What colour is your wheelbarrow?

So much depends 

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white 

chickens

William Carlos Williams

If you went to school in any English-speaking country you will probably be able to recite this evocative poem by William Carlos Williams. On the strength of these 4x4 = 16 words, I bought a red wheel-barrow for The Beloved last year . . . made, I regret to report, of inferior dark red plastic which cracked within a month under quite normal garden usage. The poem was written, or at least published, in 1923, when Williams was beginning to find his voice as a poet. It, and he, had the misfortune to be published the year after T.S.Eliot unleashed The Waste Land on a world that wasn't really ready for it.  Eliot's conscious intellectualism and his foreign references and language wrong-footed the 'vernacular' American poets like Williams and his plain-speaking contemporary Robert "Two roads in a yellow wood" Frost. You can paint red wheelbarrow on a red wheelbarrow [L] or nail a Frost poem to a tree, for Joe Bloke to appreciate. Eliot needs more work and an education to get to grips with.  The Waste Land, for example, starts off with a quote from the Satyricon of Petronius "Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: ἀποθανεῖν θέλω." to show, from the off, that you the reader are expected to know Latin and Greek . . . the German, French and Italian come later.

I know nothing about Williams really except for a short-handful of his poems, only one of which I can remember reliably. Do you think the poem looks like a stack of wheelbarrows? It doesn't work if you centre the words: then it's more 

so 

much
depends upon

a green larch tree:

christmas decorations
and a
fairy

WCW was born and raised, and indeed died, in Rutherford NJ and worked in the hospital in neighboring Passaic, New Jersey as a doctor in the days when doctors toted their bag through the neighborhoods of their practice. Years later in an interview, he remarked that he wrote red wheelbarrow out of respect and affection for an old black street-huckster called Marshall, whose back-yard housed the entire cast for the poem.

From these sketchy clues, Professor William Logan, of U Florida has dug up the inspiration of this much loved poem as Thaddeus Marshall and identified the house [still-standing at 11 Elm Street] where the wheelbarrow stood and Mr Marshall and the white chickens slept. It took days of poring over and cross-referencing maps and directories and registers. Let nobody claim that the Arts Block does no research!  Prof Logan has identified the entire Marshall kith and kindred, some with death certificates signed by Dr Williams, and written 10,000 words of exposition, explanation and extrapolation from the spare no-more-no-less "That is All" words originally crafted by the poet. Are we richer for all that context and explanation?  Possibly.  Can we still enjoy the poem on its own and for its intrinsic merit? Certainly!  And because of the whoo-har, Mr Marshall, who died in 1930, has now gotten a new and respectful gravestone.  His rellies are surprised and delighted.

 

Sunday in Suez

The hive-mind delivers! I written before about the spare enigmatic poetry of William Carlos Williams, which is filed in my mind with that of e.e. cummings. The MV Ever Given [here moving in Before Times] mishap on the Suez canal brought forth a flood of waggish and ironic comments about the problem and it's solution, even as oil prices went up $3/bbl the very next day. 

Thinkwert	William Carlos Williams
I have blocked	I have eaten
the canal	the plums
that was in	that were in
Egypt	the icebox
and which	and which
you were probably	you were probably
using	saving
for the global economy	for breakfast
Forgive me	Forgive me
It went sideways	they were delicious
so fast	so sweet
and out of control	and so cold

But the ship-wedgie is not the only thing that has floated my boat this week!

• The myth of the autistic jerk being neurodivergent may be beyond your control but being a dick is a choice.
• Exec Summ of Friday's blob about Mudlarking
• A short history of The Yellow Fleet 1967-1975.
• Here's Roger Barnes being happy in his own, much smaller than MV Ever Given, boat
• My sister don't bother with a boat on the river.
• She lived in The Barbican for a while when it was a vision for the future of community
• I wrote, with approval, about Sci-Hub Алекса́ндра Аса́новна Элбакя́н / Alexandra Elbakyan's Free the Science adventure.
• The Police warn that Sci-Hib will eat your first-born, but they would say that, wouldn't they?
• Cairde these bois can dance
• Mess is Mine - Vance Joy
• Alastair Campbell advises deal with shit when it happens
• Labour [UK] politics? Andrew Feinstein deconstructs
• Guardian advises write a few letters, everyone benefits
• Parks and Rec for light relief
• Easter is hammer family time
• Bewitched! a sit-com of my childhood was so gay all about inclusivity.
• Hot and heavy [$140] thermite torch cuts D-lock

End

Health is broke

It's four years since I read and reviewed The Way We Die Now: The View from Medicine's Front Line (2017) by Seamus O'Mahony. That was essentially a reflection on how medical hubris had deluded people that they were going to live forever. That assumption may be uppermost in your 19 y.o. 'mind' when you launch your body off a cliff-face paragliding, base-jumping or mountain biking; at 79? not so much. The actuarial odds; your slowed reaction times; the leaching of calcium from your bones; the feebleness of your immune response; all these are stacked against you at 79. O'Mahony is six years younger than me but he retired in 2o2o just as soon as his pension enabled him to do so. His Death Book made him realise that he could do better with his literary talents than writing coherent case-notes and the endless reports required of him as a latter-day health bureaucrat aka consultant gastroenterologist.

I say latter-day, not because O'Mahony is a Mormon but because in his former days (when he was in live forever mode) he and his medical professional colleagues had considerable autonomy, not to mention privilege. For about 100 years, more or less bracketting the 20thC, doctors had become gods with the power of life and death. Aseptic technique and antibiotics had a lot to do with this power. But knowing when and where to apply the levers of medicine was built up through experience; and experience built up through insane hours on the wards, in theatre or seeing a lot of sick people in clinics. Then it all turned sour: sleep-deprived doctors made too many poor decisions with obvious adverse outcomes for patients. Families refused to defer to the actual doctor in Cork, when Dr Kildare was saying something different, and far more optimistic / godlike on the telly. Dr Google only added the last nails to the coffin of medical unaccountability and that only in the 21stC.

Since I was given a smart-phone in 2019 I've been downloading audiobooks from Borrowbox. When I saw another book by O'Mahony Can Medicine Be Cured?: The Corruption of a Profession (2019), I failed to read the small print and downloaded an e-book rather than an a-book. Different medium, and not accessible when driving or walking, but readable nevertheless. When that was finished, I immediately downloaded his third unpicking of the tapestry of modern medicine The Ministry of Bodies: Life and death in a modern hospital. One anonymous reviewer called him a physician-poet, which would have pleased him mightily because William Carlos Williams of the red wheelbarrow was another such.

In the same way that The Blob refers to The Institute as my quondam place of work, O'Mahony's last gig in Cork University Hospital is lightly fictionalised as The Ministry. He retired last year because he'd done enough. Most of us couldn't work in a hospital for 20 minutes, let alone 20 years of being shouted at by those in hopeless pain and treated as an interchangeable cipher by managers and auditors in comfy offices: "we need X+1 effectives on the roster this weekend, can't you postpone your daughter's wedding?" And ever and always, despite the rhetoric from head office, the patients are last on the list whose requirements must be met. 

• Problem: Bad headline about people stacked like cordwood on trolleys spilling out along the corridors from A&E
• Solution: Minister announces firm new targets for allowable wait-times; managers bully doctors into clearing beds in the wards
• Consequence: often no action because there is no infrastructure [nursing homes, district nurses, home-helps] to support folks who are still frail but no long need an acute bed.

Never enough joinedy-up thinking. Too much bean counting.

• Problem: Stroke
• Solution: The Man sets targets for reducing the incidence of clots with the blood-thinner heparin
• Consequence: every patient is routinely heparinised on admission which makes them ineligible for surgery lest they bleed out.

The very best doctors see the whole patient, not a clatter of ¿fixable? symptoms. Regular doctors just add more meds to the list, already too long, of brightly coloured pills that appears with breakfast. And according to these books, consultants engage in a perpetual internecine feud: refusing to accept difficult cross-discipline patients on their books. An elderly lady who has broken a hip because she fainted in the kitchen is neither cardiac nor orthopedic.

O'Mahony's special tetchiness is reserved for speech and language therapists. Mission creep has allowed this discipline to own choking and swallowing. Woe betide the doctor who has a weekend's leave and comes back to find half their ward sporting nasogastric feeding tubes because the junior doctors were unable to withstand the monomaniacal certainties of the SLTs. If you are really frail having the discomfort [abdominal cramping/swelling; diarrhea; nausea; vomiting/reflux; perforation, pneumothorax . . . I could go on] and disempowerment of a NFT makes your hospital stay decidedly crappier. Note to my adult kids: I can imagine worse ways to go than choking to death on one last meatball. The holistic existential irony is that, if your child stammers, the waiting list for a qualified speech and language therapist can be years rather than weeks.

click bite

I appreciate that there is no free lunch and I've started to cough up some money to support information sources which remain Ad free. And I've also stopped reading copy where there is more acreage of Ad than text in any page. Thus 3quarksdaily has been shown the door, as has neatorama except on a very slow weekend.  It wasn't strictly necessary but this year I did $€nd $om€ $pons to Metafilter and Wikipedia and the Grauniad. On the latter, I'm a bit out of training because until I did send some finance, my conscience wouldn't allow me to browse their content. I don't know if their pages are algorithmically tailors to deliver warm certainties and  chamber-echoes to a sixty-something SWM patriarch.

But, maybe because I'm partial to a little ham, I found myself clicking on the Danish meat ban story.  What a sorry farago that has been. Last year, the deputies in the Danish parliament, felt they had to do something to reduce the nation's carbon emissions. We are required to do our bit for the planet and our grand-children (if any!). It doesn't have to hurt [our health or the economy or our lifestyle] IF we /they can implement some super technical efficiency finagle within the time-frame. Nope, I didn't think so . . . so it will hurt a little. You /me/ we/ the Danes will have to put a stop to our gallop and calm down the self-indulgence. Or there really won't be much left in 2050 but crisps.

The Danish legislators are working a democracy, so they are loath to compel citizens to do anything . . . except pay taxes. So long as everyone pays that . . . [ and therefore the roads are smooth; the trains run on time; sewage doesn't back up in the bathroom; single parents, drug addicts, pensioners and refugees get a little support; ] . . . everyone can do, go, say, think, read, eat, what they like. But they have a little bit more control over those who suck directly on the government teat. Partly because animal agriculture, in Ireland and Denmark both, is a significant contributor to the carbon footprint; partly because it would be leading from the front; partly because it would make everyone's life more interesting; they mandated two days a week meat-free in all canteens in government buildings, where the civil servants eat subsidized dinners.

What's the worst that could happen if the Danes embraced such a plan? 
Well we'll never find out because a shit-storm of indignation was raised by trades unions; pig-farmers; sustainability talking-heads; the Danish Agriculture and Food Council; and a coven of deeply unimaginative, costive, carnivorous dinosaurs . . . and the government backed-down and made it voluntary.

Been there done that in Ireland last year, with similar climb down before the gods of food tech and the €3 chicken.

So much depends 

upon 

a baked 

ham

glazed with 

marmalade

beside the white

chicken

not forgetting

roast 

potatoes and

gravy

prev: William Carlos Williams
[Red wheelbarrow]