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Neil Martinson

Review

On Barbara O’Brien’s OPERATORS AND THINGS

Neil Martinson

In the early ’60s, Ace Books, a publisher known primarily for science fiction, released a small paperbound edition of a 1958 book called Operators and Things by a woman writing under the name Barbara O’Brien. Although ostensibly a work of non-fiction, it reads a bit like a missing Philip K. Dick novel; its subtitle “The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic,” while no doubt enticing to some readers, does no justice to this mystifying, true-life initiatory tale. The author starts out by describing her experiences in the competitive, male-dominated business world of 1950s New York, detailing the various “hook operating” methods by which her aggressive coworkers would ascend the corporate ladder: vicious techniques redolent of Cold War paranoia that ranged from simple slander to complex, backstabbing daisychains of Machiavellian proportions. The institutional sociopathy she details hinges on adroit, covert manipulation and contr...
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Cultivating Pippi Longstocking

Neil Martinson

One warm spring afternoon in 1990 I was walking across the Williamsburg Bridge on my way to Manhattan, as I’d done countless times during my years in Brooklyn. A recent, tumultuous breakup was still fresh in my mind, but I was beginning to feel somewhat liberated, enjoying the freedom of finally living alone, and learning to have fun again. The bridge scene from Pippi On The Run flashed into my mind, and in a split second I knew what I had to do. In this movie, the heroine Pippi Longstocking’s indomitable approach to life achieves its peak expression, centering around her ability to achieve anything she wants, often by refusing to accept the impossible. The scene in my mind has Pippi and her two friends Tommy and Annika looking down from a bridge at a steam-engine train chugging along the tracks below. Pippi suggests all three of them jump off the bridge onto the roof of the moving train. Uptight Annika begs her not to do it, bu...
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