Pulmonary View

All good. Next CT in 3 months.

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Shock Value

Source: The New Yorker

The Stubborn Child
From Grimm’s Fairy Tales

Once upon a time there was a stubborn child who never did what his mother told him to do. The dear Lord, therefore, did not look kindly upon him, and let him become sick. No doctor could cure him and in a short time he lay on his deathbed. After he was lowered into his grave and covered over with earth, one of his little arms suddenly emerged and reached up into the air. They pushed it back down and covered the earth with fresh earth, but that did not help. The little arm kept popping out. So the child’s mother had to go to the grave herself and smack the little arm with a switch. After she had done that, the arm withdrew, and then, for the first time, the child had peace beneath the earth.

How’s that for awful? Try reading that to a kid before she goes to sleep. Even I got the chills. I had to read it a second time to trust what I thought I had just read.

Then again, at least according to this article, that could be the whole point of fairy tales:

The value of fairy tales is that they teach us not to adjust, because the oppressive society in which we live is something we should refuse to adjust to.

My own memory of fairy tales is that they were mostly creepy and that I never could shake the feeling, somewhat reassuringly, that something in them didn’t really make sense. Always had problems with their impossibilities, improbabilities.

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Canada

© 2012 Proper Manky (signed copy bought at Laguna Beach Books)

Done reading.

By Richard Ford. Best all-around book I have read in several decades. Rarely been that deeply affected by a book. Ford is such a superb writer. Everything is in perfect pitch, the dialogue, the character and landscape descriptions, the lonely, melancholic voice of adolescent wonder, longing and naivete. Every page is pure precision.

Ford writes for all the senses evoking smells and sounds and sights like few other writers, except perhaps Faulkner. A masterful craftsman who reminds you on every page that perfect writing is manual work. Every sentence is handmade.

In its most denuded form, this is a sweeping memoir about the formative year in the life of a sheltered fifteen year old boy in 1960 in Montana whose parents rob a bank and who is then sent to rural Canada to live with strangers where he becomes entangled in a murder.

The main themes of the book are about assimilation, accommodation, adjustment, acceptance, and adaptation to changing circumstances, about flexibility. It is about absence and crossing borders, frontiers be they psychic, moral, or national. It’s about unattached belonging. It’s about the “composition of unequal parts”, about making sense of things and thinking things through; or not thinking things through, as it were.

On his way to Canada, the boy is given this advice:

Don’t spent time thinking old gloomy, though. Your life’s going to be a lot of exciting ways before you’re dead. So just pay attention to the present. Don’t rule parts out, and be sure you’ve always got something you don’t mind losing.

Interesting as the plot is, the true pleasure is all in the details. There’s a beautiful diction and pace to the book throughout. It starts with fast, short vignettes and panoramic shots skipping time here and there until toward the middle it comes almost to a complete stand still at the time of the robbery, with events unfolding as if in slow motion capturing a sense of life suspended, only to slightly accelerate again when the setting moves to Canada and then into the present.

Also, starting with the first paragraph (“First, I’ll tell about the bank robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.”), Ford has an intriguing way of strewing breadcrumbs from the future into the present narrative. Yet, even though one knows what to expect, one always remains curious as to how things come about, how things are being made sense of.

Ford writes with an almost cinematic quality:

We were rattling along throughout the dark in his old International Harvester. I could only see the bright gravel roadbed in the headlights with the dusty shoulder shooting by, thick wheat planted to the verges. It was cold with the sun off. The night air was sweet as bread. We passed an empty school bus rocking along. Our headlights swept its rows of empty student seats. Far away in the fields, cutting was going on after dark. Dim moving truck lights, the swirl-up of dust. Stars completely filled the sky. […] Mosquitoes and gnats were filtering out of the wheat into the headlamp heat. Some came in the open truck with me. Then a sudden, quick flickering flash of wing fell in through the light, twisted upward, and was gone again. A hawk or an owl, drawn to the insects. It made my heart pound harder.

Ford is also a master of parenthetical and subordinate digressions, employed with great restraint. To wit:

And, of course, I knew some particulars because we were there in the house with them and observed them – as children do – as things changed from ordinary, peaceful and good, to bad, then worse, and then to as bad as could be (though no one got killed until later). […] We also knew the life with our parents was very different from other children’s lives – the children we went to school with, and parents who acted normal together. (This, of course, was wrong). We also agreed that our life was a “situation,” and waiting was the hard part. At some point it would all become something else, and it was easier if we simply were patient and made the most of things together.

These are not just a stylistic device for mere rhythm and effect. It’s very deliberately in the service of the book’s general conclusion:

What I know is, you have a better chance in life—of surviving it—if you tolerate loss well; manage not to be a cynic through it all; to subordinate, as Ruskin implied, to keep proportion, to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good, even if admittedly good is often not simple to find.

Finally, the cover of the book is brilliant on 3 levels. First, there are just the colors, the gold, yellows, the reds, etc. Second, the colors eventually emerge as a maple leaf, underscoring the book’s title. Finally, it’s not so much that one “sees” the maple leaf, but that one “hears” it as make-believe, which the book of course is full of.

Needless to say, highly recommended!

Interesting interview with Richard Ford here. Another one is on NPR, where one can hear that Ford hasn’t quite scoured Dixie out of his voice (just as Bev Parsons in the book). One more here, H/T MS. This hour-long interview by Michael Silverblatt, in typical erudite and breathless manner, nicely draws out the theme of opposites, of imbalaces, of similarities and dissimilarities. Ford also gives a reading of a lengthy section of the book.

Favorite words or expressions encountered in the book: oddment, mare’s tail, devilment, whirligig

Favorite phrases:

  • “The nervous American intensity for something else.”
  • “Nature doesn’t rhyme her children (Emerson)”
  • “Warm breeze spun the silver whirligigs in the weedy yard. They made soft clicking sounds, fluttering.”
  • “Life-changing events can seem not what they are.”
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A Serious Man

By the Coen Brothers. Movie is a few years old but finally got to watch it. What a great film!! Beautifully done with some deep, dark humor.

Best scene? Hard to pick, but it has to be the “Goy’s teeth” sequence about what it all means, with the second rabbi. The fact that Jimi Hendix’ Machine Gun is used as the soundtrack here is priceless. When Larry ends up not liking the rabbi’s story (“Why tell me the story?”) the rabbi goes: “First I should tell you, then I shouldn’t tell you?” Beautiful!

Other things to love:

  • Somebody to Love, Surrealistic Pillow
  • Fuckers on the bus
  • Columbia Record Club phone call (Santana Abraxas?)
  • Schrödiger’s Cat
  • “It’s not about wupsy dupsy”
  • “Accept the mystery”
  • The perspective. Of the parking Lot. (Rabbi #1)
  • “When the truth is found to be lies and all the hope within you dies … then what?” (Rabbi #3 before returning the radio)

Life is short. Life is uncertain. Find somebody to love.

A real gem!!

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ACE of Hearts

Update Day 5: as a precaution discontinued due to mild cheilitis.

Day 1 of Lisinopril


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Monsoon 2012

© 2012 Proper Manky

 

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Curiosity: Seven Minutes of Terror

This is pretty awesome. Mars Rover “Curiosity” is about to land on Mars Aug 5th. Been “on the road” since Nov last year. Complete robotic lab on-board for soil analysis, including a mass spectrometer, X-ray diffraction instrument, radiation detectors, cameras…basically everything that’s needed to profile substances in the soil, both inorganic and maybe even organic. 

Here’s a 10 minute silent animation of the landing and surface operations that’s fascinating (watch full screen). Very realistic. Here’s NASA’s “Seven Minutes of Terror” video with narration.

Sad to say, the real “terror” is here on Earth. Obama’s budget includes a 20% reduction in NASA’s funds for planetary science, which eliminates scheduled missions to Mars in 2016 and 2018.

This may well be the last mission for the foreseeable future. “Dare Mighty Things”? Apparently no longer.

Related: “Opportunity” is still roving 8 years later. It contains the thermal emission imaging system (THEMIS) responsible for all those awesome panoramic shots from Mars and is controlled and operated from ASU’s campus.

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To Rome With(out) Love

I used to go watch Woody Allen movies with people my age (whereby I mean “young”) and laugh my heart out. Now I go watch Woody Allen movies with old people my age and am bored to death. There’s nothing charitable one could say about “To Rome With Love.” There’s zero plot to speak of, the acting is deplorable, the gags cringe-worthy, and there is not much of Rome either except for a few glossy brochure shots of the usual aspects and a  gratuitous 360° pan of the Piazza del Popolo. Fahgettable.

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Romney’s New Low

Matt Taibbi is channeling his former self in this article. Classic venom.

Romney plunged into the speech with a creepy kamikaze smile and a rushed, weird (even for him) delivery, acting like someone proud of what a ballsily moronic dare he was attempting – like a high school kid mooning a squad car from the back of a school bus, or Peter McNeeley rushing face-first into the ring with Mike Tyson. […] He’s like a teenager who stays up all night thinking of a way to impress the prom queen, and what he comes up with is kicking a kid in a wheelchair. […] His vision of humanity is just a million tons of meat floating around in a sea of base calculations. […] If some speeches feel like a verbal embrace, Romney’s felt like a stack of cardboard emptied from the bay of a dump truck.

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The Words English Owes India

Fascinating throughout. About a dictionary first published almost 150 years ago of words of Asian origin used by the British in India. A new edition is due out next year.

My friend HC would have loved this.

50 words from India

A – atoll, avatar

B – bandana, bangle, bazaar, Blighty, bungalow

C – cashmere, catamaran, char, cheroot, cheetah, chintz, chit, chokey, chutney, cot, cummerbund, curry

D – dinghy, doolally, dungarees

G – guru, gymkhana

H – hullabaloo

J – jodhpur, jungle, juggernaut, jute

K – khaki, kedgeree

L – loot

N – nirvana

P – pariah, pashmina, polo, pukka, pundit, purdah, pyjamas

S – sari, shampoo, shawl, swastika

T – teak, thug, toddy, typhoon

V – veranda

Y – yoga

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Big City Transit Geek

In his time London’s Mayor Boris Johnson has had some pretty daft ideas (like the twisted ArcelorMittal Orbit tower) but he’s dead on when he talks about the power of the bicycle. At this link, he unabashedly states that bicycles are the future and the best way to make our cities pleasant. The transportation talk starts in at 2:40.

You go BoJo!

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Ratatat – Wildcat

RrreoowwWW the phone rings.

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Weather Forecast

Read the following today in Canada by Richard Ford (review forthcoming):

“I just stared at the mare’s tails in the west – the sky behind them purple and gold and bright green, turning blue in the high reaches.”

Mare’s tails? Never had heard this expression before. Googled it. Turns out it refers to cirrus clouds. Asked TLMW, who is a card-carrying member of the Cloud Appreciation Society. Drew a blank as well.

Apparently, there’s an old sailor’s expression that goes thus: “Mare’s tails and mackerel scales make tall ships carry low sails.” Mare’s tails are those hooked-shaped cirrus clouds and mackerel scales are cirrocumulus which appear as bands of fish scales. Both are high altitude clouds above 20,000 ft.  When both are seen together it is a sign to the sailor of a storm front bringing in a weather change within 24 hours. Mare’s tales. Ok.

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Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

New book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt looks interesting. Above is a brief video intro. Another one with different narration, along with a brief review, is here.

The book is by a journalist and a cartoonist who team up to showcase the American underbelly and illustrate the human and environmental devastation in so-called “sacrifice zones” of global capitalism which, as they tell it, seem like Dante’s circles of hell. They cast a spotlight in areas most media ignores.

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