A poem about a puppy’s paw.
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Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California. A special place where three waters meet: fresh water from a stream, salt water — the ocean below the cliffs, and hot sulfur water in the baths. Soaking late at night by candlelight with the sound of surf crashing below.
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When I was a kid, I didn’t like the ending to Gone with the Wind— “I’ll think about it tomorrow”, so I wrote another chapter. It became a habit when I finished a novel I really liked to continue the story, with the author’s voice and style bumping around in my head. Finishing Oracle Night by Paul Auster led me to write the following additional chapter, which I suppose is a kind of fan fiction. Copying Auster, I am enjoying permission to write long sentences, Hemingway vogue aside. With apologies to Paul Auster, here is my stream-of-consciousness continuation of his novel.
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On my 75th birthday, March 15, 2020, the world went into Pandemic lockdown. A few months into this solitude, I came across Jeremy Irons reading T.S. Eliot’s poem. Written in 1911, Eliot’s first published poem had eerie similarities to the changed world of locked-down 2020. I entered my own interlinear, a Pandemic poem in the midst of Prufrock. Death count then was 140K. Now two years later it is over 1 million. (And where from here?) Here is Jeremy Irons’ poignant reading followed by the expanded Prufrock.
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In 2003 I wrote an article for the New Statesman comparing the rapid spread of the SARS coronavirus with the syphilis epidemic in the 15th century. And now, seventeen years later, we have another uniquely deadly coronavirus.
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In this 4 minute youtube, Alan MacDonald holds up a copy of Modern Clinical Syphilology, by John H. Stokes, published in 1945, and says, "Everything you want to know about Lyme Disease is in this book."
Since this book was the main medical text I used for my book Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis, and since I had been comparing the symptoms of syphilis in the days before penicillin with those of Lyme Disease today, I emailed him immediately and we enjoyed a mutual appreciation for John Stokes. In this post is a brief summary comparison, with more to follow.
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Harry loved oatmeal cookies and early on began to call his wife his sweet little Oatmeal Cookie, fondly, like Sugar or Honey. He shortened the pet name not to Cookie as some men might have, but to Oatmeal, or sometimes just Oats. Their friends picked it up and so Oatmeal became her nickname, appropriate for someone with her sweet, bland nature, her light brown hair and her habit of dressing in browns and tans. At the local town library where she worked she kept her boringly average first name, which soon ceased to feel like hers at all.
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Since I live near Spirit Rock Meditation Center I occasionally attend a Monday evening meditation, especially if Jack Kornfield is speaking. On a recent Monday, Jack mentioned that the Buddha was a gargantuan list-maker. This really surprised me. Knowing very little about Buddha’s life, I had not imagined him much beyond a guy who left his father's palace to wander the world seeking enlightenment and that he achieved enlightenment--whatever that is --when he meditated under a tree. When I googled him, I was astonished to find Jack was right-- he was one of the great list makers of all time.
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I've just listened to the the final day of a 25 speaker Food Revolution Summit moderated by John and Ocean Robbins. Although I did learn enough to make it worthwhile, it could have been reduced by 75% if all the speakers just agreed to stipulate that 1) eating more organic veggies and fruit is good and 2) not so good --Monsanto/ glyphospate/ transfats, feedlot meats with antibiotics, farmed fish, junk food, and anything with ingredients you can't pronounce -in short, much of the Standard American Diet
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On the website Quora, Steve Theodore posted this photo of the earliest known spreadsheet. As he describes it: "This is a fragment of papyrus from the Egyptian Red Sea port of Wadi al-Jarf, an outpost established about 4600 years ago by pharoah Khufu (more famous for the Great Pyramid of Giza). This is sliver of the diary of an official named Merrer, who evidently visited Khufu's naval installation in between his numerous trips during the construction of the pyramid: this fragments and several others recount his trips to limestone quarries and royal warehouses in a neat tabular format that will be instantly familiar to anybody who's cracked open Excel. It's also the oldest surviving writing on papyrus. So, the oldest piece of penmanship in the world is a spreadsheet .
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