Word: goodwins
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...Often that weakness is drinking. "You're a rummy, but no more than most good writers are," Ernest Hemingway told Scott Fitzgerald, and Fitzgerald himself called alcohol the "writer's vice." Now, through a study of Fitzgerald as "an alcoholic par excellence," Washington University Psychiatrist Donald W. Goodwin has attempted to explain the remarkable statistics about the drinking habits of well-known American writers of the past century: a third to a half were alcoholic; of six Americans awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, four (Eugene O'Neill, Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner and Hemingway) were alcoholics...
...Possibly their heredity compelled it; writing ability and alcoholism may have common, partly innate roots, says Goodwin. Possibly, at least in Fitzgerald, talent and alcoholism "have a common meeting point" with another disorder that may have a genetic source: manic-depressive disease. Fitzgerald's enthusiasms were nearly manic, and he was often depressed. "In the real dark night of the soul," he wrote, "it is always three o'clock in the morning...
Perhaps he had something there. Explains Goodwin: "Writing is a form of exhibitionism; alcohol lowers inhibitions and brings out exhibitionism. Writing requires an interest in people; alcohol increases sociability. Writing involves fantasy; alcohol promotes fantasy. Writing requires self-confidence; alcohol bolsters confidence...
...techniques of political image makers often work in the service of distortion-slices of life that belie real life, conversations that never took place, facial appearances as cosmetic as Hollywood's, life-and-death issues disposed of in ten seconds. In the extreme hypothesis of Writer Richard Goodwin, once an aide to the much-televised Kennedys, TV is a way in which "you could run a candidate who is maybe in a mental hospital." Even if you did, he would have to be rich as well as sick...
Some participants worked out structures that use simple means to change the very mood of a city-to introduce new functions and fulfill traditional ones in more exciting ways. Neil Goodwin and John Borden, for example, designed a system of mobile vending booths because "... Government Center, the Southeast Expressway, and other 'urban renewal' in the West End of Boston have resulted in the devitalizing and deadening of a uniquely alive part of the city." Their hexagonal booths might be set up in under-utilized spaces like City Hall Plaza to dispense goods and information. Such units could provide homes...