Home » Posts tagged 'dartmouth'

Tag Archives: dartmouth

Orozco at Dartmouth

Posted on by

Panel of Orozco’s Epic of American Civilization

One of the things I most loved about my years at Dartmouth College was studying in the Baker Library’s Reserve Room, as it was then called. The Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949). Between 1932 and 1934, he painted a series of murals entitled “The Epic of American Civilization” in the college’s Baker Library.

There is a detailed discussion of Orozco’s mural put out by Dartmouth’s Hood Museum describing all the panels.

The Reserve Room

Sometimes I think it is those murals which first got me interested in going to Mexico. Nine years after I graduated, I finally made it to Yucatán and visited the ruins at Uxmal, Chichén Itzá, Mayapan, and Kabah during a two-week trip in November 1975.

Until I saw Orozco’s work, Mexico and the Pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas just weren’t on my radar. Afterwards, they became a major preoccupation.

Quetzalcoatl in a Panel of the Orozco Murals

Little did I know in my college years that my interest in the murals would eventually lead me not only to Mexico, but also Argentina, Guatemala, Honduras, Uruguay, Chile, Peru, and Ecuador.

My Libraries

Posted on by

The Main Branch of the Cleveland Public Library Downtown

Books and libraries have always played an important part in my life.

When I was a toddler, my mother took me to the branch of the Cleveland Public Library on East 109th Street (now Martin Luther King Drive). Not that I could read, but I could indicate based on the illustrations the books I would be most interested in. She would check them out and read them to me in Hungarian, probably embroidering a bit. The one book I remember from that period was Dr. Seuss’s The King’s Stilts, which I now have in my collection.

In 1951, after my brother Dan was born, we moved to the Lee-Harvard Area on the East Side of Cleveland. For many years, I went to the Lee-Harvard branch which was located on Lee Road, first north of Harvard, and then south of it. The head librarian was a fellow Hungarian, Mr. Matyi, who played the oboe in the Cleveland Philharmonic Orchestra.

During my college years at Dartmouth, I spent many hours at Baker Library, which was modeled after Independence Hall in Philadelphia. What I loved most about it were the frescoes in the reserve room that were painted in the 1930s by José Clemente Orozco.

Jose Clemente Orozco, Murals at Baker Library Reading room, Dartmouth College, Hanover NH; The Machine

Once I moved to Los Angeles, I spent some time at the UCLA University Library, but I liked going to the main branch of the Santa Monica Public Library—which satisfied me until an opportunity opened up with the construction of the E (for Expo) Line of the Metro Rail. Driving and parking downtown was always a major pain. But now I was able to whiz downtown for 35 cents in three quarters of an hour.

I am now hooked on the Central Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. Not only because of the library’s holdings, but various events sponsored by the library, especially the guided Thursday mindful meditation sessions.

The one library I forgot to mention is my own personal library of some 6,000 volumes, which I am slowly trying to thin by donations.

Boy Jeezus, That’s a Pissah!

Posted on by | 2 Comments

Bacteria in a Urinary Tract Infection

When I was a student at Dartmouth, we all made fun of the local New Hampshire employees, whom we called emmets. The most typical speech mannerism was the same as the title of this posting. At the time, I never realized the irony of that phrase.

After I graduated from college, and days before I was to head out for graduate school in Los Angeles, I got the mother of all headaches and lapsed into a coma. It turns out that I had a pituitary tumor, called a chromophobe adenoma. Making the right diagnosis in 1966 was a flipping miracle: Remember that MRIs and CAT Scans weren’t around then. All they had to go on were fuzzy X-Rays, and sheer deduction based on miscellaneous hard-to-interpret factors.

With luck, I not only survived, but I made medical history. The only problem is that I paid for it with a scarred urethra caused by some ICU staffer who forced a catheter up my urethra at a time when, groggy with drugs, I thought I was being attacked and resisted what I perceived was violence.

Well, boy Jeezus it was a pissah! For several years, my scarred urethra tended to shut down, forcing a procedure variously called a dilation or a cystogram tray. I have undergone that procedure about eight times over the last fifty-five years, and I’m going to have to undergo it again on Tuesday because I currently am recovering from a urinary tract infection.

This weekend, I leaked so bad I went around in Depends adult diapers. I either peed into the diaper, or had to carefully aim my instrument at the toilet while the stream tried to go in every which direction. The dilation will be a sort of quick fix, but it will result in copious if painful urination for about two weeks until the urethral scars tend to close up again.

There is no pain I have endured in this life compared to a dilation. It’s like fifteen or twenty minutes of being whipped with a cat-o-nine tails.

With luck, the pain will eventually go away, and the urethra will open up slightly … until the next time.

Now, wasn’t that fun?