RIP, RIP

We saw the passing of two important men yesterday.

Howard Zinn was an anti-war activist and historian. He's best known for his book A People's History of the United States in which he presented a very different perspective of US history through the often-submerged voices of blacks, women, American Indians, war resisters, and poor laborers of all nationalities.

His friends, though, will remember him for much more than books. Daniel Ellsberg, well known for leaking the Pentagon Papers, knew Zinn as a passionate and peaceful war protester. He recently described Zinn as "the best human being I’ve ever known. The best example of what a human can be, and can do with their life."

I'm a little embarrassed to say I only started reading A People's History this year, but I think that's a bittersweet attestation that his work will enlighten people for many more generations.

Howard Zinn died of a heart attack on Wednesday. He was 87. Rest in peace.

J.D. Salinger was an influential American writer. His novel The Catcher in the Rye was a cultural phenomena that defined teen angst. And maybe because of this, and because Salinger was the type of writer you wanted to have a drink with, just like his most famous protagonist, Holden Caulfield, would have admired, Salinger became a reluctant celebrity and then a recluse. Though he last published in 1965, fans are hopeful that he continued to write and that his archive will one day be released.

J.D. Salinger died on Wednesday. He was 91. Rest in peace.

Nevermore

A strange epiphany hit me over lunch with friends on Friday. Whenever a potential love interest has sent me a poem (and there has only been a few, believe me), I end up creeped out and anything but romanced. My lunch guest said to me, "Poe. You've read too much Poe."

Possibly. Or maybe I'll blame it on not too much but too early an exposure to the macabre poet. I really only remember two poets we studied in ninth grade English class. One was Robert Frost, and the other was Edgar Allan Poe. And I had to memorize something by one of them, but now I don't remember what. A lot of good that did me -- just a lingering dark notion of poetry. Thanks ninth grade English teacher.

Coincidentally, Edgar Allan Poe was born on this day in 1809. I see he still gets a little press and provides a little mystery at his resting place.

Since we are experiencing some awesome thunderstorms today, here is The Raven:

(YouTube video)

Kafkaesque

Apparently being exposed to things that don't make sense enhances our "cognitive mechanisms."

This recent research comes from psychologists at the University of California in Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia. Test subjects who were asked to read A Country Doctor, a surreal short story by Franz Kafka, performed better on grammar learning tasks than test subjects who read a bowdlerized version of the story.

The story, by the way, is about a doctor who desperately needs to get to a dying boy, and is carried away by magic horses to a house where he is stripped naked and put in bed with the patient, but then the doctor escapes through a window in order to save his servant girl who is being molested by a man they found in the pig pen.

And only now did I remember Rose again; what was I to do, how could I rescue her, how could I pull her away from under that groom at ten miles' distance, with a team of horses I couldn't control. These horses, now, they had somehow slipped the reins loose, pushed the windows open from outside, I did not know how; each of them had stuck a head in at a window and, quite unmoved by the startled cries of the family, stood eyeing the patient.

Damn, if that's not a metaphor for the Baucus Bill and its 500 amendments!

That's what the Baucus Bill has become -- a punchline. Max Baucus is, of course, the Democratic Senator from Montana and current chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Finance. That's where our so-called health care reform is coming from.

A few months ago I didn't know who Baucus was, but now I've come to see him as a corporate-entrenched legislator with some seriously glaring conflicts of interest. He received $3 million from insurance and healthcare lobbyists between 2003 and 2008. I guess it's only appropriate he gives something back to his true supporters.

This "gift" straight to the insurance companies is in the form of the "individual insurance mandate" which will cost some families as much as 13% of their income. Ironically, one major reason for reform is to save families from medical bankruptcy...

And now that Baucus has lost the support of many Democrats, and Republicans weren't going to support a reform bill anyway, I guess you can say the legislation really is bipartisan. Everybody hates it.

Look, the cost of health insurance is out of control, and the only way we can have meaningful reform is with an affordable public option. I think people are finally coming to support this basic idea. Healthcare doesn't have to be bizarre and illogical. It doesn't have to be Kafkaesque.

Shockingly, even Bill O'Reilly supports the public option now.

This Spells "Literary Crisis"

Here is yet another story of plagiarism in the digital age. Neale Donald Walsch, apparently a best-selling author who has conversations with God, is accused of plagiarizing a Christmas essay that is all over the internet -- sometimes credited to the real author and sometimes not.

Walsch has tried to explain his misdeed. His explanation is hard to swallow, but there is always the cryptomnesia defense. I guess Hillary Clinton could have used that defense too during the whole "sniper fire" drama last spring.

But anyway, after reading the disputed essay, I have a bigger question. Who would want to take credit for this dreck? If that's what people are reading these days, we're in a literary crisis.

Happy Halloween!

Busy day? You can still fit some tales of terror into your Halloween with these spooky stories that clock in at just 30 seconds:

The Beeps

There are bad people out there--at least that's what the security system guy told me.

"I hate security systems," I told him.

"You are by yourself at the end of a deserted road," he said. "I can even set yours so a beep sounds every time a door is opened."

"I don't need that," I told him.

Nevertheless, when he left, I went out to get the mail, be-e-e-e-p. I came back in, be-e-e-e-p. I put the garbage out, be-e-e-e-p.

I cursed the security system.

But hours later, I am awakened. My heart is pounding. Alone, in the dark, I hear the sound of... be-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-p.

-- Elise Primavera

Brave New World

"But do you like being slaves?" the Savage was saying as they entered the Hospital. His face was flushed, his eyes bright with ardour and indignation. "Do you like being babies? Yes, babies. Mewling and puking," he added, exasperated by their bestial stupidity into throwing insults at those he had come to save.
---BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley

I came across this passage today while reading the dystopian 1932 novel by Aldous Huxley. The exasperation and frustration toward the masses drugged and conditioned into ignorant bliss is a pain I feel all too often. Every day there is something new to be outraged about, and it takes discipline and a deep breath to prevent cursing at those whose minds I'd like to change.

A Sentence or Two

A New York Times book reviewer wonders if readers have "signature passages in books they love — a sentence or two that seem to convey the essence of a complex, beautiful work?" Web site visitors respond with hundreds of wonderful quotes. I actually keep my own list of eloquent quotes from books. Here is one quote from one of my favorite authors:

Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain.
The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham.