Archive for May, 2018
Sinners in the hands of an angry god
Jonathan Edwards, the 18th-century preacher who gave the world that lovely phrase, wrote a sermon on the back of a “bill of sale” accounting for his purchase of a black slave. Susan Stinson’s article is really good.
h/t MD
Obviously not obvious
If you throw everything *but* the kitchen sink at your problem, you will surely fail. You always need a kitchen sink.
Primary Progressive Aphasia
Harold Gulskin was an amazing acting coach who told his students “to emphasize the words of the script over any analysis of their characters’ motivation.” (His students included Kevin Kline, Glenn Close, and James Gandolfini.) That is, he did not believe in The Method. He believed in the script, and the actors reading that script. He passed away last week.
His wife, Sandra Jennings, said the cause [of his death] was probably a pulmonary embolism. He learned a decade ago that he had primary progressive aphasia, a rare form of dementia, she said, and had been living in a care facility in Park Ridge.
Primary Progressive Aphasia robs people of their linguistic abilities. Word by word, they can no longer understand names and terms; bit by bit, they can no longer find their own words in their minds; great big verbal parties become warehouses of nothing. Their other cognitive skills, and their memories, remain intact, for several years, until their brains and everything else fall apart.
This is what killed my Dad.
Reading Gulskin’s obituary moved me greatly.
As primary progressive aphasia gradually took away Mr. Guskin’s ability to speak and communicate, Ms. Jennings helped coach his students, filling in words he could no longer conjure and explaining his intentions.
Ms. Weisz said: “Even when he was down to about 20 words, I knew what he meant to say. We had a shorthand by then, and he would say, `No, no, no,’ when I wasn’t hitting the truth.”
My father was a stutterer well into adulthood. Learning how to speak out loud flawlessly and beautifully was I think to him his greatest achievement. That he was robbed of this toward and at his life’s end was utterly galling to him and our family. God bless Mr. Gulskin’s.
Farewell Tom Wolfe
He wrote some great books and coined new language. But I stopped liking him.
A blast from the past:
4 Nov. 04: A loyal basil.CA reader sent me a friendly election-day double-dinger: an email entitled “Is Bob Cranky Today?” that begins, “Your entry today [on Tom Wolfe, below*] was opaque and confusing.” I WAS cranky, and it IS confusing. Here is what I meant to say:
Wolfe was my favourite writer for about a year in college, when I was an editor at the college newspaper: He really opened up my view of nonfiction generally and journalism in particular. He was very USEFUL to a young writer. His later essays are often very funny, but they are infected with reverse snobbery, which I loathe a good deal more than regular snobbery. From college on, and especially from grad school on, I’ve run into countless snobs and reverse snobs. I have always like snobs more: They think they are better bred than you, and that’s fine with me, even on those occasions when they are clearly wrong. Reverse snobs decry the whole idea of breeding and so not only renounce but DENY theirs — they become citizens of the working class, etc., or some other “authentic” class. They are frauds, not to put too fine a point on it.
And here is what I meant when I said that Wolfe now parrots the Republican party: He employs clichéd expressions like “the Eastern Media elite” to echo reactionary resentments the same way that party does. I don’t know if being a parrot makes you fraudulent, but it does make you mind-numbing.
The post to which my friend was responding:
At one time Tom Wolfe was my favourite writer. (When I was at Stanford, I used to teach The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.) He lost his charm when he started writing fiction. He lost everything else when he started parrotting the Republican Party. It’s not uncommon for writers to get resentful and ossified at the end of their careers, but it always dismays.
basil.CA 