Alex O'Meara

The Loonies, Vancouver, Randall and Patty, Beer, Food, Food and Beer

Alex — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:59:12 +0000

Trish (my girlfriend) and I went on vacation to Vancouver, British Columbia, over Christmas and had the best time. The food, the scenery, the food, the beer, the food, and the beer, and the city. Best of all was the company. Trish’s brother Randall and his wife Patty hosted us and made the trip very special. I’d show you pictures and stuff, but Randall, who is a gourmand and a techie and a great all around guy, posted a series of stories on his great blog, called The Loonies. Randall’s blog overall is fun and informative, lots of recipes and info about Vancouver, and about life in general. I urge you to bookmark it.

To enjoy the vacation stories and happenings such as Japanese hotdogs, the Sunshine Coast, Gas Town, the Steam Works brewery, the Pinche Taco Shop, the Black Frog (another, ahem, brewery place where I had the Russell Black Death Porter and Trish had the Red Racer E.S.B.) , Stanley Park and much more start with the first one called Immaculate Reception and go from there for four more posts.

“ART” Is Open and Going Great

Alex — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:59:19 +0000

The play I’m in, “ART,” by Yasmina Reza, opened on Friday, November 25. It was a fun, fantastic night, and even beter the second time me, James Coull, and Greg Wingard took the stage again on Sunday for the matinee at Central School here in Bisbee. On Saturday night, the second cast, Paul Bovee, Steve Bovee, and Gene Conners had a great opening show, almost selling the house out.

The feedback we’ve received has been enthusiastic, making it a pleasure to see these months of hard work pay off. The play continues until December 17, with performances Friday and Saturday nights December 2 and 3, at 7 pm and another Sunday matinee December 4 at 3 pm. We’re on again December 9 and 10 at 7 pm then we close the next weekend December 16 and 17 with a Friday performance at 7 pm and the Saturday performance at 6.

Tickets are are available at Atalanta and Poco for $7 before the show and $9 at the door.

If you get the chance, come out and see this wonderfully funny and poignant Tony award-winning play.

"ART" Poster, produced by the Friendship Group

The creative class is a lie in Salon by Scott Timberg

Alex — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 03:46:27 +0000

Scott Timberg is one of the most insightful people blogging and writing today. His articles consistently provide astute looks at how culture is evolving. This latest example from Salon is no exception. I continue to urge you to follow Scott on his blog, The Misread City.

The creative class is a lie

The dream of a laptop-powered “knowledge class” is dead. The media is melting. Blame the economy — and the Web

By Scott Timberg

Someday, there will be a snappy acronym for the period we’re living though, but right now — three years after the crash of 2008 — American life is a blurry, scratched-out page that’s hard to read. Some Americans have recovered, or at least stabilized, from the Great Recession. Corporate profits are at record levels, and it’s not just oil companies who are flush.

For many computer programmers, corporate executives who oversee social media, and some others who fit the definition of the “creative class” — a term that dates back to the mid-’90s but was given currency early last decade by urbanist/historian Richard Florida — things are good. The creativity of video games is subsidized by government research grants; high tech is booming. This creative class was supposed to be the new engine of the United States economy, post-industrial age, and as the educated, laptop-wielding cohort grew, the U.S. was going to grow with it.

But for those who deal with ideas, culture and creativity at street level — the working- or middle-classes within the creative class — things are less cheery. Book editors, journalists, video store clerks, musicians, novelists without tenure — they’re among the many groups struggling through the dreary combination of economic slump and Internet reset. The creative class is melting, and the story is largely untold.

It’s happening at all levels, small and large. Record shops and independent bookstores close at a steady clip; newspapers and magazines announce new waves of layoffs. Tower Records crashed in 2006, costing 3,000 jobs. This summer’s bankruptcy of Borders Books — almost 700 stores closed, putting roughly 11,000 people out of work — is the most tangible and recent example. One of the last video rental shops in Los Angeles — Rocket Video — just announced that it will close at the end of the month.

On a grand scale, some 260,000 jobs have been lost in traditional publishing since 2007, according to U.S. News and World Report. In newspapers alone, the website Newspaperlayoffs.com has tracked some 40,000 job cuts since 2008.

Some of these employees are young people killing time behind a counter; it’s hard for them, but they will live to fight again. But education, talent and experience — criteria that help define Florida’s creative class, making these supposedly valued workers the equivalent of testosterone injections for cities — does not guarantee that a “knowledge worker” can make a real living these days.

“It’s sort of like job growth in Texas,” says Joe Donnelly, a former deputy editor at L.A. Weekly, laid off in 2008 and now pouring savings and the money he made from a home sale into a literary magazine. “Gov. Perry created thousands of jobs, but they’re all at McDonald’s. Now everyone has a chance to make 15 cents. People are just pecking, hunting, scratching the dirt for freelance work. Living week to week, month to month.”

* * *

Past groups punctured by economic and technological change have been woven into myth. Charles Dickens wrote sympathetically about Londoners struggling through the Industrial Revolution of 19th-century Britain. John Steinbeck brought Dust Bowl refugees to life; Woody Guthrie wrote songs about these and others with no home in this world anymore. One of his inheritors, Bruce Springsteen, did the same for the declining industrial economy.

But the human cost of this latest economic/technological shift has been ignored. Many of us, says Northern California writer Jaime O’Neill, are living in a depression. “It’s hard to make the word stick, however, because we haven’t developed the iconography yet, he writes in a recent essay titled “Where’s today’s Dorothea Lange.”

A fading creative class — experiencing real pain but less likely to end up in homeless shelters, at least so far, than the very poor — may not offer sufficient drama for novelists, songwriters or photographers.

But journalists themselves have also ignored the human story all around them. In fact, the media — businesses that have been decimated by the Internet and corporate consolidation — have been reticent at telling the tale of this erosion. Good newspapers offer responsible coverage of the mortgage meltdown and the political wars over taxes and the deficit. But it’s easier to find a story about a plucky worker who’s risen from layoff to an inspiring Plan B than it is the more typical stories: People who lose their livelihood, their homes, their marriages, their children’s schooling because of the hollowing-out of the creative class and the shredded social safety net. Meanwhile, luxury coverage of homes, fashions, watches and wine continue to be a big part of magazines and newspapers.

Optimists like Florida are undoubtedly right about something: This country doesn’t make things anymore and never will. What the United States produces now is culture and ideas. Trouble is, making a living doing this has never been harder.

Wait a minute, says Allison Glock, a magazine journalist and writer who’s just returned to her native South because she and her novelist husband could no longer afford life in New York. “Wasn’t the Internet supposed to bring this class into being?”

* * *

Much of the writing about the new economy of the 21st century, and the Internet in particular, has had a tone somewhere between cheerleading and utopian. One of the Net’s consummate optimists is Chris Anderson, whose book “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling More,” championed the Internet’s “unlimited and unfiltered access to culture and contents of all sort, from the mainstream to the farthest fringe of the underground.” With our cell phones, MP3s and TiVos, we’re not stuck watching “Gilligan’s Island” over and over again, he writes. Now we can groove to manga and “connect” through multiplayer video games.

Of course, it’s not all about the Internet: David Brooks’ influential “Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There” traced a multi-ethnic, meritocratic elite and a fantasia of latte shops, retro-hip consumers and artisanal cheese stores. The cheese stores are, in some cases, still there, but much of what Brooks predicted has fallen through. He wrote — in 2000 — that we were living “just after an age of transition,” with the culture wars dead, a “peaceful middle ground” politically and a nation improved by the efforts of a class that had reconciled the bourgeois ethos with bohemianism.

This was easier to understand when things seemed to be humming along. But even after the 2008 crash — with unemployment at 12 percent and above in California, which, thanks to Hollywood and Silicon Valley, is also the state most driven by the creative class — blind optimism continues.

In 2009, Anderson came out with the intelligently argued “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” which suggested that new revenue streams and the low cost of computer bits meant that both businesses and consumers would benefit as the Internet drove down prices. It’s nice to contemplate, but the human cost of “Free” becomes clear every day a publisher lays off staff or a record store closes.

Richard Florida helped set much of the agenda with his 2002 book “The Rise of the Creative Class,” which argued that this class would make cities rich in “technology, talent and tolerance” and jolt them back to life. His latest book, “The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity,” wrestles with the difficulty of the last few years. But it continues to put faith in knowledge workers and the places they settle to bounce back stronger than ever.

The new economy “is good for whoever owns the computer server,” says Jaron Lanier, a virtual-reality pioneer and author of “You Are Not a Gadget,” which debunks a lot of Internet hype. “So there’s a new class of elites close to the master server. Sometimes they’re social network sites, other times they’re hedge funds, or insurance companies –other times they’re a store like the Apple Store.”

Andrew Keen is another Silicon Valley insider who’s seen the dangers of the Net. “Certainly it’s made a small group of technologists very wealthy,” he says. “Especially people who’ve learned how to manipulate data. Google, YouTube, a few of the bloggers connected to big brands. And the social media aristocracy –LinkedIn, Facebook.”

Keen’s book, “The Cult of the Amateur,” looks at the way the supposedly democratizing force of the Net and its unpaid enthusiasts has put actual professionals out of work. It’s not just the Web, he says, or its open-content phase, but a larger cultural and economic shift. “We live in an age where more and more people think they have a book in them,” he says. “Or a film in them, or a song in them. But it’s harder and harder to make a living at these things.”

And when Google is used as an excuse to fire the librarian, or “free” access to information causes circulation to drop and newspapers to lay off staff, the culture pays a very real price.

* * *

So as these people lose their jobs, where are they going? The book/record/video store clerk is not only a kind of low-paid curator, but these jobs have long served as an apprenticeship for artists such as Patti Smith, Quentin Tarantino, R.E.M.’s Peter Buck or Jonathan Lethem.

Donnelly, who co-edits the Los Angeles literary magazine Slake, has watched numerous friends leave writing, art and acting. “I’ve seen a lot of people go into marketing — or help companies who want to be ‘cool.’ What artists do now is help brands build an identity. They end up styling or set decorating. That’s where we’re at now.”

The hard times and frustration are not confined to writers: Eric Levin is a kind of creative class entrepreneur: He owns Aurora Coffee — two cafes in Atlanta that employ artists and musicians as baristas, and the Little Five Points record shop Criminal Records, which, after 20 years, has just announced that it will close. (There are local efforts underway to try to save it.) When asked if he knows anyone who’s hurting, he replies, “Everybody I know.” And he emphasizes that independent business people are in the same boat with writers and musicians.

“Main Street U.S.A. is suffering,” he says. “If you like big-box retailers –they’re winning. Corporations are winning.”

The arts — and indeed, narratives of all kind — can capture a time, a place and a culture, and the inner and outer lives of its people. “But the tale of our times,” O’Neill wrote in his piece on the silence of the new depression, “is mostly being told by our unwillingness to tell it.”

Over the next few months, Salon will look periodically at the hollowing out of the creative class — its origins, its erosion, the price of “free,” and offer possible solutions and reasons for hope.

Is it a recession, a transition, a reset, or all of the above? “I think we’re nowhere,” says Donnelly. “We’re in a no man’s land.”

“Art Inspired By ‘Art’” Yasmina Reza play to be produced

Alex — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 21:18:21 +0000

Through my production company, Last Minute Productions, we are producing and I am starring in a production of “Art,” the Tony-award winning play by Yasmina Reza.

I’m really excited about this. The previous play through Last Minute Productions we did here in Bisbee was “True West” and that sold out and did very well. For “Art” we are having two casts act the play, guided by the same director, Ed Briggs, and they will alternate performances each night at Central School, in Bisbee, Arizona.

On Oct. 22 we are having a fundraiser/bash called “Art Inspired by ‘Art’” for the play. Local artists are donating works inspired by the play for silent auction. It’s being hosted by Mark and Debby Gardner at their house in Bisbee, at 44 Howell Ave., from 7-10 pm.

Here is a poster for the fundraiser:

Further information about the play is below and more updates to come. Any questions email me here or at lastminutebisbee@gmail.com

Tickets: &4 ($9 at the door)

Cast # 1: Sat. Nov. 25 @ 7 p.m., Sun. Nov. 27 @ 1 p.m., Sat. December 3 &10 & Fri. Dec. 6 @ 7 p.m.

Marc …. Alex O’Meara

Serge …. James Coull

Yvan ….. Greg Wingard

Cast # 2: Sat. Nov. 26 @ 7 p.m., Fri. Dec. 2 @ 7 p.m., Sun. Dec. 4 @ 1 p.m. & Sat. Dec. 17 @ 7 p.m.

Dec. 2 and 3 @ 7 p.m., Dec. 4 matinee @ 1 p.m. & Dec. 16, and 17 @ 7 p.m.

Marc …. Gene Conners

Serge …. Paul Bovee

Yvan …. Steve Bovee

“trash land” in Mozambique

Alex — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 22:08:12 +0000

As a reporter who has been to Africa I am saddened, sickened, and inspired. This is … simply overwhelming.

Please click here to see these photographs. http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/08/27/Mozambique.trash.city/index.html?hpt=hp_abar

Life in ‘trash land’ captured by photographer

By Emily Wither, for CNN

August 27, 2011 6:01 a.m. EDT

(CNN) — For some living in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, making a living from other people’s waste is their only means of survival.

Portuguese photographer Jose Ferreira traveled to the Huléne garbage dump, not far from the city’s airport, and captured the harsh reality of life in this “trash land.”

Ferreira says that what struck him most was that despite the hardship, he found some of the “best people” he had ever met.

“Despite all the circumstances of how they live, they keep on showing their kindness and happiness and hospitality,” he said. “We don’t find these human qualities in many places in the world.”

Ferreira explains that he met two types of people in the dump: the homeless and the “garbage collectors.”

“Many of them living there depend on trash to survive, some search for food, others for types of recycling materials to sell to the factories,” he said.

“The money they receive for all that they collect is not enough but it’s something and they keep on returning there to collect more to sell again,” he continued.

It is not known how many people live at the Huléne dump. Some reports have put the number at around 700.

The dump is located in a densely populated neighborhood and covers an area of approximately 17 hectares (170,000 square meters). It is the only official dump for the disposal of solid waste in Maputo, a city with a population of over one million.

The piles of waste at the dump can reach heights of 15 meters, according to a report by the Maputo municipal council.

One of Ferreira’s photographs shows a truck arriving with trash from the city as a crowd of people run after the vehicle.

“At the moment that the truck would dump the garbage they would ”jump’ on the trash and there you can find everything from food, recyclable material, dead animals and fetuses of newly born,” he said.

Ferreira says he doesn’t have a favorite picture. But there is an image he says was the hardest for him to take.

“The hardest to witness was when there were two women eating a dead dog’s head that was already decomposing and raw,” he said.

The dump has long been earmarked for closure, but for the moment it remains open.

After spending time in Huléne, Ferreira says that the biggest mistake people can make is to think that there is no room for embarrassment for those forced to make a living from other people’s waste.

“There is a shame a lot more legitimate than any other because for most of them being there was never a choice,” he said. “Many of them have seen the other side and dream of it themselves and every day they hope for a better life.”

For Ferreira, his experiences have taught him to appreciate life more.

“The life we waste everyday because we want a better one or because we are never satisfied with it, is the life that many wish and yearn to have and would give everything to have it.”

“Shutting the Drawer”: When THE BOOK Doesn’t Get Published, by Edan Lepucki

Alex — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 16:00:16 +0000

Very funny, insightful, and heartfelt essay in today’s The Millions on what happens when THE BOOK, THE NOVEL does not sell and how you’ll just DIE when that happens. Not that I know anything at all about that … no … but, you know, I’ve heard tell stories.

Essays

Shutting the Drawer: What Happens When a Book Doesn’t Sell?

By Edan Lepucki posted at 6:00 am on August 23, 2011 13

1.
In May, after my novel manuscript had been read and rejected by a healthy number of editors, my husband rewrote my author bio. It read as follows:

Edan Lepucki was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1981. He currently lives in East Bushwick.

As an American woman living in an uncool neighborhood in Los Angeles, I thought this hilarious. I also wondered — not entirely seriously, and not entirely in jest — if the revision might help my situation. My situation being that my agent had begun submitting my book nine months prior (not that I was keeping track), and it remained unsold. Admittedly, there had been close calls with two different editors, but, as everyone knows, almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. I was in the same place I’d been back in September. That is, unpublished. The waiting game was starting to char my soul; if you drew a finger across it and put that finger to your tongue, it would taste bitter. Joking with my husband (“Now that I’m nursing, I’ll send them a new author photo, cleavage and all!”) was one of the few coping mechanisms I had left in me.

Now that it’s almost September (“If anyone in publishing actually worked in the summer, I would’ve sold my book by now!”), the jokes aren’t as funny. The truth is, my novel isn’t selling, and it probably won’t. There, I’ve said it. Eventually, a writer must accept rejection, accept the death of her first true darling, and move on. Can I face that sobering reality? Can I put my first book into the drawer, and shut it?

Others have done it before me. There’s a long and rich history of successful writers whose first (second, third…) books didn’t see the light of day. I remember when Myla Goldberg came to speak to the Creative Writing Department at Oberlin. She explained that Bee Season was actually her second novel. “My first,” she told us wide-eyed undergraduates, “you’ll never read.” At twenty, I thought this terribly tragic. In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Dan Kois wrote about novelists who abandoned books for one reason or another: Michael Chabon’s infamously unfinished tome, Fountain City, for instance, and the burned pages of Gogol and Waugh. But the differences between these authors and myself are important. Firstly, they all had dazzling careers, failed book or not. I can’t (yet…) say the same for myself. Secondly, these authors decided to kill their books, whereas my darling was murdered.

Just let me be dramatic for a moment, okay? Murdered! My book was murdered!

Or was she? A friend pointed out that I was waiting to sell my book to publishers, when I could sell it to readers, all by myself. That’s true, of course. Self-publishing is as easy as it’s ever been, and if done well, it can even be lucrative. But, in most cases, self-published authors spend money, not make it, and they have to be their own editor, copy editor, publicist, and book cover designer (which can lead to this and this and this). I certainly could self-publish my novel, but I don’t have the cash, time, or talent to do it successfully. Plus, there’s still a stigma to publishing your own writing. Though this is changing, I’ve never been an early adopter. (I used my AOL email account well into the new millennium, y’all; I leave the experiments to the innovative types.) The truth is, I want a reputable publishing house standing behind my book; I want them to tell you it’s good so that I don’t have to.

So, okay, I’m willing to let my book die, if that’s to be its fate. With all my talk of murder and barbecued souls, I’ll be the first to admit I’m letting myself wallow. But can you blame me? I’m grieving nearly five years of hard work. I’m mourning sentences, characters, and scenes that I’m still proud of. Letting go hurts. A lot. A friend of mine once said she didn’t want to write a novel because she couldn’t stand the idea of working for years on a project that might fail. One of my writing students recently told me she’s so afraid her book won’t sell that the very thought makes her hyperventilate. Another friend said she might die if her novel wasn’t published. I identified with all of these confessions. I felt them myself. Not-selling my novel was my biggest fear, and it’s happening. It happened.

(I was in natural, unmedicated labor with my child for 36 hours. For 24 of these hours, my cervix remained only 5 centimeters dilated. No matter how relaxed I remained, how deeply I breathed, there was no progress. None. More than once during the process, I thought, “This is like trying to sell a fucking novel!”)

(There’s a moment, right before a newborn baby breaks into a wail, when his face wrinkles up, collapses in on itself like an imploding building, and sorrow, pure and clean sorrow, sweeps heavy across his features. I know this feeling.)

Goodbye, goodbye, Novel #1.

2.
The thing is, rejection is instructive. Over the past year I’ve learned that hearing “no” doesn’t get easier if the stakes are higher. Reject my piddling short stories and I will barely flinch; mess with my dear book and I’m rendered immediately vulnerable: “immobilized, apologetic,” as Alice Munro writes in her masterful story “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You.” I urge my students to go for it and send out their work, that they have to get used to a life of disappointment if they want to be writers. As if one can get used to such a thing.

I’ve also learned, however, that a thoughtful rejection is a valuable one, especially coming from an overworked, underpaid editor. To have taken the time to read my work, and written feedback — that’s something I appreciate. This is called relationship-building, I am told. I have more than one friend who sold books to editors who rejected their previous one(s).

Lastly, these months of rejection have taught me the difference between being tenacious and being stubborn — and being stubborn and being desperate. My agent can continue to shop my novel around, but I have already attended its funeral. I’ve said my eulogy, eaten the casseroles, wept in the shower, screamed into my pillow. I have willed myself to move on. I must, in order to continue my life as a writer. I haven’t lost my tenacity, I’ve simply refocused it on my next book, which I’m more than halfway done with. (This is the upside of a submission process that takes forever). Novel #2 deserves my full attention and care. Without it, my work — and I — will suffer.

And this new book, it will be published. If it doesn’t, well, I’ll just die.

Hunter Thompson Writes Rejections Letters for Rolling Stone

Alex — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 17:57:41 +0000

Damn. And I thought not hearing anything back from editors was tough.

When Hunter S. Thompson Penned Rolling Stone‘s Rejection Letters

If you’re going to get this kind of rejection letter it might as well be penned by Hunter S. Thompson. Rolling Stone should keep this on file to send out to other worthy rejectees. Writer Mike Peterson sent a scan of his rejection to Letters of Note, who have some background—”Written in 1971, at which point young Mike was a resident of South Bend, Indiana, the furious missive was sent in response to a piece of satire he submitted to Rolling Stone magazine; unluckily for him—or luckily, depending on your angle—said piece was forwarded to Hunter for assessment.” You can read it in full below:

You worthless, acid-smoking piece of illiterate shit! Don’t ever send this kind of brain-damaged swill in here again. If I had the time, I’d come out there and drive a fucking wooden stake into your forehead. Why don’t you get a job, germ? Maybe delivering advertising handouts door to door, or taking tickets for a wax museum. You drab South Bend cocksuckers are all the same; like those dope-addled dingbats at the Rolling Stone offices. I’d like to kill those bastards for sending me your piece… and I’d just as soon kill you, too. Jam this morbid drivel up your ass where your readership will better appreciate it.P.S. Keep up the good work. Have a nice day.

Sort of makes one miss the days or typewritten letters. Now, Mike, it’s time to make that submission public!

This was just one of many letters written by Thompson, of course. Another one worth reading is a job application letter, which he wrote from his basement apartment at 57 Perry Street. He was applying to the Vancouver Sun, saying, “Most of my experience has been in sports writing, but I can write everything from warmongering propaganda to learned book reviews. I can work 25 hours a day if necessary, live on any reasonable salary, and don’t give a black damn for job security, office politics, or adverse public relations.” Read the full thing here.

Interview About Clinical Trials on ‘Conversations’ with Lizz Sommars

Alex — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 16:30:46 +0000

This interview aired in Seattle on several radio stations. The host, Lizz Sommars, and I discuss all aspects of clinical trials and why the system of medical testing is heading for problems if not reformed or if improvements to the business-reliant model are not made soon.

‘Conversations’ – 8/14/11.

Review of Chasing Medical Miracles by Anthropologist Joan C. Stevenson

Alex — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 17:03:58 +0000

Anytime you get a review in which the reviewer says, “I could not put this book down,” it’s a good day. When that praise comes from an anthropologist and is followed with, “This book is a must read for those contemplating volunteering for a clinical trial (advice in the Afterward), and it also provides discussion starting points for those who teach classes on ethics in research and medicine, global health, the pharmaceutical industry, and the business of medical research,” it’s even better.

Here’s a link to the pdf and the review is below.

Chasing Medical Miracles: The Promise and Perils of Clinical Trials.

By Alex O’Meara. 264 pp. New York,

NY: Walker and Company. 2009. $25.00 (cloth),

$16.00 (paper).

O’Meara immediately caught my attention, when he noted that the number of clinical

trials worldwide has increased 300% since 1998 and 20 of 50 million clinical trial

participants live in the United States. O’Meara tells two stories in Chasing Medical

Miracles. The first is a critical evaluation of clinical trials and their slow but perhaps

steady contributions to scientific progress in medicine and human biology, and the other

story is about the author who wanted to cure his worsening type 1 diabetes by

participating in a clinical trial. I could not put this book down.

He says on page 3 of the introduction that he does not ‘‘advocate for or against

clinical trials’’ but instead desires to simplify the complex clinical trial business for

readers. He also views the clinical trials of today to anticipate aspects of future US

medical care.

Chapter 1 details what it means to volunteer for a trial or to become a ‘‘guinea

pig.’’ Chapter 2 is a spectacular discussion of the ‘‘therapeutic misconceptions’’ that

guinea pigs have, and the history of (e.g., Josef Mengele and Tuskagee) and the ethical

issues that arise when people are experimental subjects. Chapter 3 follows the money and

describes how clinical trials were initially dominated by universities that have been partly

replaced by more ‘‘efficient’’ private businesses and the conflicts of interest that can put

clinical trial participants at risk. (I also wondered about the drain of personnel from

patient care at this time of acute shortages in general practitioners, nurses, etc.)

Chapter 4 details a few of the lawsuits that have ensued.

Chapter 5 describes the typical subjects of these clinical trials from hopeful

individuals with health problems to the professional guinea pigs who may not represent

your average person anywhere. (What does that mean for medication dosages?)

Chapter 6 critiques how the business of trials has moved from the United States to

other nations in which human subjects protection can be weaker than in the United States

(e.g., the continuing use of placebos rather than comparing standard treatment protocol to

experimental protocol).

Uganda is the focus of Chapter 7 and serves as a model for a sophisticated effort

to grapple with the ethical issues and the logistics of monitoring and enforcing rules

during clinical trials.

Chapter 8 explains why specific individuals participate in clinical trials; O’Meara

includes success stories as well as failures. The book finishes with his personal

experience participating in a clinical trial to receive pancreatic islet cells from several

deceased donors. He was not cured, but he ends his tale and the critique of clinical trials

on a cautiously positive note.

This book is a must read for those contemplating volunteering for a clinical trial

(advice in the Afterward), and it also provides discussion starting points for those who

teach classes on ethics in research and medicine, global health, the pharmaceutical

industry, and the business of medical research.

JOAN C. STEVENSON

Department of Anthropology

Western Washington University

Bellingham, Washington

Dave Eggers in Salon about Teachers and Writing

Alex — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:36:09 +0000

Inspiring and heartfelt essay in Salon on a teacher who let Dave Eggers know he should be a writer. Very cool. Teachers are the best in making huge differences in people’s lives, as many did in mine. I hope one day to be able to thank them with a work of art that towers above.

The teacher who encouraged me to write

Jay Criche made “Macbeth” seem edgy to suburban teens — and he helped me believe I could be an author

By Dave Eggers

This piece originally appeared on TeacherLove.org, an online forum for sharing stories about teachers that have made a difference. If you have a story you’d like to share, please submit it here

About two months ago, we lost a great man. His name was Jay Criche, and he was a teacher.

He taught English for 30 years, 23 of them at Lake Forest High School. For most of that time, he was the head of the department, and he looked the part. He wore tweed sport coats most of the year, in weather cold or warm, and if I remember correctly, there were suede elbow patches on these sport coats. He wore small wire-framed glasses, a thick mustache, and his hair was dark, dusted with gray. He had a scholarly air because that’s what he was, a scholar. His lessons, delivered from a seemingly ancient wooden podium, were Socratic in nature, the students peppered with questions, his expectations high, his mind open and wanting to be surprised.

I took his course when I was a junior, and the first book we read was “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” In those first few weeks, he showed us a caricature of James Joyce from the New York Review of Books. In it, Joyce’s hands were rendered large, cupped and moving, as if paddling through water. Mr. Criche asked if anyone knew why the artist had depicted Joyce that way, and I raised my hand. “Is he swimming through a stream of consciousness?”

Mr. Criche cocked his head a bit, confirmed the answer, and a wave of validation swept over me. I hadn’t known, until that moment, how badly I’d wanted his approval. I was going through some rough times at school and at home — my face and back were covered in acne, my chest was concave, my last name sounded like food — but in that class, I felt I had worth. After that, I took it upon myself to impress him. Though William Faulkner wasn’t assigned reading, for weeks I brought “As I Lay Dying” to class, stacked neatly upon my other books, hoping he’d notice. (He didn’t.)

He was kind to me, but I had no sense that he took particular notice of me. There were other, smarter kids in the class, and soon I fell back into my usual position — of thinking I was just a little over average in most things. But near the end of the semester, we read “Macbeth.” Believe me, this is not an easy play to connect to the lives of suburban high schoolers, but somehow he made the play seem electric, dangerous, relevant. After procrastinating till the night before it was due, I wrote a paper about the play — the first paper I typed on a typewriter — and turned it in the next day.

I got a good grade on it, and below the grade Mr. Criche wrote, “Sure hope you become a writer.” That was it. Just those six words, written in his signature handwriting — a bit shaky, but with a very steady baseline. It was the first time he or anyone had indicated in any way that writing was a career option for me. We’d never had any writers in our family line, and we didn’t know any writers personally, even distantly, so writing for a living didn’t seem something available to me. But then, just like that, it was as if he’d ripped off the ceiling and shown me the sky.

Over the next 10 years, I thought often about Mr. Criche’s six words. Whenever I felt discouraged, and this was often, it was those six words that came back to me and gave me strength. When a few instructors in college gently and not-so-gently tried to tell me I had no talent, I held Mr. Criche’s words before me like a shield. I didn’t care what anyone else thought. Mr. Criche, head of the whole damned English department at Lake Forest High, said I could be a writer. So I put my head down and trudged forward.

Mr. Criche was part of a powerhouse English department at Lake Forest High School, a school that, I believe, knew then and knows now how to treat its teachers. Nationwide, almost half of our teachers quit before their fifth year, driven away by poor conditions and low pay, but in Lake Forest, the teachers were and are able to make careers and lives out of the profession. Most of my other English teachers from 1984 to 1988 — Mr. Ferry, Mr. Hawkins, Ms. Pese, Mrs. Silber, Mrs. Lowey — taught there for decades, most of them in the same classrooms, all of them master educators. Imagine the benefit the students there received, from getting pretty much a college-level education in high school from educators who have honed their craft for decades. Every kid in this country deserves the same thing.

I don’t want to make this remembrance about the state of teachers in America, but Mr. Criche’s passing came just when teachers are at their most vulnerable, at a time when they’re fighting to assert and retain the dignity and artistry of their work. I don’t remember Mr. Criche teaching us how to take standardized tests, but when we took them, we did well. I don’t remember Mr. Criche gearing his lesson plans toward any state-regulated curricula, but we did pretty well on any and every scale. Why? Because he made us curious. He was curious, so we were curious. He was hungry for learning, so we were hungry, too. He made us want to impress him with the contents of our brains. He taught us how to think and why.

I miss him, but he won’t be forgotten, not by me or the scores of students who sat before him. Teachers live on in a thousand hearts and minds, right? They’re stuck with us. We follow them everywhere and always.