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Not a great deal of insight in this report from The Star Ledger - a local paper in Camden, NJ. Former world champion Super Featherweight, Rocky Lockridge tells his story.

Lockridge took a job working for William Jones & Son, Inc. in Camden, a drum and barrel company on Liberty Street, where he cleaned and painted barrels for $8 per hour starting in January 1994.

Shortly thereafter, he was arrested for burglary — the first time — but was sentenced to five years probation, according to court records. Three years later, he was arrested for burglary again, this time serving 27 months before being released in July of 1999.

He hasn’t worked since.

When he got out of jail, he found he had nowhere to go and ended up on the streets.

“I don’t know exactly what happened or how it happened or what happened at that particular time in my life,” he says.

One thing he does remember is going back to using drugs.

“I knew a lot of people who I partied with here in Camden after a victory,” he says.

Lockridge says that if you’re going to be homeless, Camden is the place to be. There are many different places that will give you a free meal, many shelters that will put you up for a night.

Lockridge lives on the $140 a month and food stamps he receives from the government — as well as pocket change he gets from panhandling. He says the stroke he suffered three years ago makes it difficult to walk, no less hold a job.
John O’Boyle/The Star-LedgerRocky Lockridge walks along a street in Camden.

He sleeps in shelters occasionally but admits he’s had issues committing to a shelter because the curfew is sometimes as early as 7 p.m. Lately, he has slept in a mosquito-infested abandoned row house around the block from his regular corner.

And he continues to have troubles with the law, though his last arrest — for criminal trespassing in May — resulted only in community service.

…
As he sits on his stoop, smoking a cigarette, he talks about why he is finally ready to turn his life around, find a place to live, give up drinking and drugs.

“I’m going to get it back together and say no to drugs,” he said. “I’ve got a family that I want to spend some time with ’til my time is up on Planet Earth. I’m on a mission now, perhaps even greater than my mission before. My kids need me in their lives, experience being the best teacher.”
John O’Boyle/The Star-LedgerRocky Lockridge (left) jokes with his friend Charles Braxton on a street corner in Camden.

Lockridge says he recently was tracked down by his son, Ricky, now 24, who lives in the Washington, D.C., area near Lamar. The twins were surprised to find out a few months ago that they have a half-brother, Ramond Dixon, 22, born in Camden but who now also lives in the D.C. area. The three have become close — but they remain distant from their father.

“I remember spending time with him when I was 3 or 4, but he was never there at a steady pace,” Ramond, known as “Ron-Ron,” says. “Even though my dad wasn’t there for me growing up, I never really had harsh feelings. I never was really upset. As a man now I can see that people make mistakes.”

Ricky Lockridge has mixed feelings.

“It’s sad. It hurts,” he says about his dad’s predicament. “But I never lost confidence in my dad, he’s a strong person.”

Lockridge says reuniting with his boys is his inspiration for cleaning up his life.

“Now I’m ready for this, mentally and physically, to get me back on track,” Lockridge says. “I am in dire need of that kind of support and I want it. I’ve been knocked down. Now I’m finally ready to get back up.”

…
“It hurts. It hurts. In more ways than one, it hurts. How can you be a great man, father and husband … how can you be a great champion and not be a great father, husband? Dad? It hurts. But I’m still alive. I can’t make up for the lost time, but I can just get there, be there, spend the rest of the time with my wife and children and give them the time that I have left.”

Too good to let this pass unremarked - Julian Barnes on the underrated Frank O’Connor in The Spectator. For readers unfamiliar with his work, a good place to start is the classic GUESTS OF THE NATION. Inspiration for the Crying Game - the first part at least.

Julian Barnes on Frank O’Connor

Frank O’Connor was once stopped on the road west of Kinsale by a man who said to him: ‘I hear you’re a famous writer. I’d like to be a famous writer too, but ’tis bloody hard. The comma and the apostrophe are easy enough, but the semicolon is the very divil.’ The man was wrong, of course: the ability to punctuate, and even to spell, correctly are often missing from some of the best writers. What counts is the ability to be on that road, allow yourself to be stopped, listen to what the man says, remember the voice, and know when and how best to use it. O’Connor’s art was that of a man who travels his native Ireland at the speed of a bicycle, happy to pause and listen, slow to come to a general conclusion, preferring the particular instance and the gradually revealed truth.

Mrs W. B. Yeats used to address him as ‘Michael-Frank’, an affectionate combining of his birth-name (Michael O’Donovan) and his pen-name. But that brief hyphen is also an indicator of the proximity between his personal and artistic selves. In some writers, the artistic self is separated off from the daily one: Jekyll closes the study door and turns into Hyde (or, sometimes, vice versa). O’Connor, while containing paradoxes and contradictions as any artist does, was much less of a bifurcated spirit than most. What he was lay very close to what he did; his fiction and non-fiction have similar contours and spirit. And to read the totality of his work is to discover multiple criss-crossings between books, with the same stories alluded to and retold.

But such repetitions, when they occur, don’t feel like a writer recycling his material. Instead, the reader is more likely to smile in affectionate recognition as the stories of the Tailor and Anstey, or Mrs Yeats and the next-door dog, or Lord Edward Fitzgerald and the Native American woman, come round again. This is not just because O’Connor is a seductive and trustable narrator to whom we willingly submit, whether he is writing a short story about childhood, describing Celtic architecture, explaining Irish poetry, or fulminating against the Famine or James Joyce. It is because voice is central to O’Connor’s art. He is that comparatively rare thing in modern times, an oral prose writer.

When he came to literary awareness, modernism was enjoying its fullest and most successful expression. In its general and necessary attack on a dying tradition of panoramic social realism, it also inflicted major — and to O’Connor’s belief, catastrophic — damage on the notion of the writer’s voice. Modernism fragmented and ironised it, made it unreliable and shifty, sometimes hidden away altogether. O’Connor wanted to keep alive in prose, and especially in the short story, what he believed to be at its heart: the sound of ‘an actual man, talking’.

Talking, but also listening. O’Connor once said that when he remembered people — even those he was very fond of — he sometimes couldn’t remember their faces, but could always take off their voices. So, in his art, how a character sounds is more important than where they live or what they are wearing, or even what they look like. William Maxwell, O’Connor’s editor for many years at the New Yorker, amicably complained that though he was capable of ‘marvellous descriptions’, he didn’t go in for them much because they didn’t interest him. They did when he was writing topographically or architecturally — then he looked as closely as anyone — but in the rendering of human beings into fictional form it all began with voice — their voice, his voice.

The writer Benedict Kiely once noted that ‘O’Connor can be as outrageously at ease with his own people as a country priest skelping the courting couples out of the ditches.’ His fellow New Yorker writer Maeve Brennan also teased him with the clerical comparison, imagining St Patrick’s Cathedral with O’Connor ‘where he usually is in the afternoons, sitting in a confession box pretending to be a priest and giving penance to some old woman’. But the real priest listens, judges, issues penances, and keeps the sinner’s secrets. O’Connor listened, took notes, did not judge, and turned the confession into a story. His masters were not the moralists or the modernists, but those like Turgenev (‘my hero among writers’) who went with seeming simplicity to the complexity at the heart of human matters. And the short-story writer he turned to most often was Chekhov. When Maxwell inherited O’Connor’s volumes of Chekhov, he described them as ‘so lived with — turned down corners, coffee stains, whiskey stains, and perhaps tears’.

In his essay on the Russian in ‘The Lonely Art’, O’Connor identifies one central, and to him profoundly sympathetic, belief in Chekhov’s work: the notion that

We are not damned for our mortal sins, which so often require courage and dignity, but by our venial sins, which we often commit a hundred times a day until we become as enslaved to them as we could be to alcohol and drugs. Because of them and our toleration of them, we create a false personality for ourselves.

(Again, O’Connor’s confessional was an unorthodox one.) In ‘Checkhov’s ‘The Bishop’, written the year before he died, a bishop, originally from a poor background, is dying a lonely death. He is visited by his old mother who, because of his eminence, at first cannot stop calling him ‘Your Grace’. Only towards the end does she break through the ‘false personality’ society has imposed on her, to the intimate contact mother and son once had: she starts calling him again by the private names she once used when he was a small boy unable to button his trousers. ‘It is a final affirmation,’ O’Connor writes, ‘of Chekhov’s faith in life — lonely and sad, immeasurably sad, but beautiful beyond the power of the greatest artist to tell.’

And yet not beyond the power of the artist to try. If Chekhov was O’Connor’s prose master, Mozart was his musical master, and there is a conscious iteration in O’Connor’s analysis, on the 200th anniversary of the composer’s death, of what it is that we have come to call ‘Mozartean’:

It is a way of seeing things which revokes the tragic attitude without turning into comedy, which says, not ‘Life is beautiful but so sad’ but ‘Life is so sad but beautiful’, and this way of seeing things, half way between tragedy and comedy, represents a human norm.

That human norm tells us where O’Connor’s art came from, and where it is heading.

(c) The Spectator 2009

Interesting to see facsimilies of letters to Judge Denny Chinn. The damage done by Madoff is brought home.

Have a look at the pdf available at Nextbook.

The one from Phylis Lerner on page 41 is particularly striking.

He [Buddy McGirt] got it that the 28-year-old Paulie was smarting from his lopsided loss to the Hitman, and was searching for reasons why. So, when he didn’t get a face to face chat, or even a phone call from Paulie, informing him that he’d be working with another trainer, Buddy McGirt wasn’t all that surprised. He’s 45, he has a decade plus on Paulie, understands better, maybe, that people sometimes don’t have those difficult conversations they should have. McGirt, who fought as a pro from 1982-1997, understands that people, when they are fond of each other, often shrink back from confrontation. It is easier, less painful, less wrenching, to let a relationship wither, as opposed to severing it up close, where you can see the pain in someone’s eyes.

McGirt: “He’s going through a tough time in his life. From my experience, my first loss, to Frankie Warren in 1986, I went home and realized what happened and accepted it as a man, and moved on. That’s what Paulie has to do.”

From David Edelstein in New York Magazine:

There’s something appealingly anti-psychological about Charlie Kaufman. As a Jew who explores the inner lives of anxious neurotic depressive solipsists, he could be expected to build his works around repressed traumas and cathartic revelations: very Freudian, very twentieth century. But Kaufman goes in the opposite direction. The whirlpool doesn’t circle in on painful personal truths—it moves outward, in ever-widening spirals, until identity is swallowed up by larger forces.

… Kaufman contrives to display even more permutations of the self, on the way to the self’s dissolution. This epic dream play with its leaps through time and space, its characters and shadow characters, poses a momentous question: Uh … well … I’m not sure what question the movie is posing. The answer, though, is definitely “Death.”

From Manohla Dargis in The New York Times:

To say that Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York” is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now. That at least would be an appropriate response to a film about failure, about the struggle to make your mark in a world filled with people who are more gifted, beautiful, glamorous and desirable than the rest of us — we who are crippled by narcissistic inadequacy, yes, of course, but also by real horror, by zits, flab and the cancer that we know (we know!) is eating away at us and leaving us no choice but to lie down and die.

Despite its slippery way with time and space and narrative and Mr. Kaufman’s controlled grasp of the medium, “Synecdoche, New York” is as much a cry from the heart as it is an assertion of creative consciousness. It’s extravagantly conceptual but also tethered to the here and now, which is why, for all its flights of fancy, worlds within worlds and agonies upon agonies, it comes down hard for living in the world with real, breathing, embracing bodies pressed against other bodies. To be here now, alive in the world as it is rather than as we imagine it to be, seems a terribly simple idea, yet it’s also the only idea worth the fuss, the anxiety of influence and all the messy rest, a lesson hard won for Caden. Life is a dream, but only for sleepers.

From Carina Chocano in The LA Times:

…recalls the Jorge Luis Borges story in which the imperial cartographers make a map of the empire so detailed and true-to-life that it takes on the exact dimensions of the territory and ends up covering it entirely. Jean Baudrillard famously inverted the story to illustrate his idea about the “precession of simulacra,” a postmodern condition in which the representation of something comes before the thing it represents, breaking down the distinction between representation and reality completely.

No doubt Kaufman, the brilliant, melancholy and unrepentantly solipsistic mind behind “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Adaptation,” had both in mind when he outlined the contours of his sprawling, awe-inspiring, heartbreaking, frustrating, hard-to-follow and achingly, achingly sad movie, which might have just as well have been called “Being Charlie Kaufman” or, better yet, “Being Anybody.”

What is going on with Caden? Is he sick? Crazy? Dying? Already dead? Pretty much all of the above, though not in the usual sense. Kaufman is trying to do what Caden is trying to do; he’s trying to make sense of loss, longing and death. He’s mining all the sadness in the world. As for happiness, he’s suspicious. It’s a sham product sold by a huckster (Hope Davis, as his therapist and bestselling self-help author). He’s marveling at the struggle and the longing, multiplied by the billions, in the face of futility. He’s having an existential freakout on an epic scale.

Hoffman commits himself completely to Caden’s mournfulness, to the sadness that comes with realizing, as he does in the end, as what was once “an exciting, mysterious future” recedes into the past, “that this is everyone’s experience, every single one; that you are not special; that there is no one watching you and there never was.” This sounds hopeless — too hopeless, even, for some of the characters in the film, who chafe at Caden’s vision. There’s beauty everywhere — in the transporting score by Jon Brion, in Hoffman and Morton’s performances, in Adele’s paintings (actually the miniaturized paintings of an artist named Alex Kanevsky), in the fact that we struggle in the face of futility, that as Caden tells his actors, we simultaneously fear and don’t believe in death. That the house is on fire from the day you buy it. That the house is never not on fire.

And a less indulgent view from Anthony Lane in The New Yorker:

Well, there are three commonplaces on which it repeatedly riffs. One is what you might call the romantic-pathetic theory of imagination: any alternative reality that we design and furnish, when we conceive a work of art, is always to some extent a stand-in for the puny or pitiful one that we have been personally landed with. The second and most imperishable truth is: we grow old, and perish. And the third says: all you need is love. These are noble principles to pursue; unless the pursuit is waged with gusto, however, it threatens to slump into the sententious, and that is what happens here. With so much screen time being allotted to Caden’s bad marriage and pustular health problems, his majestic production doesn’t get going properly until the second half of the film, and by then we don’t care enough (worse still, we don’t know enough, such is the vagueness of its guiding rubric) to mind whether it triumphs or flops. Compare Dennis Potter’s great mini-series of the nineteen-eighties, “The Singing Detective,” and you will see much the same setup—a wry leading man with a skin disease, inspired by a furious creative itch—rendered with unstinting vigor. And, should you still have a taste for the fancies of a fading man, try Orson Welles’s “The Immortal Story,” or a little picture of his called “Citizen Kane,” all of which, I sometimes think, could be floating within Kane’s cranium, like snow inside a globe. In each case, there is joy—not just a mournful snickering, as carried in Charlie Kaufman’s bag of tricks, but the breath of divine pleasure—in the conjuring of dreams. If you want to show a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, go right ahead, but give that hour all the life you can.

From The Daily Mail:

Lord Mandelson discusses the difficulties in making Mr Brown more popular. ‘You need to understand just how complex Gordon is. We are all complex but Gordon has developed fewer ways of masking and managing his insecurities.

‘You have to be careful you don’t make it worse/more difficult for him to change his public personality by telling him he has got to do so and inundating him with opinions as to how he does it.’
Derek Draper

Derek Draper was Brown’s unofficial adviser when he received the Mandelson email

Lord Mandelson and Mr Draper, a qualified psychologist, discuss Mr Brown’s character flaws in intimate detail.

Lord Mandelson says: ‘He is a self-conscious person, physically and emotionally. He is not as comfortable with his own skin as Tony was (is). A new public persona cannot be glued on to him.

‘The public personality of a politician is crucial but it cannot be found, it has to emerge. It will do so from self-confidence. When things go right for him. When he is being successful and receiving approval.

‘Then he will visibly relax. He will be enjoying himself. Not so angry. Then he will start talking about himself. Finding his voice.’

An exclusive interview with J M Coetzee - DN.se

On influence

There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind. I see no marks of Wordsworths style of writing or style of thinking in my own work, yet Wordsworth is a constant presence when I write about human beings and their relations to the natural world.

Bearing these caveats in mind, and others that it is too boring to spell out, and turning to your question, I would say that in ones canon (to use that term for the moment, which I do without pleasure, since it is overworked nowadays) one does find a style of response to experience - or (a more sceptical way of putting it) ways of confirming ones responses to experience.

The writer in context

What the correct relationship ought to be between a representative of this failed or failing colonial movement, with this history of oppression behind it, on the one hand, and the part of the world where it sought and failed to establish itself and the people of that part of the world on the other hand, is the subject of your question, translated into the terms I am using here.

My response, a dubious and hesitant one, is that it has been and may continue to be, in the time that is left to me, more productive to live out the question than to try to answer it in abstract terms.

When I say I have “lived out” the question I mean I have lived it out not only in day to day life but in my fiction as well.

As you see, I do not treat the creation of fiction, that to say the invention and development of fantasies, as a form of abstract thought. I dont wish to deny the uses of the intellect, but sometimes one has the intuition that the intellect by itself will lead one nowhere.

Let me point here to the inherent tension between on the one hand the artist, to whom what we can call “the question of ones life” or “the question of how, in ones own case, to live” may be the source of a drama that plays itself out over time, with many ups and downs, and on the other hand the critic or observer or reader who wants to package and label the artist and his particular question” and move on elsewhere. No offence intended.

On writing as relief for the ‘extreme soul’

Turning to the question of what way of life is best for “the extreme soul,” I would say that what you call “the literary life,” or any other way of life that provides means for interrogation of our existence - in the case of the writer fantasy, symbolization, storytelling - seems to me a good life - good in the sense of being ethically responsible.

New Statesman - Eternal vigilance

He was not, as Lionel Trilling once pointed out, a genius; he was not mysterious; he had served in Burma, washed dishes in a Parisian hotel, and fought for a few months in Spain, but this hardly added up to a life of adventure; for the most part he lived in London and reviewed books. So odd, in fact, has the success of Orwell seemed to some that there is even a book, George Orwell: the Politics of Literary Reputation, devoted to getting to the bottom of it.

When you return to his essays of the 1940s, the mystery evaporates. You would probably not be able to write this way now, even if you learned the craft: the voice would seem put-on, after Orwell. But there is nothing put-on about it here, and it seems to speak, despite the specificity of the issues discussed, directly to the present. In Orwell’s clear, strong voice we hear a warning. Because we, too, live in a time when truth is disappearing from the world, and doing so in just the way Orwell worried it would: through language. We move through the world by naming things in it, and we explain the world through sentences and stories. The lesson of these essays is clear: Look around you.

Describe what you see as an ordinary observer – for you are one, you know – would see them. Take things seriously.

And tell the truth. Tell the truth.

Mr Gessen is smug and high handed at time, but some of his observations are interesting. He’s keen not to confine himself to embelishing the great man’s reputation - he points out numerous inconsistencies before looking at Orwell’s disillusionment with journalism - based on the direct experience of just how bad reporting can be in the Spanish Civil War.

Why is Gessen writing this? Because he wants to learn from Orwell - figure something out and correct the course he sets for himself. Perhaps it’s as much as a reminder to himself as a desire to enlighten the reader that he ends the essay with what he takes their lessons to be.

The Dark Continent: Hitler’s European Holocaust Helpers - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

… on June 27, 1941, a colonel in the staff of the Germany’s Northern Army Group in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas passed a petrol station surrounded by a crowd of people. There were shouts of bravo and clapping, mothers raised their children to give them a better view. The officer stepped closer and later wrote down what he had seen. “On the concrete courtyard there was blonde man aged around 25, of medium height, who was taking a rest and supporting himself on a wooden club which was as thick as an arm and went up to his chest. At his feet lay 15, 20 people who were dead or dying. Water poured from a hose and washed the blood into a drain.”

The soldier continued: “Just a few paces behind this man stood around 20 men who — guarded by several armed civilians — awaited their gruesome execution in silent submission. Beckoned with a curt wave, the next one stepped up silently and was (…) beaten to death with the wooden club, and every blow met with enthusiastic cheers from the audience.”

Interesting for sceptics:

Nirpal Dhaliwal reports

and devoted a chapter to the strange history of chiropractic treatments. One Daniel David Palmer invented the therapy in Davenport, Iowa, in 1895, when he convinced himself that he had cured a janitor’s deafness by “racking” his back.

Inspired by this miracle, Palmer developed the theory that “95% of all diseases are caused by displaced vertebrae”, rather than, say, the germs that so bothered conventional doctors of the time. Chiropractic therapy was a new religion, Palmer declared, and he was a successor to Christ, Muhammad and Martin Luther. At home, he practised vigorous racking on his children.

His son, Bartlett, described how he beat them with “straps until we carried welts, for which Father was often arrested and spent nights in jail”. Bartlett bought the first car Davenport had seen and paid his father back by running him down on the day of the Palmer School of Chiropractic Homecoming Parade.

Palmer died of his injuries a few weeks later, but his ideas lived on. In 2008, the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) announced that its members could help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying. Writing in the Guardian, Singh said the claim was “bogus”. Chiropractic treatments may help relieve back pain, but Professor Ernst had examined 70 trials and found no evidence that they could relieve other conditions.