Shallow breathing starves us of air; gulps through the mouth come in cold and unfiltered, and our lungs hate us for it. We breathe in many ways—and most of them are wrong.
Absence only makes the heart grow fonder under limited conditions; extend it, and you are looking at a different cliché entirely: out of sight, out of mind.
The famous American playwright left St. Louis, but St. Louis never left him.
For Black Americans, the questions might be asked, what does Christmas mean to us? And how can we make Christmas something usable for us? If, as Frederick Douglass argues, Christmas was tainted by the power politics of slavery, as the stories in Collier-Thomas’s collection make clear, it was equally tainted by Jim Crow and segregation.
Written by a quondam amateur boxer and celebrated ring scribe, Damage is a fluid combination of medical history, scientific facts, and personal narratives. Half of the gracefully written text is focused on the connection or, much more commonly, the lack thereof between the medical and boxing communities.
What immediately stands out is Schvey’s utter command of his material. The book will appeal to theatergoers and scholars interested in one of America’s greatest playwrights and his complicated relationship to a city he called home for some two decades, St. Louis.
Military deep-sea divers like to play the world’s fools, even though most are supremely competent and a little piratical. They know what their real work is and find ways to play between bouts of it. This is not “blowing off steam.” It is one answer to the problem of being in the sea and to that of being immersed in any purpose—medicine, management, even writing.
The First Nations taught us the fun of chomping on sweetened tree resin. So what did we do? We replaced it with a synthetic gum made of butyl rubber, paraffin, petroleum wax, polyethylene, polyisobutylene, and polyvinyl acetate. Now, in the first ten years of this millennium, we have manufactured more plastic than we made in the entire twentieth century.
Millan had some of the same challenges as Black actor in dealing with certain types of “minority” roles, but he also had some advantages in getting more roles. Latino actors were often all-purpose “minority” actors, playing East Indians, Native Americans, Spaniards, Mexicans, any of a wide swath of so-called “people of color.”
What does it mean to live in a country where anger is entertainment and power, and fights break out on airplanes? Some of this rage is by now a cultural habit; the rest is raw and fresh.