Poetics of Doctor Fell and a Community Health Centre

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

The poem about Dr. Fell is easy to memorize. I’ve seen it in a couple of science fiction short stories, with the main character speculating the poem was composed by an undergraduate at Edinburg medical school, a young man who just did not like his teacher.

As for community health clinics, they were on my mind last Friday morning as I sat with writers in a nice old sandstone school. Named after Princess Alexandra, it has tin ceilings in the upstairs classrooms. Located a block from Fort Calgary, the former school had housed a thriving community health clinic back when I first came to the city. Not now.

We were gathered to do Free Fall.

The “prompt” had been, “Your test results are normal.” So we all began scribbling fast in our notebooks with no editing, no revising, no perfectionism or second thoughts—such a glorious free fall. So liberating for anyone tending to be uptight. Few of us at Free fall write every day, so at least our Friday mornings, ten 'till noon, give us our one sure weekly chance to write, and to see other writers.

I was moved to write humorously, having already covered the topic seriously in an essay archived January 2013.

Here’s Friday’s piece; I invite you to imagine me reading it aloud, as comically as I can:

God I hate the so-called community health centre. Yes, it’s home sweet home to the doctors, with homey white walls—but the rest of us don’t like white. Give us wallpaper, or painted murals, or wavy aboriginal lines, give us shelves of brick-a-back and family portraits in eager sepia tones, just don’t give us the horrors of hospital white.

And I’ll never forget my first time, when I was nervous, and had a social disease to boot. The dam washroom was locked! And guarded by a human pitbull in uniform across a vast forbidding floor. So I had to make my way down a hall, and another hall, and misstep or two, before I found some old battle axe, wearing a stupid nurse hat. “Can I help you?”

“No, I can find the way myself, but I desperately need a key!” Somehow I managed to keep my sanity, but not my cool, when she asked, “The key to what?”

And back down three hallways—no, two— past the husband of Ms. Battleaxe, in his Gestapo uniform, and into the washroom. Did I make it on time? Let’s just say I’m still bitter.

Picture this: A community health clinic, with Gestapo. Now, if you wear the uniform, and you call yourself humble, low paid, harmless, and not an authority figure, well guess what? If you take your humble authority into the local skid row bar no one is going to buy you a beer.

You may be wondering if there is truly a C in community. Not if doctor Mengele has any say. Heaven forbid the board of directors should be over 50% members of the community. What if the community votes to paint the dam walls? Can’t have that. And what if the community pushes to do like that hospital beside Paddington station, in London? At Saint Mary’s you can have your AIDS test, and get your results back, both in the same afternoon. You wouldn’t believe how long it takes here in the land of the free.

Back I went, for the third time, because I have no fixed mailing address. Dr. Mengele looked at me. “Your test results,” he said, “came back normal.”

Here’s the poem:

I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,

The reason why, I cannot tell;

But this I know, and know full well,

I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

April

2015

Footnotes:

~Reminder: My serious version is archived in January 3013

~Here’s a link to what some interesting people say about the poem.

~The current Oprah Magazine, for April, where Oprah has a long handled yellow paint roller, has an article on Why Poetry Matters, page 86, as part of the monthly Reading Room section.

~We at Free Fall have a blog where we post our stuff without fixing it up, except for spelling and punctuation, so it appears just like we wrote it and read aloud on Friday. Not fancy, not lengthy, but very human. Here's the link.

~Last week I forgot to say my last 25-blog summary was a dense heavy post in November of 2014, Measuring So People Matter.

Poetics of Keeping Three Wishes Ready

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

The other morning it was a touch below freezing, and despite small patches of snow far off to the side, there was no snow beside the sidewalk, only frosty grass. It felt like the world was young and I was on a fresh morning walk to elementary school. (Of 1¼ miles or 2 kilometers) It felt like back when I memorized the start of that fairy wishes poem. Today I “search engined” for it, finding a most delightful blog posting (footnote) where two friends have experienced posting wishes on their refrigerator—with two different results.

As for my own wishes—

Today I wish to do my every-25-posts summing up…

Why? Because today the time has come around: My administrator’s page of 25 essay titles has filled up again. What have I learned? Maybe a bit about human nature. I have previously found out several times, always by accident, that I’ve been translated into several languages. That’s fine. Yet I don’t think I’ve been translated at all ever since I put into my About Me sidebar a request for translators to leave me a comment. (I believe one of my translations was into Turkish, but I can’t tell for sure) Maybe it could be easier for humans to not translate if this must involve the effort of typing in a couple lines to say, “Hello Sean, I’m translating from Xanadu for the benefit of my fairy ring…”

I imagine my site as a modest blog with modest readership, one where I might have to close one eye to the blog statistics, to avoid discouragement, saying to myself “Maybe some day it will get more readers.” Sometimes I click to see the titles of my “top ten” posts for “all time.” It’s nice to look… but I find no guidance for what makes a hit.

Well, the other day I finally thought to click on the “overview” graph for “all time.” Surprise: I have really increased my stats over the years—sweet. I guess I have been mislead by the ongoing hit counts. Due to technical reasons, the experts at Google, who run Blogger, can never register the hit counts for my latest essay: They can’t count home page hits. Don’t you wish there was an app for that? I suppose I could whip up a home page, (it’s easy) and then have people click through it onto my latest essay, and then count the essay hits, but no—I’m not quite so egotistical that I need stats. Not if it means an extra click-through for people. Not for a modest blog.

When it comes to blogs, some folks would say a blog is a requirement for everyone in the public eye. Then again, folks used to say that everybody should get a citizen band (CB) radio. My brother had one at home. The CB craze long ago died down, and I don’t miss it. Similarly, I suspect the public’s passion for blogging has begun to decline. …By the way, (BTW) Paul Brant, who remade the CB song Convoy, is a local. My client, as a patient, met him when Paul was working at the children’s hospital. …By “in the public eye” I am not thinking of singers and realtors and such, but of my fellow writers.

For various reasons, beyond the scope of this essay, writers are now being very strongly advised by agents and editors to have a blog as their “platform.”—I might not agree with this new wisdom. In the publishing trade, a platform is what implies a certain number of sales you could hope for, from your blog readers, as opposed to you putting a book out there as a complete unknown. 

My favorite platform was the one proposed by Chuck Norris, for his excellent book, which is not about fighting, entitled The Secret of My Inner Strength: My Story. As Chuck explains, when the skeptical publisher asked if there was any proof anyone would buy any copies, Chuck said he’d just won the championship for Karate-do. And so if all the practitioners of karate bought his book, well, that would be a lot of people.

In his book, Norris comes across as modest, like me and my writer friends. It must have been complete strangers who began making T-shirts showing his silhouette over slogans like, “The dark is afraid of Chuck Norris.”

As for me, let’s be clear: My blog is not my platform, because I am well aware there is almost no market for books of essays. To know that, I don’t have to seek out the teensy weensy essay section in a giant bookstore or big central library—it’s enough to say aloud, “I have a hobby of writing essays…” and then watch people’s eyes glaze over. For me, my blog is my chance to seek self-mastery… like attending Chuck’s dojo.

If I’m mentioning writers today it’s because writers are on my mind. Last week, for the first time in my life, I found out I’m on someone’s home page blog roll—wow—and wouldn’t you know, it’s a blog by a local fellow writer. Here’s the link.

And here’s the first verse of the poem, written in 1932:

I Keep Three Wishes Ready

by Annette Wynne

I keep three wishes ready,

Lest I should chance to meet

Any day a fairy,

Coming down the street.

Here’s the whole poem, on that delightful blog.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

March

2015

Footnotes:

~For those who skimmed fast, here’s that blog again.

~Myself, I disagree with skimming.

~I’m still not saying I agree with blog platforms—but if you’re thinking of starting one, for any form of art, there’s an exciting New York Times best seller called Show Your Work! By Austin Kleon, subtitled 10 ways to share your creativity and get discovered. 

~As for me, I wrote My Blog is Not a Platform archived back in February 2016

~I wonder if my essays are being read by avid readers and writers, because for the past month my most popular essay, by hit count, is Not to Be Robert Heinlein, analyzing the reputation of the dean of science fiction writers, archived October 2014. If that essay keeps getting so many hits, then it will soon become one of my top ten posts. 

~Update to below's note: My last 25-title post was in May of 2014 called Acid Blog, Stupid Yankee University where I suggested a reason for how, during the war, a university could dis-invite someone with valuable military intelligence to offer.

~Following the above, another 25-blog post was a denser, heavier piece called Measuring So People Matter in November of 2014.