Happy Birthday

Today is my birthday. It began early in the day somewhere around one a.m. We had a party for two, and I tried to be the one giving presents but willy nilly I got presents too. Giddyness reigned. Met Giddyness? Oh, oh she's hot. Multi-talented. I forgot, in my bit two entries down, about 'Professional relaxation,' Lee was always advocating non-verbal sounds as part of self-exploration. So, naturally, on my birthday, I made lots of non-verbal sounds, soft toned, mostly, except at the end. It was late, and I had a date. It must have been fate. Wowee, did we eat the cake, twice!ake!c@+87#@!

Barry   

How to Catch Flies With Your Bare Hands

In retirement at Lake Chapala, Jalisco, I had the leisure to practice catching flies without stirring, or incurring any expense. My computer chess program was busted, so swatting flies was an alternative.

I sat in my armchair on the verandah enjoying the view and waited for flies to alight. Generally I used the two-handed clap method. My cousin Peter could catch flies, when we were boys, with a one-handed scoop; either he had faster reflexes than I had, or he simply caught slower flies: that way, I'd miss, and still miss, every time. Too old now maybe, perish the thought.

Flies land and either stay still, alert, or bend or crouch while wiping themselves. Anticipating when they will wipe their head, or their wings, is a good time to strike. They'll wipe their head at least two times per sitdown. Rarely do they embrace one another, but when they do, you have an easy two-for-one kill.

Waiting for them to wring their hands gives you time to concentrate, focus, relax and summon the intensity for your attack. This preparation stage, which I borrowed from acting theory**, will improve your kill / miss ratio.

One trick is to be sure not to telegraph hand/arm motion by first moving another part of the body. A variation is to deliberately and slowly move the leg or knee the fly has landed on, then simultaneously clap your hands six inches above the target. I have killed as many as ten an hour. Flies, like El Toro, love to defy death, and return over and over till it is their turn to die. After a whole hour I'm exhausted, and take a siesta. It's not the clapping that is tiring, it's the emotion of combat. As Vince Lombardi said, catching flies is "emotional."

Moral: in retirement one can do anything.

Barry

** An Actor Prepares, by Constantin Stanislavsky

Retirement

The science of doing nothing is quite interesting. In ordinary walking around life I forget to truly relax, and 'do nothing.' At the beginning of a swim training session doing 'nothing' is a great boon because relaxed muscles made gradually to work, work better. Last Saturday at the East LA HS swimming pool I was the only swimmer doing laps in the 50 meter pool. By the end I'd completed 3,000 meters, less tired than when I began. I have a strong hunch that deep relaxation helps one achieve a longer life than one might otherwise enjoy.

"Professional relaxation" is a phrase used by Actors Studio co-founder Lee Strasberg. I was first exposed to the concept in about 1961 in Lee's acting class in the Capitol Theater building on Broadway - up the hill a bit, toward 57th street. The Method was hot in those days so luminaries, such as Marilyn Monroe showed up, albeit not for long. A bit later, in the same class, moved to the 10th floor of Carnegie Hall actually on 57th street, I had begun to surrender to the idea that relaxation can be willed through close self-examination accompanied by slow, exploratory movements. The next step in the process, in Lee's class, was to test whether the muscles associated with speech and singing are in lock step with muscles in the rest of the body. An exercize undertaken by each member of the class, separately, was to stand erect in front of the class and 'sing' a song making each syllable separately and explosively loud while keeping the rest of the body still, all the while making eye contact with the seated class. **

On one occasion a young actress (Actor, female) did quite well, boldly, but midway through her 'song' she inexplicably reached up to pull her sweater down to cover her exposed waist. Oh wow! Lee launched into a 20 minute harrangue on the utter absurdity of her extraneous, involuntary motion with her left hand. It was as if he were accusing her of fearing he, Lee, might be interested in that part of her anatomy. He didn't say that, but to me it seemed implied. Lee was good at implications. Point: if the brain doesn't know what the body is doing, or if the body has a separate life of its own, how can the actor ever perform what the actor intends to perform?

The same is true for athletes. The golfer addressing the ball almost visibly seems to be doing an inventory of what he/she is about to do: You can almost see Tiger, or whoever, letting go, lifting a foot perhaps to ease involuntary tension, then repositioning the foot.

In retirement I've continued learning to relax, in the pool, in bed (and wow that's where it really truly pays off! Lee once said that women actors in his class had thanked him for their finally being able to conceive! He said, "There's no extra charge") or even when horsing around. Tomorrow, if I can find it, I'll 'Enter' my mini essay published in a retirement periodical, called How To Kill A Fly with your bare hands.

** A variation of this 'still' version of the exercize was to make rhythmic movements involving the entire body then at will make the same explosively loud 'sung' sounds unattached to any movement of the body: object, to free the vocal muscles to do their job, and the motor muscles to do their different job. I liked that one more than I did the still version. While wildly moving you could forget about being observed. In ordinary life we fidget to shake off being observed. Notice how many great actors, especially on screen, could stay still and remain marvellously expressive.

Barry

What's Private?

The famous poem, TULIPS, by Sylvia Plath copied out below has meanings for me probably unintended by the author but I want to mention them anyway. It reads to me a private poem. That is, she expresses thoughts and feelings not ordinary, in fact fantastical, ones I, we, anyone, might not easily express. No attempt is made to justify her experience, or to garner sympathy; if we feel sympathy, I figure, that's our, my, stuff, not that of the narrator.

My ambition is to reach the author's level of self-confidence and be able to write my experience without reference to agreement, approval, applause, or fear of censure.              

- Barry

 

 

TULIPS

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes to the nurses
And my history to the anaesthetist and my body to surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillows and the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage ---
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

I have let things slip, a thirty year old cargo boat
Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my tea-set, my bureaus of linen, my books
Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free --
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched,
The tulips turn to me, and the windows behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye and the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without itself.

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.

       - Sylvia Plath, 1932 - 1963

Writing To Know Oneself

I bought eight books the other day, only one of those is new, a 'remaindered'book bought from Daedalus Catalogue (mail order) lawyer Dershowitz's take on Genesis up through The Ten Commandments as the source of our present day ideas about Justice. The book is titled The Genesis of Justice. Once I got into it it was fun, but the beginning clashed with my romanticised notions of our expulsion from Eden (Paradise) borrowed whole from Milton. Dershowitz finds God quite unreasonable and 'unjust' ha ha ha ha ha but Milton builds emotional drama when Adam and Eve, "hand in hand took their solitary way through Eden" out into the world "where to choose"!  Disobedience Dershowitz seems to skim over, but it cost our parents "Paradise"!  Milton's epic poem begins, "Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree..." is what I have from memory, plus the fact that the first line deliberately echoes the poetry of Homer. Not having a copy of the poem close at hand explains my ongoing book buying. The other seven books are the following, some virtually brand new bought at Goodwill for less than a dollar per book;  The Discovery of Poetry, 2nd Edition, Francis Mayes: (Primary reason being that flipping through the soft cover book I chanced upon Sylvia Plath's TULIPS perhaps my favorite modern poem a copy of which I don't have anymore. Yowee, it reads better now than it ever did primarily because of it's honest sentiments and stunning insights and reckless self-revelations.) Damage, by Joesphine Hart. The narrator is male. It tries to make high drama out of sex, I think, instead of out of character, but sometimes one wants to read 'low', ha!  I Hate Actors! (1944, yellowed pages but intact.) by Ben Hecht, Hollywood luminary, author, with someone else, of His Girl Friday, based on The Front Page a stage play. Very funny novel. Sort of Americanized P. G. Wodehouse. ALBERT EINSTEIN Historical and Cultural Perspectives. The Centennial Symposium in Jerusalem. I'm gonna groove on this book because since reading and rereading Stephen Hawking I've already caught on to the fact that Relativity and the follow-up new insights about the nature of the universe devined by Physicists has had, and will continue to have a huge impact on the arts, and, religion. Sexual Personae "Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson," by Camille Paglia. This is over 700 pages and dense, so it will take me a while. Twenty years ago when author Paglia was on TV a lot I couldn't make out if she was crazy, simply hostile, or a genius. So, I want to find out if I should write her a fan letter. In youth she was hot. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the one and only. I'm embarrassed; I've never read it. Classic Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

So, all that mess should keep me occupied for a while.

I'm so in love with TULIPS I might post all 63 lines here but how could I do that given the primitive nature of this format in which, as far as I know, you can't make short lines without a huge space between those lines. Yet, I've seen other bloggers do all kinds of things. I'm determinedly un-Techie.

So, I confess, I continue to read books I should have read in college but didn't because I was too busy nursing my unhappiness. Ha ha ha ha ha..........!

To torment me, an enemy, a deadly serious scurrilous enemy from the message boards, thought it would hurt me to say I took Viagra. Didn't in the slightest of course, and besides I'd never taken anything like that. Up to that time I had not. But, as of a few weeks ago, I have taken it and would like to post what thoughts I have about the experience. Do you think that is unwise? I've decided to use the trade name on the grounds that as far as I know it came first, it's the one I have used, and has become virtually the 'generic' name even though of course it is not the generic name. My physician of about three years suggested I cut each blue pill in half. I wondered how to do that but found ordinary sissors do the trick easily. For me it's better that way, half at a time. Bragging? You bet!

Barry 

 

 

The Best Advice About Writing

"What advice have I for the potential writer?
I have none, for anybody is a potential writer,
and the writer who is a writer needs needs no
advice and seeks none....The writer is a
spiritual anarchist as in the depth of his soul
every man is. He is discontented with everything
and everybody....When he's dead he'll probably
be as dead as others are dead, but while he is
alive he is alive as no one else is, not even
another writer....He is also mad, measureably so,
but saner than all others, with the best sanity, the
only sanity worth bothering about - the living,
creative, vulnerable, valorous, unintimitated, and
arrogant sanity of a free man."

        - William Saroyan

Quoted in ESSENTIAL SAROYAN
Reviewed In LA Times Book Review
September 11, 2005
The Book, unlike today's newspaper review, probably includes study of Saroyan's play(s?). For a writer of fiction this quote is liberating, inspiring, stirring, wonderfully reckless, somewhat along the lines of the power in William Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech in which he has the guts to urge writers to write about love and passion. And, best of all, Saroyan (an American Armenian) truly says that anyone can be a writer. I believe that, know that, celebrate that truth.   Barry   (Now, please, please, read the quote again, and slowly, like making long love.)

Six 'Seven Things' Game

Following the always excellent example of AOL Journaler pixiedustnme I want to play the game in which one answers these questions:

1.Things I plan to do before I die

2.Things I can't do

3.Things I can do

4.Things that attract me to the opposite sex

5.Things I say most often

6.Celebrity crushes

(7. Added: Seven things I SHOULD want to do.)

 

Seven things I plan to do before I die:

1. Complete a novel

2. Live part of the year in the Southern Hemisphere

3. Win a Master's Swimming National event, any event

4. Attend my children's weddings

5. Reward my wife for her sacrifices

6. Learn to abjure coffee

7. Atone for numerous broken promises

Seven things I can do                  

1. Skin a rabbit

2. Ride a motorcycle

3. Ride a horse

4. Speak well

5. Listen closely to someone else

6. Do nothing without anxiety

7. Say prayers

Seven things I can't do 

1. Can't dance

2. Can't sing

3. Can't stand on my hands

4. Can't do a decent springboard dive

5. Can't touch type (grrrrrr)

6. Can't stop looking at women

7. Can't want to stop looking at women

Seven things that attract me to the opposite sex

1. Carriage 

2. Modesty

3. Conversational skills

4. Interest in, and curiosity about, me

5. Faithfulness 

6. Fecundity

7. Intellectual breadth

Seven Celebrity Crushes

1. Greta Garbo

2. Liv Ullman

3. Judy Holliday

4. Margaret Thatcher

5. Maria Schell

6. Queen Elizabeth II

7. Selena       (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

Humbly submitted by,

Barry

http://journals.aol.com/bbartle3/Vengeance/

Oops, I left out two subjects; oh well, in the next life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Church of the South Pole

The French who made the splendid, Oscar Nominated Winged Migration, have done it again, even more dramatically, with the now-playing March of the Penguins. 'Enthralling' is too mild a word given how enraptured and astounded I was last night at the movie theater.

Those penguins God bless them have lessons to teach us. Numero Uno for me happened to be that it is normal, in line with nature and God's will, that the male of the species actively engage in the sheltering and nurture of his offspring. How the male Penguin does that is so astounding that you, one, might think it was invented by Walt Disney.

During the credits at the end we are treated to inset action shots of the film crew actually shooting the movie. In some of those shots it appears the penguins were not at all afraid of the humans. Those shots, of the French crew, couldn't be used along with the credits of an American-made movie, most likely, because of union restrictions: if they are onscreen, for example, they must be paid as actors! Ha! I half agree with that.  

The tenderness, courtliness, sensuousness and love clearly visible on the screen during the penquin courtship sequences are a 'marriage manual' for us men: don't be afraid of enthrallment, slowness, waiting for the moment, solicitude, showing need, and being responsible.

Another inescapable thread throughout the magnificent script, is the role played in our lives by hardships. Somehow, I believe the movie, and Nature, is telling us, hardships must almost be welcomed, or at least not resented or taken as a punishment for evil, but bowed to with humble acceptance, and once achieved we will be rewarded by innumerable thrilling compensations. We have been offered the option of partaking in creation.

Barry   

 

 

New Orleans September 2005

As our esteemed "cheerleader" (so tagged by an astute Blogger) JohnM blogged this morning, New Orleans kinda eclipses everything else for the forseeable future. From news clips alone it would seem that by far the largest number of victims of Katrina are Black. What's to be made of that fact (if it's true)?  

I can repeat what a New Orleans resident, an artist and musician, an elderly Black male, said on National Public Radio yesterday. He said he was angry. In fact, he said that the Mississippi River had brought the White Man's refuse to New Orleans for more than two hundred years where it was turned into art and culture. New Orleans, he said, wasn't destroyed by a hurricane, it was slowly destroyed by "neglect." Since the chief instrument of the destruction was broken levees it'd be hard to argue with him.

New Orleans will rise again. Just you wait 'Enry 'Iggins' just you wait. After a suitable period of mourning, and we are in mourning, the subject of New Orleans' future will become hotly, white hotly political. Hillary, or any other Democrat running in '08, will cry out for the complete rebuilding of New Orleans, while the Republicans will intone the wisdom of doing what's 'feasible.' Prediction: guilt and goodness, and hunger for votes, will propel the Democrats to victory. Notice how quiet the Black leaders are for the moment? Ominous, for their enemies.

Here's a little refresher from my own, personal experience in Mobile, Alabama when I was about 20.  Mobile, like a couple of other Gulf States towns and cities, engages in ship building and ship maintenance. As crew on an American flag ore ship we were drydocked for a week or so in Mobile. On the bus going into town I stood in the back of the crowded bus. The driver refused to go on until I came to the front and sat down. I didn't want to.  But the Black passengers wanted me to not make waves, so I came to the front.  Hey, I had not a lick of the pluck of Rosa Parks! Ha!  Even then, for me, a white rube not long from Australia, where I lived from age 3 to age 16, it all seemed kinda stupid. But then I hadn't been conditioned by hundreds of years of ugly prejudice. All through my last two years of HS in San Francisco I went from 947 Green Street, to Lowell High School then on Hayes Street, on a public bus sitting in the back with my left foot on the metal bubble over the left rear wheels. It was a ritual. I smoked a cigarette, secretly. So, on the bus in Mobile I was trying to do what I had always done, just as the bus driver was doing what he'd always done, and the gracious, lovely Black passengers were doing what they'd always done.

Now a hurricane and a broken levee or two has woken us the heck up. Oh, oh, oh, I must, I simply must end this and write to Hillary immediately!  I have a grand scheme of victory for her to get the entire black vote in the South!

May God please bless every victim of the catastrophe no matter their color, religion, or politics.

Barry