Hearts, Lungs and Minds: experimental radio documentary

In the category of groovy ideas that have nothing to do with the weather ..came across this interesting piece…hurry though you’ve only 7 days to hear it.

An experimental documentary by sound artist John Wynne, who spent a year as artist-in-residence with photographer Tim Wainwright at Harefield Hospital, one of the world’s leading centres for heart and lung transplants.

Using recordings of patients, the devices some of them were attached to, and the hospital itself, the piece weaves together intensely personal narratives with the sounds of the hospital environment, exploring the experiences of transplant patients and the important issues raised by this invasive, last-option medical procedure.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/betweentheears/pip/oe1qu/

 

Flourish

Prepare for flurry of weather centric posts …

In a round up of weather related worrying and reading I came across this article headlined Expert: Scientific reasons behind year’s weather. The second paragraph read

At least one Iowa City resident said she thinks the weather in Iowa this year, along with the seemingly apocalyptic flurry of earthquakes, deadly tornados and other natural disasters around the globe might be a sign from above.

“I think the end is near,” Linda Lewis said Friday.

I should point out the Mrs Lewis is not the expert in the article, but I was comforted to see another weather wonderer who relies on absolutely no science for her wondering.  I’ve questioned whether it’s resolvable being entirely illiterate in science and concurrently obsessed with the weather.

I’ve muttered my way through some hardware shop discussions with perplexed employees as I complain about the selection of barometers they stock, whilst not being entirely clear what barometers actually do. I’ll ask do they measure air pressure without really having a clue what the purpose of measuring air pressure is, but since it matters to weather people, so it too  matters abstractly to me.

 

Bangladesh is set to disappear under the waves by the end of the century

From Johann Hari’s piece in The Independent:

Ten years ago, the village began to die. First, many of the trees turned a strange brownish-yellow colour and rotted. Then the rice paddies stopped growing and festered in the water. Then the fish floated to the surface of the rivers, gasping. Then many of the animals began to die. Then many of the children began to die.

The waters flowing through Munshigonj – which had once been sweet and clear and teeming with life – had turned salty and dead.

Read the rest here.

Meanwhile on this side of the water they’re decking it out over whether or not to implement a carbon tax federally and some are hiccuping over the already introduced Provincial tax on petrol. Now lads, a bit closer to home, this might help you make up your minds…

The researchers say sea levels could be expected to rise by four to six meters by 2100 as part of a long-term trend towards five to ten meters. A six meter rise in sea level would put 91 per cent of Richmond, and 76 per cent of Delta underwater; the entire airport and ferry terminal at Tsawwassen would be lost to the sea; and the current erosion counter-measures around Point Grey and North Vancouver would be overwhelmed, threatening to plunge much of UBC into the ocean.

Read more here

Curiously there’s been recent, slightly rabid muttery protests about the introduction of a new bus route in our area! A bus, God help us.

Round Table discussions

I first came across these round-table discussions because one of them concerned the weather. I became distracted en route to clicking on that one and listened to the one about Susan Sontag, which is compelling listening, but rather a public dissection on her personality that, at times, seemed to these neophyte ears, a bit unforgiving. Given that this discussion took place after extracts from her journal had been published which surely gave some context on the complexities of her personality…

Perhaps I am too squeamish, but I kept thinking yes, she was a public intellectual, perhaps she could be vicious and critical, but she was also someone’s mother and it cannot be easy to have your mother turned over and pulled apart like a piece of toast. You can see why it was so necessary for her son to write his recent book, which though remarkably restrained, created a profound portrait of grief and its inherent complexities. It’s effect for the reader was what John McGahern would have described as the particular being the way to the general, which is perhaps when and how the particular can serve a purpose.

This roundtable discussion relied too much on the particular only as a means to the particular and sometimes felt like crows pecking the same patch of land to turn up the same version of the repeatedly pecked and bloodied worm.

Why are these dichotomies in her personality so surprising? Why the gasp and gush over her insecurity? I’m confused as to why this is so foreign. Are not most humans similarly flawed?

Nabakov’s position of “I pride myself on being a person with no public appeal.” made certain sense as an aspiration in the aftermath of listening to it.

The roundtable discussions are here: http://philoctetes.org/past_programs/ They are varied and some are about the brain, and the weather, areas of particular interest to me. I also like that these discussions are hours long. We live in times of conversational brevity.

Middling

“He was greatly distressed in his head. All night the parrot had swung roosting from his palate…”

From Dream of Fair to Middling Women. A Novel. Samuel Beckett. (Arcade Publishing, New York, first Arcade paperback edition 2006)

Iraqi cultural books article

Here’s a link to an article I wrote about Iraqi cultural books…

http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/weekendreview/story.html?id=a6586cbd-01af-4aa4-84b0-47bcd20ede24

Given that Iraq is so topical, it’s remarkable we hear so little about Iraqi writers or aspects of Iraqi life beyond dictator, war, and occupation. We are becoming increasingly fluent on Iraq only in sectarian language and ideas. Words like Shia, Sunni, Moqtada, IED, roll off our tongues but we know little of Iraq’s rivers, soccer players, musicians, visual artists or food.

For those who protested or opposed the invasion of Iraq, a logical follow up could be to support some ongoing cultural life amidst the mayhem that prevails in Iraq. One way to do this is to actively purchase Iraqi books and thus create more publishing opportunities for Iraqi writers.

Click here for the rest.

Hairy Relief

In these orchestra slashing (poor beleagured CBC radio orchestra), and writer shafting times, it’s rare enough to find a moment of advantage (once you don’t include obvious improvements in cholera, polio, public hanging etc) but today I chanced upon an advantaged moment to being a writer in this century, at this most inhospitable of writerly times …

“A hairy face was required of writers in the mid nineteenth century…”

From Claire Tomalin’s Thomas Hardy The Time-Torn Man. (p92 Penguin).

I have been reading Tomalin’s very enjoyable biography of Hardy in tandem with an equally intriguing history of Iraqi football. Perhaps an unusual pairing, but I wonder of other such pairings, where folks read distinctly different books at that same time.

Post your pairings.

 

Catastrophe

Quelle catastrophe! What is happening in CBC land …? A process of alienation of the most devoted listeners. All the good aspects slowly being dissolved like vitamin powder in water.

 The disbanding of the Radio Orchestra is unfathomable. 

 Stand up, speak out, pound your fists on the door people. The lunacy in suits are taking a slash hook to the arts, while filling up excel spread sheets, with middle manager smiles.  Much blather about redirecting the money, CBC Radio Orchestra was only about ever about music, and Canadian composers and it should be left well enough alone and effort instead  made to entice people out of their living rooms to hear its blessed sounds.  

May the protest rise…

more here

and here with hockey analogy

A-wondering

I’ve often wondered about this and finally someone has publicly addressed it. Bravo Edward Mills

Rich Western countries, including Canada, are demolishing African medical systems and destroying African lives by continuing to lure away their health care workers, a group of international medical experts led by a Vancouver doctor said Thursday.

The problem is so bad future active recruitment should be considered a crime in international law, argue the doctors, pharmacists and researchers in a commentary released today by the Lancet.

NYRB audio and Sontag

Some curious audio links of various writers (incl Susan Sontag, Joan Didion) reading from essays they wrote for the New York Review of Books down the years.

 On Susan Sontag there’s also a review in the latest NYRB of her son’s memoir (Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir. David Rieff) which piqued my interest in seeking out the book. I read the review while in the throws of pneumonia and was uplifted by her extraordinary determination in dealing with her numerous health battles and the way “Her unwillingness to accept her own mortality continued onto her deathbed…”

 Forget antibiotics, stock up on Sontag.

History of Mesopotamian Medicine

Just in case you were wondering after the Corp Watch piece how things were in ancient days: here’s a lively bunch of links including this one, that includes the following paragraph towards the end.

 The primary center for health care was the home, as it was when the ashipu or asu were employed. The majority of health care was provided at the patient’s own house, with the family acting as care givers in whatever capacity their lay knowledge afforded them. Outside of the home, other important sites for religious healing were nearby rivers. The Mesopotamian believed that the rivers had the power to care away evil substances and forces that were causing the illness. Sometimes a small hut was set up for the afflicted person either near the home or the river to aid in the families centralization of home health care.

(from The Asclepion Prof. Nancy Demand, Indiana University)

Iraq healthcare botch up

Corp Watch piece on the woeful state of Iraq’s healthcare and the gangsters who’ve benefitted and botched it up while civilians continue to suffer.

Taking a stand link

Dr Saad Eskander, director of Iraq’s National Library, explains why he decided to return from exile in Britain in an attempt to preserve his country’s rich cultural heritage in the face of extremists and corruption. He describes what it is like to live with the threat of assassination in a city where sectarian gangs have killed thousands.

Listen to the interview here

House-ache

900 years behind the rest of the world here, and due to frugal amounts of telly watching, (aside from the unmissable or I shall surely expire… 3 versions of the weather forecast) I saw one episode of House yesterday. Instant relief Mr Laurie playing an obnoxious crankpot, mais oui, how fine, but House nowt to do mit habitation, mais non, it’s another Hopital a la tele fiasco.

Thanks to the domination of sincerely mad and nothing to be learnt from them medical dramas on the tube I have lost all interest in medical matters and acquired a medical pain in my hole at the sight of white coats or get a trolley in here on-screen.

It beggars the question:
have screenwriters/television producers had an naturally high number of encounter with obnoxious doctors or are there genuinely a very high number of obnoxious doctors populating the planet? You can find out for yourself at ratemydoctor.com

The point being I’d like to offer some alternative and varied occupations for successful onscreen portrayal and all of whom have the onscreen potential to be both interesting and obnoxious. (disclaimer: meant in the fictional sense only)

- bus drivers

- dental hygienists

- Greenhouse owners (specifically pushing the limits on tomatoes)

- librarians

- dinosaur egg experts

- elevator companies

 The medical confusion that evolves from these hospital dramas is intense: what! you can’t have an MRI if you’ve plates in your face? Pity they don’t tell those of us with plates that. We have to learn it from sodding House, if indeed it’s even true. And doctors complain about hyper educated patients graduated from the medical school of Google!

When I think back down the years to working in a nameless London hospital I have the most hilarious memory of being informed by one of those NHS manager types that one snotty doctor, who I’d been greeting in what was considered in those staid old days as too cheerful a manner (you know what doctors are like he’d ho-hummed embarrassed to us …)  had requested that we not speak to him.

Imagine here we are checking his patients in at the waiting area and we must not speak to him. What exactly were we supposed to do if one of them fell in a heap? The ironic thing was they were all suffering from serious illnesses and our chirpy greetings were no doubt keeping them afloat as they collected the grim news of what I think were called T Cell counts and CT scans.

Once one of the patients gave me thirty oranges (did he think I had scurvy?) another handed me a very sober looking grey wool suit (point taken, I was in a punk rock phase) another fifty quid, gloria in excelsis etc.

No doubt this is the kind of pompous nonsense (the don’t speak to me rule, not the presents) that spurned such TV shows and ruined the lives of medical students, who had to put up with his morse code style of communication.  In that context ratemydoc frankly doesn’t seem such an outlandish concept.

George Eliot fogged in throat and head

In keeping with my curiosity for all things literary and meteorological here is George Eliot or Pollian as she signs the letter beleaguered by fog  on 13 November 1852..

“O this hideous fog!  Let me grumble for I have had headache the last three days and there seems little prospect of anything else in such an atmosphere. I am ready to vow that I will not live in the Strand again after Christmas. If I were not choked by the fog, the time would trot pleasantly withal, but of what use are brains and friends when one lives in a light such as might be got in the chimney?…”

 From a letter to The Brays. (Selections from George Eliot’s Letters edited by Gordon S  Haight published by Yale Univ Press).

Meteorological-chondria perhaps. I had no idea fog could give a headache and choke you. All Dickensian induced romance on fog is henceforth abruptly dumped. Though Pollian might these days have benefitted from the lack of light according to the new thinking on the dangers of light pollution.