Summary:

The first poem begins: "Let me be a poet of cripples, / of hollow men and boys groping / to be whole, of girls limping toward / womanhood. . . " This Whitmanesque introduction bespeaks two sides of Jim Ferris’s poetry. First, this is poetry of celebration: "I sing for cripples, I sing for you." But at the same time, the poems look unflinchingly at the failures, phoniness, and self-righteousness of the "fix it" establishment. They also portray (and celebrate) the community of suffering among the inmates destined to be "fixed."

In "Meat" (5) Ferris lays it on the line," Between four and five they bring down the meat / from recovery--those poor dopes have been simmering / up there for hours, bubbling up to the surface. . . " But even the children who have become "meat" have feelings. For example, the narrator of "Mercy" (18) expresses horror when two healthy classmates from the 8th grade manipulate the hospital rules in order to bring him a Get Well greeting. "How did these aliens get in?" he asks. "Leave now, trespassers, you who seek to gaze / on my humiliation." Perhaps the merciful will obtain mercy from God, he comments, "but not from me." In "Miss Karen" (25) the narrator sustains himself with erotic fantasies about his nurse and discovers to his mortification that he babbled these thoughts to his mother during recovery from anesthesia.

The culture of medicine looks cruel--or at least uncaring--though this crippled narrator’s eyes. "The Coliseum" (42) gives a telling description of the patient’s appearance at Grand Rounds: "You are a specimen / for study, a toy, a puzzle--they speak to each other / as if you were unconscious. . . " "Standard Operating Procedure" (44) reads like an ironic crib-sheet for orthopedic surgery: "Bust a chuck / of bone the rest of the way out; chisel it if you have to. . . He won’t remember much; kids are like animals / that way."

View full annotation

Summary:

A drug-addicted doctor, a dying father, and a cantankerous angel constitute a less than holy trinity. Carl is an impaired physician who is hooked on drugs. He happens to have a guiding angel following him around, but she is no guardian. Instead, she is moody and provides no protection. She offers warnings and advice. Carl met his angel when he was six years old. After being stung by wasps and experiencing an allergic reaction, she didn't lift a finger (or wing) to help him.

The angel is prescient. She can foretell who will grow up naughty or beneficent. She knows when a person will die. She tells Carl that not everyone has an angel. Only those individuals destined for greatness get an angel, but some people choose not to heed the suggestions of their spiritual attendants.

Carl is a pediatrician. He cheated in medical school and on his certifying examination but is pleased with his choice of careers: "I make my living praising the beauty of well children. I love babies and I love ketamine" (p121). His father is dying from metastatic lung cancer. Their relationship is terrible. To make matters worse, Carl cannot stomach sick adults.

His three pregnant sisters implore Carl to care for their father after discharge from the hospital. Carl reluctantly leaves San Francisco and heads to Florida. He takes his father to chemotherapy sessions, but the oncologist thinks it's time to stop further treatment. Carl administers painkillers to his dad and frequently consumes some of the prescribed morphine and Percocet for his own pleasure. The two men hardly speak to each other.

Carl's angel repeatedly implores him to reach out to the dying man. She knows that emotional and physical connection will heal both men. Carl's father longs for a storm but the weather won't deliver his wish. One night, Carl stages rainfall with the aid of the garden hose. He rests his head against his dad's chest, and they fall asleep. When morning arrives, Carl awakens and discovers that his father died during the night. The angel is weeping in the room.

View full annotation

Summary:

After several years as a firefighter, Paul Austin decided to return to school and become a doctor.  Both his training as firefighter and a somewhat late start at medical school gave him an unusual perspective on his selected specialty-emergency medicine.  The book chronicles a wide variety of surprises, learning moments, and challenges from his years in the emergency room.  These are interspersed with vignettes about the interrupted home life of an emergency physician rotating into night duty three to four times a month.  The pace is lively and the stories confessional in the best sense-rich with reflection on what he has learned, often at great cost to his resilient wife and three children, one with Down syndrome.  A strong theme in the book is the importance of developing strategies for sustaining humanity and compassion even under intense pressure to be quick, clinical, and detached. 

View full annotation

Summary:

The voice of a young girl leads us through this spare and tautly told story of a closely-knit family upon whom tragedy falls like a plague.  Before death and mental illness take up residence there, we meet the Bronstein’s, two parents and four children, in their comfortable, well-run home outside of Boston.  Hermann delicately renders the portents of change and pain that haunt all loving families. The novel opens with the nine year-old Ruby Bronstein’s discovering, while walking along the beach with her three older brothers on a winter afternoon, an old rusty pistol poking out of the sand. 

The family story deepens as the teenage Ruby recounts a sojourn with her parents to Terezin, the Nazi concentration camp where her father was interned as a child. Hermann’s restraint and precision in this sequence make this potentially familiar journey entirely new.  With her young eye trained on her father’s every muscle-twinge of reaction to what he sees, she crisply conveys the unknowability of even an adored father –let alone the events that took place within these walls. Her father’s inaccessible childhood memories are not miraculously jarred by this return to the scene of trauma – but he learns shortly thereafter of a brain tumor that soon will end his life.

One tragedy follows another, the emergence of mental illness in one brother, the death of another.  The narrative traces Ruby’s efforts to carry on in the face of these devastating losses.  Here is where the novel explodes in cold fire, in its quiet accounting of a young person’s grief as it is lived in its ordinary, daily course.  Loss begins to deform her social life, giving her the feeling that she is a freak.  The scale of things is too disproportionate; she dresses for the prom while her brother lies dying in the intensive care unit.  Carrying the stigma of disaster, she hides news of family developments for which she has no vocabulary.  What good would talking do anyhow, she asks –until she finds the listener she needs.  

View full annotation

Summary:

Inochi (Japanese for "life" or "spirit") are four human-sized figures with bulbous, alien-like heads over small bodies made of (plastic) flesh and machinery. Murakami directed videos to accompany the Inochi, consisting of a film sequence of an Inochi in school with a schoolboy-like crush on a girl; the Inochi tries to fit in, gets in trouble, and doesn't understand what is happening to its body when it begins to respond to the crush.

View full annotation

Summary:

Babies in Great Britain are vanishing - from homes, the park, and even a moving car. There is no explanation for the disappearances. The count of missing babies reaches 83 and still not a single body has been found.

Lella follows the news closely and is quite worried about her own baby. The mother clings to her daughter. One day, Lella spots mouse droppings in the kitchen. She telephones an exterminator but they are too busy to come to the house for at least one month. She next sees a large rat in the living room. Then Lella finds a nest of rodents and flushes it down the toilet.

The distraught mother becomes a recluse. She cannot sleep and has no energy. The doctor evaluates her. He prescribes some blue pills. He notes that "her hormones are still unsettled and her body weak" (107). She only pretends to swallow the medicine. Lella's husband takes a leave from work to care for her.

A tired Lella puts her baby in a cradle and later notices a rat next to it. She picks up a butter knife on the bedside table and is poised to stab the rat. Her husband enters the room, grasps Lella's wrist, and tells his wife it is only her imagination. He is correct. There is neither a rat nor a baby in the cradle, only a folded blanket.

View full annotation

Summary:

An overweight, older man is referred by his family doctor to a hospital-based Diabetic Clinic. The patient may have "borderline" diabetes and requires a glucose tolerance test to confirm the diagnosis. He remembers to bring two important items to his appointment - an early morning sample of his urine and something to read. He chooses a volume of short stories by Anton Chekhov.

At the clinic, three things vie for the man's attention: the environment of the waiting room, the requirement of providing a sample of blood and urine every thirty minutes, and one of Chekhov's stories titled "The Beauties." As the patient reads the short story, the clinic surroundings fade away. The existing reality is temporarily doused.

After the testing is completed, he meets with the doctor. Their encounter is brief. The diagnosis is not diabetes but rather impaired glucose tolerance (a condition that might progress to diabetes). The doctor recommends a healthier diet and extra exercise. The man telephones his worried wife with the news that he is alright. Like Chekhov, the patient also understands and savors the drama that is present in ordinary life.

View full annotation

Summary:

Great Deeds Against the Dead is a mixed media rendering of Plate 39 of Goya's Disaster of War series. In Goya's original etching, three figures are strung up on a tree trunk, murdered and mutilated; the Chapmans use mannequins, wigs, and fake blood to create a lifesize sculpture.

View full annotation

Summary:

This 1995 mixed media sculpture consists of life-sized mannequins of children moulded to one another, naked except for black sneakers, and some of them deformed by genitals on their faces.

View full annotation

Summary:

Two old women and one winged man peer downwards at a book held tightly by one of the women. The front cover of the books reads "Que Tal?"--Spanish for "How are Things? " or "What's the News?" Both women are elaborately dressed and made up, as though trying to cover over their age with finery and make-up. The lady on the left-hand side of the painting holding the book is dressed in black and red; she wears a veil of sorts upon her head and her clothes imply mourning. Her face is aged and nearly skeletal, her teeth appear bony and pointed, and her recessed eyes look with interest to the book she holds.

On the right hand side of the painting, another old woman dressed in white presents a visual contrast to her neighbor. Her fanciful dress is complemented by sparkling jewelry. This lady's eyes are red and puffy. She smiles as she reads, her spirit apparently engaged as her body hovers on the edge of life. Behind these two crones, Father Time approaches on his wings, holding a staff only partially revealed--it is perhaps a broom or scythe. Father Time's eyes are blackened, his hair grey, and his body well muscled. His appearance is one of age combined with strength.

View full annotation