Writers Anonymous, Inc.

Running on Empty: The Problem of Fatigue at the Workplace

2012-01-02T14:05:00.000-08:00

Chapter 4: Running on Empty
Jordan Richman
George Miller Beard and Sigmund Freud: The Id Versus Civilization

George Miller Beard coined the term neurasthenia in 1869 to describe a set of symptoms which revolved around the issue of fatigue. Freud studied the use of Beard's term, accepted it and then described himself as a neurasthenic. He later modified the meaning of the word to limit it to a description of a nervous disorder caused by sexual frustration.

Id, ego, superego, and libido were key terms in Freud's psychoanalytical theories.

The Id is the primitive, unconscious store of energy from which come the instincts for food, love, sex, and other basic needs. It is constantly in search of pleasure and seeks to avoid pain.

The libido represents the energy forces behind sexuality. Freud believed sexual energy could be sublimated or channeled to serve the demands of society.

Conflicts between the individual's sexual needs and the work ethic sap sexual energy and lead to fatigue as well as other neurotic symptoms.

The ego or "I" maintains a balance between the demands of the Id and the superego which represents one's sense of right and wrong--the conscience--and the knower of the outside world (external reality).

Freud then developed an elaborate explanation of neurosis, basing it on unresolved sexual conflicts from early childhood and the various stages of infantile and child sexuality. In Western culture, Freud believed neurosis developed by the continued existence of an attachment of the child to the parent of the opposite sex into adulthood, the Oedipus and Electra complexes. There are a number of other concepts which are identified as Freudian theories concerning personality and neuroses, such as penis envy, psychomatic disorders from unresolved childhood conflicts, the importance of dream symbols, and the need for therapeutic catharsis to resolve neurotic guilt feelings.

The neurotic personility might develop different combinations of symptoms, pains, ailmments, or dysfunctions similar to the neurasthenic patient. Freud's neurotic image, like the neurasthenic one, would always include the presence of fatigue, exhaustion, and incapacity at various levels. The only treatment for Freud's neurosis would be psychotherapy, preferably Freudian.

Beard died at the age of forty-four and Freud at seventy-six. In his longer life, Freud was able to develop and modify his ideas more thoroughly than Beard.

Beard and his fellow neurologists postulated the existence of a mystery substance that provided enegy for the nervous system. He believed that some people had a limited amount of that energy. They were easily distressed by "the forces of civilization," a phrase Beard used to describe the technological advances of society and the complex urban relationships that were beginning to take place in America after the Civil War. This stress "bankrupts" the nerve cell enegy of those who are by temperament inclined toward neurasthenia, while stronger constitutions are able to withstand the stress of the new tech tecnologies and forms of social organization.

In Civilization and its Discontents (1939)), Freud viewed the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century and concluded that there were two forces at work in the western psyche, Thanatos, the death wish, and Eros, the urge for life. Thanatos leads to hate and war, Eros to love and the energy sublimations (transformations) necessary for the development of civilization. Since sublimation is easy for some and difficult for others, the fate of civilization always hangs in the balance as the two forces struggle against one another for dominance.

Running on Empty in the Big City: Work and Depression in the Shadows of New York City

2011-11-29T22:43:00.000-08:00

ART REVIEW

ART REVIEW; Views of a Yiddish Past Spring Comically to Life

By GRACE GLUECK

Published: September 14, 2001

Meet Julius Knipl, real estate photographer, distinguished by his fedora, fine-line mustache and healthy length of nose. Living in a time warp on a rich diet of nostalgia, he is the brainchild of Ben Katchor, a cartoonist who has peopled an imaginary world with characters from a mid-20th-century Yiddish past that he manages to make vividly present.

In Knipl's universe, wholesale-calendar salesmen, importers of folding rain bonnets, stagers of going-out-of-business sales, manure futures brokers and other small-business men are caught up in the sights, scents and sounds of low-end urban life.

They spend hours riding escalators for the thrill of it, attend canned-food tastings at neighborhood groceries, catch their faces reflected in the sheen of egg-washed Danish pastries and give home musicales based on the sounds emitted by faulty radiators. One man, Emmanuel Chirrup, a skidproof-slipper tycoon, has replicated the squalid apartment of his parents at the time of his birth, down to the aroma of reheated pot roast.

Knipl (the name means a small treasure or nest egg in Yiddish) and other Katchor characters strut their stuff in ''Ben Katchor: Picture-Stories,'' a display at the Jewish Museum of the cartoon strips and drawings created by Mr. Katchor since 1988 for The Village Voice, The New York Press, The Forward and the design magazine Metropolis.

There are also excerpts from his comic-strip novel ''The Jew of New York'' and color drawings for his opera, ''The Carbon Copy Building,'' which won an Obie award when it was staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1999.

What's artful about these drawings -- mostly in black and white, with gray ink wash -- is their evocation of New York's demoniacal energy, the look of its down-at-the-heels neighborhoods and storefront facades, and the ethnic faces that Mr. Katchor has evolved from perusal of books like ''Lexicon of the Jewish Theater,'' published in 1931, with its illustrated biographies of actors and actresses.

Then, too, there is the zaniness of his characters' ruminations, like Knipl's poetic inventory of the remains of dinner with friends at the Hylozoic Restaurant: ''a piece of brisket lost in the shadow of a dessert plate; a wedge of sour tomato reflected in a pool of cole slaw dressing.'' And his subway reminiscences: of chocolate-vending machines, subterranean luncheonettes and track workers reading soft-bound leather books.

Born in 1951 in Brooklyn, Mr. Katchor grew up on comic strips, and in his teens began publishing his own on a mimeograph machine. In the 1980's, he contributed to the underground comics magazine Raw, and in 1988 he began the Knipl strip for The New York Press. Obsessed with urban life, he says in a filmed interview shown at the exhibition that for him ''every inch of pavement is a whole new world of activity.''

One of his meatier creations is ''The Jew of New York'' (1992-93), a ''historical romance'' originally done as a serial for The Forward. It takes off from the real-life effort of a 19th-century visionary, Mordechai Noah, to create a Jewish state on an island in the Niagara River in western New York State.

But the real story here is the peripatetic adventures of the hero -- Nathan Kishon, a slaughterhouse worker dismissed for mixing kosher with nonkosher animal tongues -- among hustlers of beaver pelts, importers of mother-of-pearl buttons, peddlers of soil from the Holy Land, would-be carbonators of Lake Erie water and Indians passing as Jews.

Like the rest of Mr. Katchor's work, the tale is told through vivacious, verbose cartoon strips and wanders off in many directions. It ends with a gray but graphic fire, ignited by an apparatus rigged to generate the smell of pickled herring at a theater presenting ''The Jew of New York,'' a play about the life of Mordechai Noah.

But Mr. Katchor's sagas never actually end, even when they come to a halt. You know they will regenerate in other strips, like ''Hotel and Farm'' (named for Katchor's Hotel and Farm in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., operated by his father in the 1930's), which currently appears in The Forward. Its action switches back and forth between rural and urban life, with farms that now cater to the canned- and frozen-food markets, and seedy hotels peopled by characters of varied virtue.

Given the visual challenge of a show devoted largely to black-and-white comic strips that demand a good deal of close-up reading, the museum has done a creditable presentation. The display has been enlivened with artfully fabricated artifacts, like the desiccated remains of turtle soup (circa 1831) from one Ormon's Restaurant in Manhattan and early samples from the Lake Erie Soda-Water Company.

And there are audio excerpts from ''The Knipl Radio Show,'' a 1995 production by David Isay, starring Jerry Stiller, that was broadcast on National Public Radio. ''Pleasures of Urban Decay,'' the film in which Mr. Katchor is interviewed, is also shown as a continuous loop.

Although the show seems to include miles of cartoons, you don't have to eyeball every episode to agree that he is an outsize talent, one that has found itself in a brilliant archaeological exploration of a very special world (with maybe some help from fellow diggers like Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Zero Mostel and E. L. Doctorow).

''Ben Katchor: Picture-Stories'' remains at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street, Manhattan, (212) 423-3200, through Feb. 10.

Photo: A detail of the cover of ''Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories,'' part of ''Ben Katchor: Picture-Stories,'' at the Jewish Museum. (Ben Katchor/the Jewish Museum)

Adventures in Neurasthenia, continued

2011-11-29T14:06:00.000-08:00

The popularity of treating symptoms like mental and emotional fatigue as neurasthenia ran from 1870 to 1910.

A large number of celebrities in literature, the arts, politics, and business were labeled as being neurasthenic, a diagnosis they accepted for themselves.

Theodore Roosevelt went out West to deal with his neurasthenia, while Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, to challenge the male physicians' ways of dealing with neurasthenia as she experienced it.

By 1920, the Freudian approach, which was much more complex in explaining symptoms of fatigue, began to supplant the simple one-disease theory of neurasthenia. Satires against quack doctors who treated patients suffering from persistent fatique and other nervous disorders were written during the heyday of neurasthenic rest cures. S. Weir Mitchell's The Autobiography of a Quack, (1900) is one such example. In 1910, O'Henry wrote a satire called Let Me Take Your Pulse: Adventures in Neurasthenia.

More recently, a historical novel on the subject was written by T.C. Boyle called The Road to Wellville (1994).

The appearance of a condition labeled Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) in the mid-1980s through to the mid-1990s has brought a renewed interest in the the term neurasthenia. In JAMA, April 27, 1994 appeared an article, "Was Neurasthenia a Legitimate Morbid entity":

During its heyday, which lasted from the 1870s to the turn of the century, the diagnosis of neurasthenia provided patients with a scientifically legitimate explanation of their inability to perform their expected roles. Furthermore, the patients, who tended to be in their 20s and 30s and from the urban middle classes, recovered.

Today, many people feel, like Beard's patients that they are living on a plane lower than normal. Symptom clusters that include fatigue and a general lack of vitality continue to command considerable medical attention. One has only to consult current medical journal articles on chronic fatique syndrome to see that symptom puzzles that engaged our recent ancestors continue to intrigue us.

Neurasthenia does live on, however, as a popular diagnostic entity in China, where its discourse of nerves and energy flows is believed to be more compatible with traditional Chinese explanations of fatigue and malaise than with the more purely psychological explanation[s] from the post-Freudian West.

My Energy Staircase, Overcoming Fatigue, Oblomov Review from a fellow blogger, The Lectern

2011-11-25T17:13:00.000-08:00

Walking up the Energy Staircase!

10) Nirvana--No bad thoughts or feelings; just humming away at work

09) In control of feelings; Not letting the phone, mail, or internet distract you from a targeted activity

08) Happy to discover activities that bring smiles to your lips.

07) Using the NEXT approach. After you tie your shoelaces you think NEXT and put your shirt on.

06) Steam at Y or walk on treadmill.

05) Maybe ability to relate to music (violin, flute , piano, guitar.) I just sold my old wooden Italian clarinet to an old buddy at the Y. I was amazed how well he played. He said he had not played for 40 years!

04) Look for sustained efforts: weights, walk, music, blog...etc.
Definition of sustained efforts:
a. at least an hour of activity
b. any activity as long as it's the same
c. need to do not relevant for b.
d. organize and weed out for c.
e. nap or sitting for an hour also okay
f. watching tv for an hour is okay, especially if you are able to catch up on some sleep while you are watching.

03) Show some sign of flexibility or versatility in your movements.

02) You are capable of some movement like answering the phone. I have a friend who tells me that he knows who is ringing his phone but that he is too tired to pick it up.

01) Almost total mental and physical paralysis.

If you have a fatigue diagram you use or know of one, why don't you send it in so I can post it for fellow fatigue addicts.

Also, if you have tips on falling asleep.

The Lectern

"Oblomov" Goncharov

What’s the good of a man like you? You might as well be a bundle of straw.

I wish I could lie down and go to sleep for ever.

This magnificent book is about whether to simply endure life or to really live it, and if the latter, then how.

Ilya Ilyitch Oblomov is a good-hearted man of independent means who lives a life of excessive laziness. Ensconced in his bed, or on his sofa in one room in his apartment, he spends his days in his worn and filthy dressing gown doing nothing, not even reading or writing (there is not a shred of paper in the place, and the ink in the inkwell has dried up), and bickering incessantly with his servant, Zahar, who has been with him since his childhood and treats his master with a mixture of contempt, devotion, insolence and humility. At times their relationship takes on some of the hilarious character of Beckett’s ambiguous and bleak male-male relationships:

“You lose everything,” [Zahar] remarked, opening the door into the drawing room to see if the handkerchief was there.

“Where are you going? Look for it here. I haven’t been in there for two days. Do be quick,” Ilya Ilyitch said.

The plot involves Oblomov’s struggle to escape the vice of sloth, in his failed love affair with the ravishing Olga Sergeyevna, his growing love for his landlady Agafya Matveyevna, and the machinations of her brother and his crony to rob Oblomov of the income from his estate. Oblomov is motivated by a drive to achieve the perfect bliss of family life, to which he thinks Olga can help him. Ironically, he achieves this state only with his landlady, and it takes him a while to realise this. Olga eventually marries Oblomov’s childhood friend, the worldly and practical Stolz, while Oblomov succumbs to the enervating effects of indecision, prevarication and idleness.

The theme of the true nature of love is dealt with in the relationship between Oblomov and Olga, and later in the relationship between Olga and Stolz. Early in their love, Oblomov panics and writes a long letter to Olga, warning her away from him, declaring that her love is a mistake. He clearsightedly warns that the projection of a false ideal on to an object of potential love can be mistaken for love itself; indeed that love often consists in this very projection: What you feel now is not real love, but only an expectation of it; it is merely an unconscious need of love which for lack of proper fuel burns with a false flame that has no warmth in it. The relationship between Stolz and Olga, which comes to prominence in the third part of the novel, is very well drawn with great psychological subtlety. The older Stolz teaches Olga the real meaning of love, and the relationship stands as a wonderful symbol of the marriage of innocence and experience: With the lamp of experience in his hand he ventured into the labyrinth of her mind and character, discovering each day new facts, new qualities….When Olga experiences depression later in their married life, it is Stolz who helps her most with these extremely wise words: Your sadness and yearning is rather a sign of strength. A lively active mind strives sometimes to go beyond the boundaries of life, finds of course no response to its questionings, and the result is sadness, temporary dissatisfaction with life… it’s the sadness of the soul questioning life about its mysteries. That is what one has to pay for Prometheus’s fire! You must not merely endure but love this sadness and respect your doubts and questions, they are the overflow of the luxury of life and appear for the most part on the summits of happiness. Through the character of Stolz, Goncharov reveals himself as great a philosopher of love as Stendahl.

Another marriage depicted in the novel, is that of the peasant Zahar, and the housekeeper Anyissa. She is extremely able, and puts Zahar’s clumsiness, and laziness constantly to shame, for which he exacts revenge by thrusting his elbow sharply into her breasts. Behind the high comedy of this marriage lurks the foresight of the great artist, in which the complex position of the peasant in Russian culture is symbolically described. Anyissa shows Zahar the correct way to do housework, to which Zahar responds: You stupid, I have done it my way for twenty years and I’m not likely to change for you. This little exchange exemplifies the hostile and bitter reaction the idealistic Populists were to encounter 15 years later during the 1870s in their attempts to better the peasants’ lives and improve them through modern agrarian methods and literacy. The presence of the servants in the novel added force to the controversy around the book. Goncharov’s contemporaries held that the Oblomov-Zahar relationship depicted the corrupting influence on both parties of the institution of serfdom. In the indolent figure of Oblomov, moreover, they saw a critique of Russian laziness and ineptitude, and in the practical figure of Stolz (a Russian German whose name means ‘proud’) a symbol of superior Western know-how, which Westernizers saw as the only and ultimate saviour of Russian problems. Our men of action have always been of five or six stereotyped patterns: lazily looking around them with half closed eyes, they put their hand to the machine of state, sleepily pushing it along the beaten track, treading in their predecessors’ footprints. But behold, their eyes are awakening from sleep, bold, lively footsteps can be heard, and there is a sound of animated voices… Many Stolzes with Russian names are bound to come soon! Oblomov thus acts as a bridge between the Slavophile/Westerniser debates of the 1840s, and the Father/Son debates of the 1860s as well as more generally articulating the Asian/European dialectic that has been at the heart of Russian culture since the age of Peter.

The book is of course an examination of laziness. The main foil for this is Stolz, who is a direct opposite of Oblomov, a man of action, an entrepreneur, a traveller and a socialite. Stolz claims that Oblomov is wasting his life lying on the sofa, and that the purpose of life is work, ambition, transcendence: live for the sake of the work itself, and nothing else. Work gives form and completeness and a purpose to life. Oblomov claims to the contrary that it’s his mode of life that is the real living, and that men of action are simply hiding from the fact that their lives are meaningless: There is no centre round which it all revolves, there is nothing deep, nothing vital. All these society people are dead men, men fast asleep, they are worse than I am. Empty reshuffling of days! Oblomov claims that his laziness makes him conscious of the gentle flow of life, of the delicious splashing of its stream, a moment by moment awareness of the passing of time that the busy men of action have no awareness of, but which should be the real purpose of existence: Isn’t the purpose of all your running about, your passions, ways, trade, politics, to secure rest, to attain this idea of a lost paradise? Oblomov is aware of the damage to his character his sloth is causing: he was painfully conscious that something fine and good lay buried in him and was perhaps already dead or hidden like gold in the depths of a mountain. But at the same time, he is an artist working in dreams. In part one, there is a long chapter entitled Oblomov’s Dream (the only named chapter in the novel) in which Oblomov’s childhood on his estate Oblomovka is described in idyllic terms. While this section gives plausibility to Oblomov’s psychology (he is shown to have been spoilt by over-indulgent parents, particularly his mother) it stands at the same time as a symbol of the golden age of Russia’s past, a vision of an ideal future towards which all Russians should strive, and a vision of a dreamlike alternative to the grimness of reality. This section was published separately in 1849, ten years before the rest of the novel, and did much to stoke the controversy the book aroused. Stolz loves to listen to Oblomov’s depictions of a perfect life on his estate, in which Oblomov paints a word picture of a kind of rural idyll with no falsity, no strife, a state of pure communion amidst plenty and the beauty of nature: Go on painting your ideal of life to me. Humanity at all times in all places has yearned for this dream: it is called peace.

Oblomov is one of the first novels in literature to deal explicitly with the concept of leisure time. Leisure time exists as an unarticulated fact in 19th century literature, both in novels and outside them, and is related to the emerging urban middle classes, who were not always working (like the rural peasantry) or not always doing nothing (like the landed aristocracy) but who switched between the two. However, it is not explored as a conscious theme until Oblomov. Oblomov used to have a job, but he gave it up when he became aware of the split between his working self and his leisured self: When do I live? He keeps repeating like a mantra throughout his working life. When then are you going to live? Why slave all your life? Oblomov is the first character in 19th century literature to voice the difference between the working self and the leisured self, and to reject the drive for personal transcendence and social betterment. Dostoevsky is claimed to have said: “We all come out from under Gogol’s overcoat”. Likewise, we are all the inheritors of Oblomov; out from under his filthy dressing gown, come Des Essientes, Ignatius Reilly, Zoyd Wheeler, and all the couch potatoes of our era.

Posted by Murr at 6:46 PM Labels: Essais

1 comments:

Makifat said...

Excellent analysis. I read Oblomov a couple of years ago. I forget how many pages pass before our hero even gets out of bed. The Beckett comparison is astute.

Paul Lafargue and the Right to Be Lazy

The purpose of this paper is to consider the utopia of one forgotten classic of the left, namely Paul Lafargue's pamphlet, The Right to Be Lazy. What is remarkable about this short book is its genre, which is both Marxist and utopian. For many good reasons, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels avoided that sort of writing themselves. In the 1840s, when they were first won to socialism, the workers' movement suffered from a surfeit of utopian schemes. It was not that Marx or Engels had anything against utopias, per se. But thinking of themselves as practical men, both were embarrassed by the disjunction between the glorious visions of William Weitling, Charles Fourier and Robert Owen among others, and the naïveté with which they planned to get there. The results are scorned in Engels's Anti-Dühring:

If pure reason and justice have not hitherto ruled the world, it is only because they have not been rightly understood. What was missing was only the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who has recognised the truth. The fact that he has now arisen, that the truth has been recognised precisely at this moment, is not an inevitable event following of necessity in the chain of historical development, but a happy accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years earlier and he might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife and suffering.

Engels' response to the utopian socialists was clear - no utopia mattered to him, unless its author knew which group in society was supposed to bring it into being. In this sense the Marxism of the founding fathers was very much a transitional theory. Contrary to Rosa Luxemburg, what mattered to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels above all was the means of how to get to the new society, rather than the end of what to do when they got there.

Similar tastes have been carried into the labour movement since. Marx hinted at the nature of the future Communist society in passages from his German Ideology and The Civil War in France. Then, in the middle of the Russian revolution of 1917, Lenin considered the future of the state after a successful workers' uprising. His pamphlet, The State and Revolution, predicted that the revolution would abolish the coercive apparatus of the state. Without inequality there would be no class divisions, and without classes who would be left to police? In addition to this important example of utopian theory, scientific socialists have made do with a few short pamphlets, several Marxist utopias in the form of fiction, and as far as I can see … not much more than that. We have no Marx 'On Socialism', no Engels, no Lenin, no Sartre, no Trotsky, no Serge. The literature which exists is not much of a guide, when labour activists attempt to think of a post-capitalist society, and perhaps this absence of discussion is one reason why so few socialists make that imaginative leap today.

The absence of utopian writing in the Marxist tradition helps to explain the appeal of Paul Lafargue's book. Certainly in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, his pamphlet was one of the three or four most popular books to be sold within the Second International. First published in summer 1880 as a series of articles in the newspaper L'Égalité (Equality), Le droit á la paresse came out as a short book in 1881, with new editions following in 1883, 1898 and 1900. 'According to Alexandre Bracke, the longtime socialist deputy, it was the socialist pamphlet most extensively translated after the Communist Manifesto and was translated into Russian before the Manifesto.' A first English translation was made by Charles Kerr of Chicago, based on the 1883 edition. Since then the pamphlet has continued in print, with the most recent French editions appearing in 1975 (Maspero) and 1994 (Mille et une Nuits), and English editions in 1989 (Charles Kerr) and 1999 (Fifth Season). The Right to Be Lazy was an important and widely-read pamphlet, but Lafargue's has suffered as much any of the socialist classics from the pessimism which has descended on the left since the fall of the Berlin Wall. For most of the past dozen years, there has been no English edition in print. Fifth Season must therefore be congratulated for their recent republication of The Right to Be Lazy, complete with a new translation by Len Bracken.

This paper will consider first, the life and career of Paul Lafargue, next, the argument of his pamphlet, its source, and then its reception since. One question is answered at the end of the article: How useful is Lafargue's pamphlet, how relevant is this utopia to labour movement activists, one hundred and twenty years after it was first produced?

Lafargue: A Rebel Life

Paul Lafargue was born in Santiago, Cuba, on 16 June 1842. Among his grandparents, Lafargue counted a French republican, a French Jew, a mulatto and a Caribbean Indian. In the words of the American syndicalist Daniel De Leon, 'Paul Lafargue had a constitutional affinity with the oppressed.' Originally a supporter of the French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Lafargue settled in London, and was acquainted with one of Proudhon's rivals within the First International, namely Karl Marx. Eventually won over to Marx's vision of socialism, Lafargue married the Old Moor's daughter Laura in 1865. Working as a political activist in Spain and France, Paul Lafargue helped to found the French Workers Party, which was led by his friend Jules Guesde. He and his wide corresponded with Engels until his death in 1895. The loss of three children caused Laura and Paul to devote themselves solely to political work. Their partnership ended only in 1911, with their joint suicide. Given that most socialists were suspicious of even voluntary euthanasia, it is appropriate to quote from Paul Lafargue's final note, which sets out his reason for ending his life in this way:

Healthy in body and mind, I end my life before pitiless old age which has taken from me my pleasures and joys one after another; and which has been stripping me of my physical and mental powers, can paralyse my energy and break my will, making me a burden to myself and to others. For some years I had promised myself not to live beyond 70; and I fixed the exact year for my departure from life. I prepared the method for the execution of our resolution, it was a hypodermic of cyanide acid. I die with the supreme joy of knowing that at some future time, the cause will triumph to which I have been devoted for forty-five years. Long live Communism! Long Live the Second International.

This short biographical summary highlights several themes which would be important in the genesis of The Right to Be Lazy, including Lafargue's relationship with Karl Marx, the distinctive and unfinished character of his Marxism, and the relationship between the personal and the political, as it shaped Paul Lafargue's life.

Lafargue met Karl Marx at a session of the International Working Men's Association (IWMA, or First International) in spring 1866. Marx was not very much impressed with his young co-conspirator. The problem once again was utopianism. Lafargue held to the Proudhonist doctrine that all 'nationalist' politicians whether romantic (Mazzini), reactionary (Bismarck) or revolutionary (Garibaldi) were fundamentally the same. Such a characteristically-French lumpen Communism drew Marx's scorn. This is how he described one meeting of the International in a letter addressed to Frederick Engels in June 1866:

The English laughed heartily when I began my SPEECH with the observation that our friend Lafargue, and others, who had abolished nationalities, had addressed us in 'French', i.e. in a language which 9/10 of the audience did not understand. I went on to suggest that by his denial of nationalities he seemed quite unconsciously to imply their absorption by the model French nation.

Lafargue slowly adopted Marxist doctrines through conversations held during strolls on Hampstead Heath. By the time of the 1867 Congress of the International, Lafargue was in a position to second Marx's suggestion that the Association should become 'a common centre of action for the working class'. The following year, Lafargue married Laura Marx, thus placing himself near the centre of the family. Both he and his wife corresponded with Marx and Engels, and both took on to defend the substance of Marx's socialism. Certainly when the French Socialist Workers Party split in 1881, Lafargue played the role of defending Marxist orthodoxy. Paul Brousse's party, the 'Possibilists', came out in favour of municipal reform, theoretical diversity and national defence; while Paul Lafargue and Jules Guesde's 'Impossibilists' stood for revolution, Marxism and international solidarity. The content of Lafargue's internationalism had developed, from a naïve belief in the 1860s that nations were a thing of the past, to his revolutionary claim of the 1880s that nationalism had to be fought.

During the period of the Second International, an orthodox socialist was someone who was loyal to that brand of Marxism which was developed in reading Marx, and through the interventions of Karl Marx himself, Frederick Engels and then Karl Kautsky. Lafargue's socialism was criticised by his rivals in France precisely for such fidelity - it was far too 'German'. A similar criticism is made by Leszek Kolakowski, the biographer of this generation. He maintains that Lafargue was an economic determinist whose philosophy was closer to the late Feuerbach than Marx, 'In short, it cannot be said that Lafargue enlarged or improved upon Marxist doctrine in any way.' Two responses come to mind. First, for the devotees of Marxist philosophy, it is true by definition that only philosophy matters. Such skills as the popularisation or development of existing theories do not count. Only originality is allowed. The best example of such creative thinking becomes that generation of Marxist philosophers, 'the children of Marx and Coca Cola', who have nicely reconciled Marxism with liberalism, every one of them announcing the same formula that 'grand narratives' (herds) are a thing of the past. Second, the judgement of the philosophers is unfair to the man himself. Lafargue was a much more interesting and diverse thinker. Having come to scientific socialism late, and through admiration for both Proudhon and especially Auguste Blanqui (who Paul Lafargue met as a student activist), our author retained some of his old libertarian background. It is this unusual combination of Marxism with pre-Marxist French socialism which makes The Right to Be Lazy such an interesting document to read.

As for the contradiction between the personal and the political, every socialist activist in history has encountered a tension between these two. This problem follows from the contradictions within the socialist project, which were raised at the very opening of this paper. The reason to become a socialist, is that people want to see a different, equal society, without inhumanity and want. But stuck in a racist, sexist and capitalist world, it is impossible for anyone to escape to the future, and emancipate themselves thereby from the pressures to conform to the dictates of the present. Different writers and activists have resolved this tension keeping more or less of their dignity intact. Frederick Engels worked as a factory-manager, while Karl Marx owned shares, and Paul Lafargue had no better answers to these problems than anyone else. Moving towards the contents of his pamphlet, was Lafargue indolent in the way that The Right to Be Lazy demands? Certainly, Paul Lafargue was not a disciplined student, and his natural indolence helps to explain his failure to qualify as a doctor, at least as much as the important distractions that he encountered on the revolutionary left. Yet liberated after 1870 by an inheritance from his father which rescued him from the need to find paid employment, Paul Lafargue settled down and became a hard-working and widely-published socialist activist. Our hero could be as disciplined as anyone else, when the task in question was something which he wanted to do.

Work: A Strange Madness

The Right to Be Lazy was a masterpiece of studied contempt. Lafargue relaxed his pen, and employed the satirist's skills of scorn and sarcasm, as he never had before. The structure of his first sentence owed something to the first line of the Communist Manifesto, 'A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism'. The difference is that in Paul Lafargue's account, the monstrous danger was something to be avoided, and not praised:

A strange madness has taken possession of the working-classes of those nations in which capitalist civilisation dominates. This madness brings in its wake the individual and collective sufferings which for two centuries have tortured an unhappy humanity. This madness is the love of work, the destructive desire for labour, carried even to the extent of exhausting the vital forces of the individual and his offspring.

For his negative model, Lafargue took the seventy-hour working week which was practised by so many people in late nineteenth-century France: 'Work, work, proletarians to augment social wealth and your individual misery. Work, work, so that becoming poorer you will have more reasons to work and be miserable. This is the inexorable law of capitalist production.' In its place, Lafargue advocated leisure - not the wretched leisure industry of our day, but the emancipation of work through its re-integration into older patterns of short-work and frequent rest, 'The proletariat must constrain itself to work for no more than three hours a day and spend the rest of the day and night resting and banqueting.'

One of the most distinctive themes of Lafargue's argument was his frequent use of classical and sometimes even older sources to praise an earlier world in which leisure was seen as a higher virtue than permanent toil. The Bible was praised both for the Sermon on the Mount ('Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not neither do they spin') and for the example given to everyone in Genesis, 'The bearded Jehovah gave his followers the supreme example of ideal laziness - after six day's work, he rested for eternity.' There were also references to Antipatros, Cicero, Arcadian parrots, Venus, Herodotus ('even women were not allowed to spin or weave so as not to detract from their nobility'), Brutus the Elder, Tarquin, Plato, Xenophon ('work steals time'), Plutarch, Lycurgus and Daedalus. Paul Lafargue praised to the skies the Greek ideal of civilised leisure:

The ancient Greeks had no more desire for work: free men practised only physical exercise and games of intelligence. This was the era when Aristotle, Phidias and Aristophanes moved and breathed among the people; when heroes at Marathon crushed the Asian hordes, who were also conquered by Alexander. The philosophers of Antiquity taught contempt for work - the degradation of the free man.

You might from this passage conclude that Lafargue had been boning up on his classics - indeed, as I will show, he had been doing just this.

One less attractive theme of The Right to Be Lazy was its author's confusion of matters of class and race. This point was never made explicit, nor was Lafargue arguing in defence of racial privilege, but like several other nineteenth-century writers, Paul Lafargue found it easiest when looking for a capitalist, to name a Jew. There are three references to Rothschild in this fifteen-thousand word pamphlet, which is at least two more than any other banker or industrialist who came to Lafargue's mind. A similar disorder infects the following passage, harmless in itself, but odd to a twenty-first century ear, 'For which races is work an organic necessity? The Auvergnians; the Scots (Auvergnians of the British Isles); Galicians (Spanish Auvergnians); Pomeranians (German Auvergnians); the Chinese (Asian Auvergnians).' Was race really this important? - I doubt it. The pamphlet makes no racist argument, nor was Paul Lafargue a recognisably racist writer - either by the standards of his day, or our own. Yet there is something crude here, which does not impress.

Of more interest is Lafargue's attack on organised religion, as far as he was concerned, Christianity had justified slavery in antiquity and now it glorified alienated labour. Paul Lafargue had nothing bad to say against scripture, as we have seen. Yet our author had no good word to say for the work-ethic of Protestantism, bemoaning the death of feudal work-practices in eighteenth-century Britain. Before the industrial revolution, by contrast, everything was fine, 'Morose England, immersed in Protestantism, was then known as "Merrie England".' Catholicism received even shorter shrift from Paul Lafargue's pen: 'Christian hypocrisy and capitalist utilitarianism didn't pervert the philosophers of the ancient Republics … The Bastiats, Dupanloups, Beaulieus and co with their Christian and capitalist morality, these thinkers and their philosophers recommend slavery.' Such anti-clericalism was a common part of Paul Lafargue's socialism, certainly until the time of the Dreyfus affair, when it appears that secular intellectuals took over this target role.

In the final few paragraphs of The Right to Be Lazy, Lafargue reminded his reader of the Greek philosopher Aristotle's desire that machinery would user in a new era of human rest, 'if every tool could be used effortlessly, or move itself like the masterpieces of Daedalus or begin spontaneously their scared work like Vulcan's tripods; if, for example, the weaver's shuttles did their own weaving, the head of the shop would not need any assistant, nor the master, slaves.' Paul Lafargue wholeheartedly endorsed this vision of the future of technology, where human inventions could be used to secure the idleness people deserved, 'The genius of the great capitalist philosophers remains dominated by the prejudices of the salary, the worst slavery. They still don't understand that the machine is the redeemer of mankind, the God who will rescue humanity from the sordidae artes of wage slavery, the God who will give us leisure and liberty.' To this I add, Amen!

Origins of an Idea

The success of The Right to Be Lazy, and the general absence of footnotes in the pamphlet, have encouraged historians to look for earlier manuscripts which acted as source-material for it. One influence could be the philosophy of Epicurus. He has been associated with the idea that a good life is a happy life - or as this philosophy has been understood in English, 'eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die'. Indeed, Epicurus is no accidental figure to associate with the nineteenth-century left. Marx devoted his doctoral thesis to a comparison of the natural philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus, concluding heavily on the side of the latter. A second potential source could be Lafargue's long-term influence, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The introduction to his pamphlet Sunday, recommends leaving aside the 'discussion of work and wages, organisation and industry' in favour of the study of 'a law which would have at its basis a theory of rest'. Another influence may have been Charles Fourier, whose work includes its own passionate critique of toil. A fourth and most likely influence is Karl Marx. The message of Lafargue's pamphlet is close to the themes of Marx's earlier philosophical writings, including the German Ideology and his 1844 Manuscripts. Most of these remained unpublished until the twentieth century - but it is likely that some of the same themes recurred in those formative strolls along Hampstead Heath.

One source we know for certain, even though Lafargue declined to provide a reference. The very name of Lafargue's pamphlet was plundered from an earlier book by Louis Moreau-Christophe, The Right to Idleness and the Organisation of Slavery in the Greek and Roman Republics. Lafargue gently tweaked the phrase, to give his title a more provocative edge. No doubt Moreau-Christophe also provided the classical references. Our author came across the earlier book in the private library of Karl Marx, and was later sent Marx's original copy, following the older man's death in 1883.

We cannot really know what Marx made of Moreau-Christophe's book, and still less can we know what opinions he passed on to his son-in-law. Yet Marx wrote several comments on his copy of this book. Many were aimed at Joseph Naudet, who wrote a critical after-word to Moreau-Christophe's original paper. Marx's marginal notes included a criticism of Naudet's belief that the law was a means to achieve justice, 'This proves that Naudet, although he cites the authors didn't understand the first word of Roman Law. Product, property - whose? That means law - whose? Force, armed theft or rapine.' Later Marx responded to Moreau-Christophe's defence of the duty to work, with a caustic aside worthy of Lafargue, work is … 'that which Christianity came to teach the world.' Although these comments are interesting in themselves, sadly they do not constitute any 'missing link' to Lafargue's pamphlet. They were not read by Paul Lafargue, and if he did read them, it was only after The Right to Be Lazy had already been published.

A Pamphlet and a Programme?

Part of the historical interest of Lafargue's pamphlet lies with the moment at which it was published. Over the past dozen years or so, several writers have sought a return to a pure set of left-wing values, a 'classical Marxism' unsullied by the defeat of the Russian Revolution. The phrase 'classical Marxism' is taken from the Polish revolutionary, Isaac Deutscher, who was a supporter of Trotsky in exile and later became an inspiration to the New Left that grew up in the 1960s. Deutscher was very much an enthusiast for the Marxism of Lafargue's day, talking of the 'striking, and to a Marxist often humiliating contrast between what I call classical Marxism - that is, the body of thought developed by Marx, Engels, their contemporaries and after them by Kautsky, Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg - and the vulgar Marxism, the pseudo-Marxism of the different varieties of European social-democrats, Stalinists, Kruschevities, and their like.' Not everyone has been so friendly to the Marxists of the Second International. John Rees has condemned the lack of imaginative, dialectical thinking among several members of this generation, including especially Karl Kautsky. It is hard to fit Paul Lafargue's into this debate. His significance is uneven, his presence contradictory. His other translated works lack the wit of The Right to Be Lazy, are derivative, and generally confirm the negative judgements given above. Yet this pamphlet is Lafargue at his best. Its utopianism stands beyond the perspective of his contemporaries. The living essence of Marxism - the dialectical method - is there.

What about Lafargue's argument? In the one-hundred-plus years since the publication of Paul Lafargue's pamphlet, critical judgement has varied. The Right to Be Lazy has found unlikely enemies, and a few surprising champions as well. Among the unexpected critics, I would include the dissident Marxist Leszek Kolakowski, who was mentioned earlier. His claim is that Lafargue's socialism was a step backwards from classical Marxism. He suggests that the flaw of The Right to Be Lazy was that it described socialism purely in terms of consumption - 'resting and banqueting'. Such 'hedonistic Marxism', according to Kolakowski, fails to explain what will happen when labour is no longer alienated. Even after the revolution, we will still need hospitals, schools, food and power supplies. So how will these be established, if nobody is going to do any work? Lafargue gives two direct answers to this question in The Right to Be Lazy - the first is that the use of machinery should lead to greater leisure, the second is his acceptance of the need for a three-hour working day - yet both responses are insufficient as answers. On my reading of Paul Lafargue's pamphlet, a third and more compelling answer to Kolakowski's question is implied, although it is only lightly traced. I will say more about this in a moment.

Among Paul Lafargue's surprising admirers can be counted the current French government. In 1999 Lionel Jospin's socialists passed a new law introducing the 35-hour week. French workers already benefit from five week's paid holiday, two month's summer vacation, and a range of public holidays to make their confreres in Britain and America weep. Indeed Jospin has dropped his own hints suggesting the influence of Paul Lafargue on the new law. Although Lafargue's general belief that shorter working hours could reduce unemployment may have influenced Lionel Jospin's coalition, the most compelling reason for introducing the law would have been to strengthen a Socialist Party challenged by no less than three electoral blocs to its left - the Trotskyists, the Greens, and the Communists, each of which achieved over 5 per cent of the vote in last year's Euro-elections.

Between the crude ultra-left criticised by Kolakowski and the mild-mannered reformist beloved of Jospin, is there any space for the real Paul Lafargue to make himself known? One point which occurs to me is that Lafargue's claims are really not that exceptional. Even the physicist Albert Einstein, on those rare occasions when he gave substance to his socialist politics, spoke of the need to reduce the working week: 'In each branch of industry the number of working hours per week ought to be reduced by law so that unemployment is systematically abolished. At the same time minimum wages must be fixed in such a way that the purchasing power of the workers keeps pace with production.' On this reading, the importance of Lafargue is that he reminds us of a basic truth which the left knew all along. The politics of Marx, the influence of Proudhon, the memory of the Paris Commune (during which Lafargue was a delegate-at-large in France), each of these influences can be traced in his book. The true originality of The Right to Be Lazy is that everyone else forgets to make these points in their propaganda, and it was left to Lafargue to fill the gap.

Kolakowski's challenge remains unanswered. If work is to be abolished, then what (in socialist theory) should take its place? It seems to me that the answer implied in Lafargue is the traditional Marxist answer. Certainly people will continue to produce after the revolution, but their labour will be different from 'work' as we understand it now. For one thing, there will be no class of employers, and no class of the employed. Therefore work will not be alien, in the sense that it will belong to the worker. No-one will be expected to labour on tasks which they have not chosen. More fundamentally, the nature of employment will change. The one literature in which people have seriously considered what useful work will be like beyond the confines of the market, is in educational theory. Thirty years ago Paulo Freire wrote about education as a means to self-emancipation. More recently, the most widely-used concept has been 'play'. When educational writers use this word, they have in mind the unstructured learning which children develop in their first years. Rules are developed by individuals and groups, without external compulsion. Education without rules, self-development and unconstrained learning, these are the ideals that writers have in mind.

The one author I know who has attempted to marry The Right to Be Lazy to play-theory is an anarchist Bob Black. His web-tract, 'The Abolition of Work' follows closely the argument of Lafargue, 'Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law'. There are several unconvincing puns on 'ludic' game-playing, but the content of Black's argument provides a serious answer to Kolakowski's challenge, mentioned above. Bob Black includes a useful definition of work (as 'forced labour') as well as a mapped-out alternative to it:

What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a 'job' and an 'occupation'. Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else … Second, there are some things that people like to do from time to time, but not for too long, and certainly not all of the time … Third, other things being equal, some things are unsatisfying if done by yourself or in unpleasant surroundings or at the orders of an overlord, are enjoyable, at least for a while, if these circumstances are changed.

I don't think Lafargue would have cut a single word from this passage. I would restate his belief in mechanisation (democratically controlled by workers, not by managers), and his notion of a remaining transitional three-hour day. The picture becomes clearer then and more consistent, the future more worked-out and more real.

In conclusion, it seems to me that Paul Lafargue's notion of a work-less future provides a compelling vision of the alternative society that most labour movement activists would actually like to bring about. Indeed I suspect that his utopia would be compelling to much wider layers of people, even than that. Each year seems to bring new advances in labour-saving technology, but the working week never shortens - not for Spanish-speaking workers who are now challenging African-Americans to take on the roles of labourer, driver and cleaner for white urban America; not in Russia, where life expectancy has fallen over the past fifteen years; not in France where unemployment remains at 10 per cent; and not in Britain where the gap between rich and poor has hardly narrowed in the 100 years since statistics were first collected. The anarchists, turtles kids and Lesbian Avengers who were at Seattle last year have at least as much to say about Lafargue, as the hard-hats who marched with them. Spread the word.

From: DKrenton.com.uk

Adventures in Neurasthenia, continued

2011-11-24T19:45:00.000-08:00

Men and women were both subject to nervous diseases from different pressures. Beard thought that men in the professions, especially his own, medicine, were most inclined to neurasthenia (he diagnosed and treated himself as a neurasthenic) because of the pressures of overwork and guilt for not living up to the standards of their professions

Adventures in Neurasthenia, continued

2011-11-22T11:38:00.000-08:00

In Nervous Exhaustion (1880) and American Nervousness (1881) George Beard argued that while similar disorders appeared in other countries, neurasthenia was an illness peculiar to America and was brought on by changes in the conditions of the United States in his own time. Elsewhere, Men were expected to follow in their father's footsteps. In America, they were expected to work their way up the economic ladder, to make something of themselves!

But how were they to accomplish this mission if they were plagued all the time by severe fatigue?

"Let be be the finale of seem."

2011-11-22T00:29:00.000-08:00

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Wallace Stevens

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be the finale of seem.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.

Let the lamp affix its beam.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

1922

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and educated in the classics at Reading Boys' High School, and at Harvard during the years 1897-1900, acting as president of the Harvard Advocate and publishing some verse. After several years as a reporter in New York, Stevens entered New York Law School in 1901 and was admitted to the bar in 1904. In New York he worked for several law firms and then joined an insurance firm, the American Bonding Company of Baltimore, which became the Equitable Surety Company of St. Louis. Stevens married in 1909 and lived in New York until moving to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1916. Until his retirement, he worked for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, moving up to Vice President in 1934, akin to composer Charles Ives, who also worked in insurance while pursuing his craft. Steven's poem "Pecksniffiana" won the Helen Haire Levinson Prize offered by Poetry in 1920.

Stevens wrote, "A poem need not have a meaning and, like most things in nature, often does not have." In Opus Posthumous, "Adagia" (1959). Stevens knew well Key West in Florida, which is probably where this poem takes place, since ice-cream was commonly served at funerals during the hot weather. It is said the poem speaks of the duality of eros and thanatos, of life and death.

2011-11-21T11:12:00.000-08:00

Are Marathons Dangerous?

2011-11-20T14:11:00.000-08:00

Special Report: Are Marathons Dangerous?

If running is so good for you, why do people drop dead during marathons every year? A lifelong runner, with help from the experts, finds the encouraging truth behind the scary headlines.

By Amby Burfoot

Image by Matt Mahurin

Grave Concerns

Special Report: Are Marathons Dangerous?

If running is so good for you, why do people drop dead during marathons every year? A lifelong runner, with help from the experts, finds the encouraging truth behind the scary headlines.

By Amby Burfoot

Image by Matt Mahurin

From the December 2008 issue of Runner's World

The Running Effect

"I feel a little awkward about meeting John Fixx," says heart specialist Paul Thompson, M.D. "His father made me famous." It's a gray, drizzly afternoon three days after my run with Steve Blair. Thompson and I are jogging from Hartford Hospital, where he's chief of cardiology, toward nearby Colt Park. I've arranged for Fixx, an old friend, to meet us there for a five-mile run.

A month earlier, Thompson, 61, had finished the Boston Marathon in 3:24:01. He's slight-5'7" and 144 pounds-with a boyish face, a forehead that goes on forever, and a respectful manner. Thompson completed his first Boston 40 years earlier, in 1968 (34th place, 2:49:22), while still a Tufts University undergrad. Several years later, he improved his Boston best to 2:28:25, his PR. He ran 14 straight Bostons, but a move to Pittsburgh, four kids, and increasing hospital responsibilities will put a dent in anyone's schedule. More recently, with the kids grown and a move to Hartford, he's run the last nine Bostons.

By the time of Jim Fixx's death at age 52 in 1984, Thompson had graduated from medical school, done some advanced studies at Stanford, and published two papers on heart-attack deaths in runners. That made him the go-to expert for hundreds of TV, radio, and newspaper reporters chasing down the Fixx story. Over the years, Thompson has remained everyone's favorite expert for insights on exercise and heart disease. He has also worked as a TV commentator at the Seoul Olympics and the New York City Marathon, and his name turns up frequently in publications like The New England Journal of Medicine.

Thompson has had a lifelong fascination with the workings of the heart, in particular its response to exercise. "Sometimes I wish I could read heart studies all day long instead of attending to administration details," he says. "Think about the overweight guy who's totally out of shape until he begins exercising. A couple of months later, he's a different person. The heart is so amazing, and so damned good at what it does."

Thompson runs with the quick, light stride of the veteran marathoner, and has already covered eight miles in the early morning. "It's the one time of day I get to focus on myself," he says. "This makes me a much better person when I get to work and have to focus on staff and patients."

I ask Thompson why some runners keel over and die from heart attacks. He explains, first, that the young ones, mostly under 30 or 35, generally have structural defects in their hearts, such as the heart scarring that apparently led to Ryan Shay's death. These include a bewildering variety of rare conditions, and one-hypertrophic cardiomyopathy-that gets mentioned much more than the others for two reasons. First, it's the most common cause of sudden heart death in young athletes. Second, it results from an enlarged heart. This leads to widespread confusion, because endurance athletes like marathoners also have enlarged hearts. But the two are completely different. The marathoner's heart is large, healthy, and efficient; it's like a car that gets 40 miles per gallon. The hypertrophic cardiomyopathy heart is misshapen, malfunctioning, and dangerous; it results from a physical defect, not from hard endurance training.

When an over-35 exerciser dies on the run, Thompson continues, the cause is almost always artery disease-that is, cholesterol deposits that rupture and provoke a heart attack. He describes it like this: Imagine a garden hose with a modest flow of water moving through it. That's your arteries when you're resting. When you begin to run faster, the flow of blood increases dramatically. The hose begins to twist and flail. You've felt this with your own hose, or noticed how firemen must brace themselves to control a high-pressure hose. "So your arteries are flexing and bending," says Thompson. "Now if you've got a cholesterol deposit in the artery, the movement can crack the deposit open. Your blood mixes with the cholesterol to form a clot that blocks the artery. A few minutes later, you've bought the farm."

In Thompson's classic 1982 study of runners' heart-attack deaths in the state of Rhode Island, he found that a runner's relative risk of dying during a workout was about seven times that of dying in front of the TV. It amounted to one death for every 396,000 hours of running, almost exactly the same rate found decades later in several marathon studies (see "Risk of Death While Marathoning," page 98). This doesn't mean that running caused the deaths. It would be more accurate to say that artery disease caused the deaths, and running was merely the trigger. Here's why: Another Rhode Island study showed that the blizzard of February 1978 touched off a mini-epidemic of snow-shoveling deaths. A week later, however, heart-attack deaths dropped below normal levels. In other words, after all the people with advanced artery disease had died, there were few diseased hearts left.

Like other heart experts, Thompson notes that regular exercise offers no sure protection from heart disease. Three hundred and twenty-five thousand Americans suffer an outside-a-hospital heart attack every year, often without warning, and 40 percent of these events end in sudden death. "Exercise is not a savior," Thompson says. "The risks are very low, the benefits are real, and the benefits outweigh the risks. But there are no guarantees. Regular exercise is like investing in the stock market. You hope that your stock will improve over time, but every once in a while you catch a Bear Stearns."

This can happen even to fit runners with low cholesterol who've passed a stress test in the last 48 hours. Still, the occasional exercise death doesn't change the advice for healthy living. "If you want to live a long, vigorous life, you should do an hour of moderate exercise a day," says Thompson. "If your only goal is to survive the next hour of your life, you should get into bed-alone."

Time on Newt

2011-11-20T09:33:00.000-08:00

Sunday, November 20, 2011

November 9, 2011, 12:04 am

Gingrich Rises in Polls But Has Major Obstacles to Nomination

By NATE SILVER

I forget whether I posted something on Twitter to this effect or simply kept the thought to myself, but there was a point in time at which I would have given Newt Gingrich not more than a 1-in-1,000 chance of winning the Republican nomination.

That may have been foolish. This year’s Republican nomination process, if nothing else, has reminded us how often things don’t go to plan and how unpredictable the primaries can be. Lately, Mr. Gingrich has been showing some signs of life.

He has averaged 13 percent of the vote in polls conducted of Republican voters so far in November, his third straight month of improvement after he bottomed out at 5 percent in July and August. There’s also some evidence that Mr. Gingrich tends to be competing for the same types of voters as Herman Cain, so if Mr. Cain’s campaign begins to erode support, Mr. Gingrich could be the beneficiary of that.

Perhaps more surprising is the rebound in Mr. Gingrich’s favorability ratings among Republican voters. According to Gallup’s tracking poll, Mr. Gingrich is now viewed favorably by 55 percent of Republican voters and unfavorably by 23 percent, a big improvement from June when those numbers were 42 and 31 percent, respectively.

But there is much to consider in a primary campaign beyond the national polls. I would group these “fundamental” factors into five broad categories, each of which we will consider in the context of Mr. Gingrich:

Early State Polls and Positioning Somewhat contrary to the perception that Mr. Gingrich is running a national book tour rather than a serious campaign for the White House, he has spent most of his time in the key early-voting states. Based on Politico’s candidate tracker, I show Mr. Gingrich as having held 11 events in Iowa between Sept. 1 and Oct. 31, along with seven in Florida and five in South Carolina. He has spent very little time in New Hampshire, but overall he made 25 appearances between the four states during this period, about the same number as Mitt Romney

Polls suggest that Mr. Gingrich is right to concentrate on the other three states at the expense of New Hampshire: his numbers lag his national support by several points in the there, while running roughly in line with it in the others. It’s conceivable that Florida and South Carolina could turn into strengths for Mr. Gingrich. He is from Georgia, which neighbors both of them, and polls find that Mr. Gingrich runs relatively strongly among older voters, which will be helpful to him in Florida. But he will probably have to perform strongly in Iowa to get to those states in decent shape, and although recent polls show his numbers improving there, he lacks infrastructure in Iowa and fared very poorly in the Ames Straw Poll.

Endorsements and Party Support. Mr. Gingrich has a half-dozen endorsements from Republicans in the U.S. House, but almost all of them came toward the start of his campaign in May and all but two of them are from his home state of Georgia. (He also has the endorsement of Georgia’s governor, Nathan Deal.) Mr. Gingrich has very few endorsements in key early-voting states.

Some endorsements are better than none, and Mr. Gingrich has more from members of the Congress than candidates like Herman Cain (who has just one), Representative Michele Bachmann (zero) and Jon M. Huntsman Jr. (also zero). It’s important to remember that relatively few Republican party leaders have made endorsements of any kind so far, and it’s certainly not impossible to imagine the former speaker of the House finding support within the Republican establishment. For the time being, however, the low endorsement total qualifies as a weakness for Mr. Gingrich.

Fundraising and Campaign Infrastructure. Mr. Gingrich’s fundraising has been simply abysmal — just $2.9 million brought in through Sept. 30. Not only that, but as of Sept. 30, Mr. Gingrich had only $353,000 in cash on hand but $1.2 million in debt. There’s some question about whether fundraising is more of a lagging or a leading indicator; the money sometimes follows the polls. But it is hard to see how numbers like these are anything other than a huge problem for Mr. Gingrich.

What they may really point toward is his lack of a robust campaign infrastructure, caused in part by numerous staff defections early in this campaign. He may even be in something of a Catch-22: it’s hard to hire staff if you don’t have money, but it’s hard to raise money if you don’t have any staff. Whether Mr. Gingrich makes a credible effort to address these issues over the next several weeks will be a good sign of how seriously his surge should be taken.

Ideological Positioning. Mr. Gingrich got himself into trouble early on with his apostasies over Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan. But most every Republican candidate has one or two positions that they now find inconvenient, and Mr. Gingrich’s overall ideological positioning isn’t bad given the mood of the Republican electorate. We did not include Mr. Gingrich in our recent magazine feature on Republican candidates that rated their ideology from center to right on a 100-point scale, but his score would be fairly close to that of Gov. Rick Perry, which in my view represents something of a sweet spot for the Republican primary electorate: solidly conservative but not in Michele Bachmann territory. Mr. Gingrich is also fairly well positioned on what I call the establishment-insurgent axis; he can claim to know how Washington works while also seeming like an outsider since he has been out of it for some time.

This, overall, is one of Mr. Gingrich’s greater strengths: one can imagine him being acceptable in theory to a fairly broad array of conservative voters.

Electability and Personal Liabilities The downside to being acceptable to most conservative Republicans is that you may not be ideally positioned for the general election. I don’t place a lot of emphasis on horse-race polls this early out, but Mr. Gingrich trails President Obama by 11 points in recent surveys, about the same as Mr. Perry. Our forecasting model, which is based on ideology ratings rather than these polls, suggests that he might ultimately run a net of about 4 points worse than someone like Mitt Romney nationally.

Of course, in the context of a nomination race, the perception of electability may be more important than the reality of it. But those numbers are quite poor for Mr. Gingrich as well. In the recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, just 5 percent of G.O.P. voters identified him as the candidate with “the best chance to defeat Barack Obama in the general election,” well below the 11 percent support he had overall in the survey.

Meanwhile, although Mr. Gingrich’s personal favorability rating has rebounded a great deal among Republican voters, he has some image problems that could come back to harm him should he rise in the polls and receive more scrutiny from voters and the media. The most obvious problem is Mr. Gingrich’s two divorces, a subject that may receive more attention given the recent focus on the sexual harassment allegations against Mr. Cain. Mr. Gingrich may also not be as thoroughly vetted as candidates like Mr. Romney and Mr. Perry, who have run for office more recently.

Finally, there’s the fact that Mr. Gingrich is anything but a new face to voters and is associated with an exceptionally unpopular institution, the United States Congress.

Overall, I would read three of these factors, establishment support, personal liabilities, and (especially) fund-raising, as being clearly negative for Mr. Gingrich. This contrasts against one, ideological positioning, which is potentially favorable for him. He has both strengths and weakness in the key early-voting states, meanwhile.

That balance is unfavorable enough to suggest that his chances of winning the nomination are weaker than his polls alone would imply. That certainly does not mean that his chances are zero, or 1,000-to-1 against. If Republican voters decide that they really don’t want to nominate Mitt Romney, Mr. Gingrich could be the last man standing. But even if Mr. Gingrich continues to gain in the polls, he will have some major weaknesses to overcome.

George Miller Beard, M.D. (1837-1883)

2011-11-18T14:43:00.000-08:00

George Beard, M.D. (1837-1883)

George Beard is credited with coining the word "neurasthenia," a term that came into great prominence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Beard received his medical degree in 1866 at The College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York and then joined Dr. A. D. Rockwell, a New York neurologist who was using electricity in medical and surgical therapy and with whom Beard later published favorably received book on the subject. Beard became interested in psychology, and in 1876 he read a paper at a meeting of the American Neurological Association entitled, "On the influence of the mind on the cure and causation of disease" (Journal of Nervous & Mental Diseases, 1876, vol. 3, pp. 429-434). Beard credited emotions as influencing symptoms which could be dispelled by positive thinking, to which he applied the term "mental therapeutics." His paper met with derision from his colleagues, and The Superintendents’ Association lost no opportunity to disparage Beard’s writings. Beard’s book, A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia) (New York, 1880) received a scathing review in The AJI (April 1880, v. 36, pp. 522-526).

Historian Charles Rosenberg wrote, "Beard was neither a profound nor critical thinker. His popularization of the idea of neurasthenia won him an international reputation in the late 19th century… he was a forerunner of French and modern psychological medicine." ("The place of George M. Beard in 19th-century psychiatry," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1962, v. 36 (3), pp. 245-259).

Profile from: http://www.nim.nih.gov/hmd/diseases/note.html

From Wikipedia:
George Miller Beard (May 8, 1839 – January 23, 1883) was a U.S. neurologist who popularized the term neurasthenia, starting around 1869.

Biography:

Dr. Beard was born in Montville, Connecticut on May 8, 1839, [1837, according to the NIH profile, J. Richman] to Rev. Spencer F. Beard, a Congregational minister, and Lucy A. Leonard. He graduated from Yale College in 1862, and received his medical degree from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York in 1866. While still in medical school during the American Civil War, he served as an assistant surgeon in the West Gulf squadron of the United States Navy. After the war and graduation from medical school, he married Elizabeth Ann Alden, of Westville, Connecticut, on December 25, 1866.[1]

He is remembered best for having defined neurasthenia as a medical condition with symptoms of fatigue, anxiety, headache, impotence, neuralgia and depression, as a result of exhaustion of the central nervous system's energy reserves, which Beard attributed to civilization. Physicians who agreed with Beard associated neurasthenia with the stresses of urbanization and the increasingly competitive business environment. Stated simply, people were attempting to achieve more than their constitution could cope with. Typically this followed a short illness from which the patient was thought to have recovered.[2]

One of the more unusual disorders he studied from 1878 onwards was the exaggerated startle reflex among French-Canadian lumbermen from the Moosehead Lake region of Maine, that came to be known as the 'Jumpers of Maine'. If they were startled by a short verbal command, they would carry out the instruction without hesitation, irrespective of the consequences. The studies stimulated further research by the military and Georges Gilles de la Tourette.[3]

Beard was also involved extensively with electricity as a medical treatment, and published extensively on the subject. He was a champion of many reforms of psychiatry, and was a founder of the National Association for the Protection of the Insane and the Prevention of Insanity. He also took an unpopular stance against the death penalty for persons with mental illness, going so far as to campaign for leniency for Charles J. Guiteau, the assassin of President James Garfield on the basis that the man was not guilty because of insanity.[1]

He died on January 23, 1883 in New York City.[4]

[Other accounts say he died of pneumonia in his mid-forties, along with his wife who also died from the disease in their downtown New York City home which was also his office. Living before the age of anti-biotics, Beard was supposed to have tried electricity cures to treat their disease. Electrical medical devices to treat a range of diseases from cancer to cold were common in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Contrary to commonly held views on his work from his own period on to the present, I do not believe he was a "shallow" thinker. Quite to the contrary, his early death may have aborted a much more brillant career as a humanistic doctor of the science of mental disorders.
Beard had a profound effect on the thinking and writings of Sigmund Freud whose essay Civilization and its Discontents owes its core thesis to Beard and his associates view of the stresses of the business world we inhabit. Freud also converted the term neurasthenia to apply to other manifestations of neurotic behavior which his theories adumbrated.
He deserves a much higher place in American medical history. In the Race for the Republican nominee for the presidency, Newt Gingrich has declared his interest in funding a vigorous research program for treating disorders from neurosis to Alzheimers! Such a revolutionary declaration should put him first in the hearts of all those who have lost their loved ones to Alzheimer's disease and other mental disorders.
Interestingly, Jonathan Swift, who in the last 10 years of his life as Dean Swift at St. Patricks in Dublin perished from a number of severe mental disorders, which led one of his lesser admirers, Dr. Samuel Johnson, in his long poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes, to observe, "See Swift expire a drivel'r and dumb show," ('dumb show,') His caretakers would charge money to show off the Dean in his decrepit condition, thus marking the ultimate irony of the life of Swift after his earlier literary victories over his political enemies, in Johnson's poem. J. Richman]

References1.Dictionary of American Biography Base Set. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928-1936.

2. A Handbook of Practical Treatment, John H. Musser, M.D. and O. A. Kelly, M.D., 1912.

3. Beard, George (1878). "Remarks upon 'jumpers or jumping Frenchmen'". The Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases 5: 526.

4. Almanac of Famous People, 8th ed. Gale Group, 2003.

Contact us: I am posting my book called "Running on Empty" on my Writers Anonymous blog. After I have posted the entire book, in about a year, I will be glad to review the scholarship on Dr. Beard and others included in my book for Wikipedia articles.
A follow up book could be, From George Miller Beard to President Newt Gingrich!
jordanp.richman@gmail.com

"Adventures in Neurasthenia," from Running on Empty, an unpublished ms, by Jordan Richman

2011-11-18T14:07:00.000-08:00

Shell shock, neurasthenia and war neurosis

Two Official British figures claim that 80,000 cases of shell shock passed through the various medical facilities during WW1 but many cases were covered up by sending psychiatric cases to ordinary hospitals and the true figure could be approximately 200,000 cases. German records recorded a figure of 613,047 cases of nervous disorders between 1913-1918.

'Neurasthenia' was a term used by an American neurologist, George Beard, M.D. in 1869. He described patients as neurasthenic when they were depressed and inert. 'War neurosis' was described as nervous exhaustion through overwork and the Weir Mitchell Cure was applied - isolation, rest and a diet rich in milk-based foods.

The term 'shell shock' was first used in the public domain by Charles Samuel Meyers, a Cambridge psychologist, in an article he wrote about the cases he had been treating. He felt uncomfortable about using the term because it did not describe the mental conditions that these men were suffering.

Shell shock was literally the shock felt by a soldier near to an exploding shell and the feelings of having one's senses assaulted by the detonation flash, heat, displacement of the air and the ground tremors as the shell formed a crater in the earth.

By the mid-nineteenth century in America, fatigue, viewed as a nervous disorder brought about by the brain work or the professional classes, rather than the physical work of the working classes, received sympathetic treatment from the American and European medical profession.

Fatigue, bordering on exhaustion, was seen as a central focus of a cluster of nervous conditions. These conditions were named by the neurologist George Beard in 1869 as neurasthenia.

Neurologists worked with Civil War soldiers who suffered from battle fatigue and other nervous conditions brought on by the war. These physicians eagerly accepted the term as one that differentiated insanity from neurosis.

Even earlier at the beginning of the nineteenth century, an English physician, Thomas Trotter, in A View of the Nervous Temperament (1807), had identified the nervous disorders of mental workers as the chief medical problem of the new century, surpassing fever, which he believed had been more common in the previous century.

The Overworked American, A Warning from 2000

2011-11-18T08:10:00.001-08:00

4.0 out of 5 stars Trouble In Our Worker's Paradise!, June 28, 2000

By Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews

(TOP 50 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME) This review is from: The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline Of Leisure (Paperback)

America is the fabled land of plenty, and according to Juliet Schor, most of us seem to be lining up for more than our share of work hours. In our unabated obsession to get more than our fair share of the virtual cornucopia of goods and services out there in the marketplace, we seem to have become collectively addicted to working more and more hours in a devil's bargain with our employers. This book is a wonderful overview of this long-term trend toward overwork, where the average American now works the equivalent of an extra month a year.

Since it is cheaper to pay someone overtime than it is to hire new workers and pay the associated benefits, corporations gladly ante up to pay for our increasing presence at work. Yet this mysterious and unexpected contemporary American addiction to being on the job has its associated costs (as well as causes).

Harvard professor Juliet Schor spins a convincing and disturbing tale regarding the increasing numbers of hours we spend each week at work rather than leisure. This is a historical surprise, since most baby boomers emerged from the colleges and universities convinced we would have more leisure time and better ways to pursue our many avocational interests than any generation in the past. In this entertaining, topical, and quite readable book, the author surveys a plethora of reasons for the surprising trend toward overwork.

The principal dynamic she pinpoints in influencing this trend is an economy that literally demands extra effort and time from its employees, an economy which until quite recently had a chronic shortage of available jobs and "surplus" labor pool of potential workers.

Under such circumstances, anyone lacking the requisite willingness to work extra hours was indeed dispensable. Thus one becomes a careerist in an effort to survive.

She also details how our culturally conditioned goal-oriented attitude toward time as a resource to be used effectively and efficiently rather than as a precious resource to be used to increase the quality of our own lives plays into the situation.

For Schor, we are on a treadmill, if not to oblivion, then to an impoverished cultural life where we are what we do occupationally rather than what we do and what we become in our leisure hours pursuing our avocations and our personal lives with family and friends.

This is an important and path breaking book, one that we should find especially relevant given the fact that many of the jobs we are so seemingly addicted to will soon fade away in the new markets and new economies of the so-called "Third Wave".

Anyone who has experienced "downsizing" at the hands of a large and impersonal corporation can tell you how quickly all those sacrifices and long hours are disregarded and forgotten by your employer. The emotional and economic impacts of such events can be devastating to the individual and his or her family. As a friend said to me recently, anyone who is what they do really isn't very much at all. Read and heed.

Elite Runners of 2011 New York City Marathon (NY Times photo)

2011-11-18T00:24:00.000-08:00

Paula Radcliffe of Britain, appropriately front and center even at the start, won the women's New York City Marathon nine months after giving birth. She finished in 2 hours 23 minutes 9 seconds, far slower than her world record of 2:15.25.

Running on Empty

In the 1990s, tired and overworked Americans were losing confidence about moving toward a better life in spite of their intense and passionate dedication to the work ethic. They were "running on empty" because they felt overworked and tired.

Fatigue

2011-11-17T11:33:00.000-08:00

In 1875, the English physician, Dr. George Johnson, wrote an article in The Lancet which he called, "Lectures on Some Nervous Disorders that Result from Overwork and Anxiety." Since 1853 Dr. Johnson had been studying cases of fatigue he thought might fall into the category of fatigue caused by "overwork and anxiety."

In his Lancet article he describes the symptoms of a twenty-three-year overworked legal clerk:

"For several weeks he had suffered from headache, confusion of thought, and inability to work. His appetite was bad, and he complained of uneasiness after taking food. He slept badly, and he was much distressed by dreams. The cause of the symptoms in this case was overwork of brain."

Dr. Johnson concludes:

"We may commonly notice, that an overworked man, whether his work be mechanical or mental, becomes an over anxious, nervous man. The overtaxing of the strength is attended by a sense of fatigue and exhaustion, loss of appetite for food, and often by inability to sleep soundly; with this there comes an anxious dread of breaking down, and the combination of fatigue, anxiety, and unrefreshing sleep is a common cause of mental and bodily collapse."

As the Earth Turns

2011-11-17T07:17:00.000-08:00

Human history moves through cycles of high to low energy periods.

Europe in the Renaissance and the French Revolution were periods of high energy.

Michelangelo and Beethoven gave artistic expression to the enthusiasm of these two energy peaks in human history.

The Race Toward the Future by Jordan Richman

2011-11-16T01:13:00.000-08:00

The Race Toward the Future Chapter II

In my last post I asked the following question:

Why were the 1990s called an "age of disappointment" and a "time of diminished expectations."

I also asked for readers comments.

None, so far.

As Judge Judy would say, "Put on your thinking
caps!

Racing to the Future by J. Richman

2011-11-15T14:29:00.000-08:00

Overview

Henry Adams' 1904 Prediction

Henry Adams predicted in 1904 that, "The new American --the child of incalculable coal power, electric power, and radiating energy, as well as of new forces yet undetermined--must be a sort of God compared with any former creature of nature."

His 1904 prediction continues:

"Every American who lives into the year 2000 will think in complexities unimaginable to an earlier mind and deal with a range of problems no other previous society could even conceive. "

Adams probably was speaking with tongue in cheek when he made those predictions. He was challenging the growing belief that scientific discoveries and new technologies based on these discoveries would open the door to an American Utopia.

Students of American sociology have called the 1990s an "Age of Disappointment" and a "time of diminished expectations."

Why?

I would welcome your thoughts on this question.
Write your comments in the box after the post or to jordanp.richman@gmail.com

Thanks!

James Joyce Revisited

2011-11-06T12:17:00.000-08:00

ULYSSES YEARS

In some ways Ulysses begins where Portrait leaves off. It opens on June 16, 1904, with Stephen Dedalus sharing rooms in a Martello tower on the east coast of Ireland, south of Dublin, with "Buck" Mulligan and a visiting Englishman named Haines who is studying Irish culture.

Stephen has returned from Paris, where he has had experiences much like Joyce's, and he is recovering from the death of his mother. But in the fourth chapter of the book we are introduced to a new character, a Jewish advertising canvasser named Leopold Bloom whose wife, Molly, is planning on committing adultery with a man named "Blazes" Boylan that afternoon. Bloom knows Stephen's father, but has no obvious connection to the boy; nevertheless, the meeting of the two is as much of a dramatic climax as the book admits. The entirety of Ulysses' seven-hundred-odd pages takes place on the same day, during which we go deeply into the minds of both main characters--and, finally, of Molly as well--and meet a bewildering variety of subsidiary ones.
But perhaps the book's most striking feature is its narrative innovations. Starting around the ninth chapter, the narration, which had begun in a mode something like the last chapter of Portrait (although with more internal monologue), begins to vary wildly.

There are interpolated episodes in play form, a chapter narrated by an unnamed barfly, one that is told as if it were a poorly written domestic romance, one told in ludicrously abstract question-and-answer form, and so forth. Perhaps the most noticeable shift in tone from Portrait is due to the humor of the book: it is crammed with jokes, from high intellectual verbal play to the most vulgar slapstick. On several occasions Joyce remarked that he wished reviewers, instead of worrying about the book's obscenity, would at least notice that it was funny. While writing Ulysses Joyce had returned to Trieste, and then in 1920 at the urging of Pound the Joyces had gone to Paris for a week's excursion. They wound up staying twenty years. With the enthusiastic support of Pound, T. S. Eliot, and a Parisian bookstore-owner named Sylvia Beach, Joyce soon gathered an admiring circle of friends, French literary luminaries, and aspiring young writers from England and America. When the Little Review editors were prosecuted for obscenity because of an episode of Ulysses that appeared there, it only added to Joyce's international fame. By the time Beach's bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, published the first edition of the complete book in 1922, Joyce was already the literary toast of Paris, and had been acclaimed by many as the greatest modern writer of English prose.

Joyce and Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company

Meanwhile, Joyce circulated among friends a chart showing in detail what the book's title had not made entirely clear: that despite its surface naturalism, his novel contained an elaborate series of correspondences to Homer's Odyssey. Indeed, in 1930, after considerable help and occasional direction from Joyce, Stuart Gilbert published a book on Ulysses exploring these correspondences and many other subtle features of the novel. Critics now conventionally refer to the chapters of the book by the titles of the parallel episodes in the Odyssey, such as "Lestrygonians" or "Aeolus." Gilbert also helped with the French translation of Ulysses, which--again with Joyce's advice and encouragement--appeared in 1929, and had considerable impact upon French literature.

Despite the fact that it was banned from publication in America, Ulysses was frequently smuggled into the country, becoming one of the best-known banned books of all time. Still, it was not until 1934 that Random House, under the leadership of Bennett Cerf, won a landmark court battle and the right to publish Ulysses in America; two years later it was published in England as well. But in the meantime, starting in 1923, Joyce had begun work on his most radical and ambitious work of prose, the book parts of which were published as Work in Progress (among other provisional titles) but which finally emerged as Finnegans Wake.

Ford Madox Ford

From its first fragment, published in Ford Madox Ford's transatlantic review in 1924, the Wake caused trouble for Joyce. Many of his friends and supporters were dismayed. Pound confessed himself baffled, and even Harriet Weaver expressed disappointment, which caused Joyce considerable pain. The book is written in a "night-language" far removed from ordinary English, jammed with portmanteau words and multilingual puns. When a friend objected that some of the puns in the Wake were trivial, Joyce replied that some were indeed trivial, and some quadrivial. Worse, there are no fixed characters or events in the book--or, alternately, there are too many for comfort.

FINNEGANS WAKE

Far more elaborately planned and embellished even than Ulysses, Finnegans Wake on one level concerns the family of a pubkeeper in Chapelizod, a Dublin suburb, named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, his wife, two sons, and daughter. But character, time, and place seldom remain fixed for more than a sentence in this work; the ultimate male character appears in a wide variety of guises signalled by the initials "HCE", such as "Haveth Childers Everywhere" or "Here Comes Everybody", and in a great number of less easily identifiable ones as well, such as Adam, Humpty Dumpty, Parnell or King Mark of the "Tristan and Isolde" legend. This figure merges into that of Tim Finnegan, hero of an Irish comic song about a man who arises at his own wake to share the drink, and with the mythic Irish hero Finn, who is also a mountain. The main female figure, usually called Anna Livia Plurabelle, or ALP, is most frequently identified with rivers, although she too has a variety of mythic and historical guises. The two embattled sons, Shem and Shaun, represent respectively the "artistic" personality--withdrawn, exiled, obsessed with sex and with excrement, a universal scapegoat--and the successful public personality--alternately postman, policeman, politician, and empire-builder. The daughter, Issy, merges into virtually any young woman, or splinters into groups of them. But even this vague summary is far too explicitly literal: Joyce indicated his "characters" by "sigla", geometric symbols that seem to represent functions rather than anything we would ordinarily call "characters." In its own strange fashion the book reprises the history of Ireland, the author's life, and a selection of major myths from European culture. But more than any narrative line, the Wake's structure depends upon a conception by the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, the idea that history progresses in a three-part cycle followed by a "ricorso" that returns us to an initial stage, passing through theocratic, aristocratic, democratic, and chaotic phases. The book's three major chapters, followed by a briefer one, mirrors this structure.

Samuel Beckett

As with Ulysses, Joyce tried to orchestrate the reception of the Wake. He encouraged twelve of his friends, including Stuart Gilbert and Samuel Beckett, who had informally apprenticed himself to Joyce, to produce a volume treating the book. This was published as Our Exagmination round His Factification for Incamination of "Work in Progress" in 1929. But events conspired against him. By the time the book was finally published, in 1939, the world was on the brink of war. Joyce's own health and eyesight were failing during his last decade. Most painfully, his children, whom he had grown to cherish passionately, were in trouble.

By 1929 it was becoming clear that his daughter Lucia, a bright and talented girl, was mentally unstable. Joyce fought the realization as long as possible, arranging projects in which she could express her artistic impulses and encouraging her in everything, but by 1932, when she had conceived a hopeless passion for Samuel Beckett, even he had to seek treatment for her, and finally institutionalization. In 1931 for various reasons, including the wish to make a gesture of reconciliation with his father, who was dying, Joyce took Nora to a London registry office to legalize their marriage.

Lucia

Joyce, Nora and their solicitor

Joyce's son Giorgio was unable to undertake a successful career, and his marriage was troubled; in 1939 his wife had a breakdown and the two were separated. Perhaps the brightest spot in this period was the birth of Joyce's grandson Stephen James Joyce in 1932, less than two months after Joyce's father's death. Perhaps Joyce's most moving poem, "Ecce Puer" ("Behold the Child"), commemorates these two events with stunning simplicity.

In 1940 the Joyces were forced to leave Paris for Vichy, where they stayed with a family friend while Joyce carried on protracted negotiations to be allowed to enter Switzerland. Meanwhile, he was assisting a number of Jewish friends to escape to neutral territory.

He left only a few scattered comments about his ideas for his next book: that it would be a book of reawakening (after the dream-world of the Wake) and that it would be short and simple. In December 1940 the Joyces entered Switzerland, and soon returned to Zurich. Less than a month later, Joyce was taken to the hospital with severe stomach cramps and was diagnosed as suffering a perforated duodenal ulcer. Although an operation was apparently successful, he soon weakened, passed into a coma, and died on January 13, just before his fifty-ninth birthday. He was buried in the Fluntern cemetery above Zurich. Nora, out of respect for her husband's lifelong rebellion, refused the offer of Catholic rites.

Spenser's Fairie Queen, Plato, and Blake

2011-09-05T20:38:00.000-07:00

"Now I'm discovering there is also a literary path. It turns out that Spenser's Faerie Queen contains poetic accounts of these same ideas. Particularly the Plato-derived fable that souls gather in one spot to await dying out of the Ideal world, and being born into ours. As they descend they have a material body made for them. " Read More: http://epyle.blogspot.com/

Freelance Writing Secrets from Paige Taylor

2011-06-22T05:16:00.000-07:00

Home About Book About Author Order Book News ContactBlogWriters! — Learn How to Launch,

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Words@Work

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2011-06-20T01:45:00.000-07:00

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From Southwest Writers

2011-06-19T02:38:00.000-07:00

From the Arizona Authors Association

Welcome

Since 1978, the Arizona Authors Association serves as information and referral center for the community, helping and supporting our local authors statewide. We serve our membership which includes award-winning and best-selling authors of fiction and nonfiction works, as well as beginning writers, aspiring authors, poets, journalists, columnists, song writers, screenwriters, business writers, illustrators, reviewers, editors, and other allied professionals.

Check out our Events Calendar for upcoming meetings, events and free workshops!

Attend free workshops

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Read our newsletter

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Sign books in our booth at local book festivals

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Become a member (click Join us at top of page)

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Directions to our Venues

Anzio’s Italian Restaurant

12418 N. 28th Dr, Phoenix 85029

[mapquest]

Arizona Authors Association Headquarters

6145 West Echo Lane, Glendale AZ

Directions: 59th Ave. and Northern cross streets

[website] [mapquest]

Arizona Biltmore Resort & Spa

2400 East Missouri Avenue, Phoenix 85016

[mapquest]

ASU Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing

Arizona State University, Tempe - Arizona

[website] [mapquest]

Barnes & Noble - Arrowhead

7685 West Bell Road , Glendale - AZ 85382

Directions: South-East corner of 73rd Avenue and Bell Road

[mapquest]

Barnes & Noble - Flagstaff

701 S. Milton Rd, Flagstaff 86001

Directions: Milton Road and West Hwy. 66

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Barnes & Noble - Val Vista - Mesa

1758 South Val Vista Drive, Mesa 85204

Directions: Dana Park Village Square I-60 & Val Vista Dr.

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Barnes & Noble cafe - Surprise Marketplace

13719 West Bell Road , Surprise 85374

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Barnes & Noble Scottsdale

10500 N 90th St, Scottsdale, AZ 85258

Directions: South East corner of the 101 freeway and Shea Blvd.

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Bluewater Grill

1720 E. Camelback, Phoenix, AZ 85016

Directions: 602) 277-3474

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Borders Arrowhead

7320 West Bell Road, Glendale AZ 85308

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Borders Camelback

2402 East Camelback Road, Phoenix 85251

Directions: NE corner of Camelback and 24th Street

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Borders Tempe

699 S. Mill Avenue, Tempe 85281

Directions: NE corner of Mill Avenue and 7th street

[website] [mapquest]

Burton Barr Central Library

1221 N. Central Ave, Phoenix 85004

Directions: Located on Central Avenue, one block south of McDowell Road on Willetta Street adjacent to Margaret T. Hance Park.

[website] [mapquest]

Cafe Carumba - Scottsdale

7303 E. Indian School Rd, Scottsdale 85251

Directions: Located one block east of Scottsdale Road on Indian School Road. From the 101, Exit Indian School and go west approximately 2 miles

480-947-8777

[website] [mapquest]

Calvary Church of the Valley

6107 N. Invergordon Road, Paradise Valley, AZ 85253

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Camelback Church of Christ

5225 East Camelback Rd, Phoenix, Arizona 85018

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Chandler Community Center Downtown

125 East Commonwealth Avenue , Chandler 85225

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Chandler Community College - Pecos Campus

2626 East Pecos Road , Chandler 85225

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Chandler Public Library (Sunset Branch)

4930 West Ray Road, Chandler 85226

Directions: From either freeway, 10 or 101, take the Ray Road exit.

480-782-2842

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Chandler Public Library - Delaware

22 S. Delaware Street, Chandler 85225

Directions: (480) 782-2812

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Chandler Recreational Senior Center

202 E. Boston Street , Chandler 85225

Directions: Just South of Chandler Blvd, East of Arizona Avenue

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Changing Hands Bookstore - Tempe

6428 S. McClintock Drive, Tempe 85283

Directions: At McClintock and Guadalupe Tel: 480-730-0205

[website] [mapquest]

Chapparral Suites - Scottsdale

5001 N. Scottsdale Road, Scottsdale 85250

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Crowne Plaza Phoenix Airport Hotel

4300 East Washington Street, Phoenix, Arizona 85034

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Days Inn - Scottsdale

4710 N. Scottsdale Road, Scottsdale 85251

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Desert Broom Library

29710 N. Cave Creek Road, Cave Creek 85331

Directions: The Desert Broom Library is located south of Tatum Blvd. on Cave Creek Road.

[website] [mapquest]

Desert Foothills Library

38443 N. Schoolhouse Road, Cave Creek, AZ 85327

Tel: 480-488-2286

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Desert Rose Community Church

4445 W Olive Avenue, Glendale AZ 85302

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Dog-Eared Pages Used Books

16428 N. 32nd Street Suite 111 , Phoenix, AZ 85032

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Double Tree Guest Suites

320 N 44th St, Phoenix, AZ

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El Parador Tropical Restaurant

2744 E Broadway Blvd, Tucson

Directions: for directions, go to: http://www.elparadortucson.com/contact/mapdirections.php

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Embassy Suites

4400 S. Rural Rd, Tempe 85282-7044

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Embassy Suites

2333 East Thomas Road , Phoenix, AZ 85016

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Fiesta Resort

2100 South Priest Drive, Tempe - Arizona

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Foothills Glendale Library

19055 N. 57th Avenue, Glendale 85308

Directions: North of Union Hills on the east side of 57th Avenue. From Loop 101, exit at 59th Avenue, go south to Utopia Road, turn left, go to 57th Avenue, turn right then an immediate left into the library parking lot.

623-930-3831.

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Fountain Hills Branch Library

12901 N La Montana Dr, Fountain Hills - AZ 85268

Directions: Cross Streets: Between E Stewart Vista Ave and E Avenue of the Fountains

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Fountain Hills Community Center

13001 N.La Montana Drive, Fountain Hills 85268

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Friendship Community Church Ahwatukee

9807 S. 48th Street, Phoenix, AZ 85044

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Gaslight Inn

5747 W. Glendale Avenue , Glendale - AZ

Directions: across from Murphy Park, at 58th Avenue and Glendale Avenue, South side of the street.

Tel: 623-934-9119

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Gilbert Southeast Regional Library

775 North Greenfield Road, Gilbert 85234

Directions: Southeast corner of Guadalupe and Greenfield Roads

(602) 652-3000

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Glendale Civic Center

5750 West Glenn Drive, Glendale - AZ 85301

Directions: North on 32nd Place to 202; 202 (becomes I-10) West to 19th Avenue; North (right) on 19th Avenue to Grand Avenue; West (left) on Grand Avenue to 58th Avenue; North (right) on 58th Avenue to Glenn Drive; East (right) on Glenn Drive to address.

[mapquest]

Golden Buddah Chinese Restaurant

668 N. 44th Street, Phoenix, AZ 85008

Directions: east side of the Chinese Cultural Center

[mapquest]

Great Wall Buffet

59th Avenue and Bell - Southwest corner, Glendale

Directions: Southwest corner, behind McDonald's

[website] [mapquest]

Grimaldi's

4000 N. Scottsdale Road, Scottsdale, AZ

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Hilton Garden Inn - North Happy Valley

1940 W. Pinnacle Peak RD, Phoenix 85027

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Hilton Garden Inn - Phoenix Airport

3838 East Van Buren Street, Phoenix, AZ 85008

Directions: (602) 306-2323

[mapquest]

Holiday Inn - Palo Verde

4550 S. Palo Verde Boulevard, Tucson 85715

Directions: Ph: (800) 465-4329 or (520) 746-1161 Fax: (520) 741-1170

Tell the hotel you are a participant with the Society of Southwestern Authors conference. Be sure to ask for conference prices, $72 plus tax/night.

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Home Town Buffet - Tucson

5101 N. Oracle Rd, Tucson - AZ

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Hotel Saint Michael

205 W Gurley St., Prescott, Arizona 86301

Directions: Ideally located in the heart of Downtown Prescott on the Courthouse Plaza “Grand Dame of Prescott, the Cornerstone of Whiskey Row” * Complementary Cooked To Order Breakfast served in our Award Winning Caffe’ * * 72 Guest Rooms * Meeting and Reception Facilities * Specialty Shops *

[website] [mapquest]

In the Northwest Valley

47th Avenue and Union Hills, Glendale AZ 85308

Directions: Exact address and directions given upon registration

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Inn Suites - Tempe

1651 W. Baseline Road, Tempe - Arizona 85283

Directions: 480-897-7900

HOTEL AMMENITIES: • Free Hot Breakfast Buffet • Free Hi-Speed and Wi-Fi Internet Access • Free Evening Social Hour • Free Fitness Center/Spa • Free Newspaper • Free Parking • Heated Pool • Pillowtop Cloud 9 Beds with Deluxe Bedding • Premier Cable Movie Channels • Microwave/Refrigerator • Coffee/Tea Maker with Coffee & Tea • Upgraded Bath amenities

[mapquest]

Iron Works Restaurant

17233 N. 45th Ave., Glendale 85308

Directions: Just North of Bell Road on 45th Avenue

[mapquest]

Ironworks Restaurant

17233 N. 45th Avenue, Phoenix

Directions: Crossroads: Bell Road and 45th Avenue Just North of Bell on 45th Avenue.

[mapquest]

La Parilla Suiza

3508 W Peoria Ave, Phoenix, AZ 85029

Phone: 602 978-8334

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Lifelong Learning, Inc.

13815 W. Camino del Sol, Sun City West 85375

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Macayo's Depot Cantina

300 S Ash Ave, Tempe 85281

Directions: (480) 966-6677

[website] [mapquest]

Manuel's Restaurant

2350 E. Southern, Mesa 85282

Directions: At the 101 and Southern, east of the intersection, on the north side of Southern.

480-897-0025

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Marriott Old Town

7325 E. Third Avenue, Scottsdale AZ

Directions: Off Scottsdale Rd. South of Camelback turn at the light parking near hotel

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McDowell Corporate Center

4909 E McDowell Road, Phoenix 85008

Directions: 48th and McDowell, near the airport

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Mesa Community College

1833 West Southern Avenue , Mesa 85202

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Mesa Senior Center

247 N Macdonald, Mesa 85201-6622

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Monte Vista Village Resort

8865 E. Baseline Road, Mesa 85208

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Monti's La Casa Vieja

100 S Mill Avenue, Tempe - Arizona 85281

Phone: (480) 967-7594 Fax: (480) 967-8129

[mapquest]

Multigenerational Center

7550 E. Adobe St, Mesa 85207

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Mystic Moon Bookstore

7119 E. Mercer, Scottsdale, AZ

[mapquest]

Octagon Cafe - Fountain Hills

12645 N Saguaro Blvd , Fountain Hills - AZ

Directions: As you enter Fountain Hills: Turn LEFT/RIGHT on E Palisades Blvd And proceed to the end and Turn RIGHT on N Saguaro Blvd Arrive at 12645 N Saguaro Blvd , Octagon Cafe is on your left. The restaurant is well marked.

[mapquest]

Opt-In Learning Center

1440 S. Country Club Dr., Mesa, AZ 85210

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Oro Valley Library

1305 W. Naranja Drive, Oro Valley 85737

Directions: From I-10, take Tangerine Exit #240 east. Turn left onto West Tangerine Road. Go one mile. Turn right onto N. La Canada Drive. Go one mile. Turn left onto West Naranja Drive.

[website] [mapquest]

PAGES BOOKSTORE - New, Rare, antiquarian, Maps, Documents

7100 E. Cave Creek Rd - Suite #164 , Cave Creek AZ 85331

Directions: Tel: 480-575-7220

[website] [mapquest]

Pete's Family Restaurant

1355 Iron Springs Road, Prescott, Arizona

[mapquest]

Phoenix Country Club

2901 N. 7th Street, Phoenix - Arizona

Directions: NE Corner of 7th Street & Thomas Road 602-263-5208

[mapquest]

Prescott Country Club

1030 Prescott Country Club Blvd, Dewey, Arizona

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Red Mountain Multigenerational Center

7550 E. Adobe St, Mesa 85207

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Scottsdale Arts School

3720 North Marshall Way, Scottsdale AZ

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Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts

7380 E. 2nd St., Scottsdale, AZ 85251

[mapquest]

Scottsdale Civic Center Library

3839 N Drinkwater Blvd , Scottsdale 85251

Directions: Southeast corner of Indian School and Drinkwater Blvd - Parking entrance on Drinkwater just south of the bridge. Two levels of parking available.

Tel: (480) 312-7323

[mapquest]

Scottsdale Civic Center Plaza

7380 E. 2nd Street, Scottsdale, AZ

Directions: 75th St. and Indian School

[mapquest]

Scottsdale Community College

9000 East Chapparrel Road, Scottsdale, AZ 85256

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Scottsdale House Club House

4800 N. 68th St, Scottsdale, AZ 85251

[mapquest]

Scottsdale Mustang Library

10101 N. 90th St, Scottsdale 85258

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Sedona Public Library

3250 White Bear Rd , Sedona, AZ 86336-4337

Directions: Tel 928.282.7714 Fax 928.282.5789

[website] [mapquest]

Sheraton 4 Points Hotel - Conference Center

1900 E. Speedway Blvd., Tucson 85719

[website] [mapquest]

TBA (to be announced later)

,

[mapquest]

The Poisoned Pen Bookstore

4014 N Goldwater, Scottsdale 85251

Directions: Tel: 480 947-2974

[mapquest]

The Well Red Coyote Bookstore

3190 W. Hwy 89A, Suite 400, Sedona 86336

Directions: The Well Red Coyote is located at: 3190 W. Highway 89A (at Dry Creek Road in West Sedona) Suite #400 (behind D'Lish Restaurant) Sedona, AZ 86336 Telephone numbers: (928) 282-2284 (866) 282-9291 Our hours are: Monday - Saturday: 10 am - 6 pm Sunday: 12 noon - 5 pm (Except for evenings when we schedule 7 pm author events. Then we stay open until the event is over, usually 8:30 - 9:00 pm.)

[website] [mapquest]

Velma Teague Library

7010 N. 58th Ave, Glendale AZ 85301

[website] [mapquest]

Wildflower Bread Company

2805 West Agua Fria Freeway, Phoenix, AZ 85027

Directions: near the intersection of I-17 and the 101 loop.

[website] [mapquest]

Wright House Reception Centre

636 W. University Dr., Mesa - AZ 85201

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WRIGLEY MANSION

2501 East Telewa Trail, Phoenix, AZ 85016-2814

Directions: (602) 955-4079

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Posted by Jordan Richman at 2:04 PM 0 comments Email This

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Tuesday, September 28, 2010Do you have short stories, poems, or ideas for a novel?

Drop your creative writing efforts to Sowthwest Writers even if you live in Brooklyn or Singapore, especially Singapore because you guys are such talented people.

Could it be that Joseph Conrad had an influence on you?

Also, checkout writersanonymousinc.blogspot.com for samples of nonfiction writing, which you might want to send also.

Please send to jprich9231@aol.com.

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Monday, September 13, 2010Arizona Clubs

Arizona Authors Association

http://www.azauthors.com/

Arizona Mystery Writers

http://amw.satoriwebdesign.com/blogs/

Desert Rose RWA Chapter

http://www.desertroserwa.org/

Desert Sleuths Chapter (Sisters in Crime)

Meetings: Phoenix, AZ

Northern Arizona RWA Chapter

Meetings: Dewey, AZ

Professional Writers of Prescott

Meetings: Prescott, AZ

SCBWI-Arizona

Meetings: Various

Scottsdale Society of Women Writers

Meetings: Scottsdale

Society of Southwestern Authors

2010 Annual Writers' Conference: September 24-26, Tucson, AZ

Tucson Saguaro Romance Writers

Meetings: Tucson

Valley of the Sun Romance Writers

Meetings: Phoenix, AZ

West Valley Authors Association

Meetings: Sun City West

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Southwest writers

Joining a writing club is a good way to get your work seen, critiqued, and even published. This blogsite lists groups in the Southwest for writers and authors.

Attending club meetings and regional writer conferences is a useful way to learn about writing as an occupation. You may then have the opportunity to meet with published authors, editors, and agents.

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From The Chronicle of Higher Education

2011-04-07T11:22:00.000-07:00

The Road From Dissertation to Book Has a New Pothole: the Internet

Libraries' digital open-access rules make some editors wary of buying graduate students' work, although others see a marketing boost

John A. Bowersmith for The Chronicle

Unless junior scholars limit online access to their work, says Ann Hawkins, she won't consider it for publication. A professor of English at Texas Tech, she edits a book series for an academic press.

By Jennifer Howard

Ann R. Hawkins, a professor of English at Texas Tech University, likes the idea of sharing research, but she's worried that sharing has gone too far when it comes to students' dissertations.

Not long ago, Ms. Hawkins heard from a junior scholar who wanted her to consider his revised dissertation for a series she edits for Pickering & Chatto, an academic press. She liked the idea—until she discovered his work was fully accessible on the Internet. Few would buy the specialized book, she worried, if much of its contents was already freely available.

"The problem I have is when anyone can either find the dissertation immediately on Google or by going to the university page and just clicking it and downloading it, whether they are in the United States or Taiwan," Ms. Hawkins says. Unless he could limit access, she told the hopeful author, she wouldn't consider it for the series.

That is not what any author wants to hear, but it's especially alarming for scholars at the beginning of their publishing careers. With jobs scarce, the pressure to produce a monograph that enhances their credentials is intense in many humanities and social-sciences fields. But more institutions now require master's and Ph.D. candidates to submit work in electronic form, and it appears that the rules could make publishing—and job-hunting—even harder, at least in some cases.

The digital push is being driven by an understandable desire to make scholarship, some of it supported by public money, easily available. And bits and bytes don't take up shelf space in cramped libraries the way bound dissertations do. But several series editors and publishers echo Hawkins's concerns. "If authors have an opt-out option, I would recommend that they do opt out, at least until their first book is published," says Ann Donahue, a senior editor at Ashgate Publishing Group, which puts out a number of books that began life as dissertations. (There is a similar set of issues around journal articles.)

Others, though, take the opposite view: Digital dissertations stand a better chance of getting published because, if a work is viewed or downloaded many times, that can signal there's a readership for it. It's an issue "with more angles than a geometry textbook," says Patrick Alexander, director of Penn State University Press, in an e-mail.

Staying Offline

Brandon D. Shuler, now a Ph.D. candidate in the program of literature, social justice, and environment at Texas Tech, had his own moment of authorial vertigo brought on by a requirement that he submit his graduate work digitally. He holds a master's degree from the University of Texas Pan-American and just published a heavily revised version of his thesis, on the work of a Texas outdoorsman and writer, with a university press.

Mr. Shuler thought he had successfully navigated Pan American's thesis rules, which mandate using a digital repository but did—like the rules at many institutions—allow him to embargo his work for a limited period of time. He thought he had done that. "They can publish it automatically unless you go through this Barnum & Bailey, Ringling Brothers, three-ring circus of hoops," he says. "Then my publisher calls me and asks me if I'd had my thesis electronically published." His editor had stumbled on a copy of the work online and had jitters about its being readily available.

Mr. Shuler had to get in touch directly with ProQuest, the electronic publisher with which the vast majority of U.S. universities contract to house digital copies of dissertations, and get the company to restrict access. According to Mr. Shuler, the process took about a month. "I'm working on my Ph.D.," he says. "I really didn't have time to be doing all this, but obviously with a book coming out, I had to get it done."

ProQuest says it follows each institution's and author's instructions about how much of the work to make available (full text or abstract only, for instance), and on what schedule (immediately available, embargoed for a period of time, etc.). "We are the university's partner in dissemination," says Austin McLean, the company's director of scholarly communication and dissertations publishing. "We go by what the universities require. We have a highly customized embargo option for universities."

At the University of Illinois, the ProQuest agreement is one of the few areas that graduate students have had problems with since the university put into effect its new digital-repository policy, says Rebecca Bryant, assistant dean of the graduate college. Illinois receives about 1,200 master's and doctoral theses every year, she says, and no longer accepts paper copies. The digital documents are deposited in the university's repository, known as Ideals, as well as with ProQuest, which means that the student must also sign ProQuest's publishing agreement. "It's confusing to students, quite frankly, that they are basically asked to enter into two publishing agreements," Ms. Bryant says.

She adds that "there are still great benefits to using ProQuest"—having one's work listed in the major professional databases, for instance.

At Illinois, the default option is that work will go open access after two years; students may request an extension, although requests for a permanent embargo have to go through a special petition process. Since 2009, according to Ms. Bryant, 63 percent of graduate students have opted to make their work open access, about 20 percent have chosen campus-only access, and about 17 percent have chosen to keep their work off-limits altogether for now.

Publishing Dilemma

In the United States and beyond, there's a push for more coordination of practices and standards in this area. The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations has been working since the 1990s to promote "the adoption, creation, use, dissemination, and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations," according to the group's Web site. Statewide ETD (for electronic dissertations and theses) groups exist, and in May, the newly created U.S. Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Association will hold its first conference.

Having clear standards and policies may help students understand and navigate their degree and graduation requirements, but it is not going to settle the question of whether ETD's help or hurt their publishing chances. One publisher that views those chances as diminished by the digital availability of student work is Texas A&M University Press.

The press has become "much more reluctant to consider works based on dissertations than in the past," says its director, Charles Backus. In an e-mail, he described his concern that online dissertations might cut into sales: The press has come to assume that "most libraries and library vendors will not buy or recommend purchase of ensuing books that are based substantially on them," he wrote.

Ms. Donohue, of Ashgate Publishing, says she and her colleagues have similar concerns. The publisher does not yet have a firm policy in place regarding digital dissertations but has been thinking hard about the potential risks in recent months.

From Ms. Donohue's perspective, work that's behind a firewall of some sort doesn't really pose a threat. "We're really interested in the kind of open access where the dissertations turn up easily on a Google search," she says.

Other scholarly publishers, however, see no need to worry. Jim McCoy, who directs the University of Iowa Press, which publishes a mix of fiction and nonfiction books, views open access as an opportunity. "Any dissertation that's on the Internet and has taken on a life of its own, that would be a selling point to me," Mr. McCoy says. "That would mean there's a market out there for this material, and there could be an even greater market" for a revised, edited, well-marketed version published by a scholarly press.

The novelist and short-story writer Sara Pritchard also has an optimistic view of open access and dissertations. In 2007 she was working as the marketing director for West Virginia University Press when it decided to publish Bringing Down the Mountains, by Shirley Stewart Burns. The book was based on her history Ph.D. dissertation on coal mining. The document was in the university's repository, and a lot of people were looking at it. "We thought it was a good sign that her electronic dissertation was receiving so many hits (Shirley pointed this out to us) and that it boded well for sales of her book," Ms. Pritchard said in an e-mail. "And her book has sold extremely well (used primarily as a textbook on mountaintop-removal coal mining—which is a big controversy)."

The creative-writing community, whose graduate students tend to be keenly focused on publishing, has had particular concerns about ETD's. Ms. Pritchard's own career offers evidence that putting creative work in a digital repository doesn't necessarily get in the way of publishing it. She holds a master of fine arts degree from West Virginia and published a version of her M.F.A. thesis, a short-story collection, with Houghton Mifflin, just making sure to keep the thesis embargoed until the commercial book came out.

Mr. Alexander, the Penn State press director, says that for many presses, the decision becomes easier—and more likely to go the author's way—when the proposed book differs significantly from the graduate-school version. "The more crucial question for us, especially in the case of a dissertation, is whether the author can explain the extent to which and how the submission differs from the original version," he said via e-mail. A work written to satisfy a graduate committee should probably look very different from a book meant for a somewhat wider audience. That was true long before electronic repositories, and it holds true for dissertations in any format.

When scholars can show that they've reworked their projects with that in mind, Mr. Alexander expects that most university presses will remain open to considering their work. "The best advice I could give students ... is to remember that books and dissertations are two distinct species," he said.

It is interesting that several of the "we won't publish it" crowd represent very specialized series from very high-priced publishers. These are exactly the kinds of works that should be put on the web freely because there is an insufficient market for them. Even libraries have cut back a lot on these kinds of works and will be cutting a lot more in the current environment. Few individuals (except the independently wealthy) are buying any of these books. If the budding scholars actually want their works to be read, they should welcome free electronic publication.

Iif they substantially revise and rework their dissertation, it should still be publishable. Dissertations are written for committees according to arcane rules, not for readers. Presses that publish unrevised or lightly revised dissertations are doing a service to none.

Northern Illinois University English Department's literary journal, Style, requires all accepted essays to remain embargoed from free Net publication for one year AFTER publication. In that way, we still maintain a subscription base, but at the same time allow relatively open access for those interested in reviewing earlier scholarship. Open access is not necessarily a completely positive direction for scholars in the humanities, as witness the article above.

I see a lot of assumptions here by the press editors that don't seem to be based on any evidence. Has anyone done any kind of survey of acquisitions librarians to determine if anyone is actually bothering to Google search individual book titles to find a free copy out there before ordering a paid copy? I don't have time for that, and I've never heard of any other librarians who do either. We might do that for journals, which represent substantial forward-going commitment to a subscription, but not for individual books, which are one-off purchases, unless the book is extraordinarily expensive (typically, reference handbooks). Further, more and more book purchases are starting to follow the model of journals, and be bundled in packages (especially ebook packages) rather than be made as individual title decisions.

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blendedlibrarian 5 hours ago

Thank you for providing the story about "Bringing Down the Mountain". Let's not ignore the dissertation authors whose research has been discovered by scholars via a Google Scholar search, leading to invitations to present, submit to a journal or even potential employment? Prior to the Internet pothole and open publishing of dissertations and theses, such discoveries would be far less likely to happen. Mbelvadi also makes a good point. I select in the field of education at my library, and I've never declined to purchase a book simply because it was already freely available in dissertation form (no, I don't even check). I expect, as Mr. Alexander points out, that the university press is going to significantly edit and revamp the dissertation into a much better and valued publication. I would also like to know how many university presses will actually turn the dissertation of an unknown scholar into a monograph. Can they afford to take that risk?

I addressed this question in "Dissertations into Books? The Lack of Logic in the System" (Against the Grain, April 2007), which can be found at Penn State Press's web site here: http://www.psupress.org/news/S... There, pace "mbelvadi," I provided the evidence of librarians refusing to purchase books based on dissertations. They do so simply by instructing vendors like Yankee Book Peddler to look for evidence (in the book's Acknowledgments, e.g., or in ProQuest's database by author/title) that the book originated as a dissertation and they then exclude such books from inclusion in their approval plans. Estimates of the effects on sales vary, with reductions ranging from 20% to 40%. I examined the titles in Latin American studies published by Penn State Press, when I was director there (1989-2009), and found a difference in average sale between books based on dissertations and those not so based at the lower end of this range. So there is a demonstrable effect. The problem was even worse, no doubt, when ProQuest had an agreement with Amazon to sell dissertations; I understand that this will begin again soon. It is because of this effect that we initiated the practice at Penn State of asking every author of a revised dissertation to explain in detail the differences between dissertation and book. While those differences are often very substantial indeed, unfortunately librarians who control approval plans do not have access to this information and therefore do not act upon it; it suffices for them that the author did write a dissertation on the subject to exclude it from the approval plan. Knowing of this practice by librarians, which is "rational" from their point of view, editors for publishers "rationally" decide not to consider books based on dissertations for publication. Yet tenure committees continue, "rationally" from their standpoint, to require a book or two for award of tenure. Such subsystem-level rationality adds up to systemic dysfunctionality, which can only be repaired by intervention from top administrators, which sadly has not been forthcoming. As the date on my article indicates, this is not a new problem; the origins of it go back at least a decade.---Sandy Thatcher

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Electrowetting by Jordan Richman for Today in Science

2011-04-04T19:19:00.000-07:00

Electrowetting Creates the Miniature Liquid Lens

It is easy to miniaturize cellphones and hand-held computers that have built-in cameras, but to get these cameras to focus and zoom requires tiny moving parts that are costly and wear out quickly from friction. As a result of this cost factor, most miniature cameras have a fixed-focus glass or plastic lens. A new experimental liquid lens, however, can change its shape and thereby its focus through the low cost of a very small electronic charge. Instead of numerous small parts, all it needs is a tiny battery to produce a near zero charge to change its focal length.
Electrowetting is the process whereby the liquid lens changes the curvature of its surface to form a flexible lens.
A lens is a device, usually made of glass or plastic, for either concentrating or diverging rays of light. It is usually formed from a piece of shaped glass or plastic, but other substances have been used to form lenses. Magnifying glasses, eyeglasses, contact lenses, microscopes, telescopes and cameras are just some of the many objects that require the use of lenses.
The lens has two curved surfaces. The type of curvature of its surfaces will determine the kind of jobs it does. Like a prism, a lens works by refracting or bending the light that passes through it.
Lens are classified by the curvature of these two surfaces. A convex lens bulges out from its center, A concave lens bulges inward towards its center. A flat surface is caled a plano lens. If the curvatures of both surfaces are equal it is a meniscus lens
The kind of lens used determines the distance necessary to bring the object into focus. That distance is called its focal length which is determined its refractive index.
The value of the focal length f for a particular lens can be calculated from a lensmaker's equation.
The focal length f is positive for converging lenses (convex), negative for diverging lenses (concave), and infinite for meniscus lenses. The value 1/f is known as the power of the lens. Since meniscus lenses are equal on both surfaces they neither magnify nor diminish the object.
Philips Research has developed a liquid lens for a miniature camera through the use of a process known as electrowetting, that is the passing of an electric current over the surface of two fluid bodies.
As an experimental laboratory process, electrowetting (applying an electrical current to fluid surfaces) has been studied as a curiosity for about forty years. Even before formal experiments were conducted on electrowetting, scientists were concerned about what happens when two opposite forces such as electricity and water were combined. People are warned not to go swimming when it is raining because lightning hitting the water could electrocute them. Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity with his kite and key but took precautions to avoid the rain when he made those tests. He chose a cloudy, not rainy day. The major effect of water on an electric current is to short circuit it, but that problem is overcome in electrowetting experiments mainly by using very small amounts of fluids in mixtures.
Electrowetting is a process that controls the way a nonmixable fluid mixture changes its surface tension. The effect of passing an electric current across the surface of a fluid mixture that contains a water solvent fluid at one end and a hydrophobic fluid (non-water combing fluid) that has difficulty mixing with water at the other end, like oil, is to change the surface tension where the two fluids meet (its meniscus) from convex to concave.
This effect takes place because the electric current reduces the hydrophobia (water aversion) of the nonwater mixing fluid. The surface tension of the meniscus (point where the two fluids meet, changes from convex, plano, to concave thus altering the focal length of the object. The miniature camera can now zoom in and out of objects.
[Without the electrical charge, the surface of the liquid would always be a fixed convex curve. When the charge is applied through the electrodes, however, the reduced surface tension forces the droplet lens to undergo quick changes from a convex to a flat and to a concave lens depending on the amount of current which is passed through the fluids.]
The above bracketed lines could be the text for a captioned diagram.)
[Amy: Here if possible there are several diagrams showing the two tubes of Philips' FluidFocus lens with the fluids in them to explain how the electric current changes the shape of the fluid lens.]
Philips liquid lens takes up hardly any electric battery power. It is extremely fast in switching its focus to a wide range of focal lengths. The durability of the lens is also very high. Philips tested it over a million operations without any loss of its optical power. It is shock resistant and can operate over a wide temperature range. The absence of moving mechanical parts eliminates friction and cost consuming wear and tear problems that smaller cameras have.
It will be interesting for the commercial future of the liquid lens to see the outcome of the patent claims made by another company, Varioptics, against Philips' decision to present its liquid lens. Varioptics contests Philips' development of the liquid lens by announcing its international patents on a single-element focusing lens. They claim that since the 1940s their optical engineers have been working on a lens that could focus without moving parts and that they already hold patents for a liquid lens that changes it shape from convex to concave using the process of electrowetting.
Electrowetting is also being used to develop a new video display technology. Using what is called "electronic paper" the process of electrowetting (applying electrical charges to fluid surfaces) can be used to form a video display that may some day be used for computer video monitors. As in the case of using electrowetting for the liquid lens, Royal Philips Electronics is at the forefront of using electrowetting for developing electronic paper.
The liquid lens may only be a year or so away from the market, but the idea of electronic paper video displays is believed to be at least five years from a usable product form.
Even so, Peter Kurstjens, general manager of Electronic Ink Displays at Philips points out that, "while the amount of information that we digitally process ever increases, more printers are sold each year. This contrast goes to show we still prefer reading from paper rather than from electronic displays,"
Printing and paper distribution are the mostly costly parts of information distribution. If it were as easy to read monitor displays as it is to read a paper book the cost savings of information retrieval could be enormous. Reading from a video display is difficult because it reflects light unlike paper's absorption of light. Despite all the technological hurdles ahead of e-paper, (electronic paper) large companies see the economical potential of e-paper displays.

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