Running on Empty in the Big City: Work and Depression in the Shadows of New York City

ART REVIEW

ART REVIEW; Views of a Yiddish Past Spring Comically to Life

By GRACE GLUECK

Published: September 14, 2001

Meet Julius Knipl, real estate photographer, distinguished by his fedora, fine-line mustache and healthy length of nose. Living in a time warp on a rich diet of nostalgia, he is the brainchild of Ben Katchor, a cartoonist who has peopled an imaginary world with characters from a mid-20th-century Yiddish past that he manages to make vividly present.

In Knipl's universe, wholesale-calendar salesmen, importers of folding rain bonnets, stagers of going-out-of-business sales, manure futures brokers and other small-business men are caught up in the sights, scents and sounds of low-end urban life.

They spend hours riding escalators for the thrill of it, attend canned-food tastings at neighborhood groceries, catch their faces reflected in the sheen of egg-washed Danish pastries and give home musicales based on the sounds emitted by faulty radiators. One man, Emmanuel Chirrup, a skidproof-slipper tycoon, has replicated the squalid apartment of his parents at the time of his birth, down to the aroma of reheated pot roast.

Knipl (the name means a small treasure or nest egg in Yiddish) and other Katchor characters strut their stuff in ''Ben Katchor: Picture-Stories,'' a display at the Jewish Museum of the cartoon strips and drawings created by Mr. Katchor since 1988 for The Village Voice, The New York Press, The Forward and the design magazine Metropolis.

There are also excerpts from his comic-strip novel ''The Jew of New York'' and color drawings for his opera, ''The Carbon Copy Building,'' which won an Obie award when it was staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1999.

What's artful about these drawings -- mostly in black and white, with gray ink wash -- is their evocation of New York's demoniacal energy, the look of its down-at-the-heels neighborhoods and storefront facades, and the ethnic faces that Mr. Katchor has evolved from perusal of books like ''Lexicon of the Jewish Theater,'' published in 1931, with its illustrated biographies of actors and actresses.

Then, too, there is the zaniness of his characters' ruminations, like Knipl's poetic inventory of the remains of dinner with friends at the Hylozoic Restaurant: ''a piece of brisket lost in the shadow of a dessert plate; a wedge of sour tomato reflected in a pool of cole slaw dressing.'' And his subway reminiscences: of chocolate-vending machines, subterranean luncheonettes and track workers reading soft-bound leather books.

Born in 1951 in Brooklyn, Mr. Katchor grew up on comic strips, and in his teens began publishing his own on a mimeograph machine. In the 1980's, he contributed to the underground comics magazine Raw, and in 1988 he began the Knipl strip for The New York Press. Obsessed with urban life, he says in a filmed interview shown at the exhibition that for him ''every inch of pavement is a whole new world of activity.''

One of his meatier creations is ''The Jew of New York'' (1992-93), a ''historical romance'' originally done as a serial for The Forward. It takes off from the real-life effort of a 19th-century visionary, Mordechai Noah, to create a Jewish state on an island in the Niagara River in western New York State.

But the real story here is the peripatetic adventures of the hero -- Nathan Kishon, a slaughterhouse worker dismissed for mixing kosher with nonkosher animal tongues -- among hustlers of beaver pelts, importers of mother-of-pearl buttons, peddlers of soil from the Holy Land, would-be carbonators of Lake Erie water and Indians passing as Jews.

Like the rest of Mr. Katchor's work, the tale is told through vivacious, verbose cartoon strips and wanders off in many directions. It ends with a gray but graphic fire, ignited by an apparatus rigged to generate the smell of pickled herring at a theater presenting ''The Jew of New York,'' a play about the life of Mordechai Noah.

But Mr. Katchor's sagas never actually end, even when they come to a halt. You know they will regenerate in other strips, like ''Hotel and Farm'' (named for Katchor's Hotel and Farm in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., operated by his father in the 1930's), which currently appears in The Forward. Its action switches back and forth between rural and urban life, with farms that now cater to the canned- and frozen-food markets, and seedy hotels peopled by characters of varied virtue.

Given the visual challenge of a show devoted largely to black-and-white comic strips that demand a good deal of close-up reading, the museum has done a creditable presentation. The display has been enlivened with artfully fabricated artifacts, like the desiccated remains of turtle soup (circa 1831) from one Ormon's Restaurant in Manhattan and early samples from the Lake Erie Soda-Water Company.

And there are audio excerpts from ''The Knipl Radio Show,'' a 1995 production by David Isay, starring Jerry Stiller, that was broadcast on National Public Radio. ''Pleasures of Urban Decay,'' the film in which Mr. Katchor is interviewed, is also shown as a continuous loop.

Although the show seems to include miles of cartoons, you don't have to eyeball every episode to agree that he is an outsize talent, one that has found itself in a brilliant archaeological exploration of a very special world (with maybe some help from fellow diggers like Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Zero Mostel and E. L. Doctorow).

''Ben Katchor: Picture-Stories'' remains at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street, Manhattan, (212) 423-3200, through Feb. 10.

Photo: A detail of the cover of ''Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories,'' part of ''Ben Katchor: Picture-Stories,'' at the Jewish Museum. (Ben Katchor/the Jewish Museum)

Adventures in Neurasthenia, continued

The popularity of treating symptoms like mental and emotional fatigue as neurasthenia ran from 1870 to 1910.

A large number of celebrities in literature, the arts, politics, and business were labeled as being neurasthenic, a diagnosis they accepted for themselves.

Theodore Roosevelt went out West to deal with his neurasthenia, while Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, to challenge the male physicians' ways of dealing with neurasthenia as she experienced it.

By 1920, the Freudian approach, which was much more complex in explaining symptoms of fatigue, began to supplant the simple one-disease theory of neurasthenia. Satires against quack doctors who treated patients suffering from persistent fatique and other nervous disorders were written during the heyday of neurasthenic rest cures. S. Weir Mitchell's The Autobiography of a Quack, (1900) is one such example. In 1910, O'Henry wrote a satire called Let Me Take Your Pulse: Adventures in Neurasthenia.

More recently, a historical novel on the subject was written by T.C. Boyle called The Road to Wellville (1994).

The appearance of a condition labeled Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS)  in the mid-1980s through to the mid-1990s has brought a renewed interest in the the term neurasthenia. In JAMA, April 27, 1994 appeared an article, "Was Neurasthenia a Legitimate Morbid entity":

During its heyday, which lasted from the 1870s to the turn of the century, the diagnosis of neurasthenia provided patients with a scientifically legitimate explanation of their inability to perform their expected roles. Furthermore, the patients, who tended to be in their 20s and 30s and from the urban middle classes, recovered.

Today, many people feel, like Beard's patients that they are living on a plane lower than normal. Symptom clusters that include fatigue and a general lack of vitality continue to command considerable medical attention. One has only to consult current medical journal articles on chronic fatique syndrome to see that symptom puzzles that engaged our recent ancestors continue to intrigue us. 

Neurasthenia does live on, however, as a popular diagnostic entity in China, where its discourse of nerves and energy flows is believed to be more compatible with traditional Chinese explanations of fatigue and malaise than with the more purely psychological explanation[s] from the post-Freudian West.

My Energy Staircase, Overcoming Fatigue, Oblomov Review from a fellow blogger, The Lectern

Walking up the Energy Staircase!

10) Nirvana--No bad thoughts or feelings; just humming away at work

09) In control of feelings; Not letting the phone, mail, or internet distract you from a targeted activity

08) Happy to discover activities that bring smiles to your lips.

07) Using the NEXT approach. After you tie your shoelaces you think NEXT and put your shirt on.

06) Steam at Y or walk on treadmill.

05) Maybe ability to relate to music (violin, flute , piano, guitar.) I just sold my old wooden Italian clarinet to an old buddy at the Y. I was amazed how well he played. He said he had not played for 40 years!

04) Look for sustained efforts: weights, walk, music, blog...etc.
Definition of sustained efforts:
a. at least an hour of activity
b. any activity as long as it's the same
c. need to do not relevant for b.
d. organize and weed out for c.
e. nap or sitting for an hour also okay
f. watching tv for an hour is okay, especially if you are able to catch up on some sleep while you are watching.

03) Show some sign of flexibility or versatility in your movements.

02) You are capable of some movement like answering the phone. I have a friend who tells me that he knows who is ringing his phone but that he is too tired to pick it up.

01) Almost total mental and physical paralysis.

If you have a fatigue diagram you use or know of one, why don't you send it in so I can post it for fellow fatigue addicts.

Also, if you have tips on falling asleep.

The Lectern


"Oblomov" Goncharov


What’s the good of a man like you? You might as well be a bundle of straw.


I wish I could lie down and go to sleep for ever.


This magnificent book is about whether to simply endure life or to really live it, and if the latter, then how.


Ilya Ilyitch Oblomov is a good-hearted man of independent means who lives a life of excessive laziness. Ensconced in his bed, or on his sofa in one room in his apartment, he spends his days in his worn and filthy dressing gown doing nothing, not even reading or writing (there is not a shred of paper in the place, and the ink in the inkwell has dried up), and bickering incessantly with his servant, Zahar, who has been with him since his childhood and treats his master with a mixture of contempt, devotion, insolence and humility. At times their relationship takes on some of the hilarious character of Beckett’s ambiguous and bleak male-male relationships:


“You lose everything,” [Zahar] remarked, opening the door into the drawing room to see if the handkerchief was there.


“Where are you going? Look for it here. I haven’t been in there for two days. Do be quick,” Ilya Ilyitch said.


The plot involves Oblomov’s struggle to escape the vice of sloth, in his failed love affair with the ravishing Olga Sergeyevna, his growing love for his landlady Agafya Matveyevna, and the machinations of her brother and his crony to rob Oblomov of the income from his estate. Oblomov is motivated by a drive to achieve the perfect bliss of family life, to which he thinks Olga can help him. Ironically, he achieves this state only with his landlady, and it takes him a while to realise this. Olga eventually marries Oblomov’s childhood friend, the worldly and practical Stolz, while Oblomov succumbs to the enervating effects of indecision, prevarication and idleness.


The theme of the true nature of love is dealt with in the relationship between Oblomov and Olga, and later in the relationship between Olga and Stolz. Early in their love, Oblomov panics and writes a long letter to Olga, warning her away from him, declaring that her love is a mistake. He clearsightedly warns that the projection of a false ideal on to an object of potential love can be mistaken for love itself; indeed that love often consists in this very projection: What you feel now is not real love, but only an expectation of it; it is merely an unconscious need of love which for lack of proper fuel burns with a false flame that has no warmth in it. The relationship between Stolz and Olga, which comes to prominence in the third part of the novel, is very well drawn with great psychological subtlety. The older Stolz teaches Olga the real meaning of love, and the relationship stands as a wonderful symbol of the marriage of innocence and experience: With the lamp of experience in his hand he ventured into the labyrinth of her mind and character, discovering each day new facts, new qualities….When Olga experiences depression later in their married life, it is Stolz who helps her most with these extremely wise words: Your sadness and yearning is rather a sign of strength. A lively active mind strives sometimes to go beyond the boundaries of life, finds of course no response to its questionings, and the result is sadness, temporary dissatisfaction with life… it’s the sadness of the soul questioning life about its mysteries. That is what one has to pay for Prometheus’s fire! You must not merely endure but love this sadness and respect your doubts and questions, they are the overflow of the luxury of life and appear for the most part on the summits of happiness. Through the character of Stolz, Goncharov reveals himself as great a philosopher of love as Stendahl.


Another marriage depicted in the novel, is that of the peasant Zahar, and the housekeeper Anyissa. She is extremely able, and puts Zahar’s clumsiness, and laziness constantly to shame, for which he exacts revenge by thrusting his elbow sharply into her breasts. Behind the high comedy of this marriage lurks the foresight of the great artist, in which the complex position of the peasant in Russian culture is symbolically described. Anyissa shows Zahar the correct way to do housework, to which Zahar responds: You stupid, I have done it my way for twenty years and I’m not likely to change for you. This little exchange exemplifies the hostile and bitter reaction the idealistic Populists were to encounter 15 years later during the 1870s in their attempts to better the peasants’ lives and improve them through modern agrarian methods and literacy. The presence of the servants in the novel added force to the controversy around the book. Goncharov’s contemporaries held that the Oblomov-Zahar relationship depicted the corrupting influence on both parties of the institution of serfdom. In the indolent figure of Oblomov, moreover, they saw a critique of Russian laziness and ineptitude, and in the practical figure of Stolz (a Russian German whose name means ‘proud’) a symbol of superior Western know-how, which Westernizers saw as the only and ultimate saviour of Russian problems. Our men of action have always been of five or six stereotyped patterns: lazily looking around them with half closed eyes, they put their hand to the machine of state, sleepily pushing it along the beaten track, treading in their predecessors’ footprints. But behold, their eyes are awakening from sleep, bold, lively footsteps can be heard, and there is a sound of animated voices… Many Stolzes with Russian names are bound to come soon! Oblomov thus acts as a bridge between the Slavophile/Westerniser debates of the 1840s, and the Father/Son debates of the 1860s as well as more generally articulating the Asian/European dialectic that has been at the heart of Russian culture since the age of Peter.


The book is of course an examination of laziness. The main foil for this is Stolz, who is a direct opposite of Oblomov, a man of action, an entrepreneur, a traveller and a socialite. Stolz claims that Oblomov is wasting his life lying on the sofa, and that the purpose of life is work, ambition, transcendence: live for the sake of the work itself, and nothing else. Work gives form and completeness and a purpose to life. Oblomov claims to the contrary that it’s his mode of life that is the real living, and that men of action are simply hiding from the fact that their lives are meaningless: There is no centre round which it all revolves, there is nothing deep, nothing vital. All these society people are dead men, men fast asleep, they are worse than I am. Empty reshuffling of days! Oblomov claims that his laziness makes him conscious of the gentle flow of life, of the delicious splashing of its stream, a moment by moment awareness of the passing of time that the busy men of action have no awareness of, but which should be the real purpose of existence: Isn’t the purpose of all your running about, your passions, ways, trade, politics, to secure rest, to attain this idea of a lost paradise? Oblomov is aware of the damage to his character his sloth is causing: he was painfully conscious that something fine and good lay buried in him and was perhaps already dead or hidden like gold in the depths of a mountain. But at the same time, he is an artist working in dreams. In part one, there is a long chapter entitled Oblomov’s Dream (the only named chapter in the novel) in which Oblomov’s childhood on his estate Oblomovka is described in idyllic terms. While this section gives plausibility to Oblomov’s psychology (he is shown to have been spoilt by over-indulgent parents, particularly his mother) it stands at the same time as a symbol of the golden age of Russia’s past, a vision of an ideal future towards which all Russians should strive, and a vision of a dreamlike alternative to the grimness of reality. This section was published separately in 1849, ten years before the rest of the novel, and did much to stoke the controversy the book aroused. Stolz loves to listen to Oblomov’s depictions of a perfect life on his estate, in which Oblomov paints a word picture of a kind of rural idyll with no falsity, no strife, a state of pure communion amidst plenty and the beauty of nature: Go on painting your ideal of life to me. Humanity at all times in all places has yearned for this dream: it is called peace.


Oblomov is one of the first novels in literature to deal explicitly with the concept of leisure time. Leisure time exists as an unarticulated fact in 19th century literature, both in novels and outside them, and is related to the emerging urban middle classes, who were not always working (like the rural peasantry) or not always doing nothing (like the landed aristocracy) but who switched between the two. However, it is not explored as a conscious theme until Oblomov. Oblomov used to have a job, but he gave it up when he became aware of the split between his working self and his leisured self: When do I live? He keeps repeating like a mantra throughout his working life. When then are you going to live? Why slave all your life? Oblomov is the first character in 19th century literature to voice the difference between the working self and the leisured self, and to reject the drive for personal transcendence and social betterment. Dostoevsky is claimed to have said: “We all come out from under Gogol’s overcoat”. Likewise, we are all the inheritors of Oblomov; out from under his filthy dressing gown, come Des Essientes, Ignatius Reilly, Zoyd Wheeler, and all the couch potatoes of our era.


Posted by Murr at 6:46 PM Labels: Essais


1 comments:


Makifat said...


Excellent analysis. I read Oblomov a couple of years ago. I forget how many pages pass before our hero even gets out of bed. The Beckett comparison is astute.


Paul Lafargue and the Right to Be Lazy

The purpose of this paper is to consider the utopia of one forgotten classic of the left, namely Paul Lafargue's pamphlet, The Right to Be Lazy. What is remarkable about this short book is its genre, which is both Marxist and utopian. For many good reasons, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels avoided that sort of writing themselves. In the 1840s, when they were first won to socialism, the workers' movement suffered from a surfeit of utopian schemes. It was not that Marx or Engels had anything against utopias, per se. But thinking of themselves as practical men, both were embarrassed by the disjunction between the glorious visions of William Weitling, Charles Fourier and Robert Owen among others, and the naïveté with which they planned to get there. The results are scorned in Engels's Anti-Dühring:

If pure reason and justice have not hitherto ruled the world, it is only because they have not been rightly understood. What was missing was only the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who has recognised the truth. The fact that he has now arisen, that the truth has been recognised precisely at this moment, is not an inevitable event following of necessity in the chain of historical development, but a happy accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years earlier and he might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife and suffering.

Engels' response to the utopian socialists was clear - no utopia mattered to him, unless its author knew which group in society was supposed to bring it into being. In this sense the Marxism of the founding fathers was very much a transitional theory. Contrary to Rosa Luxemburg, what mattered to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels above all was the means of how to get to the new society, rather than the end of what to do when they got there.

Similar tastes have been carried into the labour movement since. Marx hinted at the nature of the future Communist society in passages from his German Ideology and The Civil War in France. Then, in the middle of the Russian revolution of 1917, Lenin considered the future of the state after a successful workers' uprising. His pamphlet, The State and Revolution, predicted that the revolution would abolish the coercive apparatus of the state. Without inequality there would be no class divisions, and without classes who would be left to police? In addition to this important example of utopian theory, scientific socialists have made do with a few short pamphlets, several Marxist utopias in the form of fiction, and as far as I can see … not much more than that. We have no Marx 'On Socialism', no Engels, no Lenin, no Sartre, no Trotsky, no Serge. The literature which exists is not much of a guide, when labour activists attempt to think of a post-capitalist society, and perhaps this absence of discussion is one reason why so few socialists make that imaginative leap today.

The absence of utopian writing in the Marxist tradition helps to explain the appeal of Paul Lafargue's book. Certainly in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, his pamphlet was one of the three or four most popular books to be sold within the Second International. First published in summer 1880 as a series of articles in the newspaper L'Égalité (Equality), Le droit á la paresse came out as a short book in 1881, with new editions following in 1883, 1898 and 1900. 'According to Alexandre Bracke, the longtime socialist deputy, it was the socialist pamphlet most extensively translated after the Communist Manifesto and was translated into Russian before the Manifesto.' A first English translation was made by Charles Kerr of Chicago, based on the 1883 edition. Since then the pamphlet has continued in print, with the most recent French editions appearing in 1975 (Maspero) and 1994 (Mille et une Nuits), and English editions in 1989 (Charles Kerr) and 1999 (Fifth Season). The Right to Be Lazy was an important and widely-read pamphlet, but Lafargue's has suffered as much any of the socialist classics from the pessimism which has descended on the left since the fall of the Berlin Wall. For most of the past dozen years, there has been no English edition in print. Fifth Season must therefore be congratulated for their recent republication of The Right to Be Lazy, complete with a new translation by Len Bracken.

This paper will consider first, the life and career of Paul Lafargue, next, the argument of his pamphlet, its source, and then its reception since. One question is answered at the end of the article: How useful is Lafargue's pamphlet, how relevant is this utopia to labour movement activists, one hundred and twenty years after it was first produced?

Lafargue: A Rebel Life

Paul Lafargue was born in Santiago, Cuba, on 16 June 1842. Among his grandparents, Lafargue counted a French republican, a French Jew, a mulatto and a Caribbean Indian. In the words of the American syndicalist Daniel De Leon, 'Paul Lafargue had a constitutional affinity with the oppressed.' Originally a supporter of the French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Lafargue settled in London, and was acquainted with one of Proudhon's rivals within the First International, namely Karl Marx. Eventually won over to Marx's vision of socialism, Lafargue married the Old Moor's daughter Laura in 1865. Working as a political activist in Spain and France, Paul Lafargue helped to found the French Workers Party, which was led by his friend Jules Guesde. He and his wide corresponded with Engels until his death in 1895. The loss of three children caused Laura and Paul to devote themselves solely to political work. Their partnership ended only in 1911, with their joint suicide. Given that most socialists were suspicious of even voluntary euthanasia, it is appropriate to quote from Paul Lafargue's final note, which sets out his reason for ending his life in this way:

Healthy in body and mind, I end my life before pitiless old age which has taken from me my pleasures and joys one after another; and which has been stripping me of my physical and mental powers, can paralyse my energy and break my will, making me a burden to myself and to others. For some years I had promised myself not to live beyond 70; and I fixed the exact year for my departure from life. I prepared the method for the execution of our resolution, it was a hypodermic of cyanide acid. I die with the supreme joy of knowing that at some future time, the cause will triumph to which I have been devoted for forty-five years. Long live Communism! Long Live the Second International.

This short biographical summary highlights several themes which would be important in the genesis of The Right to Be Lazy, including Lafargue's relationship with Karl Marx, the distinctive and unfinished character of his Marxism, and the relationship between the personal and the political, as it shaped Paul Lafargue's life.

Lafargue met Karl Marx at a session of the International Working Men's Association (IWMA, or First International) in spring 1866. Marx was not very much impressed with his young co-conspirator. The problem once again was utopianism. Lafargue held to the Proudhonist doctrine that all 'nationalist' politicians whether romantic (Mazzini), reactionary (Bismarck) or revolutionary (Garibaldi) were fundamentally the same. Such a characteristically-French lumpen Communism drew Marx's scorn. This is how he described one meeting of the International in a letter addressed to Frederick Engels in June 1866:

The English laughed heartily when I began my SPEECH with the observation that our friend Lafargue, and others, who had abolished nationalities, had addressed us in 'French', i.e. in a language which 9/10 of the audience did not understand. I went on to suggest that by his denial of nationalities he seemed quite unconsciously to imply their absorption by the model French nation.

Lafargue slowly adopted Marxist doctrines through conversations held during strolls on Hampstead Heath. By the time of the 1867 Congress of the International, Lafargue was in a position to second Marx's suggestion that the Association should become 'a common centre of action for the working class'. The following year, Lafargue married Laura Marx, thus placing himself near the centre of the family. Both he and his wife corresponded with Marx and Engels, and both took on to defend the substance of Marx's socialism. Certainly when the French Socialist Workers Party split in 1881, Lafargue played the role of defending Marxist orthodoxy. Paul Brousse's party, the 'Possibilists', came out in favour of municipal reform, theoretical diversity and national defence; while Paul Lafargue and Jules Guesde's 'Impossibilists' stood for revolution, Marxism and international solidarity. The content of Lafargue's internationalism had developed, from a naïve belief in the 1860s that nations were a thing of the past, to his revolutionary claim of the 1880s that nationalism had to be fought.

During the period of the Second International, an orthodox socialist was someone who was loyal to that brand of Marxism which was developed in reading Marx, and through the interventions of Karl Marx himself, Frederick Engels and then Karl Kautsky. Lafargue's socialism was criticised by his rivals in France precisely for such fidelity - it was far too 'German'. A similar criticism is made by Leszek Kolakowski, the biographer of this generation. He maintains that Lafargue was an economic determinist whose philosophy was closer to the late Feuerbach than Marx, 'In short, it cannot be said that Lafargue enlarged or improved upon Marxist doctrine in any way.' Two responses come to mind. First, for the devotees of Marxist philosophy, it is true by definition that only philosophy matters. Such skills as the popularisation or development of existing theories do not count. Only originality is allowed. The best example of such creative thinking becomes that generation of Marxist philosophers, 'the children of Marx and Coca Cola', who have nicely reconciled Marxism with liberalism, every one of them announcing the same formula that 'grand narratives' (herds) are a thing of the past. Second, the judgement of the philosophers is unfair to the man himself. Lafargue was a much more interesting and diverse thinker. Having come to scientific socialism late, and through admiration for both Proudhon and especially Auguste Blanqui (who Paul Lafargue met as a student activist), our author retained some of his old libertarian background. It is this unusual combination of Marxism with pre-Marxist French socialism which makes The Right to Be Lazy such an interesting document to read.

As for the contradiction between the personal and the political, every socialist activist in history has encountered a tension between these two. This problem follows from the contradictions within the socialist project, which were raised at the very opening of this paper. The reason to become a socialist, is that people want to see a different, equal society, without inhumanity and want. But stuck in a racist, sexist and capitalist world, it is impossible for anyone to escape to the future, and emancipate themselves thereby from the pressures to conform to the dictates of the present. Different writers and activists have resolved this tension keeping more or less of their dignity intact. Frederick Engels worked as a factory-manager, while Karl Marx owned shares, and Paul Lafargue had no better answers to these problems than anyone else. Moving towards the contents of his pamphlet, was Lafargue indolent in the way that The Right to Be Lazy demands? Certainly, Paul Lafargue was not a disciplined student, and his natural indolence helps to explain his failure to qualify as a doctor, at least as much as the important distractions that he encountered on the revolutionary left. Yet liberated after 1870 by an inheritance from his father which rescued him from the need to find paid employment, Paul Lafargue settled down and became a hard-working and widely-published socialist activist. Our hero could be as disciplined as anyone else, when the task in question was something which he wanted to do.

Work: A Strange Madness

The Right to Be Lazy was a masterpiece of studied contempt. Lafargue relaxed his pen, and employed the satirist's skills of scorn and sarcasm, as he never had before. The structure of his first sentence owed something to the first line of the Communist Manifesto, 'A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism'. The difference is that in Paul Lafargue's account, the monstrous danger was something to be avoided, and not praised:

A strange madness has taken possession of the working-classes of those nations in which capitalist civilisation dominates. This madness brings in its wake the individual and collective sufferings which for two centuries have tortured an unhappy humanity. This madness is the love of work, the destructive desire for labour, carried even to the extent of exhausting the vital forces of the individual and his offspring.

For his negative model, Lafargue took the seventy-hour working week which was practised by so many people in late nineteenth-century France: 'Work, work, proletarians to augment social wealth and your individual misery. Work, work, so that becoming poorer you will have more reasons to work and be miserable. This is the inexorable law of capitalist production.' In its place, Lafargue advocated leisure - not the wretched leisure industry of our day, but the emancipation of work through its re-integration into older patterns of short-work and frequent rest, 'The proletariat must constrain itself to work for no more than three hours a day and spend the rest of the day and night resting and banqueting.'

One of the most distinctive themes of Lafargue's argument was his frequent use of classical and sometimes even older sources to praise an earlier world in which leisure was seen as a higher virtue than permanent toil. The Bible was praised both for the Sermon on the Mount ('Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not neither do they spin') and for the example given to everyone in Genesis, 'The bearded Jehovah gave his followers the supreme example of ideal laziness - after six day's work, he rested for eternity.' There were also references to Antipatros, Cicero, Arcadian parrots, Venus, Herodotus ('even women were not allowed to spin or weave so as not to detract from their nobility'), Brutus the Elder, Tarquin, Plato, Xenophon ('work steals time'), Plutarch, Lycurgus and Daedalus. Paul Lafargue praised to the skies the Greek ideal of civilised leisure:

The ancient Greeks had no more desire for work: free men practised only physical exercise and games of intelligence. This was the era when Aristotle, Phidias and Aristophanes moved and breathed among the people; when heroes at Marathon crushed the Asian hordes, who were also conquered by Alexander. The philosophers of Antiquity taught contempt for work - the degradation of the free man.

You might from this passage conclude that Lafargue had been boning up on his classics - indeed, as I will show, he had been doing just this.

One less attractive theme of The Right to Be Lazy was its author's confusion of matters of class and race. This point was never made explicit, nor was Lafargue arguing in defence of racial privilege, but like several other nineteenth-century writers, Paul Lafargue found it easiest when looking for a capitalist, to name a Jew. There are three references to Rothschild in this fifteen-thousand word pamphlet, which is at least two more than any other banker or industrialist who came to Lafargue's mind. A similar disorder infects the following passage, harmless in itself, but odd to a twenty-first century ear, 'For which races is work an organic necessity? The Auvergnians; the Scots (Auvergnians of the British Isles); Galicians (Spanish Auvergnians); Pomeranians (German Auvergnians); the Chinese (Asian Auvergnians).' Was race really this important? - I doubt it. The pamphlet makes no racist argument, nor was Paul Lafargue a recognisably racist writer - either by the standards of his day, or our own. Yet there is something crude here, which does not impress.

Of more interest is Lafargue's attack on organised religion, as far as he was concerned, Christianity had justified slavery in antiquity and now it glorified alienated labour. Paul Lafargue had nothing bad to say against scripture, as we have seen. Yet our author had no good word to say for the work-ethic of Protestantism, bemoaning the death of feudal work-practices in eighteenth-century Britain. Before the industrial revolution, by contrast, everything was fine, 'Morose England, immersed in Protestantism, was then known as "Merrie England".' Catholicism received even shorter shrift from Paul Lafargue's pen: 'Christian hypocrisy and capitalist utilitarianism didn't pervert the philosophers of the ancient Republics … The Bastiats, Dupanloups, Beaulieus and co with their Christian and capitalist morality, these thinkers and their philosophers recommend slavery.' Such anti-clericalism was a common part of Paul Lafargue's socialism, certainly until the time of the Dreyfus affair, when it appears that secular intellectuals took over this target role.

In the final few paragraphs of The Right to Be Lazy, Lafargue reminded his reader of the Greek philosopher Aristotle's desire that machinery would user in a new era of human rest, 'if every tool could be used effortlessly, or move itself like the masterpieces of Daedalus or begin spontaneously their scared work like Vulcan's tripods; if, for example, the weaver's shuttles did their own weaving, the head of the shop would not need any assistant, nor the master, slaves.' Paul Lafargue wholeheartedly endorsed this vision of the future of technology, where human inventions could be used to secure the idleness people deserved, 'The genius of the great capitalist philosophers remains dominated by the prejudices of the salary, the worst slavery. They still don't understand that the machine is the redeemer of mankind, the God who will rescue humanity from the sordidae artes of wage slavery, the God who will give us leisure and liberty.' To this I add, Amen!

Origins of an Idea

The success of The Right to Be Lazy, and the general absence of footnotes in the pamphlet, have encouraged historians to look for earlier manuscripts which acted as source-material for it. One influence could be the philosophy of Epicurus. He has been associated with the idea that a good life is a happy life - or as this philosophy has been understood in English, 'eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die'. Indeed, Epicurus is no accidental figure to associate with the nineteenth-century left. Marx devoted his doctoral thesis to a comparison of the natural philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus, concluding heavily on the side of the latter. A second potential source could be Lafargue's long-term influence, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The introduction to his pamphlet Sunday, recommends leaving aside the 'discussion of work and wages, organisation and industry' in favour of the study of 'a law which would have at its basis a theory of rest'. Another influence may have been Charles Fourier, whose work includes its own passionate critique of toil. A fourth and most likely influence is Karl Marx. The message of Lafargue's pamphlet is close to the themes of Marx's earlier philosophical writings, including the German Ideology and his 1844 Manuscripts. Most of these remained unpublished until the twentieth century - but it is likely that some of the same themes recurred in those formative strolls along Hampstead Heath.

One source we know for certain, even though Lafargue declined to provide a reference. The very name of Lafargue's pamphlet was plundered from an earlier book by Louis Moreau-Christophe, The Right to Idleness and the Organisation of Slavery in the Greek and Roman Republics. Lafargue gently tweaked the phrase, to give his title a more provocative edge. No doubt Moreau-Christophe also provided the classical references. Our author came across the earlier book in the private library of Karl Marx, and was later sent Marx's original copy, following the older man's death in 1883.


We cannot really know what Marx made of Moreau-Christophe's book, and still less can we know what opinions he passed on to his son-in-law. Yet Marx wrote several comments on his copy of this book. Many were aimed at Joseph Naudet, who wrote a critical after-word to Moreau-Christophe's original paper. Marx's marginal notes included a criticism of Naudet's belief that the law was a means to achieve justice, 'This proves that Naudet, although he cites the authors didn't understand the first word of Roman Law. Product, property - whose? That means law - whose? Force, armed theft or rapine.' Later Marx responded to Moreau-Christophe's defence of the duty to work, with a caustic aside worthy of Lafargue, work is … 'that which Christianity came to teach the world.' Although these comments are interesting in themselves, sadly they do not constitute any 'missing link' to Lafargue's pamphlet. They were not read by Paul Lafargue, and if he did read them, it was only after The Right to Be Lazy had already been published.

A Pamphlet and a Programme?

Part of the historical interest of Lafargue's pamphlet lies with the moment at which it was published. Over the past dozen years or so, several writers have sought a return to a pure set of left-wing values, a 'classical Marxism' unsullied by the defeat of the Russian Revolution. The phrase 'classical Marxism' is taken from the Polish revolutionary, Isaac Deutscher, who was a supporter of Trotsky in exile and later became an inspiration to the New Left that grew up in the 1960s. Deutscher was very much an enthusiast for the Marxism of Lafargue's day, talking of the 'striking, and to a Marxist often humiliating contrast between what I call classical Marxism - that is, the body of thought developed by Marx, Engels, their contemporaries and after them by Kautsky, Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg - and the vulgar Marxism, the pseudo-Marxism of the different varieties of European social-democrats, Stalinists, Kruschevities, and their like.' Not everyone has been so friendly to the Marxists of the Second International. John Rees has condemned the lack of imaginative, dialectical thinking among several members of this generation, including especially Karl Kautsky. It is hard to fit Paul Lafargue's into this debate. His significance is uneven, his presence contradictory. His other translated works lack the wit of The Right to Be Lazy, are derivative, and generally confirm the negative judgements given above. Yet this pamphlet is Lafargue at his best. Its utopianism stands beyond the perspective of his contemporaries. The living essence of Marxism - the dialectical method - is there.

What about Lafargue's argument? In the one-hundred-plus years since the publication of Paul Lafargue's pamphlet, critical judgement has varied. The Right to Be Lazy has found unlikely enemies, and a few surprising champions as well. Among the unexpected critics, I would include the dissident Marxist Leszek Kolakowski, who was mentioned earlier. His claim is that Lafargue's socialism was a step backwards from classical Marxism. He suggests that the flaw of The Right to Be Lazy was that it described socialism purely in terms of consumption - 'resting and banqueting'. Such 'hedonistic Marxism', according to Kolakowski, fails to explain what will happen when labour is no longer alienated. Even after the revolution, we will still need hospitals, schools, food and power supplies. So how will these be established, if nobody is going to do any work? Lafargue gives two direct answers to this question in The Right to Be Lazy - the first is that the use of machinery should lead to greater leisure, the second is his acceptance of the need for a three-hour working day - yet both responses are insufficient as answers. On my reading of Paul Lafargue's pamphlet, a third and more compelling answer to Kolakowski's question is implied, although it is only lightly traced. I will say more about this in a moment.

Among Paul Lafargue's surprising admirers can be counted the current French government. In 1999 Lionel Jospin's socialists passed a new law introducing the 35-hour week. French workers already benefit from five week's paid holiday, two month's summer vacation, and a range of public holidays to make their confreres in Britain and America weep. Indeed Jospin has dropped his own hints suggesting the influence of Paul Lafargue on the new law. Although Lafargue's general belief that shorter working hours could reduce unemployment may have influenced Lionel Jospin's coalition, the most compelling reason for introducing the law would have been to strengthen a Socialist Party challenged by no less than three electoral blocs to its left - the Trotskyists, the Greens, and the Communists, each of which achieved over 5 per cent of the vote in last year's Euro-elections.

Between the crude ultra-left criticised by Kolakowski and the mild-mannered reformist beloved of Jospin, is there any space for the real Paul Lafargue to make himself known? One point which occurs to me is that Lafargue's claims are really not that exceptional. Even the physicist Albert Einstein, on those rare occasions when he gave substance to his socialist politics, spoke of the need to reduce the working week: 'In each branch of industry the number of working hours per week ought to be reduced by law so that unemployment is systematically abolished. At the same time minimum wages must be fixed in such a way that the purchasing power of the workers keeps pace with production.' On this reading, the importance of Lafargue is that he reminds us of a basic truth which the left knew all along. The politics of Marx, the influence of Proudhon, the memory of the Paris Commune (during which Lafargue was a delegate-at-large in France), each of these influences can be traced in his book. The true originality of The Right to Be Lazy is that everyone else forgets to make these points in their propaganda, and it was left to Lafargue to fill the gap.

Kolakowski's challenge remains unanswered. If work is to be abolished, then what (in socialist theory) should take its place? It seems to me that the answer implied in Lafargue is the traditional Marxist answer. Certainly people will continue to produce after the revolution, but their labour will be different from 'work' as we understand it now. For one thing, there will be no class of employers, and no class of the employed. Therefore work will not be alien, in the sense that it will belong to the worker. No-one will be expected to labour on tasks which they have not chosen. More fundamentally, the nature of employment will change. The one literature in which people have seriously considered what useful work will be like beyond the confines of the market, is in educational theory. Thirty years ago Paulo Freire wrote about education as a means to self-emancipation. More recently, the most widely-used concept has been 'play'. When educational writers use this word, they have in mind the unstructured learning which children develop in their first years. Rules are developed by individuals and groups, without external compulsion. Education without rules, self-development and unconstrained learning, these are the ideals that writers have in mind.

The one author I know who has attempted to marry The Right to Be Lazy to play-theory is an anarchist Bob Black. His web-tract, 'The Abolition of Work' follows closely the argument of Lafargue, 'Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law'. There are several unconvincing puns on 'ludic' game-playing, but the content of Black's argument provides a serious answer to Kolakowski's challenge, mentioned above. Bob Black includes a useful definition of work (as 'forced labour') as well as a mapped-out alternative to it:

What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a 'job' and an 'occupation'. Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else … Second, there are some things that people like to do from time to time, but not for too long, and certainly not all of the time … Third, other things being equal, some things are unsatisfying if done by yourself or in unpleasant surroundings or at the orders of an overlord, are enjoyable, at least for a while, if these circumstances are changed.

I don't think Lafargue would have cut a single word from this passage. I would restate his belief in mechanisation (democratically controlled by workers, not by managers), and his notion of a remaining transitional three-hour day. The picture becomes clearer then and more consistent, the future more worked-out and more real.

In conclusion, it seems to me that Paul Lafargue's notion of a work-less future provides a compelling vision of the alternative society that most labour movement activists would actually like to bring about. Indeed I suspect that his utopia would be compelling to much wider layers of people, even than that. Each year seems to bring new advances in labour-saving technology, but the working week never shortens - not for Spanish-speaking workers who are now challenging African-Americans to take on the roles of labourer, driver and cleaner for white urban America; not in Russia, where life expectancy has fallen over the past fifteen years; not in France where unemployment remains at 10 per cent; and not in Britain where the gap between rich and poor has hardly narrowed in the 100 years since statistics were first collected. The anarchists, turtles kids and Lesbian Avengers who were at Seattle last year have at least as much to say about Lafargue, as the hard-hats who marched with them. Spread the word.

From: DKrenton.com.uk

Adventures in Neurasthenia, continued

Men and women were both subject to nervous diseases from different  pressures. Beard thought that men in the professions, especially his own, medicine, were most inclined to neurasthenia (he diagnosed and treated himself as a neurasthenic) because of the pressures of overwork and guilt for not living up to the standards of their professions

Adventures in Neurasthenia, continued

In Nervous Exhaustion (1880) and American Nervousness (1881) George Beard argued that while similar disorders appeared in other countries, neurasthenia was an illness peculiar to America and was brought on by changes in the conditions of the United States in his own time. Elsewhere, Men were expected to follow in their father's footsteps. In America, they were expected to work their way up the economic ladder, to make something of themselves!

But how were they to accomplish this mission if they were plagued all the time by severe fatigue?

"Let be be the finale of seem."

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Wallace Stevens


Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be the finale of seem.


The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.


Let the lamp affix its beam.


The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.


1922




Wallace Stevens


Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and educated in the classics at Reading Boys' High School, and at Harvard during the years 1897-1900, acting as president of the Harvard Advocate and publishing some verse. After several years as a reporter in New York, Stevens entered New York Law School in 1901 and was admitted to the bar in 1904. In New York he worked for several law firms and then joined an insurance firm, the American Bonding Company of Baltimore, which became the Equitable Surety Company of St. Louis. Stevens married in 1909 and lived in New York until moving to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1916. Until his retirement, he worked for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, moving up to Vice President in 1934, akin to composer Charles Ives, who also worked in insurance while pursuing his craft. Steven's poem "Pecksniffiana" won the Helen Haire Levinson Prize offered by Poetry in 1920.

Stevens wrote, "A poem need not have a meaning and, like most things in nature, often does not have." In Opus Posthumous, "Adagia" (1959). Stevens knew well Key West in Florida, which is probably where this poem takes place, since ice-cream was commonly served at funerals during the hot weather. It is said the poem speaks of the duality of eros and thanatos, of life and death.

Are Marathons Dangerous?

Special Report: Are Marathons Dangerous?



If running is so good for you, why do people drop dead during marathons every year? A lifelong runner, with help from the experts, finds the encouraging truth behind the scary headlines.


By Amby Burfoot


Image by Matt Mahurin


Grave Concerns


Special Report: Are Marathons Dangerous?


If running is so good for you, why do people drop dead during marathons every year? A lifelong runner, with help from the experts, finds the encouraging truth behind the scary headlines.


By Amby Burfoot


Image by Matt Mahurin


From the December 2008 issue of Runner's World


The Running Effect


"I feel a little awkward about meeting John Fixx," says heart specialist Paul Thompson, M.D. "His father made me famous." It's a gray, drizzly afternoon three days after my run with Steve Blair. Thompson and I are jogging from Hartford Hospital, where he's chief of cardiology, toward nearby Colt Park. I've arranged for Fixx, an old friend, to meet us there for a five-mile run.


A month earlier, Thompson, 61, had finished the Boston Marathon in 3:24:01. He's slight-5'7" and 144 pounds-with a boyish face, a forehead that goes on forever, and a respectful manner. Thompson completed his first Boston 40 years earlier, in 1968 (34th place, 2:49:22), while still a Tufts University undergrad. Several years later, he improved his Boston best to 2:28:25, his PR. He ran 14 straight Bostons, but a move to Pittsburgh, four kids, and increasing hospital responsibilities will put a dent in anyone's schedule. More recently, with the kids grown and a move to Hartford, he's run the last nine Bostons.


By the time of Jim Fixx's death at age 52 in 1984, Thompson had graduated from medical school, done some advanced studies at Stanford, and published two papers on heart-attack deaths in runners. That made him the go-to expert for hundreds of TV, radio, and newspaper reporters chasing down the Fixx story. Over the years, Thompson has remained everyone's favorite expert for insights on exercise and heart disease. He has also worked as a TV commentator at the Seoul Olympics and the New York City Marathon, and his name turns up frequently in publications like The New England Journal of Medicine.


Thompson has had a lifelong fascination with the workings of the heart, in particular its response to exercise. "Sometimes I wish I could read heart studies all day long instead of attending to administration details," he says. "Think about the overweight guy who's totally out of shape until he begins exercising. A couple of months later, he's a different person. The heart is so amazing, and so damned good at what it does."


Thompson runs with the quick, light stride of the veteran marathoner, and has already covered eight miles in the early morning. "It's the one time of day I get to focus on myself," he says. "This makes me a much better person when I get to work and have to focus on staff and patients."


I ask Thompson why some runners keel over and die from heart attacks. He explains, first, that the young ones, mostly under 30 or 35, generally have structural defects in their hearts, such as the heart scarring that apparently led to Ryan Shay's death. These include a bewildering variety of rare conditions, and one-hypertrophic cardiomyopathy-that gets mentioned much more than the others for two reasons. First, it's the most common cause of sudden heart death in young athletes. Second, it results from an enlarged heart. This leads to widespread confusion, because endurance athletes like marathoners also have enlarged hearts. But the two are completely different. The marathoner's heart is large, healthy, and efficient; it's like a car that gets 40 miles per gallon. The hypertrophic cardiomyopathy heart is misshapen, malfunctioning, and dangerous; it results from a physical defect, not from hard endurance training.


When an over-35 exerciser dies on the run, Thompson continues, the cause is almost always artery disease-that is, cholesterol deposits that rupture and provoke a heart attack. He describes it like this: Imagine a garden hose with a modest flow of water moving through it. That's your arteries when you're resting. When you begin to run faster, the flow of blood increases dramatically. The hose begins to twist and flail. You've felt this with your own hose, or noticed how firemen must brace themselves to control a high-pressure hose. "So your arteries are flexing and bending," says Thompson. "Now if you've got a cholesterol deposit in the artery, the movement can crack the deposit open. Your blood mixes with the cholesterol to form a clot that blocks the artery. A few minutes later, you've bought the farm."


In Thompson's classic 1982 study of runners' heart-attack deaths in the state of Rhode Island, he found that a runner's relative risk of dying during a workout was about seven times that of dying in front of the TV. It amounted to one death for every 396,000 hours of running, almost exactly the same rate found decades later in several marathon studies (see "Risk of Death While Marathoning," page 98). This doesn't mean that running caused the deaths. It would be more accurate to say that artery disease caused the deaths, and running was merely the trigger. Here's why: Another Rhode Island study showed that the blizzard of February 1978 touched off a mini-epidemic of snow-shoveling deaths. A week later, however, heart-attack deaths dropped below normal levels. In other words, after all the people with advanced artery disease had died, there were few diseased hearts left.


Like other heart experts, Thompson notes that regular exercise offers no sure protection from heart disease. Three hundred and twenty-five thousand Americans suffer an outside-a-hospital heart attack every year, often without warning, and 40 percent of these events end in sudden death. "Exercise is not a savior," Thompson says. "The risks are very low, the benefits are real, and the benefits outweigh the risks. But there are no guarantees. Regular exercise is like investing in the stock market. You hope that your stock will improve over time, but every once in a while you catch a Bear Stearns."


This can happen even to fit runners with low cholesterol who've passed a stress test in the last 48 hours. Still, the occasional exercise death doesn't change the advice for healthy living. "If you want to live a long, vigorous life, you should do an hour of moderate exercise a day," says Thompson. "If your only goal is to survive the next hour of your life, you should get into bed-alone."

Time on Newt

Sunday, November 20, 2011

November 9, 2011, 12:04 am

Gingrich Rises in Polls But Has Major Obstacles to Nomination

By NATE SILVER

I forget whether I posted something on Twitter to this effect or simply kept the thought to myself, but there was a point in time at which I would have given Newt Gingrich not more than a 1-in-1,000 chance of winning the Republican nomination.

That may have been foolish. This year’s Republican nomination process, if nothing else, has reminded us how often things don’t go to plan and how unpredictable the primaries can be. Lately, Mr. Gingrich has been showing some signs of life.


He has averaged 13 percent of the vote in polls conducted of Republican voters so far in November, his third straight month of improvement after he bottomed out at 5 percent in July and August. There’s also some evidence that Mr. Gingrich tends to be competing for the same types of voters as Herman Cain, so if Mr. Cain’s campaign begins to erode support, Mr. Gingrich could be the beneficiary of that.

Perhaps more surprising is the rebound in Mr. Gingrich’s favorability ratings among Republican voters. According to Gallup’s tracking poll, Mr. Gingrich is now viewed favorably by 55 percent of Republican voters and unfavorably by 23 percent, a big improvement from June when those numbers were 42 and 31 percent, respectively.


But there is much to consider in a primary campaign beyond the national polls. I would group these “fundamental” factors into five broad categories, each of which we will consider in the context of Mr. Gingrich:

Early State Polls and Positioning Somewhat contrary to the perception that Mr. Gingrich is running a national book tour rather than a serious campaign for the White House, he has spent most of his time in the key early-voting states. Based on Politico’s candidate tracker, I show Mr. Gingrich as having held 11 events in Iowa between Sept. 1 and Oct. 31, along with seven in Florida and five in South Carolina. He has spent very little time in New Hampshire, but overall he made 25 appearances between the four states during this period, about the same number as Mitt Romney

Polls suggest that Mr. Gingrich is right to concentrate on the other three states at the expense of New Hampshire: his numbers lag his national support by several points in the there, while running roughly in line with it in the others. It’s conceivable that Florida and South Carolina could turn into strengths for Mr. Gingrich. He is from Georgia, which neighbors both of them, and polls find that Mr. Gingrich runs relatively strongly among older voters, which will be helpful to him in Florida. But he will probably have to perform strongly in Iowa to get to those states in decent shape, and although recent polls show his numbers improving there, he lacks infrastructure in Iowa and fared very poorly in the Ames Straw Poll.

Endorsements and Party Support. Mr. Gingrich has a half-dozen endorsements from Republicans in the U.S. House, but almost all of them came toward the start of his campaign in May and all but two of them are from his home state of Georgia. (He also has the endorsement of Georgia’s governor, Nathan Deal.) Mr. Gingrich has very few endorsements in key early-voting states.


Some endorsements are better than none, and Mr. Gingrich has more from members of the Congress than candidates like Herman Cain (who has just one), Representative Michele Bachmann (zero) and Jon M. Huntsman Jr. (also zero). It’s important to remember that relatively few Republican party leaders have made endorsements of any kind so far, and it’s certainly not impossible to imagine the former speaker of the House finding support within the Republican establishment. For the time being, however, the low endorsement total qualifies as a weakness for Mr. Gingrich.


Fundraising and Campaign Infrastructure. Mr. Gingrich’s fundraising has been simply abysmal — just $2.9 million brought in through Sept. 30. Not only that, but as of Sept. 30, Mr. Gingrich had only $353,000 in cash on hand but $1.2 million in debt. There’s some question about whether fundraising is more of a lagging or a leading indicator; the money sometimes follows the polls. But it is hard to see how numbers like these are anything other than a huge problem for Mr. Gingrich.


What they may really point toward is his lack of a robust campaign infrastructure, caused in part by numerous staff defections early in this campaign. He may even be in something of a Catch-22: it’s hard to hire staff if you don’t have money, but it’s hard to raise money if you don’t have any staff. Whether Mr. Gingrich makes a credible effort to address these issues over the next several weeks will be a good sign of how seriously his surge should be taken.


Ideological Positioning. Mr. Gingrich got himself into trouble early on with his apostasies over Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan. But most every Republican candidate has one or two positions that they now find inconvenient, and Mr. Gingrich’s overall ideological positioning isn’t bad given the mood of the Republican electorate. We did not include Mr. Gingrich in our recent magazine feature on Republican candidates that rated their ideology from center to right on a 100-point scale, but his score would be fairly close to that of Gov. Rick Perry, which in my view represents something of a sweet spot for the Republican primary electorate: solidly conservative but not in Michele Bachmann territory. Mr. Gingrich is also fairly well positioned on what I call the establishment-insurgent axis; he can claim to know how Washington works while also seeming like an outsider since he has been out of it for some time.


This, overall, is one of Mr. Gingrich’s greater strengths: one can imagine him being acceptable in theory to a fairly broad array of conservative voters.


Electability and Personal Liabilities The downside to being acceptable to most conservative Republicans is that you may not be ideally positioned for the general election. I don’t place a lot of emphasis on horse-race polls this early out, but Mr. Gingrich trails President Obama by 11 points in recent surveys, about the same as Mr. Perry. Our forecasting model, which is based on ideology ratings rather than these polls, suggests that he might ultimately run a net of about 4 points worse than someone like Mitt Romney nationally.


Of course, in the context of a nomination race, the perception of electability may be more important than the reality of it. But those numbers are quite poor for Mr. Gingrich as well. In the recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, just 5 percent of G.O.P. voters identified him as the candidate with “the best chance to defeat Barack Obama in the general election,” well below the 11 percent support he had overall in the survey.


Meanwhile, although Mr. Gingrich’s personal favorability rating has rebounded a great deal among Republican voters, he has some image problems that could come back to harm him should he rise in the polls and receive more scrutiny from voters and the media. The most obvious problem is Mr. Gingrich’s two divorces, a subject that may receive more attention given the recent focus on the sexual harassment allegations against Mr. Cain. Mr. Gingrich may also not be as thoroughly vetted as candidates like Mr. Romney and Mr. Perry, who have run for office more recently.


Finally, there’s the fact that Mr. Gingrich is anything but a new face to voters and is associated with an exceptionally unpopular institution, the United States Congress.


Overall, I would read three of these factors, establishment support, personal liabilities, and (especially) fund-raising, as being clearly negative for Mr. Gingrich. This contrasts against one, ideological positioning, which is potentially favorable for him. He has both strengths and weakness in the key early-voting states, meanwhile.


That balance is unfavorable enough to suggest that his chances of winning the nomination are weaker than his polls alone would imply. That certainly does not mean that his chances are zero, or 1,000-to-1 against. If Republican voters decide that they really don’t want to nominate Mitt Romney, Mr. Gingrich could be the last man standing. But even if Mr. Gingrich continues to gain in the polls, he will have some major weaknesses to overcome.

George Miller Beard, M.D. (1837-1883)

George Beard, M.D. (1837-1883)


George Beard is credited with coining the word "neurasthenia," a term that came into great prominence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Beard received his medical degree in 1866 at The College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York and then joined Dr. A. D. Rockwell, a New York neurologist who was using electricity in medical and surgical therapy and with whom Beard later published favorably received book on the subject. Beard became interested in psychology, and in 1876 he read a paper at a meeting of the American Neurological Association entitled, "On the influence of the mind on the cure and causation of disease" (Journal of Nervous & Mental Diseases, 1876, vol. 3, pp. 429-434). Beard credited emotions as influencing symptoms which could be dispelled by positive thinking, to which he applied the term "mental therapeutics." His paper met with derision from his colleagues, and The Superintendents’ Association lost no opportunity to disparage Beard’s writings. Beard’s book, A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia) (New York, 1880) received a scathing review in The AJI (April 1880, v. 36, pp. 522-526).

Historian Charles Rosenberg wrote, "Beard was neither a profound nor critical thinker. His popularization of the idea of neurasthenia won him an international reputation in the late 19th century… he was a forerunner of French and modern psychological medicine." ("The place of George M. Beard in 19th-century psychiatry," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1962, v. 36 (3), pp. 245-259).


Profile from: http://www.nim.nih.gov/hmd/diseases/note.html

From Wikipedia:
George Miller Beard (May 8, 1839 – January 23, 1883) was a U.S. neurologist who popularized the term neurasthenia, starting around 1869.


Biography:


Dr. Beard was born in Montville, Connecticut on May 8, 1839, [1837, according to the NIH profile, J. Richman] to Rev. Spencer F. Beard, a Congregational minister, and Lucy A. Leonard. He graduated from Yale College in 1862, and received his medical degree from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York in 1866. While still in medical school during the American Civil War, he served as an assistant surgeon in the West Gulf squadron of the United States Navy. After the war and graduation from medical school, he married Elizabeth Ann Alden, of Westville, Connecticut, on December 25, 1866.[1]


He is remembered best for having defined neurasthenia as a medical condition with symptoms of fatigue, anxiety, headache, impotence, neuralgia and depression, as a result of exhaustion of the central nervous system's energy reserves, which Beard attributed to civilization. Physicians who agreed with Beard associated neurasthenia with the stresses of urbanization and the increasingly competitive business environment. Stated simply, people were attempting to achieve more than their constitution could cope with. Typically this followed a short illness from which the patient was thought to have recovered.[2]


One of the more unusual disorders he studied from 1878 onwards was the exaggerated startle reflex among French-Canadian lumbermen from the Moosehead Lake region of Maine, that came to be known as the 'Jumpers of Maine'. If they were startled by a short verbal command, they would carry out the instruction without hesitation, irrespective of the consequences. The studies stimulated further research by the military and Georges Gilles de la Tourette.[3]


Beard was also involved extensively with electricity as a medical treatment, and published extensively on the subject. He was a champion of many reforms of psychiatry, and was a founder of the National Association for the Protection of the Insane and the Prevention of Insanity. He also took an unpopular stance against the death penalty for persons with mental illness, going so far as to campaign for leniency for Charles J. Guiteau, the assassin of President James Garfield on the basis that the man was not guilty because of insanity.[1]


He died on January 23, 1883 in New York City.[4]


[Other accounts say he died of pneumonia in his mid-forties, along with his wife who also died from the disease in their downtown New York City home which was also his office. Living before the age of anti-biotics, Beard was supposed to have tried electricity cures to treat their disease. Electrical medical devices to treat a range of diseases from cancer to cold were common in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Contrary to commonly held views on his work from his own period on to the present, I do not believe he was a "shallow" thinker. Quite to the contrary, his early death may have aborted a much more brillant career as a humanistic doctor of the science of mental disorders.
Beard had a profound effect on the thinking and writings of Sigmund Freud whose essay Civilization and its Discontents owes its core thesis to Beard and his associates view of the stresses of the business world we inhabit. Freud also converted the term neurasthenia to apply to other manifestations of neurotic behavior which his theories adumbrated.
He deserves a much higher place in American medical history. In the Race for the Republican nominee for the presidency, Newt Gingrich has declared his interest in funding a vigorous research program for treating disorders from neurosis to Alzheimers! Such a revolutionary declaration should put him first in the hearts of all those who have lost their loved ones to Alzheimer's disease and other mental disorders.
Interestingly, Jonathan Swift, who in the last 10 years of his life as Dean Swift at St. Patricks in Dublin perished from a number of severe mental disorders, which led one of  his lesser admirers, Dr. Samuel Johnson, in his long poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes, to observe, "See Swift expire a drivel'r and dumb show," ('dumb show,') His caretakers would charge money to show off the Dean in his decrepit condition, thus marking the ultimate irony of the life of Swift after his earlier literary victories over his political enemies, in Johnson's poem. J. Richman]


References1.Dictionary of American Biography Base Set. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928-1936.


2. A Handbook of Practical Treatment, John H. Musser, M.D. and O. A. Kelly, M.D., 1912.


3. Beard, George (1878). "Remarks upon 'jumpers or jumping Frenchmen'". The Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases 5: 526.


4. Almanac of Famous People, 8th ed. Gale Group, 2003.

Contact us: I am posting my book called "Running on Empty" on my Writers Anonymous blog. After I have posted the entire book, in about a year, I will be glad to review the scholarship on Dr. Beard and others included in my book for Wikipedia articles.
A follow up book could be, From George Miller Beard to President Newt Gingrich!
jordanp.richman@gmail.com