Feldman's Faves: June 19, 2023

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE

I hope those of you that celebrate Father’s Day had a wonderful and enjoyable day yesterday.

With basketball and hockey both over for the season, my social calendar has freed up significantly. I might even think about going outside at some point...

I want to congratulate our good friend Tara on her wedding this past weekend.

As we are right in the swing of the summer season just a reminder to keep engaging with our students and finding them interesting work to do. They are eager to learn and get involved in your files.

This week’s theme focuses on the spectrum of wellness and mental well-being.

THE BELL JAR By: Sylvia Plath – The book I read last week, Monsters – A Fan’s Dilemma, made reference to the life of Sylvia Plath and the struggles she went through to make her art and the sacrifices she made to get there. I was warned by my daughter not to read this book given its difficult and challenging subject matter but once the “forbidden fruit” is dangled it is hard to resist. There is no doubt that the themes of mental illness and suicide are difficult topics and at the time this book was written it was quite a controversial work (which is in part why Plath published it under a pseudonym). But I feel that in today’s climate where these issues are discussed, better understood and not hidden in the dark, I was not super shocked about what I read here. The Bell Jar feels a little bit like reading Catcher in the Rye in that it captures both a time (in this case the 1950s of New York and the Boston area) and the main character’s state of mind (Esther’s feeling of being out of place in a society that demands certain behaviours from women of her age but ones that she simply cannot get comfortable performing, which leads to her decline). As one reviewer describes the plot of The Bell Jar, “Esther Greenwood, a college student from Massachusetts, travels to New York to work on a magazine for a month as a guest editor. She works for Jay Cee, a sympathetic but demanding woman. Esther and eleven other college girls live in a women’s hotel. The sponsors of their trip wine and dine them and shower them with presents. Esther knows she should be having the time of her life, but she feels deadened. The execution of the Rosenbergs worries her, and she can embrace neither the rebellious attitude of her friend Doreen nor the perky conformism of her friend Betsy. Esther and the other girls suffer food poisoning after a fancy banquet. Esther attempts to lose her virginity with a UN interpreter, but he seems uninterested. She questions her abilities and worries about what she will do after college. On her last night in the city, she goes on a disastrous blind date with a man named Marco, who tries to rape her. Esther wonders if she should marry and live a conventional domestic life, or attempt to satisfy her ambition. Buddy Willard, her college boyfriend, is recovering from tuberculosis in a sanitarium, and wants to marry Esther when he regains his health. To an outside observer, Buddy appears to be the ideal mate: he is handsome, gentle, intelligent, and ambitious. But he does not understand Esther’s desire to write poetry, and when he confesses that he slept with a waitress while dating Esther, Esther thinks him a hypocrite and decides she cannot marry him. She sets out to lose her virginity as though in pursuit of the answer to an important mystery. Esther returns to the Boston suburbs and discovers that she has not been accepted to a writing class she had planned to take. She will spend the summer with her mother instead. She makes vague plans to write a novel, learn shorthand, and start her senior thesis. Soon she finds the feelings of unreality she experienced in New York taking over her life. She is unable to read, write, or sleep, and she stops bathing. Her mother takes her to Dr. Gordon, a psychiatrist who prescribes electric shock therapy for Esther. Esther becomes more unstable than ever after this terrifying treatment, and decides to kill herself. She tries to slit her wrists, but can only bring herself to slash her calf. She tries to hang herself, but cannot find a place to tie the rope in her low ceilinged house. At the beach with friends, she attempts to drown herself, but she keeps floating to the surface of the water. Finally, she hides in a basement crawl space and takes a large quantity of sleeping pills. Esther awakens to find herself in the hospital. She has survived her suicide attempt with no permanent physical injuries. Once her body heals, she is sent to the psychological ward in the city hospital, where she is uncooperative, paranoid, and determined to end her life. Eventually, Philomena Guinea, a famous novelist who sponsors Esther’s college scholarship, pays to move her to a private hospital. In this more enlightened environment, Esther comes to trust her new psychiatrist, a woman named Dr. Nolan. She slowly begins to improve with a combination of talk therapy, insulin injections, and properly administered electric shock therapy. She becomes friends with Joan, a woman from her hometown and college who has had experiences similar to Esther’s. She is repulsed, however, when Joan makes a sexual advance toward her. As Esther improves, the hospital officials grant her permission to leave the hospital from time to time. During one of these excursions, she finally loses her virginity with a math professor named Irwin. She begins bleeding profusely and has to go to the emergency room. One morning, Joan, who seemed to be improving, hangs herself. Buddy comes to visit Esther, and both understand that their relationship is over. Esther will leave the mental hospital in time to start winter semester at college. She believes that she has regained a tenuous grasp on sanity, but knows that the bell jar of her madness could descend again at any time.” This story is so well written and is so effective in capturing Plath’s own state of mind and foreshadowed her own suicide in which it was clear that she never felt she could get out from under the stale air of her own bell jar. Here’s a classic review from The New Yorker - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1971/07/10/dying-an-introduction-howard-moss

The Next Big Idea - Joy of Movement: How Exercise Can Help You Find Happiness and Connection –There is no silver bullet when it comes to health living and healthy aging. That said, scientists are doing more and more research on the physical and mental health benefits of exercise for people of all ages and are concluding that exercise plays a huge part in living a high quality of life for the years we have especially of you can do it in a social setting. As some of you know, we built Stan’s Gym (named after my dad) at Baycrest whose primary focus is to study and design exercise programs for older men and women in an effort to improve the quality of their lives – and it is working. Today’s PODCAST extolls the virtues of movement and explains why it is so good for all of us. Here’s an excerpt from the PODCAST itself, “Pay a visit to your local gym, observe the grimacing patrons as they pound the treadmill or march in place on the StairMaster, and you might conclude that exercise is no fun. But it doesn’t have to be that way, according to Kelly McGonigal, who lectures at Stanford, teaches dance classes, and wrote “The Joy of Movement: How Exercise Helps Us Find Happiness, Hope, Connection, and Courage.” Today, she explains how exercise — of all kinds and in all doses — can strengthen your mind, elevate your mood, and deepen your social connections.” https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-next-big-idea/id1482067226?i=1000614446221

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation.

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

Jon