The Wet Blanket

A Journals (Blogs) HOST (ValGal) calls my journal entries "Pontificating." I replied, mildly, and my post was taken down. So I want to know who gave her, who at AOL, gave her the title of "HOST"? Her folder is on a message board called Writer's Pad Discussion, folder named "Journals." Presumably her function is to encourage people to start a journal. Yet, she seems to know nothing about journals, and in effect turns people off, and away from even thnking about starting a journal. For months she gave "prompts" as journal practice on a message board I suppose. Over many months we never got into what a journal is, can be, or has been practiced as.

If I'm "pontificating," should I stop?

Main Entry: [2]pon·tif·i·cate
Pronunciation: pän-'ti-f&-"kAt
Function: intransitive verb
Inflected Form(s): -cat·ed; -cat·ing
Etymology: Medieval Latin pontificatus, past participle of pontificare, from Latin pontific-, pontifex
Date: 1818
1 a : to officiate as a pontiff b : to celebrate pontifical mass
2 : to speak or express opinions in a pompous or dogmatic way
- pon·tif·i·ca·tion /(")pän-"ti-f&-'kA-sh&n/ noun
- pon·tif·i·ca·tor /-"kA-t&r/ noun

Wow, I sure didn't realize I was doing THAT!  Help! Help!!

Barry

And listen, when I'm in full dogmatic mode I'm 'Barrington,' my birth certificate name.

 

"Baby's" Assisted Suicide

Whatever I end up writing in this journal entry remember, please, I started off by saying that the 2004 Best Picture Oscar winner  Million Dollar Baby is well worth seeing.

I saw the movie last night on a date. In the same mall in Glendale, CA we ate first at a Chinese restaurant which has as a name a huge pictograph (?) of what in English, so the waiter told us, the equivalent of 'Prosperity/Blessings/Tips.' He added the last with a broad smile. I copied the Chinese writing as best I could onto a scrap of paper and will send it to my 'date's' Chinese Mother in the Philippines for true translation. It was fun being on a date with my wife.

Still not having killed enough time after eating, and tipping, we decided to see the very end of Million Dollar Baby of the previous screening, first, then wait for the movie to begin  again. Serious stuff, sober, so dark it looked as if shot in black and white. Directly behind us a middle aged, grossly overweight woman was sobbing. To my right, also behind us, a man was snoring. 

I'd received about a week ago a movie-review clipping from my New York buddy, Dick,  written for the New York Post by Maggie Gallagher. She titles her review, "At The Movies Killing is Love."  Her timing was made especially effective by coupling to her review the illness of the Pope, and William F. Buckley's opining in his column that the Pope would be better off dead.

Amazing that the plot of Million Dollar Baby didn't become debate fodder when the movie first opened. It's chances of winning an Oscar might have been dimmed.

The subject is so huge I won't go into it today. Trying to make a hero out Howard Hughes was more reprehensible than showing via dramatic narrative that young people, especially young people, would rather be dead than incapacitated, in spite of what Maggie Gallagher claims as fact that incapacitated people very often are just as happy after a period of mourning, as they were when whole. Humans, in other words, can triumph over catastrophies.

- Barry  

Stories True Stories False

Remembering childhood reading makes today's reading seem kinda tame. Rabble In Arms by Kenneth Roberts, now there was a good one. How about Ironheart about an Iroquoi Chief that was pretty good too. Or, Down the Colorado in a Canoe, that'd keep me inside on a sunny day, long enough to get my mother worried about me and want to shoo me off to the beach or the swimming pool. A bit later, a few years older, reading over in a corner at boarding school, me and, believe it or not, For Whom The Bell Tolls at about age 13. Yep, at thirteen I conjured the earth moving.

What's to read today? Reread the old stuff probably best. Sampling the latest published feels like eating stale doughnuts. I want to read again The Snows of Kilamanjara and spell it right. Most of all The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. Now that I'm nearly grown up maybe I could tackle once more the novel about the guy whose equipment was a bit off. I'll remember the title when I walk into the used book store. I could have the patience to again plough through Crime and Punishment. In today's Red and Blue America I wonder if a novel about offing your landlord with an ax could get published? Well, it's been done. Maybe you'd have to try something really, really awful to compete with Reality Shows.

Writing letters to my friends may have to suffice. Not that they answer very often, and never at length. Oh, and be sure to include a photo. Of the kids is safer.

Barry  

 

 

 

Self-observation

Accurate self-observation might sometimes be equated with self-absorption. (Already I've had to go to the dictionary thrice. No spell-check feels like deprivation when you spell as badly as I do.) However, it can be argued, and I will argue, that self-observation is necessary for survival, let alone a happy life. Driving drunk and getting killed might in millions of instances have been averted if the driver had noticed, and taken in, that they were drunk. 

Where I most value accurate self-observation is in the following activities:

1. Swimming competitively, and training for same

2. Speaking in public.

3. Acting in any medium.

4. Making love.

5. Posting in  my journal

5. Disciplining my children ("Am I fully under control?")

6. Noticing my evasion of responsibilities.

7. Lapsing into blame, rather than taking responsibility.

8. Noticing my peculiar euphoria when I have even a tiny bit of extra cash.

9. Being alert to the possibility of illness in myself, and family.

10. Not losing my temper when I'm stopped by a cop.  Ha!

11. If my hands shake, taking time to check for the source.

12. To check if I can achieve greater overall physical and mental relaxation.

Well, there's a dozen eggs to crack. Hope I make a palatable omlette. Got any tips? Observations?

- Barry

 

   

BOBBY FISCHER GOES TO WAR

In 1972 When Fischer "went to war" and did his bit in the propaganda war against the Soviet Union, and won by beating the World Champion Boris Spassky, the whole world was rivetted. The match was broadcast from Iceland. Nixon, and U.S. Secretary of State Kissinger, cheered Fischer on, and congratulated him when he won.

Now Fischer is in disgrace. He disobeyed a State Department order to US Citizens to avoid all the former Yugoslav states and in 1992, twenty years later, played Spassky for a purse of 5 million dollars in the forbidden land. Fischer won. He pocketted 3 million dollars. He always claimed he'd get rich from chess. Now he's married to a Japanese chess champion (Yes! a woman!) and living in Japan, his status indeterminate. 

Two BBC Brits, excellent professional writers, David Edmonds and John Eidinow, published a comprehensive book in 2004 on the 1972 match with Spassky in Iceland. The book was hideously dismissed in the New Yorker by a Harvard faculty member. I've written the New Yorker threatening to cancel my subscription (ha!) if they fail to reopen the subject. I told them, the truth, that there's a Harvard grad, a sidewalk fixture, just outside the Yard on Massachusetts Avenue who plays speed chess against all comers for small change and who could tell them all about the significance of the Fischer/Spassky matches. I'm waiting for their reply. I have not paid them. Yet, my recent copy has on the name label subscription good through 2006. It's War!

It is not true that chess is of no interest to Americans. I received a postcard, richly colored, inviting me to play in a Midwest tourney that has a prize fund of half a million dollars. Beats Ice Hockey and the NHL.

Detente existed between the USSR and the USA in 1972 so the match apparently had less political impact, propaganda value, than expected. Many Russians liked, and respected Fischer, including Boris Spassky! The account of the match in 'Bobby Fischer Goes to War' makes splendid reading and, I pray, could even go a long way toward bringing Russians and Americans closer together. Russia at the present time is in a dreadful state, and I pray for her recovery. Go ahead! Call me Red and watch me spit. Oh, by the way, I too like Bobby Fischer. So, he's excitable. So?

 

Barry  

 

 

 

Loving

"Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds, / Or bends with the remover to remove: / Oh no! it is an ever-fixed mark, / That looks on tempests and is never shaken:"  Oh sure, and rots of ruck.

Later, much later, older, and apparently chastened, Shakespeare wrote, "That time of year thou mayest in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, / Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."  

The author is counting on mutual aging to cause the lovers to cling together.  I hope it worked out for him. We'll never know. Will In The World a new book about the actual world of Shakespeare may throw more light on Shakespeare's marriage. She was Catholic at a time when that was dangerous, and Shakespeare was chummy with Elizabeth I the Protestant Queen heavy into survival.

Can loving exist in a time of social upheaval? I mean what must the life of lovers be like when one is an Arab, and the couple move into a Red State? while she declines to stop wearing Mid-Eastern garb? Ha! Makes me laugh, but it's also tragic, our separations, and violent prejudices. 

Marriages of conveniences. Is that all marriage can be? Convenient?  My marriage is excoriated on AOL message boards and AOL does zip about it. A poster uses my son's name as a Screen Name, then puts words into the mouth of my 'son' about my sex life, and AOL does nothing about it.

This is not free speech, it is freedom to murder reputation. AOL, you're sliding, sliding down a slope toward wrecking yourself.

Barry

Sidney Lumet's Oscar

Ordinarily gossip is best avoided, right? For one thing The Gossip usually knows only a little, not the full story.  I know only a little bit.

The poignancy of his getting an Oscar is that he made his movies in NY not Hollywood. His whole life he badmouthed Hollywood: the place, and the mindset. He did weird thigs. He made a movie, in color yet, suggesting he had a budget, of Chekhov's The Seagull.  When it opened, in NY, even acting teacher Lee Strasberg couldn't resist pointing out the impossibility of the task. Lumet hit his stride with Pawnbroker,  and even more so with Dog Day Afternoon.   He flopped with The Group because that was a bad novel to begin with. It's almost as if he couldn't read.  A New York Jew, he married Lena Horne's daughter Gail Jones. The scoop there was she saved his life from suicide. They divorced.

I think Hollywood gave him an Oscar 'cause they felt sorry for him.

Still angry with Hollywood, on Sunday night he managed only to thank "The Movies." I believe the man was crude, violent, selfish, and semi-literate. A typical product of "the movies."

Barry