@ Paula (67) - Bravo! And for some reason i just couldn't help mentally adding, "...and Goldberry is waiting!" to the end... :-)
#106 - Ken - At my high school, smoking was not allowed in school or on school grounds, but an outside area between two wings, known as "The Pit," was an open secret. Teachers even had to sign up for monitoring duty by the door leading outside... Not to stop kids from smoking, but just to guard against fights and (unsuccessfully on purpose?) marijuana use (it was the '70s after all).
In all this talk about analyzing, there is one factor missing... the author.
There's a lot about what an author is trying to accomplish, or whether or not the author wrote a fun read. What I would like to hear is how people go about analyzing the authors themselves.
I'm not talking about a public discussion of so-and-so's particular neuroses or the childhood trauma that affected so-and-so's later writing. That, for the most part, would be horribly disrespectful (except for the few authors who specifically encourage it), especially for living writers.
What I'm wondering is how people allow discoveries about writers to affect their perceptions of that author's works.
For example, there are two authors whose books I initially loved. In each case, a few hints lead me to investigate their positions on gender relations. What I discovered caused me to never pick up their works again, despite the fact that the stories had not changed.
On the flip side, learning about several other authors as people has made me reread and enjoy work that hadn't interested me before, or made me want to pick up books I might not have considered before meeting/learning of that particular author.
I find that once I understand (at least the basics of) an author, that person's books don't need as much analysis. They can be understood at more of an intuative level (of course, I could just be foolin' myself there). Which is good, because I'm terrible at analysis. I'm the opposite of Dr. Letson above, wholly unschooled beyond the high school/college liberal arts minimums in serious literature. When asked recently to test read a book, I found doing the feedback to be as hard as any college paper ever was. I loved the book, but actually analyzing why, and putting that into words, was very difficult (as well as one of the more interesting and unique bits of fun I've had in years).
It's funny... Sean's top/bottom comments have actually underscored my belief in trying to understand the authors more so than their individual works... I can think of several authors that I love to read who have described themselves as being very commercial... they ARE my bitches, writing what I want to read. For a few others, they are in charge of what they write and when, and I am THEIR willing bitch if it will help persuade them to focus on what I want.
In both cases, knowing which role they like is a definite part of their appeal.
It's GOOD to live in a genre with choices! :-)
TNH @ #23 - Not more than two hours ago, by the oddest of coincedenks, Melody was reading me your review of Black Body, and I had decided I really should go read it, just to bask in its' awesome badness...
Patrick: All your Cricket Bat of Authoriteh is ours. Bend over, naawteh boi...
Jim @ #26 - I wonder how many tens of books were sold outside the circle of those poor authors themselves?
There were people in the Bush White House who sounded sane?
#109 - Rikibeth - And I should have known better and given you the benefit of the doubt... sorry for being kind of grumpy about it...
#103 Rickibeth - Ummm... did that come out like you intended it? This sub-thread about organ donation has shown what an emotional hot-button it can be.
My own father was furious at me for signing up as a donor. He was under the impression that the donor (or their survivors) had to pay for the donation. There's a lot of similar misconceptions (like the utterly false but persistent rumour that donors are allowed to die in ERs to get their organs) that keep people from signing up. As a nation, we could do a lot better at volunteering to be donors, which is what Marilee was saying.
#102 PJ Evans - I can't speak to Fungi's doctor to admin ratio directly, but I volunteer with a doc who deals only with street people. Those who have coverage are all Medicaid or General Assistance. When we started billing those who have coverage three years ago, it took a volunteer on sabbatical 6 months to write us a billing system. There are still over a dozen payers to deal with. We don't have enough funding to support a billing assistant for Doc, and he spends almost as many hours on billing as he does seeing patients...
The sheer complexity of dealing with the government programs was enough to crush a planned start-up venture of my own, that of providing Emergency Room visit follow-up care on the streets instead of back in the ER... It became clear that without a dedicated computerized billing system, I simply would not be able to spend enough time actually seeing patients to be a viable option for the county hospital...
"On the other hand, I don't see any requirement anywhere that doctors live in expensive houses and drive luxury cars, so I have to assume that what those complaints about reimbursements are about is more that the doctors aren't able to pay off their education loans and, at the same time, live the lifestyle they assume they're automagically entitled to."
I find that statement a little... hasty, perhaps? Unless you're quite familiar with loan costs and other factors such as Resident's pay scales, and malpractice insurance costs for independent doctors...
Ten years ago, for a senior project, I did a comparison of an 18 year old becoming a new MD in Internal Medicine (the adult version of a GP), and an 18 year old high school grad getting a job with General Motors (under UAW contract). Between lost income during education, loan repayments, higher taxes, and malpractice insurance, the MD was 54 years old before he surpassed the auto worker in lifetime net earnings. Specialists reach that figure at a much lower age.
The doc I volunteer for drives a 10 year old VW, lives in a smaller house than mine, and is relying on loans to put his 2 daughters through local colleges.
Cutting doctor's pay will solve little, and could well contribute to future MD shortages, especially in rural areas.
I pray that if I'm ever sued, it is by someone as inept and self-damning as Fletcher...
Abi - Like everyone has been saying, your feelings of guilt cross lines of gender and industry...
In my part of the nursing profession, we routinely have to make up our care plans on the fly, and implement them as we go. Aside from asking another nurse (of which there is only one other on duty), we're pretty much on our own. We're a small satellite operation kludged onto a local large trauma hospital down the street, with no on-site doc of our own. We have telephone access to the E.R. docs, but this works much better on paper than in reality. We also have a phonebook-sized policy/procedure manual that serves as our bosses 20/20 Hindsight Machine.
The upshot of all this is that we make all kinds of mistakes, all the time, and 99.9% of them don't impact the quality of our service to our patients. However, we get hauled into the office for beatings on a regular basis. Our bosses don't EVER give us permission to suck, because they enjoy the beatings too much. We (or at least I) have had to learn to forgive ourselves for the vast majority of our mistakes.
I always get among the top feedback scores from patients, and the worst reviews from my bosses. I treasure the former more than gold, and have made the latter worse for myself by repeatedly saying to my boss, "Hey, if that's the worst mistake I make all day, then I'm doing pretty damn good." (The Mantra)
Although actually saying that to my boss isn't the greatest for labour relations, it has really helped me to get over (mostly, but not completely, alas...) being my own worst critic, and let's me really focus in on the real learning opportunities, which I'm alerted to any time I find that using The Mantra isn't appropriate...
#53 - Erik -- It's even worse yet if the jets of water coming out Uranus miss all the Klingons.
SOMEBODY was bound to say it; just think of it as me taking one for the thread.
It was our dear, dear, Mr. P that just used his line-item veto power to cut nearly 5% from the operating revenue of Minnesota's largest health care system. That $88 million was the money they gave the system to defray the cost of serving those who cannot pay for their care, which they must do by law.
Availability of healthcare has always been one of the biggest dividers between upper and lower classes. Welcome back to pre-revolutionary France...
Pawlenty is unmitigated Evil... Very charming Evil when in person, but Pure Evil nonetheless... I shook his hand; I counted my fingers... They were all there... until next time.
Will @ 57 -- Thanks for the link!
When stripped of all the polite semi-sympathy, and disregarding who and what caused MJ to reach the point he had, it all boils down to this:
He could no longer function in normal society, nor should he have been allowed to do so. Both for other peoples' safety and his own.
The first line of Rossney's article really did hit it dead on...
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