Monthly Archives for: June 2011
2011 June
THIRTEEN (13) SEMI-EXTEMPORANEOUS NOTES
- Memory is a collective enterprise, and — as such — it’s a fabricated virtual world that’s as rich, vibrant, and captivating as it is mostly unreliable. Also: it can serve to connect people or to isolate them.
- You can also do this: Memory The Internet is a collective enterprise, and — as such — it’s a fabricated virtual world that’s as rich, vibrant, and captivating as it is mostly unreliable. Also: the Internet can serve to connect people or to isolate them.
- More and more, the Internet serves as our memory, both collective and individual. (more…)
I have learned firsthand how the body can change drastically depending on what it’s given for fuel, and this book is the primary source of that knowledge/experience. One December more than a decade ago, after a twelve-hour drive from Virginia to Alabama, and a steady diet of French fries and cheeseburgers and sodas along the way, I pulled off the highway and into one of Tuscaloosa’s sundry strip malls to buy a book at a mega-bookstore. (Books are — I think I may have mentioned this — a salve for me.) I ended up buying two: the very first Harry Potter book and Eating Well for Optimum Health. I can’t remember precisely why I chose to pick the book up in the first place, but it must have had something to do with the queasy feeling in my stomach, the concomitant throbbing headache I had been nursing since northeast Georgia. I just didn’t feel right and I blamed it (not erroneously) on the food I’d eaten that day. (more…)
Wait. Is that your sister?
Yeah. I mean. Maybe.
I thought she wanted to remain anonymous.
Maybe it’s not even her, you know? And if it is her, then you can rest assured she’s been radically disguised. So that’s definitely not what she would look like in real life. It’s like when folks in the Witness Relocation Program go on 60 Minutes. Yeah. Um. It’s like that. So, yeah, if that’s her — I mean, if — then it’s a helluva job by the folks in Make-Up. (more…)
Okay, first a disclaimer of sorts: Walt Stoll can come across as a curmudgeon at times — even a crackpot — but his critique of modern medicine is difficult for me to simply push aside. If you or someone you care about has had any experience using the conventional medical system to figure out what ails you/him/her, particularly if there’s been some level of difficulty in finding a diagnosis, you’ve likely come to this conclusion: Western medicine is pretty good at diagnosing and treating some conditions (typically acute ones: broken legs, infectious diseases, etc.) and not so good at treating others (typically chronic ones, like autoimmune disorders, that tend to be extremely sensitive to diet and lifestyle choices). Nowadays — due in no small part to less curmudgeonly figures, such as ol’ Andy Weil — this is almost a mainstream view, and you can find a good number of conventional medical doctors who, for the most part, hold it to be true. So far so good. (more…)
The normal human body — e.g., Ben Hogan, arguably the most consistently pure striker of a golf ball who ever picked up sticks, was no taller than 5’9” and weighed 150 pounds soaking wet — can be trained with utter precision to perform a series of intricate, interconnected movements time and time again, under enormous pressure. How? The big muscles lead the small ones. It’s easier to coordinate the movements of your hips, back, and shoulders in a consistent, repeatable motion than it is to do the same with your wrists and hands. That’s a parable. Start with the big things, the little things will fall in line.
FYI/411
Previous Sacred Text: “Letters to a Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke.
["Wait: what the hell does he mean by Sacred Text?"]
WAIT: WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING HERE?
So the question that presents itself is bipartite: 1) what, pray tell, is a “Misfit Pilgrimage” and 2) why on earth would somebody want to embark upon one?
Well. As tjbman.com is the home of a dyed-in-the-wool Misfit Pilgrim, the answer to the former question is: it’s what we do around here. And the answer to the latter question is, well, you know, you gotta do something, right? You can’t just sit around twiddling your thumbs or whatever.
But serious. I’m a word guy and so the best way to get at the marrow of it would simply be to parse out the words themselves. (more…)
This one’s worth it for its sheer intensity and for its paradoxical combination of narcissism and selflessness. On the one hand, Rilke is ostensibly responding to fan mail — a series of unsolicited letters from a novice poet named Franz Xaver Kappus — by waxing philosophical about his own existence. There is the sense of journaling to this work, a certain note-to-self nature that, at times, seems to bypass Kappus and his concerns entirely.
On the other hand, how magnanimous of Rilke to engage Kappus, a neophyte-stranger in need, with the full faculties of his poetic thought, with the intense energy he otherwise guarded jealously, fearing even his own family would devour it if given half a chance.
(Or maybe it just boils down to what Gertrude Stein is supposed to have said: “I write for myself and strangers.”) (more…)
