I’ve been reading a compilation called The Dragonfly (named after her most famous poem). There are bits that rocket straight out of the known universe

Then it swelled up
the sack of tears
but it wasn't punctured
I'll keep it in a little
Greco-Roman vase
he'll bring it to my house
triumphant elephant of pain!

and there are brilliant moments of clarity, breath-catching in their honesty

The objective and determining mind is a neat trick.
Cosmopolitan wisdom may be the best of our
canastras. The self-determining mind may be
a cheap trick. Convinced of the contrary I pondered
the country's internal crises and observed adrift on
the town's principal river a sardine can.

She is a political poet who writes about the fractured world of Europe in the build up to the second world war. She was born in 1930 to into an Italian Jewish educated and politically active family.

She committed suicide in 1996.

From The Daily Dish

Neuroscientists are beginning to identify the specific deficits that define the psychopathic brain. The main problem seems to be a broken amygdala, a brain area responsible for secreting aversive emotions, like fear and anxiety. As a result, psychopaths never feel bad when they make other people feel bad. Aggression doesn’t make them nervous. Terror isn’t terrifying. (Brain imaging studies have demonstrated that the amygdala is activated when most people even think about committing a “moral transgression.”)

This emotional void means that psychopaths never learn from their adverse experiences: They are four times as likely as other prisoners to commit another crime after being released. For a psychopath on parole, there is nothing inherently wrong with violence. Hurting someone else is just another way of getting what they want, a perfectly reasonable way to satisfy their desires. In other words, it is the absence of emotion–and not a lack of rationality–that makes the most basic moral concepts incomprehensible to them.

I think I am going to read Snakes in Suites: When Psychopaths Go to Work.

I also think I want to get a copy of Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist-Revised. The results will be interesting regardless of their outcome.

I’m not at all superstitious but I am also  not a bad driver but I’ve been hit twice in the last year.  It might be fun to go out tonight and watch the craziness. I bet the bus and ambulance drivers and cops are not looking forward to this shift.

One of my favourite coffee shops is a 24-hour place. If I could find an out-of-the-way parking spot it might be amusing for a couple of hours. I was going to go see The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus but I’d have to go downtown and that seems a bit risky.

Anyway, I’m just rambling. Tomorrow I’ll go see the movie and depending on the weather, I’ll either go out to the bird sanctuary or to the art museum again.

Another 3 1/2 days off! Wahoooooooooooo!

Sometimes not only are we not part of the conversation, sometimes we are not even on the same playing field. I think Brian O’Nolan may have felt like that as an author. When he submitted (as Flann O’Brien) The Third Policeman to his publishers it was rejected as too fantastic. The manuscript sat on his sideboard chastising him (as I think of it) for the next quarter century and during that time he told friends that enquired of its fate that the manuscript had been irretrievably lost. It wasn’t published until after his death, and now, of course, it is considered “a masterpiece.”
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I have never been able to like Faulkner. I admire much about the books I have been able to struggle through, but I always finish them feeling raw and dirty.

This time it is The Sound and the Fury. In part I reread him because he is a very important American writer, in part because because not knowing Faulkner is to miss something vital about the growth of the American psyche and intellect, but really I decided to reread The Sound and the Fury because I still can’t figure out what it is about his books that causes me such distress.
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Fear is an interesting thing. Or at least how people respond to it is.

We all have fear. For me at this moment I am finding myself afraid to go back to work. It’s not the work of course. That’s easy and my bosses are mellow and understanding, even in difficult corporate and economic times. What I am afraid of is being so far from the comfort of my home.  Here if I feel bad I can go to my room and take a nap. There, if I need to leave I am still 30 or 40 minutes from home.

I can’t stay home until this is all over either. Can’t afford that on a number of levels. So I am going but I am going to compromise with my fear. I am taking the car to work. It’s expensive but at least with it there (and the blankets and pillows in the back seat) I can retreat to a personal environment should things go south today. I’ll get over it soon. Probably once today is over and it all goes OK. Still, while I feel it, fear is a hard one to negotiate with any grace and especially hard to negotiate with any degree of rationality.

Two things prompted this post. The first is a good article called the Pandemic of Fear by Michael Specter and the second is an old CBS video going around about Judy Roberts and her neurological damage following the swine flu vaccination she received in 1976.

Then I ran across this offensive bit of misinformation about the nature of vaccination. It says, for example, “it is absurd to give a disease to a healthy person in order to prevent the same disease. It is like giving a child a small rape in order to prepare her/him for a possibly bigger rape later.” I mean really! It really says that.

I mean if the author can’t tell the difference between a virus and a rapist he/she is in big trouble.  It also shows such incredible basic ignorance of how immunization works that apart from the possibility of a seriously low IQ, the only thing that really makes sense is that either the person knows better and is using our penchant for irrationality for some unknown personal reason or the person has been raised inside a cult/cave.

Here’s an example of this same kind of “thinking.” (Imagine a news anchor speaking in horrified tones) – “The vaccine in 1976 caused more deaths (4000 of the 46,000,000 million people vaccinated – that’s 0.008% of the population by the way) than the epidemic itself!”  Gee. That’s terrible. That means we didn’t need the vaccinations. Right?

What is left unsaid is that maybe the low death toll was because the vaccine worked just fine for the other 99.992 % of the population.

Here’s a question: if you had a 99.992% chance of winning the lottery would you buy the ticket? If there was an 0.008% chance that someone would break both your legs as a consequence would you still buy it? Probably is my guess.

Do vaccines bear risks? Sure. Do diseases bear far, far greater risks? For sure.

Am I going to be vaccinated? Yes.

Am I worried? About 0.008% of me is worried. (I am 66 inches tall. That means about half an inch of me is worried.) I’ll probably get over it pretty quick.

There. Done.

There is a rather good article on Ayn Rand called Mrs. Logic at NYmag.com. The author, Sam Anderson, is an admitted ex-devotee but he keeps a careful path in the article between the good and the bad. It’s hard to do with people like Ayn Rand.

What strikes me about human lone wolves – people like Ayn Rand and Christopher McCandless – is not so much them, but their followers.  I mean there will always be those who are mad hatters.  The world is very hard on some of us, and sometimes we simply cannot cope with what happens.  Rand’s terrible childhood, McCandless’ schizophrenia, these are things that made them what they were, and because of what they were – the madness, the intelligence and the ferocious desire – they became our mad hatters.
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The movie Precious starts on November 6 and I want to watch it. I just don’t know if it is a good idea.

Just the trailer is enough to open that jagged well of pain. It’s not that I went through anything nearly as bad as that character but how do different pains get weighed? How do my childhood memories of what some people will do match up to what some girls go through? There is no way to answer that, which leads me to believe it is really the wrong question.
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Drove the 400 or so miles from Vancouver to Spokane on Thursday. And back again on Friday night.

From this world:

To this:

It does weird things to my head.

And then I go to the Resevation. Stars. I wish the recombobulator was real.

Anyway, when we got to the motel on Thursday night we got one of the last two rooms available in my favourite dive-of-a-motel. (Got the suite!) Went to dinner. Visited (very briefly, unfortunately) with a very good friend then slept. Next morning we drove up to the wedding (topic of another post).

The wedding was at 1PM.  We visited a bit after the ceremony then as people started to head to the POWWOW grounds, we drove off across the reservation and out, looking for plant communities I haven’t seen for too long.

Ended up back on the highway (by design). Got a take-out dinner. Then drove. Drove. Drove. Drove.

Got back to Vancouver around 3 AM Saturday morning.

Saturday I was a basket case.  It’s now Sunday morning and I feel sane again.