Feldman's Faves: January 30, 2023

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE

Now that we are back into the office, JC and I wanted to remind everyone of the importance of showing up to work on every day that we are “in the office”. People have been doing a very good job in our section but we can do better. Also, just a reminder that on FEBRUARY 15th we will be having our first section lunch of 2023. I hope you can all be there. Alex is all over it and she has guaranteed me that it will be delicious.

I want to take this opportunity to wish our leader and mentor, Steve Halperin, who celebrated his birthday this weekend, all the very best.

I am excited to see KC and Philly play in the Super Bowl. Based on this week’s games I think it should be an epic battle of two teams that are really in the zone (especially if Mahomes can rest his ankle over the next two weeks).

This week’s theme could maybe be considered one about wellness (but probably a stretch).

STELLA MARIS By: Cormac McCarthy – Stella Maris is the companion novel to McCarthy’s novel The Passenger, which I had read and reviewed a few months ago. While I found The Passenger very difficult to read and struggled to get through it, I still felt compelled to “finish the set” and explore Stella Maris. The format of this book is “the recordings” of conversations between Alicia (who at 20 years old and a grad student at the University of Chicago studying math admitted herself to the Stella Maris hospital) and her psychiatrist, Dr. Cohen. The conversational narrative in Stella Maris makes this a much easier read. That said, the topics covered ranging from mental illness, to suicide and incest do make this an easy read. As one reviewer notes, “A companion to McCarthy’s The Passenger that both supplements and subverts it. Alice Western—now known as Alicia, her birth certificate changed via her brother’s counterfeiter pal, John Sheddan—is a brilliant mathematician, at work on a doctorate even as a teenager. Her mind has melted, though. In this series of dialogues with a psychiatrist, she reveals herself to be thoroughly self-aware: “Mental illness is an illness. What else to call it? But it’s an illness associated with an organ that might as well belong to Martians for all our understanding of it.” Still, the seemingly very real friend she calls the Thalidomide Kid turns out to be one of many hallucinations that show up to keep Alicia company—an interesting turn, since it seems the Kid also visited her brother, Bobby, in the predecessor novel. Is Bobby’s life also a hallucination, a dream? Perhaps, for Alicia suggests that Bobby may still be lying in a coma following an auto-racing accident in Italy. For Alicia, just 20 years old, mathematics is both a defense and a curse, something she’s given up—not easily, for, as she tells Dr. Cohen, “I think maybe it’s harder to lose just one thing than to lose everything.” One thing that does seem to be uncomfortably real is her incestuous relationship with Bobby, which she reveals to Dr. Cohen in small, enigmatic bits seeded with defiant assertions that her conscience is untroubled: “I knew that I would love him forever. In spite of the laws of Heaven.” Some of her defenses melt a little toward the end, when, having revealed some of the cracks in her psyche, she asks Dr. Cohen to hold her hand—because, McCarthy writes in a characteristically gnomic phrase, “that’s what people do when they’re waiting for the end of something. ”A grand puzzle, and grandly written at that, about shattered psyches and illicit dreams.” I enjoyed the flow of Stella Maris (almost written like a play) and while it deals with some very heavy topics, was much easier to read than The Passenger and also fills in a bunch of gaps that the original book left open (which in hindsight now seems intentional). I would recommend reading both books as these might be Cormac McCarthy’s last great works – Here’s a good review from The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/dec/07/stella-maris-by-cormac-mccarthy-review-a-slow-motion-study-of-obliteration

The Next Big Idea - Sleep: How Understanding Your Body’s Clock Can Revolutionize Your Health – I feel that the universe is trying to send me a message as I keep running into content that extols the virtues of good sleep and the evils of failing to so enough. As a result, I am once again making a New Year’s resolution to sleep more in 2023 (or at least more than I did in 2022). While I don’t expect to get eight hours I will try really hard for more than four given all that I am learning about the long term effects of no sleep. This PODCAST is yet another example as to why….Here’s an excerpt from the PODCAST itself: “Sleep can enhance your creativity, lift your spirits, improve your sense of humor, and amplify your sociability. So why do so many of us struggle to get a good night's rest? Russell Foster, a professor of circadian neuroscience at the University of Oxford, says it's because we've let the frantic drumbeat of modern life drown out the steady tick-tock of our biological clocks. That's the bad news. The good news is that Russell's here to share science-backed tips that will have you catching more z's in no time. Russell's new book is "Life Time: Your Body Clock and Its Essential Roles in Good Health and Sleep.": https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-next-big-idea/id1482067226?i=1000589385928

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation.

And remember to stay safe, stay healthy and to docket daily.

Jon