Speak up!

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I’ve been kinda quiet here lately.

That’s a shame. I like to write on my blog. But my life has been somewhat exciting, and that doesn’t always leave time for writing.

Isn’t that funny? When life is most interesting, you don’t have time to stop and tell about it.

I remember I kept a diary as a teenager. I would oh-so-faithfully write down everything that happened or occurred to me. Volumes, pages and pages of my life would be documented.

I soon grew incredibly sick of writing down all the nothing that occurred in my life. I thought to myself “I am spending so much time writing down what I’m doing that I am not doing anything.”

I was young and had no basis for comparison. It did not occur to me that I had no life. I just had directionless ambition for a life.

Anyway, I am blessed to have a life now. And that life has been getting in the way of my art–the art of this blog.

You know, I’d love to fill this blog with delightful bits of interesting, useful and enlightening paragraphs. Some of the bits are those things.

Some of them aren’t.

I suppose that anything i write is useful to me. It is useful to write, it is useful to express my thoughts, for my own edification, even if no one else really cares.

So, I do write.

But I would really like to be better at expressing my thoughts and impressions in such a way that others can benefit. Sure, I don’t mind being self-centered. That’s fine. But it is more fun when you can bring others along on the trip.

Sometimes, though, when I am at my most creative and original, when I am most inspired, I seem to lose connection with others.

I am in love with originality. I reach for it whenever I can. I am thrilled when I find a new perspective, or a new way to express something difficult to grok.

It is HARD! We struggle, I struggle to understand more about how people workd and how the world works. WHY are things the way they are? WHY do things turn out the way they do?

Once in a while, I catch a glimpse. A flash of what I know to be the bigger picture hits the retinas of my understanding.

Hallelujah! Tell everyone and throw a party! I just got a little bit more of what it’s all about!

Except…not everyone wants to come to the party. I want to share the gift I recieved, but it turns out that people are not ready to listen.

What?! I thought we were all doing this together. I thought that this was we were all working on. Understanding, enlightenment, all of that.

So why don’t you want it when it comes available? I want to share, and you don’t want any?

Why not?

Maybe other people really aren’t looking for enlightenment. Maybe they prefer dim light and stupefied complacency.

Or

Maybe I’m just kidding myself. Maybe the revelation I think i have recieved is not amazing. Maybe I am stupid, and this insight that I astonishes me is as ordinary as a rock.

Or

Maybe I’ve been walking on a slow incline. As I work towards understanding more and more, my atennae are picking up bits and pieces and gathering and re-forming the information that I get. Maybe the accumulation of knowledge has been a slow process, one requiring diligence and time.

Therefore, my flash of brilliance took place at a mountaintop. I’ve been working towards it harder than I realized.

When I go to share it, I find that I am already being a geek and using advanced examples that others don’t understand.

It’s like I’ve been following a train of thought pretty far down the tracks, and I’m way down the line.

Sometimes, when I’m trying to explain something, I get frustrated. I feel like snapping my fingers and saying “Hey! Keep up! Pay attention, we haven’t even gotten to the main point yet.”

But then, who am I to demand that kind of attention? If others don’t want to know, they won’t pay attention.

I know some nerdy people who know a hell of a lot about certain rather narrow subjects. They dove deep to get to what they wanted to know. About the inner workings of physics, or the inner workings of a computer, or the relationships in telecommunications networks.

And that means they get to a point where they can only talk to each other about those particular subjects. No one else understands them.

I often feel like that. Like I’ve jumped into a body of knowledge, and I’ve gotten far enough that it’s hard to talk to others about it without a LOT of background explanation.

Except…where are my colleagues?

Poets and philosophers are not honored in this computer age.

Original thought is not prized. Not unless you can patent it.

And you know what? I understand that. I am a deeply practical person. I understand the value of a good meal. “Good” meaning reliably recurring.

But I also understand the value of an original thought; it is at the same time the most selfish and altruistic act.

For what is more personally gratifying than discovery?

And by what means will humanity and the world improve itself other than through the adoption of new ideas?

I wrestle with my creativity. I am electrified and frustrated by turns. And sometimes at the same time.

Perhaps it would be easier if my talents lay in more tangible directions. If I were inspired to be a plumber, for example.

But that is not the case. Here I am, striving with Ideas.

Rick Steves’ Germany, Austria, and Switzerland 2003

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Okay, so I’ve been looking at a lot of guide books for Germany

This one was the first one I bought, but that’s because it was on sale at AAA when I went down to renew my membership. I was also trying to shake them for free maps of Germany.

They don’t have them. You have to pay for maps not it America. That’s what the last A in the series is for.

So, I bought this guide. It seems very good, if you don’t read any other guides. But the problem, is, Rick Steves is very opinionated. He only tells you about the parts he likes. So he tells you all kinds of things about the stuff he recommends, gets you all excited. But he doesn’t give you a chance to make up your own mind.

If you want to just follow his footsteps, go ahead and use this book.

Otherwise shop around.

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall…

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In
One week
Seven days

I will be on vacation in Germany! I will, to be exact, be in the very same town that the Brothers Grimm lived in while they were gathering their fairy tales.

I love the Grimm Fairy tales.

Kindermarchen, they call them.

Skazki, also.

I read all of them when I was a kid.
I immediately recognized that Disney had not told them right. They are much scarier and bloodier the old way.

I guess we liked the scary parts.

I wish that we still told one another stories. I fear that story telling is dying out. We read now. Or we watch it on TV.

We don’t tell.

_A Treasury of Victorian Murder_

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Professor Wilson was the one who taught me Victorian Literature. He was quite good at it too.

Of course, you had to get used to the fact that he would take a 3 1/2 hour class, talk for three hours without a break, then send you home a half hour early. Once you learned not to drink a lot of liquids before his class, and that all his questions were rhetorical, you could settle in and start to enjoy his very dry humor and somewhat bashful retelling of victorian scandal.

He knew his stuff, and when you learned to listen, you learned a lot. I remember he told us a story of one victorian figure (can’t recall who) that had a fetish for women with strong arms. He left his wife and became involved with this cleaning woman who had very well developed muscles in her arm. However, the gentleman did not actually become intimate with this cleaning woman, much to her frustration.

I don’t remember exactly, but I have the impression it ended in some sort of murder. I do remember exactly how Professor Wilson would tell the sordid details with excruciating delicacy and yet with absolute relish and delight.

When I ran across the graphic novel A Treasury of Victorian Murder by Rick Geary, the idea fit in very well with my concept of Victorian times. The artwork was a wonderful combination of cute and sinister, perfect for the subject. Geary shows all the nice little details of dress and furnishings that gladden the hearts of Victorians, but he shows the terrifying evil faces of the murders that would satisfy the judgemental souls.

The book is not very long, but it is only one in a series. Geary tells the stories in a journalistic, factual way. He lets his pictures build the drama.

“How I learned to drive” by Paula Vogel

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What is it about sexual abuse stories? They are such a strange combination of feelings. One part is the seduction, the sexiness of talking about sex. But at the same time there is the alarm bells, ringing “Danger! This is wrong!” There is the pushing-away feeling of disgust at the molester, that is part of the alarm-bell feeling.

There is also the hypnotic sensation of watching a car accident happen in slow motion. This horrible thing is happening; is the bad man going to get caught? Is the poor child going to be okay? and you are not sure of either.

And while I am wondering if the kid in the story is going to be okay, I also wonder if I am a sick person to be seduced into the sexy side of the story.

It makes me feel sick to my stomach, while being slightly turned on, which makes me feel even sicker.

That is what this story did. I guess that means Vogel did a good job of making me feel the same sort of thing that Li’l Bit felt. Surely she must have felt those feelings and more.

This play was better than just a “How I recovered from my Molesting Uncle” article in a woman’s magazine. There was a stronger pull of power between the girl and her Uncle Peck.

It reminded me a whole lot of Lolita, the way Li’l Bit turned the situation to have more power. Lolita had a pull of power over Humbert too.

The influence of Li’l Bit’s family on how she dealt with issues of femininity were quite funny-a horrifying combination of frankness and misinformation, high expectations and hypocrisy.

The characters are all sympathetic, Vogel made everyone come alive.

_A Bridge Too Far_

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One of the things I always have trouble with, in the WW2 movies, or really, almost any war movie, is that I can never tell the different characters apart.

They all look somewhat uniformly handsome, they wear uniforms. As the movies progress, they all get kind of dirty and greasy.

How am I supposed to tell who from who?

Some people, guys especially, can tell the difference by the hats and the insignias on their uniforms. Chris knows all about it. Even more!

He brought over a bunch of DVDs, A Bridge Too Far among them. We started to watch it. He would pause it and explain to me all the different implications of what was going on.

Boy, that made a difference! I mean, I could tell, when they talked, who was american, british, german and polish. But it was hard to tell when they were just walking around. And they would refer to each other by numbers: 82nd, tank support, etc.

This movie tried very hard to make the characters distinct by using famous actors. Robert Redford, Gene Hackman, Elliot Gould, Sean Connery, Laurence Olivier were among the characters. That helped.

The story was a really amazing battle that took place towards the end of WW2. The Americans, Brits, and Poles all cooperated to try to close in on some bridges in Holland.

They used Paratroopers extensively, and the battle was the first to do so. It was amazing to see, in the movie, all the parachutes opening up in the sky. I kept thinking, “they are going to land on top of each other!”

The movie is almost three hours long, but it was gripping. It took some paying attention to keep track of who was where and who they were talking about at different times. The movie didn’t let you rest.

I kept feeling sad about the whole thing. The difference between the enemy and the allies was just placement. This story did not focus on the atrocities of one or the other. It just seemed to show the damage to all involved.

Mind your nouns and tenses

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Yesterday, as i was riding the bus home early because I was coming home sick, a young man got on the bus. He handed the bus driver a ticket, and then made some gestures like he needed to say more.

After trying to understand him for a moment, the bus driver said, “I speak six languages, but I do not speak American Sign Language.”

The young man gave up and sat down.

He had been motioning that he wanted to write something down. But he didn’t have any paper. I happened to have a pad on me.

I took it out, and wrote down:

What do you need?

I handed him the pad and pen:

I told him that I did paid ticket at the metro rail transfer to bus should give me ticket is some

You want another transfer?

I gave him my ticket need to change a bus ticket. also i paid ticket at the metro rail machines

You need another tranfer or what? a ‘transfer’ is a ticket that lets you get on the next bus.

I need a ticket because my grammar isn’t good. but most of time I using on american sign laguage.

Well, if you need another bus pass, you need to pay for it. He will give you one.

I did gave him of my ticket. I was paid a ticket machine at the metro rail, can rail transfer to bus don’t need I another to pay a ticket just I gave him give me one a ticket. if I not paid only metro rail it mean i can’t get another a ticket

Do you need something else? You are riding the bus now

Just forgot about that I’ll pay other but I knew depend on the people force to the people to pay but i knew about rule MTA

Then it was time for him to get off the bus. He blew me a kiss and held his hands to his heart, mouthing the words ‘thank you.’

He was very nice, I thought. A nice deaf young man.
I really wish I could have understood what he meant.

All this, I write, to illustrate the
IMPORTANCE OF GRAMMAR

There are times when it is very important to be understood. Constructing sentences with subjects, objects, verbs and prepositions really helps out with being understood.

I wish that boy luck, but man, he needs to study his grammar.

_Crimes of the Heart_

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More Southern Drawly Drama.

This story is basically funny, but if you only look at what actually happens you wouldn’t think it was. But the family, and the way they handle the problems that come their way make it comedy.

The action starts on Lenore’s birthday. Her sister Babe is just being released from prison, because she shot her husband in the stomach. The oldest sister has come back from her failed starry singing career in Hollywood to help out the family. The family tragedy, one that happened years before, is that their mother committed suicide, hanging herself and their pet cat in the basement. All these things are definitely the makings of tragedy.

But it doesn’t turn out like that. The sisters are so funny–the way they interact and bicker! They do foolish things, but they are very good-hearted about it.

They bring up the subject of their mother’s death, and wonder why she did it. The only thing they can come up with is that “She had a really bad day.” Towards the end, they decide that they have got to figure out how to get through the really bad days.

The sibling interaction alone makes this worth seeing.

_Portnoy’s Complaint_

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This novel by Philip Roth is number 52 on the “Top 100 best English language novels of the 20th century.” I’ve talked about this list before, and I’d said how I’ve read a number of them already.

I hadn’t read Portnoy’s, although I’d read another more recent Roth novel, The Human Stain.

That one was really good. Interesting characters, challenging themes, plot twists, all good stuff. I figured I would like Portnoy too.

Mm. Portnoy’s Complaint came out in ’67. I think the author has matured quite alot by the time he got to Human Stain.

Intresting how there are some similar themes: Female who is illiterate, Jewishness, Racism, Sex.

But PC positively reeks of the sixties. I think, what with the sexual revolution and all that, the on-going topic of masturbation was much more compelling than it is now. And I guess all of Portnoy’s sexual exploits were supposed to be deviant and shocking.

Gotta tell ya, they just aren’t anymore. Other than his obsession with choking his chicken as an adolescent, his main sexual sin seems to be fulfilling his fantasy of sleeping with two women at once.

Yawn.

This is regular prime-time fare in the naughty aughts. What shocked in the 60s is discussed around the dinner table this side of the 20th century.

I found his resentment of his family to be a far more interesting story line. And his Jewishness. Ethnic distinctions have also faded in importance by now, but it is interesting to remember how important they used to be.

I’m glad that I’ve read Human Stain already, it lets me know that the author has also progressed with the times. The Anti-Semitism that is the obsession of Portnoy is completely outside of my own experience. And the 90s setting of Human Stain reflects that cultural change. In some ways, chronicles it.

But that’s another review.

Portnoy’s Complaint seems like an artifact now. Perhaps the reasons it is so heralded is because it said some things for the first time. It does not come to any kind of conclusions. It just states a problem, Portnoy’s problem.

I don’t identify with him that much. And even if I did, he never offers any kind of solution. He’s just complaining.

What does it MEAN?

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I went to visit a hospital for a checkup, but they put me in a gown and gave me a bed. The bed was in this huge open room with tons of other beds and no walls.I didn’t know why I was there, or what was wrong with me, other than that they were going to operate. There were going to open up my stomach and cut me.

I was so upset, I didn’t want to have this operation. No one would tell me what was going on, no one would talk to me. I felt fine! I thought that if there was something wrong with me, surgery should be the last, rather than the first, effort to solve the problem.

I was crying and pleading with people as they passed, asking what was happening, demanding to see a doctor, but no one would pay any attention to me.

Finally a nurse stopped, and explained that I had little growths, like plantar’s warts, on my intestine, and that they were going to remove those parts of my intestine.

“But, That sounds very risky! what if they grow back? Or my intestine doesn’t heal properly!”

“That’s ridiculous! This procedure has a 100% success rate”

I didn’t believe her. I begged to see a doctor, and she left, exasperated that I was so silly about this perfectly safe procedure.
I just lay down on the bed and cried.

Then I woke up. Freaky. Dreams can be so interesting.

Fortunately, I have a marvelous book.

10,000 Dreams Interpreted

I will admit, this dream is kind of baffling, but I have found Dream dictionaries (which is what this book really is) to be quite useful for understanding what my subconscious is trying to tell me.

This book is a good resource.