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

 

 

 

Single Childless and Dead

My newspaper reports that the "largest segment of the population" is from households single and childless. The LA Times says it's quoting figures just released from the 2000 census. (Today, five years later, that figure must be even greater.)

If that's true, then there can be no mystery about the woman picketing GW in Texas is/was the dead soldier's mother, not his wife. There's a shortage of soldiers. My goodness, how about that? Volunteers? Anyone? Come on, men and women wanted. Women today can fly jets into battle. The thrill! Dead men at the press of a button. I served in Korea. I'm damned if I can remember if, at night, on guard duty (even though I was a scrub nurse, MOS 1835 at the 25th Station Hospital, Taegu, Korea) alone, my rifle, my "weapon" was loaded? Bothers me. At Camp Pickett, VA (now vanished I believe) I was on guard duty at the PX, at night, and my weapon was not loaded. See? Soldiering is easy.

It used to be that for every soldier on the front line, there were five other soldiers in support. But of course in the present wars there virtually is no 'front line.'

So, I guess, the majority of bloggers, and chat people, and message board Members, are single and childless. A very popular Blogger, right here in AOL City, mentioned she had a "Mister-in-the wings" and was astonished, I believe, and just possibly slightly annoyed, that she got so many emails of enquiry (or surprise) about a date with this guy that only resulted in both falling asleep in front of the TV. All my posts, therefore, about sex have been a huge waste of time. I imagined I was writing for and being read by married people with children. ALL, I believe, the kind people men and women (mostly women) who have left a comment are virtually all married with children. I don't know how to talk to single, childless people from the majority of households in America. Boo hoo!

Apparently my most successful entry was mine on Father's Day posted in June 2005. I have no proof, but I suspect and even hope, my estranged daughter, now in her 30s, telephoned me after about 15 years of silence, partly in response to my Father's Day entry. The call was completely out of the blue. The single most dramatic moment in the conversation was when she said, with some ardor, that she wished she was married.

For those wanting to get married let me please recommend the superb book On The Way To The Wedding by Linda Schierse Leonard. Here's a free tip: sex in marriage is infinitely more powerful than that resulting from a date in front of the TV.

Barry

 

 

 

 

Boyhood

(In repeated corrections and rereading of this entry I realize that in my zeal to be honest, and revelatory, I may have inadvertently given the impression I think it's okay to be openly critical of one's own children. I do not. Earnestly and every day we attempt to fully convey to the three children how much we love them. Yet, between us we find it expedient to admit to ourselves and each other how difficult parental responsibility can be. Mister Rogers, for example, very likely never had to be Mister Rogers 24 hours a day. Hope you can understand.) 

Little boys are fiends, everybody knows that, right? To be socially correct, these days, I suppose I should give equal time and say little girls can be monsters too? After all, Cookie Monster is for the amusement of parents of little boys and girls as well as to sort of 'give permissions,' to be naturally greedy, to little boys as well as to little girls. Well, I don't have a little girl so in the mischievous department, and the self-maiming department, I can only speak of little boys. My littlest boy's mother complains, "You never give me girl."

My boy, the youngest, three, has bang marks all over his head, and a scar still visible through his right eyebrow. What am I supposed to do, tie him down all day and all night? The second floor windows, of course, must always be tightly shut, even on the hottest of summer days. He'd have flown to the garden below many times but for that caution. He treats the bunk bed he shares with his older brother as if it were a piece of gym equipment. Since he was two, or younger, he could scramble down at the sound of my approach so fast the squeaking of the bed, and the rustle of his gymnastics caused me to run to the bedroom ready to catch him before he hit the floor, which, miraculously he never has done. To my knowledge he's never hurt himself in the 'gym' only on more prosaic pieces of furniture, and large toys such as metal Tonka Trucks.

I wonder if his aggression comes from wanting and needing to keep up with his several-years-older, two brothers? Recently when both brothers went off to school, leaving him alone, the youngest's personality, and his caution, blossomed. Gee, pretty soon we might even have a conversation. Yesterday we walked around the block sort of chatting the whole time. I figure if I can exhaust him he'll injure himself less often, so our walks will get longer and longer. It's not easy being the youngest.  I was the oldest, and shame on me, I thought the two younger were a pain, an irrelevance to be ignored if at all possible.

Then there's the 'Gimme,' 'Buy me' mania. I've lied and lied about all the things I'll buy him and give him just to shut him up. He's only three, so he mercifully forgets the huge long lists of things I've promised to give and get him. Toy police cars and toy put-em-together-yourself trucks are his favorite. But what am I to make of it when he has a two-by-four, used as a battering ram, a pile driver, crunch savagely into those toys so as to get them apart and to see what's inside? Grin and bear it? I've weakened and asked the idiotic, "Why do you like to break things?" The temper in my voice makes me ashamed even while I'm saying the ridiculous words. I know the answer to my own question only too well, 'Because it's fun, man!'

Hmmm, "You never give me girl" she says with a pretend pout. Shoot, let's give it another shot.

Barry