Black Lamb

May 2011 in Black Lamb

Volume 9, Number 5 — May 2011

May 1st, 2011

In the cover story of our May issue, The world in flux, Ed Goldberg finds that everything is changing. In Public servant, Benjamin Feliciano paints the portrait of a memorable bus driver in Denver. Lane Browning takes a wry look at the illnesses that have plagued her in Sick & tired.

In the first of a three-part series on his mother’s death, Snowfall in Minneapolis, John M. Daniel recalls a son’s visit. In Eco-mom, Elizabeth Fournier remembers a mother who was ahead of her time. Toby Tompkins begins a three-part travel journal called A Hobbling Tour of Florence & Rome. Hal Clanger relates some of his experiences as a hostel caregiver in It’s about them — & me. Advice columnist Millicent Marshall dispenses wisdom, and Professor Avram Khan gives us another challenging Black Lamb Word Puzzle.

Posted by: The Editors
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Sick & tired

May 1st, 2011

BY LANE BROWNING

Emily Dickinson was lucky. Not because she had writing chops, but because she had a cool kind of sick. I’d like to have a cool kind of sick.

Emily had Bright’s disease. Maybe not a picnic to navigate, but what a charming name! So much nicer to be Bright than… er, Banal. So much prettier than “chronic idiopathic neuropathy,” one of my longtime physiological partners. Frederic Chopin and D.H. Lawrence were really lucky; they had tuberculosis! They could wheeze and cough and nearly faint from breathy malaise, their pale faces flushed with weariness and froth. They could wilt and swoon. Poets, artists, and musicians claimed that TB conferred heightened sensitivity — spiritual purity and temporal wealth. The Greeks named it phithisis — how cool would it be to tell someone you had that, to pronounce your ailment sounding like Sylvester the Cat’s “Thuffering Thuccotash”?

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Browning | Link to this Entry