about "[sic]" by Joshua Cody

 
When he was about to receive his doctorate, doctors diagnosed noted young composer Joshua Cody with an aggressive cancer. The memoir-ish [sic] documents without form Cody's life and death struggle; hold the book in your hands, open to just about any page, and be treated to some trivia or personal revelation or philosophical reflection. This nonlinear form was well received by a lot of critics. Not all readers will agree.

I recognize the stakes were profound and, for that, a reader can indulge his author; but Cody really challenged my limits. I got bored and lost interest in Cody's scrapbook of a memoir. The value of this book, for me, anyway, is that, if you're not into "reading" lately, you can keep this book around for a week or so and poke around in it as you wait for sleep.

How can I write this about a memoir written by a dying man? I wait for sleep. Not everyone else does.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Reading Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Early in the novel our freewheelin' protagonist McMurphy approaches the insecurely effeminate and possibly homosexual patient Harding following the latter's humiliation during group therapy. McMurphy aims to open Harding's eyes and expose the cruelty of Nurse Ratchet. Harding protests at first, defending the therapeutic methods of the clinic by asserting that its practitioners' expertise is too much for any layman to critique. In other words, the medical community's knowledge is their power. But McMurphy persists, using analogy and his gruff but down-home brand of empiricism to bring Harding to realize that Ratchet's clinic seeks to instill and maintain order through shame. Harding is won over, but then one-ups McMurphy by claiming that they are both peons, separated only by a few degrees.

I can't tell if, in Kesey's mind, Ratchet represents merely a bad apple within the system or if she is the system. Another observation: Having seen the movie many times, I'm surprised by how important a role gender plays in the original story.