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Quotes and wool-gathering from several years ago;
It's sorta paradoxical, aint it.
October 26, 2011 at 1:35 pm
From weakness comes strength. We
forgive to be forgiven. We give it away to keep it. We suffer to get
well. We surrender to win. We die to live. From darkness comes
light. From dependence we found independence......and...some of the stuff that is above my pay-grade is stuff that is also, not necessarily irrational, but beyond rational.
From the prologue to The Illusion of Technique, Wm. Barrett, Anchor Press, 1976.
October 20, 2011 at 8:22 am
"The techniques of shaping
behavior are the preoccupation ... of our American psychologist B.F.
Skinner, whose book Beyond Freedom and Dignity had appeared at about
this time, though I had not yet gotten around to reading it. Now
suddenly this passing column in the Times brought the two authors,
Solzhenitsyn and Skinner, to the forefront of my attention, and I could
not resist the impulse to place them in imaginary dialogue with each
other. Professor Skinner, after all, might do as an American stand-in,
with due allowances made for their political differences, for that
unnamed Soviet behaviorist with whom the Times reporter had talked in
Leningrad. I had never thought that Mr. Lewis, [ Anthony, author of the article at issue ] would be a
catalyst for me in anything; but one never knows from what quarter the
light may suddenly strike. At any rate, his column set me about the
intellectual experiment of reading two books side by side, or more
accurately, in counterpoint with one another.
And they do make a
very striking counterpoint amid the general disorder of contemporary
events. Both books appeared close enough in time so that they can be
considered as virtually simultaneous products of our period. Both had
large sales, yet must have reached different audiences, for there was no
public indication that anybody drew comparison between them. And yet
both dealt, in their different ways, with the subject of freedom, which
has now become the paramount issue of our time.
To be sure, they
deal with this issue so differently that their paths might not seem to
cross ideologically at all. The American psychologist does not discuss
political liberty as such. He is simply concerned to deny that anyone
as a matter of fact is ever free under any circumstances at all,
whatever the political form under which he lives. Yet this sweeping
metaphysical position is not altogether without political consequences. The society according to Pavlov would not be innocent of political
implications. The ideal of the free and self-governing (autonomous)
personality is a traditional part of our thinking in law and political
philosophy. For Professor Skinner this idea is not only an illusion,
but also a pernicious relic of the past that stands as a barrier to our
future progress. A thoroughly scientific program for the advancement of
mankind demands that we scrap it. So he does come on as something of a
social crusader after all.
Solzhenitsyn, on the other hand, gives
us a powerful and horrifying picture of what life is like for millions
of people who have in fact been deprived of their freedom. The Russian
had been imprisoned and then exiled for espousing liberty. The
American, who denigrates the idea of individual freedom as a
metaphysical belief, has been the recipient of the highest academic
honors in this country. We are a free country and would not have it
otherwise. ......."
They're Sorry, but cannot attend.
September 19, 2011 at 8:05 am
So far, a growing list of
notables have e-mailed to say they will NOT be attending the [my] talk on
Oct. 1st. Among those having sent RSVP's, are.....
Anna Wintour
Mayor Bloomberg
Police Commissioner Kelly
Sting
Bebe Rebosa
Lady Gaga
Andrew Stein
Woody Allen
Bobby Kennedy Jr.
[ Above is a snarky comment concerning a talk I gave in Amagansett about a segment of local history of no interest to the above.. ...though it was surprisingly well attended by people that matter to me.]
GORKY vs. GORKY
August 22, 2011 at 5:04 pm
Gorky vs. Gorky
Arshile Gorky, Maxim Gorky, Max Eastman and Walter Benjamin..., West, Rebecca; West, Nathaniel; Gertrude Stein and Peggy Guggen….heim…. Hegel, Hiedegger, Luce and Smith, that’s both Clare Booth and Ms. Chase; Ludwig Bemelmens, ....Bernard Berenson, ( also, kinda, Ludvig, Binswanger,)
.....Dawn Powell, Kaye Boyle, ...Robert Lowell, Randall Jarell, Krishnamurti,…Chris, ( that’s Isherwood, ) I would remember them all if I could.
[ Confused yet?]
It was a cry for help................
July 18, 2011 at 4:02 pm
Yes, it was a cry for help. I
was whining. Whinging and whining...because I had lost something. At
least every other day I loose something; today it was my sandals.
Generally I only wear them in the house or down to the pool, but I need
to wear them every so often or my feet cry out. See, these are special
sandals. For sensitive feet. They lift up yer metatarsal arch or
whatever. So I wear them for a couple of days, just around the house,
and then my feets feels good and I store them back in the closet. But
they weren't there. Mickey found them. They were up off the floor and
under a pile of folded blankets on a bench in the bedroom where they had
been hidden by the evil cleaning person-hood.
See, there was a
time in my life when I had wandered far from my roots. I had gotten
ungrounded. I thought I would transform myself into a Green,Vegetarian,Yoga loving, Mother-Earth loving, Birkenstock wearing guy
who could get laid alot by impressing stupid Hippy chicks. In truth, I
was pretty stupid myself. I had only recently stopped using substances
which atrophy the brain cells. I'd been using said substances for quite
a few years, long enough to atrophy virtually my entire cerebellum, two
thirds of my cerebral cortex and my entire corpus Colossium; (that's
the corpus where they throw Christians to the Lions.)
But I hadn't
had the Birkinstocks for more than five minutes when the woman whose
love slave I was employed as told me that I should not be wearing them,
because no real man, or woman who thought of herself as a young boy, as
did Lindsay Not-Lohan, said Love Slaver, would wear any kind of foot
gear which restricted either running away, or kicking. This was so
brilliant, so rational and so generous on her part, that I immediately
decided to restrict my usage of my brand-new Birkinstocks to days when
Lindsay was out of town and I was only going to walk as far as the
Salmagundi Soup kitchen to be taunted by the Gay waiter.
It's
probably also why I still have the same pair, thirty years later. But
I'm glad I didn't throw them out, because they really do make my feet
feel better, even though I'd never wear them Downtown, because who
knows, someday I might find myself in a position where I will either
need to have on my fancy pair of Adidas, or the pair of Wing Tipped
Cordovans I bought on the advice of a street-fighting former member of
the Bloods, who said they came in handy when you were kicking somebody
in the head. So far, I've been lucky.
Revolution Now !!!!!
June 29, 2011 at 10:20 am
"Our history is the exact
opposite of the French Revolution and their wretched masses guillotining
the aristocracy and clergy. It has become fashionable to equate the
two revolutions, but they share absolutely nothing beyond the word
"revolution." The American Revolution was a movement based on ideas,
painstakingly argued by serious men in the process of creating what
would become the freest, most prosperous nation in world history.
The French Revolution was a revolt of the mob. It was the primogenitor
of the horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution, Hitler's Nazi Party, Mao's
Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's slaughter, and America's periodic mob
uprisings, from Shays' Rebellion to today's dirty waifs smashing
Starbucks windows whenever bankers come to town. The French Revolution
is the godless antithesis to the founding of America. "
-Ann Coulter, Demonic, Ch. 8, The American Revolution: How to throw a revolution without losing your head.
Alger, Adolph, and the Gang;
June 3, 2011 at 11:33 am
This from Alfred Kazin's New York Jew, pub. Alfred A. Knopf, 1978.
P. 194;
"...Like
all of us old liberals, the Trillings lived at the edge of the abyss
created in modern culture, in all our cultured minds, by the
extermination of the Jews. The case of Alger Hiss seemed easier to deal
with. He was a proven liar perhaps especially to himself. And he was
such an obvious case of what was wrong with liberals that he made
society real to those for whom it meant liberalism gone sour.
But the faster time carried us away from it, the closer the gas came. It
stole up our skin without our always knowing it. It was total, the
inescapable crime lying across the most documented century in history.
People in the millions could be considered superfluous. Lenin had first
propounded this. The Jews as a people were now the most concentrated and
direct example. Certainly they were not the only ones. But the abyss
was at our feet because we believed in nothing so much as what Trilling
called "the life of the mind." The life of the mind was of no use unless
it addressed itself to the gas. And what then? Letters of fire had been
read at Nuremberg:
A word must be said on
the decision to economize on gas. By the summer of 1944, the collapse
of the Eastern front meant that the destruction of European Jewry might
not be completed before the advancing Allied armies arrived. So
Hungarian Jewry was killed at maximum speed - at the rate of up to ten
thousand people a day. Priority was given to transports of death over
trains with reinforcements and munitions needed for the Wehrmacht.
Entire trainloads were marched straight to the gas chambers.
The
gas used, -Zyklon B- causes death by internal asphyxiation, with damage
to the centers of respiration, accompanied by feelings of fear,
dizziness, and vomiting. In the chamber, when released, 'The gas climbs
gradually to the ceiling, forcing the victims to claw and trample upon
one another in their struggle to reach upward. Those on the top are the
last to succumb...The corpses are piled one on top of another in an enormous heap...'
The sheer volume of gas used in the
summer of 1944 depleted the gas supply. In addition, the Nazis deemed
the costs excessive ...the dosage of gas was halved from twelve boxes to
six per gassing. When the concentration of the gas is quite high, death
occurs quickly. The decision to cut the dosage in half was to more
than double the agony.
Life seemed far from terrible
and extreme in this postwar era of expansion and prosperity when so
many Jews 'came into their own.' But it was. We had just been ruled out
of the human race, systematically annihilated on the latest scientific
principles. What did our political thinkers have to say about this? The
left had nothing to say, did not even include the gas in its summary
view of Hitler-ism as 'the last decadent stage of capitalism.' The
right excused everything and everyone: there is evil in all of us. The
great violinist Yehudi Menuhin, like many a Christian quietest,
explained that 'everyone is guilty.' For me, no one was serious who did
not fight the condemnation of a specific group that ended in its
extermination." Nothing else was serious. Murder had become the first
political principle. We had to recognize the abyss on whose edge we
lived." .....
Mama
The painting on the left, by Ray,
my father, is of "Mama." I never met her. She died sometime in the
early '50's. According to my father she was The origin of all that is
good and saintly...an excellent cook.., a fount of wisdom. ...My
half-brother said she reminded him of the nasty old Sicilian woman
similar to the one with a mustache that Bobby Darin used to impersonate
on his old T.V. show. She wasn't Italian, though; she was a Montenegrin
Serb.
Off the cuff..........
May 27, 2011 at 10:52 am
Off the cuff..., while we're
waiting for the trail to begin again, it's in a fifteen minute
recess....the Casey Anthony Trail which has caused Florida to grind to a
halt.... ....I'm not getting anything done.....I'm supposed to be
re-writing my book about Me, Mom-Dad-Sis and Bonac, but I've got the
Casey Fever. Big boobs, a psycho bitch, possible child abuse, and a
mother murdering a child;
...beats football, anywayz, ...
I know I'm a
contrarian. ...During normal times, Mickey and I like to gather around a
warm T.V. and watch Snaps, our replacement for City Confidential.
But
I did mean to update my Semi-Annual Report, which is usually about
reading. This one's no exception. I spent Post-Christmas reading Art
Lover, Anton Gill's book about Peggy Guggenheim, after which I re-read
Jimmy Ernst's autobiography and then read his mother's diary, (which
goes until just before she was put on the next to last train out of
France for Aushwitz.) This in an attempt to know more about the era of
WWll and just after, the era into which I was born; and also an effort to learn more about the Art World
during that time. Jimmy Ernst and his father Max Ernst were both in
Amagansett during The War, as were more than a few other ex-patriot
artists and intellectuals. Some of their group crashed in the house I
grew up in, before it was lovingly restored by Ma and Pa.
I'm now
reading Alfred Kazin's New York Jew, an amazing book about the New York
Intellectuals, (and others,) during The War and after. I'm also
picking away at a book about Mary Magdalene; re-reading Tristram Shandy,
and enjoying a couple of goofy self-help books that I'm too snobby to
admit to, almost. But everything's kind of ground to a halt, because of
that Little Tramp, Casey. It seems like there's always some little
tramp disrupting the equilibrium; if it ain't Casey it's Lindsey Lohan.
..I suppose that's why I'm such a fan of Joan Rivers. I don't watch it
regularly, but her show about the Royal Wedding, I watched the Rivers
show, not the wedding, J.R.'s show was great.
Oh, and yeah, I've
become addicted to finding Prohaskas on-line. There are over a thousand
signed up on Facebook; about half in Europe and half in the U.S. As a
Yoot I suffered from low self- esteem because of my lack of cousins,
growing up in a village where everybody but me was a descendant of
Granny Loper Payne Scott, ...so now I'm compensating. For a slight fee,
you can see my collection of young Austrian Prohaskas in bikinis
bathing in the Adriatic......O.K., I gotta get back to the trail.
Very Liberal...
May 4, 2011 at 12:33 pm
O.K. then. What is the
difference between very liberal and socialist? Between National
Socialist and Stalinist Socialist? Are you a Trotskiite? Which European
Socialist country is your role model? Have you read Hayek?
Shumpeter? de Toqueville? What level of taxes do you think would be
sufficient for the U.S. to run economically under Socialism? Do you
have any money invested in the Stock Market? By that I mean I.R.A.,
pension, etc. What companies do you think we should Nationalize? Do
you hate George Bush and Sara Palin? Do you think you are more civil
than your Republican counterparts? Are you a Vegan? Do you love Jane
Fonda?
Just answer the above questions and don't give me any
opinions. I know all your opinions. I'm not interested. I think you
are beastly. But I want to keep my eye on you. By the way. Close
personal friends are exempted from the Beastly thing. Close personal
friends who believe Marxist theory are simply ill.They have a disease
which tells them they do not have a disease.
I'm Difrent........
April 25, 2011 at 3:27 pm
I'm different from most of my
Liberal friends. For one thing, It would never occur to me to say "well, what's so bad about Socialism?" I mean, I've already figured
that out. For another, I'm not worried about the possibility that Alger
Hiss was innocent and was persecuted, because I've read the Venona
Files. I guess if you went to one of those Left Wing Schools in
Manhattan where they teach Marxism 101, like New Lincoln, or The Little
Red School House, that it's only natural that after having worn those
red diapers you would have remained a good Fellow Traveler, but I was
lucky. I went to school in America. I did get taken on occasion to
Barnes Landing Beach when I was a rug-rat, by my Stevensonian mother,
where I saw all those children of psychiatrists and television writers
who learned how to argue about Trotsky when they were still teething,
but I preferred Albert's Landing where the kids were more interested in
playing Show Bottoms under water, or digging for Chowder Clams with our
dirty little feet.
Those city slickers didn't like me anyway. They
said I was a Towney. They were a bunch of snobs. They did have some
cute sisters though, but of course, they didn't find me interesting
either, at all. [Above is typical of my attitude in the book The White Fence.]
...A few years
later though, I got to meet a couple of Barnes Landing kids who were
pretty good kids. This would have been in the mid- fifties, when I was
taking out riders at Roy Lester's Livery Stable. Their names were Sara
Jane and Bobby Newton, and their father was a Sullivinian; that is to
say a practitioner of the Harry Stack Sullivan brand of therapy. My
mother had Sullivan's books, but I don't think she ever really read
them. ...The Sullivanians got in trouble some
years later for being a cult. But, Sara Jane and Bobby were cute kids.
They were in the area of five and six years old, and we put them on the
two horses that I used to drive as a team on hayrides, Pal and Paul.
They were two horses who were great with kids, gentle as lambs, although
if you put a bucking strap on him, Paul would buck like a pro. Well,
maybe any horse would do that, I dunno, but, of the two horses, I only
tried it on Paul.
Harry Fields and I went so far as to buy our own
bucking horse, a skinny white thing that Harry named Midnight, and that
we used primarily for bucking. In those days it was fun to fall in the
dirt. Today it would mean surgery, and metal pins, and probably time in
a nursing home.
Roy was insured with Lloyds of London. Good
thing. We might have needed it. But, we didn't. Anyway, Sara Jane and
Bobby were my special charge. I enjoyed taking them out on the trail,
and they rode very well for little kids. I often wonder what happened
to them. Figure they were eight or ten years younger than me, that would
make them now in the neighborhood of sixty. My God. I hope they're
both alive and healthy, and it would be great if they remembered me.
Teapot Dome Scandal..............
April 15, 2011 at 1:10 pm
I Confess. I fried the teapot.
Cuisinart brand, twenty years in the family, I went for a cup of tea and
forgot it until it almost blackened the whole stove. So I volunteered
to buy a new one, out of my massive Social Security check. I went to
Target, the local version of that ole Bonac institution, Kaldorz...and
bought one for seventeen dollars that has a whistle.The Cuisinart
didn't even have a fricken whistle fercrissakes...( and by the way I do a
great imitation of a teapot whistle..)
................................................................
Here I erased some several-years-later ranting that seems irrelevant now, but I had been talking about the history of Eastern Long Island...
Vis a
vis home rule: I was reading lately in The Writings of Henry P. Hedges,
in Tracing of the Past, Ed. by Tom Twomey, about the Hi-Jacking of the
East End by New York from the Connecticut Colony, back in....lemmee
see...
P. 342
" The English Title......
....England
conquered and absorbed the Dutch settlements in the province of New
York in 1664. The Duke of York then claimed title to all Long Island
and by this Governor Nichols demanded that all the Eastern towns take
title by patent forthwith from him or they would be deemed to have
forfeited their rights to their land and dealt with as trespassers. Protest was disregarded, resistance hopeless. At great expense the town
obtained a new patent and paid quit rent to this new claimant and
extortioner, which was for the second time a payment to purchase the
English title. In 1675 another English Governor even more unprincipled
and rapacious than the first, contended that Nichols patent did not
cover the town territory and again for the third time they paid for
another patent from Governor Andross. Still unsatisfied another
Governor made under like pretences a demand and they obtained from
Governor Dongan a patent dated December 6th 1686, which was the fourth
purchase and payment for their title to the towns territory. By their
conduct Kings forfeited the regard and respect of our forefathers. Their contempt we inherit.
"The Town Self-Governed 1640 - 1664.....
....From
the settlement of the town in 1640, [Southampton,] to the conquest of
New York from the Dutch by the English in 1664; almost a generation had
gone.The founders born in old England, emigrating from New England,
bound to her by ties of kindred, blood and purpose, allied for mutual
defence, alike in spiritual vision, alike in aspiration for liberty;
alike as pioneers in enterprise and daring; alike in the power and
practice of self-government, were to all intents a part of New England. Severed there-from they yearned the old union and associations in vain. They hated to become vassals of the Duke of York, and from 1664 to
1775, for a hundred years on their altar the fire of freedom burned
un-quenched. In that long conflict Bridgehampton nobly bore her part. The champions of liberty and people's rights in no part of this town or
county maintained their cause more heroically than the sons of
Bridgehampton. The Piersons, Henry, [Grandson of Henry the first Town
Clerk of Southampton, my Grandfather 9 generations back,] the speaker
of the Assembly, and his son David, member of Assembly, sturdily stood for
popular rights against the arbitrary and oppressive claims of the royal
governors, and that for nearly twenty years. No honor of knighthood; no
embellishment of armorial bearings can worthily tell the story of their
high-souled devoted patriotism."
_____
The English
treated Eastern Long Islanders not much better than they treated the
Irish! (It's just another nail in my coffin that my mother's mother was a
Catholic from Northern Ireland married to a Protestant also from the
North, and that they came to the States for religious freedom and then
after having three children separated because they fought too much.)
And so as you
can see my semi-annual update is mostly about my mean-spirited and
resentful cerebrations, along with a backhanded apology and some self
pity.....so a further up-date shall be planned for the near future.
Yours, Anton
Opinion without solicited refutations, #17......
March 18, 2011 at 1:31 pm
Regarding David Remnick's
Comment, A Man, A Plan, in this week's New Yorker; It starts out with
spin, continues on with spin, then segues in to more spin, and winds up
with, yes, more spin. If he is forced, in supporting the Regime, to
continue spinning, he will eventually fall off a cliff. Well, I for one
wouldn't mind seeing that.
P.S. Why does he use the word reactionary? Did he learn that at his Momma's knee, when he was still in Red diapers?
P.P.S. And he wants Israel to roll over why? So the Arab world will send them chocolates and flowers?
On Surrealism....
January 27, 2011 at 10:19 am
A quote, and a quote within a
quote, from Art Lover; a Biography of Peggy Guggenheim, by Anton Gill. "Surrealism encompassed poetry and prose as well as painting, but
Breton was the ultimate arbiter. Himself a writer, born in 1896, he'd
spent World War 1 as a psychiatric intern treating the victims of shell
shock, beginning to use their dreams as a route toward understanding
their psychoses (it wasn't until the mid-1920s that Freud's major work
was translated into French). Breton was less interested, as an artist,
in the curative potential of dreams than in the imagery, the shamanistic
qualities they encompassed. The idolized antecedent of the Surrealists,
pace Breton's thinking, was Isidore Ducasse, who wrote his one great
work, Les chants de Maldoror, under the nom de plume of Le Comte de
Lautreamont. This extraordinary novel, first published in 1868, is
famous for the passage, so often quoted, and so beloved of the
surrealists that it became a kind of summum bonum for them:
" 'He is as
handsome as the retractility of the claws in birds of prey: or, again,
as the unpredictability of muscular movement in sores in the soft part
of the posterior cervical region; or rather, as the perpetual motion
rat-trap which is always reset by the trapped animal and which can go on
catching rodents indefinitely and works even when it is buried under
straw; and above all, as the chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine
and an umbrella on a dissecting table.' "
December 2, 2010 at 1:34 pm
I read a second de Souza book,
this one about life after death. Well, he seems to agree with me, which
I'm sure will encourage him, that there is life after death, and that
we should all be slightly on-edge about it, since we have no real idea
how we will be treated, when we get there. I don't know. Would you be
interested in a book like that? It's pretty well done, I mean, not too
thin, not too thick; enough to upgrade my own curiosity about that big
elephant in the room, anyway. ....just finished reading the only
fiction book by Iris Murdoch I hadn't read, The Sacred and Profane Love
Machine. ...I suppose Iris appeals to me partly because I'm such a
voyeur. She's kind of the thinking man's Grace Metalious. [sp.] ...I've
always wanted to take the roof off the town, any town, and find out
what all the little creatures are really up to, when we aren't looking.
...I'm also re-reading a book about Milton Erickson, which I like even
though I'm never sure what parts are fiction and which not. My Voice
Will Go with You. ...the dot dot dot is something I use in notes and
letters and which I picked up from Bob Sylvester. If you've read this
far, maybe you have your own Sylvester story.
BOB SYLVESTER :
He was my father's surf-casting buddy. And a columnist for the New
York Daily News. His column was called Dream Street, and was mostly
about Broadway and it's characters, but also about night-club people,
Hollywood types, and Montauk. He was the most renowned promoter of
Montauk and it's sports fishing culture. He used these dot dot dots
in his column to go from one "mention", to another. He was a great
friend of our family.Whenever he'd drive in the driveway in his old
Army Jeep beach-buggie, I would yell to my father in his studio...,
"Sylvester's
here!" Sometimes he brought his girlfriend, who's name was Bunty
Pendelton, and who was either a lounge singer or an actress I forget
which. Other times he'd bring a jeep load of chorus girls. He was
always funny, drank alot, and was, in general, a good role model for a
young man. In Dad's studio there was a dark-room- bathroom. A Dark
room with a toilet. No windows, an enlarger, a sink, developer,
developer stop, reels, print trays.., all the equipment necessary for
the old man to do his own printing. He took photographs of models with his
Rollieflex,[sp.], developed and printed them and then used the prints
to draw his illustration characters. ...The toilet had a wooden
seat that Dad had painted red. It was a very comfy seat. There was also a
red light, which added to the charm.
...Sylvester called it The Chapman John, which was a double entendre, meant as a jibe at the theater
critic at the News, John Chapman, who was thought to be a Red.
Here's
a dot dot dot from de-Souza...."Reductive materialism not only provides
atheists with their arguments; it gives them an underlying
philosophical framework to understand reality. Many atheists consider
reductive materialism to be synonymous with reason and science, and
indeed there are many philosophers and scientists who agree with them.
Moreover this form of materialism gives today's atheists the confidence
to laugh off what the vast majority of the world believes. Such
beliefs, they say, have no scientific basis and therefore must be the
product of wishful thinking. As Sam Harris writes, "Clearly the fact of
death is intolerable...and faith is little more than the shadow cast by
the hope for a better life beyond the grave.
"Reductive materialism
empowers atheists like Harris to believe that they are right and
everyone else is wrong. Indeed atheists are convinced that in reductive
materialism they have the weapon they need to wipe out religion and
expose beliefs in God and the afterlife as illusions.
"Even
though reductive materialism is so thoroughly hostile to religious
belief,it goes largely uncontested in the public arena. This is not so
surprising in secular Europe, but it is very surprising in the United
States. Life after death is a classic case of this. It is a belief
upheld by all religions and one that is especially central to
Christianity. Christ's resurrection, after all, is the event on which
Christianity is based and without which Christianity would not exist.
Yet do you regularly hear Christians, even Christian pastors and leaders
- defend the resurrection or life after death in the public sphere? Me
neither. " Dot dot dot.
D'Souza, on Obama...
October 25, 2010 at 10:23 am
"Barack Obama returned from his
father's grave in Kenya a changed man. If our account is right, at this
point in his life he was filled with hatred, but it was a calm hatred,
an ideological hatred. This hatred derived from the debris of the
anti-colonial wars and their impact on his family and especially his
father. These anti-colonial wars now raged in Obama's mind, and he seems
to have resolved to become an anti-colonial warrior himself, taking up
the cause and seeing the fight to the finish; his father's dream had
truly become his own. This was not about settling individual scores -
about going and finding the men who had harmed his father and holding
them to account. Nor was it a matter of rescuing relatives like poor
George Obama. No, this was about systems, social hierarchies, and the
movement of history. The colonial wars themselves were over, but they
had been replaced by something else, a neo-colonial subjugation that
defined the world of the Twenty-first Century. It was this world that
Barack Obama resolved to change, and that is how he could be true to the
largeness of his father's liberationist dream."
Pgs, 127-8, The Roots
of Obama's Rage, Dinesh D'Souza.
Lord Love a Duck.................
October 7, 2010 at 12:30 pm
Winter, 1965, outside Anchorage,
Alaska. Two young Army PFCs, are itching to go into town and get drunk,
but they've both spent their paychecks, all but a few dollars. There
names are Prohaska and MacDougal. I'm Prohaska, so I'll refer to myself
as me. MacDougal is MacDougal. ...MacDougal has the highest IQ on the
Post, knowledge the Headquarters Company is kind enough to keep
posted. That makes him a genius. So, being broke is only a problem for
him as long as it takes him to focus on the problem, just a few minutes
after he finds out that I don't have any money.
His brilliant
idea was one that I was reminded of recently when I was bobbing up and
down in the pool with a group of seventy somethings, her in Florida. One of the ladies was named Sunday. I thought about whether I knew
anybody named Sunday, and I didn't, so I started going through the Days
of the Week, just for something to do. That's when I thought of
Tuesday.
MacDougal's idea was that we should scrape together our
pennies and buy enough cough syrup to get stoned, and go to a movie. We
scraped and borrowed a few dollars and took the bus into town. We had
enough money for three bottles of Robitussen, which we bought at the
nearest drug store, coughing and hacking all the while. Now all we
needed was a movie.
Lord Love a Duck, starring Tuesday Weld and
Roddie McDowell was playing, so we decided to go see that. It was still
morning, Saturday, on a chilly winter day in Anchorage, maybe ten
above, so we sat down front in the nearly empty theater and started
working on the Roby. The first few sips were the hardest, but the movie
was fascinating, Tuesday was unbelievably sexy and gorgeous, so before
we knew it we were both paralyzed. We sat there, mostly not moving, not
thinking, not talking, for ten hours. Years later, we both thought of
it as some kind of marathon, and something to be proud of. A word to
the wise. Don't try this at home! In fact just don't try it. Cough
syrup can cause all sorts of negative reactions, death being one of the
less painful.
What I remember most however, was thinking the
movie was brilliant, a double star turn for two people who were made for
each other, like Bogey and Bacall, or Ginger and Fred, or Roy and Dale,
or whatever. So I decided recently that I should buy the DVD. Once I
ordered it I was anxious to see it and it took like it seemed weeks. I
played it the other day, for me and Martha, aka Mickey. Mickey didn't
get it, but then satire, spoof, obscurity, those aren't her things. Her
favorite movies are Documentaries and Disaster movies. (She used to
be in the Documentary film business. ...and she loves special effects. )
Watching a film with someone prone to not get it isn't the
best, and she did keep saying Whaa? and stuff like that, but I enjoyed
it anyway. I suppose you could say it was one of the early precursors
of the adolescent male humor genre, those films that I and my 20
something nephew enjoy so well; the ones of which Lindsay is the
reigning Queen. Luv-Duck doesn't have the same pace, it's a little
slower, much more prudish, though it didn't seem like it back then, back
in those pointy bra days.
I've decided to rent a few more
Tuesday films. ...I have to admit, I've been off going to the movies
for quite a few years now. Probably since the first time I went to the
Edward's Theater and didn't recognize one soul sitting in the audience.
...Actually, I did stick it out for maybe a decade after that, going
occasionally, mostly to Southampton or Sag Harbor, but eventually I
developed that whole Fiction Phobia thing, having to do with the Iowa
Writer's Workshop, ( things I learned about it from various and sundry, )
and some off-putting things about some writers I met when I was dating
an Upper West Side Aparatchik. [ sp. ] ...I've been waiting for some
sort of stimulus for getting back into the movie watching game, and,
well, maybe this is it.
Maureen, Maher, Evolution, and the Big Bang....
September 26, 2010 at 11:27 am
Well, it's nice to know that
Maureen Dowd and Bill Maher are saving the world from those Conservative
nuts that cling to their guns and Bibles; those poor fools. But I'm
just curious. How sacred IS evolution not-a-theory? Is it's sacredness
on an equal footing with that of the Big Bang? Which was created
sometime after the big bang that resulted in my birth? Or is evolution a
more holy of holies, on account of because "they", (the Gods,) are now
saying that the Universe actually bubbled off, or calved, or excreted
itself, from another Universe..., and in fact maybe that had happened
once or twice or even infinite times, and in fact maybe it's still
happening, and maybe we, (the Gods,) could do it ourselves, in a lab. [I'm not kidding, I heard this all on a science program on T.V. ] I
mean, don't mis-unnerstan me !...The Bang, and Evolution, belong to the
same time frame. I mean you can actually trace the years, minutes and
seconds from the Bang, through Geologic Time, life begins on Earth,
through Monkeys, Apes, to racist name-calling and Bush Derangement
Syndrome. But. And this is a big But. There is no measurement for the
circumference of the big bang's ball! On account of that there isn't
any outside to it!! Which is about as problematic to me as how the
Universe could have been created by the son of a fifteen year old girl
in Bethlehem two thousand years ago. And if the Bang really did come
about as a result of a Ball that exploded, then what about that bubbling
off? I don't want to say it's confusing, because that wouldn't make
for a very good alternative to this Myth stuff. But, which is more
mythological, or less mythological; bang, multi-verse, super-string, or
G__? [ or was it all done with mirrors?]
Reading notes, summer of 2010.
September 17, 2010 at 10:25 am
I joined Library Thing a couple
of years ago at the suggestion of Lucinda Mayo. It's kind of nice to
have a list of your favorite books where you can peruse it and find out
what other people think of your reading list..., but as usual, I have
difficulty working these websites, so I haven't developed any electronic
friendships out of it. Anyway, I guess I really wouldn't know what to
do with an electronic friend.
I'm pretty much satisfied with this
facebook notes venue because here only my invisible friends read what I
have to say. My rants and screeds.
This summer I read a
book about Memes, A Virus of the Mind. I'm still not convinced about
Memes. I also read Peter Mathiessen's two early books, Partisans and
Race Rock. I'd tried to read Race Rock many moons ago, but was deterred
by the fictionalization of Bonac. (The fictional re-juxtaposing of geography was frustrating to a local.) So I guess now
that I'm old as whale barnacles, and my mind is less cluttered due to brain cell loss, I have this new found freedom. I
liked both books. Partisans gave me a closer look at an insiders view
of the political intrigue of the early post-war period in France as it
appeared to someone who was a young, practicing Cold Warrior, pretty
much the same crowd, or overlapping thereof, that made up the New York
Intellectuals. In those days, Liberal guilt was tangible, palpable, and
understandable. It was a controlling dynamic in the lives of the
educated class. I knew, from my perch sitting on the fence in front
of my house, watching people come in and out of the Post Office, that
there were people in Amagansett and environs that were shaping the World
View of the country. ..We could all name drop here...*
Which
brings me to another subject. Lists. I mean.., I always get a laugh
out of the Artist's beach pictures. ...Want to cause a traffic jam? Let
out the news there's going to be an artist's beach picture taken at
Wiborg's or someplace. Divorcees recently moved to Springs will be
crashing into and climbing over each other to get there on time for the
shutter snap.
I have to say I enjoyed, more than the artists
pix, the group photo I saw, by Durrell Godfrey, on someone's facebook
page showing a group of local models. Much more attractive than the
artists. Probably more fun too. ....I told my sister we should make a
list of models who've made the local scene since, well, the Herters, or
at least since Mac Clelland Barclay. My father inherited some of
Barclay's models, when he didn't come home from The Pacific.
And how about a list of Art Critics? I mean it wasn't just Harold
Rosenberg, fer crissakes, though he did cut quite a figure. Movie
actors? Sure. There were Rudolph Valentino, Hoot Gibson, Gary Cooper,
not to mention the present day group who are too numerous to numerate. Existentialist Philosophers? Well, there was Paul Tillich...,
(corner, Highway behind the lots, and Woods Lane,) ...or was he a
Theologian? Speaking of which, there were Beechers, and Huntington, and
Scoville, and who else? A list. ...Big Game Fishermen. Television
Stars. Singahs... sex therapists. No, let us not get ridiculous. I
mean, there could be some great lists. (People who had sex with sex therapists.) In fact, I think there should
be a Repository of Lists. Just an idea. [or a Meme.]
* Talking here of course of people who's feet have touched the ground on The East End, aka Bonac.
**( Bonac in the larger sense.)
Here's what I think....
August 17, 2010 at 1:19 pm
Socialism will lock in the caste
system. Rich guys like George Soros won't have to worry about being
knocked off the top of the heap. The people who ordinarily would become
the next entrepreneurs will be swamped with debt. How can you fund a
start-up when you're working to pay half your income to the IRS? That's
why Socialism is so popular with so many of the nouveau Hamptons rich,
those in the half-a-billion range. It will re-affirm their Old Money
fantasies; that on which Ralph Lauren has staked his fortunes. The idea
of The American Dream will become a thing of the past. No one wants to
admit they are a product of the American Dream. That's like admitting
that your grandmother was an old lady with a moustache who always wore
black, or, that your father actually worked with his hands! Better to
be part of the Permanent Elite! So much like Old Money, which was so
much like European Aristocracy!
In reaction to being
locked out, ambitious people will try to glamorize their plight.
They'll become afficionados of pointless hobbies, like riding around on
bicycles with fancy colored but affordable spandex outfits and
modernistic helmuts. ( Or helmoots..) Or they'll install permanent
plastic kayaks on top of their Hyundai SUVs. They'll become Foodies.
Vegetarians. They will adopt fervent political causes, like saving the
Sharks. They'll put their whole lives up on Facebook. ( Like this old
fool. )
But don't worry. Swedish Socialism in America
won't last long. Soon as it's bankrupt, and that will happen faster
than it took any of the European countries, because there won't be any
American capital seeping in through the cracks to prolong the bliss...,
it will be replaced by, not Democratic Republicanism, because we will
have all been programmed against that, but by The Iron Fist of some
strong man, or woman..., of whom we know there are always a few waiting
in the wings. "Don't worry! I'm in charge here!"
Attention residents of East Hampton, and Hamptons of any similar name....
August 3, 2010 at 1:35 pm
State Police report an
Anti-Socialist meme has breached the Shinnecock Canal barrier and is
headed East. Experts believe the meme was created at a bar in Mineola
on Saturday night, then made it's way to Manorville, and crossed over in
the middle of the night before dawn on Monday. People are warned not
to confront this meme head on, without a helmut. Or, for that matter, a
helmoot.
The meme may have been absorbed into the protoplasm of
several East End residents when it's carrier hit the Diner in Hampton
Bays, and from there spread over the next few days through coffee shops,
bagel shops, and Balsamic Vinegar Stores throughout the area.
Do
not panic! If you have symptoms, such as a Bullseye in your frontal
cortext, return home immediately and tune your television to the State
Controlled Media. If you go out, put a recording by Tom Brokaw reading
from his latest book on your I-Pod and screw your ear-phones on tight.
Stay among your own kind. Frequent art galleries and cultural centers.
Avoid any establishment where beer or french fries are served.
Remember..., the meme is an insidious phenomenon. Many people think it
does not exist. If it does not exist, why are you so nervous? What are
you taking Zoloft for? Will it spread? What happens if there are many
memes? Are the plural of memes memes? Like Dog and Dogs, or is it
moome, kind of like the opposite of Moose and Meese. What happens if a
meme becomes a mime! Would that be the end of the world as we know it?
Or would it be just more of the same? Stay tuned.....
Biloxi, Blues, and the meaning of morbidity.
July 12, 2010 at 1:49 pm
I've just written a letter to
some friends about my trip to San Antonio. I won't go into my various
and sundry epiphanies accumulated at the Convention in and around The
Riverwalk Hyatt and the Riverwalk Marriott, except to say that, yes, I
do believe in God. [ I had a meeting with a long lost relative. No
kidding! Issues of anonymity forbid further discussion in this venue. I
hope that isn't too clinical. ]
It was a long trip for two
out-of-shape travelers, Me and Mrs. Kalser, but we had a good time,
taking turns back-seat driving. ...We stopped in Biloxi for a free lunch
at the Casino, so that one of us could gamble and the other could go
searching for oil on the beaches. My results are in with my photos on
Facebook. ( There wasn't much oil, though I expect it'll wash up
eventually.)
I told a friend that I intended to play Lucinda
Williams's song Lake Charles, when we went through that town. And I did.
Lucinda's voice is a little too raspy for Mickey, so I had to turn the
sound way down, and cut down on the airtime I gave to my dear Lucy.
I
seem to have a morbid streak. Even my beloved father told me that,
years ago. When I was trying to explain the spiritual program I belong
to, he said, "Gee, it sound's kind of morbid." Another person said the
same thing to me a few years later. She was a woman I met on the #10
Stockton Bus, in San Francisco. She looked like a young Patsy
Southgate, but without the tan, and with a toothpick thin body. She was
a very WASPY graduate student at Stanford. I took her to the clubhouse
that was then at the corner of Grant and Bush St.s. She thought it had
a bad vibe, that it was creepy and, and..Morbid! Jesus, what an
insult. Granted there were some street folks hanging out in the place, a
few with missing teeth, or no teeth, but there would also have been, if
it was lunch hour, a smattering of Wall Street types, preppies, clean
hippies, ...and over a period of two years, I even met a few celebrities
there.
But back to Morbidity, and Lucinda Williams. And Mrs.
K. ...I discovered Williams's music in the latter days of her career,
...well behind the curve. And also, it took me a long time to realize I
had a fondness for dirgey music; Mickey brought that up after having to
listen to Emmy Lou Harris's Wrecking Ball a few dozen times.
Given
my propensity, I had to analyze this, of course. I decided that
there's something in that dirgier vein of country music that helps leach
out, from the Pierson side of my soul, the Puritan side, any repressed
grief or sadness I might have stored or accumulated. It makes sense.
Bare with me.
...Carolyn had terribly repressed sadness, from
her mother's death. It led to a kind of hysteria. Her sober, normal
day-to-day self was very unflappable, stoic, stiff upper lip. But under
great stress, like the death of a friend, or a near-miss car accident,
she could break down into tears.
There's a self-help Guru I
used to like quite a bit, Pia Mellody,* who talks about something she
calls "carried pain", and which, she explains in her book, can be
passed from parent to child. I'm a believer in this sort of unconscious
transfer of emotional dysfunction. I think Ray [Carolyn and Ray were my mother and father], as an immigrant and
first born surviving son of a woman who'd had many miscarriages, carried
survivor's guilt, which resonated among his immediate clan. ....I mean,
like.., me. .......I think everyone has "carried resonance." [ Don't
know if that's an actual term; Ed. Morphic resonance is though, Google it.]
*Mellody, Miller, and Miller; Facing Co-Dependence.
From Here to Eternity..........
Just finished reading From Here
to Eternity, which I guess you could say was on my Bucket List, although
the list itself started long before Bucket Lists were invented. As
I've said earlier, I read it partly because Joan Didion at one point
says it's her favorite novel or the great American novel, or something
like that, but also because it's by James Jones who was so locally
famous around the time that I lived in Bridgehampton, thirty years ago.
At that time a group of functional alcoholics were making Bobby Van's
into the local equivalent of The Lion's Head, or The White Horse. I say
functional because they could make a living, get to the bar, stay all
day, and drive home without, for the most part, being arrested. I have
always envied functional alcoholism, though I can't imagine what it
feels like. To me, a normal drunk was waking up in a strange city with
palm trees waving outside the window, or spending the night sleeping on
the 42st Shuttle while it goes peacefully back and forth, back and
forth. Or waking up while rowing a dory across Coonfoot Cove in a
blinding snowstorm, after spending an afternoon drinking socially at
Fitzgerald's. I don't know shee-it.
Why I never read the book
before was I suppose because I figured it was too full of emotions that
might cause me to feel something, or because it was too long, or because
I'd seen the movie. Of course, we've all usually seen the movie. We
all know the book is always different. ...I can tell you that the one
character who's movie image remains in the book after I've read it, was
Sinatra. I suppose that's mostly because he was typecast. As for
Prewitt, well, wasn't he played by Montgomery Clift? It's been so long
since I saw the movie. ( I'll look it up, and check the date....)
Clift
was an amazing actor and he must have been amazing as Prewitt, because
with the book fresh in my mind, I just finished reading it a few minutes
ago, Clift's aura was all over the character. In my mind, I rarely
put movie star's images onto the characters in books I'm reading, the
faces are almost always more vague than that, ..auras can get much more
real in my imagination when I'm reading than when I'm watching a movie.
...I'm thinking specifically of the 1st. Sgt. , Sgt. Warden, who was
played well by Burt Lancaster, but in my mind he was more like the 1st
Sgt of my Company when I was in the Army, a guy who was so tough and so
mean that you couldn't make it up. He was from Alabama. He made Robert
Mitchum look like a little girl. ( He had two handsome black guys as
company clerks, one, a ballet dancer, was from Music and Art High
School, in N.Y. and the other, an opera singer, was from Julliard,) and
he let them terrorize the Company with threats of canceled passes and
article fifteens. But, at least in my peacetime Army, [early Viet-nam
era, Alaska, Headquarters Company, Ft. Richardson,] there weren't any
bloody tooth-spitting fights, like in the book; or if there were, I
always knew how to make myself disappear when fists started flying.
I
don't remember if there was a Stockade part to the movie but it plays
heavily in the book, and it triggered all sorts of low-self-esteem
masochism in my soul. I hated the guards right along with Prewitt and
his buddies.
The movie couldn't be made today because anyone still
alive who could play a part would be too old. I'm thinking of Gene
Hackman, Clint Eastwood, Harry Dean Stanton. Although, Nicole Kidman
could play the C.O.'s wife, inna heart-beat. Anyway, Didion was right.
It's all good. From the Pre-War Army to the Stockade, to the romantic
stuff. What makes it so good is his ability to describe a dusty Army
post so romantically, so that you can feel why the men who love the Army
feel the way they feel, and the blood and guts parts so cleanly and
with such detachment, and then to be able to get Careless Love, and
Hopeless Love down so well,without ever being sentimental.
I
remember Merle Travis being in the movie, and that was around the time
that I'd just learned about him and about the guitar style named after
him, Travis picking. [around 1959?] I'm pretty sure I remember Travis
playing Re-Inlistment Blues, in the movie. I wonder if It's a
coincidence that my favorite music is still The Blues, especially of the
Hillbilly variety. Another thing about the book..., at the end, he
thanks Maxwell Perkins and a man we knew as the Poet Laureate of East
Hampton, John Hall Wheelock, which was a surprise to me; I suppose
Wheelock must have helped in the editing, or something, which I'm going
to check on............
2010 So Far................
May 3, 2010 at 2:33 pm
..........Just finished reading a
little book called Horses and The Mystical Path...about how horses can
sorta be I guess spirit guides or something in the Celtic Tradition.
It's by a husband, wife, and daughter team, all shrinks. I bought the
whole package but wouldn't expect a more reasonable sort to do so. I
may visit these people at their Ranch, near San Antonio, where they
raise Peruvian horses and give seminars, when I go to Texas over July
4th for the Convention of the Former Worshipers of Bacchus, as Pop
Cheney used to call us.
I'm re-reading The Denial of Death, by
Ernest Becker, which is the source of a few quotes in these-here notes.
I will try not to read Becker again as I think three or four times with
a book over a forty year period is enough and much more and you're in
the Serial-Killer-Psycho range....I knew a guy years ago, he was part of
that Hippy commune there used to be up in North Sea, (Southampton, N.Y.) called something
like Lindesfarne, ...he'd read Spengler's Decline and Fall five or six
times, and was kind of loony; maybe on second thought, it was the dope.
Wonder what happened to him.... Of course, there is a dispensation for
Moby Dick, which only improves with exposure, don't know why.
I
toyed with the idea of making lists of fiction and non-fiction
bring-to-a-desert-island picks, but decided it reminds me too much of
those Esquire writers I knew when I was going with whatsername, Greta
Garbo number 14.
Since I'm reading From Here to Eternity, which was
always on my Bucket list on account of it's high esteem in the eyes of
Joan Didion, who I remain faithful to, I have another couple of repeat
books I'm picking at but won't mention unless I finish with them, and
I'd like to add Black Lamb Grey Falcon to the repeat list for this year,
but if not it will be next; or the next. That way I cannot die. ....You may
have been told or maybe not that in March I thought for awhile I was a
goner when I went into Kidney failure.., but it seems it was a
combination of The Quick Weight Loss Diet and a massive dose of Niacin
that my Dr. had me on. My Kidillys are, it develops, compromised from
many years of hypertension, ( which I've known about and have been on
medication for, for twenty years or so, ) but they've bounced back to
75%, so I guess I'll be O.K.
That's all for now, Uncle Tone
Ian Fraser update.....,
April 22, 2010 at 11:37 am
I had mentioned that I hope Peter
Mathiessen reads Mickey Miller's poem. Then I went into the kitchen
and had my lunch, a frozen tamale with rice cooked in the Nuke, and
garnished with Tabasco Green Jalapeno sauce. (Years of fancy Prohaska
gourmet cooking has had no effect on me.) And while thus abusing myself I
read the latest 'Cursing Mommy' episode in the New Yorker. The last one,
I'd found, was less than satisfying. And I love Ian Fraser, so I was a
little upset. But this one is good, in fact it's back up to form.
Thank God.
Fraser,
I heard somewhere, is a fan of Peter Mathiessen, who I think of as one
of Amagansett's own, somewhat like my illustrious self and the similarly
illustrious Mr. Mickey Miller. Another Mathiessen fan, according to
whoever that person was, is Jim Harrison, another writer I like. Now,
there is this guy, Richard Cummings, who, it seems to me of course I
could be wrong, seems, as I say, in an article he wrote in an on-line
magazine, to be trying to denigrate Peter. He goes into the C.I.A.
relationships of the Anti-Communist Left in general, and the Paris
Review and the Committee on Cultural Freedom in particular, which of
course is all very interesting, but, well, not being an educated man
like Mr. Cummings I hate to criticize, but it seems to me that maybe he
has completely missed the point of that most costly episode of the 20th
Century, The Cold War.
( I know, I have the voice of the Stewie in Family Guy. I can't help it, that's just who I am. )
Spiritual book list:
April 21, 2010 at 9:05 am
Outside of the Bible and, for
those inclined, The Big Book, what spiritually inclined books would you
bring to a desert island if you were being confined there for a year?
O.K., I suppose, ( by the way, can I bring my recliner too? ), I could
make a list:
Teihard de Chardin - The Phenomenon of Man
Varieties of Religious Experience - William James
The Diamond Sutra & The Sutra of Hui-Neng - Shambhala
The Denial of Death - Becker
Creative Evolution - Henri Bergson
The Sermon on The Mount - Emmett Fox
Zen Buddhism - Christmas Humphries
The Perennial Philosophy - Aldous Huxley
The Hero with a Thousand Faces - Campbell
Imus song list.............just in case.
April 21, 2010 at 8:42 am
Imus requires all his visitors to have five favorite songs, so I figured just in case his office calls, I should have mine ready. This is after a day perusing U-tube.
1. Lake Charles - Lucinda Williams
2. I didn't see you, you didn't see me. - Ray Charles and George Jones
3. Message to my heart. - Dwight Yocum and Patty Loveless
4. Love hurts. - Emmy Lou Harris
5. Creepin in. - Dolly Parton and Nora Jones
And if you need one for good luck, She Even Woke Me Up to Say Good-bye.., Jerry Lee.
Driver's box controversy.....
April 10, 2010 at 10:04 am
Regarding the picture of me
driving the coach, called an Omnibus, on the highway to Montauk. I was
proud to have that picture taken because I figured we might be, myself
and the rest of the group, the last horse and buggy drivers to take that
trip. Not much call for it. We made a convoy out of it, Roy, Me,
Frank Tillinghast, and Pop Gardell. [Charlie Shaw] There might have been another, I
forget. But my joy was turned to sorrow when I discovered I'd been
sitting on the wrong side. I was supposed to be sitting on the right
side. That's where the brake was. Roy had taught me about using the
brake, but I hadn't had much experience with it. And I didn't like
sitting on the driver's box. It was convex, like sitting on a big hard
tire, to keep you sitting up straight, and was uncomfortable. So, at
some point I had a print of the picture made in reverse. The photo with
the horses facing to your left is the one in reverse. But, the
dishonesty of that sort of bothered me, not to mention that if you're
trying to correct a mistake you can't do it with another mistake.
So,
I decided...I'll reverse it....there. Now it's right. Horses facing
to the right of the picture. Which, isn't really wrong, because the
custom was never that cut and dried. Drivers were allowed to sit on
either side, as long as their boss approved, and as long as someone was
there to use the brake, like maybe Gabby Hayes. Independent
contractors, as became more common in American times, chose sides for
their own comfort. One fellow, back at the turn of the century, wrote a
letter to the New York Times suggesting that drivers could see traffic
better if they drove on the left side. ...And of course, Brits drive
their cars on the wrong side....One more thing. The left side is called
the Near side, because if you are driving a rig while walking beside
it, you'd probably, most people being right handed, want your right
hand, your whip hand, nearest the horse...hence near. The other side,
the right side, is called the Off side, because it's off a ways. You
probably won't ever need this information, but then, that's why I'm
here.
Fanny and Tommy...
April 9, 2010 at 2:53 pm
Over the years Fanny has done
many things. She has raised two children, she has fished and hunted and
rode and shown, run horse farms, made four appearances on the Dick
Cavett Show, and become a champion bowler. Anything she knows about she
will expound upon. She is always dogmatic. And the only time she is
sentimental is when she talks about horses.
Not too many years
ago, sitting in her small trailer next to her horse barn, while she
monitored the radio for the Coast Guard Auxiliary, she told me this
story. She talked about when she’d been working for Dr. Star, in
Montauk, who was raising thoroughbreds for the track. She had worked
with a colt named Tommy Glitters. Then, she and the Doctor had gone
their separate ways. A short time later, Tommy had been injured at the
track, and had been put out to stud for awhile before being sold. His
potential as a stud had never been realized.
In '71, some years
later, she was working as a flag judge at a little rodeo at the Suffolk
County Fair, in Patchogue, and she got talking to Claudia Howell who was
barrel racing champion of Long Island. Claudia asked her if she was
interested in buying a thoroughbred stud, cheap. The price was $ 1500.
It was Tommy Glitters. He was in Oklahoma. Claudia was surprised that
Fanny knew where Tommy was. "Claudia," she said, "I pulled him out of
his mother, I named him, I broke him, I took him to the track and I
brought him home." She hadn't seen him in four years, but of course she
knew where he was.
Fanny let Claudia handle the deal. Two weeks
later she called from a diner in Syosset and said she had his papers.
"Have another cup of coffee, kid, I'll be there in a few minutes," she
said. Although the transaction was completed later that day it was
delayed because an outbreak of Venezuelan sleeping sickness caused the
government to enforce a halt in the transportation of horses. She told
herself to be patient. She called Milton Potter, a horse dealer in
Northport, who agreed to pick up Tommy when he went down to the Oklahoma
sale.
A month or so later Milton was down in Oklahoma. He loaded
Tommy up and departed on a Saturday night and was in Northport Monday
morning at two a.m. and Fanny was there at six. She parked her trailer
and said hello to Milton and paid him for the trucking, and then said,
"lets go see if he knows me." Milton disdainfully pooh poohed that idea.
"Milton Potter," said Fanny, "you are about to learn something.”
Tommy
Glitters was tired out, asleep, in Milton’s barn, rump to the stall
door. Fanny looked into the dark stall. "Tommy Glitters," she said,
"what are you doing." He turned and looked at her. Fanny put out her
hands for him to smell, and he buried his head in her chest. "You see
Milton, they do know," she said.
From the day he drew his first
breath the horse had been hers. She grabbed the lead and Tommy followed
her right into the trailer. “You see,” she said to me, “horses have
memories too.”
Becker on psychoanalysis.
March 30, 2010 at 11:11 am
"Psychology narrows the cause for
personal unhappiness down to the person himself, and then he is stuck
with himself. But we know that the universal and general cause for
personal badness, guilt, and inferiority is the natural world and the
person's relationship to it as a symbolic animal who must find a secure
place in it. All the analysis in the world doesn't allow the person to
find out who he is and why he is here on earth, why he has to die, and
how he can make his life a triumph. It is when psychology pretends to
do this, when it offers itself as a full explanation of human
unhappiness, that it becomes a fraud that makes the situation of modern
man an impasse from which he cannot escape. Or, put another way,
psychology has limited its understanding of human unhappiness to the
personal life-history of the individual and has not understood how much
individual unhappiness is itself a historical problem in the larger
sense, a problem of the eclipse of secure communal ideologies of
redemption. Rank [ Otto Rank] put it this way:
"In the neurotic in
whom one sees the collapse of the whole human ideology of God it has
also become obvious what this signifies psychologically. This was not
explained by Freud's psychoanalysis which only comprehended the
destructive process in the patient from his personal history without
considering the cultural development which bred this type."
D.O.D. p.193
The Problem of Illusion
March 26, 2010 at 8:58 am
"We have looked at neurosis as a
problem of character and have seen that it can be approached in two
ways: as a problem of too much narrowness toward the world or of too
much openness. There are those who are too narrowly built into their
world, and there are those who are floating too freely apart from it.
Rank makes a special type out of the hypersensitive, open neurotic: and
if we put him on the schizoid continuum this is probably true. But it
is very risky to try to be hard and fast about types of personality;
there are all kinds of blends and combinations that defy precise
compartmentalization. After all, one of the reasons we narrow down too
much is that we must sense on some level of awareness that life is too
big and threatening a problem. And if we say that the average man
narrows down "just about right," we have to ask who this average man is.
He may avoid the psychiatric clinic, but somebody around has to pay
for it. We are reminded of those Roman portrait-busts that stuff our
museums: to live in this tight lipped style as an average good citizen
must have created some daily hell. Of course we are not talking only
about daily pettinesses and the small sadisms that are practiced on
family and friends. Even if the average man lives in a kind of
obliviousness of anxiety, it is because he has erected a massive wall of
repressions to hide the problem of life and death. His anality may
protect him, but all through history it is the "normal, average men,"
who, like locusts, have laid waste to the world in order to forget
themselves."
Ernest Becker; D.O.D. p. 186
Personal flypaper: ( something like a Meme..)*
March 25, 2010 at 2:43 pm
Hedy Lamaar
From Here to Eternity
Corinne Calvet
Thunderbird
Alger Hiss
Bobby Darin
Sandra Dee
Johnny Ray
Elvis
Walter Farley
Shane
Dale Evans
Candace Mosler
Naked Lunch
Lenny Bruce
John Wayne
Marijuana
Jackson Pollock
Ezra Taft Benson
Lee Van Cleeft
The Cisco Kid
*Se also: Hobby Horse
Liberal flypaper.
March 25, 2010 at 12:06 pm
You land on it, it's got some sticky glop on it, and you get stuck, and die.
It's called different things, like:
Pacific Rim
diversity
Rock criticism
Tofu
Susan Sontag
Macrobiotics
Book Hampton
Anything Hampton
Che
Any Communist Dictator
Sex in the City
Salgado
homelessness
drugs
Amsterdam
Upper West Side
Hillary
Scientology
Hegelian
bodily fluids
bicycle helmet
any Helmut
hat on backwards
Nicaragua
Fiber
Poverty
Solar Power
Persimmons
Chester Beecroft: Ma's first husband....
March 16, 2010 at 4:12 pm
In an article in the Sports Page of the New York Times, Aug. 19, 1900, the following appeared:
"
R. Chester Beecroft was the easy victor of the 100 yard race for boys
under eighteen, [sponsored by the New York Yacht Club,] so easy in fact
that some of the competitors were inclined to question his age for the
contest. No contest was made however, as several of the officials knew
the youngster well."
I can't seem to find a birth date for
Chester, but I imagine this notice places his birth at around 1882.
This jibes well with Carolyn's admission that he was an "older man." (
She was born in 1908. ) Chester was the son of John R. Beecroft of
Keston, Kent, England, who came to the U.S. and for several years was
Chicago manager of the Scribner Publishing Company, before moving to
Pelham Manor in Westchester County.
In 1893 Chester's father
started a newspaper, The Pelham Manor Tribune, and almost immediately
sold out to his son, Edgar C. Beecroft. Another brother, William G.
became editor. ...After a few years in the Newspaper business, Edgar,
who had been to Law School, opened a Law Practice, and became active in
politics. He was a Democrat, and was Town Supervisor of Pelham from '07
to '14, and then became Justice of the Peace.
As a young man
Chester also had a career as a journalist, and another career as an
actor on Broadway. in 1899 he was working as a public relations man for
the Hotel Astor, and also for a movie company. At that time he went to
Washington D.C. to plead the case of Minik, an Eskimo who had been
abandoned in New York by Robert Peary, the Polar Explorer. Chester had
an audience with T.R.'s secretary, William Loeb Jr, who asked him to
prepare a written statement, and he did so. The statement began;
"I
beg to call your attention to the very pitiful case of Minik.."
The
statement was a plea for financial support for Minik, who's whole family
had been brought to New York by Peary and handed over to the Museum of
Natural History to be observed and experimented on. The whole family
save Minik had died from diseases commonly devastating to aboriginal
people. Chester had befriended the boy, and continued to assist him for
the rest of the boy's short life. Whether T.R. ever got the memo is
uncertain, but nothing was ever heard from him. Chester, however
continued to lobby for the kid.
Minik's story is brought to
life in a book by Kenn Harper, called Give Me My Father's Body. The
book has been optioned for it's movie rights by Kevin Spacey. One blurb
on the book's jacket, from Library Journal, says; "This powerful book
details the short, sad life of Minik, an orphaned Eskimo raised in New
York at the turn of the twentieth century...it is a tragic tale of a boy
caught between two cultures, but more than that it is an expose of the
intellectual arrogance that permeated the race to explore the Arctic
region during this period."
Another blurb, from Farley Mowat, says;
Give Me My Father's Body is a rarity in the Arctic genre - a book about
that fascinating region by someone who actually lives in the world about
which he writes. But the book is much more than that: It is also the
finest revelation of the truth behind the Peary polar myth I've ever
read; and the story of Minik, the New York Eskimo, is a gut-wrenching
account of man's inhumanity to man, and the blind idolatry with which
science is worshiped in our times."
On- going report on the annual report...
March 10, 2010 at 12:09 pm
I finished reading Skel-Key to
Finnwake...., like I said I wood. It's hard to read segments of
Finnwake without thinking and dreaming in that crazy J.J. style. In
fact, while you're reading it, you start thinking that way. Well, if
you try it you'll see. I used to try drugs, kamikaze Russian Roulette,
just for the fun of it, but I'm too old for that now. So. I suppose
I'll have to read it [SKF]again. It's that kind of book. Also, I'm
kind of a book repeater. Like.., I know a few people who are Movie
repeaters. They keep watching the same movie over and over. Like
Godfather. I used to live with a woman who watched the three of them
over and over and over. She said it was so she could fall asleep. And I
had to stay awake too, because otherwise, my snoring kept her awake.
Am I complaining? NO! All in good fun. In the past anyway.
If I
do read it again it won't be for awhile. There are a number of subjects
one should familiarize Oneself with before one attacks the book itself,
the real original Finnwake.... I think.., like, Vico.., Swift and
Stella, Kaballa, [sp.] Irish Mythological history, and the list could go
on, but I think that's as far as I'll go. After all, it's just a
hobby, not a vocation for Crissakes.
vis a vis book repeating I've
been re-reading Iris Murdoch. I love her stuff. Maybe because I loved
London so much the year I was there, that winter after JFK died. I
stayed toasted on lager and Miltown and didn't think about the dreaded
draftboard which would get me eventually. Anyhowway, that concludes
this appendectomy of the ongoing annual repart.
Contrarian Autodidact
February 23, 2010 at 6:22 pm
Kendall Hailey is forty two.
When she wrote her book, The Day I became an Autodidact, she was
sixteen. Today she's married to a screenwriter and they live in L.A.
somewhere. When I read her book, probably around 1990, she was still a
teenager, and I was pushing fifty. I'd never actually thought of
myself, at least not using the term, as an Autodidact. But I suppose I
am. It's one of those things, like Alcoholism, that is self-diagnosed.
Anywayz, I enjoyed the book. I bought it at Bargain Books, in East
Hampton, my favorite bookstore on the East Coast. ( Is it still open? )
I picked it up, thought it sounded interesting, and then when I
started reading it, I discovered that Kendall's mother was the author of
a book that Lindsay Not Lohan, the former girlfriend, had read during
her transformation into a Former. That book was A Woman of Independent
Mind, by Elizabeth Forsyth Hailey.(Sp.) Not a bad book, but not
particularly a handbook on how to get away from a needy co-dependent.
I
don't remember Kendall's book too clearly, except that it was a memoir,
with touching insights about her sick father, and her family, And that I
felt great admiration for her, coming to the realization at such a
young age that she could take a year off and read The Great Books.
I
came slowly to the realization that I was an autodidact. I thought of
myself as a kind of closet reader, or a solitary reader. From teenager
to well into middle age, I hardly ever discussed the books I read with
anyone but my mother. And I never got to The Great Books. I remember
when my mother used to go to The Great Books discussions at the East
Hampton Library. It was a small group that varied over time, and
probably existed for at least several years. They weren't lining up at
the door to get in.
What drove me to be a self-learner
was that no-one could ever teach me anything. From Second Grade on, I
thought of teachers as the enemy. First Grade was different. I loved
Mrs. Joyce. ( Peggy Joyce of Montauk. ) I was in her first class,
after she graduated from Teachers College. Mrs. Joyce and I, and I
suppose there were a few other kids involved, built a life sized house
out of cardboard, big enough for a five year old to get inside of. We
even made a braided rug for it. The house was quite similar to the one
that the little kid on the adult cartoon Family Guy shacked up in when
he was "married" to his little girlfriend.
Second Grade was Miss
Phillips. I don't know why, but I had an instant hatred for her, which
she must have picked up. ( Second Graders, are not too good at hiding
their contempt, I suppose.) In my memory, and this might be off, none
of the kids liked her very much. The following year, we had Mrs. Smith,
who was as nice as nice could be, but I resisted everything she tried to
teach me, and consequently, never learned to write longhand that anyone
can read.
I learned to read in Grade School, but that was about
it. And in High School, the same. Nada. Four years to get through two
years of Math, and only because I took both Algebra and Geometry over in
the summer, and Pop Cheney sat next to me and gave me all the answers.
I tried college several times, and it became clear that it
wasn't for me. The teacher would give us ten books to read over the
semester, and I'd read ten other, not related, books. By that time I
was aware that I was, as I still am, a chronic Contrarian. Tell me to
go left, and I'll go right. ( If that's how I became a Conservative,
then I believe there is a God. )
Lasch...........
February 12, 2010 at 10:14 am
Usually takes me all week to read
the N.Y. Times book review; to decide which things are inoffensive
enough for my delicate sensibility. I notice this week that the Essay
at the back is on Christopher Lasch's book, The Culture of Narcissism. I
remember when I read it. ...I was house-sitting for Jerry Smith, the
guy who started WLNG. He'd bought a house on Indian Wells Hwy, in
Amagansett. ...We had an on-going war about the heat. He kept telling
me to not use so much. The house leaked like a sieve.
After
reading the Lasch book, of course, I was obsessed with Narcissism. My
own and that of everybody else. ( Maybe that's why, some years later, I
came to enjoy watching Imus in the Morning. He makes no bones about
his.) ...I had always assumed that only artists are narcissistic. My
model for the disorder was a particular artist that my parents were
acquainted with, who, when talking about his work, well, he would talk
about "My Work," while caressing his own chest in this kind of
expansive, self-important, obnoxious way. ( don't worry, it's nobody you
know...or else it's everybody you know.)
I suppose I'd also gotten
that idea about artists from reading Schneider's book about artists and
psychoanalysis, (Psychoanalysis and The Artist), and from having Tried to read Otto Rank's book, Art and
Artist, which is just too deep for me, though I've enjoyed having a few
different people explain it to me.
Anyway, of course I know that I
qualify, as narcissistic. And I should also say, I suppose, why I
think it's o.k. to talk about my own, well, idiosyncrasies. ( If and
when I get around to it. ) To which I say, well, I'm hoping someone
might "identify. " ( In case you didn't know, I can be obnoxious.., )
Being the-one-identified- with makes me feel good,which is why I get out of bed
in the morning. More simply, I'm still looking for Hope and Change.
Eventually,
I had what we grandiose neurotics call a " big breakthrough", when I
realized that Normal people, like fisherman, and farmers, and teachers,
and mechanics are narcissistic too, and can be included under Lasch's
umbrella. Now, life gained a new fascination. For instance: That
winter on Indian Wells, I had an old Ford pickup that [my friend] Harry Cullum was
helping me keep alive. Now, if you were a mechanic of his talent, how
could you not think highly of yourself! And how could you not be pissed
off when I blew up the damn truck! ..I don't mean to imply that Harry
wasn't a humble man, because he was. But, he knew how good he was. He
got pleasure out of it. He had what they call healthy narcissism.
Of
course, everyone has narcissism, in a blend of healthy and
pathological, and it's partly subjective. I mean if the person drives
you crazy, then it's pathological. I'm thinking about a certain
fisherman who's father used to pick on him in front of the whole crew,
causing a battle of swear words. Well, I won't mention any names, but,
I'm sure you get the idea. He thought very highly of himself, and he
didn't mind steamrollering over his kid, to make his point. But, the
son had the strength and the fortitude to argue the old man to a
stalemate.
So after I read Lasch's book, way back when it first came out, I read several of the
books in the bibliography.., including one by a guy named Heinz Kohut,
and one by Otto Kernberg, ( I guess they're both M.D.'s or Phd's,), and
by then I guess I thought I knew enough to impress my shrink, which of
course is the only reason to go to one, right? ..........to be
continued...
Used books.
February 2, 2010 at 12:00 pm
I lived in San Francisco for a
couple of years, back in the seventies. I went there because I'd had my
poor little heart broken by a Mean Girl. It wasn't Lindsay Lohan, for
which I'm eternally ungrateful, but never-the-less, I felt I couldn't
hold my head up in Sag Harbor anymore, that being where I'd lived for
several years, and that being also the town in which nobody knew me from
Adam, I having moved there from Amagansett, via Bridgehampton. I decided on San Fran because the West Coast was as far as I
wanted to travel, having already been to Alaska, and because my father
had grown up there, and always talked about the place with fondness.
And I had two Aunts there, who I figured I could visit,and maybe get a
hot meal from.
Due to the Brotherhood that I belonged to,
it took me 24 hours to make several friends, get a job, and get a date
for the week-end. The job and the date turned out to be problematic. I
was working with a crew of guys who were renovating houses in The
Sunset district, where my father grew up. I started work the Monday
after the weekend, so I'd already had the date, which had turned out
well. Remember, this was the seventies. If you weren't there, you
wouldn't understand. ( Every young woman in America had a burned patch in
her backyard where her bras had been set on fire.) One of the guys I
was working with, there were I think five of us, was a Mexican guy,
about my age, maybe thirty, who was unusually quiet and sullen, and
menacing. But then I thought, maybe I'm being paranoid. By the third
day the vibes were so intense that I got up the nerve to ask one of the
guys what was going on, and he said that I had dated the fellow's ex,
who he'd just broken up with.
Well, lemme tell you I did some back
pedaling.., coward that I am. Told him I had no idea, and of course, I
would never see the girl again..which I never did, after a couple of
weeks of sneaking around, mostly because she didn't like sneaking
around. Out of that experience here's what I learned, and this comes
either from Ben Franklin or Bette Davis: It's better to give a
resentment, than to get one. Or, in the vernacular, It's Better to be
Pissed Off, then to be Pissed On!.
I was out there two
years, and had a good time. I would have stayed, but my father was sick
and I was homesick for Bonac,* so I came home.
While I was out there though, I was
kind of adopted by a gang of Irish guys, who were the real locals of
the area, having descended from Gold Rush men and their prostitute
women. They thought I looked Irish, I guess. They called me N.Y. Tony.
Most of them worked in Civil Service, Fire Department, Police, etc.
But my two best friends were poets. One had a day job designing
boilers, and the other's day job was writing grants for the Police Dept.
Through them, I got to see the old Beatnik haunts of North Beach, and
eat in the real local-favorite Chinese Restaurants in Chinatown. But the
best thing they taught me was how to be a used bookstore junky. One of
the guys, Bob, the biggest book freak, had a bedroom at his mother's
house where he kept books he didn't have room for. When it was full
floor to ceiling, he'd pile them in a truck and sell them back.
The
only store who's name I can remember now is The Green Apple, which was
in the Richmond District. But there were many others, each with a
special aura, and some more oriented to rare books, or intellectual
stuff, or art stuff. ...There was of course a defining moment. That
was, when I found a book by a guy who my parents knew, Dr. Daniel
Schneider. The name of the book was Psycho-analysis of Heart Attack.
...What you do in these places is start reading the book standing up,
and if it's not easy to put it down, you buy. The book was partly about
Atrial Fibrillation, which I'd had a problem with, and so, that's where
my interest came from I guess, but I became a devotee of Dr Schneider,
and read his books. (He's considered a too far-out theorist by many
shrinks, but they are a prejudiced lot so that never phased me.)
As
years went by, [by then I had moved back to Sag Harbor], I met several patients and ex-patients of "Schneidz," as
they called him. And it turned out that my sister knew his kids, so I
met them too. Schneidz had a summer house on Spaeth Lane, in East
Hampton. His roster of patients in N.Y. is a who's who of the rich and
famous. ..Recently, a friend told me that a book of short stories, ( or
a novel, I'm not sure which, ) by another friend of my sister's, Dan
Meneker, (sp.) called something like, The Analysand, [?] is about the
esteemed Dr. ......I'll probably have more to say about used book
stores, and etc. at some point,.........
Commies.
January 28, 2010 at 4:26 pm
I've been watching Fox News for
several years, so I'm aware that it's programming is mostly the
brainchild of a single guy, a visionary named Roger Ailes. No matter
what you think of his network, he's done some gutsy things; like Glen
Beck's show, for instance.
I know, I know, all my Liberal
friends think they are evil and awful and stupid.. [ Ailes and Beck,
both] yes I understand that. And since you are my friends, I know that
you're smart, and you've spent considerable time studying politics and
society from your side of the spectrum. If I come at it from a
different perspective, though, it's not simply because I'm a Contrarian.
And it's not simply rebellion. I mean, I'll show you my Oedipus
complex if you'll show me yours.
I got interested at some
point, maybe thirty years ago, in those intellectuals some of whom used
to show up around Springs and Amagansett back when I was a kid; the New
York Intellectuals. I read a few books, like Partisans, about the
Partisan Review, and Truants, about those same Intellectuals, and books
by Mary MacCarthy and Edmund Wilson, and began to be interested enough
in the fascination those people had with Communism, and communism by
any other name, so that it became a real source of pleasure for me to
explore.
( ... When I was watching Imus one morning a few years
ago and he had on Sam Tannenhaus, (sp.) who wrote a biography of
Whitaker Chambers, [Whitaker Chambers] I was as excited as a young stamp collector who finds
out there's another kid in town who collects stamps. A Wow moment.. )
I
was already a Spy nut. Didn't read a lot of spy novels, but had read a
number of books about American Communism.., I remember I especially
liked The Haunted Wood. I'd also read several books about Stalin, ( I
remember liking the one by Alex de Jong, ) and one I liked about the
Dictator of Romania, Ceausescu, who's wife was named after my sister.[ was it Red Horizon ?]
The
point is, somewhere along the line I became enthusiastically
anti-Communist, after being a wishy washy, hot and cold Liberal until
advanced middle age. Well, I'd always been kind of fairer to Republican
thinking than most of my friends, but that was only because I grew up in
a town that was Republican, back when, and in my childhood, I new lots
of non-baby-eating Republican adults, ( in point of fact, some of those
adults were really wonderful with kids.)
When I traveled
afar, like Up-the-Island, and to Alaska, and places like New York City, I
found that many people thought that in East Hampton there lived only a
bunch of Brilliant Artists, and a small tribe of exploited and starving
fishermen. This caused me to wonder. How can smart people be so Dumb?
Then,
one day, while cogitating about life in general, it came to me.
.....Half the people in the world are below average! ...Now.., I
suppose in my egotistical way I intended to put myself somewhere on the
higher side of that ratio, but never-the-less, I learned something. I
looked it up. The average I.Q. is between 100 and 104. So, you don't
have to go very far down before you're in double digits! As Carleton
Kelsey's favorite cartoon character, Pogo, used to say, GAK !! And in double digits, that making up about 140 million Americans, [ at the Very Least! ] you've pretty
much got a full day making a living, eating, sleeping, shopping,
watching T.V., performing your Toilette, and such, so that you don't
have too much time, or mental energy, to look into things that are
abstract to the core, like Marxism. So, you assume, as rightly you
should, that Liberalism springs whole from the American value of
Christian Charity. And if anyone disagrees with that, why they are Dumb
and Dangerous.
And so, along comes Glen Beck. Not all that
different from Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, in his day, or that guy that did
the excellent Joseph Campbell series, Bill Moyers, who by the way
believes, as some of my friends do, in The Origin of Socialism in the
Sacred Heart of Goodness and Mercy. Beck has an alternative, and he
backs it up.
Dive by the side of the Road...
January 20, 2010 at 2:25 pm
O.K. Another memory test. Maybe
somebody can help me here. This ain't going to be easy because my
memory's not what it used to be. Anybody out there remember Jack of
Eagles? How many of you stopped in there one night to see what the
noise was? ( Across from Abe Katz's, near the Bowling Alley.... ) Can't
remember who was running it, (someone named Jack..) but I do know I
spent some time behind the bar. There was no hard liquor license but I
remember on occasion, myself and/or Bobby Jones running over to the
Bowling Alley and getting a tray of drinks and re-selling them at J. of
E.'s... ..Skip Boone came up with the idea of holding Hootenanys [sp.]
there. What year was this..? Mmmm. Summer of 63. I remember because
some of the Hootenany money went with us to Mexico that fall.
( Statute of Limitations? )
The
place was a surprise hit. Many of the Town Father's showed up...the
entertainment featured anybody with a guitar and nerve. Help me out
here. There was a folksinger from Greenwich Village who sang a song
called Jack of Diamonds, that he claimed he learned from Bobby Dylan.
Skip sang The House of the Rising Sun. There were several girl singers
with long, ironed-flat hair. There was a rich lady who came in her
Rolls Royce with a large entourage, including, often, Edie Beale, and
her boyfriend, toothless country singer Tex Logan. The Rich Lady's name
was Francis Carpenter, an elegant lesbian. She took a fancy to me. I
was kind of androgynous looking in those days, with a haunted, stoned,
expression and a clueless demeanor. She used to bring me Balkan
Sobraine [sp.] cigarettes. I must have told her my Pa was from Yugo.
They tasted like camel dung, and smelled worse, but I smoked them
anyway; I just thought it was a cool thing to do.
At one time or
another it seemed like everybody in town showed up. It was like
Casablanca. Several members of the Town and Village Police Departments
attempted to blend in, looking for "The Stuff.." We thought that was
hilarious...(snotty young crowd of pre-hippy pot smokers..)
Who
Wasn't there would have been more like it...I remember Walt Cobb, Dr.
Cooper and Dr. French, and several representatives of The Town fathers,
Edwardes, Osborns, Yardleys, Fritz Leddy, all The Kingsmen, and the
crowd from The Cottage Inn and the crowd from Mitty's, some college kids, the
little mafia I associated with that seemed to me to be led by Sandy
Salter, pre-hippy Golden Girl who's family owned Salter's Book store up
by Columbia University, ...help me out here.., I'm walking down memory
lane....
Elena Glinn: "Jack of Eagles I recall but it's like remembering
Jungle Pete's or Wolfie's, comes with somewhat of a fog."
Post Annual Report Planning...
January 8, 2010 at 8:13 pm
I hate planning. People make
plans, God laughs. When God laughs I feel, well, humbled a bit, maybe,
but more I just remember the pain, the humiliations. But let's not be
morose. This is 2010. I have my reading list, some places to go,
people to see, etc. So, with the proviso that someone else is in
charge, my plans:
We have our reservations for the July 4th
Weekend Convention in San Antonio. [Twelve step stuff..] That's the convention of that
anonymous program that some say I have been associated with for X number
of years. [LX as of this insert.] I'll be able to give Mickey the tour of East Texas. Not
that I'm an expert, but I did hitch-hike through the state many years
ago, 1963, sleeping in cow pastures, drinking warm beer and etcetera,
with a friend who played guitar much better than I did, a situation that
hasn't changed. We were searching for our Inner Woody Guthrie. Before
we get to Texas we'll drive through Lafayette and see if Jerry Lee is
home, and eat some fried okra or something, gearing up for the Texas
Barbecue. I prefer Barbecue to anything else I can think of, at least
at this moment. Thinking about it makes my stomach growl.
Very selfish of me to drag my Little Darlin' all that way, but, well,
she does plan to stop at a casino or two along the way. Always, there
has to be a casino somewhere near anywherz we might be heading. That's
how I got to Iceland, one of the neatest places I've ever been, though I
was only there one day, due to our being on a cruise ship.
(Seeing that
island appear out of the black water of the North Atlantic, with it's
Hokusai breakers reaching up to the greenest green hills I've ever
seen, was enough to make me long to go back.) It was a stop on an
East-West crossing we took a few years ago..I got to ride one of those
little horses up into the peat bogs, and across a glacial stream. Of
course, since I wasn't in my Birkenstocks, didn't have a rucksack, and
wasn't eating trail mix out of a fanny pack, some would say the trip
didn't count, that I wasn't In Nature, savoring the Green of it all,
but, they can go suck turtle eggs.
For years now, I've
always had a reading list.., one that changes slightly over time, but
still has kept me on a preordained track, unavailable for the most part
to the seductions of best sellers, but it's not something I've ever
divulged to what we narcissists call the Outside World. In the same
way, I don't tell people what I pray about, or how I do it. Oh, I admit
I pray.., "Get me outta this and I'll...," Well, that's how I used to
do it....but I do have a couple of secret prayers, which I only share
with the desperate..and same thing with my book list, ...I mean, maybe
Proust, but probably not until I'm 80.
( I need some leeway..) I'm
talking here about plowing through from beginning to end, which is how I
regard my reading list and reading habit.., the shmorgazborg, (sp.)
doesn't count. I did buy Mark Twain's Autobiography, and it's on my
list, so that's a probably.., and there's a bio of Bette Davis, another
probable...but the rest of the list is either not firmed up yet or still
need-to-know. I started a re-read campaign this past summer, and it's
not over yet, so I'm not prepared to confess that either. If it
continues until next summer I'll have to rename it..[ the campaign. ]
I hope I'll see my friend Scotty in San Antonio. And I'm sure I'll
see a few other old-timers. ( I wonder if there will be a fiftieth
reunion of my High School class, class of 1960, East Hampton High School, That's in N.Y. State, not the one in Connecticut, for you foreigners.)
And I wonder if I'll go? I really do intend to get back to the Ray
Prohaska Website and add some art and some photography, and put it in a
little more order..., and I'd like to get started on correcting the
errors and typo's that I've come across in The History Project.., and
I'd like to find a way to get people that have found their way to the
H.P. to point out the particular file and page of any errors they might
come across.
Heavy lifting in fair weather and foul.
January 5, 2010 at 3:48 pm
I've got a new heavy lifting
project vis a vis reading; Joseph Campbell's Skeleton Key to James
Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. My mother got me to read Portrait of an
Artist, back when I was just entering my finding-myself phase. ( That
went on for a long time.)
(Don't ask.) Before I began The Phase, I
read lots of Western Horseman Magazine, Horse Lovers Magazine, Boys
Life, Horse books, and the dirty parts of anything in my parent's
bookshelf. Later on, I read Dubliners, and Chamber Music, and always
intended to read Ulysses.
Then, during the fall of The Perfect Storm,
living in Joyce Baronio's house in Northwest Creek, I decided to tackle
it. It takes simple associations, for me. Joyce and Joyce. We, Joyce
and I, had been in N.Y.C., and had bought a bunch of books from a
sidewalk vendor. I bought a book called Joyce's Voices. It was a small
book, by Hugh Kenner, that explained the different voices J.J. used in
Ulysses.
I decided, though, to take no chances, and bought the
Cliff Notes for Ulysses, too. You see, one of the things that always
hampered me was false pride..., but as I aged, I realized that no-one
would care if I needed Cliffs Notes. And wow, was it helpful. So I dug
in. So much so, that when The Perfect Storm flooded Northwest, a foot
of water in the front lawn and waves lapping against the front door, and
sleet and snow blowing straight sideways across the flooded plane, and
the wind blowing through cracks in the walls, I kept the logs piled high
in the Heatalator, put the couch close to the fire, covered myself in
blankets, and with the howling wind, thunder, lightning and driving snow
to drown out my neurotic interior dialogue, I was happy as a Piss Clam
at high tide. And of course the storm was over long before I finished
reading the book, but it was a nice experience. I went on to read
several books about Joyce, and gave myself a gold star......or, as Jean
Shepard used to say, a brass filigree with bronze oak leaf cluster.
Getting to know Notes....
January 3, 2010 at 4:28 pm
Here's the deal. Without this
notes thing, [This Blog file was originally on Facebook], you can only write a few lines, never enough for me. So. I
set "notes", on "friends". Please let me know if you see me flailing
helplessly in facebook world and think you can help.
Anywayz, I thought I'd do a sort of quicky annual report.
A
friend called the other day to tell me that our mutual friend Ray Ford
died. I was very sad to get that news. Ray was as true-blue a friend
as they come. We met on the beach in the summer of 1960, when he and a
group that became known as the Garden City gang came out from G.C. to
see the Warriner girls, who lived in a house on the beach next to the
Coast Guard beach in Amagansett. It was a kind of Gidget Goes Hawaiian
summer. The Warriner girls were two lean, blond, and leggy kids who
were the children of the head of the English department at Garden City
High School, John E. Warriner, who for years wrote the English Grammar
books, including the Regents study books, for all of New York State.
There was another girl named Gail Patterson, a bombshell out of central
casting..., a muscle-man kid named Fred Rhoner, and a few other girls
and guys.
They soon joined my crowd, which at that time was a bunch of
kids I had started hanging out with at The Cottage Inn, a bar where the
Senior Citizen's place in East Hampton now is. They included the members
of the band, the Kingsmen; Skip Boone, Jan Beuchner, Joe Butler, and
Seth Weinberger. That place was rockin, believe me. And it was
probably the must peacefully integrated dance-hall saloon in the
Northern Hemisphere, at the time.
That crowd grew. And mingled
with other gangs of High School graduates not ready to get married and
settle down. We added a few more saloons. Sams, first, then Mitty's,
where Ray became bartender. Someone should write a book about that
place. Any Mitty's graduates out there please feel free to add any
comments. ....
Well, I feel better knowing I'm no longer limited
to a few lines. A few lines, hmm, well there were some drugs at that
time, but in my memory, now, ( I turned 67 last week, ) I prefer the
days of beer, rum and coke, and rock and roll. Hmm..., think I'll
continue with the annual report later, thinking about Ray brought me
back in time..., anyway, I haven't been doing much.., the Holidays ..,
we had company.., I'm exhausted.
O.K. I had dinner,
now I feel better. Back to Tony Inc. Annual Report, 2009. Mickey had
foot surgery, then more surgery, then fell and broke her other foot.
She spent two weeks in a nursing home, which was way over in West Boca,
or as they say somewheres, half way to Hell-and-gone. Then I spent the
next few months waiting on her and doing all the shopping and cooking.
And I ain't much as a cook. I am good at takeout though, so we both
gained extensive poundage.
Several years previous I had come across a book by a distant relative, George Wilson Pierson, late of the Georgica
Estate and Yale University. It's a huge tome and I put off reading it
long as I could. So I figgered during this time while I was playing Nurse Ratchett, I'd tackle it. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Toqueville in America. That was my
literary weight-lifting for the year. So now I've got a good handle on old
De Toque, who predicted the predicament We The People are now in. Of
course, many of my friends would disagree with me, allowing as how
everything is peachy now that we are on the road to Socialist Paradise.
Well, as my mother used to say, gather ye rosebuds while ye may.
I gained some weight, lost some, gained it back..., had no love
affairs, accumulated 35 years of uninterrupted sobriety, (not
recommended for amateurs,) smoked a few puffs of a cigar in the
Dominican Republic, saw my hair turn from gray to white, and then to
spoil my fun, my doctor told me I was heading toward Kidney failure.
Well, Mickey stormed up to the V.A. with me, and we forced the Doctor to
take it back. The Doc said O.K., maybe it isn't that bad, but I need to go to
the specialist...I have an appointment next week.
I spent alot
of time in the car, driving around listening to C.D.s. George Jones
Bradley Barn sessions, Emmy Lou Harris.., Jerry Lee Lewis sings Hank
Williams, and Dire Straits.... today I've been humming that song of Mark
Knopfler's all day, the one about the trawler man. Not that I'm a
trawler man, never was, but in my golden years, with the help of the
oral history tapes I made of some great local [East Hampton Town], men like Johnny Erickson
and Bobby Byrnes, I've become nostalgic for the earlier times. Not sure
of the title of that song, but, it goes, da da da dum, da da da dum.
Easy to hum.
Judith Bernazzani:
"Tony
- love this annual report. Keep it going. However, I'm blown away to
hear that the Cottage Inn is no more! I was one of those seamlessly
integrated natives lovin' life and still not jaded enough to still be
living in the moment. Of course when I wasn't loving life I was hating
myself and waiting to bust out of Bonac. By the way, there's a Mark Knopfler site:" http://www.markknopfler.com/
I
believe the song in your head is The Trawlerman's Song(?) and - good
news - he's on tour in Europe and North America right now. If you don't want to
go to Europe (I might be tempted myself to go to Rome or Perugia) there
are a bunch of West and East Coast venues (love that word)! including
DC, Atlantic City and NYC.
Oh, and by the way, my left kidney has
been on the blink for the last 30 years, and is only 2/3 functional with
multiple lesions. I'm not much of a doctor-truster so get several
opinions and do your homework. There's always at least on or two
alternatives if you look for around. Keep up the good work,
j.
|
May 29, 2011 at 4:26 pm
[The picture is available somewhere, if you ask me I'll find it.]