Notabilia

Pinfeathers

There are some things you can’t show, things you can’t share once you’ve seen them, so you turn them into a poem, and you can barely do that. Because they happened in the state you’re from. Because they happened in the state mental hospital where your mother worked. Because they happened while everyone looked away. Because we were not much better here in the United States than the Nazis were where those sent to mental hospitals were concerned.

Because in a day room in Taft, Oklahoma, we let a little boy sit wet with his own excrement or urine or blood or all three, a strip of white cloth cinching his arms to his neck. Because he’s not the only boy or the only man in the photo. Because this is what we did to human beings in the 1940s but also now or again or now and again with a new face, a new flavor, a new reason, from a new hatred, a new greed, a new form of consciouslessness.

What did I leave out? That the boy was Black. Everyone in the photo was Black. This was at the State Hospital for the Negro Insane. That’s what they called it. Are you sick yet? Do you want to turn away? You already have, from all of us, as the cages are built in Florida, as we find new reasons to cage. Will PETA come to the rescue? People are animals, too, and being treated worse than animals.

People who cage people are animals in a different sense of the word. They should start an organization called People for the Obliteration of People. POP for short. It has a ring to it. It’s weaponized.

Here, drink from this metal cup. Here, sit on this wooden bench. Here, look through this barred window for the rest of your life. Here, here. Here, here.

The photos I’m looking at include one of the back ward at the hospital where my mother worked in Norman, Oklahoma. These are not easy images to see, but this history matters. What’s been happening to people like me has been happening to people like me for a long time. This country could learn a lot from this history as its pinfeathers break our democracy’s skin.

The Oklahoma History Most Oklahomans Never Learned

On the desegregation of American psychiatric institutions and structural racism in American psychiatry. Link in comments.

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Oklahoma,1964: Taft State Hospital was an all-Black facility, with an all-Black staff, located in an all-Black town. In 1940, its 738 patients were cared for by three psychiatrists (including the superintendent), three nurses, and an unknown number of direct care staff, who apparently all lived in one room. In 1949, Oklahoma consolidated the state hospital with the Institute for Colored Blind, Deaf, and Orphans and the Training School for Negro Girls, creating one large facility for Blacks with all manner of clinical needs. Oklahoma desegregated its public facilities in 1964. Rather than admit white patients to its state hospital for Black patients, as most of the other states would do, Oklahoma transferred the Black patients to its two other (all white) state hospitals. Taft was closed in 1970 and converted into a correctional facility, thus confounding in the public’s mind people with mental illness and criminals. (Some state hospitals have converted some of their units into correctional facilities, leading some people to think that psychiatric patients are being held behind multi-layered, barbed wire, razor-topped fences.)

Consciousness and the Sonnet

In The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness, and the Invention of the Sonnet, Paul Oppenheimer argues that … the invention of the sonnet must itself be considered symptomatic of the slowly developing state of mind that we designate by the term “Renaissance.” The sonnet is so much more than a form. It marked a shift in Western thought, and what it left out is as important as what it ushered in. That’s what makes it alive and allows us to push up against its constraints. We can both live freely inside its walls and break its walls down to live free. It ain’t no pantoum, baby. That’s for sure. The sonnet exists on a whole other level.

On Plagiarism

In this piece on plagiarism, the author argues that it’s not a behavior caused by mental illness. I’ve been trying to understand the psychology behind plagiarism because a poet was recently identified as having plagiarized a number of poems that were published in literary journals, placed in or won contests, and may have been included in a forthcoming collection. Excerpt below.

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As a psychiatrist, I do not believe primary mental illnesses (aside from the aforementioned personality disorders) cause plagiarism. Plagiarism involves an internally logical thought process, a steady hand carefully putting together portions of copied information in a linear fashion; the product pretends to be an original completed written piece. Plagiarism is difficult to detect without someone directly pointing out the absent attributions and copied words.

It seems atypical to me for this deliberate, planned, coherent act of writing to be associated with the thought disorder and flight of ideas and ramblings of someone in the throes of acute delusional psychosis or florid mania. It is also atypical of the creativity and originality well-known to be associated with some people with mood disorders (including famous artists and writers), who tend to have no trouble coming up with their own ideas and material, and if anything, seem the least likely types to merely copy someone else’s work.

[Do Not Read]

I woke up at 2:34 a.m. when the nearly unbearable headache I developed two days ago turned into an unbearable headache.

[Do not keep reading this. It is not interesting.]

The pain is spreading down my back now, too. I know there are bigger problems in the world, but this is my immediate problem. Tylenol does nothing for this pain. Massage, creams, ice. Nothing. Meditation nothing. Distraction nothing. Writing nothing. Sleeping nothing.

[Seriously, why are you still reading this?]

It actually gets worse with sleep, this pain, hence my no longer being able to sleep. I feel like my head weighs too much. I need flying buttresses or similar architecture to help hold it up.

[Here comes a not-so big insight.]

Oh, this is from my posture when I use my phone. I’m using my phone right now. I’m making things worse. I literally need to shape up.

[I warned you about how this boring post was going to be boring.]

I don’t wanna sit up straight. I love my bad posture. I love my phone. So pretty. So bright. Thank you for coming to my Ted Whine. It’s like a Ted Talk only whiny.

The Shame of the States

Public [psychiatric] hospitals became overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of patients. In the 1950s, there were only 26 U.S. cities whose population exceeded the aggregate population of public psychiatric institutions. The two largest hospitals each had a census that exceeded 16,000 patients. Never able to keep up with the needs of their patients, the hospitals went from awful to appalling when their workforce—from the farmer to the doctor—was pulled away to meet the manpower demands of World War II. The population at large learned of the horrors of their public psychiatric hospitals, tragedies long hidden away, through exposés such as The Snake Pit, Mary Jane Ward’s fictionalized account of her hospitalization at Rockland State Hospital (book, 1946; movie 1948); author Albert Q. Maisel’s article in Life magazine (1946) accompanied by some of the most painful pictures the American public had ever seen from Pennsylvania’s Byberry and Ohio’s Cleveland state hospitals; and The Shame of the States (1948), New York Post reporter Albert Deutsch’s opus based on research from 1944 to 1947.

Blood Work

I’m basking in the afterglow of running the gauntlet of angry Utahns waiting to have their blood work done at the draw station when none of the phlebotomists managed to report to work, so another staff member who knows phlebotomy had to step in, even though that’s not her job.

The people in that waiting room were hungry because these are fasting tests. They were sick and old and impatient. They had things to do or nothing to do that they’d rather do elsewhere than at the draw station.

One had a repairman coming. Another needed to get back to his morning gardening. A third was assessing the situation from a systems-theory perspective. Things weren’t run like this when he worked in IT for military hospitals, he told me.

A fourth tried to jump the line and complained bitterly when he was told he couldn’t do that. A fifth ran through the halls with blood dripping from her arm where the needle had been inserted for the draw.

And then there was my favorite, an octogenarian who turned to her husband and shouted, “Well, this is going to take forFUCKINGever” loud enough for everyone waiting to hear.

Also, even with all the peeing I do day in and day out, there’s one time I can’t pee. It’s when someone tells me I need to provide a urine sample and hands me a clear plastic cup.

One Hundred Ninety-Seven Words and Phrases Being Dumpted by Donald Trump

accessible activism activists advocacy advocate advocates affirming care all-inclusive allyship anti-racism antiracist assigned at birth assigned female at birth assigned male at birth at risk barrier barriers belong bias biased biased toward biases biases towards biologically female biologically male BIPOC Black breastfeed + people breastfeed + person chestfeed + people chestfeed + person clean energy climate crisis climate science commercial sex worker community diversity community equity confirmation bias cultural competence cultural differences cultural heritage cultural sensitivity culturally appropriate culturally responsive DEI DEIA DEIAB DEIJ disabilities disability discriminated discrimination discriminatory disparity diverse diverse backgrounds diverse communities diverse community diverse group diverse groups diversified diversify diversifying diversity enhance the diversity enhancing diversity environmental quality equal opportunity equality equitable equitableness equity ethnicity excluded exclusion expression female females feminism fostering inclusivity GBV gender gender based gender based violence gender diversity gender identity gender ideology gender-affirming care genders Gulf of Mexico hate speech health disparity health equity hispanic minority historically identity immigrants implicit bias implicit biases inclusion inclusive inclusive leadership inclusiveness inclusivity increase diversity increase the diversity indigenous community inequalities inequality inequitable inequities inequity injustice institutional intersectional intersectionality key groups key people key populations Latinx LGBT LGBTQ marginalize marginalized men who have sex with men mental health minorities minority most risk MSM multicultural Mx Native American non-binary nonbinary oppression oppressive orientation people + uterus people-centered care person-centered person-centered care polarization political pollution pregnant people pregnant person pregnant persons prejudice privilege privileges promote diversity promoting diversity pronoun pronouns prostitute race race and ethnicity racial racial diversity racial identity racial inequality racial justice racially racism segregation sense of belonging sex sexual preferences sexuality social justice sociocultural socioeconomic status stereotype stereotypes systemic systemically they/them trans transgender transsexual trauma traumatic tribal unconscious bias underappreciated underprivileged underrepresentation underrepresented underserved undervalued victim victims vulnerable populations women women and underrepresented

Memory Presists

I’m toying with the idea that people are beings who live and die every moment, and any sense of continuity between moments is similar to the way our eyes smooth out what we see through a combination of physical and perceptual processes, such as saccades.

Memory persists to some degree between these deaths and births, though imperfectly and sometimes as complete fabrications that allow this or that narrative to earn its wings so it can soar across momentary lifetimes in order to either free us or whisk us away to ruin.

I don’t mean bodily birth or bodily death. I mean birth and death of self and of the worlds available to the self at any given time.

I don’t expect anyone other than Matt Jasper to understand this or see anything of value in it. What this means, for me, is that I can only take people as they are in the moment—a moment that’s passed before I can even perceive it. It’s the best I can do.

We are flame and ash, flame and ash. Who we are today is not who we were yesterday or who we will be tomorrow. These are fictions. Even time is a fiction.

You are a person doing a thing in a place. I’ll meet you there to the best of my ability. Tomorrow, same. The day after that, same.

Is this nonsense? Maybe. Certainly. What isn’t.

Frisson

Yesterday, as an associate at the Washington County Library scanned each poetry collection I’d put on hold and laid them one by one in front of me in an ever-growing stack, I got all-over body chills. This happened not once, but each time a collection was added to the stack and I saw the author and title upside down, the cover design, the colors, the typography, the book’s size and thickness, and the way they each looked—as if they’d never been opened.

I could be their first reader, I thought, chills continuing to wash over my skin. The first to touch their pages, not just their covers. The first to want to know what they had to say as opposed to simply cataloging them or shelving them or facing them when it was time to tidy up the stacks.

I’m getting chills again just writing this. I knew I loved books, but I had no idea until yesterday how much poetry curated in the form of a printed collection could affect me.