In today’s Impromptus, I spend some time on a Cuban writer, Carlos Alberto Montaner, who died two weeks ago. I spend some more time on Milan Kundera, the Czech writer, who died on Tuesday. I have sundry other items as well. See what you think.
Earlier this week, I cited an article in the Wall Street Journal: “Cannabis Is Linked to Mental Illness.” The subheading of the article read, “A major new study shows that people who abuse the drug are more likely to be diagnosed with depression and bipolar disorder.”
I commented,
Most of us don’t have social science — data. But doesn’t our life experience tell us it’s true?
This is not to make a point about legalization, necessarily. Plenty of things that are bad, and bad for you, are legal. But — don’t we all know it’s true?
Medical marijuana seems to me in a different category altogether. In any event, a reader of ours writes,
Senior year of high school, Adam Jones was my best friend. He made sure I was welcome at parties, got me my first beer, passed me my first joint.
We went to the same college but drifted apart. Different majors, dorms at opposite ends of the campus. And he became a major pothead.
End of fall semester he had a 1.0 GPA. The dean suggested that maybe college wasn’t the right fit for Adam.
His mom drove up and met the dean personally. Adam was the oldest of ten kids, first in the family to attend college, would straighten up and do better. The dean said Adam could come back.
Spring semester, another 1.0.
He returned home and worked at a series of menial jobs. Early one morning, while driving home from his job as a night janitor, he was killed when he drove into the river. The cops and coroner cleaned it as a result of excessive speed on winter roads in limited visibility, and nobody mentioned how Adam talked about getting baked at work every night.
Legalization, my a**.
In response to a piece of mine about music, a reader — a retired cop — writes,
So, around 1980, I walked into Tower Records on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood. I told the kid that I’d just gotten a stereo and wanted a selection of LPs to start building a library. He immediately said, “You’ll want this.” The “this” was George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra playing the Brahms symphonies. Life went on . . .
Just got a refurbished Magnavox HiFi from an outfit in Youngstown, Ohio. Put on the Brahms. I can’t listen to it without getting wet-eyed. It is so powerful and so beautiful.
It is indeed “Classic” rock and roll.
In a column, I embedded a video of a ping-pong player, Yang Wang, displaying incredible skill, and style to go with it. A reader writes,
Hello, Jay,
Yang Wang’s style and skill, especially his relaxed return at the end — so nonchalant (what a lovely word that is, by the way) — reminded me of the retired Bulgarian footballer Dimitar Berbatov, whose style has been described as “silky,” when he casually lobbed a beauty with the outside of his right foot in a game against Nice back in 2014.
See it here. And I thank one and all readers and correspondents. Later on.