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Archive for the ‘Creativity’ Category

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“Whiskey River,” A Poem by Bruce Craven

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Creativity, Humanities, Poetry on July 22, 2020 at 6:45 am

Bruce Craven is a member of the Columbia Business School Executive Education faculty in New York City. In addition to directing and teaching in a variety of executive programs, he teaches graduate business students his popular elective Leadership Through Fiction.  His book Win or Die: Leadership Secrets from Game of Thrones, was published in March 2019 by Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press.  The book is currently being translated into Russian and Turkish. He wrote the novel Fast Sofa (1993) which was published in Japanese and German. He also co-wrote the script for the film adaptation, starring Jennifer Tilly, Jake Busey and Crispin Glover. His collection of poetry, Buena Suerte in Red Glitter will be published in 2019 by Red Dirt Press. He lives with his wife and two sons in the Coachella Valley in California.

 

Whiskey River

Willie committed to stay after every show
on stage, signing autographs until the last
item was signed. My wife’s merch hat cost dough.
“50 bucks?!” She was mad at my gift. I sassed
her stinginess, hurt, sipped my pricy whiskey.
Our tix, an in-law’s X-mas gift. Will ancient,
but Shotgun stepped on stage, nailed a couple nifty
licks on Trigger. T-shirt black, skin crepe. Patient,
the packed, tiered casino venue breathed as one.
Then his voice, his band and Whiskey River broke
open the roar. The room lifting: people up! Cheering his runs
on that battered guitar. The troubadour smoked
out riffs like Hendrix would’ve in his eighties. Will played long.
My wife, joyous, alive! Will signed her hat, then was gone.

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“Branson,” A Poem by Bruce Craven

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Creativity, Humanities, liberal arts, Poetry on July 15, 2020 at 6:45 am

Bruce Craven is a member of the Columbia Business School Executive Education faculty in New York City. In addition to directing and teaching in a variety of executive programs, he teaches graduate business students his popular elective Leadership Through Fiction.  His book Win or Die: Leadership Secrets from Game of Thrones, was published in March 2019 by Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press.  The book is currently being translated into Russian and Turkish. He wrote the novel Fast Sofa (1993) which was published in Japanese and German. He also co-wrote the script for the film adaptation, starring Jennifer Tilly, Jake Busey and Crispin Glover. His collection of poetry, Buena Suerte in Red Glitter will be published in 2019 by Red Dirt Press. He lives with his wife and two sons in the Coachella Valley in California.

 

Branson

The Live Music Capital of the World wasn’t good.
“We were stuck in one spot. Artistically,
it sucked,” said Mickey Raphael. Willie should
not have committed months without simply
talking to Mark, his business advisor,
but Tillis brought tequila, weed, smiles. Shotgun
signed to play the venue-town for guitar survivors
in need of steady short sets, repeat forever. Fun
for some, sure, merchandise, tourists, but for outlaws?
No freedom. Still is still moving for Will, but no bus
was a cell. In the Ozark motel, Mark saw
the sleeping bag, the tent pitched on carpet. This deal’s a bust;
rust, not freedom. “Get me out of here!” Willie blamed
the road for his pain, but Branson was prison, just loss, just fame.

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Three Poems by Carrie Goertz-Flores

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Creativity, Humanities, Poetry, Writing on July 3, 2019 at 6:45 am

Carrie Goertz-Flores has published work in New Plains Review, and has work forthcoming in Red Dirt Forum: A Journal of Contemporary Literature, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a poetry collection, Solanaceae, which seeks to bridge the gap between the botanical world and modern human experience. She lives in rural Oklahoma with her husband and four dogs who serve as dedicated editors and muses for her work. 

 

Shrapnel

Dedicated to my father.

His face was worn with trenches while his gaze was guarded by barbed wire fences,
Yet beyond all those lines lay an abandoned field of friends and rusting wheels,
A battle no longer of bullets but shards so small no one would ever think to notice;
How they stuck then sunk so far into the mind even he had almost forgotten for a time.

Scraping and scrapping pieces of his life along with almost every peace of mind,
They lay like the mines lost long ago in wars no one remembers until they detonate.

For some those metal teeth burrow deeper, shell cased in scars of anger and regret,
The tissue too thick for any surgeon and the surgery worse than the first war crime.
Maybe for the lucky few whose draft number they drew, the pieces begin to surface;
Perhaps they even breach with fallen comrades and the white eyes of their enemies…

But memory is a funny bitch of a thing when carried on a shaft, shell, or bomb;
Shrapnel may burrow or it may breach but nothing can ever make it dissolve.

 

The Suitcase

We heard that jeep limpin’ along, over the hills and somehow still not under one.
A custom clunker with age-enhanced leg room where the floorboards had rusted off,
That black and green ride baptized Camo-Mile, how she hacked on her own exhaust –
Or maybe that was just Aunt Sammy with her Category 5 smoker’s cough.

We watched her climb out then sway and swagger down the rocky drive,
A bloated bag swung in one hand and a square suitcase cradled in the other.
I opened the screen door wide and she handed the paper bag to my mother,
Then bumpin’ past and still hugging that cask, she made the table on a winded sigh.

As Sammy insisted, that suitcase was christened the centerpiece over the honey ham,
Towering like a great white behemoth, sporting a spout for a tail and plastic trunk handle,
While its keeper kept us dazzled with stories of her cats and that long planned trip to France;
She was still talking as we cleared, but helped by finger cleanin’ three plates of pumpkin pie.

That evening all but one gathered in the den to claim their turf and surf the cable channels.
Still I heard it over the rattle of rusty memories and reckless booms of political commentary,
A sudden clink from the kitchen and then a long pour that turned into a longer lonely drawl,
Cup in hand, Aunt Sam sat in time to cackle at the news that Paul was now ready to pass on.

With no on left but me, she finally snored into the dreams that only her suitcase could still bring –
Though she still wore that dreamcatcher charm and the golden cross it had tangled and caught on.
Finally, my dad carried in that Wal-mart bag that still remained packed and crumbled without care:
Panties, pills, and toothpaste pokin’ out, we set it by her fetal form with hopes and continued prayers.

But that suitcase now it hardly sloshed – how she’d solo unpacked that box of Franzia Sauvignon.
Still, Dad and I had our doubts that her latest cardboard carry-on had indeed come from Avignon.

 

 

Leaky Faucet

My mind’s a kitchen faucet
All day filling needy cups
But at night not quite off
Drips are my own dreams
Clinging to the cold sink
I must try to remember…
I must try to save from the daily drain.

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Three Poems by Bruce Craven

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Creativity, Humanities, liberal arts, Poetry on June 19, 2019 at 6:45 am

Bruce Craven is a member of the Columbia Business School Executive Education faculty in New York City. In addition to directing and teaching in a variety of executive programs, he teaches graduate business students his popular elective Leadership Through Fiction.  His book Win or Die: Leadership Secrets from Game of Thrones, was published in March 2019 by Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press.  The book is currently being translated into Russian and Turkish. He wrote the novel Fast Sofa (1993) which was published in Japanese and German. He also co-wrote the script for the film adaptation, starring Jennifer Tilly, Jake Busey and Crispin Glover. His collection of poetry, Buena Suerte in Red Glitter will be published in 2019 by Red Dirt Press. He lives with his wife and two sons in the Coachella Valley in California.

 

Gun Crazy

I’m a failure. I fell in love

with the sharpshooting girl

with pearl-handled pistols

in white holsters and the short skirt

trimmed with fringe.

We shot six-shooters together,

then she came

around the corner in a Buick

with running boards and a hood ornament

that shined like God’s right eye in the Kansas sun.

Her patent leather boots were ice-cream white,

same as those dangerous holsters and the yoke

of her midnight blue silk rodeo shirt. White

as her teeth and the fake-pearl snaps.

Her small bosom

unveiled in the carnival noise of sweeping up,

the sound of a generator, voices from a distant poker game.

I’m almost scared.

Her breasts in my hands make me think

of mounds of warm dirt when I was a boy

sitting beside the lake. I leaned

against a big rock out past the drive-in,

took potshots at birds in the sky

with my Crosman Pellgun,

dreaming of coyote, catamount or wolf.

And now

the towns don’t know what hit ‘em.

Bank alarms clang, people wave their arms

or lie down on the sidewalk. And we

count the money and drive.

 

My love can pick a lit cigarette out of my lips from thirty feet, eyes closed.

My love can hold an empty beer can bouncing in the air on bullets

like it was bouncing down from heaven on a string.

My love can talk for hours, then sleep, curled, in the shotgun seat

with her head in my lap, one arm between her legs

and the road never ends and she only complains about the heat

and this engine is a gem, an oiled gun that fires fast and smooth.

You know they’re never going to catch you.

 

We got married on the run.

Like real lovers should, she whispered.

Like criminals, joked the man in Reno who sold us a couple boxes of .38 shells,

a bottle of rye and an extra blanket for the cold desert nights.

Then we reached the ocean…the big blue desert

where the Buick is useless.

During day we hide in our white motel and pay cash.

At night, we walk the sand and don’t talk anymore.

Tonight, the waves spill in moonlight. We made a fire out of driftwood and finished the rye.

I held a cigarette in my lips under the carousel of stars.

Her shot ripped the cherry spark

and I jumped like it was the first time.

My love’s breasts are small and beautiful and she trembles

under me now in the cold sand and cries,

not from our passion, but because she shot a man

in the back in the back of a Saving’s & Loan

back near San Bernardino. Three shots.

He was armed. That’s what the newspaper’s say.

He died. Call us killers. Call us another Bonnie and Clyde.

Shown a big picture of the Buick.

Big pictures of me and my love.

I told you I was bad, she says.

I failed you, I say.

She wipes her tears, lifts her pistol. No, you didn’t.

But she’s wrong.

We got nowhere to drive. We got nowhere to hide.

 

My love points her gun at the sky and fires.

The stars crackle. We got nothing but each other.

We see it before we hear it: the flash of their blue gunfire.

 

 

1966

Fingers against the screen door,

bug-light yellowing the porch beyond

my six-year-old threshold. Burgoyne Drive

glittered with imperforate forms,

neighbors caught in the high-beams

of an idling Ford Falcon. Butcher’s paper

spanned between tentacle streetlights:

a single name in blue paint.

Shadow of rooftops a coal black Monopoly.

Mom and Dad on the lawn, arms linked; their voices hushed.

Bap of moths against the eaves,

one step beyond my cell.

A dense furniture of light radiates from every wall.

 

The world outside in the dark

waits for a neighbor’s son to return from Vietnam.

Everyone waits in that world of hurt.

Horror, a dog-eared pack of playing cards taken home

after the fictional kill-ratios got burned off on the wire.

Skin of some little country bubbling from Napalm,

saturation bombing and the strategy of not losing another domino.

 

The everyday banter as simple as looking up from the dice

to point at the homespun robe stained with blood; the enemy

caught in the coils of razor wire. Black cloth or olive cloth: dead

from exposure or loss of blood or organ failure. Roll

the dice. Oh, the games the leaders play!

 

And a blipping rain of incandescent frogs over Da Nang.

 

But what do I know?

 

Only that I was reading a picture book that night

about a group of children who painted the white walls

of their bedroom into a miraculous jungle

of maroon tigers, thick, green, lustrous fronds

and fierce, flesh-hungry natives. Knives azure.

Teeth tangerine and sharp. The children run

deeper into the jungle, desperate to paint a way

out, an exit strategy. The children scribble their colored brushes:

bridges, rivers, nets, canoes. They draw solutions.

Anything to stay one step ahead. Anything to elude

the nick of time. Until…

They are trapped! No escape.

Lost in the garden of fear. Evil prowls

in the brilliance of vine, petal, flower; hides

waiting in the shadows. Home so far away.

 

And only one can of paint left.

 

The youngest girl grabs a brush, paints the outline

of a door they all remember. A door that will open

into their familiar white bedroom. A door

that will close

and keep the fierce natives locked away.

The danger over by dinner. The jungle as real as TV.

The neighbor’s son returns from Vietnam.

1966.

 

 

 

 

Mud-Flap Girl

You’ve seen her,

against her black curtain backdrop.

She and her sister, silver and shiny,

roar past on the interstate,

bounce behind the gasoline truck

with the brilliant red WARNING

or maybe the yellow and black BIOHAZARD.

In Brooklyn, there’s an ice-cream step-van

covered completely, a friend told me,

with you. O, Mud-Flap Girl,

you’re so much more than a rebel flag, an eagle, the letters N.R.A.

You’re on my Zippo and you’re in my heart.

You go back in time with me.

You teach me and save me. I’ve met you,

in so many disguises, behind the masks

of women with names and wallets and

different driver’s licenses; phone numbers

scribbled on scraps of bar napkin before something

falters and there is hurt and loneliness

and only you, silver outline that became flesh

and warm and sang sentences, then faded

for one reason or another.

 

let me smoke another cigarette.

Let me drink another whiskey.

Let me drive nowhere fast.

Let me run my fingers around your hour-glass hips,

the black curtain your silver legs sculpt as you begin to rise,

icon of slender wrist and ankle. Move to me,

but not like a stripper. I’m out of dollars.

Barbarella of exhaust pipes and road tar

and tasteless fried chicken

I wouldn’t feed a starving cat. Baby,

I don’t care and I forgive you and I do, really,

love you when the red lights of the Highway Patrol

surge past in the fast-lane, siren whining, and I sip

my dead coffee and the dashboard glimmers

and the odometer counts each mile like it matters.

When the bartender fills my glass

with flames of bourbon and screaming ice,

you are there beside my cigarettes, looking good.

Women lean forward, cup fingers

around your red flame, give thanks with their eyes.

Smile when they catch sight of you.

No, I refuse to believe your body is a patriarchal lie,

marketed for profit. Your long hair, parted mouth

and up-thrust breasts are more than pornography, more than

the imposition of an unfair and dangerous standard of femininity.

 

I know this because I have been with you,

have stood beside a white bed, struggling out of my Levi’s

and watched as you pounced onto your knees,

then bounced once on the mattress

like a little girl waiting for a story.

 

I have heard you plead, C’mon! Hurry!

 

And I have crawled to you like a man.

 

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What, Then, is Creativity?

In Arts & Letters, Creativity, Humanities, liberal arts, Philosophy, Teaching on January 9, 2019 at 6:45 am

This piece originally appeared here in The Imaginative Conservative.

Last week a student asked me, “What is creativity?” I was unsure how to respond. I felt like the speaker from Leaves of Grass musing about a child, who, fetching a handful of grass, asks him what the grass is. “How could I answer the child?” the speaker wonders. “I do not know what it is any more than he.”

What is creativity? How could I answer the student? I did not know what it was any more than he. My ignorance on this subject nevertheless inspired me to seek understanding, perhaps even a definition, and then to proffer brief, explanatory remarks. Here they are, principally for his benefit but also for mine—and for that of anyone, I suppose, who cares to consider them.

Every human, I think, is the handiwork of God. If humans are created in God’s image, and God is our creator, then humanity’s creativity is, or might be, a limited, earthly, imperfect glimpse into the ways and workings of God. “We too,” said Paul Elmore More, “as possessors of the word may be called after a fashion children of the Most High and sons of the Father, but as creatures of His will we are not of His substance and nature, however we may be like Him.”[1]

Inherently flawed and sinful, humans cannot create what or as God creates and cannot be divine. Our imagination can be powerfully dark, dangerous, and wicked. The Lord proclaimed in the Noahic covenant that “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.”[2] Construction of the Tower of Babel demonstrated that the unified power of ambitious men laboring together may engender impious unrestraint.[3]

Humans, however, being more rational and intelligent than animals, are supreme among God’s creation and bear the divine image of God. “What is man, that thou are mindful of him?” asks the psalmist, adding, “and the son of man, that thou visitest him?  For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hath crowned him with glory and honour.”[4]

Saint Peter—or the author of Second Peter if that book is pseudographical—called humans potential partakers in the divine nature who have escaped the corruption of the world.[5] Saint Paul implied that followers of Christ enjoy something of Christ’s mind, some special understanding of Christ’s instructions.[6] He also suggested that followers of Christ, the saints, will judge not only the world but the angels,[7]beneath whom, in substance, we consist.[8]

What these passages mean, exactly, is subject to robust academic and theological debate, but surely humanity’s crowning artistic achievements—our paintings, sculptures, philosophies, architecture, poetry, theater, novels, and music—are starting points for exploration. What evidence have we besides these tangible products of our working minds that we who are not divine somehow partake in divinity?

Humans are moral, spiritual, social, creative, and loving, unlike the rest of God’s animate creation, only some of which, the animals, are also sentient. Aristotle and Aquinas, to say nothing of the author of Genesis, rank animals lower than humans in the hierarchy of living beings because, although sentient, they lack a discernable will, conscientiousness, consciousness, and capacity for reason that humans definitively possess. Moreover, animals provide humans with the necessary sustenance to survive, and our survival is indispensable to the advancement of knowledge and intelligence, themselves essential to the enjoyment and preservation of God’s creation.

All human life is sacred because of humanity’s godly nature,[9] which is a privilege with coordinate duties and responsibilities: to be fruitful and multiply and to subdue, or care for, the inferior creatures of the earth.[10] However awesome humanity’s creative faculties are, they are not themselves divine, and cannot be. “As the heavens are higher than the earth,” intones the prophet, “so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”[11]

Russell Kirk titled his autobiography The Sword of Imagination. A sword is a bladed weapon with a sharp, lethal point and sharp, lethal edges. It’s the symbol of medieval warriors and Romantic knights. The imagination, powerful like a sword, can be wielded for the forces of good or evil. It’s unsafe. But it can be channeled for moral and virtuous purposes.

Only God can have created something from nothing. That the cosmos exists at all is proof of an originating, ultimate cause, of some supreme power that is antecedent to all material life and form. Human creativity, by contrast, is iterative and mimetic, not the generation of perceptible substance out of an absolute void.

Human creativity builds on itself, repurposing and reinvigorating old concepts and fields of knowledge for new environments and changed conditions. We learn to be creative even if we are born with creative gifts and faculties. Imitative practice transforms our merely derivative designs and expressions into awesome originality and innovation.

Creativity, then, is the ability of human faculties to connect disparate ideas, designs, and concepts to solve actual problems, inspire awe, heighten the emotions and passions, or illuminate the complex realities of everyday experience through artistic and aesthetic expression. The most creative among us achieve their brilliance through rigorous training and a cultivated association with some master or teacher who imparts exceptional techniques and intuitions to the pupil or apprentice; every great teacher was a student once.

Or so I believe, having thought the matter through. It may be that I know no more about creativity than I do about grass. But I know, deeply and profoundly, that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, and for that I am infinitely and earnestly grateful.

 

Notes:

[1] Paul Elmore More, The Essential Paul Elmer More (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1972), p. 55.

[2] Genesis 8:21.

[3] Genesis 11:5-7.

[4] Psalm 8:4-5.

[5] 2 Peter 1:4.

[6] 1 Corinthians 2:16.

[7] 1 Corinthians 6: 2-3.

[8] Psalm 8:4-5.

[9] Genesis 9:6.

[10] Genesis 28.

[11] Isaiah 55:9.

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John William Corrington on the Mystery of Writing

In Academia, American History, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Books, Conservatism, Creative Writing, Creativity, Essays, History, Humanities, John William Corrington, liberal arts, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Scholarship, Southern History, Southern Literature, The South, Writing on September 19, 2018 at 6:45 am

In 1985, John William Corrington delivered a lecture (“The Mystery of Writing”) at the Northwest Louisiana Writer’s Conference in Shreveport, Louisiana, his hometown. The lecture is part memoir, part commentary on writing as a craft.

Corrington explained in his lecture that he wanted to be a musician before he wanted to be a writer. He discusses his education at Centenary College and the state of popular literature at the time. He explains that he left academia because he felt disenfranchised politically in the academy, thus causing him to enter law school.

The lecture demonstrates that Corrington saw himself as a Southern author who bemoaned the state of current popular writing. He notes how his popular writing for film and television earned him money though his literary writing—novels and poetry—was not profitable.

Although he wrote for film and television, Corrington disdained those media forms and felt they did not challenge viewers intellectually, at least not in the way that literature challenged readers.

Corrington’s conservatism is evident in his emphasis on a discernible literary tradition and his disgust for the technologies that made possible his own career. His advice for his audience is that they write about what they know, just as he writes about the South; therefore, he advises his audience not to become professional writers, but to find other employment as a source for writing. His discussion of good writing as an ongoing investigation of perennial themes calls to mind the controversial notion of the literary canon as developed by Harold Bloom, Allan Bloom, John Ellis, and E. D. Hirsch.

“The Mystery of Writing” has been printed in my recent edition of Corrington’s work, which is available for purchase by clicking on the image below:

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Interview with Cyrus Webb Regarding “Of Bees and Boys”

In Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Books, Creative Writing, Creativity, Essays, Humanities, Literature, Southern Literature on November 22, 2017 at 6:45 am

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Redeeming the Debauched Falstaff

In Academia, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Books, Britain, British Literature, Creativity, Fiction, Humanities, liberal arts, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Philosophy, Shakespeare, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on November 15, 2017 at 6:45 am

This review originally appeared here in The American Conservative. 

In The Daemon Knows, published in 2015, the heroic, boundless Harold Bloom claimed to have one more book left in him. If his contract with Simon & Schuster is any indication, he has more work than that to complete. The effusive 86-year-old has agreed to produce a sequence of five books on Shakespearean personalities, presumably those with whom he’s most enamored.

The first, recently released, is Falstaff: Give Me Life, which has been called an “extended essay” but reads more like 21 ponderous essay-fragments, as though Bloom has compiled his notes and reflections over the years.

The result is a solemn, exhilarating meditation on Sir John Falstaff, the cheerful, slovenly, degenerate knight whose unwavering and ultimately self-destructive loyalty to Henry of Monmouth, or Prince Hal, his companion in William Shakespeare’s Henry trilogy (“the Henriad”), redeems his otherwise debauched character.

Except Bloom doesn’t see the punning, name-calling Falstaff that way. He exalts this portly, subversive figure as the charming master of deception and rogue scheming, and more importantly as a courageous vitalist “unmatched in all of Western imaginative literature.” Bloom’s astounding reverence for this clever, corrupting, calculating, mischievous Bacchanalian—whose life-affirming zest is as delightful as it is disconcerting—reveals he’s capable of the same kind of strategic indulgence that animates his transgressive subject.

His opening lines establish an affectionate, worshipful tone: “I fell in love with Sir John Falstaff when I was a boy of twelve, almost seventy-five years ago. A rather plump and melancholy youth, I turned to him out of need, because I was lonely. Finding myself in him liberated me from a debilitating self-consciousness.”

This isn’t academic prose. Bloom doesn’t write scholarship in the sense in which English professors, who chase tenure and peer approval, understand that term. Could you imagine a graduate student in literature showing up at the Modern Language Association’s annual convention and pronouncing from behind a podium that “Falstaff wants us to love him”? Or that Falstaff “is the mortal god of our vitalism and of our capacity for joyous play of every kind”? That would end a career before it began.

To hold Bloom to professional academic standards is fundamentally to misunderstand the man. His criticism is art unto itself; it’s genre-defying literature: part memoir, part fiction, part psychoanalysis. He’s a character of his own creation, as imaginary as Falstaff, and yet real and alive. In his psyche, the mysteries of which he plumbs with Freudian apprehension, Falstaff, too, is alive—and more than that, he’s a deified “embassy of life.” Bloom calls him the “greatest wit in literature,” whose vices “are perfectly open and cheerfully self-acknowledged.”

Immediately objections spring to mind: Didn’t Falstaff take bribes from competent soldiers who wished to avoid battle, thereby dooming his innocent, rag-tag band of unready troops? Doesn’t this bawdy gambler fake his own death to avoid injury and then seek credit for Hal’s slaying of Hotspur? Isn’t he a compulsive liar and self-serving fabricator? Rather than earn his keep, doesn’t he mooch off borrowed and stolen money while fraternizing with lowly criminals in disreputable taverns? Doesn’t he find stealing entertaining? Doesn’t he fail miserably in his attempt to seduce married women? Doesn’t he thrive in the seedy underbelly of impolite society?

No matter. The venerating and visionary Bloom sees Falstaff’s flaws as part of his appeal. Falstaff, prefiguring Nietzsche and Sartre, stands outside ethical jurisdiction as the lovable übermensch, the seductive sum of his own deliberate actions and unbridled agency in a world without God. Falstaffianism can be reduced to an abrupt imperative: “do not moralize.” These are Bloom’s italics, emphasizing, perhaps, the enthusiasm with which Falstaff rebuffs normative codes and basic standards of decency, vivaciously embracing the self—the subjective, knowing, self-aware “I” that wills a future into being—with laughter and existential rapture.

Kate Havard argues in Commentary that “Bloom must actually reckon with the sorts of things Falstaff does that would seem monstrous in real life.” I’m not sure about this mandate. Everyone is susceptible to wickedness. We’re fallible. Yet the magnitude of our evil acts is proportionate only to our capacity and will for achieving them. Greater power over others has the potential to increase the enormity of our chosen wrongs. Two hearts, equally blameworthy, can enact varying degrees of harm. With our meanness and malevolence, depravity and double-dealing, we’re all like Falstaff at some instant, even if we “cannot say that we are Falstaff’’ (my italics this time) because Falstaff cannot be universal—he’s too shrewd, raucous, and riotously convivial to be an archetype.

That we haven’t occasioned rank violence or mass damage is only evidence of our own powerlessness to do so in our moment of darkness. Our minds have contemplated horrors that our bodies never brought to bear. Knowing this, one begins to appreciate Bloom’s melancholy voice in such an adoring account. “Falstaff is no everyman,” he intones, “[b]ut all of us, whatever our age or gender, participate in him.” This truth, if it is one, doesn’t excuse Falstaff; rather it makes his decisions disturbingly recognizable.

Falstaff stands for absolute freedom, challenging dogmatic pieties even as he uses them to his advantage. He signals human choice and authenticity, but he’s elusive and multifaceted. “There is no single Falstaff,” Bloom submits. “In my youth and middle years I thought I knew Falstaff. That Falstaff has vanished from me. The better I know Sir John the less I know him. He has become one of the lost vehemences my midnights hold.”

This tragicomic Falstaff is so complex and ambiguous that he undermines expectations, avoids patterned behavior, and escapes simple explanation. “Falstaff is as bewildering as Hamlet, as infinitely varied as Cleopatra,” says Bloom. “He can be apprehended but never fully comprehended. There is no end to Falstaff. His matrix is freedom but he dies for love.”

Falstaff is a more cunning and charismatic version of Chaucer’s drunkenly crass miller, whose hilarious tale of casual adultery lacks the stark intentionality that makes Falstaff so treacherously in control. He’s like a flatulent Santa Claus, without the meekness or mildness of Christian self-denial. He is, in a word, exuberant, and as Bloom opines, “Exuberance in itself is a shadowy virtue and can be dangerous to the self and to others, but in Falstaff it generates more life.”

Bloom commendably acknowledges the charges leveled against him: “I am weary of being accused of sentimentalizing Falstaff.” He says he’s “been chided for sentimentality when I observe Falstaff betrays and harms no one,” and he pleads with us to enjoy Shakespeare’s rendering of the Fat Knight, adding, “Do not moralize.” The point is not to elicit agreement but to move you emotionally, although his expressive mode is less sentimental than it is spiritual or mystical. He has a jovial appetite for living, thinking, and loving that resembles Falstaff’s in its sheer capaciousness—hence his aside that he’s a “lifelong Falstaffian.”

The Book of Genesis asserts that God made man in his image. One wonders whether Bloom’s ecstatic Bardolatry—he once called Shakespeare “a mortal god”—leads to a different but related conclusion: that Shakespeare, as God, created Bloom in Falstaff’s image. Although age has thinned his once corpulent physique, Bloom is, at times, the boastful embodiment of the bombastic, iconoclastic genius (Sir John) whose chief weakness is his fondness and devotion. At other times, he’s a prophetic seer haunted by the daemon, devoid of merry wit, laughter, or redemptive charm and enthused by ineffable forces to cry out with beautiful despair and angst. His gusto seems ever-present, as does his displayed interiority.

Yet there is no single Bloom. You may think you know him, but then he vanishes as a lost vehemence.

“He has never abandoned me for three-quarters of a century,” Bloom muses of Falstaff, “and I trust will be with me until the end. The true and perfect image of life abides with him: robustly, unforgettably, forever. He exposes what is counterfeit in me and in all others.” Perhaps that’s why Falstaff is so threatening: he lays bare that manipulative, liberated part of ourselves that we don’t acknowledge or even fathom, that’s alienated and estranged from other people, accessible only to the “I myself”—the only thing we know that we know.

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Bob Higgs, the Man with a Smart Card

In Creativity, Economics, Law, Politics, Science on October 11, 2017 at 6:45 am

A different version of this article appeared here in the Library of Law and Liberty.

The U.S. healthcare industry is notoriously inefficient and troublesomely massive. It’s also wealthy and getting wealthier and more powerful as medical costs have exceeded, by some estimates, $10,000 per person.

What’s to be done?

Back in 2005, a group of healthcare experts asked, in a RAND Corporation study, whether electronic medical-record systems could transform healthcare by reducing costs and increasing efficiency. The answer, in short, was: it depends.

Although systematizing electronic medical records could save over $81 billion per year, these potential savings would be realized, the study concluded, only if healthcare in the United States integrated new technologies to allow for the flow of medical data between the patient and relevant parties such as doctors, hospitals, or insurers. Non-standardized record systems would result, by contrast, in inconsistent, inefficient, and incomplete data exchanges that could increase rather than decrease costs.

RAND Corporation revisited the issue in 2013, finding that healthcare expenditures had grown by $800 million since 2005 in part because systems of electronic medical records remained non-standardized. “We believe that the original promise of health IT can be met,” wrote Arthur L. Kellermann and Spencer S. Jones, the authors of the study, “if the systems are redesigned to address these flaws by creating more-standardized systems that are easier to use, are truly interoperable, and afford patients more access to and control over their health data.”

Healthcare in the United States is constitutionally fragmented: Not only does the industry consist of various entities, from doctors and hospitals and insurance providers to commercial suppliers of devices, goods, and services, but also the pricing of medical services is unreliable and unpredictable in part because the country is so large and the industry subject to different regulations from state to state.

Information integration could go a long way towards cutting medical costs and increasing medical savings. For example, it could reduce waste resulting from misdiagnoses, repetitive procedures, erroneous prescriptions, and duplicate testing and imaging.

What if there were a simple solution for this waste?

One entrepreneur believes he’s found the technology to revolutionize the way healthcare records are shared and maintained through Health Information Exchange (HIE).

Robert E. Higgs is the founder of ICUcare, a company that aims to improve technologies in the fields of telemedicine and electronic health records. He has invented a “smart” health card that can contain a patient’s complete medical history, which is stored in a cloud. His vision is that patients own their personalized smart cards, which they can voluntarily submit to healthcare providers and institutions for cheaper and more efficient services. Data on the card are easily stored and updated and exchanged only with the patient’s consent; thus, in the case of emergency, the patient’s medical records can be readily accessed and quickly reviewed.

There remains, sadly, a felt need to transition the healthcare industry from paper to electronic records. The smart card meets this need, but it does much more. It tracks your billing history, reconciles erroneous payment information, protects against fraud and identity-theft, and serves as a conveniently portable device.

One would expect such a card to have been in circulation by now, given the extensive government investment in HIEs. President George W. Bush, for example, issued an executive order in 2004 to create the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHS) designed to advance technology and innovation pertaining to the exchange of healthcare information. This office created eHealth Exchange, a coalition of states, federal agencies, hospitals, medical groups, pharmacies, and other such entities that’s now run by the Sequoia Project.

But the federal government and the public-private partnerships it has fostered have been unable to produce a smart card that matches Higgs’s in capability and functionality. And even if they had, government retention of sensitive medical data would, among other things, raise privacy concerns that voluntary private transactions and coordination would alleviate.

Moreover, the many spinoff organizations emanating from the ONC and DHS have only crowded the field with swollen, inefficient government and quasi-government structures and programs. Rather than helping the situation, these putative “solutions” have slowed down innovators like Higgs, forcing them to deal with politicians and bureaucrats rather than patients and hospitals.

Having heard about Higgs’s curious smart card through a friend, I decided to reach out to him to find out more. I asked him, first, about privacy implications, namely whether the smart card could increase incidents of non-consensual data transfers and disclosures.

The smart card, he said, “never sends data to the care provider—it brings the care provider to the data.” He explained that data on the smart card are encrypted using the same standards as those used by the Department of Defense for common-access cards.

“We used Advanced Encryption Standard 265, or AES-256,” he said, “the highest standardized encryption specification that’s used worldwide by entities as diverse as corporations and the U.S. government. The key size of 256 bits means that the key, which turns encrypted data into unencrypted data, is a string of 256 ones or zeros.”

I admitted that I didn’t fully understand.

“Put it this way,” he said. “The research I’ve read indicates that each character has two possibilities—one or zero—for which there are 2,256 possible combinations. If 50% of the possibilities must be exhausted to determine the correct key, then you need to guess 2,255 of them [to hack the encryption].”

Pressed about how long it would take to test all possible keys to break the encryption, Higgs, parroting a claim I’ve heard used to describe bitcoin, said, “The universe itself has existed for 14 billion years. It would take something like 1.5770813e18 longer than our universe’s full age to exhaust just half of the key-space of our encryption.”

An attempt to verify Higgs’s figures turned up a plethora of studies and blog posts about encryption and decryption, bitcoin, hacking, and computer engineering (the calculation appearing on many blogs and tech sites is ~6.7e40, which equals 235,385,265,247,008,100, which is multiplied by 6.7 to yield the 1.5770813e18 number that Higgs supplied).

These calculations can be confusing, but the point Higgs wanted to drive home is that the smart card reverses the current power imbalance: today corporations and governments store medical records that patients often can’t access or don’t know about; the smart card, however, empowers patients to store their own records that they may voluntarily release to corporations and governments. The smart card, in other words, returns agency to the consumer whose data is at stake.

It would also, Higgs alleges, reduce rates of healthcare fraud. According to estimates by the National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association, the United States loses tens of billions of dollars every year due to healthcare fraud. Canada, Germany, and France have each instituted some form of a smart card to successfully cut back on fraud.

A company called Cerner has just landed a deal with the Department of Veterans Affairs (the VA) to implement an electronic health records system. The move away from the VA’s Vista system to Cerner’s electronic system suggests that at least some government officials are aware of the need to adopt interoperable and integrated measures of retaining and sharing medical records. The VA will implement the same electronic health record system used by the DOD.

So far as I can tell, however, Cerner has not created a smart card like Higgs’s. I reached out to Adam Lee, a senior communications partner at Cerner, to ask about smart cards and Cerner’s hopes and plans with the VA. Lee referred me to this press release about Cerner’s work with the VA but did not discuss smart cards.

Talking to Higgs is like talking to a computer: more engineer than salesman, he’s strikingly intelligent but has difficulty getting through to politicians. He’s monotone and meticulous, frank and unexcitable. He’s fast with facts and figures and savvy with technology, but the average politician wants to know primarily whether the smart card appeals to constituents and only secondarily whether it’s operable and efficient.

Higgs grew emotional during our phone call, however, as he told me the story of his wife, who underwent a routine procedure that went wrong. He claimed that, during this standard operation, errors were made that could have been avoided had her doctors possessed his wife’s proper medical records. She’s been subjected to numerous tests throughout her illness, he said, only to have them redone when visiting a new facility or specialist because of an inability to simply retrieve her medical history. She remains in bad shape, living at home with hired assistance.

This unfortunate situation has motivated Higgs to seek answers to save others from similar mistakes in similar circumstances.

If Higgs’s smart card is so great, you might ask, why hasn’t it been adopted? Why haven’t I heard of it? Why doesn’t it circulate widely? Why aren’t hospitals jumping at the opportunity to use it?

The answer, according to Higgs, is simple: the healthcare industry doesn’t want you to know about his smart card because it doesn’t want to reduce costs. It’s full of people getting rich off inefficiency and artificially high prices. Lobbyists for the healthcare industry have taken advantage of the fear and apathy of politicians to ensure that technological progress is delayed or stymied.

Thus, Higgs describes his job in terms of David versus Goliath.

There are numerous ideas about how to trim healthcare spending; Higgs’s smart card is not the exclusive remedy or sole fix. But it’s an encouraging development. Healthcare spending makes up about 17.8% of the nation’s economy, according to an actuary report by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. And it shows no signs of decreasing. This trend is unsustainable; something must be done—and undone.

We could use more men like Higgs and less government to push us in the right direction before it’s too late.

 

 

 

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The American Nietzsche? Fate and Power in Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s Pragmatism

In America, American History, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Creativity, Emerson, Essays, History, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Law-and-Literature, liberal arts, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Philosophy, Pragmatism, Rhetoric, Scholarship, Western Philosophy on February 15, 2017 at 6:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

Seth Vannatta of Morgan State University recently coauthored a piece with me on Friedrich Nietzsche’s influence on U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.  The piece appeared in the fall 2016 issue of UMKC Law Review.

Richard Posner is one of the few legal minds to have noticed the affinity between the philosophies of Holmes and Nietzsche. Dr. Vannatta and I hope to expand the circles of interest in this topic.

Our article demonstrates how Holmes’s pragmatism both comports with and departs from Nietzsche’s existentialism. Holmes’s pragmatism shares with Nietzsche’s existentialism a commitment to skepticism, perspectivalism, experiential knowledge, and aesthetics, as well as an abiding awareness of the problematic nature of truth and the fallibility of the human mind.

We suggest that Holmes was familiar with Nietzsche’s writings and that the two thinkers turned away from Christian ethics and glorified the life struggle in distinctly evolutionary terms. Both men celebrated the individual capacity to exercise the will for purposes of personal autonomy, greatness, and creative or aesthetic achievement. Nietzsche, however, did not share Holmes’s belief in the pragmatic potential of meliorism, which marks the distinction between their notions of fate.

The thinking of Nietzsche and Holmes converges in the person of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a manifest influence on both Holmes and Nietzsche and whose thinking on fate and power, inflected as it is by aesthetic pragmatism, shapes our understanding not only of Holmes and Nietzsche in isolation but also of Holmes and Nietzsche as paired, ambitious philosophers concerned about the role of fate and power in human activity.

The article is available for download here in the SSRN database for those who are interested in reading more about this curious relationship between two intellectuals whose ideas shaped society during the 20th century.