More recent reading

Here are brief notes on some books I've read recently. 

Behind the beautiful forevers, by Katherine Boo is brilliant narrative journalism by a Pulitzer Prize winning American journalist of Dutch origin (hence her name) about a few families and young children  living on their own in the sprawling shanty-town slum I remember seeing - and smelling - on the approach road to Mumbai (Bombay) International Airport. The "beautiful forevers" are the high painted fences that prevent the slum from encroaching on the airport. The inhabitants of this slum are at the very bottom of the socio-economic heap, a bad place to be in any country, probably worse in a huge Indian city like Mumbai than almost anywhere else. Somehow they survive, much of the time anyway, though many die too, confronted by universal corruption, merciless bullying, cheating, robbery, to which they are subjected. This is an outstanding book, hard to put down to eat or sleep.

419 by Will Ferguson won the Giller Prize last year.  I think it's over-rated rubbish, strains credibility beyond breaking point. Real people would have to be extraordinarily naive and very stupid to behave as do some of the characters in this implausible story of Nigerian con artists who loot the savings of gullible Canadians.

Still life and A Trick of the Light are two elegant who-dunnits by Louise Penny, set in the fictional village of Three Pines, home to artists and writers in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. They are part of a series featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surete du Quebec. Two may be enough for me but if I feel in the mood for more, there are several, all reputedly as good as these two.

Essays of E B White.  I read some of these when they appeared in the New Yorker in the late 1940s. It was a nostalgic pleasure to reread them.; and they took me back to archy and mehitabel as I've already related in an earlier post 

Things I didn't know, by Robert Hughes, the Australian art historian and public intellectual. is a memoir that, like Salman Rushdie's memoir Joseph Anton,  opens with an account of a life-changing crisis - a near fatal road traffic crash - then traces the course through life from childhood onward, of Robert Hughes.  Like The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes's account of convict colonization of New South Wales, it's beautifully written, an ideal memoir. I am following this model in the latest revision of my own memoirs and intend to test drive some opening paragraphs of this revision in a forthcoming post on this blog.

Alexander McCall Smith's series about Isobel Dalhousie, independently wealthy editor of the fictitious Journal of Applied Ethics is highly addictive- for me anyway, and I imagine for many other lovers of Edinburgh who have the misfortune to be exiled from that loveliest of cities.  The latest in this series is The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds, but when I sing the praises of this series in particular, I suggest to anyone unfamiliar with Edinburgh and with Isobel Dalhousie, start at the beginning with the first book in the series, The Sunday Philosophy Club.  Was there ever a more prolific author?  I doubt it. And his books, though light, always contain skillfully wrapped moral and ethical conundrums that add heft to their seeming light weight. They are well written too.

Did I mention Carmen Aguirre's memoir, Something Fierce in an earlier post? This won the Canada Reads contest on CBC Radio, deservedly so. It's a rattling good yarn about a girl, exiled with her family from Pinochet's Chile, daughter of opponents of the regime, who spent her early childhood in Canada and became a revolutionary in adolescence.  It's a coming of age memoir with hair-raising accounts of gun-running and other adventures, illicit journeys into Chile, a catch-as-catch-can education acquired in Bolivia, Argentina as well as Canada; learning to fly so she could pilot plane-loads of guns into Chile.  I suppose most of it is true.   

What else?  I've reread a biography of Tommy Douglas, founder of Canadian Medicare and voted the Greatest Canadian in a CBC-sponsored poll.  I struggled through Eugenia, by Mark Tedeschi, an Australian book that brother Peter sent me, about a transsexual woman who lived as a man for many years and 'married' two women, one of whom he/she was accused and convicted of murdering. It's interesting mainly as a reflection on the quality of Australian justice and forensic investigation in the 1920s,  the time of the events described. It's very well written. I don't know what it's like now but in my youth, Australian justice often resembled the frontier justice depicted in Hollywood movies, and clearly Eugenia Falleni was a victim of primitive justice - as would have been the case had the trial taken place in Canada, USA or the UK in the 1920s or before. I like to think we've advanced in the last 90-100 years. I liked the sympathetic discussion of gender identity in this book, and I'll share it with someone I know who has been struggling though problems associated with this state of affairs.

I almost forgot the iPad and e-books!  Many classics are available free from the Gutenberg  Collection; I've just finished Voltaire's Candide, and before that I read Pride and Prejudice (of course!); several of James Joyce's short stories, some of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories; Fanny Hill; and a big chunk of Tristam Shandy; others too, but I forget exactly what.  I must have read a dozen or more other books since I last posted a 'book report' on this blog, but that's all I can recall for now.  Reading is my greatest pleasure and I do a prodigious amount of it, should use e-books more, but I love the sensuous pleasure of holding a book in my hands and turning the pages.

Looking back, looking forward

Occasionally I look at the statistics that Google compiles automatically about this blog, and when I do, I'm always perplexed.  I started blogging as a convenient way to inform family and friends scattered around the world about Wendy's condition as motor neurone disease or ALS relentlessly advanced and ultimately took her life.  I hope I've emphasized clearly enough that the disease wasn't the terrible, much feared end of life that many try to avoid by physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia.  It was a  painless and gentle ending. The most distressing or frustrating aspect was loss of speech when the muscles Wendy used to speak were knocked out a few weeks before she died. It was surely preferable to a lingering death from disseminated cancer or Alzheimer's disease.

Since her death I've used the blog as a form of therapy for me, posting abridged and edited excerpts of my memoirs, and haphazard comments on many other themes and topics, notably about books I've been reading.  I do a great deal of reading and it's fun to share with others my opinions about books I've been reading lately.  I'm happy to share with others but I write entirely for my own amusement. 

Who are these others? I'm fascinated when I review the statistics, especially the table headed 'Audience' which tabulates the countries from which readers come.  The blog is getting about 1000 hits/month now. Readers come from many countries, more from Canada than anywhere else most of the time though there are occasional times when what I've written attracts more readers in the USA or the UK than in Canada.  A few people arrive at particular posts when a Google search directs them to it; I assume that's why posts on Sri Lanka, Glenelg, Sympathy and Condolence messages, touring Europe, and Early Childhood attract so many. I assume that a steady small number of readers in Brazil, Turkey, Japan, Iran, Switzerland, France, Netherlands, as well as some of those in Canada, USA, UK, Australia and New Zealand are family members, friends, professional colleagues.  But I'm perplexed by the steady small following I seem to have in Latvia, Ukraine, Slovenia, where so far as I know I have no family, friends or colleagues. It would be nice if a few of them dropped me a line to let me know who they are and why they bother to read my blog.    

What's in store for my faithful followers? I've mentioned a post on recent reading some time soon.  There are a few current issues I intend to discuss, including family violence, the perennial problem of guns over which my friends in the USA obsess often; and, most important, a review by Paul and Anne Ehrlich of threats to human communities that was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society in its first issue for 2013. Also, I've been revising and reworking my memoirs, adopting suggestions that have come out of writers' workshops.  Instead of a straightforward chronological record from birth onward, I've begun the revision with a chapter on a defining event that set the course of the rest of my life -- picking up a pair of hitch hikers one sunny Sunday morning when I was on my way to play golf. I'm also writing into the memoirs a more detailed description of some of the distinguished people I've had the pleasure and privilege of meeting, interacting and working with in the course of my long and interesting professional life.  

archy and mehitabel

My friend Karen Trollope Kumar gave me a copy of selected essays by E B White, and I've been rereading them with great pleasure.  Some appeared in the New Yorker in the late 1940s when I subscribed to this magazine in the latter part of its greatest years as the repository for the best writing and best cartoons in America, perhaps in the world at that time.  I've been reading them slowly, sipping them as I'd sip a single malt whisky.  A  few days ago I came to E B White's eulogy for Don Marquis, who was a reporter for the New York Sun, a playwright, and the creator of archy and mehitabel. archy was a cockroach who contained the transmigrated soul of a verse libre poet.  archy typed his bad poetry, which contained much simple homespun philosophy, in the newspaper's office after everyone had left for the day. He typed painstakingly and painfully (for him) on a huge Office Underwood typewriter by diving head-first on to the keyboard, one letter at a time. He wasn't able to operate the shift key, so everything is typed lower case; how he operated the carriage to shift the paper down one line at a time is never explained.  mehitabel is a disreputable alley cat of questionable lineage and parentage, with the transmigrated soul of Cleopatra and sundry other notorious girls with equivocal moral and ethical standards. Naturally, after reading E B White's eulogy of Don Marquis I had to go back to the complete archy and mehitabel poems, which amazingly still survive on the set of book shelves where I keep my most precious books. I quoted one of the shorter poems in my last post, and the temptation to post more is irresistible. 

Here is archy's first 'poem' in the sequence that ran for years:

expression is the need of my soul
i was once a verse libre bard
but i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach
it has given me a new outlook upon life
i see things from the underside now
thank you for the apple peelings in the wastepaper basket
but your paste is getting so stale i cant eat it
there is a cat here called mehitabel i wish you would have 
removed she nearly ate me the other night why dont
she catch rats that is what she is supposed to be for
there is a rat here she should get without delay

most of these rats here are just rats
but this rat is like me he has a human soul in him
he used to be a poet himself
night after night i have written poetry for you
on your typewriter
and this big brute of a rat who used to be a poet
comes out of his hole when it is done
and reads it and sniffs at it
he is jealous of my poetry
he used to make fun of it when we were both human
he was a punk poet himself
and after he has read it he sneers
and then he eats it

i wish you would have mehitabel kill that rat
or get a cat that is onto her job 
and i will write you a series of poems showing how things look
to a cockroach
that rats name is freddy
the next time freddy dies i hope he wont be a rat
but something smaller i hope i will be a rat
in the next transmigration and freddy a cockroach
i will teach him to sneer at my poetry then

don't you ever eat any sandwiches in your office
i havent had a crumb of bread for i dont know how long
or a piece of ham or anything but apple parings
and paste leave a piece of paper in your machine
every night you can call me archy

I'm tempted to add the next poem, about and partly by mehitabel, but it will keep for another time.

Clashes and crystal ball-gazing

For years there has been loose talk about a "clash of civilizations" but I think the reality is at one level simpler, at another more complex. The chronic conflict in the Darfur region of western Sudan is ultimately a territorial dispute between pastoralists and nomads for shrinking fresh water resources; the chronic conflict in the Eastern Congo is a struggle among warlords for control of rich but scarce natural resources.  I believe all the intractable festering low level armed conflicts that collectively have killed tens of millions and maimed score of millions in the last 50 years aren't so much based in religious or ethnic differences as in a struggle for survival in a world where too many people seek their share of declining essentials to sustain their lives. I'm sure this is true of the latest outbreak in Mali that's worrying the French and the Americans, and no doubt our leaders in Canada. What's really happening is that the human swarm is running out of essentials for survival in zones of scarcity all over the world. The struggles are most overt in Africa but seem likely to flare up in the Middle East and south central Asia any day. In a facile way these struggles can be related to religious or ethnic differences or to the level of development in different regions. Put more harshly, humans who were always more predatory and parasitic than other species in the biosphere have become rather like a cancer on the surface of the earth. We are destroying life supporting ecosystems, and in the near future more of us everywhere may be forced to fight for a sufficient share in order to survive. I first ventured into print with thoughts along these lines in 1949 when I was a 23-year-old medical student a few months away from graduating. I wrote gloomily about population pressure, war, famine, reduced genetic diversity, deteriorating moral and ethical standards - I was a cheerful young chap, wasn't I? With more optimism than realism I suggested that a society led by members of the medical profession would be best equipped to deal with or prevent these dire outcomes. 

My gloomy predictions haven't come true yet. But I think Don Marquis's creation, archy the cockroach got it right:

         prophecies

the papers are full of the prophecies
of preachers professors and laymen 
to the effect that this human civilization
is on the way out
and it looks to an insect such as i
very possible
the only thing i wonder about
is why the human species call it a civilization 
human society has never been
as well organized as a hill of ants
or a hive of bees
and all the ancient sites of civilization
are now in the possession of insects
who are far superior in organization
and in their ethical practices
spiders bite the mummified feet 
of the pharaohs of egypt
and the kings of babylon are covered with fleas
which they are too defunct to feel

                      archy the cockroach

I'll say more about archy the cockroach and his best friend mehitabel the cat who is the reincarnated shade of Cleopatra in my next post.

Mistakes

Occasionally a flesh-creeping memory bubbles to the surface, or one that makes me cringe with shame or embarrassment.  Sometimes I recall medical mistakes, errors of judgement, sins of omission and sins of commission.  Most are little things and mostly I believe I learnt from my mistakes, didn't make the same mistake a second time.  I told the sad story of what I regard as my worst sin of omission, my failure to recognize, receive and react to distress signals transmitted on an unconventional wavelength, in a post on this blog about a patient I called Peter Szas whose suicide I have always thought would not have happened if I had been more perceptive. had more empathy, more experience (See "Missed signals," February 12 2012).  All young doctors make mistakes due to inexperience. One day a patient who happened to be a personal friend hit his thumb rather than the tack he was vigorously hammering. I drained the painful blood clot under his thumbnail. But I didn't Xray his thumb, didn't discover the crush fracture of the bone below his thumbnail. The hole I bored into his thumbnail to relieve the pressure from the blood clot converted that closed fracture into a compound fracture, the crushed bone got infected, eventually had to be amputated and he lost the extremely important and useful terminal bone, joint, nail, pad of skin and its nerve endings, all the features that make the terminal joint of human thumbs so valuable to us. If such a calamity happened in these litigious times rather than in 1955, he might have sued me for malpractice, and would probably win. I never made that mistake again, and the lesson I learnt from it became an example in one of my regular tutorials with medical students.

Once I slapped an obnoxious little girl, in front of her mother too, to try to make her behave so I could listen to her heart and lungs and look at her throat. Oh, I'd tried everything else first and I had her mother's agreement - her mother told me to do it in fact - and it worked, the little brat shut up; but it would be a criminal offence if I were to do this now.  What's more important, I'm sure it would have been unnecessary if I'd been more experienced, had more arrows in my quiver, at that time. Kneeling at her level and whispering to her, for instance, might have worked.

In a later phase life as chairman of the curriculum committee, I presented to faculty council a proposal for some common-sense fine tuning of teaching time allocated to various subjects.  I had neglected to consult in advance with a few department chairmen whose teaching hours would expand or contract by an hour or so each year as a result of this eminently sensible change in the curriculum.  It was the most angry, acrimonious meeting ever.  I had overlooked a vitally important fact: department chairmen, especially those who feel a trifle insecure, have an attitude towards allocated teaching time (measured in minutes, not hours!) resembling that of mediaeval barons and dukes to their fiefdoms. I learnt never to present proposals to colleagues in a manner that may come as a nasty surprise.

I am a lousy public speaker.  I think I've improved gradually over the years but reflecting even on some relatively recent performances, I shudder with shame at the recollection of times when I rambled off topic, digressing from my written text into a boring in-group anecdote, or made a feeble joke based on a play on words. I've always been fond of making a play on words, often a kind of pun. I did it at school once, with very painful results: my play in words made use of the names of half a dozen prefects. I was summoned to their sanctum, commanded to apologize, but was so terrified and intimidated I had no idea what I had done wrong, and when I asked, the head prefect was so enraged he gave me an extra "six of the best" on top of the prescribed four for my crime of disrespect for authority. I don't think I learnt anything useful from the experience but I carried the bruises from the beating on my backside for several weeks.

Ah well.  No doubt all of us could do better if we had a second go around the track.

What attracted me to Wendy

Jan Wendelken ("Wendy") and John Last earnestly talking on a hillside above Yankalilla beach, South Australia, September 1955

Photo by Louise Zuhrer








There hasn't been a day since she died that I haven't thought about Wendy. I went public with the story of our meeting when Shelagh Rogers, at the time the host of a CBC Radio classical music request program, asked her listeners who had married on St Valentine's Day to describe how they had met. I dashed off a brief account of how I'd picked up two hitch hikers when on my way to play golf one Sunday morning in the spring of 1955, and instead of dropping them 10 minutes later, spent the day driving them around. After that magical day one of the hitch hikers and I wrote increasingly passionate letters to each other until the winter of 1956, when she came back from New Zealand to Adelaide and we courted more conventionally until our marriage on St Valentine's Day 1957. I posted the story I told Shelagh Rogers on my blog on May 2, 2012. Shelagh phoned me to check  a few details, and read my account on our 40th wedding anniversary, on 14 February 1997.  She awarded me the prize (a CD of chamber music by Mozart) for the best story she had received.

It was a miracle that we met. I'd delivered a baby in the small hours of that morning, went back to the hospital at the far edge of our practice to make sure mother and baby were OK, so I was approaching my golf club on a road I'd never used previously to get there, and running an hour late. The two girls were running over an hour later than their intended start that day too, because the landlady of the B&B where they'd stayed the previous night was ill, and Wendy had insisted on tidying the place, washing their sheets and towels, getting fresh milk and bread before they set off. Wendy went up a long way in my estimation when Louise told me that. As we got better acquainted I got used to Wendy's spontaneous  acts of altruism and generosity that were integral parts of her personality.  She never boasted about these acts but in her memoir fragment "The Smile" which was published 2 months ago in Capital Writers, an anthology of stories by Ottawa writers, she casually mentions how she wrapped a TB patient's meals in towels and ran all the way to his hut at the sanatorium, to ensure that his meals reached him hot rather than cold. I wonder how many other student nurses would have done this? 

Everyone who knew Wendy knew how her smile lit up her surroundings. I was instantly captivated by her smile when it lit up my little car as she got on board;  and when she described some of her hitch hiking experiences as we drove on from the place where I'd picked up the two girls, her adventurous spirit and sense of fun attracted me further. Later that day as we sat on a hillside eating our lunch she was near tears as she spoke of the injustices and inequities she had observed in her nursing career. She was talking of this when Louise took the photo at the head of this post. She clearly had the same attitudes and beliefs as I, about what was wrong and what was right in the world. It was then if not sooner that I decided she was the maid for me.  When I began reading her diaries after she died, I was hoping to find remarks pointing to her similar instant attraction to me, but although she writes warmly about me, she doesn't say anything that suggests such powerful emotions as I felt.  But she does in later diary entries during our courtship after she came back to Adelaide.  I'll have to decide whether I should allow anyone else to read her rather steamy 1956 diary...  

John and Wendy about 1997

Photo by Karen Trollope Kumar