The Practicing Mind by Thomas Sterner

Bringing Discipline and Focus into Your Life

Adversity's Sweet Milk...

FRIAR LAWRENCE

I'll give thee armor to keep off that word:
Adversity's sweet milk, philosophy,
To comfort thee, though thou art banished.

ROMEO

Yet 'banished'? Hang up philosophy!
Unless philosophy can make a Juliet,
Displant a town, reverse a prince's doom,
It helps not, it prevails not: talk no more.

FRIAR LAWRENCE

O, then I see that madmen have no ears.

ROMEO

How should they, when that wise men have no eyes?

FRIAR LAWRENCE

Let me dispute with thee of thy estate.

(Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene 3)

Trouble in Gotham

"In the early 1960s, uncertainty and menace gripped New York, crystallizing in a poisonous divide between a deeply corrupt, cynical, and racist police force, and an African American community buffeted by economic distress, brutality, and narcotics. On August 28, 1963—the day Martin Luther King Jr. declared "I have a dream" on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial—two young white women were murdered in their Manhattan apartment. Dubbed the Career Girls Murders case, the crime sent ripples of fear throughout the city, as police scrambled fruitlessly for months to find the killer. But it also marked the start of a ten-year saga of fear, racial violence, and turmoil in the city—an era that took in events from the Harlem Riots of the mid-1960s to the Panther Twenty-One trials and Knapp Commission police corruption hearings of the early 1970s.

The Savage City explores this pivotal and traumatic decade through the stories of three very different men:

• George Whitmore Jr., the near-blind, destitute nineteen-year-old black man who was coerced into confessing to the Career Girls Murders and several other crimes. Whitmore, an innocent man, would spend the decade in and out of the justice system, becoming a scapegoat for the NYPD—and a symbol of the inequities of the system.

• Bill Phillips, a brazenly crooked NYPD officer who spent years plundering the system before being caught in a corruption sting—and turning jaybird to create the largest scandal in the department's history.

• Dhoruba bin Wahad, a son of the Bronx and founding member of New York's Black Panther Party, whose militant activism would make him a target of local and federal law enforcement as conflicts between the Panthers and the police gradually devolved into open warfare. 


Animated by the voices of the three participants—all three of whom spent years in prison, and are still alive today—The Savage City emerges as an epic narrative of injustice and defiance, revealing for the first time the gripping story of how a great city, marred by fear and hatred, struggled for its soul in a time of sweeping social, political, and economic change." - from Amazon's Product Descriptor

All the Names by Jose Saramago

"The deceptive simplicity of Nobel Prize-winner Saramago's prose, and the ironic comments that he intersperses within this story of an obsessional quest, initially have a disarming effect; one expects that this low-key exploration of a quiet man's eccentric descent into a metaphysical labyrinth will be an extremely intelligent but unexciting read. Unexciting: wrong. Within the first few pages, Saramago establishes a tension that sings on the page, rises, produces stunning revelations and culminates when the final paragraph twists expectations once again. The title refers to the miles of archival records among which the protagonist toils at the Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths in an unnamed small country whose inhabitants still live by ancient rules of hierarchical social classes. The registry is quixotically disorganized so that the files of those most recently deceased are buried under miles of paper at the furthest remove of the massive building. After more than two decades at the job, 50-year-old Senhor Jos is still a mere clerk in the bureau. A penurious, reclusive, lonely bachelor, Senhor Jos has only one secret passion: he collects clippings about famous people and surreptitiously copies their birth certificates, purloining them from the registry at night and returning them stealthily. Purely by accident, the index card of a 36-year-old woman unknown to him becomes entangled in the clippings he steals. Suddenly, he is stricken by a need to learn about this woman's life. Consumed by passion, this heretofore model of punctilious behavior commits a series of dangerous and unprofessional acts. He forges official papers, breaks into a building, removes records from institutions and continues to enter the registry after darkDall punishable offenses. To carry out his mission, he is forced to become practical, clever and brave. But the more risks he takes, the more astonishing events occur, chief among them that the remote, authoritarian Registrar takes a personal interest in his lowly employee. Meanwhile, Senhor Jos himself discovers shocking facts about the woman he seeks. Saramago relates these events in finely honed prose pervaded with irony, but also playful, mocking and witty. Alternately farcical, macabre, surreal and tragic, this mesmerizing narrative depicts the loneliness of individual lives and the universal need for human connection even as it illuminates the fine line between the living and the dead." - from Publishers Weekly

Pulitzer Prizes - 2012

LETTERS, DRAMA and MUSIC

Fiction - No award (probably the right move here)
Drama - "Water by the Spoonful" by Quiara Alegría Hudes
History - "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention," by the late Manning Marable (Viking)
Biography - "George F. Kennan: An American Life," by John Lewis Gaddis (The Penguin Press)
Poetry - "Life on Mars" by Tracy K. Smith (Graywolf Press)
General Nonfiction - "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern," by Stephen Greenblatt (W.W. Norton and Company)
Music - "Silent Night: Opera in Two Acts" by Kevin Puts (Aperto Press)

Traffic Isn't Moving...

Traffic isn't moving. We're stuck - again. Not moving when we're supposed to be somewhere. No worries. Look around at the other drivers who seem almost used to it by now, resigned, complacent. They've done this a million times. They know the drill. We'll get there eventually. But for now we're stuck. More on that later. Since there's nowhere to go at the moment, consider the role that Fate plays in all this. At moments like these, I always do. And I use that word advisedly, because something like Fate seems involved. Just think about all the strangely fated, "predestined routines" that we go along with because we have no choice, because someone else, it seems, has made the decision for us, presumably on our behalf, that THIS is what works best, that THIS is how IT should be, this is how it will play out in the best of all possible worlds. We're stuck in traffic and it has to be that way because what's the alternative?  Got any bright ideas? It's rush hour; it's busy outside; millions of motorists are mobilizing at once, trying to get to the same little green patch of earth using the same narrow swath of concrete.  So what are you gonna do? Are you visualizing this scenario? Good. We're stuck, remember. Now repeat after me: it's already been decided. It's sort of like Fate has already spoken, but you weren't consulted somehow.  In large measure, it's already been decided what you will do today, what you will be able to do, where you will go, how and by what means; it's also been decided which destinations you will not venture to arrive at, and which plans, enterprises, excursions you will leave on the cutting-room floor. It's already been decided:  what clothes you will be wearing along with the passengers who will ride along with you to the places you will go. Already been decided. And where these clothes come from and what other people will think of you when you try them on, and what car you'll be driving (it won't be a horse, mind you...) to and from the clothing store, what brand of coffee you'll be sipping, and the food-court victuals you will consume before, during and after a long, hard shopping all day; and what late breaking news you'll hear on the radio, what topics you'll latch onto, which definition of style or beauty or health or joie de vivre you will subscribe to (automatically) as a result of your quixotic quest; to some degree, likewise,  it's already been decided what gadgets you will need for this excursion, which movie or music or youtube "prompts" will influence these "choices" of yours - which books you will end up reading to expand your  temporarily constricted horizons... what other big ventures you will envision for the new year; where you will dream of settling down eventually (whether in a city or a suburb or a farm) - driven there by some strange spiritual imperative - and the hyper-restricted, this-or-that "options" that will be waiting there for you to make... it's already been decided....That's what it feels like at least. So far so good...but when it comes to traffic patterns and gridlock on the roads, this too having already been decided by some anonymous cabal of planners and developers who shun the spotlight for good reason... here I must put my foot down and demand to meet the committee of geniuses who invented these beltways and turnpikes and toll roads and narrow, winding vertigo-inducing highways and bridges leading from "bumper-to-bumper snail's pace" traffic to "let's-park-here-for-the-night-might-as-well" congestion; not to mention those drab, dreary frontage roads overloaded with row after row of chain hotels, restaurants, shopping malls, gas stations, business parks, etc. etc.. It's already been decided that we will travel in this manner with these traffic patterns, traffic jams, traffic derailments, traffic meltdowns, traffic absurdist theater, traffic zombie caravans...but what happens when what has been decided upon just isn't working any longer...What then?

Political Biography Anyone?

The fourth installment of Robert Caro's monumental, magisterial biography on Lyndon Johnson is set to be released on May 1st. I would expect that this volume, dealing with the Johnson presidency, will be hailed as the greatest one yet - and it's only 736 pages long!

And while we're at it, let's not forget Eisenhower in War and Peace by Jean Edward Smith.