Commentaries - September 2008

Dead invoked for McCain

John Rich of Big & Rich is already well known as a McCain guy.

Narrative medicine

For several years people affiliated with the Kelly Writers House here have been gathering under the clever series title “Word.Doc” (word dot doc) to talk about narrative medicine and “to discuss and experience the ways in which medicine, narrative, literature and art inform one another in creative and useful ways.” A now somewhat dated web site was created by these folks.

One year they made a Word.Doc t-shirt — images from its front and back are below.

Really she's Betty Goldstein, commie

A woman presents herself as a typical suburban housewife, but she’s really a communist Jewess with a hidden political agenda. And she lied.

Eating is her subject and so is herself

PoemTalk’s tenth episode is being released today.

portrait, but of whom? (PoemTalk #10)

"Stein leaves no doubt...that she's doing portraits in the same way that Picasso and Braque are doing portraits." So says Jerome Rothenberg--very helpfully--in the first minute of our discussion of Gertrude Stein's "Christian Bérard." PennSound's Stein page includes a recording made in New York during the winter of 1934-35 of the first page of the poem as it appeared in Portraits & Prayers, the Random House