the bird book that I mentioned in a previous post. There I discovered that the largest known bird was the recently extinct elephant bird, a distant Madagascan cousin of the ostrich, which stood 10 feet tall and tipped the scale at 880 pounds. Its eggs were 3 feet in circumference and would have provided three chicken-size egg omelets for about 55 people. I also learned that the smallest bird is the bee hummingbird which the calipers says is two inches long and which weighs .06 of an ounce. Its egg is the size of a pea, which means than it would take a small flock of hummingbirds many days to make me a decent breakfast. 

Here's a bee hummingbird:

And here's an imaginative reconstruction of the elephant bird, a grossvogel if there ever was one.

 

They are not drawn to scale.

Quiz

What is a currawong? a gonolek, a boubou, a tchagra, a brubru?  a sitella, a minivet? a drongo? a common koel?  Do you think that I've invented these words?  Heck no. Each one is absolutely genuine and furthermore, far beyond my powers of invention. And from the same large family come the zitting cisticola, the bulbul, the cacique, the oropedola, the po'o-uli, and the 'o'u. Not to mention the rhabdornis, the oxpecker. the rockjumper, the babbler, the treecreeper, the tapaculo, the cotinga, the manakin, the pitta, the assity, the yellow rifleman, and the logrunner.

You've probably figured it out by now. They're all passerines.

These great and new-to-me words come from The Bird (New York, 2008), a whimsical, idiosyncratic survey, by the appropriately--named ornithologist Colin Tudge. "What's that on that branch over there? Is it a grinning tudge?"

Onagers

It's absolutely astonishing that I've lived all these years in total ignorance of onagers. And would have presisted in abysmal onagerian oblivion hadn't read David Anthony's fascinating monograph, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language (2007). Anthony's thesis is that "proto-Indo-European" -- from which the Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Romance, and Indic languages, among others, are descended, originated in the steppes north of the Black and Caspian seas. The inhabitants of these areas domesticated horses and invented or adopted the wheel and the wagon, which gave them the technological advantage to spread their culture and language across the steppes eastward as far as China and westward to the Atlantic. This same people also invented  the chariot -- a horse-drawn single-axle vehicle, which, manned by a warrior armed with bronze-headed javelins, was the principal engine of war for the thousand years that began about 1700 BCE and ended about 700 BCE. It's a lovely hypothesis, bristling with the evidence of hundreds of archeological digs. 

Pre-proto-Indo-European speakers ate horses long before they domesticated them and rode them before they learned to harness them to chariots and wagons. However, horses weren't the only equid in the neighborhood.  There were also onagers.

But all they could do with onagers was feast on them. The evidence lies in the thousands of midden heaps that are loaded with onager bones. Here are two onagers:

 

Onagers are half the size, or less, than the horses with which we are familiar. They are apparently untamable, like zebras, but, uniike zebras, edible. (So tasty, in fact, that fewer than a thousand of them survive in the wild.)

Anthony doesn't say so, but if there had been only onagers, and not those noble and cooperative horses, we would certainly not be speaking and writing an Indo-European language -- and, for that matter, we might still be trundling across the wide Missouri in oxcarts. 

From the Bronze Age down to the second decade of the nineteenth century, the horse was the fastest and most reliable way to travel, the quickest way to convey information, the backbone of armies, and the most conspicuous index of wealth and status.

Horses are handsome and intelligent. Onagers are ugly, awkward, and stubborn, and could never have taken part in the creation of complex civilizations. Poets have celebrated "fiery Pegasus"  for millenia; no one, to the best of my knowledge, has ever rhapsodized the onager. 

Fermat's Room; Goldbach's Conjecture.

I reached my peak with numbers when I was a child at P. S. 217 (under the tutelage of Mrs. McNulty).  Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division -- that's my area of expertise. Geometry, algebra, trig -- way too abstract for my pedestrian brain. Calculus and up -- not the least chance.

Arithmetic yes, mathematics no.

Sometimes I try to read popularizations of mathematical theory, but I rarely make it beyond the first few sentences. Once symbols start to appear, I'm done. Especially Greek letters (in parentheses). 

The consolation prize is that I'm better than most people at mental arithmetic. I can do sums and approximations and other stuff in my head.

Last night, we watched Fermat's Room. It's the kind of movie that is often called an "ingenious thriller."  It's also a member of a very small group of films that concern mathematics or mathematicians:  Good Will Hunting, Stand and Deliver, Antonia's Line, Straw Dogs. 

Fermat's Room focuses on a possible proof of Christian Goldbach's Conjecture. I suppose that I should have known about Herr Goldbach and his guess, but I confess to ignorance. Goldbach's conjecture dates to 1742 and is apparently one of the oldest unsolved problems in number theory. In brief, Goldbach theorized that every even integer greater than 2 can be written as the sum of two prime numbers. For example, 10 is equal to 3 plus 7, 20 to 17 plus 3 (or 13 plus 7), and 100 resolves into 47 plus 53. Although no one has found a number that doesn't work, the conjecture can't be proved -- or, at least, hasn't been proved because there are some very large numbers out there. In Fermat's Room, two of the characters claim to have proved the conjecture. And they are consequently at odds.

I had always thought of prime numbers as a kind of novelty or curiosity. But if primes are a component of all even numbers -- well, that's something.  Goldbach's idea raises the stature of primes in my perennially naive eyes -- in exactly the same way that the Fibonacci series became more important to me when I learned that the chambered nautilis is structured Fibonacci-wise.  

While watching the movie (which is a good one), I ran through the even numbers from 10 to 70.  Everything was in order. But why?

Later in the evening, I read that every even number can also be resolved into the sum of a semi-prime (which is the product of two primes) and a prime. So 100 equals 77 (7 time 11) and 23. I spent a restless  night summing, in my bed, semi-primes and primes from 10 to 100. All in order, once again.

Why should it be so?

Whether it should be, or not, it is.  I remember that I used to answer my children and my students with the response, "That's not a why question?" Goldbach's Conjecture is a fact, not a why.

It's like gravity. I understand that the apple falls to the ground and that the moon doesn't head out into space and that it's harder to walk uphill than downhill. But I still don't understand why. It works, and that's enough. For me.

Re-thinking Slugs

Yesterday's post was disrespectful of slugs. I'm chagrined to have been so benighted and bigoted. After all, slugs have mothers too. In a comment, Mrs. KKP --formerly Miss KKH -- (a food safety specialist) reports that many people happily eat slugs, which are a great source of protein and surely taste just like chicken when fried, or blended into a stew. They will no doubt serve equally well in a fricassee or a ragout.

In my defense, I can only say that I've not enjoyed a good relationship with slugs, so far. I remember my first encounter with the slimy tribe -- as a young, innocent boy, in my father's garden on East 9th Street, where six-inch long fat gruesome creatures violated the precious daylilies with trails of goo. Slugs were unlike anything I had previously encountered and seemed to me to be either extra-terrestrial or transplanted from a horror movie. "Just pick them up and throw them into the bucket," my father said, optimistically. Squeamish, I declined.

And then there were the foot-long slugs crawling up the outsides of the windows on Mackinack Island and California's horrid banana slugs. They're all dreadful and voracious beings.

But now, in my maturity, I say, live and let live. Just don't make me eat them -- or any cephalopod, for that matter.

The most popular slug recipe, google tells us, is for slug fritters. It begins with this ominous sentence: "Ingredients: ten freshly slaughtered slugs cleaned of all outer mucous."

Two Good Reasons Not To Eat Raw Slugs on a Dare

Reason A.  Because slugs are hideous and disgusting. 

                    

Reason B:  Because slugs eat rat droppings which can carry a lungworm parasite -- a nematode called Angiostrongylus cantonensis -- which causes fatal brain swelling. According to the NYTimes, a 27-year-old Australian man "has been hospitalized for more than a month after eating the slugs on a dare."

“We hope this will help to remind others to avoid eating raw slugs," said a spokesman.

Barmagillion

A:  "What's that stand of trees that are down there by the brook?"

M:  "Cottonwoods.  I planted one of them must be thirty-five years ago.  The big one.  They reproduce like aspens, underground runners.  Turned into a nice stand."

A:  "When I was working the sawmill, sometimes the locals would bring in a tree they called "barmagillion" or "bahmagillion."  I could never figure out what it was.  I looked in all the tree books.  We treated it just like poplar."

M:  "Was it poplar?.  Cottonwoods are poplars."

A:  "It took me twenty years to figure out what 'barmagillion' was.  Actually, I didn't figure it out.  Neill was here with one of those telephones that does everything.  He looked it up.  It's "balm of Gilead."  

(I looked it up also.  "Balm of Gilead" is another name for what most people around here call "balsam poplar."  It's not uncommon but not plentiful either, at least in these parts. I didn't know that the buds are covered with sticky resin used by bees to plug holes in their nests and by humans as a kind of perfume.)

A Brief Conversation about Computers and also about Good and Evil

Vivian de St. Vrain:  "Why is my computer always breaking down. Why does it get infected with these nasty viruses and trojan horses and stuff?"

NGP (my computer consultant):  "Because there are evil people in the world."

Brain Chemistry, Macbeth, Nihilism

Our knowledge of our own brains is mighty slim and as a consequence our therapies for insanity, head injuries and dementia are primitive. When John Donne was dying in 1633, his physicians tied pigeons to his feet. Present-day medicine offers remedies for Alzheimer's sufferers that are no more effective than pigeon tying. Brainwise, we linger in the dark ages (nowadays renamed "late antiquity").  

Or the early medieval period. Not to say that nothing is known. There have been advances. To bring myself up-to-date, I read The Tell-Tale Brain by V. S. Ramachandran, a book which has been making a stir in pop-science circles. Ramachandran's sensible thesis is that there are structures in the human brain that are either undeveloped or that simply don't exist in the brains of apes. It's commons sense to think so: human beings do things that apes don't: they study themselves in the mirror, they compose and play piano sonatas, and they think about their place in the universe.  

Ramachandran is an ingenious experimenter but he gets beyond his depth when he waxes philosophical -- which he does far too often. Here's an example of the kind of thinking that rubs me wrong.

"I get chills," says Ramachandran, "whenever I hear Macbeth's immortal soliloquy 'Out out, brief candle!/Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/ And then is heard no more. It is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.'"  He says that "these  words are one of the most profound and deeply moving remarks about life that anyone has ever made!"

I don't question Ramachandran's chills, but I'm bothered by his unthinking Bardolatry ("immortal solilquy"; "profound";  "that anyone has ever made").  Poor Will doesn't need  more reverent cliches shoveled his way. He's already buried under heaps of them.    

Bardolatry such as Ramachandran's obstructs thinking. What does it mean to say that Macbeth's soliloquy is "profound... about life?"  Let's go to the tape.

When Macbeth says these words, he's taken his cue from the witches, who are "instruments of darkness."  At their suggestion, he's murdered his king, murdered his closest friend Banquo and Banquo's son Fleance, and he's "savagely slaughtered" Macduff's wife and children ("All my pretty ones...  All my pretty chickens and their dam/ At one fell swoop"). Moreover, he's committed uncatalogued atrocities innumerable: "Each new morn/ New widows howl, new orphans cry." His brain is "filled with scorpions" and just before he utters the soliloquy that gives Ramachandran goosebumps, he learns that his wife, burdened with guilt, has done herself in. Macbeth is not in a good way. 

Macbeth is not a role-model and his philosophical revelations are not designed to be insightful or profound. Quite the opposite. Though Macbeth is undeniably eloquent, he's become a shallow nihilist. Life, in fact, is not "a tale told by an idiot" and in Shakespeare's late-medieval religious universe, only someone in the throes of deepest despair and certain of his own damnation would think so. Macbeth has learned exactly the wrong lesson. So, apparently, has Ramachandran.

Gosh, great literature can sometimes be dangerous, can't it?

It's no secret that the universe with its billions and billions of galaxies will go on very well without us.  Shakespeare knew that when looked at from the strictly scientific point of view, people are no more than "many a thousand grains/ That issue out of dust."  But just because we're little and it's big, we're not compelled to admire the despairing and empty philosphy of to which Macbeth subscribes.

Not while there are red wheelbarrows, winter love in dark corners, and "little nameless, unremembered acts/ Of kindness and of love." 

Sticker Shock

In the old days, when I'd whip up a big batch of spaghetti sauce, I'd add a pound or so of ground beef and a generous portion of hot Italian sausage. But that was B. C. (before cholesterol). Nowadays, it's all vegetarian. Not nearly as tasty, but acceptable -- and appropriate, in its blandness, to these latter days.  To enrich the meatless mixture, I add a couple of cuisinarted carrots and a grated zucchini or two. 

At our local food market, a 6" zucchini costs $1.00. An entire buck. I'm not usually one to complain about the price of things. It's not helpful or cheerful to do so.  I pay the freight and and I'm glad to be able to do so.  I don't grieve about the cost of cars or insurance or potatoes. Nevertheless, I'm appalled when I plunk down that dollar for a short, skinny zucchini. 

The zucchini is an abundant fruit.  Production is measured in cornucopias. In August and September, at harvest time, it's impossible to keep up with them.  Just two small hills and there are so many zucchinis that we can't possibly eat them, can't give them away, and have to get out the backhoe and dig a trench to dispose of them. (In our part of Vermont, there's a local saying that in late summer you must keep the door of your car locked or someone will open it up and throw in a zucchini.)  And then there's always the hidden zuke that, hiding under an enormous leaf, has grown to the size of a three-year-old child, only heavier.  

I know that it shouldn't be so, but that dollar for a measly little zucchini irks me.     

 

 

 

Amnesia in Films: Random Harvest (1942)

In Mervyn LeRoy's  Random Harvest (1942), amnesia is not merely a plot gimmick. The amnesia of Charles Rainier, a shell-shocked World War I veteran, is the principal subject of the film. Rainier (Ronald Colman) begins in Condition A (amnesiac but solid citizen and loving husband) but is hit by a cab in Liverpool and transitions to Condition B (aristocratic, efficient, but passionless, and with no knowledge of the three years between the war and the cab).  Will he remember the lost years and reintegrate the two parts of his hstory?  Well, yes, he does, but only with the decades-long assistance of his patient-Griselda wife Paula/Margaret (excellently played by the ageless Green Garson). 

It's kind of a soap-opera-y film and I'm embarrassed to confess that it moved me.  The last scene, when Rainier finally remembers that he had long ago loved and married Margaret under her real name Paula, is a curious kind of anagnorisis.  Although they've known each other for decades, true recognition comes suddenly and joyfully.  And I bought it, much against my will.  Dropped a reluctant tear. 

Because of the amnesia, Charles has two different lives, but he doesn't, as in other films, have two different personalities.  He's kindly, steadfast, and rather boring in both states. The film offers little in the way of theory of amnesia.  "As one door opens, another closes" says a friendly but passive psychiatrist, whose expertise is validated only by his middle-European accent. 

In most films, diseases resemble their manifestations in real life. Amnesia, on the other hand, can be anything the screenwriter says it it is.  It's a mighty elastic phenomenon, unmoored to medical experience or knowledge.  However imagined, the total amnesia of characters in films is a great plot device.  The audience is always in the know and therefore feels superior to the poor character/actor who stumbles toward an understanding of his own self.  It's hard to believe that Shakespeare was able to write forty plays without ever resorting to amnesia. 

At a social event a few days ago I met a psychologist who works at the AFB in Colorado Springs with veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq. I asked her if she had ever encountered a case of amnesia.  She said that many injured personnel can't remember the moments just before they were wounded, but that she'd never enountered a case of movie-style amnesia.  Or heard of one.  And, she added, trust me, I've dealt with many kinds of mental disturbances.

Dentists I Have Known

When I was a child, there were two neighborhood dentists.  One was named Caress and the other was named Yankowitz.  My parents chose Nathan Caress, possibly for onomastic reasons, but they might have made a mistake;  Nathan Caress should have been called Nathan Butcher.  Dentistry sixty years ago was much inferior to dentistry today, especially in our dark corner of the universe.  There was no anaesthetics, no novacaine.  Baby teeth that developed cavities were summarily yankowitzed with a pair of what looked like industrial pliers.  Adult teeth that needed repair were excavated with a low-speed mechanical drill, then sterilized with carbolic acid, and filled with a mercury compound that has over the years not doubt lowered my IQ by dozens or scores of points. Dentistry was painful. No, it wasn't painful, it was torture.  Dr. Caress, whose office was in the living room of his house on Rugby Road, had a big black ugly mole on his left cheek. I studied that mole for many too many hours.

Sometime in my early teens I was sent to an orthodontist, Irving Pollack, who had a very official suite of rooms in a high-rise on Joralemon Street, a subway ride away.  I am grateful to him because, although he made a miserable adolescence even more miserable, his "appliances" helped keep my mismatched, askew anthology of teeth in my head.  In fact, I have all but one of them to this day.  

No thanks to my next dentist, T. Gorfein of Cambridge, Massachusetts, a genuine criminal who asserted that I had twenty-two cavities and set out to fill them. I left him after a couple of weeks, not because I was wise enough to suspect that he was  a cheat, but because while he was working on me, he called over his assistant and said -- genuine historical quote coming here -- "Would you look at that sucker bleed."  At the university clinic, the dentist to whom I was assigned could find only two cavities, which she (my first female practitioner) painlessly filled. I must have had other dental experiences before Colorado's Amiot and Johnson, both of whom were competent but both of whom insisted on talking Republican nonsense to defenseless me while my mouth was filled with equipment and fat fingers. Johnson left a crown too high, causing enormous pain; searching for an alternative for his ham-handedness, I remembered that I had bus-commuted with a dental student who seemed intelligent. She became a dentista of high regard for many years until she took very early retirement from the trade -- I never knew why. She sold her practice to another competent woman who charges outrageous sky high prices for her services, but keeps me healthy.

So the score as we head into overtime:  one fake tooth, two root canal jobs, a couple of tender spots, two unerupted wisdom teeth waiting to cause trouble, but unabated ability to eat and enjoy corn on the cob. Nevertheless, lots of residual Caress-caused nervousness every time I need to see someone in the tooth business.  

More tooth news:

Prostituting that Past-Cure Malady

i''ve read All's Well that Ends Well many times (thrice just in the last week), always with puzzlement and  dissatisfaction. It's a confused and confusing play. My best guess is that Shakespeare got going on some appealing but intractable material and struggled with it for many years but was never able to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion. 

Until this last reading, I had never paid much attention to the King of France who is, I think, more of a plot mechanism than a rounded character. Shakespeare never even bothered to give him a first name -- he's "King" but whether Charles or Louis or Lothair we're never told.  He plays a crucial part in the fable, because, dying of a "fistula," he is cured by our heroine Helen and in exchange grants her the husband of her choice (her obsession, actually) -- the handsome soldier and lout Bertram. Later in the play, after Bertram has fled from the marriage, the King again intervenes to restore him (against his will) to Helen.  The King is short-tempered and highly conscious of his regal status -- as Kings are in literature -- but he is not particularly eloquent or interesting. 

But in my most recent reading, I was struck by some lines that I had not registered in my salad days. Helen urges the King to allow her to try her "receipts" (i.e. prescriptions or drugs) on him. He resists, of course, simply so that Helen may overcome another contrived obstacle. But the King's sentences, fable apart, are very pertinent, most particularly to those of us who have staggered to life's endgame:  

                                We thank you, maiden,

But may not be so credulous of cure,

When our most learned doctors leave us and

The congregated college have concluded

That laboring art can never ransom nature

From her inaidable estate.  I say we must not

So stain our judgment, or corrupt our hope,

To prostitute our past-cure malady

To empirics, or to dissever so

Our great self and our credit to esteem

A senseless help, when help past sense we deem.

"Empiric" is Shakespearean for "phonies."  The King will not compromise his rationality or his dignity by indulging himself with the sixteenth-century version of faith-healers, herbalists, reiki masters, homeopaths, naturists or any other of the enormous plague of quack-quacks who litter our anti-rational landscape. 

Good for him, I say, even though, as it turns out, he's wrong and the maiden successfully works her receipts.  Shakespeare keeps us out of the sickroom, so we don't know exactly what she prescribes (just as well), but we do learn that the credulous bystanders attribute the cure not to science but to divine intervention.  As the very orthodox and conventional Lafeu puts it, "They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons to make modern  (i.e. routine, everyday) and familiar, things [that are] supernatural and causeless.  Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear (i.e. fear of the unknown)" -- an interpretation that might made sense in Shakespeare's scientifically-ignorant late medieval world, but which is no longer applicable.  

Nevertheless, I trust that when my time comes, I will follow the King's good example and come to terms with reality rather than succumb to irrationality and "esteem a senseless hope."    

Sign of the Times

I had a prescription to fill for amoxicillin.  I noticed that there's a new pharmacy on Pearl Street;  or at least I thought there is.  It's called by the very pharmacy-sounding name Boulder Rx.  I walked in:  very definitely not a pharmacy.  Not when there's a large illustration of marijuana leaf and a sign that reads "Headies."  And a very thick probably bullet-proof plate glass window separating customers from clerk.  Sign of the times.  MMJ (medical marijuana) is now perfectly legal here in Colorado.

I took my prescription elsewhere.

From the Boulder Rx website:  "Menu: Bubba Kush, Tangerine Kush, Sour D, Chemdog, Godfather, Sour Kush, Purple Cinderella, Mananuska, OG Kush."  Different strains, not doubt designed to attack different diseases.  I wonder exactly what is cured by Purple Cinderalla. 

Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore. 

 

Somnus Imago Mortis

It's an ancient commonplace -- sleep is the image of death.  In some versions, it's a preparation for death: God has provided us with sleep to get us ready for our inevitable end.  "Somnus imago mortis" is all over Shakespeare:  "sleep thou ape of death,"  "death-counterfeiting sleep," etc.

My own personal sleep is so wracked with awakenings and nightmares and night-sweats and fluff in the lung and a feverish tongue that I can't easily think of it as a preparation for anything.  For me, sleep is rather a task, an effort, than a period of oblivion.  I want my tombstone to be inscribed with the motto, "No more insomnia, forever."

But just six weeks ago, I experienced a pure "somnus imago mortis" moment.  I was on a gurney, drugged, prepared for surgery.  I was wheeled into a room.  Time came to a complete halt.  And then several hours later I was awakened. Nothing -- nothing -- intervened from the time that I was put under until the moment when I came to. (Perhaps there was an amnesic in the drug cocktail -- I wouldn't know.)

It was such a profound and eventless sleep that it has, in fact, prepared me for the sleep of death.  There was not a whisper, not a thought, nothing.  Now, at last, I know how it will be.

In the hospital, there was a very welcome rebirth.  But why, then, does the phrase, "I have been half in love with easeful death" continue to resonate in my brain?

An Unsettling Anecdote

There's an article in the current Harvard Magazine on the subject of caregiving.  (I've been thinking about caregiving quite a bit the last while, because I've been the recipient of a lot of it, having been bedridden for a couple of weeks with a slipped, or herniated, or ruptured disc).  Taking care of me has been a chore, performed with great grace and generosity by Mrs. Dr. M, by Dr. M's oldest son, and by his son's wonderful wife. 

The article on caregiving begins with a striking, unsettling anecdote. 

In 1966, as a visiting medical student at a London teaching hospital, I interviewed a husband and wife, in their early twenties, who had recently experienced a truly calamitous health catastrophe. On their wedding night, in their first experience of sexual intercourse, a malformed blood vessel in the husband’s brain burst, leaving him with a disabling paralysis of the right side of his body. Stunned and guilt-ridden, the couple clutched hands and cried silently as they shared their suffering with me. My job was to get the neurological examination right and diagnose where the rupture had taken place.

The authori's point is that a diagnosis is incomplete in the absence of compassion, not only in this most dramatic case but in more ordinary occasions.  

It has been difficult for me to keep my mind off this traumatized young couple --- stepping enthusiastically and it would appear naively into a first adventure in sexual expression only to be overwhelmed by an out-of-the-blue horror.  It's a sorrow beyond ordinary sorrow.  I wish that the author had added a paragraph in which he reported that the young man recovered, that surgery corrected the defect, and that the couple went on to live a long and satisfying life.  I fear that the absence of such a report means that there was no good news.  Starting with an aneurysm in the brain, it's easy to descend into scenarios of doom.

Ah life!  So many potential disasters out there, so many bullets to dodge.

Even while I'm lying here, unable to get around without pain, I know that I've lived a most fortunate life.  No sex-related aneurysms, for one thing.

Why I Fear Dentists

Novacaine was discovered sometime around the turn of the last century, but it hadn't reached the backward interior of Brooklyn during my childhood.  As a result, I endured hours of drilling and filling without anaesthetics. It was horrible.

The local dentist was named Dr. Caress. It would have been more appropriate if he had been called Dr. Butcher. 

There were no high-speed drills.  Dr. Caress used a mechanical drill -- a motor attached to a system of small pulleys, if I remember correctly, at the business end of which was some sort of bur.  It was slow and awkward and It took forever to drill out a cavity.  There was lots of starting and stopping and moaning and readjusting and rinsing and spitting.  I can still remember the pain.  It was not a "discomfort" kind of pain.  It was a torture kind of pain. 

All this in the office of Dr. Caress.  I can't even imagine what it was like across Ocean Parkway where the local dentist was named Dr. Yankowitz. 

More on Dr. Metablog's mouth right here.

A Further Note on Nineteenth-Century Horsedrawn Vehicles

Modern readers of the great classic novels of the previous era generally have no clue about the significance of horses and horse-drawn vehicles.  As I wrote, right here on this blague a couple of months ago, "no, I'm not obsessed, it's just that I have this little bee in my bonnet about the fact that we gasoline-era moderns understand the exact social significance of jeep, Jaguar, Jetta, and jalopy, but we are, except for specialists, utterly clueless as to the valence of barouche, basket carriage, berlin, britchka, brougham, buckboard, buggy, cabriolet, caleche, cariole, carryall, chaise, chariot, clarence, coupe, croydon, curricle, cutter, daumont, dearborn, diligence, dog-cart, fiacre, fly, four-wheeler, gig, go-cart, governess cart, hansom, jaunty car, jersey-wagon, kibitka, landau, phaeton, post-chaise, rockaway, shandrydan, shay, spider-phaeton, spring-van, stanhope, sulky, surrey, T-cart, telyezhka, tilbury, tarantass, trap, troika, victoria, vis-a-vis, wagonette, and wurt."

What does it tell us when our hero arrives on the scene in a wurt?  Does it mean that he is rich and stylish, or vulgar and pretentious, or tasteless, or downtrodden.  We don't know, and so we read our own traditional literature with one hand tied behind our backs.

Well, I though that I had made my point, and I thought also that I had exhausted the list of nineteenth-century horse-drawn vehicles.  But then I came upon this passage in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (a truly splendid novel published in 1920, though the action is set in the 1870s). 

They [Archer and Countess Olenska] walked back toward Beacon Street, and near the club Archer caught sight of the plush-lined "herdic" which had carried his note to the Parker House, and whose driver was reposing from this effort by bathing his brow at the corner hydrant.
    "I told you everything was predestined!  Here's a cab for us.  You see!"  They laughed, astonished at the miracle of picking up a public conveyance at that hour, and in that unlikely spot, in a city where cabstands were still a "foreign" novelty.

The novelty, the herdic, was "a kind of carriage invented by Peter Herdic of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, in 1881" (so Wharton is guilty of a tiny anachronism).  "A predecessor of the taxicab, the herdic was a small two-wheeled carriage that had side seats and an entrance at the back.  Their low entry made it easy for passengers to enter and exit the cars.  The first herdics carried up to eight passengers.  The earliest herdics were painted bright yellow."

Cheers to Peter Herdic, forgotten father of the Yellow Cab. 

New Bird in Town

A creature previously unknown to me has appeared in the pond.  After a few moments with the binoculars and a glance at Peterson's classic Field Guide to the Birds along with some intense internet research, I could make a positive identification.  It's a double-crested cormorant, usually found at the seacoast but sometimes in rivers and lakes, which has been "recently extending its range" and which has just now arrived on Hackett Hill Road.  Although it's exciting to encounter a new bird, especially a large graceful swimmer and diver, the cormorant arrives tarnished by a bad reputation.  Cormorants form very large colonies and over-indulge their voracious appetites -- they gobble fish, frogs, salamanders, clean out the lakes.  Is it after our trout?  They've become a pest on Lake Champlain, where they're now "taking measures" to reduce the population.  I don't mind one cormorant, but I certainly don't want to host a horde of them

When the first wild turkey arrived, about fifteen years ago, everyone would stop and stare.  Now turkeys are as common as pigeons, but as far as I can tell, do no damage (unless they get into the garden, which they haven't, so far).  They eat insects, not frogs. Plus they're good eating.  I've never heard of anyone salivating over roast cormorant.

I'd trade the cormorant, and the turkeys for that matter, for some of the birds that have disappared over the last forty years.  We used to have a symphony at dawn and dusk -- now there's hardly a peep, except for the robins and the bluejays.  I'd give a lot to hear a white-throated sparrow at daybreak.  It's been years since I've seen a bluebird, a wren, an indigo bunting, an oriole, a purple martin, a red-wing blackbird, a sandpiper, a tanager, a vireo.  Or seen the swifts overhead. Even our once-abundant swallows have become rare. Where are they? 

Late Blight

It sems so allegorically named, late blight, especially appropriate to your septuagenarian gardener. But it's more than symbolic -- late blight here and it's real.   It's official name is phytophthora infestans.  It's a noxious fungus and it appears just when you're about to start harvesting your abundant tomatoes.  Late blight blackens and putrifies leaves, stems, and the fruits themselves. It leaves nothing edible, and there's no recourse o do except to pull out your plants, and then either burn them or put them in black plastic and take them to the dump.  We're trying to rescue a few of the tomatoes by pulling off the bad leaves, but it's a losing cause.  All that work -- starting the seeds, watching and watering, fertilizing and staking and tying up -- all wasted.  What a pity.

 Late blight also affects potatoes.  In fact, this nasty fungus is responsible for the great Irish famine of the 1840s.  So while we're mournful, we're glad that we don't depend on our tomatoes for sustenance or income. 

Why this year?  Some say that the disease comes to us from the great factory farms in the south, where tomatoes are started early and then shipped north in late spring. My neighbors put the blame on Wal-Mart.  But in all honesty, I must admit that all my tomatoes were started locally, by friends and relations.  The fungus can't be transmitted through the seed, so the tomato factories are off the hook.  The real culprit is the weather -- the soggy cold of June and July was hideous if you're a tomato but just perfect if you're a blight.  

I think I'll take a year off from tomatoes -- let the garden go fallow, or just plant flowers.  I couldn't bear to lose another crop. I'll follow the official advice --root out every single volunteer tomato and pull every weed in the nightshade family.  No tomatoes until 2011.       

The Slightness of the Lambs

As far as I can tell, the deer generally keep clear of the back field where the Morgans and the Scottish Blackfaces are pastured.  Perhaps it's because the domestic animals eat down the grass, or perhaps the deer just don't like company.  But a few days ago, I watched four white-tailed deer -- a doe with three fawns, I believe, though such a group makes an unlikely family -- chase twenty-two sheep out of the field and back to their fold.  Sheep are notoriously skittish, but then, so are the white tails.  It was a battle of cowards.  It was especially painful to watch because one of the sheep was the ram, McCavish, and it's his job (aside from the annual servicing, at which he performed brilliantly) is to guard the ewes.  McCavish is the "herd sire," new to the flock,  He was recently imported from Wisconsin; his grandfather came from Scotland in the form of a vial of sperm packed in dry ice.  What was Mr. McCavish thinking when he ran from the field?  I was embarrassed for him and for the entire flock.  Query:  will the sheep stand their ground or will they allow themselves to be intimidated by the wild turkeys?

Pastorale

Sharon was here yesterday.  She has a new method to keep the raccoons and the rats out of the food bins.  "The rats gnaw through the plastic garbage cans, the raccons open them unless I bungee them real tight. Galvinized works, but what we do now is buy junk refrigerators or freezers.  The rats can't get into them.  Of course, what you spill is feast for the mice."  Sharon's husband is a vet, but at lambing time last winter he was still recuperating from a hip replacement.  "One of the ewes," Sharon says, "was having a hard time delivering her lamb.  I went out to help pull.  I pulled out a head and a leg.  The lamb must have been dead for a long time.  I whipped out the cell phone.  I said to David, 'I don't care how long it takes to limp down here, you're in charge.'  He took one look, got the rifle, and shot the ewe." 

On Aggasiz

Louis Agassiz was, Darwin aside, the nineteenth century's most acclaimed naturalist.  He was the first to speculate about the ice ages and the first to suggest that mastodons and other giant quadrapeds had become extinct as a consequence of the deep freeze in Europe and America.  Agassiz was much celebrated in his lifetime, and at his death, Harvard, where he taught, shut down for a day for his majestic funeral.  James Russell Lowell contributed an eleven-page elegy to the Atlantic. "Seldom, if ever, has the death of a man of science been so deeply felt," reported The Nation.

These details are drawn from Barry Werth's Banquet at Delmonico's (2009) an oddly-titled but informative and accessible history of Darwinism in gilded-age America.

Here's a striking and crowded sentence about Aggasiz, also drawn from Werth's book."The son of a strong-willed assistant pastor to the Protestant congregation of a lakeside village in French-speaking Switzerland who married well, he was his parents' fifth child but the first to survive infancy." 

Agassiz was a therefore a "replacement child" with a vengeance. He "replaced" four lost siblings (but whether male or female Werth does not say).  Imagine his parents' pain; imagine how young Louis must have been cherished and protected but also, possibly, afflicted with the 'guilt of the survivor.'  Or how he must have unconsciously competed with his deceased and therefore perfect brothers and sisters.  And then try to imagine both his mother's suffering and also how his aspiring and apparently devout father might have responded to such an appalling succession of family tragedies. 

Agassiz wa.s America's foremost opponent of evolution.  He rejected natural selection because, he claimed, "Darwinism" led inevitably to "atheism" -- which hasn't turned out to be the case, although I personally can't imagine why not.  Agassiz took his own idiosyncratic route and proselytized for the curious and retrograde doctrine of "polygenism" -- the idea that the various races of man were separately -- and hierarchically -- created.  Agassiz imagined eight different kinds of humans, ranked according to their "cranial capacity" -- Caucasian, Arctic, Mongol, American Indian, Negro, Hottentot, Malay, and Australian (thereby running afoul of both "monogenists" like Darwin and bible-worshippers who acknowledged only one creation -- that of Adam and Eve). For Agassiz, each species was "a thought of God."  An odd path for usually observant scientist.  Agassiz was the favorite intellectual of slaveholders and their apologists. 

Agassiz was also a virulent and odious racist. Here's what he wrote to his mother when he stopped at a hotel in which he was served by black waiters.  "It is impossible to repress the feeling that they are not of the same blood as us. Seeing their black faces with their fat lips and their grimacing teeth, the wool on their heads, their bent knees and elongated hands, their large curved fingernails, and above all the livid colors of their palms, I could not turn my eyes from their face in order to tell them to keep their distance, and when they advanced that hideous hand toward my plate to serve me, I wished that I could leave in order to eat my bread apart rather than dine with such service.  What unhappiness for the white race to have tied its existence so closely with that of the Negroes. God protect us."  And so on, and more, and worse.  I can't remember reading a paragraph that more turned the stomach or that more cried out for psychological analysis.       

I cannot help wondering whether there might not be a connection between Agassiz's status as a replacement child and his embrace of polygenism.  It is possible that he unconsciously thought that he was a special and superior person because he, of all his siblings, was chosen for survival?  And that in the same way, white people were chosen and superior among all the "races" of humankind.  His deeply-held resistance to evidence that persuaded almost all of his fellow naturalists is inexplicable -- unless he clung to the doctrine of special creation for reasons that were fundamentally irrational.  Put it this way:  Agassiz's unusual situation required him to believe that he, and people with whom he could identify, were marked for distinction -- and that all others were inferior.  One of five among the siblings, one of eight among the races.  How else could he free himself of the guilt that he lived and thrived while his apparently less deserving siblings had perished?

Broad-brush cheap pop psychologizing, to be sure -- but let's reserve judgment until we find some time to get ourself to the library and learn a little about this brilliant, disgusting man. 

Carrots, etc.

I've experimented a bit in with flowers but in my choice of vegetables I've been quite conservative.  My garden has always relied upon the standards:  black-seeded Simpson lettuce, Detroit red beets, Danvers carrots, Waltham 29 broccoli.  But now I've decided to take a walk on the wild side.  In today's mail came my brand-new heirloom and rare seed catalog.  (Is there anything that more brightens a cold December morn than the colorful arden catalog that arrives in the mailbox at winter solstice?)  Consider the lowly carrot, for example.  Here are some of the possible choices for next year's adventure garden:  the 12" long red-orange St. Valery, dating from the 19th century;  Lunar Whites -- "white carrots were grown during the Middle Ages but now rare";  Cosmic Purple -- a dark variety, loaded with lycopene;  Parisienne -- "small round carrots popular in France";  Chantenay Red Core -- "a large stump-rooted carrot with a deep red-orange center" dating from 1929;  the "mild and sweet" Shin Kuroda, a Japanese variety.  And twenty other equally entrancing varieties.  How to choose?  I have room for twenty feet of carrots.  Just enough for one variety, or possibly, if I push it, two.   And what about tomatoes, the king of all summer vegetables, but an uncontrollable plant that turns itself into a jungle come August.  Nine pages of varieties -- greens, yellows, pinks, reds, purples in various sizes form cherry to plum to 2-pounders;  some of them mottled, others striped, round, cylindrical, and every one of  them claiming to offer old-fashioned sweet/acid tomato taste.  How many can I possibly plant?   However few, I know I'll be imploring my friends take some, please, with you when you leave.  Old Vermont saying:  "always keep your car locked in August, otherwise someone will open your door and throw in a bunch of zucchinis."  Or tomatoes. Which brings me to the nine pages of exciting squash, including the Hopi Cushaw and the Pink Banana and the.....  Well, you can see my dilemma. 

The Black Cochin

Cathy: "We have a Cochin.  She's beautiful.  Her feathers are an iridescent black.  With Cochins, the feathers cover the entire leg.  She's a pet, part of the family.  She's four years old and must weigh seven pounds.  But just lately she developed some sort of neurological disease.  She would quiver, shake, sometimes her wings, sometimes all over.  Faint.  We took her to the vet.  We thought she had eaten something bad.  It's such a wet year, there are mushrooms all over the place.  Perhaps she ate mushrooms or some poisonous berries.  The vet took an x-ray.  It cost $400."

Dr. M. (flabbergasted):  "You spent $400 on a ten-dollar chicken?!

Cathy:  "Actually, she was given to us.  Free."

Dr. M.:  "What did the x-ray show?"

Cathy:  "An egg.  You could see it clearly."

Dr. M.:  "I mean about the disease."

Cathy:  "Nothing in particular.  The shaking stopped after a while,  But a few days later she developed bumblefoot because she couldn't perch correctly.

Dr. M.:  "Bumblefoot?"

Cathy:   "Bumblefoot is an infection.  It distorts the shape of the foot.  So we've been giving her antibiotics.  One of us holds her in a towel, then the other pries open her beak.  You insert a mixture of applesauce and antibiotic into her beak. She doesn't like it."

Dr. M.:  "Is it working?"

Cathy:  "It's not clear.  She may have to have surgery. The doctor recommends it."

Dr. M. (in a state of shock):  "Surgery?  On a chicken?  How much is that going to cost."

Cathy:  "The vet says $700.  He's an avian specialist.

Dr. M (astounded):  "Are you going to do it?"

Cathy:  "We don't know.  We're thinking about it."

Dr. M.:  "Have you considered physical therapy?  Massage.  Perhaps acupuncture?

Cathy: "First we're going to try echinacea or goldenseal."

The Sculpin. Slimy or Mottled?

Knowing little of the finny tribe, I borrowed the Bradford Public Library's copy of Langdon's introductory Fishes of Vermont (2006).  It's an excellent, informative, helpful guide. With Langdon's help, I can now declare that it's undeniably the brown bullhead, a species of catfish, that has been multiplying in our pond,  The bullhead, a villainous omnivore, is one of the causes of the steep decline of our population of frogs.  The butt-ugly, scaleless, bebarbelled brute gobbles frog eggs.    

Readers of this blague will not be astonished to learn that Dr. M .has fallen deeply in love with fish names.  Take the brown bullhead, for example.  It's also known by such evocative and lunatic denominations as the horned pout, the mudcat, and the minister.  Minister?  To whom, or under what circumstances, would a brown bullhead minister?

My favorite Vermont fish, nomenclature-wise, is the slimy sculpin, also performing under such titles as the blob, the chucklehead, the rock cusk, the stargazer, and the cockatouch.  The slimy sculpin should not be confused with its near cousin, the mottled sculpin -- which can also be addressed as the slowfish or gudgeon. 

Many of the common Vermont fishes have lost their colorful historic names.  The bowfin was once called the John A. Gindle, the stonecat was the doogler, the lake trout was the togue or longue, the burbot was variously ling or lawyer (lawyer? minister?  why not accountant? or dentist?), the quillback was the buffalo, and the gar was the needlenose. On the other hand, the blandly-named pond perch of olden days is trending in the reverse direction:  it's now called the pumpkinseed -- a name which seems curiously vegetarian for a denizen of the deep.   

If I had known that there was a fish called the cisco (known on jolly days as the tollibee and on prosaic days as the sand herring), I would long ago have promoted Galen Cisco to my all-time-great Baseball-Fish Team, adding him to such piscine luminaries as Catfish Hunter, Dizzy Trout, Chico Salmon, Sid Bream, Bobby Sturgeon, Art "Red" Herring, and Shad Roe.

No Sculpins in MLB that I can recall, but In a more poetic universe, "Slimy" Sculpin would have been a spitball pitcher, or perhaps even a team owner.

A Non-Mystical Experience

It was the evening of a cloudy day and I had my face in among the clumps of blooming daylilies, which I was trying to protect from the constant encroachment of witch grass.  It's a minor art -- to lie on the ground and reach arm's length into the forest of leaves, careful not to knock the fragile buds off the scapes, and identify and remove the underground stems of the witch grass by feel alone.  I had pulled out a heap of noxious weeds and was lost, absolutely lost, in the project, when suddenly, from behind my back the about-to-set sun emerged and illuminated the scene   For no more than thirty seconds the daylily spectrum was on full display:  apricot, pink, a range of yellows, each slightly different from its neighbor, a near white, along with a few fully saturated, shimmering crimsons, plus some bicolors with their cute contrasting throats.  For a glorious moment, everything leaped at me. It was truly theatrical to be surrounded by such brilliant colors and shapes and fragrances -- a rare and memorable instance of transcendent aesthetic bliss. 

The next day, on he telephone, I tried to convey my rapture to The Daughter. She was concerned.  One of her friends had had a similar moment. Her friend was walking in the Colorado mountains and came upon a magnificent field of wild flowers.  The experience was powerful and life-changing, and she's now, after years of study, an Episcopal priest. "You're not going to tell me that it was a religious experience, are you?"  I could hear the worry in her voice.  My response:  "I would have thought you'd have known me better than that."

Some people conflate beauty with spirituality and religion.  I'm not one of those people.  Beauty is transcendent, yes, but it's also material and explicable. 

No question but that the profusion of daylily colors is glorious. For a hundred years now, careful hybridizers have worked on the homely fulvous lily, a roadside weed sometimes inelegantly called the "outhouse lily", and have transformed it into the bearer of the rainbow colors in which it now sparkles.  Thank you, clever daylily breeders, for your generations of imaginative work.  Thanks also to the parcel post driver who every year brings me three or four more new varieties from Oakes in Tennessee.  And while I'm at it, I would also like to thank the people who designed and built that brown truck and its rubber tires and constructed the roads and refined the gasoline -- no border of daylilies without their help.  Nor without the designers and manufacturers of my spade and my favorite dibble and my all-purpose dandelion puller.  I could add other equally essential people -- go right back to the first practitioners of smelting -- but I think I've made my point.  The daylilies do not declare the glory of god;  they declare the glory of human civilization and human enterprise. 

I  grow a single wild fulvous lily on the grounds, just as a reminder.

It's drab. 

Firlik, Bezoars

I don't like gore.  I’m the kind of person who won’t recklessly channel-surf for fear that the changer gizmo will maliciously lock onto our 24/7 surgery channel, where some poor soul's innards will be on garish hi-def display, And yet, despite my squeamishness, I steeled myself and read right through to the end of Katrina Firlik's Another Day in the Frontal Lobe,  which is a young neurosurgeon’s bildungs-autobiography.  Of course, I allowed myself the indulgence of zooming through some of the more gruesome parts.  How much do I need to know about maggot infestations in the living brain?

I’m grateful to Firlik for her vivid stories, for the occasional moment of black humor and also for offering a forthright glimpse into an alternative world.  Nevertheless, I'm sorry to report, Another Day is not a good book.  It's too transparently a package shaped by agent and editor for short-term commercial appeal.  The author is so anxious to be cute and to be loved – she must have been one of those front-row, admiring-eyes-glued-to-the-professor straight-A pupils -- that whenever she comes up against a controversial topic, such as the irrational funding of our medical system or the egomania of surgeons or the morality of expensive, hopeless surgical interventions, she hints at concern but then swerves and punts.  She doesn't want to offend a single potential buyer.

Not a courageous writer, she is not an admirable being either: what can one say about a highly-skilled professional who turns down job after job in the American hinterland and elects to live in New Canaan, Connecticut, because, she admits, it would be impossible to find a good Japanese restaurant in the sticks?, and who in one sentence notes that her rich town has more neurosurgeons than all of sub-Sahara Africa and in another reveals that she works on spines rather than brains nowadays because spines are more lucrative.

Hey, Katrina, the next time you publish something, sacrifice some of that royalty money and write directly from your heart (even though it's one cold and stony organ). 

Readers of this blague will not be surprised to learn that Dr. M. was much intrigued by the book's medical vocabulary.  Another Day serves up a feast of beautiful and exotic words:  venous infarct, dura, spicule, rongeur, neuroma, glioma, glioblastoma (you don’t want one!), bone dust, debulk, pachygyria. The ugliest of all: intubated.  My personal favorite, and a word that I've now put in the running for Word of the Year: bezoar.

How could I have lived all these years without knowing the word bezoar?  Could there be a surer index of my ignorance of medicine?  A bezoar, as everyone but me seems to know, is a concretion of indigestible stuff stuck somewhere in the digestive tract – hairballs, medicines, bits of food. Sometimes they can be dissolved, but on occasions they can only be removed by surgery. A bezoar was formerly thought to be a magical antidote for poisons –- so score another couple of strikes against our ignorant superstitious ancestors. The most common kind of bezoar is the phytobezoar, which is a collection of lignin, cellulose, or tannin of food fibers.  Common sources:  celery, grapes, raisins, prunes, pumpkins, all of which, if you’re like me, you’ve probably unwittingly eaten without having given a thought to their bezoar-potential and therefore neglected a splendid opportunity for hypochondria.   

A bezoar caused by eating persimmons (an especially dangerous fruit, bezoarwise), earns its very own word-- diospyrobezoar -- an odd amalgam of Greek and Persian linguistic roots and a word which, just as soon as a suitable opening arises, I intend to insinuate into the conversation.