August Works: Reading a Different Author Daily

Dan Ariely - The Upside of Irrationality

On Saturday, I read Part II of this book: The Unexpected Ways we Defy Logic at Home.

Friday Failure

No time to read before work, and nothing short pre-selected that I could bring with me. After work I walked downtown for our weekly happy hour, and by the time I walked back home it was 9:30. After cooking and eating dinner, the television absorbed my time and attention for the remainder for the remainder of the evening. I didn’t even think about needing too read something. I’ll read two authors today, because I’ve really been enjoying this experimonth.

Anais Nin - Little Birds

Thursday I read the title story from Anais Nin’s Little Birds before work, another author I haven’t read in 15+ years (Nin and Bukowski were both favorites in college). It was nice to revisit this piece, but I always liked the diaries more, and will probably pull one of those out to revisit sometime in the coming months. 

William Matthews - Cheap Seats, the Cincinnati Gardens, Professional Basketball, 1959Cheap Seats, the Cincinnati Gardens, Professional Basketball, 1959

Today’s author and poem came to me unexpectedly, via Nina Simon’s Museum 2.0 blog. She shared this poem as part of a post on where we feel like a fan:

The person who best described this feeling is one of my favorite poets, William Matthews, in a poem about watching basketball as a teenager.

Cheap Seats, the Cincinnati Gardens, Professional Basketball, 1959

The less we paid, the more we climbed. Tendrils
of smoke lazed just as high and hung there, blue,
particulate, the opposite of dew.
We saw the whole court from up there. Few girls
had come, few wives, numerous boys in molt
like me. Our heroes leapt and surged and looped
and two nights out of three, like us, they’d lose.
But “like us” is wrong: we had no result
three nights out of three: so we had heroes.
And “we” is wrong, for I knew none by name
among that hazy company unless
I brought her with me. This was loneliness
with noise, unlike the kind I had at home
with no clock running down, and mirrors.

I found the last four lines to be really powerful.

David Mamet - Some Freaks

I recently pulled out my vhs copy of House of Games, so Mamet jumped out at me as I scanned my bookshelves tonight. 

I knew I wanted to read the essay “A First Time Film Director” about that film, but reading through others first, I was again struck by “Women” and “In the Company of Men.” I’d also just listened to Patrice O’Neal’s views on men and women on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, and these two guys have views that are really freaking counterintuitive to me. But as I’m older I’m finding that there is a gut level commonsense part of what they’re saying that I might have dismissed too quickly as misogyny in the past.

Good reading.  The book also has an amusing inscription, and I’m puzzling over whether I bought it used or it was written to me (I’m 75% sure I bought it used). 

Greatest magazine articles and more Gawande

Kevin Kelly has been creating this list of the best magazine articles ever, and I noticed that Atul Gawande has two articles currently listed: 

* Atul Gawande, “The Itch.” The New Yorker, June 30 2008. About a woman who itched so much that one day she scratched right through to her brain.

* Atul Gawande, “Letting Go: What Should Medicine Do When It Can’t Save Your Life?” The New Yorker, August 2, 2010. I couldn’t read it all at once because I started crying at several points.

Atul Gawande - Letting Go

Like most New Yorker subscribers, I don’t have the time to read every issue cover to cover. But I always make a point of reading Atul Gawande. I’m assuming this piece, subtitled “What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?”, is behind the subscriber paywall, but I highly recommend it.

Here’s the crux:

People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system’s expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what’s most important to them at the end of their lives.

I never realized that hospice and palliative care are so little understood, particularly by doctors. The work they do is tremendous - those people are saints. 

Revisiting an old favorite - Bukowski

I thought I’d start off this month with some of the first and only poetry I’ve ever really enjoyed.  Went to the bookshelf and grabbed a book of short stories instead - the first collection of his I ever bought. Reading old favorites like Six Inches and The Fuck Machine was fun.