New article by the very excellent Elizabeth Corey.
I have always been of the view that Amy Winehouse was the only female artist that was on Etta James’ plane — the parallels are all too obvious — a profound expression of “love and trouble” experience going back to Billie Holiday. Now that the dust has settled in the four years since Amy’s death I was very impressed with the feature length documentary Amy, a close-grained, subtle and unflinching look at the toxic cocktail of the dark-sided clash of contemporary fame and artistic authenticity, an authenticity conspicuously absent from the current crop of phony “divas”. A favorite scene is Amy recording a duet with Tony Bennett. Priceless!
Since that time I have learned that a reading over 6 generally means that a person has so abstracted himself from himself and from the world around him, seeing things as theories and himself as a shadow, that he cannot, so to speak, reenter the lovely ordinary world. Instead he orbits the earth and himself. Such a person, and there are millions, is destined to haunt the human condition like the Flying Dutchman.
. . .
If you measure the pineal activity of a monkey—or any other subhuman animal—with my lapsometer, you will invariably record identical readings at Layers I and II. Its self, that is to say, coincides with itself. Only in man do you find a discrepancy: Layer I, the outer social self, ticking over, say, at a sprightly 5.4 mmv, while Layer II just lies there, barely alive at 0.7 mmv, or even zero!—a nought, a gap, an aching wound. Only in man does the self miss itself, fall from itself (hence lapsometer!) Suppose—! Suppose I could hit on the right dosage and weld the broken self whole! What if man could reenter paradise, so to speak, and live there both as man and spirit, whole and intact man-spirit, as solid flesh as a speckled trout, a dappled thing, yet aware of itself as a self!
. . .
“I mean like this morning I looked at myself in the mirror and I said, Charley, who in the hell are you? What does it all mean? It was strange, Doc. What does it all mean, is the thing.”
“What does what all mean?”
. . .
I nodded, taking hope. He could be right.
A note for physicians: if you listen carefully to what patients say, they will often tell you not only what is wrong with them but also what is wrong with you.
Micah White in Biography.
Kafka used this grotesque scenario as a springboard to explore the confusion and turmoil he experienced as a human living in an uncontrollable modern world. As our world is just as disorderly and unruly as Kafka’s, if not more so, we would be wise to keep The Metamorphosis in mind and to take its implications to heart.
The 5th edition of Joaquin Fuster’s classic is now available. Coming soon: a close-grained review by Valerie Hardcastle of Joaquin’s latest The Neuroscience of Freedom and Creativity to appear in The Journal of Mind and Behavior.
My chum Noonie Minogue is the translator of this autobiography (sounds like my kinda guy), heretofore unavailable in English — click on the graphic for Amazon details and check out this Guardian article:
The bouzouki is what the hardened criminals laid hold of, killers with life sentences, the guys on death row… it’s a sacred thing. They didn’t want it to spread. But it did spread — Markos Vamvakaris
The confessions of a man on the fringes of society, who was to alter the music of a nation. A brilliant translation — Markos Dragoumis, Folk Music Archives, Athens
In Piraeus during the 1930s and 40s, dockworkers, tradesmen, thieves, and ex-cons sat together in shacks or mountain caves smoking the arghile and playing stringed instruments. They wrote songs in profusion, about their tough, anarchic lives, their loves, their sacred rituals, and the beloved haunts of a now vanished city. They sang and played Rebetiko. Markos Vamvakaris is the undisputed Patriarch of Rebetiko. Out of the lowlife of the port, the brothels and hashish dens, the man and the bouzouki trod an unlikely path from disgrace to glory. The autobiography was compiled in 1972 by Angeliki Vellou Keil from dictated material and recorded interviews with Markos in the last years of his life. The English translation is by Noonie Minogue. This timely and ground-breaking translation vividly conveys the speaking voice of a Rebetiko legend.
Colley, I will admit, has not gone along with my idea of measuring and treating the deep perturbations of the soul. Unfortunately, there still persists in the medical profession the quaint superstition that only that which is visible is real. Thus the soul is not real. Uncaused terror cannot exist. Then, friend, how come you are shaking?
No matter, though. Later I was made a professor and didn’t need Colley’s help.
I have called my machine More’s Qualitative Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer.
. . .
Allow me to cite, in simplified terms, a couple of my early case histories.
Patient #1
One hot summer afternoon as I sat at my father’s old coroner’s desk by the open back door sipping Early Times, watching the flight patterns of the martins, and pondering the singularity of being forty-four years old, my nurse, whom I mainly employ to keep patients away, brought in a patient.
Nothing changes in a man, I was thinking. I felt exactly as I felt when I was ten years old. Only accidentals change. Hair begins to sprout from your ears, your toes rotate, showing more skin.
My nurse first put away the bottle. She is a beautiful though dour Georgia Presbyterian of the strict observance named Ellen Oglethorpe. Her eyes, blue as Lake Geneva, glittered in triumph as she stowed the Early Times and closed the door behind the patient. For she had, to her way of thinking, killed two birds with one stone. She was striking a blow at my drinking and at the same time delivering one of the “better sort” of patients, the sort who have money. She approves of money on religious grounds.
Brian May nails it — the man and the musician. Both men of taste and decency. (A postscript: May mentions Donal, Rory’s brother who talks here about Rory:
We went down to see Muddy and his band playing in a New York club called Ungano’s. The gig was very badly attended by the public, but it was the million dollar audience with Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Steve Marriott, Buddy Miles and Hendrix all sitting there.
At the end of Muddy’s set, it inevitably turned into a jam session and Muddy called Rory to the stage, but before he got there, Steve Marriott went up and took the guitar! In typical fashion, Rory just shied away and backed off.
manwithoutqualities 