A Holiday Break: Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis

Books are always the best holiday gift for me. The only thing I like better than the anticipation of reading a long sought after title is the fondness that comes with remembering the discovery of an unexpected treasure.

As I look back on all the books I've profiled here in 2021, the one I'd most like to revisit is Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis, which I blogged about back in November. On the surface, it is the story of Martin Arrowsmith, a young doctor who vacillates between the two opposite poles of all physicians -- the life of the clinician and the life of the researcher. But in Lewis’s capable hands, the tension between these two objectives takes on a more universal and philosophical importance.

As Martin vacillates, the reader is presented with competing ideals and competing understandings of the world. What is the thing that matters? Practical success? Or esoteric greatness? And why is it not possible to have both? For that, as we read and enjoy all of Lewis’s prose describing Martin’s vacillations, is the underlying truth of it all. Whichever one chooses, the other has to be sacrificed in order to attain it.

For me, it is reminiscent of the same choice that Charles Strickland makes at the beginning of The Moon and Sixpence. To achieve something, something else must be sacrificed. In the most general of terms, if you want comfort, you must sacrifice art; and if you want art, you must sacrifice comfort. There’s no other way to approach it, and that may be what I like best about Lewis’s novel.

As you enjoy your holiday break, I hope you find some time to curl up with a good book. I know I will.

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This post was written by Eric Lanke, an association executive, blogger and author. For more information, visit www.ericlanke.blogspot.com, follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Taming the Big Data Tidal Wave by Bill Franks

I didn’t dogear a single page or scribble a single marginal note while reading this 304-page business book.

I don’t blame it. From my distant perspective, it seems like a good overview of its subject, even though some of its content undoubtedly aging as the years keep passing by (it was published in 2012). But to be fair, I don’t think I was the intended audience.

The primary focus [of this book] is educating the reader on what big data is all about and how it can be utilized through analytics, and providing guidance on how to approach the creation and evolution of a world-class advanced analytics ecosystem in today’s big data environment. A wide range of readers will find this book to be of value and interest. Whether you are an analytics professional, a businessperson who uses the results that analytics produce, or just someone with an interest in big data and advanced analytics, this book has something for you.

I picked it up because I thought I might have been at least one of those things. If the book subsequently taught me anything, it is that I am clearly none of those things -- at least not at the scale or level that the author expected.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 77 (DRAFT)

Going to the clinic where Jenny saw her doctor was like going to another world -- an alien world where everything had its place and everything was in its place, even the broken and suffering human creatures that had journeyed there, often at great risk and peril to themselves. The building had four wings that spread out from a central core like the splayed limbs of a condemned man -- one, seemingly, for each of that man’s ages: birth, youth, adult, and old age, better known to the medically-literate as obstetrics, pediatrics, internal medicine, and geriatrics. The wayward and shuffling souls that each made their way through the whooshing automatic doors went first up to an enormous reception desk to make their offerings of insurance cards and co-pays, where, once recognized and registered, they would be sent down to one of the spacious waiting areas at the center of each wing, each customized for those whose ailments and concerns brought them to that temporary destination.

Lots of mothers with small children, obviously, found their way to the obstetrics waiting area, and, as such, it was appropriately decked-out with comfortable recliners, small, private lactation chambers, and, for the elder siblings of the soon-to-be-birthed, an elaborate and modular jungle gym of sorts -- a series of ramps, platforms, and slides that even toddlers could push around in order to create unique configurations of their play space.

Needless to say, Jacob loved this jungle gym. It was the thing that we could use to consistently coax him to both behave and to go peacefully to the doctor. They had a larger and more elaborate version in the pediatrics waiting area, but even the one meant for toddlers in the obstetrics area was usually enough for him. We had used it again that morning, simply reminding him of its existence and how much fun he could have with it. Suddenly, he had no longer wanted to stay home and play with his trains. He wanted to go to Mommy’s doctor and play with the jungle gym.

Not that getting there and getting settled in was any easier after that. Even with Jacob fully on board we couldn’t get to the clinic any sooner than ten minutes past Jenny’s appointment time. We hustled as quick as we could down the throat of the beast and arrived breathless at its thumping, thriving heart. There, we received a disapproving look from the school marm that sat there, her day evidently ruined by the need to wait for the tardy Larson family to arrive.

Jacob was already tugging on my arm and Jenny told us to go -- knowing both where we would be going and that he would just be a distraction as she went through the ritual of getting checked in and placed in the queue. Once we got within eyesight of the Holy Land I let Jacob go and he half-jumped, half-ran the remaining distance, too excited to do either one consistently. As I settled into one of the ordinary waiting room chairs (not the recliners, oh no; even if vacant, a man sitting in one of those was akin to parking on top of a handicapped person in one of their coveted spots), I watched Jacob immediately set about to start re-arranging the modular pieces in the way that scratched his particular itch.

There were two other kids already playing there, their parents among the half dozen or so adults scattered about. I carefully avoided eye contact with all of them, and used my kindest parent voice to caution Jacob to play nice with the others.

Soon Jenny came waddling down the concourse, a clipboard in one hand and her heavy purse slung over the opposite shoulder. She came and sat down next to me, exhaling deeply as she settled into the ordinary chair.

“How is he?” she asked.

“Fine,” I said, looking up to see Jacob in some kind of friendly discussion with another one of the children, each navigating how to compel the other to create the playzone each preferred, but apparently doing it amicably. “No screaming or tears, yet.”

“Good,” Jenny said, turning her attention down to the form attached to her clipboard and beginning to scribble the information it requested with the provided pen. It was a simple ballpoint, but it was taped to a large and long tongue depressor, which in turn was taped to a three foot length of heavy twine, the other end of which was in turn taped to the shiny metal clip at the business end of the clipboard. It appeared like an entire roll of tape had been used to create the contraption.

“Do they think you’re going to steal their pen?” I asked.

Jenny mumbled a response.

“And why do they make you fill out that same form every single time?” I asked, my annoyance springing from some unknown place. “They must have all that information already. We’ve been coming here for years.”

“It’s just their process,” Jenny said, the pen continuing to scratch its way across the form. 

“Well, their process is stupid.”

Jenny shushed me. “Alan, keep your voice down.”

“Keep my voice down?” I asked, unconsciously lowering my voice. “Why? Are you afraid of being kicked out by the stupid process police?”

She gave me a sarcastic smile. “Here,” she said, pushing the clipboard into my hands. “I’m done. Go put this in the bin for me. My feet hurt.”

“I’m sure they do,” I said, pretending to be more upset than I actually was. I got up in a feigned huff and went over to the door that led back to the various examination rooms. This was also part of the stupid process. I wrapped the tethered pen around the top of the clipboard and placed it along with Jenny’s completed form into a large document bin that had been attached to the wall next to the door. Next to the bin was a small panel with a series of lighted buttons on it, each one labelled with the name of one of the doctors that were busy working today. I pushed the button that matched Jenny’s doctor and made sure the light came on. Somewhere within, I knew, there was a matching panel, and the same little light had just gone on there, alerting whoever’s job it was to monitor such things that Doctor Mauser had a patient patiently waiting. 

My assigned task in the ritual completed, I went back to sit down next to my wife. As I passed, I happened to catch the gaze of another of the expecting mothers, waiting for the light that corresponded with her doctor to also be noticed so that she could be called back into the inner sanctum. She gave me only a passing glance, but it felt overly hostile.

Jenny was already deep into one of her magazines when I sat back down. “I just got the stink eye,” I whispered to her.

“From who?” she whispered back, not looking up from the glossy photographs.

“That woman over there,” I said, just as the door opened and a nurse in scrubs called for the very woman I was referring to. She got slowly to her feet, gathered her paraphernalia, and started making her slow way out of the waiting room.

Jenny watched her go. “You’re imagining things,” she told me, and then turned back to her magazine. “Now, sit there quietly and stop making trouble.”

I decided not to dwell on that one for very long. It seemed to me that I could either be imagining things OR I could be making trouble, not both. But Jenny, typically, saw things from a different angle than I did. In her view, two opposite things could be true at the same time.

Instead, I turned my attention back to Jacob and his playmates and settled in for what I called “the long wait.” No matter what time one arrived at the clinic, twenty minutes early or twenty minutes late, you were always left to stew in your own juices in the waiting area for at least forty-five minutes. They were either chronically behind schedule, or they had determined that patients had to marinate for an designated period of time before they were ready to be poked and prodded.

Deciding to test my theory, I brought up the stopwatch function on my watch and set it going.

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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source

http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault

This is the second work of Foucault’s that I’ve read. Both of these works contain what I often call a “big idea” -- a way of looking at the world and our place in it (i.e., a philosophy) that provides new and intriguing explanatory powers. In The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, the big idea was that sexuality is not a science, subject to an empirical understanding of its tenets and mechanisms, but an ideology, constructed out of a particular sociological context with no other binding effects. Here, in Madness and Civilization, the big idea is similarly that madness is also essentially an ideology -- something that existed in another form prior to the Age of Enlightenment, but which was re-contextualized into its current abhorrent configuration during the initial rise of that civilization. As is well summarized on the back cover of my paperback edition:

What does it mean to be mad? In Madness and Civilization, perhaps his masterpiece, Michel Foucault examines the archaeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 -- from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and walls were erected between the “insane” and the rest of humanity.

The quotation marks around “insane” in that last sentence are really doing a lot of work, because it’s not that Foucault is claiming that the insane did not exist prior to the Renaissance, just that they weren’t treated as something antipodal to the new civilization, people to be excised from that enterprise, almost like the lepers of the previous age. Indeed, as Foucault sets up the premise for his case, he will describe in the historical disappearance of the leper colony both the context and the structure for the new “insane.” As the leper was removed from the body of the Church in order to save both his soul and the souls of the unaffected…

If the leper was removed from the world, and from the community of the Church visible, his existence was yet a constant manifestation of God, since it was a sign both of His anger and of His grace: “My friend,” says the ritual of the Church of Vienne, “it pleaseth Our Lord that thou shouldst be infected with this malady, and thou hast great grace at the hands of Our Lord that he desireth to punish thee for thy iniquities in this world.” And at the very moment when the priest and his assistants drag him out of the church with backward step, the leper is assured that he still bears witness for God: “And howsoever thou mayest be apart from the Church and the company of the Sound, yet art thou not apart from the grace of God.” Brueghel’s lepers attend at a distance, but forever, that climb to Calvary on which the entire people accompanies Christ. Hieratic witnesses of evil, they accomplish their salvation in and by their very exclusion: in a strange reversibility that is the opposite of good works and prayer, they are saved by the hand that is not stretched out.

...the lunatic will come to be removed from Civilization using the same mechanisms and for the same reasons.

Leprosy disappeared, the leper vanished, or almost, from memory; these structures remained. Often, in these same places, the formulas of exclusion would be repeated, strangely similar two or three centuries later. Poor vagabonds, criminals, and “deranged minds” would take the part played by the leper, and we shall see what salvation was expected from this exclusion, for them and for those who excluded them as well. With an altogether new meaning and in a very different culture, the forms would remain -- essentially that major form of a rigorous division which is social exclusion but spiritual reintegration.

But there is more to the argument than “the insane are the new lepers.” Much more. Because, with a glance back at those quotation marks, we can come to understand that the “lunatics” of the Renaissance are not the same “lunatics” that freely moved about the landscape of the Middle Ages. No, because the very definition of insane will also change to better encompass those who are increasingly at odds with the tenants of the new civilization.

To inhabit the reaches long since abandoned by the lepers, they chose a group that to our eyes is strangely mixed and confused. But what is for us merely an undifferentiated sensibility must have been, for those living in the classical age, a clearly articulated perception. It is this mode of perception which we must investigate in order to discover the form of sensibility to madness in an epoch we are accustomed to define by the privileges of Reason. The act which, by tracing the locus of confinement, conferred upon it its power of segregation and provided a new homeland for madness, though it may be coherent and concerted, is not simple. It organizes into a complex unity a new sensibility to poverty and to the duties of assistance, new forms of reaction to the economic problems of unemployment and idleness, a new ethic of work, and also the dream of a city where moral obligation was joined to civil law, within the authoritarian forms of constraint. Obscurely, these themes are present during the construction of the cities of confinement and their organization. They give a meaning to this ritual, and explain in part the mode in which madness was perceived, and experienced, by the classical age.

That, like a lot of Michel’s writing, is a dense paragraph, but it well summarizes the ideological forces at work as the “new insane” were defined and then confined in practical “cities” of incarceration. No longer just the motley fools and village idiots of their pastoral precedents, these new lunatics would include the poor, the unemployed, the shiftless -- any and all who would be perceived as failing to properly embrace the spirit of the new age and, because of the moral force given to civilization and its gatekeepers, they, like the lepers before them, could be seen as being very properly punished for their sins of accident, ineptitude, and opposition.

If there is, in classical madness, something which refers elsewhere, and to other things, it is no longer because the madman comes from the world of the irrational and bears its stigmata; rather, it is because he crosses the frontiers of bourgeois order of his own accord, and alienates himself outside the sacred limits of its ethic.

In fact, the relation between the practice of confinement and the insistence on work is not defined by economic conditions; far from it. A moral perception sustains and animates it. When the Board of Trade published its report on the poor in which it proposed the means “to render them useful to the public,” it was made quite clear that the origin of poverty was neither scarcity of commodities nor unemployment, but “the weakening of discipline and the relaxation of morals.”

In this, it seems, we see the beginnings of one of the great moral canards of not just this civilization but ours as well: that the poor are not just morally deficient, but that they are poor because of their moral deficiency, and that we, their moral superiors, are morally justified in making them pay for their “sins.”

The edict of 1657, too, was full of moral denunciations and strange threats. “The libertinage of beggars has risen to excess because of an unfortunate tolerance of crimes of all sorts, which attract the curse of God upon the State when they remain unpunished.” This “libertinage” is not the kind that can be defined in relation to the great law of work, but a moral libertinage: “Experience having taught those persons who are employed in charitable occupations that many among them of either sex live together without marriage, that many of their children are unbaptized, and that almost all of them live in ignorance of religion, disdaining the sacraments, and continually practicing all sorts of vice.”

In 1657 in France the power to regulate these moral infractions was given to the “Hôpital Général” -- a new kind of institution that saw to the infirmities of both the body and the soul.

Hence the Hôpital does not have the appearance of a mere refuge for those whom age, infirmity, or sickness keep from working; it will have not only the aspect of a forced labor camp, but also that of a moral institution responsible for punishing, for correcting a certain moral “abeyance” which does not merit the tribunal of men, but cannot be corrected by the severity of penance alone. The Hôpital Général has an ethical status. It is this moral charge which invests its directors, and they are granted every judicial apparatus and means of repression: “They have power of authority, of direction, of administration and punishment”; and to accomplish this task “stakes, irons, prisons, and dungeons” are put at their disposal.

This is all leading somewhere. In Foucault’s estimation, this power to both define the cage and to place people within it is about more than just an expansion of our collective understanding of who is and is not insane. His chapter on this subject is called “The Great Confinement,” referring to the thousands who suddenly found themselves behind bars, but it could just as easily have been called “The Great Conflation,” since in this time two separate forces appeared to have been conflated together in a way not previously seen.

Thus we see inscribed in the institutions of absolute monarchy -- in the very ones that long remained the symbol of its arbitrary power -- the great bourgeois, and soon republican, idea that virtue, too, is an affair of state, that decrees can be published to make it flourish, that an authority can be established to make sure it is respected. The walls of confinement actually enclose the negative of that moral city of which the bourgeois conscience began to dream in the seventeenth century; a moral city for those who sought, from the start, to avoid it, a city where right reigns only by virtue of a force without appeal -- a sort of sovereignty of good, in which intimidation alone prevails and the only recompense of virtue (to this degree its own reward) is to escape punishment. In the shadows of the bourgeois city is born this strange republic of the good which is imposed by force on all those suspected of belonging to evil. This is the underside of the bourgeoisie’s great dream and great preoccupation in the classical age: the laws of the State and the laws of the heart at last identical.

This, indeed, may be Foucault’s second big idea in this short work. What we call madness and who we identify as madmen is ideology, yes, but the effect of that ideology in our age is to conflate the State with the “moral city,” and those who transgress one are, by definition, transgressing the other.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 76 (DRAFT)

The following day was Friday. I must have been in a deep sleep, because when the morning alarm went off at its usual 5:30 AM, it felt like a bucket of cold water being dropped on me. I woke so violently that I woke Jenny, who normally slept peacefully through my alarm.

“Whaaaaat?” she moaned groggily. 

I sat for a moment in bed, the klaxon call of the alarm growing steadily louder in our dark room, trying to catch my breath and slow my heart down. I had been dreaming. Running, I think, down a dark hallway, and being chased by shadowy figures with sharp teeth and sharper knives.

“Alan,” Jenny groaned, pushing me in the small of my back. “Get up.”

I did, dragging myself over to the dresser just long enough to switch off the alarm before flopping myself back down on the bed.

“Alan,” Jenny said again, rolling her pregnant belly over so she could face me. “Get up. You have to go to work.”

“I don’t want to,” I said. “Not today. I’m going to call in sick.”

Jenny seemed instantly awake. “Are you sick?” She reached out a motherly hand and felt my forehead for a fever.

“I’m sick, all right,” I said. “Sick of that fucking place.”

Jenny knew all about Gerald’s attempted coup, my role in it, and the fallout that I would now have to deal with. We had talked about it at length, Jenny pulling the details and confessions out of me like an experienced prosecutor. She was more committed than ever to getting me out of that place, and had been sending my resume to even the less attractive listings in the newspaper. She was still hopeful about Quest Partners, but, like me, was growing worried that I hadn’t heard from Steve Anderson or his assistant.

“Have you ever called in sick before?” she asked me, a tinge of hopefulness in her voice.

“Not that I can remember,” I said. “But I really feel like doing it today.”

“If you stay home,” Jenny said, “you can come with me to my well baby checkup. Help your fat, pregnant wife out of the car. See the latest ultrasound.”

That was all it took to decide it. In a moment my cell phone was in my hand and I was placing a call to Ruthie’s direct line -- the company-approved method for calling in sick. Checking the clock to make sure it wasn’t a time that Ruthie might be at her desk, I waited for her voicemail to pick up and then left a short and appropriate message. I’m sick. I won’t be in today.

That task completed Jenny actually gave me a kiss on my unshaven cheek. “Come on,” she said. “You can make us breakfast while I get in the shower. We have to be there by nine o’clock.”

Having just looked at the clock I knew that was more than three hours away, but I also knew that that would be calling it close. The clinic was only a few minutes from our home, but there was a lot that would need to be accomplished and organized before we could leave. Even still, I waited until Jenny was in the bathroom and I heard the water running before I even got out of bed. Making breakfast now would just mean a cold breakfast by the time she got herself dressed, so I went down the hall and peeked in on Jacob.

He was sleeping soundly -- a tuft of hair on his pillow and a pudgy calf and bare foot sticking out from under his blanket. I left his bedroom door open, expecting the noise of the house to wake him gradually in the next half hour or so, and went downstairs to use the second bathroom and start putting some things in order for everyone’s breakfast.

I didn’t feel the least bit guilty about calling in sick. Rather, I felt liberated, as if some heavy burden had been lifted from my shoulders. I suddenly decided that I was going to make the best breakfast ever, even pulling a package of bacon out of the freezer and getting the microwave working on defrosting it while prepping the other things I would need for both scrambled eggs and French toast. Jenny liked a little cinnamon on her toast, I knew, and I decided to include some of that even though I didn’t care for it. This breakfast was not about me. It was about her, my wife, my soulmate, the mother of my children. Cinnamon French toast with raspberries and warm maple syrup -- it would be like that bed and breakfast we had once stayed in, long before Jacob was born, before everything -- and I would act like it was no big deal, like it was everyday. Here you are, darling. Can I get you anything else? 

Jacob was down first, trailing his baby blanket on the floor behind him and rubbing his eyes with a balled-up fist. “Daddy,” he said. “What are you doing?”

He wasn’t used to seeing me, I knew. I was usually up and gone to work before he even got out of bed in the morning, but now the noise of my bustle in the kitchen must have brought him disoriented to my door. I saw that his sleep diaper was full and sagging under his pajama pants. Everything was prepped but nothing had started cooking yet, so it was easy for SuperDad to wipe his hands on a towel, scoop his son up in his arms, and carry him back upstairs to get him changed and ready for the day. On our way past the bathroom door we heard the shower shut off and the shower door slide open. I told Jacob that I was making a special breakfast for Mommy and that he could help me with the fruit salad.

In a flash we were back downstairs and Jacob was sitting in a corner of the kitchen where I could keep an eye on him, carefully plucking grapes off their stems and dropping them into a bowl, while I started pouring the egg mixture into a pan.

Jenny suddenly appeared at the door in her bathrobe and with her hair wrapped in a towel. “Oh my goodness,” she said, feigning surprise. “What’s going on here?”

“We’re making breakfast!” Jacob proclaimed proudly, smiling with his cheeks stuffed with some of the grapes that were supposed to be going into the bowl. 

“Indeed you are,” she said, as she came over and gave me another kiss on the cheek. “And what a breakfast! Is that bacon I’m smelling?”

“It sure is. Bacon and eggs and French toast -- just the way you like them, dear.”

“Well, I’d better go get dressed,” Jenny said. “And Jacob,” she said as she shuffled out on slippered feet, “save some of the grapes for the fruit salad.”

When everything was ready, I called up the stairs to let Jenny know. I could hear the blow dryer going so I had to shout in order to be heard over it.

“Okay!” Jenny called out. “I’ll be down in a minute!”

I got Jacob strapped into his booster seat and put his bowl of fruit in front of him as I retreated back into the kitchen in order to serve the plates and bring them to the table. In no time at all we were all around our small dining room table, enjoying the feast I had created, Jenny still in her bathrobe but with her hair dried and appropriately tousled.

“Fantastic!” she said, as she lifted her wine glass filled with orange juice and toasted me. “I think you should stay home from work more often.”

We ate in comfortable silence, Jenny encouraging Jacob to try some of the new-to-him things that I had made and Jacob firmly refusing. When she was done eating, I got up and started clearing the plates.

“Oh, I’ll do the dishes,” Jenny said.

“No,” I told her, looking pointedly at her bathrobe. “I’ll do them. You go get Jacob and yourself ready for the appointment.”

“Aren’t you going to shower?” she asked, a little bit of horror creeping into her voice.

I looked at the clock. It was a little past seven-thirty. “I’ve got time,” I told her. “I only need fifteen minutes to shower and get ready.”

She looked at me a little suspiciously, but accepted it, knowing that it was probably true. “Okay,” she said, rubbing me on the back. “Thanks for the wonderful breakfast.”

Truth be told, doing the dishes never took me as long as it took Jenny. She claimed I didn’t do them “right,” assuming, of course, that “her” way of doing dishes was the only “right” way of doing dishes. The same could be said about any other household chore she assigned, be it cleaning the bathroom or vacuuming the floors. Jenny both insisted that I help her with these chores -- which I did -- and she insisted that I didn’t do them “right.” As if there were a right way and a wrong way to vacuum a rug. What Jenny of course meant by the right way was her way.

I made short order of the dishes, making sure to hang the kitchen towels up just the way Jenny liked them, and then headed upstairs to take my shower and get ready. Jenny was still in her bathrobe, perched on the edge of our bed with a makeup mirror propped up on top of a pile of books on top of my nightstand. She pushed her eyelashes up with a mascara brush as she told me to get in the shower. Jacob’s bag was already packed and we needed to be out the door in twenty minutes.

When I came out of the bathroom a few minutes later with wet hair and a towel wrapped around my waist, Jenny told me that my phone had been ringing while I had been in the shower. I shouldn’t have, but without thinking I scooped it up and looked at its little screen.

“It’s work,” I said, recognizing the caller ID. “Someone from the office was trying to reach me.”

“You’re sick today,” Jenny said, standing up and shrugging herself out of her bathrobe. Underneath she was only wearing her bra and panties, her enormous belly exposed and glistening with the lotion she had recently applied. 

“You’re right,” I said, putting the phone back down. “I went back to sleep after leaving the message for Ruthie. And I turned my phone off so I wouldn’t be disturbed.”

“I swear, your honor,” she said, beginning to slather her armpits with deodorant.

“Mommy!” Jacob suddenly cried, barreling into our bedroom like a forgotten and out-of-control freight train. He rushed at Jenny and wrapped himself around her bare legs, almost knocking her over.

“OH MY GOD!” Jenny practically screamed. “Alan, get him out of here!”

I rushed over to extract Jacob as ordered, knowing that I had committed one of the greatest domestic crimes there was in our household -- leaving our bedroom door open while Jenny was getting dressed. Ever since Jacob learned how to crawl, Jenny had made it very clear that there was nothing more important than keeping the bedroom door closed while she was getting dressed. As I struggled to pull Jacob away, I could feel the towel around my waist begin to loosen, and my efforts were hampered by my own need to keep one hand on it to keep it from falling away. 

“Mommy!” Jacob was crying. “Mommy! Mommy!”

Jenny, for her part, was able to move closer to the bed and sit down, which both kept her from falling over and gave me the additional leverage I needed to finally pull Jacob away. Hooking him under one arm like a football and keeping my other hand on the knot of my towel, I carried him out of our room and into his. As soon as I left the master bedroom the door slammed shut behind me.

“Mommy!” Jacob continued to cry, but he wasn’t writhing like he would have been had this been a full-blown tantrum. 

In his room I put him down on his bed and took the necessary moment to re-secure the towel around my waist. “Jacob!” I said. “What is the matter with you? What do you want?”

“I want Mommy!” he said, looking up at me defiantly.

“Well, Mommy is getting dressed,” I said. “And I need to get dressed, too. We’re going to Mommy’s doctor today.”

Jacob crossed his arms and started to pout. “I don’t want to go to Mommy’s doctor,” he said. “I want to stay home and play with my trains.”

“We can play with your trains later,” I said, doing the best I could to not lose my temper and to reason with this unreasonable creature. “The doctor is going to take a picture of your baby sister in Mommy’s tummy. Don’t you want to see a picture of your baby sister?”

“No!” Jacob cried, kicking his feet out and rumpling his blankets. “I want to stay home and play with my trains!”

I shook my head. “Well, we can do that later. In a few minutes we’re leaving for Mommy’s doctor, and you’re going to come along.”

“No, I’m not!” Jacob said, his voice threatening the darkest violence.

I’m not sure what would’ve happened next had Jenny not appeared behind me.

“Mommy!” Jacob cried, seeing her and extending his arms toward her.

She moved around me, now dressed in a pair of stretch pants and a fleecy maternity tunic, and confidently told me to go get dressed. She sat down on the bed next to Jacob and wrapped him in a tender embrace. He clutched her desperately, pressing his face into the soft fabric of her top. 

“It’s okay, honey,” she said soothingly to him. “Mommy’s here now. Mommy’s here.”

I shook my head, not really understanding the why and how of anything that had happened that morning, nor what any of it might portend for the future, and left the room. 

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source

http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet

I had a difficult time with this one.

Here’s the first paragraph of the introduction included in my edition, written by Jean-Paul Sartre:

Our Lady of the Flowers, which is often considered to be Genet’s masterpiece, was written entirely in the solitude of a prison cell. The exceptional value of the work lies in its ambiguity. It appears at first to have only one subject, Fatality: the characters are puppets of destiny. But we quickly discover that this pitiless Providence is really the counterpart of a sovereign -- indeed divine -- freedom, that of the author. Our Lady of the Flowers is the most pessimistic of books. With fiendish application it leads human creatures to downfall and death. And yet, in its strange language it presents this downfall as a triumph. The rogues and wretches of whom it speaks all seem to be heroes, to be of the elect. But what is far more astonishing, the book itself is an act of the rashest optimism.

Wow. Now that is a book I would really like to read. But is Our Lady of the Flowers that book? In the end, I’d have to say no.

The backstory here is important. Sartre continues to explain:

French prison authorities, convinced that “work is freedom,” give the inmates paper from which they are required to make bags. It was on this brown paper that Genet wrote, in pencil, Our Lady of the Flowers. One day, while the prisoners were marching in the yard, a turnkey entered the cell, noticed the manuscript, took it away, and burned it. Genet began again. Why? For whom? There was small chance of keeping the work until his release, and even less of getting it printed. If, against all likelihood, he succeeded, the book was bound to be banned; it would be confiscated and scrapped. Yet he wrote on, he persisted in writing. Nothing in the world mattered to him except those sheets of brown paper which a match could reduce to ashes.

Sartre’s rhetorical questions are important ones. Why? For whom? Because the truth seems to be that Genet wrote Our Lady of the Flowers entirely for himself, and not just to occupy his mind while serving time in prison, but also to aid in his masturbatory fantasies.

No wonder Our Lady horrifies people: it is the epic of masturbation. The words which compose this book are those that a prisoner said to himself while panting with excitement, those with which he loaded himself, as with stones, in order to sink to the bottom of his reveries, those which were born of the dream itself and which are dream-words, dreams of words. The reader will open Our Lady of the Flowers, as one might open the cabinet of a fetishist, and find there, laid out on the shelves, like shoes that have been sniffed at and kissed and bitten hundreds of times, the damp and evil words that gleam with the excitement which they arouse in another person and which we cannot feel.

And this, to me, is key to understanding what one is reading, and whether the words can approach the heights that Sartre describes in his opening paragraph. Can they, in other words, be both the scribblings of masturbatory fantasy AND the transcendent work of genius that presents fatalism in oddly optimistic triumph?

When one looks at the descriptions that Sartre chooses and compares them to Genet’s actual words and the intent behind those words…

I have already spoken of my fondness for odors, the strong odors of the earth, of latrines, of the loins of Arabs and, above all, the odor of my farts, which is not the odor of my shit, a loathsome odor, so much so that here again I bury myself beneath the covers and gather in my cupped hands my crushed farts, which I carry to my nose. They open to me hidden treasures of happiness. I inhale, I suck it in. I feel them, almost solid, going down through my nostrils. But only the odor of my own farts delights me, and those of the handsomest boy repel me. Even the faintest doubt as to whether an odor comes from me or someone else is enough for me to stop relishing it.

...one can only come to the conclusion that the genius one is dealing with here is Sartre’s, not Genet’s. For, I think, it is Sartre who sees a pattern that Genet did not intend. Remember, it is Sartre who said:

The exceptional value of the work lies in its ambiguity.

In other words, it is a canvas upon which the reader can paint any picture he desires. And remember, he also said:

It appears at first to have only one subject, Fatality: the characters are puppets of destiny. But we quickly discover that this pitiless Providence is really the counterpart of a sovereign -- indeed divine -- freedom, that of the author. Our Lady of the Flowers is the most pessimistic of books. With fiendish application it leads human creatures to downfall and death. 

As masturbatory fantasy, it ends and can only end with one object in mind: the mad, rushing relief and pleasure of self-gratification. The characters in such a play are, of course, puppets of destiny, twisted and turned into whichever contortion the unrestrained freedom of their author desires and dictates. And remember, he also said:

And yet, in its strange language it presents this downfall as a triumph. The rogues and wretches of whom it speaks all seem to be heroes, to be of the elect. But what is far more astonishing, the book itself is an act of the rashest optimism.

Yes, the characters Genet creates are doomed to suffer a single and inevitable fate, but in doing so they give their author his tremulous joy in the bleakest of circumstances. In this regard, they are heroes -- they, specifically, are Genet’s heroes -- and, if he is painting them at all, he can paint them in no other light.

Genet’s genius -- if it exists -- has to be embodied in this dual understanding of his text. There are glimpses that Genet intends Sartre’s more subversive understanding…

Don’t complain about improbability. What’s going to follow is false, and no one has to accept it as gospel truth. Truth is not my strong point. But “one must lie in order to be true.” And even go beyond. What truth do I want to talk about? If it is really true that I am a prisoner who plays (who plays for himself) scenes of the inner life, you will require nothing other than a game.

...but none of these glimpses are enough to convince me that Genet is possessed of an understanding of any deeper intention than an attempt to occupy the carnal directives of his enlightened and imprisoned mind.

+ + +

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 75 (DRAFT)

Very late that afternoon Mary stopped by my office. I was in the middle of packing things up for the day, sliding my laptop into its sleeve in my shoulder bag.

Mary shut my door and stood with her back to it. “Paul Webster is out,” she said.

My fingers froze on the zipper. “What?”

“Paul Webster is out,” she repeated. “Don and I spoke to him this afternoon and he’s agreed to resign from the Board. He’s out.”

“Just like that?” I asked.

Mary gave me a disappointed look. “No, if you must know. Not ‘just like that.’ We had to move heaven and earth to pull this one off. Eleanor is not happy about any of this, and especially since we had to pull her in to do some of the dirty work.”

Not happy. That was one of Mary’s euphemisms. It meant Eleanor was spitting mad. She had likely chewed Mary out and extracted all kinds of promises for future work and concessions. And that, I knew, made Mary more uncomfortable than any coup attempt from below possibly could have.

“You and Gerald really did a number on us, but we’ve taken care of it. It’s over.”

“Wait, Mary,” I said. “What do you mean ‘me and Gerald’? I didn’t have anything to do with this. I’m the one who brought it to your attention, remember?”

The look on Mary’s face could only be described as skeptical, but her words were placating. “Yes, I’m sorry. You’re right. I spoke in haste. This was Gerald’s doing, but you should have discovered his plans when he started concocting them, not when he was about to execute them.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “If I wasn’t doing two other jobs in addition to mine, maybe I could’ve kept a closer eye on him.”

It was a dangerous thing to say, but the words were out before I could stop them. Most things Mary said were crazy, but it was typically even crazier to challenge them. For a moment I saw Mary’s eyes smolder, but then she carefully cooled whatever fire was brewing within. 

“You’ve got three other jobs to do now, Alan. And the leadership meeting is in ten days. I told you, we’ll talk about help when we’re on the other side of that. Not before.”

I zipped up my bag and slung it over my shoulder. I just wanted to get out of there. “Uh huh. So who am I supposed to coordinate the agenda with now? If Paul is out, is Eleanor going to step in and run the meeting in his stead?”

“No,” Mary said. “We’re moving Wes Howard into the president-elect seat. You should work with him on the final details for the event.”

My heart stopped. 

Wes Howard.

“Mary!” I cried, but her hand was already on the door knob and she had already pulled it open. 

“Yes, I know,” she said, as she exited my office. “You’ll just have to find a way to work with him. There’s no other way, now.”

And quick as that, she was gone.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source

http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/