fieldus

Robert Stone is taken to task by the famously pitiless Ms Kakutani in The New York Times:

Similar cynics populate Mr. Stone’s novels, of course, but in the most persuasive of those books, he not only maps the sources of his heroes’ malaise and the fallout it has on their lives but also dramatizes their flailing efforts to grab after one last chance at a big score or even a whiff of love and salvation. In the stories in this volume we are not given the full arc of his people’s lives; we get only snapshots of their drunken nihilism and puerile self-pity. It’s certainly not enough to make us care, not even enough to engage our voyeuristic curiosity; it’s simply dismal and depressing.

Heaviest snow fall for several years and it’s still snowing. There are going to be some fine snowmen patted together. I wonder what percentage of commuters made it into work? The car insurance companies must be nervous indeed.

Sad story of Jerry Quarry’s younger brother, Mike.

From the LA Daily News, 23 Aug 2006:

Ellen encouraged Mike to go to school so he could seek steady work, but his memory became so poor he couldn’t hold down a job. She can’t remember exactly when Mike was diagnosed with dementia pugilistica, but she said that it was more than 10 years ago.

In 1998, Ellen began taking Mike to UC Irvine, where he was examined yearly by doctors specializing in neurology.

His neuropsychologist, Dr. Malcolm Dick, was responsible for administering tests that would determine the pace the disease was progressing.

“During that time, Michael showed a significant decline in his abilities,” Dick said. “He went essentially from, I would say, a mild dementia to a severe dementia.

“It is sort of not surprising that he had these behavioral problems and was more confused.”

Over the first seven years of testing, Quarry’s condition worsened gradually. Last year, it escalated.

Ellen became faced with the burden of not only caring for a husband with advanced dementia pugilistica, but one whose aggressive behavior began to rise at an alarming rate.

She has threatening handwritten notes she said were signed by her husband. One to Ellen read, “I’m going to get you.” Others were made out to neighbors Mike believed were stealing from the condominium garage.

“He got aggressive on me,” Ellen said.

Ellen, not a big woman, feared for her safety, and for Mike’s. She had him committed to Brighton Gardens in Yorba Linda in a locked dementia unit, but she said he escaped after a month. Then he was put in Sunrise, a home in Seal Beach. He was there 10 months, from March 2005 through last December.

Ellen said she moved Mike to Seasons, where he died, because it was better equipped to deal with patients with severe dementia. Seasons cost her $5,000 monthly.

By January, Mike had been on Haldol, an anti-psychotic tranquilizer used to control behavior, for three months. Neurologists at UC Irvine prescribed the drug, Dick said.

But neither Mike Quarry’s sister, Wilma Pearson, nor her husband, Robert, is convinced that Mike had become violent enough to warrant being put on Haldol. Robert Pearson drafted a letter signed by his wife and her two remaining sisters, Janet and Diana, questioning Ellen Quarry as to why Mike had to go on Haldol.

“I don’t know

her motivation; all I know is what was happening,” Robert Pearson said. “She kept telling everybody how violent Mike was, and that was why she had to keep him on this medicine. But he was never violent. His caregiver told us Mike was never violent. And he was fired.”

David Finns, the caregiver, was one of two who helped care for Mike prior to his being placed in a home. Finns, who described Mike as having the mind of an 8-year-old, admitted that Mike did head-butt him once, but playfully.

“I said, `Michael, don’t ever do that again,”’ Finns said. “He said, `I’m sorry, Dave.’ He would get in my face, but he would never, ever hit me. I really loved that man.”

However, Ana Kunz, supervisor of the dementia unit at Seasons, said that nurses sometimes had difficulty with Mike.

“When we would try to clean him up, he would try to punch you like he was boxing,” Kunz said. “He was pretty much aggressive at that point. We would just try to talk to him, tell him to put his hands down because he was a very strong guy.”

Familiar situation

For Wilma and Robert Pearson, seeing Mike on Haldol was all too familiar. In the 1990s, as he too battled dementia pugilistica, Jerry Quarry was living with his brother Jimmy, who later died of cancer. Jimmy had been designated as Jerry’s caregiver, and Jerry was on the drugs Haldol and Thorazine, also a tranquilizer.

“Even when he was inducted into the World Boxing Hall of Fame
, he couldn’t sign (autographs),” Wilma said.

Jerry, according to several reports, was on the dais drooling, and couldn’t make an acceptance speech.

“We … got him off the drugs and he really came out of that,” Wilma said of Jerry, who was honored Aug. 12 by the Golden State Boxing Association.

“Jerry got his speech back.”

Wilma said she couldn’t bear visiting Mike once the effects of the Haldol began to take hold.

“He immediately started to have an arm that was shaking,” she said, noting one of Haldol’s side effects

. “He had to drag his leg. (Ellen) would tell us we could only visit for 30 minutes. But it took us at least 30 minutes to get him conscious, to get him out of drowning in the drugs.”

Ellen disputed the assertion and said she never put any visitation restrictions on Mike’s family. Ellen also said that Mike’s sisters rarely visited, coming down from Bakersfield to do so only every “three months or so.”

“I had a birthday party for him in March,” Ellen said. “I brought in musicians, I had streamers

put up, balloons. They didn’t call. Not even a card.”

One observer said Ellen was always by her husband’s side.

“From what I have seen there with Michael was the relationship he had with Ellen,” said Ken Garnett, community director at Seasons. “She was a very dedicated family member. She was there almost every day.

“I have never even met the (Quarry) family. I can’t remember a time that they were here. I know they never checked in with me to see how he was doing.”

According to Ellen, Mike’s sisters visited him only once or twice during the six months he was at Seasons. So she said it is unlikely that they could understand just how much their brother had regressed and how erratic his behavior had become.

Prizefighting family

Perhaps, more than anything else, Mike and Jerry Quarry died young because they were members of the fighting Quarry family.

Three of the four brothers had lengthy pro careers. Mike contended in the light heavyweight division, Jerry in the heavyweight division.

Jerry was 53-9-4 with 32 knockouts and he was knocked out by the best — twice each by Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, and by George Chuvalo and Ken Norton. Making matters worse, Jerry retired in 1977 but came back for two fights in 1983.

For him, it wasn’t enough. He came back again for one fight in 1992 at the age of 47.

Bobby Quarry, the sole surviving brother, was 9-12-2 with six knockouts fighting as a heavyweight from 1982-92. Bobby, 43, is scheduled to be released in November from Folsom State Prison, where he is serving a sentence for grand theft.

Jimmy Quarry had one pro fight. He was knocked out and never fought again.

“The boys had to eat, sleep and drink boxing,” Wilma Pearson said, referring to the law of the land laid down by her father, the late Jack Quarry. “They weren’t allowed to do anything else.”

But Wilma refused to blame her father for the deaths of Mike and Jerry.

“When my father was 14, his father told him to hit the road because he couldn’t afford to feed him anymore,” she said. “So he had to hop on a train and fight here and there, wherever he could. My father has been named as an animal. But my dad was a very loving man.

“My brothers tried to do everything to get his attention, especially Michael. No, I don’t think Michael would have fought if it wasn’t for my dad, but it’s all my dad knew.”

Retired sports writer Bill O’Neil eulogized Mike at the funeral held by Ellen Quarry (the Quarry sisters held their own funeral a week later).

O’Neil said of Mike Quarry’s condition after a knockout at the hands of Foster: “He didn’t have the same spark, the same cockiness. I think if he would have retired from boxing, that would have been the right thing. But that would have been like quitting.”

Perhaps for Mike Quarry, dying young was better than being a quitter.

robert.morales@presstelegram.com

Another Mike Quarry profile in The New York Times Magazine.

Interesting look at a murder investigation recently carried out by the Hampshire constabulary. The film focuses on how the investigating team approached the problem of identifying a victim and catching a murderer.
Some googling provide further information. Strangely, thisishampshire identifies a Detective Sergeant Richard Rowledge as the man leading the investigation. In the documentary, the Senior investigating officer is DCI Jason Hogg.

Ziaul Haque, 27, worked at the Euston Ibis hotel with 26-year-old Sylwia Sobczak of Tottenham. They were in some kind of relationship which obviously turned sour and ended with Haque murdering Ms Sobczak. Her burnt body was found by a dog walker on a bridleway half a mile from the centre of Dummer in Hampshire on May 8.

A very sad tale from the new London - a kind of DIRTY, PRETTY THINGS without the happy ending.

Reading the newspaper reports, it’s disappointing to note the relish with which they report that the body was found near the estate owned by the parents of Tara Palmer-Tompinkson.
Report from The Guardian
Documentary available on 40D
New Statesman review

From The New York Times:

Jonathan Lear, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago who is teaching a course with Mr. Coetzee this semester, said: “One of the things he looks at, which other people including myself lack the courage to look at, is human cruelty and insensitivity as it occurs in all sort of contexts. If you read his work, it’s really a surgical, clinical diagnosis of what’s going on here, and it’s not pretty. On the other hand, he has an amazing human passion that is very clear even when he’s describing the worst things people do to one another. He’s asking what are the conditions of our salvation and damnation.”

Cityscapes by Marc Yankus (New York, NY)

“In moments of transient repose, when its elements are briefly cloaked in softness, a kind of beauty envelops even the most mundane street scenes.”

As a recent reader of GREAT EXPECTATIONS, it was good to have some articulation of why I enjoyed it as much as I did:

From Jon Michael Varese, writing the Guardian books blog:

“We need to read Dickens’s novels,” she wrote, “because they tell us, in the grandest way possible, why we are what we are.”

There it was, like a perfectly formed pearl shucked from the dirty shell of my over-zealous efforts – an explanation so simple and beautiful that only a 15-year-old could have written it. I could add all of the decoration to the argument with my years of education – the pantheon of rich characters mirroring every personality type; the “universal themes” laid out in such meticulous and timeless detail; the dramas and the melodramas by which we recognise our own place in the Dickensian theatre – but the kernel of what I truly wanted to say had come from someone else. As is often the case in Dickens, the moment of realisation for the main character here was induced by the forthrightness of another party.

And who was I, that I needed to be told why I was what I was? Like most people, I think I knew who I was without knowing it. I was Oliver Twist, always wanting and asking for more. I was Nicholas Nickleby, the son of a dead man, incurably convinced that my father was watching me from beyond the grave. I was Esther Summerson, longing for a mother who had abandoned me long ago due to circumstances beyond her control. I was Pip in love with someone far beyond my reach. I was all of these characters, rewritten for another time and place, and I began to understand more about why I was who I was because Dickens had told me so much about human beings and human interaction.

There are still two or three Dickens novels that I haven’t actually read; but when the time is right I’ll pick them up and read them. I already know who it is I’ll meet in those novels – the Mr Micawbers, the Mrs Jellybys, the Ebenezer Scrooges, the Amy Dorrits. They are, like all of us, cut from the same cloth, and at the same time as individual as their unforgettable aptronyms suggest. They are the assurances that Dickens, whether I am reading him or not, is shining a light on who I am during the best and worst of times.

Edward Carr on the dwindling of the polymath:

In an age of specialists, does it matter that generalists no longer thrive? The world is hardly short of knowledge. Countless books are written, canvases painted and songs recorded. A torrent of research is pouring out. A new orthodoxy, popularised by Malcolm Gladwell, sees obsessive focus as the key that unlocks genius.

Just knowing about a lot of things has never been easier. Never before have dabblers been so free to paddle along the shore and dip into the first rock pool that catches the eye. If you have an urge to take off your shoes and test the water, countless specialists are ready to hold your hand.

And yet you will never get very deep. Depth is for monomaths—which is why experts so often seem to miss what really matters. Specialisation has made the study of English so sterile that students lose much of the joy in reading great literature for its own sake. A generation of mathematically inclined economists neglected many of Keynes’s insights about the Depression because he put them into words. For decades economists sweated over fiendish mathematical equations, only to be brought down to earth by the credit crunch: Keynes’s well-turned phrases had come back to life.

from Louis MacNiece, Autumn Journal:

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.

The last stanza captures something about autumn and its implicit corollary to think about death and re-birth.

A picture taken this morning, full of autumnal sunlight, cold and hard.

From a review Graham Swift’s memoir, Making An Elephant:

But probably the most affecting essay is his recollection of fishing adventures with Ted Hughes, who showed him some of his favorite stretches of river in Devon. Swift recounts that “once, when I said goodbye to him to come back to London and made that glib and flimsy remark, ‘Back to the real world,’ he said, without any trace of sentimentality and almost sternly, ‘No, this is the real world.’ ”

Something to ponder.