Perhaps you should never fully trust anyone whose business card reads “Belief System Re-Patterning through Psychobiology.†In fact, anytime someone describes his or her profession with a series of prefixes followed by the vague “-ology,†you should definitely be wary.

Read More

On January 9, psychoanalyst and author Louise J Kaplan died from pancreatic cancer in Manhattan at the age of 82. Ms. Kaplan’s titillating 1991 book, Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary, explored the subtlety of female fetish within an industrial/material society.

Read More

I recently watched the classic 90s movie True Romance, a film about killing people, unconditional love and killing more people. The moral of the story: Love is a war that kills a lot of people. Love when you are sick is not quite as gruesome, but things still get a little messy. Indeed romance seems best left to the healthy people, so you get your kicks in other ways.

Read More

Bundled-up farolito enthusiasts, hand-warming by the firelight, speed walkers, green and gold lights streaming in the trees and around various torsos: Every Christmas celebrator contributes to the stream coursing up Canyon Road, countered by the contrary movement of people pushing past shoulders in search of lost relatives.

Read More

Great books and works of literature often provide a sharp perspective for deciphering events of life and the world. In 2011, the American withdrawal from the Iraq war, the 22^nd annual Bioneers conference, Hurricane Irene, London riots, a great flood of the Mississippi River, and other events brought important human ideas to the forefront, the ideas explored in great literary works.

Read More

You know things have hit rock bottom when you find yourself sitting down in the shower crying. Not just crying in the shower, but sitting on the floor crying. The shower floor. A place you would avoid under almost all circumstances. Where old foot and genital skin go to die. And here you are, hot tears competing with the steam of the shower above, your naked butt cheeks communing with swirls of hair, soap scum, and the residue you have just washed off the rest of your body.

Read More

My first year of teaching was a nightmare. The other special education (sped) teachers had carefully chosen their students and grade levels at the end of the previous school year, leaving me with a large group of kids that included the three most challenging "Level D" students at the school, two of whom were autistic and one of whom was wheelchair-bound, legally blind and needed to be tube fed twice daily and have his diaper changed every two hours or so.

Read More

He has a way of saying, “Mi amor.†He says it more often than he says my name. In fact, the way he uses it would make anyone listening, including me, believe it actually is my name, “My love.†

Read More

On Dec. 9, 1905, 106 years ago today, one of the most underappreciated American authors was born in Colorado: Dalton Trumbo. A prolific writer of motion picture screenplays, Trumbo credits ultimately included Kitty Foyle (1940 Academy Award nominated), Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), Roman Holiday (1953 Academy Award winner), The Brave One (1956 Academy Award winner under the pseudonym “Robert Richâ€), and the Kirk Douglas screen classic Spartacus (1960). In addition to numerous other screenplays, Trumbo wrote nine books. The best of his literary fiction was the National Book Award winning antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun, published in 1939.

Johnny Got His Gun was fiction inspired by a gruesome true story about a Canadian soldier from World War I. During battle, a mortar shell hits very close to “Johnny†Joe Bonham, causing severe physical damage. He loses both legs, both arms, eyesight and hearing—nearly every physical bridge to the outside world—yet remains alive in an Army hospital with a hood covering his disfigured face. At first, Joe cannot determine whether he is asleep or awake, alive or dead.

Slowly, he perceives his situation and becomes very pessimistic, remembering all of the good things lost from his life— health, an idyllic childhood, a hometown girlfriend, and conversation with his understanding father.

During the second half of the story, Joe becomes more optimistic and wills himself to accomplish what he can. He figures out how to tell time and then establishes communication via Morse code (banging his head on a pillow) with a nurse compassionate to his situation. His only request is to be near people and explain to them what it is like to be essentially dead. Army officers become aware of Bonham’s intent and quarantine him, fearing his ideas may corrupt wartime morale. This isolation leaves Joe in a miserable state where he simply repeats “Kill me!†to the bedside nurse in Morse code.

The powerful and provocative effect of Johnny Got His Gun upon early readership led Trumbo to suspend reprints of the novel from 1941 until the end of World War II. Afterward, it became an antiwar classic, resurrected during the Vietnam era and later in the 1990s with the hit song and video “One†by the heavy metal bad Metallica.

Beyond its appeal as an antiwar story, Johnny Got His Gun artfully explores a classic 1700s debate between philosophers David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Hume argued that all knowledge and truth come from direct experience/interaction with objects, the indisputable and reproducible effects of outside objects. Hume’s philosophy is the foundation of positivism, where scientific experiments can be tightly controlled to one variable and produce specific, repeated and measured results (produce “truthsâ€).

With “The Critique of Pure Reason,†Kant argued that knowledge and truth come from the perception of the beholder, the “scientist.†A priori screens, personal mental filters and bias interpret all information that enters or exits a being. Therefore, truth is in the eye of the beholder—or, in Frederick Nietzsche’s words, “I am the truth.†

Kant expands his philosophy to the idea of freedom: Is it externally or internally created? Is freedom driven by internal sense or external consensus? Like his character Joe Bonham, Dalton Trumbo faced these questions after being blacklisted, along with nine other writers (“The Hollywood Tenâ€), by Sen. Joseph McCarthy in 1947. Trumbo refused to admit “communist activity†or name other communists during the Senate hearings and was sent to prison for 11 months in 1950. Afterward, Trumbo fled to Mexico for years as a political exile. Like Joe Bonham, Trumbo’s voice was nearly silenced.

Lee Miller is the author of the Bengali novel, Kali Sunset(www.clovercreekpress.com), the story of how Mrs. Sona Choudhury’s perception of Bengali culture influences her family, her life, and 20^th Century India.

Their burgers are legendary, the venue world-famous, the chile just right. I had always overheard glowing reports of the little pink adobe joint off of Old Las Vegas Highway, but somehow in 17 years had never made the trip (probably due to its off-kilter hours).

Read More