I've had a one half-hour riding lesson on my schedule every week for about the last ten years, but this year, after having "my own horse", that is a leased one, for several months, and after taking a few weeks off and doing nothing but reading and writing, I took a lesson this morning and found it too hot. So I've quit again.* I'll need to take a couple of lessons before I go on a planned "Clinic", at an Icelandic Horse Camp in Tennessee on Labor Day Weekend, but until then I'm sequestered at my desk in the air conditioning of South Florida Summer. I need to do the best I can under what are, at least for the time being, for a deep thinking bookworm such as me, almost ideal circumstances. The future is in the hands of God.
I'm still reading the de Kooning bio. Seems I've been picking at it for months, but I'm enjoying being able to go back to it in small doses. For me, thinking about my misspent youth is emotionally taxing. I'm now at the point in the book where John McMahon and Michael Wright came on board, and they were part of the group that I drank with, (which to some extent added color and meaning to my otherwise grim life), and also, Lisa is growing and becoming the wild child she was.
Also still reading Robert Kaplan's book about Romania, In Europe's Shadow. It's a bit tough getting hold of the Eastern European history of the last few centuries, but Kaplan is such a great writer that he makes it palatable even for a non-scholar like me. He rightly calls himself both a travel writer and a political journalist because that is what he is. His book Balkan Ghosts paid homage to Rebecca West's Black Lamb Grey Falcon, which book inspired me to write about my father who was born one hundred and eighteen years ago in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
Also still reading Patriarchy and Incest from Shakespeare to Joyce, by Jane M. Ford, a book I was steered to by something someone said somewhere, I've forgotten where, having to do with the author's Lacanian leanings. I've been leaning on Lacan for a couple of years now, and in some way I might have deKooning to blame for that because he was always quoting Wittgenstein, about whom I'm not sure how much he knew, and about whom I haven't learned much of anything, except that he helped to start the fire which became Structuralism which is mired in Linguistics, into which I've done some peering.
In the aforementioned incest book the author refers to James Joyce's character Stephen Daedelus doing some theorizing about Shakespeare. In Ulysses Chapter Nine, in the Library, Stephen and his cronies are talking about Shakespeare's traumatic life with his seductive and cuckolding older woman wife and his relationships with his daughters and sons as they reach a certain age and said certain age's relationship to the wife and children of Joyce himself. So I went back and read chapter nine in Ulysses,* no easy trick because there are no chapter headings in the Kindle version and I can't find the book. I can never find the book I want though others jump off the shelves at me with regularity.
Amazon books is the biggest Library* the world has ever known, and I'll accept that it is a gift from God. In a regular library, you can just ignore the genres. Go straight to what you're looking for. But with Amazon the temptation is too great to see what all the other freaks are up to. My God! There are so many genres! I mean there are people who spend their whole lives reading about seventh graders who have super powers!
But, getting back to me, and how I, me personally that is, get Me side-tracked, let me say that from semiotics to Chris Langan is only a short distance from Ingo Swann, about whom I've been hearing things for years...
Having read Physics of The Non-Physical, by John Joseph Petrovic, just for a treat, along the lines of way back when, reading The Tao of Physics, which was intellectual candy; a sugar-free sugar-rush, and wow, Petrovic can do that thing, delivering the sub-atomic Universe to the Unwashed, (that's me), better than anybody, at least so far, and since he goes into some depth about Ingo Swann's career as a Remote Viewer for the National Security apparatus, amazing stuff, I figured I'd read one of Swann's books and it turns out he's a terrific writer and I've gobbled up several more of his books in the past few weeks.
The point being, that in Swann's explanation of how the psychic facility works he gets into the importance of visualizing pictures, instead of, or in addition to, words; and the importance of things like symbols and pictographs.
And so that has led me to order a print book, (it's not available on Kindle), Art and Visual Perception, A Psychology of the Creative Eye, by Robert Arnheim, which, if you've been following me, brings me right back to square one. Keep in touch, love 'ya.
*O.K., technically it's a bookstore.
*If you're wondering why I have such a half-baked routine of horsemanship, it's just that I never got to be a really good horseman, I was too busy with other things until I got too old to be involved in anything really sporty, and besides you really need money to get going in the horse world, either money or extreme ambition, and I was lacking in both. Money is a touchy subject with me, so, I'll get back to you on that. The reason I take lessons, instead of just going on a trail ride, is because, one, the stable right next to my apartment is a teaching stable, oriented toward Hunter-Jumpers and Dressage, and two, a lesson is better exercise, and the only kind of exercise I'm willing to do, is riding. Period.
*For those of you in Rio Linda, the only way to read Ulysses is with the help of Cliff's notes.That is unless you are a brilliant scholar of The Whole of Western Civilization, in which case, well, excuse me! (Me, I whipped out my Cliff's and turned to Chapter Nine.) [I said Help of, not instead of].
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