The Life of Raymond Carver (according to Stephen King)

Here’s something I came across while browsing through my updates, a very good article by Stephen King.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/books/review/King-t.html?_r=1&nl=books&emc=booksupdateema1

Enjoy

PhilosopherPoet

Raymond Carver’s Life and Stories

By Stephen King

Illustration by Ruth Gwily, based on a photograph by Bob Adelman/Corbis

 

Raymond Carver, surely the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the 20th century, makes an early appearance in Carol Sklenicka’s exhaustive and sometimes exhausting biography as a 3- or 4-year-old on a leash. “Well, of course I had to keep him on a leash,” his mother, Ella Carver, said much later — and seemingly without irony.

Mrs. Carver might have had the right idea. Like the perplexed lower-middle-class juicers who populate his stories, Carver never seemed to know where he was or why he was there. I was constantly reminded of a passage in Peter Straub’s “Ghost Story”: “The man just drove, distracted by this endless soap opera of America’s bottom dogs.”

Born in Oregon in 1938, Carver soon moved with his family to Yakima, Wash. In 1956, the Car­vers relocated to Chester, Calif. A year later, Carver and a couple of friends were carousing in Mexico. After that the moves accelerated: Paradise, Calif.; Chico, Calif.; Iowa City, Sacramento, Palo Alto, Tel Aviv, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Cupertino, Humboldt County . . . and that takes us up only to 1977, the year Carver took his last drink.

Through most of those early years of restless travel, he dragged his two children and his long-suffering wife, Maryann, the mostly unsung heroine of Sklenicka’s tale, behind him like tin cans tied to the bumper of a jalopy that no car dealer in his right mind would take in trade. It’s no wonder that his friends nicknamed him Running Dog. Or that when his mother took him into downtown Yakima, she kept him on a leash.

As brilliant and talented as he was, Ray Carver was also the destructive, ­everything-in-the-pot kind of drinker who hits bottom, then starts burrowing deeper. Longtime A.A.’s know that drunks like Carver are master practitioners of the geographical cure, refusing to recognize that if you put an out-of-control boozer on a plane in California, an out-of-control boozer is going to get off in Chicago. Or Iowa. Or Mexico.

And until mid-1977, Raymond Carver was out of control. While teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he and John Cheever became drinking buddies. “He and I did nothing but drink,” Carver said of the fall semester of 1973. “I don’t think either of us ever took the covers off our typewriters.” Because Cheever had no car, Carver provided transportation on their twice-weekly booze runs. They liked to arrive at the liquor store just as the clerk was unlocking for the day. Cheever noted in his journal that Carver was “a very kind man.” He was also an irresponsible boozehound who habitually ran out on the check in restaurants, even though he must have known it was the waitress who had to pay the bill for such dine-and-dash customers. His wife, after all, often waited tables to support him.

It was Maryann Burk Carver who won the bread in those early years while Ray drank, fished, went to school and began writing the stories that a generation of critics and teachers would miscategorize as “minimalism” or “dirty realism.” Writing talent often runs on its own clean circuit (as the Library of America’s “Raymond Carver: Collected Stories” attests), but writers whose works shine with insight and mystery are often prosaic monsters at home.

Maryann Burk met the love of her life — or her nemesis; Carver appears to have been both — in 1955, while working the counter of a Spudnut Shop in Union Gap, Wash. She was 14. When she and Carver married in 1957, she was two months shy of her 17th birthday and pregnant. Before turning 18, she discovered she was pregnant again. For the next quarter-century she supported Ray as a cocktail waitress, a restaurant hostess, an encyclopedia saleswoman and a teacher. Early in the marriage she packed fruit for two weeks in order to buy him his first typewriter.

She was beautiful; he was hulking, possessive and sometimes violent. In Car­ver’s view, his own infidelities did not excuse hers. After Maryann indulged in “a tipsy flirtation” at a dinner party in 1975 — by which time Carver’s alcoholism had reached the full-blown stage — he hit her upside the head with a wine bottle, severing an artery near her ear and almost killing her. “He needed ‘an illusion of freedom,’ ” Sklenicka writes, “but could not bear the thought of her with another man.” It is one of the few points in her admirable biography where Sklenicka shows real sympathy for the woman who supported Carver and seems to have never stopped loving him.

Although Sklenicka exhibits something like awe for Carver the writer, and clearly understands the warping influence alcohol had on his life, she is almost nonjudgmental when it comes to Carver the nasty drunk and ungrateful (not to mention sometimes dangerous) husband. She quotes the novelist Diane Smith (“Letters From Yellowstone”) as saying, “That was a bad generation of men,” and pretty much leaves it at that. When she quotes Maryann calling herself a “literary Cinderella, living in exile for the good of Car­ver’s career,” the first Mrs. Carver comes across as just another whining ex-wife rather than as the stalwart she undoubtedly was. Ray and Maryann were married for 25 years, and it was during those years that Carver wrote the bulk of his work. His time with the poet Tess Gallagher, the only other significant woman in his life, was less than half that.

Nevertheless, it was Gallagher who reaped the personal benefits of Carver’s sobriety (he took his last drink a year before they fell in love) and the financial ones as well. During the divorce proceedings, Maryann’s lawyer said — this both haunts me and to some degree taints my enjoyment of Carver’s stories — that without a decent court settlement, Maryann Burk Carver’s post-divorce life would be “like a bag of doorknobs that wouldn’t open any doors.”

Maryann’s response was, “Ray says he’ll send money every month, and I believe him.” Carver carried through on that promise, although not without a good deal of grousing. But when he died in 1988, the woman who had provided his financial foundation discovered that she had been cut out of sharing the continuing financial rewards of Carver’s popular short-story collections. Carver’s savings alone totaled almost $215,000 at the time of his death; Maryann got about $10,000. Carver’s mother got even less: at age 78, she was living in public housing in Sacramento and eking out a living as a “grandmother aide” in an elementary school. Sklenicka doesn’t call this shabby treatment, but I am happy to do it for her.

It’s as a chronicle of Carver’s growth as a writer that Sklenicka’s book is invaluable, particularly after his career path crossed that of the editor Gordon Lish, the self-styled “Captain Fiction.” Any readers who doubt Lish’s baleful influence on the stories in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” are apt to think differently after reading Sklenicka’s eye-opening account of this difficult and ultimately poisonous relationship. Those still not convinced can read the corresponding stories in “Beginners,” now available in the sublimely portable and long-overdue “Raymond Carver: Collected Stories.”

In 1972, Lish changed the title of Car­ver’s second Esquire story — which he edited heavily — from “Are These Actual Miles?” (interesting and mysterious) to “What Is It?” (boring). When Carver, wild to be published in a major slick, decided to accept the changes, Maryann accused him “of being a whore, of selling out to the establishment.” John Gardner had once told Carver that line-editing was not negotiable. Carver may have accepted that — most writers willing to submit to the editing process do — but Lish’s changes were wide and deep. Car­ver argued that “a major magazine publication was worth the compromise.” Lish, who tried unsuccessfully to edit Leonard Gardner (who would go on to write “Fat City”) with a similarly heavy hand, got his way with Carver. It was a harbinger.

Was Gordon Lish a good editor? Undoubtedly. Curtis Johnson, a textbook editor who introduced Lish to Carver, claims that Lish had “infallible taste in fiction.” But, as Maryann feared, he was — in Ray Carver’s case, at least — much better at discovery than development. And with Carver, he got what he wanted. Perhaps he sensed an essential weakness at Carver’s core (“people-pleasing” is what recovering alcoholics call it). Perhaps it was the strangely elitist view he seems to have held of Carver’s writing, branding the characters “grossly inept” and speaking of “their blatant illiteracies, of which Carver himself was unaware.” This did not stop him from taking credit for Car­ver’s success; Lish is said to have bragged that Car­ver was “his creature,” and what appears on the back jacket of “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?”(1976), Car­ver’s first book of stories, is not Raymond Car­ver’s photograph but Gordon Lish’s name.

Sklenicka’s account of the changes in Carver’s third book of stories, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (1981), is meticulous and heartbreaking. There were, she says, three versions: A, B and C. Version A was the manuscript Car­ver submitted. It was titled “So Much Water So Close to Home.” B was the manuscript Lish initially sent back. He changed the name of the story “Beginners” to “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” and that became the new title of the book. Although Carver was disturbed by this, he nonetheless signed a binding (and unagented) contract in 1980. Soon after, Version C — the version most readers know — arrived on Carver’s desk. The differences between B and C “astounded” him. “He had urged Lish to take a pencil to the stories,” Skle­nicka writes. “He had not expected . . . a meat cleaver.” Unsure of himself, Carver was only three years into sobriety after two decades of heavy drinking; his correspondence with Lish over the wholesale changes to his work alternated between groveling (“you are a wonder, a genius”) and outright begging for a return to Version B. It did no good. According to Tess Gallagher, Lish refused by telephone to restore the earlier version, and if Carver understood nothing else, he understood that Lish held the “power of publication access.”

This Hobson’s choice is the beating heart of “Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life.” Any writer might wonder what he’d do in such a case. Certainly I did; in 1973, when my first novel was accepted for publication, I was in similar straits: young, endlessly drunk, trying to support a wife and two children, writing at night, hoping for a break. The break came, but until reading Sklenicka’s book, I thought it was the $2,500 advance Doubleday paid for “Carrie.” Now I realize it may have been not winding up with Gordon Lish as my editor.

One needs only to scan the stories in “Beginners” and the ones in “What We Talk About” to see the most obvious change: the prose in “Beginners” consists of dense blocks of narration broken up by bursts of dialogue; in “What We Talk About,” there is so much white space that some of the stories (“After the Denim,” for instance) look almost like chapters in a James Patterson novel. In many cases, the man who didn’t allow editors to change his own work gutted Carver’s, and on this subject Sklenicka voices an indignation she is either unwilling or unable to muster on Maryann’s behalf, calling Lish’s editing of Carver “a usurpation.” He imposed his own style on Carver’s stories, and the so-called minimalism with which Carver is credited was actually Lish’s deal. “Gordon . . . came to think that he knew everything,” Curtis Johnson says. “It became pernicious.”

Sklenicka analyzes many of the ­changes, but the wise reader will turn to the “Collected Stories” and see them for him- or herself. Two of the most dismaying examples are “If It Please You” (“After the Denim” in “What We Talk About”) and “A Small, Good Thing” (“The Bath” in “What We Talk About”).

In “If It Please You,” James and Edith Packer, a getting-on-in-years couple, arrive at the local bingo hall to discover their regular places have been taken by a young hippie couple. Worse, James observes the young man cheating (although he doesn’t win; his girlfriend does). During the course of the evening, Edith whispers to her husband that she’s “spotting.” Later, back at home, she tells him the bleeding is serious, and she’ll have to go to the doctor the following day. In bed, James struggles to pray (a survival skill both James and his creator acquired in daily A.A. meetings), first hesitantly, then “beginning to mutter words aloud and to pray in earnest. . . . He prayed for Edith, that she would be all right.” The prayers don’t bring relief until he adds the hippie couple to his meditations, casting aside his former bitter feelings. The story ends on a note of hard-won hope: “ ‘If it please you,’ he said in the new prayers for all of them, the living and the dead.” In the Lish-edited version, there are no prayers and hence no epiphany — only a worried and resentful husband who wants to tell the irritating hippies what happens “after the denim,” after the games. It’s a total rewrite, and it’s a cheat.

The contrast between “The Bath” (Lish-edited) and “A Small, Good Thing” (Ray Carver unplugged) is even less palatable. On her son’s birthday, Scotty’s mother orders a birthday cake that will never be eaten. The boy is struck by a car on his way home from school and winds up in a coma. In both stories, the baker makes dunning calls to the mother and her husband while their son lies near death in the hospital. Lish’s baker is a sinister figure, symbolic of death’s inevitability. We last hear from him on the phone, still wanting to be paid. In Carver’s version, the couple — who are actually characters instead of shadows — go to see the baker, who apologizes for his unintended cruelty when he understands the situation. He gives the bereaved parents coffee and hot rolls. The three of them take this communion together and talk until morning. “Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this,” the baker says. This version has a satisfying symmetry that the stripped-down Lish version lacks, but it has something more important: it has heart.

“Lish was able . . . to make a snowman out of a snowdrift” is what Sklenicka says about his version of Carver’s stories, but that’s not much of a metaphor. She does better when talking about Lish’s changes to a passage in “They’re Not Your Husband” (in “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?”), pointing out that the Lish version is “meaner, coarser and somewhat diminishing to both characters.” Carver himself says it best. When the narrator of “The Fling” finally faces up to the fact that he has no love or comfort to give his father, he says of himself, “I was all smooth surface with nothing inside except emptiness.” Ultimately, that’s what is wrong with the Ray Carver stories as Lish presented them to the world, and what makes both the Sklenicka biography and the “Collected Stories” such a welcome and necessary corrective.

Stephen King’s latest novel is “Under the Dome.”

Young Bloggers Have Ear of Fashion Heavyweights

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/technology/14youth.html?_r=1&nl=technology&emc=techupdateema3

September 14, 2009

By ALICE PFEIFFER
PARIS — At first glance, Dirrty Glam resembles any trendy online magazine. It features famous faces like Lilly Allen and Sienna Miller on its cover, and combines fashion, film and music reviews with celebrity interviews.

There is just one thing: Dirrty Glam’s entire team, from editor in chief to public relations manager, is between 19 and 22 years old. The magazine, based in Paris, was started three years ago by Alie Suvelor, then 18 and now editor in chief.

“We’re young but this isn’t a hobby, this is our full-time job,” said Ms. Suvelor, who also serves as stylist and writes for the magazine, which is in its 24th issue and has an English-language version.

The magazine and other fashion blogs and blog networks are helping to give young entrepreneurs an early entry into journalism and winning some of them a place in the notoriously competitive fashion industry. Other sites include TeenUgly, an American-based blog network; the blogs Susie Bubble, based in London, and Childhood Flames, from the United States; and Cherry Blossom Girl, a blogger and designer from London.

“Traditional fashion publications are all learning to adapt to this new force,” said Géraldine Dormoy, the online fashion editor for the French magazine L’Express.

Ms. Dormoy, who is in her 30s, has been on both ends of the fashion media continuum. She created the blog Café Mode five years ago and was later offered a fashion position at L’Express, a widely read weekly. She continues to produce her blog.

That a younger crowd is making its mark in online journalism should not come as a surprise. Tools available on the Web — in addition to the proclivity of younger people to adapt to them — has made it easier to create a Web site, blog or network.

“Today’s teenagers never had to discover the Internet,” said Tomas Gonsorcik, head of intelligence at the social media consultancy Interaction London. They were “almost predetermined to master the new means of media and communication in a way that is qualitatively much richer than the older generation.”

Mr. Gonsorcik said the online projects presented many advantages. Blogging tools offer simple layouts that resemble Web sites, making the blogs and other projects almost indistinguishable from traditional online media, he said.

At the same time, Mr. Gonsorcik said, they “reach out a demographic beyond their own by the very ability to sit side-by-side their older competitors in the search engine result.”

And they have been received and recognized by the fashion industry in part because of the value it places on self-training.

“Fashion is one of the few fields which accepts people with little formal training,” Ms. Dormoy said. “Through these blogs, these young girls show their ability to work as stylists or photographers.”

Some of the efforts are attracting advertisers. DirrtyGlam has ads from the clothing retailer Miss Sixty. The online luxury boutique Net-à-Porter has partnerships with DirrtyGlam and Red Carpet Fashion Awards, a blog that comments and rates celebrities’ red carpet outfits.

Alison Loehnis, vice president for sales and marketing at Net-à-Porter, said the new generation of fashion blogs was attractive because it had “a wonderful viral capability” and allowed the company “to connect and interact more closely the potential future audience.”

American Apparel, the sportswear brand, advertises on all the major fashion blogs, like Teen Vogue; and Childhood Flame, produced by a 15-year-old from Portland, Ore., Camille Rushanaedy; or Fashion Toast, by Rumi Neely of San Francisco. It also created a personalized ad for the online fashion journalist Alix Bancourt, the Paris-based creator of the Cherry Blossom Girl blog.

For Chictopia, with more than five million unique visitors a month, the reward has come in the recognition. The fashion-blog network introduced TeenUgly in 2008, which is produced by high school fashion enthusiasts and features offers to share and comment on outfit snapshots.

TeenUgly rapidly met such popularity that the editors, ages 14 and 16, were invited to New York Fashion week in February and reviewed several shows for Chictopia.

Sea of Shoes, a blog from Jane Aldridge, 17, of Dallas, gained such a following that she was asked, in June, to design her own line of shoes for Urban Outfitters.

Similarly, the British blogger Susanna Lau, better known as Susie Bubble, and her blog Style Bubble, has just designed her own line of clothes, produced and sold by the online retailer Urban Collection. Last May, Ms. Lau, 24, was also made commissioning editor for the online edition of the British fashion magazine Dazed and Confused.

Some say that making the move from amateur entrepreneur to worldwide recognition highlights the intuitive aspect of fashion.

“Fashion is subjective,” says Keith Pollock, executive online editor of Brant Publications, which publishes art magazines and Interview, the pop culture magazine founded by Andy Warhol. “There are very respected fashion journalists that can evaluate the state of the market. However I don’t see how a fashion editor’s perspective on a Prada shoe is more valid than that of a teen blogger in Evanston, Illinois.”

A Tribute to John Updike (1932-2009)

I don’t know if you heard the news that John Updike, died yesterday (January 27, 2009) of lung cancer. In memory of him  I thought I’d include one of his short stories that appeared in The New Yorker. This is was a newspaper his was editor of for a long while. Below there are two links, the first is a link to more information about his death, and the second is a reference as to where I got the short story from.

L.A. Times: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-me-john-updike28-2009jan28,0,7381588.story

The Full Glass: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2008/05/26/080526fi_fiction_updike?currentPage=1

The Full Glass

By John Updike

Approaching eighty, I sometimes see myself from a little distance, as a man I know but not intimately. Normally I have no use for introspection. My employment for thirty years, refinishing wood floors-carried on single-handedly out of a small white truck, a Chevrolet Spartan, with the several sizes of electric sanders and the belts and disks of sandpaper in all their graded degrees of coarseness and five-gallon containers of polyurethane and thinner and brushes ranging from a stout six-inch width to a diagonally cut two-inch sash brush for tight corners and jigsaw-fitted thresholds-has conditioned me against digging too deep. Balancing in a crouch on the last dry boards like a Mohawk steel walker has taught me the value of the superficial, of that wet second coat glistening from baseboard to baseboard. All it needs and asks is twenty-four undisturbed hours to dry in. Some of these fine old New England floors, especially the hard yellow pine from the Carolinas that was common in the better homes a hundred years ago, but also the newer floors of short tongued pieces of oak or maple, shock you with their carefree gouges and cigarette burns and the black scuff marks synthetic soles leave. Do people still give that kind of party? I entered this trade, after fifteen years in a white-collar, smooth-talking line of work, as a refugee from romantic disgrace, and abstain from passing judgment, even on clients arrogant enough to schedule a dinner party six hours after I give their hall parquet the finish coat.

But, now that I’m retired-the sawdust gets to your lungs, and the fumes get to you and eat away your sinuses, even through a paper mask-I watch myself with a keener attention, as you’d keep an eye on a stranger who might start to go to pieces any minute. Some of my recently acquired habits strike me as curious. At night, having brushed my teeth and flossed and done the eyedrops and about to take my pills, I like to have the water glass already full. The rational explanation might be that, with a left hand clutching my pills, I don’t want to fumble at the faucet and simultaneously try to hold the glass with the right. Still, it’s more than a matter of convenience. There is a small but distinct pleasure, in a life with most pleasures levelled out of it, in having the full glass there on the white marble sink-top waiting for me, before I sluice down the anti-cholesterol pill, the anti-inflammatory, the sleeping, the calcium supplement (my wife’s idea, now that I get foot cramps in bed, somehow from the pressure of the top sheet), along with the Xalatan drops to stave off glaucoma and the Systane drops to ease dry eye. In the middle of the night, on the way to the bathroom, my eye feels like it has a beam in it, not a mote but literally a beam-I never took that image from the King James Version seriously before.

The wife keeps nagging me to drink more water. Eight glasses a day is what her doctor recommended to her as one of those feminine beauty tricks. It makes me gag just to think about it-eight glasses comes to half a gallon, it would bubble right out my ears-but that healthy sweet swig near the end of the day has gotten to be something important, a tiny piece that fits in: the pills popped into my mouth, the full glass raised to my lips, the swallow that takes the pills down with it, all in less time than it takes to tell it, but tasting of bliss.

The bliss goes back, I suppose, to moments of thirst satisfied in my childhood, five states to the south of this one, where there were public drinking fountains in all the municipal buildings and department stores, and luncheonettes would put glasses of ice water on the table without your having to ask, and drugstores served Alka-Seltzer up at the soda fountain to cure whatever ailed you, from hangover to hives. I lived with my grandparents, a child lodged with old people thanks to the disruptions of the Depression, and their house had a linoleum floor and deep slate sinks in the kitchen, and above the sinks long-nosed copper faucets tinged by the green of oxidation. A child back then had usually been running from somewhere or other and had a great innocent thirst-running, or else pumping a fat-tired bicycle, imagining it was a dive-bomber about to obliterate a Jap battleship. Filling a tumbler with water at the old faucet connected you with the wider world. Think of it: pipes running through the earth below the frost line and up unseen from the basement right through the walls to bring you this transparent flow, which you swallowed down in rhythmic gulps-down what my grandfather called, with that twinkle he had, behind his bifocals, “the little red lane.” The copper would bead with condensation while you waited for the water to run cold enough.

The automobile garage a block away from my grandparents’ back yard had the coldest water in town, at a bubbler just inside the overhead sliding doors. It made your front teeth ache, it was so cold. Our dentist, a tall lean tennis player already going bald in his thirties, once told me, after extracting an abscessed back molar of mine when I was fifteen, that no matter what else happened to me dentally I would have my front teeth till the day I died. Now, how could he know that just by looking every six months into a mouth where a Pennsylvania diet of sugar doughnuts and licorice sticks had already wreaked havoc? But he was right. Slightly crooked though they are, I still have my front teeth, the others having long since gone under to New England root canals and Swedish implantology. I think of him, my aboriginal dentist, twice a day when I do my brushing. He was the beloved town doctor’s son, and had stopped short at dentistry as a kind of rebellion. Tennis was really his game, and he made it to the county semifinals at least twice, before dropping over with a heart attack in his forties. In those days there was no such thing as a heart bypass, and we didn’t know much about flossing, either.

The town tennis courts were handy to his office, right across the street-a main avenue, with trolley tracks in the middle that would take you in twenty minutes the three miles into the local metropolis of eighty thousand working men and women, five first-run movie theatres, and a surplus of obsolescing factories. The courts, four of them, were on the high-school grounds, at the stop where my grandmother and I, back from my piano lesson or buying my good coat for the year, would get off the trolley, to walk the rest of the way home because I was sure I was about to throw up. She blamed the ozone: according to her, the trolley ran on ozone, or generated it as a by-product. She was an old-fashioned country woman who used to cut dandelions out of the school grounds and cook the greens into a disgusting stew. There was a little trickling creek on the edge of town where she would gather watercress. Farther still into the countryside, she had a cousin, a man even older than she, who had a spring on his property he was very proud of, and would always insist that I visit.

I disliked these country visits, so full, I thought, of unnecessary ceremony. My great-cousin was a dapper chicken farmer who by the time of our last visits had become noticeably shorter than I. He had a clean smell to him, starchy with a touch of liniment, and a closeted mustiness I notice now on my own clothes. With a sort of birdy animation he would faithfully lead me to the spring, down a path of boards slippery with moss from being in the perpetual damp shade of the droopy limbs of a great hemlock there. In my memory, beyond the shadows of the hemlock the spring was always in a ray of sunlight. Spidery water striders walked on its surface, and the dimples around their feet threw interlocking golden-brown rings onto the sandy bottom. A tin dipper rested on one of the large sandstones encircling the spring, and my elderly host would hand it to me, full, with a grin that was all pink gums. He hadn’t kept his front teeth.

I was afraid of bringing a water strider up to my lips. What I did bring up held my nostrils in the dipper’s wobbly circle of reflection. The water was cold, tasting brightly of tin, but not as cold as that which bubbled up in a corner of that small-town garage, the cement floor black with grease and the ceiling obscured by the sliding-door tracks and suspended wood frames holding rubber tires fresh from Akron. The rubber overhead had a smell that cleared your head the way a bite of licorice did, and the virgin treads had the sharp cut of metal type or newly ironed clothes. That icy water held an ingredient that made me, a boy of nine or ten, eager for the next moment of life, one brimming moment after another.

Thinking back, trying to locate in my life other moments of that full-glass feeling, I recall one in Passaic, New Jersey, when I still wore a suit for work, which was selling life insurance to reluctant prospects. Passaic was out of my territory, and I was there on a stolen day off, with a woman who was not my wife. She was somebody else’s wife, and I had a wife of my own, and that particular fullness of our situation was in danger of breaking over the rim. But I was young enough to live in the present, thinking the world owed me happiness. I rejoiced, to the extent of being downright dazed, in the female presence beside me in the rented automobile, a red Dodge coupe. The car had just a few miles on it and, as unfamiliar automobiles do, seemed to glide effortlessly at the merest touch of my hand or foot. My companion wore a broad-shouldered tweedy fall outfit I had never seen on her before; its warm brown color, flecked with pimento red, set off her thick auburn hair, done up loosely in a twist behind-in my memory, when she turned her head to look through the windshield with me, whole loops of it had escaped the tortoiseshell hair clip. We must have gone to bed together at some point in that day, but what I remember is being with her in the cave of the car, proudly conscious of the wealth of her hair and the width of her smile and the breadth of her hips, and then in my happiness jauntily swerving across an uncrowded, sunny street in Passaic to seize a metered parking space along the left-hand curb.

A policeman saw the maneuver and before I could open the driver’s door was standing there. “Driver’s license,” he said. “And car registration.”

My heart was thumping and my hands jumping as I rummaged in the glove compartment for the registration, yet I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face. The cop saw it there and it must have further annoyed him, but he studied the documents I handed him as if patiently mastering a difficult lesson. “You crossed over onto the left side of the street,” he explained at last. “You could have caused a head-on collision.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I spotted the parking space and saw no traffic was coming. I wasn’t thinking.” I had forgotten one of the prime axioms of driving: a red car attracts the police. You can get away with almost nothing in a red car.

“Now you’re parked illegally, headed the wrong way.”

“Is that illegal? We’re not from Passaic,” my passenger intervened, bending down low, across my lap, so he could see her face. She looked so terrific, I felt, in her thick shoulder pads and pimento-flecked wool, that another man must understand and forgive my intoxication. Her long oval hands, darting up out of her lap; her painted lips, tensed avidly in the excitement of argument; her voice, which slid past me almost palpably, like a very fine grade of finish sandpaper, caressing away my smallest imperfections-the policeman must share my own amazed gratitude at what she did, for me and my prick, with this array of erotic instruments.

He handed the documents back to me without a word, and bent down to say past my body, “Lady, you don’t cut across traffic lanes in Passaic or anywhere else in the United States to grab a parking space heading the wrong way.”

“I’ll move the car,” I told him, and unnecessarily repeated, “I’m sorry.” I wanted to get going; my sense of fullness was leaking away.

My companion took a breath to tell the cop something, perhaps word of some idyllic town, back in Connecticut, where we came from, where such a maneuver was perfectly legal. But my body language may have communicated to her a wish that she say nothing more, for she stopped herself, her lips parted as if holding a bubble between them.

The policeman, having sensed her intention and braced to make a rejoinder, silently straightened up into his full frowning dignity. He was young, but it wasn’t his youth that impressed me; it was his uniform, his badge, his authority. We were all young, relatively, as I look back at us. It has taken old age to make me realize that the world exists for young people. Their tastes in food and music and clothing are what the world is catering to, even while they are imagining themselves victims of the old.

The officer dismissed me with “O.K., buddy.” Perhaps in deference to my deranged condition, he added, “Take it easy.”

The lady and I were not young enough to let our love go, the way teen-agers do, knowing another season is around the corner. We returned to our Connecticut households unarrested, and persisted in what my grandfather would have called evildoing until we were caught, with the usual results: the wounded wife, the seething husband, the puzzled and frightened children. She got a divorce, I didn’t. We both stayed in town; her husband went to the city to survey his new prospects. We entered upon an awkward afterlife of some ten years, meeting at parties, in the supermarket, at the playground. She kept looking terrific; woe had carved a few pounds off her frame. It was a decade of national carnival. At one Christmas party, I remember, she wore red hot pants and green net stockings, with furry antlers on a headband and a red ball, alluding to Rudolph the Reindeer’s nose, stuck in the middle of her heart-shaped face.

Parties are theatre in Connecticut bedroom towns, and the wife and I did nothing to make her performances easier, the wife giving her the cold shoulder, and I sitting in a corner staring steelily, still on fire. She had taken on a new persona, a kind of fallen-woman persona, laughing, brazen, flirting with every man the way she had with that cop in Passaic. I took a spiteful pleasure in watching her, at my remove, bump like a pinball from one unsuccessful romance to another. It enraged me when one would appear to be successful. I couldn’t bear imagining it-the nakedness I had known, the little whimpers of renewed surprise I had heard. She brought these men to parties, and I had to shake their hands, which seemed damp and bloated to me, like raw squid touched in the fish market.

Our affair had hurt me professionally. An insurance salesman is like a preacher-he reminds us of death, and should be extra earnest and virtuous, as payback for the investment he asks. As an insurance agent I had been proficient and tidy in filling out the forms but less good in tipping the customers into the plunge that would bring a commission. The wife and I moved to a state, Massachusetts, where nobody knew us and I could work with my hands. We had been living there some fifteen years when word came from Connecticut that my former friend-her long looping hair, her broad bright smile, her gesturing oval hands-was dying, of ovarian cancer. When she was dead, I rejoiced, to a degree. Her death removed a confusing presence from the world, an index to its unfulfilled potential. There. You see why I am not given to introspection. Scratch the surface, and ugliness pops up.

Before we were spoiled for each other, she saw me as an innocent, and sweetly tried to educate me. With her husband’s example in mind, she told me I must learn to drink more, as if liquor were medicine for grownups. She told me the way to cure a cold was to drink it under. Rather shyly, early in our love life, she told me my orgasms told her that this was important for me. “But isn’t it for everybody?” I asked.

She made a wry mouth, shrugged her naked shoulders slightly, and said, “No. You’d be surprised.” There was a purity, a Puritan clarity, to her teaching, as she sought to make me human. At some point in the ungainly aftermath of our brief intimacy, she let me know-for I used to seek her out at parties, to take her temperature, as it were, and to receive a bit of the wisdom a love object appears to possess-how I should have behaved to her if I “had been a gentleman.” If I had been a gentleman: it was a revelatory slur. I was not a gentleman, and had no business putting on a suit each morning and setting off to persuade people wealthier than I to invest in the possibility of their own deaths. I had begun to stammer on the mollifying jargon: “in the extremely unlikely event” and “when you’re no longer in the picture” and “giving your loved ones financial continuity” and “let’s say you live forever, this is still a quality investment.”

My clients could sense that to me death was basically unthinkable, and they shied away from this hole in my sales pitch. Not being a gentleman, I could move to a new state and acquire a truck and heavy sanders and master the modest science of penetrating slow-drying sealers, steel-wool buffer pads, and alkyd varnishes. Keep a wet edge to avoid lap marks, and don’t paint yourself into a corner. Brush with the grain, apply your mind to the surface, and leave some ventilation if you want to breathe. Young men now don’t want to go into it, though the market for such services keeps expanding with gentrification, because everybody wants to be gentry. Toward the end, I had so many clamoring clients that retiring was the only way I could escape them, whereas selling insurance had always been, for me at least, an uphill push. People are more concerned about the floors they walk on than the loved ones they leave behind.

Another curious habit of mine can be observed only in December, when, in the mid-sized sea-view Cape Ann Colonial the wife and I moved to over thirty years ago, I run up on the flagpole five strands of Christmas lights, forming a tent shape that at night strongly suggests the festoons on an invisible tree. I have rigged two extension cords to connect with an outside spotlight so the illusion can be controlled from an inside switch. When, before heading up to the bedroom-”climbing the wooden hill,” my grandfather used to say-I switch it off, I could do it without a glance outdoors, but in fact I move to the nearby window with my arm extended, my fingers on the switch, so that I can see the lights go out.

In one nanosecond, the drooping strands are burning bright, casting their image of a Christmas tree out into the world, and in the next, so quick that there seems no time at all while the signal travels along the wires from the switch, the colored, candle-flame-shaped bulbs-red, orange, green, blue, white-are doused. I keep imagining, since a pair of hundred-foot extension cords carry the electrons across the yard, through the bushes and frozen flower beds, that I will perceive a time lag, as with a lightning flash and subsequent thunder. But no; the connection between the lights and my hand on the switch appears instantaneous. The lights are there, imprinting the dark with holiday cheer, and then are not. I need to see this instant transformation occur. I recognize something unhealthy in my need, and often vow beforehand just to touch the switch and forgo peeking. But always I break my vow. It’s like trying to catch by its tail the elusive moment in which you fall asleep. I think that, subconsciously, I fear that if I don’t look the current will jam and reverse, and it is I who will die, and not the lights.

The wife and I are proud of our homemade Christmas tree. We see it loom vividly from the beach below and, stupid as children, imagined we could even see it from Marblehead, eight miles away. But, though we took along our younger son’s telescope-abandoned in his room, with all his toys and posters and science fiction and old Playboys-we couldn’t make out our festooned flagpole at all, amid so many other shore lights. Our faces hurt in the December wind; our eyes watered. What we, after much searching, thought might be our illusion of a tree was a blurred speck in which the five colors and the five strands had merged to a trembling gray as slippery in the telescope as a droplet of mercury.

My hoping to see the current snake through the extension cords possibly harks back to my fascination, as a boy, with pathways. I loved the idea of something irresistibly travelling along a set path-marbles rolling down wooden or plastic troughs, subway trains hurtling beneath city streets, water propelled by gravity through underground pipes, rivers implacably tumbling and oozing their way to the sea. Such phenomena gave me a secret joy to contemplate, and, with the lessening intensity that applies in my old age to all sensations, they still do. They appeal, perhaps, to a bone-deep laziness of mine, a death wish. My favorite moment in the floor-finishing business is getting out the door and closing it, knowing that all that remains is for the polyurethane to dry, which will happen without me, in my absence.

Another full moment: beginning in kindergarten, all through grade school and high school, I was in love with a classmate I almost never spoke to. Like marbles in parallel troughs we rolled down the years toward graduation. She was popular-a cheerleader, a star hockey player, a singer of solos in school assemblies-with many boyfriends. She had big breasts on a lean body. My small-town grandparents had kept their country connections, and through them I was invited to a Maytime barn dance five miles out of town. Somehow I got up my nerve and invited this local beauty to go with me, and she absorbed her surprise and surprisingly accepted. Perhaps, reigning so securely in our small town, she was amused by the idea of a barn dance. The barn was as big as a church, and last harvest’s hay bales were stacked to the roof in the side mows. I had been to barn dances before, with my country cousins, and knew the calls. Bow to your partner. Bow to your corner. All hands left. Women like all that, it occurs to me this late in life-connections and combinations, contact. As she got the hang of it, her trim waist swung into my hand with the smart impact of a drumbeat, a football catch, a layup off the reverberating backboard. I felt her moist sides and the soft insides beneath her rib cage, all taut in the spirit of the dance. Sexual intercourse for a female has always been hard for me to picture, but it must feel to be all about you, at the center of everything. She might have said yes to me before, if I had asked. But that would have spilled her, for me, into too much reality.

From a geographical standpoint, my life has been a slow crawl up the Eastern Seaboard. The wife and I joke that our next move is to Canada, where we’ll get the benefits of universal health care. A third curious habit I’ve fallen into is that, when I get into bed at night, having been fending off sleep with a magazine and waiting in vain for the wife to join me (she is deep into e-mail with our grandchildren and English costume dramas on public television), I bury my face in the side of the pillow, stretch out down to my toes in the hope of forestalling the foot cramps, and groan loudly three times-”Ooh! Ooh! Ooh-uh!“-as if the bliss of letting go at the end of the day were agony. At first it may have been an audible signal to the wife to switch off whatever electronic device was keeping her up (I’m deaf enough to be totally flummoxed by the British accents in those costume dramas) and to come join me in bed, but now it has become a ritual I perform for an immaterial, invisible audience-my Maker, my grandfather would have said, with that little thin-lipped smile of his peeping out from under his gray mustache.

As a child I would look at him and wonder how he could stay sane, being so close to his death. But actually, it turns out, Nature drips a little anesthetic into your veins each day that makes you think a day is as good as a year, and a year as long as a lifetime. The routines of living-the tooth-brushing and pill-taking, the flossing and the water glass, the matching of socks and the sorting of the laundry into the proper bureau drawers-wear you down.

I wake each morning with hurting eyeballs and with dread gnawing at my stomach-that blank drop-off at the end of the chute, that scientifically verified emptiness of the atom and the spaces between the stars. Nevertheless, I shave. Athletes and movie actors leave a little bristle now, to intimidate rivals or attract cavewomen, but a man of my generation would sooner go onto the street in his underpants than unshaven. The very hot washcloth, held against the lids for dry eye. The lather, the brush, the razor. The right cheek, then the left, feeling for missed spots along the jaw line, and next the upper lip, the sides and that middle dent called the philtrum, and finally the fussy section, where most cuts occur, between the lower lip and the knob of the chin. My hand is still steady, and the triple blades they make these days last forever.

The first time I slept with the woman I was nearly arrested in Passaic with, I purred. That detail had fled my memory for years, but the other day, as I held somebody else’s cat on my lap, it came back to me. We were on a scratchy sofa, covered in that off-white Haitian cotton that was once fashionable in suburban décor, and when I had pumped her full of myself-my genetic surrogate, wrapped in protein-I lay on top of her, cooling off. “Listen to this,” I said, and laid my cheek against hers, which was still hot, and let her listen to the lightly rattling sound of animal contentment that my throat was producing. I hadn’t known I could do it, but I had felt the sound inside, waiting for me to be happy enough to produce it. She heard it. Her eyes, a few inches from mine, flared in astonishment, and she laughed. I had been a dutiful, religious child, but there and then I realized that the haven of true meaning, where life was rounded beyond the need for any further explanation, had been opened up, and I experienced a peace that has never quite left me, clinging to me in shreds.

Years before, before our affair, a group of us young marrieds had been sitting and smoking on a summer porch, and when she, wearing a miniskirt, crossed her legs the flash of the underside of her thigh made my mouth go dry, as sharply dry as if a desert wind had howled in my skull. Human physiology is the demon we can’t exorcize. She was to me a marked woman from that moment on.

Until the wife leaves off her electronic entertainments and comes to bed, I have trouble going to sleep. Then, at three o’clock, when there’s not a car stirring in town, not even a drunken kid or a sated philanderer hurrying home on rubber tires, I wake and marvel at how motionlessly she sleeps. She has taken to wearing a knotted bandanna to keep her hair from going wild, and the two ends of the knot stick up against the faint window light like little ears on top of her head. Her stillness is touching, as is the girlishly tidy order in which she keeps her dressing room and the kitchen and would keep the entire house if I would let her. I can’t fall back into unconsciousness, like a water strider held aloft on the surface tension of her beautiful stillness.

I listen for the first car to stir toward dawn downtown; I wait for her to wake and get out of bed and set the world in motion again. The hours flow forward in sluggish jerks. She says I sleep more than I am aware. But I am certainly aware of when, at last, she stirs: she irritably moves her arms, as if fighting her way out of a dream, and then in the strengthening window light pushes back the covers and exposes for a moment her rucked-up nightie and her torso moving through a diagonal to a sitting position. Her bare feet pad around the bed, and, many mornings, now that I’m retired and nearly eighty, I fall back asleep for another hour. The world is being tended to, I can let go of it, it doesn’t need me.

The shaving mirror hangs in front of a window overlooking the sea. The sea is always full, flat as a floor. Or almost: there is a delicate planetary bulge in it, supporting a few shadowy freighters and cruise ships making their motionless way out of Boston Harbor. At night, the horizon springs a rim of lights-more, it seems, every year. Winking airplanes from the corners of the earth descend on a slant, a curved groove in the air, toward the unseen airport in East Boston. My life-prolonging pills cupped in my left hand, I lift the glass, its water sweetened by its brief wait on the marble sink-top. If I can read this strange old guy’s mind aright, he’s drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned.

Blogging Terms For Beginners

(This list comes out of Wikipedia, thought that those new to blogging can benefit from it. It’s also just good to refresh your memory once in a while!)

A

Atom
Another popular feed format developed as an alternative to RSS.

Autocasting
Automated form of podcasting that allows bloggers and blog readers to generate audio versions of text blogs from RSS feeds.

Audioblog
A blog where the posts consist mainly of voice recordings sent by mobile phone, sometimes with some short text message added for metadata purposes. (cf. podcasting)

B

Bleg
A blog article that begs for something, such as a donation or product sale.

Blog Carnival
A blog article that contains links to other articles covering a specific topic. Most blog carnivals are hosted by a rotating list of frequent contributors to the carnival, and serve to both generate new posts by contributors and highlight new bloggers posting matter in that subject area.

Blog client
(weblog client) is software to manage (post, edit) blogs from operating system with no need to launch a web browser. A typical blog client has an editor, a spell-checker and a few more options that simplify content creation and editing.

Blogger
Person who runs a blog. Also blogger.com, a popular blog hosting web site. Rarely: weblogger.

Bloggernacle
Blogs written by and for Mormons (a portmanteau of “blog” and “Tabernacle)”. Generally refers to faithful Mormon bloggers and sometimes refers to a specific grouping of faithful Mormon bloggers.

Bloggies
One of the most popular blog awards.

Blogroll
A list of blogs, usually placed in the sidebar of a blog, that reads as a list of recommendations by the blogger of other blogs.

Blogosphere
All blogs, or the blogging community. Also called blogistan or, more rarely, blogspace.

Blogware
A category of software which consists of a specialized form of a Content Management System specifically designed for creating and maintaining weblogs.

C

Collaborative blog
A blog (usually focused on a single issue or political stripe) on which multiple users enjoy posting permission. Also known as group blog.

Comment spam
Like e-mail spam. Robot “spambots” flood a blog with advertising in the form of bogus comments. A serious problem that requires bloggers and blog platforms to have tools to exclude some users or ban some addresses in comments.

D

Desktop Blogging Client
An off-line blog management (posting, editing and archiving) tool

F

Fisking
To rebut a blog entry in a line-by-line fashion.

Flog
A portmanteau of “fake” and “blog”. A blog that’s ghostwritten by someone, such as in the marketing department.

Feeds
RSS Feeds

M

Milblog
Term for blogs written by members or veterans of any branch of military service – Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marines. A contraction of military and blog.

Moblog
A portmanteau of “mobile” and “blog”. A blog featuring posts sent mainly by mobile phone, using SMS or MMS messages. They are often photoblogs.

Multiblog
A blog constructed as a conversation between more than two people.

P

Permalink
Permanent link. The unique URL of a single post. Use this when you want to link to a post somewhere.

Phlog
Type of blog utilising the Gopher protocol instead of HTTP

Photoblog, A
A portmanteau of “photo” and “blog”.

Photoblog
A blog mostly containing photos, posted constantly and chronologically.

Pingback
The alert in the TrackBack system that notifies the original poster of a blog post when someone else writes an entry concerning the original post.

Podcasting
Contraction of “iPod” and “broadcasting” (but not for iPods only). Posting audio and video material on a blog and its RSS feed, for digital players.

Post
An entry written and published to a blog.

Post Slug
For blogs with common language URLs, the post slug is the portion of the URL that represents the post. Example: http://domain.com/2008/01/this-is-the-post-slug

R

RSS
Really Simple Syndication is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts.

RSS aggregator
Software or online service allowing a blogger to read an RSS feed, especially the latest posts on their favourite blogs. Also called a reader, or feedreader.

RSS feed
The file containing a blog’s latest posts. It is read by an RSS aggregator/reader and shows at once when a blog has been updated. It may contain only the title of the post, the title plus the first few lines of a post, or the entire post.

S

Spam blog
A blog which is composed of spam. A Spam blog or “any blog whose creator doesn’t add any written value.”

Slashdot effect
The Slashdot effect can hit blogs or other website, and is caused by a major website (usually Slashdot, but also Digg, Metafilter, Boing Boing, Instapundit and others) sending huge amounts of temporary traffic that often slow down the server.

Subscribe
The term used when a blogs feed is added to a feed reader like Bloglines or Google. Some blogging platforms have internal subscriptions, this allows readers to receive notification when there are new posts in a blog.

Search engine friendly URLs
Or for short, SEF URLs, implemented with a Rewrite engine.

T

Templates
Templates, used on the “back end” of a blog that work together to handle information and present it on a blog.

Theme
CSS based code that when applied to the templates will result in visual element changes to the blog. The theme, as a whole, is also referred to as a blog design.

TrackBack
A system that allows a blogger to see who has seen the original post and has written another entry concerning it. The system works by sending a ‘ping’ between the blogs, and therefore providing the alert.

V

Vlog
A video blog; a vlogger is a video blogger (e.g. someone who records himself interviewing people of a certain field).

W

Warblog
a blog devoted mostly or wholly to covering news events concerning an ongoing war.

PhilosopherPoet

My autobiography in progress

My therapist suggested that I try and write my own biography to process stuff. I took this advice and begun to work on it. So far I’ve written five/six short chapters, and I’m pleased with what has turned out so far. It actually smells like something that could potentially be published.

I’d like to add that for the privacy of family members I have changed names, although i try to keep events as clear as I can. I have called it Tattooed Paper, because I’m essentially a writer and that is what you are doing. I find it far more descriptive than just saying ‘writing’. The reason? Well, tattoos have meaning and are symbols to us.

Tattooed Paper should follow in the next post.

PhilosopherPoet

The Race That Wouldn’t Die

This was taken from the Washington Post webpage. I receive daily emails that keep me update on current events, this was one of the links I followed, I love the witticism expressed in this article. It’s brilliant. It also reminded me to read more of the newspaper.

 

 

By Eugene Robinson

Friday, April 25, 2008

Who picked this movie? A few months ago, the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination looked as if it would be the feel-good political campaign of the decade, if not the century. We settled in for a heartwarming sequel to “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Instead, we’re having to endure an endless loop of “Alien vs. Predator,” a grisly piece of cinema in which all-powerful extraterrestrials battle for ultimate supremacy while mere humans become collateral damage.

Somebody make it stop.

Actually, the better film analogy may be “The Terminator.” (Anything but “Rocky” — or, in the popular Internet video, “Baracky.”) Yes, I know it’s inappropriate to compare a talented and accomplished woman such as Hillary Clinton with a homicidal cyborg from the future. But it’s hard to come up with a better image for the woman’s sheer relentlessness. If she ever says “I’ll be back” while I’m within earshot, I’m getting out of Dodge.

No, I’m not calling for Clinton to get out of the race. It’s ridiculous to advise a candidate who just won Pennsylvania by 10 points to pack it in, even if it’s still hard to imagine a plausible way for her to win the nomination.

And it is, you know; the delegate arithmetic has hardly budged. Clinton would have a realistic chance of eliminating the future rebel leader who someday will threaten the dominion of sentient machines over all of humankind — I mean, of defeating Barack Obama — only if her opponent were gracious enough to dissolve into a quivering puddle. She has done everything she can to encourage such a meltdown, but by now it should be clear that it won’t happen.

If anything, Obama is learning some of Clinton’s war craft. He watched as she moved the goalposts so often that they’re not even in the stadium anymore, they’re somewhere out in the parking lot — his lead in delegates didn’t matter, his wins in caucus states didn’t matter, his wins in states below a certain population threshold didn’t matter, his wins in states above that threshold didn’t matter if those states were Illinois, Georgia and Virginia. In Pennsylvania, the Obama campaign did a similar thing with Clinton’s victory margin, arguing that if Clinton won by five points or less she would actually suffer a humbling defeat.

But she beat the point spread handily. Our long national nightmare continues.

I still believe that either Democrat would be able to beat John McCain. Millions of new voters and tons of new money are flooding into the Democratic Party, and at least some of this new wealth has to stick. Those surveys of registered Democrats showing that huge numbers of Clinton supporters would never vote for Obama, and that huge numbers of Obama voters would never vote for Clinton, are almost certain to change when disaffected true believers see how little McCain’s political philosophy has to do with core Democratic Party values.

But the longer this slugfest continues, the more the eventual nominee will be tarnished in the eyes of independents who are looking for bipartisan solutions to the nation’s problems. Obama, who holds a solid lead of at least 150 pledged convention delegates, clearly would like to shift his campaign into general election mode. But now he has to scrap for every vote in Indiana and North Carolina, which means he has to continue to appeal to the Democratic Party’s activist base — while McCain does photo ops in African American communities and talks about climate change.

All the extraneous “issues” aren’t helping, either. In a sense, it’s better for Obama to deal with spurious questions about aloofness or patriotism now than in the fall — just as it’s better for Clinton, should she be the nominee, to face questions now about truthfulness or the role she envisions for her husband. But after a certain point, a candidate isn’t being tempered by adversity. He or she is just getting bashed.

At least until the votes are counted in Indiana and North Carolina on May 6, there’s not much anyone can do to stop the punishment — except the candidates themselves. Democratic Party elders and superdelegates might not be able to end this thing yet, but they can put the campaigns on notice: Fighting hard for the nomination is understandable, but fighting in such a way as to give the presidency to McCain is unforgivable.

 

(Just for the record in case I might confuse some people I’m not Eugene Robinson, this is an article I didn’t write…hope you’ve enjoyed it! )

PhilosopherPoet

Nothing is certain (Plato’s Cave)

Nothing is certain. It’s a common expression, and when you start looking at the basis of all life, there’s energy. There are probably quite a few interpretations of the phrase ‘nothing is certain’. I can think of one while I type.

 

 

The Limits of our World

 

The first is we are limited. We have senses, and a language. Beyond that is all just a guess. Jeanette Winterson said, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” We can’t put a finger on what is out there, or even inside of ourselves.

 

Now a question arises. Assuming we have limited experiences in this world, then what are we missing? Is there an alternate reality that we cannot ’see’? I can’t help but think back to Plato’s Cave. This was an allegory he used to explain the world of the Forms. This is how it goes…

 

There are prisoners (chained) sided by sided in a dark cave. Far behind them is a fire, and just in front of that are clay pots and figurines raised up that project above the heads of the prisoners (the roadway in the illustration below). So all the prisoners see their whole lives are the shadows in front of themselves. They see the shadows that belong to them and the pots. This is all they believe, and all they know.

 

I’ve added two drawings of the cave, the first is 3D, and the second is two dimensional. Hopefully one of them will help

 

 

You could relate this to our lives. We initially see it on a very simple, superficial level. We see things for what they are. We believe and accept them. Then you get a brave prisoner who breaks free from the others. He turns around to face the fire and is temporarily blinded. His eyes have become accustomed to the dark. Slowly his eyes adapt to the fire and he begins to see things for what they are inside the cave.

 

One could see this as a person adopting a religion for a first time. Their eyes are ‘opened’ and they begin to experience things they haven’t before. Their lives change, and the way they see life changes. This allegory can also be seen as the stages in someone’s spiritual development.

 

The allegory continues. The prisoner learns more about the cave, and decides at last to step out side of the cave to journey into a new realm. Harsh sunlight blinds the prisoner more than ever now. A flame is one thing, but facing an illuminating ball of burning gas, has got to do something awful to your retinas. So our hero here staggers out in the sunlight blinded again, but in the Real world for the first time.

 

(Although the sense of sight is primarily used in this illustration, let’s not forget that this prisoner is stumbling into new smells, sensations and tastes. There’ll be fresh air and the scent of flowers, the sun will warm his skin and he might even feel the wind for the first time.)

 

Once this guy can see, I assume his immediate response will be “WTF (What the f**k) I never knew a place so awesome existed!” This is a pretty idealistic allegory so try think of this stage as the prisoner in one of those romance movies. The sunlight warms his smile and he frolics in the meadow, with butterflies around him, and the distant sound of stringed instruments accompany his laughter. All is perfect when he stumbles on a pond, and looks into it. He sees who he really is now. The prisoner not only sees his own face, but the detail, his blue eyes, brown hair, etc. He is overcome by tears. Think Orlando Bloom in a romantic drama…

 

This drawing I find more informative in its verbal detail. The bottom caption is very helpful.

 

 

Plato would now say that the prisoner has reached and experienced the true world of the Forms. He is in the ultimate perfect world. Plato believed that there was a place where everything was perfect. Not so much a tangible place, but more of a state in which true Forms (that we would experience on earth) existed.

 

Take a butterfly for example, somewhere in the world of the Forms there is the ultimate ‘butterfly-ness’. The thing is we can tell what a butterfly is even though they don’t all look the same. So there is a state (outside of our normal senses) in which a perfect blueprint of everything exists. This goes for everything including emotions, thoughts and desires.

 

Unfortunately, this nursery rhyme does not have a happy ending. Once outside of the Cave, the now enlightened prisoner goes back to tell the other prisoners what they need to experience. This is meant with fierce hostility. This guy seems not only crazed, but arrogant and most definitely delusional. The initial prisoners freak out and beat him to death.

 

Why? Well, he was so far advanced; that what he said had not even entered their frame of reference. The reason there are stages in the development, is because that adjustment in itself is so massive. Skipping a step would be like jumping from diapers into the adult world. You’re simply not ready, and would either become traumatized, angry, or both.

 

In a Nutshell

 

I know that people aren’t always good with long explanations, so I’ll give a short one. The second illustration I found is very succinct. Here’s a quick four part tutorial to sum up.

 

1 We haven’t even learnt to believe. We simply accept way we see with no argument. We see the illusion for what it is, and base our understanding on what is there.

2 There is evidence behind the unknown. We now believe the facts (since skepticism has stopped us from simply accepting).

3 This more in-depth question that was used to counter the illusions. We start to ask…Is believing enough? Surely we’re just emotionally accepting what evidence we see? We now start to rationally battle concepts, we previously listened to with irrational responses.

4 We have integrated rationality with spirituality. We don’t accept what we feel because we ’sense’ there is something greater. This is beyond sensing to be frank. We Know (intuitively) what is there, and have the courage to face the ‘true’ world…The World of the Forms.

 

 

Why the Steps?

 

The steps are a guideline. They are a symbol of spiritual growth and our progress from not understanding all the way to intuitively ‘Knowing’. If the prisoner that had broken free from the pack was taken into direct sunlight…he would’ve been permanently blinded. This explains that criticism of fundamentalist faith systems (from a superior source) turns on the aggression since they do not ‘know’ the true world.

 

 

 

So what is my point after all of this?

 

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

– Teilhard de Chardin (French geologist 1881-1955)

 

 

 

PhilosopherPoet

Ted Bundy – The Most Infamous

I joined a facebook group that had an interest in violence, and I was browsing through all the serial killers. I discovered some new ones, and decided to research Ted Bundy. I knew his name, but not the details behind him.

 

It turns out he was a really good looking serial killer. A serial killer changes his habits. That stuff in movies about a murderer getting away with doing multiple murders the same way, is a load of bullshit. You’re just stupid if you stick to the same plan because guess what…some one’s gonna figure you out. This man seemed to be obsessed with killing young women. The ages of the women he killed ranged from 15-25 years of age.

There was one more problem, he was charming and good-looking. People respond better to good-looking people. Ted different have an unusual face which meant that descriptions of him varied, and he have the ability of concealing his identity pretty well by simply adding a moustache or beard. People estimate that he killed between 25-100 people.

 

The estimate is on 35, which Bundy admitted to a lawyer is most probably closer to the actual number (earlier when someone had asked if he’d killed 35 people, he said that they’d have to put another zero on that to make it accurate). I’m still surprised that he was so successful. What was amazing is that he evaded the cops for long, and not to forget that when captured by the police he escaped and resumed killing.

 

The night before his death he had an interview with James Dobson. He claimed that pornography started him killing. I won’t deny that I think the porn was fuel to the fire, although I don’t ever think you can have a single scapegoat. Porn may be part of it, although I think a lot of it has to do with the adrenaline rush of killing. Killers are thrill seekers. They want that high, and intensity of feeling someone dying in their hands.

 

Some people said that after talking to him, he seemed like a natural killer. He was obsessed with killing and when asked about killings years back, he described it with detail as if it had just happened. I have to be skeptical I don’t think you can be a natural at killing people, because every killer has a first victim they start off with. I’m sure if you get in the amount of practice someone like Bundy got, it does become more professional.

 

I’m no psychologist but I assume that the rush is still there.

 

 

PhilosopherPoet

The Science of Food

 

I got this from a friend on facebook, this is really interesting and helpful!

 

Every whole food has a pattern that resembles a body organ or physiological function and that this pattern acts as a signal or signs, as to the benefit the food provides the eater. Here is just a short list of examples of Whole Food Signatures.

A sliced Carrot looks like the human eye. The pupil, iris and radiating lines look just like the human eye…and science shows that carrots greatly enhance blood flow to and function of the eyes.

A Tomato has four chambers and is red. The heart is red and has four chambers. All of the research shows tomatoes are indeed pure heart and blood food.

Grapes hang in a cluster that has the shape of the heart. Each grape looks like a blood cell and all of the research today shows that grapes are also profound heart and blood vitalizing food.

A Walnut looks like a little brain, a left and right hemisphere, upper cerebrums and lower cerebellums. Even the wrinkles or folds are on the nut just like the neo-cortex. We now know that walnuts help develop over 3 dozen neuron-transmitters for brain function.

Kidney Beans actually heal and help maintain kidney function and yes, they look exactly like the human kidneys.

Celery, Bok Choy, Rhubarb and more look just like bones. These foods specifically target bone strength. Bones are 23% sodium and these foods are 23% sodium. If you don’t have enough sodium in your diet the body pulls it from the bones, making them weak. These foods replenish the skeletal needs of the body.

Eggplant, Avocadoes and Pears target the health and function of the womb and cervix of the female – they look just like these organs. Today’s research shows that when a woman eats 1 avocado a week, it balances hormones, sheds unwanted birth weight and prevents cervical cancers. And how profound is this? …. It takes exactly 9 months to grow an avocado from blossom to ripened fruit. There are over 14,000 photolytic chemical constituents of nutrition in each one of these foods (modern science has only studied and named about 141 of them).

Figs are full of seeds and hang in twos when they grow. Figs increase the motility of male sperm and increase the numbers of sperm as well to overcome male sterility.

Sweet Potatoes look like the pancreas and actually balance the glycemic index of diabetics.

Olives assist the health and function of the ovaries.

Grapefruits, Oranges, and other citrus fruits look just like the mammary glands of the female and actually assist the health of the breasts and the movement of lymph in and out of the breasts.

Onions look like body cells. Today’s research shows that onions help clear waste materials from all of the body cells They even produce tears which wash the epithelial layers of the eyes.

 

 

I’ve learnt that food can be your best medicine, this is a good example.

 

 

PhilosopherPoet

Concentration Camps: Real Facts

Two of my most popular posts are titled ‘Crucify’ and ‘Concentration Camps’. They tend to rip off rather than offer sympathy to the situation. I do have a dark sense of humor…so that is most probably part of the problem. I think that History tends to ‘forget itself’. For example if you think of events in this century, like the Holocaust they still feel close to us, and our emotions are close to it. Although if you start turning the clock further back to events like the Spanish Inquisition, or the Crusades…your heart isn’t in the same place.

 

Here’s a reminder of what some of us might’ve forgotten. I’ve added some photos, looking back at an era so far away, its kind of difficult to put yourself there, although its still there.

 

 

 

I’ll start off with a happy moment. These are survivors of one of the Concentration Camps. Note the people in striped clothes are the prisoners. It’s lovely to see a smile on their faces. I assume the Officer walking with them is either American or British, since they were the Nations who put an end to the war.

 

 

Women trying to cook for themselves.

 

 

 

 

Here’s some children at Concentration Camps. I noticed their faces had a heaviness to them.

 

 

(Right): German civilians were forced to carry away the shriveled bodies of the camp’s victims.

(Left):    Dead and dying lay all over the ground as the 418^th entered the camp.

 

 

 

These are orphans at one of the death camps.

 

 

 

These are German troops marching through the streets.

 

 

I’ve been highly criticized for the comic I posted under this subject. You could say that this is a message to say I do have a heart, and I do see the horror, although I don’t believe you can hold onto life to seriously cos if you do, something’s gonna blow. I won’t deny the horror of WWII, I’ll say that much. In the end its all opinion.

 

PhilosopherPoet