psychology dector

The Complete Sherlock Holmes: All 4 Novels and 56 Short Stories in Two Volumes By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Bantam Classics, $13.90 paper ISBN: 978-0-553-358257 I have been amusing myself this holiday season by walking the streets of Victorian London with Sherlock Holmes . Of course, it was nothing like when I was actually there, walking the streets of the east end of the city in the steps of Jack the Ripper . The Tower of London is nearby, and across the Thames is the famed Dungeon Museum . However, that was modern London, and nothing like the slums and opium dens haunted by the criminals who are the targets of Holmes and his intrepid partner, Doctor John Watson . Bantam Classics has a nice two-volume set of the complete Sir Arthur Conan Doyle novels and short stories featuring Homes and Watson, reasonably priced, in a cardboard slipcover. This is light reading, something to sit with by the fire in an evening and drift off. The books are also suitable for trains, planes, and automob...

Primers For The Age of Inner Space VI: Cracking the Code Of the Ultimate Enigma: The Atman Discovery: An Unperceived Revolution By John E. Whiteford Boyle Academy of Independent Scholars/Essentialist Philosophical Society/Wheat/Forders Press $15.00 paper ISBN: 0-917888-012 This book is a quagmire, a sinkhole of enormous proportions. I found it on a dusty college library shelf. The premise sounded interesting: what if all the world’s religions, quantum physics, and analytical psychology were all connected? The scene is the mid-twentieth century in California, and a group of writers and mystics gather at a Vedantist retreat center called Trabuco. Among the attendees are Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood . “Here,” the book jacket promises, “finally is the Pantheist monist philosophical and religious trend line, discernible in their work, extended to our time.” I should have run the other way. I struggled through several weeks of trying to decipher author John E. Whiteford Boyle’s ...

“Hey, knuckleheads, don’t ride in the street,” Monica yelled from the porch. I jumped off my bike and walked it to the curb. Daryl and Keenie continued crisscrossing the empty residential street lined with tract homes. Once on the curb, I rode up the sweeping concrete-gray driveway to where my father and Clete stood in the garage. A 1963 Chevrolet Impala, its windows obscured with brown paper and masking tape, was parked in the interior. “I’ve fucked over a thousand women,” Clete was saying to my dad, “and every one said thanks after, you know what I mean?” My dad glanced down at me, his face going red. “I’m good. I don’t need General Motors to make me a man. I can paint any car as long as it ain’t moving. I don’t need GM.” Clete, Daryl, Keenie and Monica lived down the street from us when I was ten years old. I often rode bikes with the boys up down our quiet street. My dad had an uneasy relationship with Clete. They had been hunting together a few times because Clete had a Jeep with ...

I have defected to the other side. About a month ago, I gave up coffee and switched to tea. Aside from that one nightmare I had where Voltaire visited me as a disembodied spirit surrounded by fifty or so empty coffee cups floating in the air, things have proceeded quite uneventfully. Why would I forsake a beverage upon whose altar I would have gratefully sacrificed my first born, if I had a first born? There are many reasons, but first, some history. I started drinking coffee in college when it became necessary to live on a maximum of six hours of sleep per night. That was a good night, six hours. Most of the time, it was more like three or four hours. I fell hard for this lover. I arose with half a pot, took the other half to work with me and finished it before ten in the morning. I purchased the largest cup possible at the local 7-11 on my break, and a second during lunch. (I am the only person I’ve known who tried to fill a Super Big Gulp with coffee instead of soda.) I struggled t...

Why aren’t state colleges and universities free? The question popped into my head while watching stuffy Prince Charles and his horsy wife, Camilla , get pummeled on a London street by students protesting the tripling of tuition fees. A Huffington Post piece stated that the vintage 1977 Rolls-Royce Phantom VI containing the couple was also damaged. But who cares about the car or the royal couple. I am with the students. How are people supposed to get an education if tuition keeps skyrocketing? The average amount of student loan debt an undergraduate accrues these days is approximately $23,186. A graduate degree requires another $25,000 on average, and a doctorate involves $52,000. These are averages; costs can be a lot higher for some students, especially those who do not have parental support or who attend a private university. I do not expect private universities and colleges to be free. If a student selects that option, then he must pay the full freight. However, public universit...

How To Live or A Life of Montaigne In One Question and Twenty Attempts At An Answer By Sarah Bakewell Other Press , $25.00 cloth ISBN: 978-159051425-2 Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Works Edited by Donald M. Frame Everyman’s Library , Alfred A Knopf, $30.00, cloth ISBN: 978-1-4000-4021-3 Sarah Bakewell takes an interesting approach in her new biography of Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, How To Live or A Life of Montaigne In One Question and Twenty Attempts At An Answer. She focuses not on a linear telling of the writer’s life, but divides the book up thematically according to the answers Montaigne considered in his essays regarding the most basic of philosophical questions. She succeeds in rendering a complete and compelling narrative while also addressing the more philosophical implications of the French essayist’s work. As Shakespeare is to drama in the Western Canon , Montaigne is to the personal essay. He was born near Bordeaux, France in 1533, where he grew up to become an emissa...

“So we beat on, boats against the current...” F. Scott Fitzgerald   The Great Gatsby The long drive home in the evening. Endless traffic and gridlock, all of us like one animal curling our way through the streets, inching our way forward. One hour to travel a mile. Plenty of time to ponder recent events: Nice to know we are pawns in a political game. Multi-millionaires in Congress make deals that favor the rich. Tax cuts for the wealthiest two to three percent of the nation? Oh, yeah, we will throw in the middle class cuts and reluctantly add another thirteen months of unemployment. Meanwhile, the 99rs, or those whose unemployment benefits have completely run out, must shuffle through the holiday season with no income. Worse, the talking heads in Congress call them “shiftless” or “lazy.” They are “people who won’t get a job until the government money runs out.” I do not understand why people in this country do not realize that our government favors only the wealthiest Americans. Th...

“They also serve who only stand and wait.” John Milton (1608-1674)  “On His Blindness” In the Catholic Church, the season of Advent is a time of reflection and preparation leading to Christmas. It is, as Felix Just, S.J., Ph.D writes , “a season of hope and of longing…” As with Christmas, Advent is associated with a variety of symbols and traditions, such as the use of an Advent Wreath composed of evergreen branches and four candles—three purple and one pink—which are lit each night, one purple candle per week with the pink candle used during the final week before Christmas; liturgical music; cultural traditions like Los Posadas ; and my favorite, the Advent Calendar . When I was a child, my mother taped an Advent Calendar to our bedroom windows. The calendar was usually a Christmas scene, like the infant Christ in his manger-cradle surrounded by shepherds, farm animals, and his parents. Embedded in the picture were tiny doors with a number on them corresponding to the December c...

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” Socrates . “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Joan Didion . I vacillate between these two quotes on a good day. On a bad day I am apt to curl into a fetal position and give up the ghost. I spend a lot of time examining my life, and what I have discovered in my thorough study is a lot of regret, even as I face new situations that offer yet more regret. As much as I try, I cannot see the future. I am no oracle, no visionary. My gut instinct is way off. Meanwhile, the things happening now get short shrift while I am mired in regret, and therefore, I make new mistakes to regret tomorrow. And right now, more than any other time in my life, I need to be able to see where my life is going because I am making decisions that will affect my life for the remainder of it, and I have no trouble admitting that I am scared. So, if I turn to what I feel is the right course of action, I definitely have a gut feeling, but is it just a story I wish ...

Once, having transferred to my first Catholic high school teaching position, I walked into trouble. I was eager to please and willing to do anything to be successful, an often fatal combination. As I signed my contract, I did not think about the principal’s off-the-cuff remark that, “the tenth grade English teacher is also the faculty advisor for the school newspaper.” I was so excited and overwhelmed planning my classes that I gave little thought to my upcoming foray into journalism. After classes began and I had a free moment, the first task I focused on was setting up the journalism room. Actually, the room was a storage closet, but I was not going to complain. I’d make it work. I carried fifteen electric typewriters up two flights of stairs to our newsroom. I wanted computers, but there were none to spare. “Besides,” the principal assured me, “journalists have been using typewriters for a hundred years. And these are top of the line: they’re electric!” As I won over my students in ...

Babette’s Feast A film by Gabriel Axel Denmark, 102 min. 1987, Color It’s Thanksgiving weekend, and of course, one expects special holiday essays about heartwarming moments and time spent with family, but what this weekend is all about is eating, pure and simple. If one is not into football and visiting with family members, the thing to do when not eating is to watch films about eating. And that brings me the long way around the barn to Babette’s Feast . Twenty-three years ago, Danish director Gabriel Axel made a special movie based on a short story by Isak Dinesen . (A little secret: Isak Dinesen was actually a woman named Karen Blixen.) The film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1987. The cast is made up of relatively unknown French, Danish, and Swedish actors, and features the starkly beautiful coast of Jutland with its wind-swept beaches and harsh climate. Axel makes us feel the cold and biting wind, but he also rewards us with a feast of sensual extravagance...

I have written a previous post about Diane Ravitch and another on the film, Waiting for “Superman.” In the November 11th issue of The New York Review of Books , Ravitch does a thorough job of reviewing the film herself. One point she makes stands out. In her discussion of who, exactly, should be held accountable for the crisis in American education, Ravitch makes the following statement: "Ultimately the job of hiring teachers, evaluating them, and deciding who should stay and who should go falls to administrators. We should be taking a close look at those who award due process rights (the accurate term for ‘tenure’) to too many incompetent teachers. The best way to ensure that there are no bad or ineffective teachers in our public schools is to insist that we have principals and supervisors who are knowledgeable and experienced educators. Yet there is currently a vogue to recruit and train principals who have little or no education experience." I would add that too many ...