Dana Czapnik in The Guardian:

Here’s a thought. Teen angst, once regarded as stubbornly generic, is actually a product of each person’s unique circumstances: gender, race, class, era. Angst is universal, but the content of it is particular. This might explain why Holden Caulfield, once the universal everyteen, does not speak to this generation in the way he’s spoken to young people in the past. Electric Literature gave this explanation of The Catcher in the Rye’s datedness: “If you’re a white, relatively affluent, permanently grouchy young man with no real problems at all, it’s extraordinarily relatable. The problem comes when you’re not. Where’s The Catcher in the Rye for the majority of readers who are too non-young, non-white, and non-male to be able to stand listening to Holden Caulfield feel sorry for himself?”

On the one hand, Yes! On the other,Oof!

I’ve had conversations about Catcher with undergraduate students in creative writing classes I’ve taught, and every one has complained about disliking Holden. In my limited network of young people, Catcher is not only no longer beloved, it has become something even more tragic: uncool. But is it as simple as Electric Literature posits – that if you’re not white, privileged and male, it’s hard to see yourself in Holden? After all, this is partly why I wrote my coming-of-age novel The Falconer, told from the perspective of a young woman in early 1990s New York. Maybe hating on Holden has turned into its own form of adolescent rebellion. Catcher was an incendiary novel when it was first published and was banned from many school districts. Reading it once felt subversive; now it’s a reliable presence on most curriculums. And once adults tell you something’s good, aren’t you supposed to hate it?

More here.

Ash Wednesday, Offshore

We cordoned the bay from the ocean and it did not contain the spill.

….…….. O God, who created the earth,

We used napalm and explosives to breach the freighter’s tanks

and discovered more fuel on board than we originally believed.

….…….. whose spirit hovers over the water,

Daily we counted the dead or injured grebe, sanderling,

and snowy plover. We knew that soon some would have built nests.

….…….. who said, Let it teem with living creatures,

We began an investigation. We said,

Oil-spill prevention has become good business.

….…….. and let birds fly above the earth,

The predicted storm arrived. Twenty-five knot winds

blew across twenty foot seas. We waited for the water to calm.

….…….. forgive us.

We towed the mangled vessel two-hundred miles

to where the ocean drops six-thousand feet. Coast guard

and naval ships fired at the bow to sink it, and it sank.

….…….. Grant that these ashes,

The pressure and cold sea water turned the remaining thousands

of gallons of bunker fuel viscous.

the mark on our foreheads of your suffering,

….…….. be to us a sign. Amen.
.

by Marlene Muller
from Ecotheo Review
Spring 2019, July 22
________________________________________________

The facts and quotation regarding the “New Carissa,” grounded near Coos Bay, Oregon, are extracted from February issues of The Seattle Times; in particular, February 17, Ash Wednesday, 1999.

Kerry Grens in The Scientist:

Despite the recent approval of two cancer therapies that use CAR T cells to treat lymphoma, 25 percent of eligible patients still choose to enter clinical trials instead of undergoing the available treatments. That’s according to insurance claims analyzed by health care consulting firm Vizient, Reuters reports. Cost may be the driving factor behind patients’ decisions to forgo CAR T therapies already on the market for those still in clinical trials. Approved CAR T interventions Kymriah and Yescarta carry price tags in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, while experimental treatments are typically covered by the trials’ sponsors. “Inadequate inpatient reimbursement, especially for Medicare patients, can be a significant deterrent for hospitals to use commercially approved CAR-Ts,” Jennifer Tedaldi, associate principal at consulting firm ZS Associates, tells Reuters.

CAR T therapies involve extracting a patient’s T cells, engineering them to contain chimeric antigen receptors (CARs), and infusing the cells back into the patient to seek out and destroy cells bearing antigens complementary to the CARs on their surface. The US Food and Drug Administration approved Kymriah in August 2017 and Yescarta two months later, in October. From  May 2017 until December 2018, according to Vizient’s data, 900 patients at 58 hospitals in the US received a CAR T intervention, and 25 percent of those patients did so through a clinical trial. Because this time period stretches back a few months before the cell therapies hit the market, the data include clinical trial patients who may have received the treatments pre-approval. Medical bills for the patients on experimental cell therapies were half as much as those for patients receiving the approved treatments.

More here.