MEMORIES...IN THE CORNERS OF MASS. AVE.

I was reading the New York Review of Books, and was struck by the opening of an article by Jerome Groopman on memory. Describing his waking before dawn on a Sunday to start work on the piece, he makes his way to the kitchen.

"The dark-roast coffee was retrieved from its place in the pantry, four scoops then placed in a filter. While the coffee was brewing, I picked up the New York Times at the door...I prepared an egg-white omelettte and toasted two slices of multigrain bread. After a few sips of coffee, fragments of the night's dream came to mind..."

It's not how I would write it. Note the adjectival specificity. Not 'coffee', but dark-roast coffee. Not 'the paper' or indeed 'the Globe' since Prof. Groopman teaches at Harvard, but The New York Times (it is Sunday, in mitigation). Not 'eggs' but an 'egg-white omelette' and finally not 'toast' but toasted two slices of multigrain bread. It's not brand-name specific, like a Stephen King story, but it has the feel of one of the personal ads in the back of the NYRB, all professorial good taste and healthy options.

The article itself is an interesting review of a number of books about how memory works, and stops working. But Prof. Groopman's dietary preferences come back into focus near the end, as he discusses Alzheimer's disease.

"To be sure, there is merit in seeking environmental factors that affect risk for a disorder like Alzheimer's disease...But in this search we need to be alert to wishful thinking. Identifying something simple in the environment, like junk food, as having a major impact on developing dementia is wonderful to imagine. If true, we could markedly reduce our risk by committing to a lifestyle free of soda, pizza, and French fries."

Wishful thinking indeed! Soda, pizza and French fries sounds like the sort of stuff the creative writing professor discovers in the ice-box of the trailer-park waitress with whom he's having an affair in one of those 'dirty realism' novels from the Reaganite Eighties. But would losing them really be 'wonderful to imagine'? I now feel guilty in admitting that I followed my trip to the Yale Art Gallery last week by sharing a white clam pizza and a pitcher of birch beer with a professor friend at the Modern Apizza. Obviously we undid whatever positive effect walking through Yale had on my brain cells.

It occurs to me it might be even more wonderful were we to discover that Cambridge's dark-roast coffee, egg-white omelettes, and multigrain bread turned out to increase the risk-factor of Alzheimers. And isn't it even more likely that we someday discover the brains of readers of the New York Times have chosen to shut themselves down rather than remember being subjected to the likes of Tom Friedman or David Brooks?

THE PRICETAG OF TRAGEDY: THE NEW YORK TIMES & CANTOR FITZGERALD

In a New York Times article today about the $135 million settlement of Wall Street investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald's lawsuit against American Airlines for negligence on 9/11 the reporter, Benjamin Weiser, led his third paragraph thus:

'No amount of money, of course, could compensate Cantor or its families for the losses on Sept. 11'.

While the platitude may be, in the sense of all platitudes, true, in the context of a newspaper story, it's statement stands as opinion, not reporting. Indeed, were the platitude true in any but the abstract sense, no one would file such lawsuits at all, since the compensation received would be worthless.

But the reality is that Cantor, who had offices in the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and lost 658 employees, about two-thirds of their work force there, claimed they had suffered 'unspeakable losses' and went on to delineate the unspeakable at sums as much as $1 billion, after insurance recovery, specifying $800 million for 'interruption of business' (that is, because of losing their employees) and the other $200 million for property damage. Unspeakable indeed. Currency, it turns out, is America's real currency of grief.

Judge Alvin Hellerstein noted that New York law does not allow an employer to sue for the wrongful death of its employees, and otherwise limited the companies damages. In a separate case, Hellerstein also dismissed a suit by World Trade Center Properties, who apparently had already received more in insurance settlement than they had already lost.

Cantor employees were already compensated either from the federal fund set up for 9/11 victims, or from their own lawsuits. Hellerstein has been the point-man for suits filed by victims' families, survivors, responders, property owners, and the like, all seeking compensation for things which, as Mr. Weiser reports, cannot be compensated. And many, like illnesses caused by the dust raised by the towers' crash, that can.

Had any suits against American Airlines gone to trial, they would have had to prove that the airline had been negligent in preventing a terrorist attack; American would have argued they had done everything expected and required by government experts (ie: by law) before the 9/11 gang used the planes themselves as weapons. The blame might have spread, from that point, to the Federal Aviation Adminstration, or indeed to various government agencies charged with fighting terrorism.

It's also curious that Cantor employees hadn't thought to sue the World Trade Towers, for not constructing a building that would better withstand collapse, or Cantor, for not providing better facilities and training for escape in emergencies. In the 20/20 hindsight world of victims, grief and compensation, it would seem only fitting.

MICHAEL GOLDFARB'S 'MISSION ACCOMPLISHED' MAYDAY MOMENT

Today is May 1st, which in many parts of the world, though not in either of my two countries, is a time for working people to celebrate and contemplate some sort of solidarity. This year, I thought of the international distress signal, 'mayday! mayday!' when an essay by my friend Michael Goldfarb reminded me that today is also the tenth anniversary of Shrub Bush's Top Gun moment, when he landed on the flight deck of the carrier Abraham Lincoln in his jumpsuit, to the carefully choeroegraphed dropping of a huge banner saying 'Mission Accomplished'. A decade later, after untold deaths, a new President, an entrenching of government policies allowing torture, encouraging repression, and increasing control over day to day life, the main question has become to which mission was Bush referring, and how long will it continue, accomplished or not?

Goldfarb has written an essay, posted to his blog, which deserves a much wider readership. It is a meditation on the nature of freedom as much as the nature of war, and it's based on his own first-hand sobering experience. We disagreed over the waging of the second Iraqi war, but when it began Michael was there, an unembedded correspondent, and he saw the so-called liberation of Iraq first hand, accompanied by his friend Ahmad Shawkat. That's them in the photo above. His essay, one of an occasional series he calls History In A Time Of Forgetting, is titled 'And Would It Have Been Worth It, After All'. You can link to it here. 

If what he says resonates with you, I'd suggest you read his book, Ahmad's War, Ahmad's Peace, which is both a brilliant exegesis of the war and a moving tribute to his friend. Although it was a New York Times notable book of the year, its balance and honesty seem to have left it, and Michael, underappreciated in certain areas of the mainstream, but it is a rewarding experience, and today's essay is a small distillation of that.

SPEAKING POETIC TRUTH TO POWER: KLEINZAHLER TAKES TIMES

The New York Times said, some months ago, that August Kleinzahler was pugnacious, had charm, and could write poetry. The LA Times called him the bad boy of American poetry. All of this is true, although the pugnacity is probably more evident to critics, professors of creative writing, and poetasters than it has been to me since I first met him some thirty years when our paths finally crossed (after much build-up by mutual friends) in Montreal.

So imagine my surprise when the NYT invited the pride of San Francisco, via Ft Lee New Jersey, to comment on the election, alongside John Ashberry and three others, and guess what, August's isn't the poem set among rolling wheat fields...in fact you can check it out right here.

It sure is an improvement over Tom 'The World Is Fat' Friedman, or Maureen 'Edwards Spends Almost As Much On Haircuts As I Do' Dowd! Check out his poetry, and his essays; in fact the NYT must dig his act, because he's in this weekend's book review with a fine appreciation of James Merrill, find it here (though I might contend Richard Wilbur, among those writing in rhyme and metre, is at least Merrill's elegant equal)

But Augie's the real deal, if not quite as pugnacious as Mike Singletary. But we are talking poets here...