Let's all pat ourselves on the back for another successful and thoroughly enjoyable meeting!
Agora, despite it's unfortunate but all too common in D.C. "no happy hour at the 'dinner tables'" rule, was a delight. Honestly, I know it was just Mythos and Peroni, but it's nice to find a bar anywhere that has $3 happy hour beers that aren't Bud or Miller Lite, so, kudos, Agora. Plus, I really quite like Mythos in the oppressive heat of summer.
The dueling discussions carried on with the kind of light-hearted chicanery that I expect took place in Bride Wars (but I haven't seen that movie, so I leave it up for debate which novel was Kate Hudson and which was Anne Hathaway). I have to say that I think the option to read one of two books this month worked out fairly well. Go ahead and give yourselves another back-pat.
In the end it was decided that, after five months of decreasingly subtle suggestions from Wendy, our next book will be Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (here's the Gutenberg link for all-a-y'all's eReadin' needs). I for one feel very cultured to finally be reading something by an author that has a special punctuation mark in their name (and it's an umlaut at that! That's like the Daily Double of special punctuation!). I picked my decrepit used copy up today, and it is just a skosh longer than I thought, but I think we can handle it. Hell, it's still shorter than the abridged Count of Monte Cristo, right? I just hope it's as full of swashbuckling!
Happy reading!Daniel
I really enjoyed reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest because it got me thinking about the way the mentally ill were treated back in the day when electro-shock therapy was in vogue and patients were given lobotomies simply for being aggressive. It wasn't too long ago that this was standard practice, and as someone who is related to and works with people with mental illnesses, I am appalled! I was hoping to start a little discussion here in the comment section about this, so feel free to weigh in with your thoughts on the subject.
ReplyDeleteI'm down with lobotomies, but I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy (credit goes to my uncle for that one). I would have to say that my favorite person to undergo a lobotomy was Rosemary Kennedy, related to John F., if you've heard of him. Apparently she didn't take it too well, though, and lost her fucking mind, although I can't really blame her for that.
ReplyDeleteINTERESTED? Read more! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy
John, after I sent that email last night, I was Wikipedia-ing One Flew Over, and ended up reading all about the history of lobotomies and Rosemary Kennedy. In fact, I sent an email titled "Holy Shit" to Danielle with the block quote of Walter Freeman describing the procedure. Because really: Holy. Shit. I can't believe that just poking an ice pick into a conscious person's brain until they became incoherent was considered a legitimate medical procedure any time on this side of the dark ages. Gruesome stuff.
ReplyDeleteWalter Freeman sounds like he was a royal dick: "His license to practice medicine was revoked when a patient he was lobotomizing at the Herrick Memorial Hospital in Berkeley, California, died of a brain hemorrhage, purportedly, when he stepped back for a photo, accidentally bumping the orbitoclast." Really? You killed a patient because you felt the need to carelessly pose for a photo WHILE YOU HAVE AN ICE-PICK SHOVED IN THE PATIENT'S BRAIN??
Sorry for the shouting, but that's like, Mel Brooks movie ridiculous, but this guy actually did that. Kind of ironic that the guy who popularized the lobotomy to "cure" "crazy people" was a goddamn lunatic, no?
For a lobotomy story with a happier ending (and I mean that in a very relative way), check out the article on Howard Dully: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Dully.