bridey murphy or mesmerize

Accidentally, I discovered a pamphlet—a book, really, but there was such a paucity of substance as to make modern de-sophisticates a little dismissive, on the subject of self-hypnosis from the early 1960s.
At times the tone of the discipline took on this familiar, yet unheard for these disciplines for me, which seemed to have been something akin to a huge craze, apologetic, open and self-effacing tone of gimmicky schemes, modern touts for exercise equipment and miracle diets. Still curious, I read on, knowing that such disdain was exactly what the bulk of the argument warned about: people are simply more accustomed to failure than success and suggestible to a fault, and stressed the safety of auto-hypnosis, dispelling apparently equally stern warnings against enthusiastic self-treatment. Like all forms of meditation, and prayer even, these techniques seem far from the pseudo-science of quack tonics or séance sessions, and at worse a placebo, and though discipline and patience is never an appealing delivery system, and likely a sort of psychic flexibility that can work in surprising ways—unexpected too since one’s own faulty beliefs are trying to remedy themselves.
Personally, I am not a stranger to the passing yet memorable thrill that’s called self-help and though I can’t always keep up some mantras, no matter how good and sensible the advice, I was convinced when despite my concentration on apparent vanities, even with unrealistic expectations but allowable since they were daily companions for quite some time, bigger and more defining anxieties instead surfaced and allowed themselves, I felt, to be redressed. That was pretty keen. In the end, I suppose, I wonder why such a fad was a fad and then was forgot and what sort of turf battle occurred to end this study’s popularity.

manager of mirth or as you like it

The Bard, William Shakespeare, had such a circumspect command of English grammar (and other languages besides) as to be able to depart significantly from convention and intersperse his plays with what is regarded now as natural and essential parts of speech but created or rather committed to paper transformations of verbs in to noun counterparts and vice-versa and coined the antithesis for many words. The action to manage was in common parlance but not so a manager; there was hearten but no dishearten, the same for inaudible—not to mention inventive and intuitive words for the nonce, like swagger and belongings. One convention Shakespeare was unable to buck, however, was the Elizabethan proscription again having women on the stage and all roles were played by male actors. Often in the stage directions, one can find the abbreviation, “Dr.A.G.,” dressed as a girl, in other words, when these characters were cued. It was not until the latter half of the nineteenth century that the term drag (and the counterpart for a cross-dressing female, drab—dressed as a boy) appeared again in print, but maybe the idea can be traced by to the playwright as well.

1993 or janet reno, meter-maid

There was recently an afternoon happy-hour poll on Mental Floss that invited readers to participate in a rather nebulous exercise, which really turned into some provocative and poignant searching for me.
 The question posed asked what people were doing twenty years ago on that particular day, and though that date registered nothing particularly memorable, like the days the Kennedys were shot, the moon-landing or 9/11, I do have a few resources, like diaries than reach back nearly that far and watching the daily addendum to the Tagesschau (the nightly national news report) that broadcasts (sometimes with extensive warning labels) the installment from two decades ago. In the early part of 1993, William Jefferson Clinton was inaugurated as president of the United States, poet and statesman Václav Havel became the president of the young Czech Republic, it was the dread beginning of nostalgic adaptations first with the Beverly Hillbillies and The Fugitive, there was the first World Trade Center bombings occurred, the cable channel Comedy Central premiered (I really, really wish-a I’d never heard of Amy Fisher—Mohammed Salameh, Mohammed salaam, I was only the driver, I didn’t build that bomb) , and the now redundant bureau of the US ATF (alcohol, tobacco and firearms) began a fifty-one day stand-off at the Branch-Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, Iraqi authorities refuse NATO weapons-inspectors access, fractures began to appear in Yugoslavia, the Red Army Faction was still active in a united Germany, the trials of the Rodney King beatings began, and Stephen Hawking published A Brief History of Time.
Later in the year, there was a lot more.  I couldn’t say definitively how a certain day reverberated for me personally, but the notion of taking time to review one’s life from the perspective of two decades or just two years on (everyone probably has their modern history well-documented though all time is full) is something powerful and perhaps an archive that should be sought out.

the bronx is up and the battery’s down

To celebrate the centennial of New York City’s Grand Central Station, which at the commission of the Vanderbilt family, first opened its doors at midnight tonight (or possibly, one minute of, so as to not technically fall on the next day), The Daily Beast presents an interesting collection of one hundred facts, which makes for a great scavenger hunt of trivia, no matter how far one is away from this gorgeous and storied terminus.