Craftsmen in writing: Enigma ? in conversation with the birds
"In the wake of two well publicized suicides (Anthony Michael Bourdain, Kate Spade) last week one thing stands out for me: the idea our society has that fame and money mean "having it all." It doesn't matter how much money you have, joy is not out there in money or things, it is within us and between us. #Mentalhealth" (Claire J De Boer@ClaireJDeBoer )
Above got my attention to something beyond "fame and money" - passion to literature scholarship -
Below, self-directed scholar, John Kidd, the greatest James Joyce scholar, couldn't communicate with other human beings. So, he was in conversation with the birds, a way that James Watson discovered the double helix structure of DNA, while observing birds in the field of Cambridge, England, 1953.
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He's a professor at Boston University. He quit. He lingered on campus for a while, haunting Marsh Plaza, and then he disappeared.
John Kidd, ‘talking to the squirrels’ deal. A sad ending.”
In an interview for the release of the book, Mihaies explained: John Kidd “died under sordid circumstances in 2010, buried in debt, detested, insulted, alone, abandoned by everyone, communicating only with pigeons on a Boston campus.”
That sounded like a complete story, except for one thing. I couldn’t find an obituary.
His work style: "By nature, he was a scattershot writer, scribbling on scraps of paper, composing in notebooks and revising excerpts after they appeared in magazines — and in 1922, when “Ulysses” first appeared, all that chaos was botched into print by French typesetters, most of whom spoke no English. "
His motif: "Kidd’s compulsion to understand any culture’s big book is still what gets him out of bed in the morning."
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On one hand, they're talented in doing something unique an ordinary person couldn't do. on the other hand, they're categorized as mental illness madness?.
Perhaps, it's not a mental problem/sickness - Medicine treats like disease - it's a unique way to deal with the world. Schizophrenia/bipolar made Vivian Leigh do exceptional performances in her acting, and John Nash, Nobel laureate work. Yes, it's some thin lines between superb work and pathologic behavior - Scientists need to figure that out.
"For a few minutes, I thought I was onto something brilliant, until another yawning fan in the bookstore mentioned a set of connections she had found and I realized, Oh, right, we’re all doing this." So called "mental health" is something that spontaneously connected synapses firing signals in your brain - some lucky ones catches it up and make history - some others, sadly, being treated as "crazy" madness? - where can you draw a line? Who got the say? Lack of medical standard, Lack of mechanisms to justify an act of someone so far ahead of the crowd - that's a problem, which departed this grid of current understanding of human talent versus mental illness.
In summary conclusion:
Calling attention to mental health shouldn't been the product of passing years of fine-tooth-combing through fact-collecting manuscripts and copy-sheets of patient's charts, one letter at a time, all done according to a dense old textual theory that almost no one could understand. You gotta come up with some totally new theory to define "mental healthiness" - not old say Mo, say Mo concepts - never work. Some revolutionary concepts must be invented and desperately needed.
My hunch is that mental health is positive spin in multiple ways - not just like the old timer, one way of thinking black and white. Someone's brilliance, beyond our current "normal" standard, likely divine-sent to us, ought to be much appreciated. For example, someone like John Kidd, ‘talking to the squirrels’ - our society should have police protection, watching him and keep him safe ...
If medicine called 21st century "personalized medicine" - we need "personalized attention" to mental health like John Kidd.
My own note: passion to literature scholarship may drive you nuts as you're buried inside of language to language. I guess doing laboratory work, use your own hands, walk around, chat with your colleagues and collaborators, keep your sanity.
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"in conversation with the birds was John Kidd, once celebrated as the greatest James Joyce scholar alive.
Kidd had been the director of the James Joyce Research Center, a suite of offices on the campus of Boston University dedicated to the study of “Ulysses,” arguably the greatest and definitely the most-obsessed-over novel of the 20th century. Armed with generous endowments and cutting-edge technology, he led a team dedicated to a single goal: producing a perfect edition of the text. I saved the Boston Globe story on my computer and would occasionally open it and just stare. Long ago, I contacted Kidd about working on an article together, because I was fascinated by one of his other projects — he had produced a digital edition, one that used embedded hyperlinks to make the novel’s vast thicket of references and allusions, patterns and connections all available to the reader at a click.
Joyce once said about “Ulysses” — and it’s practically a requirement of any article about the novel to use this quote — “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.” And that has always been part of how the novel works. For most of the book, what you are reading are the fractured bits of memory and observation kicking around in the head of a single schlub named Leopold Bloom as he wanders about Dublin on a single day, June 16, 1904. It’s the sensation of putting these bits together and the pleasure, when it happens, of suddenly getting it — the joke, the story, the book — that compels you throughout."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/magazine/the-strange-case-of-the-missing-joyce-scholar.html
Author:
Jack Hitt is the creator and a co-host of the 2018 Peabody Award-winning podcast “Uncivil.” His last feature for the magazine was about the battle over the Sea-Monkey fortune.
