Talenti gelato

If you like ice cream, and who doesn't?, you will love Talenti Gelato. Highly recommended. 3 different flavors in the freezer right now. Coconut! Coconut!

A day in the kitchen

First bread. Then breakfast. Then scotch eggs made with maple sausage. Meanwhile chicken legs in Korean marinade, now slow roasting. Bok choy tofu stir fry for dinner, ready to go.

Keeps my mind occupied ha ha.

Bread

Baking bread this morning. Been baking artisan bread for some time now but I still get better, I still experiment as well. But the experiments are smaller, not new flours but subtle additions, like this morning adding a little garlic olive oil to the mix. Some experiments fail and are discarded. Others get incorporated into the standard loaf.

The week is too damn busy, what with taxes and house chores that need doing by Friday and the general hobbling pace of the household at our age. I'd rather have nothing to do but write, read, cook, walk the dog, and watch TV.

Notice music is absent on that list. Been slipping in that department.

My friend in LA doesn't check her email often. A drag.

Well, I am ready for spring, summer, warm weather, and a short trip/vacation of some sort.

One of those days

Doing laundry and other chores, getting tax info together for our tax man, this that and the other. A drag, really, but stuff that needs to be done. So you reward yourself and go out to lunch, and we went to McMenamen's in Oregon City, an delightful place, one of their cozier spots, and we definitely will go back again. Now I am half asleep but not wanting to nap, which will deflate me for the rest of the day. The fantasy is a second wind. This old man almost never gets a second wind.

Write on!

A bit of encouragement from my publisher, after I told him I had started over. I can count my visible support system on one hand, and losing a finger or two wouldn't change that, but it's better than nothing, that's for damn sure.

Round Bend Press Books.

I really like this new minor character, a lot of my most radical notions are in him. I can present them without being preachy because CJ can be buffer and counter puncher. Opens up thematic possibilities and a bit of comedy that wasn't there before. CJ meets him in the retirement center. This is where everything went wrong first time around. Now it will be the opposite, turning the narrative in a new layered reality.

The moral is, If it's wrong, throw it away and start over but DON'T GIVE UP. Most of my students never learned that. They quit. Too hard. Yes, it is very hard. And you have to believe in yourself, which is harder yet if you have no track record or experience that stamina works.

Renewed enthusiasm

A bit of work on the novel this morning, triggering renewed energy and enthusiasm because I have a minor character now who will add considerably to action, character, theme, and relieve CJ from carrying the entire burden. Very excited. Onward.

Marketing

Being retired, I do very little marketing. I publish my books with Round Bend Press. I market screenplays and stage plays online, passively. I keep a screenplay at Inktip. I check the monthly Play Submission Helper and send scripts appropriately only to competitions with no fees and electronic submissions. Passive again. But it makes me think I am keeping the embers burning. I know from experience that good news can come without warning, but only if work is available.

On oil

Thanks, Sketch

An unusually productive morning, no doubt to the very early start. Much done on the novel, 20 pages now and looking good. But I am tired and will need a nap soon.

Circles

Nothing like the tranquility of very early morning to encourage reflection and introspection. It has occurred to me that in some ways my writer's life now is similar to same in the very beginning of my career. Which is to say, in both instances I am writing with little sense of having an audience at all. The difference is that in the beginning I had a strong sense of being part of a community, serious writers, and of doing something culturally important. Now I have no sense of community, I think I live in a culture where literature has been poisoned by star power and money, and I write largely from habit.

Both are very different from how I felt in the 80s and most of the 90s, writing with great visibility, a secure sense of audience, a sense of being an important contributor to my community art culture.

At any rate, interestingly enough, this feeling is not particularly negative or depressing. Instead it suggests that I was naive in my younger days. Of course, the art-commerce pendulum swings from one extreme to another. When I started, art ruled. In fact, in grad school, we thought of screenwriters as hacks. Today commerce rules. I won't live long enough to see the pendulum swing back again.

But at least I am writing and enjoying it. The novel feels under control again, and I have a supporting character, a literary novelist stuck in a retirement center, whom CJ will help "escape" and he will be a mouthpiece for many cultural criticisms that CJ never thought about before, not being very engaged with the arts. This is a minor theme and must not get overblown. I think an issue with earlier draft is that this theme was too loud too early.

At any rate, I'd love to have a draft done by or during summer. It feels very good to be in a rhythm again.

Life is good. Not quite what I expected at this stage but I am upright and cogent. Complaints in this context are selfish.

Nature

Sketch woke me up at 330 to take a dump. Now I seem to be up. What to do?

Cook!

Simmering stuff for carrot, sweet potato soup. Slow roasting beef patties. Brewing new Hawaiian coffee blend. More to come.

Later, I suppose, zzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Variation on a theme

I added scrapple to country potatoes this morning. Not too shabby.

Jonathan Capehart's open letter to Parkland students

In today's Washington Post. Capehart begins with his recent depression.

The election of President Trump meant all those those high-minded lectures on morality turned out to be a generations-long exercise in hypocrisy. All that concern that the president uphold the honor and dignity of the Oval Office was bunk. All that reverence for the presidency and its customs and traditions was fake. All those decades as “leader of the free world,” as a bulwark against tyranny in general and Russia in particular, were abandoned.
The country that swelled me with pride by twice electing Barack Obama its 44th president, the first African American entrusted with the White House, broke my heart by handing over the keys to a thin-skinned, thrice-married adulterer unfit for the office he holds and incapable of discharging the awesome duties that go with it. Every day since Jan. 20, 2017, we have endured a demoralizing deluge of drama and dysfunction from an incompetent president who is an affront to our nation’s history and the 44 men who preceded him.

And then students from Parkland, with Alfonso Calderon among the leaders, became activists for gun control. "Within days, you descended upon Florida’s capital bearing thunder. And it was there that you, Alfonso, said the words that gave me hope."

What we need is action and we need it now more than ever because people are losing their lives and it is still not being taken seriously. I don’t know what it’s going to take. I don’t know what it’s going to take to get some people to realize this is more than just reelection. This is more than just political gain. This is more than the conspiracy theories and people trying to disqualify us for even having an opinion. This matters to me more than anything else in my entire life. And I want everybody to know, I, personally, I’m prepared to drop out of school. I am prepared to not worry about anything else besides this because change might not come today. It might not come tomorrow. It might not even come March 24, when we march for our lives down in Washington. But it’s going to happen and it’s going to happen before my lifetime because I will fight every single day.

Our last president concurs.

“Young people have helped lead all our great movements. How inspiring to see it again in so many smart, fearless students standing up for their right to be safe; marching and organizing to remake the world as it should be,” former president Barack Obama tweeted on Thursday. “We’ve been waiting for you. And we’ve got your backs.”

Do the kids have the stamina? 

Inspirational headline

Drexel overcomes 34-point deficit to beat Delaware, largest comeback in D1 history

Nice thing to wake up to. Remember this in March Madness.

Miniseries

The miniseries has become one of the better dramatic forms on television. I've seen many good ones and am watching a good one now, WACO. Very compelling.

Old dog, new tricks

As I was making breakfast, on a sudden inspiration, or whim, I made something I'd never made before: a scrapple omelette! And man, delicious! A keeper!

Two slices of fried scrapple and cheddar cheese folded inside the eggs. First rate.

LATER. Many photos on net. I didn't invent it.

Clone this day

Constantly productive, but slowly so, no urgency, writing, cooking, paying bills, giving dog his time, writing more, catching up on news, reading, music ... like the old days but much slower. I like it.

History's ironies

History is full of ironies. Consider Nixon's trip to China.

Trump now stands on the brink of another major irony: he can do something meaningful about gun control. It would get his Russia problems off the front page. It would make him popular.

Will he?

High school rebellion

My play Family Climate is a story driven by a nationwide movement to address climate change, driven by high school students using social media. And here on TV this morning, high school students in Florida demanding gun control laws. It's coming. It will be their world and we did a piss poor job getting it ready for them. Their rebellion is overdue. I wish them well. But wishing is just wishing.

Includes FAMILY CLIMATE, FAMILY VALUES and THE OLD BEATNIK.

Book at Amazon.

Good rhythm

A good early morning of writing. Feel like I am finally in a good, and new, rhythm. Hope it lasts a while.

Watched two great films

Saw BBC miniseries of Dr Zhivago, which inspired me to see Reds, a fav, again, and I very much loved both.

Today's bread

Keeping it going

 In the retirement center, I started a Readers Theater group, and we did three shows. Harriet started a twice monthly women's circle. We talked of keeping them going after we moved but I haven't.

Harriet, though, has and is off there now to do her circle. It's good for her, a more social being than I am. She's said she wants to move back if I pass first, which surprised me, since she didn't like it at all when we lived there. I wasn't hot for it but seemed to like it more than she did. Or maybe she just bitched about it more.

What's in a name?

American capitalism has a special skill in defusing radical ideas and images with cooptation into the predominant status quo. In the 1960s "black panther" equated to a radical political party, the Black Panthers, but today it's the title of an action movie with a black hero that is shattering financial records. From free food for kids to great profits for corporations, all to the cheers of satisfied customers. We get the governments we deserve.

Writing is a physical act

A good morning of writing, five pages of the new entry into the story, and I'm mentally and physically exhausted. Writing takes a physical toll as well as mental. And the older I get, the greater the exhaustion. But I am very pleased with how it's going. It now has the feel of a novella, short and sweet, rather like my Army novella, a favorite work.

A month ago I was in Starbucks. A young man introduced himself as a former student, now active in local theater, I didn't remember him, but he said his dad was a great fan of my Army novel because he'd served in the same area of Germany some years after I did and not much had changed. Nice to learn.

Women's BB

Yesterday saw Oregon, Oregon State, UCLA and USC in action -- and none play in the same league as Connecticut. Major differences! All the former look downright sloppy compared to the ballet of the Huskies. Remarkable.

DNA

Getting checked for roots. Compensate for little sense of family ha ha.

A new first page on novel! See how it sits. Very different strategy, to say the least.

Feeling better. Disposition better, thanks to that page. Feel like I've done work for a change. This morning also baked bread, made batch of buttermilk.

Not too shabby for an old fart.

The season

Both sick, probably low level flu. Taking it easy.

New ideas for getting into story.

Norway, UK, Australia, Japan

Countries that have gone far to eliminate gun deaths. We, on the other hand, are barbarian on the issue.

Starting over

Yep. Back to point zero on new CJ novel.

Down

I am having a hard time getting into the novel's story with the right tone and at the right place. The story is whole in my mind, regarding events, but it's the subtext that will make it work, and I haven't quite found it yet. Discouraging. Yet I've been there before. But not this old ha ha! Maybe I don't have the chops any more. We'll see.

Taking Harriet to a Valentine's lunch on the river.

Page one rewrite

Still not right. Ah, me. Start over again.

Kitchen help

There's nothing like a time-saving kitchen gadget. For my money, the crown goes to the Danish Whisk, which I discovered when I started making artisan bread a few years back. Now I couldn't like without it.

Well, I just discovered another gadget that strikes my fancy, sold under the name Egglette. This gadget makes perfect soft boiled eggs. You crack the egg into the plastic container and drop it into boiling water. For my set up, takes about 9 minutes and you get the perfect egg.

Biathlon

This is one of my favorite events in Winter Olympics.

The biathlon is a winter sport that combines cross-country skiing and rifle shooting. It is treated as a race where the contestant with the shortest total time wins. Depending on the competition, missed shots result in extra distance or time added to the contestant's total running distance or time.

Germany and Norway dominate the sport. The U.S. only recently has become competitive.

 The U.S. Biathlon Team will look to ride the wave of its history-making performance at last year’s world championships and capture its first-ever Olympic medal at the Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018. The U.S. team boasts a wealth of experience with six returning Olympians, including all five members of the Sochi 2014 men’s squad.

Great basketball

UConn women at their best.


The complete mind-boggling game:

Awe!(some)

The snowboarders in the Olympics blow me away. How do they practice this without killing themselves?

Here, failure is clear. Very clear. You screw up snowboarding and everyone sees it and you suffer for your failure.

There are areas of non-physical behavior (thinking, feeling) in which there also is clarity about success and failure but we've lost our sensitivity to it, certainly so in my lifetime. Now, it  seems, many believe one opinion is as good as another with respect to knowledge. Without this degradation of clear thinking, the Trump phenomenon would not be possible. Farce would not have become tragedy.

Anxiety

Watching ski jumping on the Olympics this morning, I imagined the anxiety of the athletes as they wait ... and this reminded me of one of the better titles in world literature, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick.

This is a novel by the remarkable German writer Peter Handke.

“Handke became the enfant terrible of the European avant-garde, denouncing all social, psychological and historical categories of experience as species of linguistic fraud. But [he] has aged well and now…is regarded as one of the most important writers in German.” ―Richard Locke, The New York Times

Handke wrote a terrific avant-garde play, Insulting the Audience, which is an accurate description of the play's action. I saw a production at the Univ of Oregon as a grad student and have been a Handke fan ever since -- and a wee bit jealous that Europe has such a stronger literary tradition than we do, embracing the avant-garde with more interest and energy. Hence my success with hyperdrama overseas but not at home.

Handke has had a very controversial career.

He has been awarded the Georg Büchner Prize, the Franz Kafka Prize and the International Ibsen Award; the latter award was extremely controversial and Handke was met by protesters in Oslo and widely described by critics in Norwegian media as a fascist with ties to war criminals.^[2] In 2006 his nomination for the Heinrich Heine Prize caused a scandal, and the prize was withdrawn due to his political views.^{[3] (Wikipedia)}

He has fans and literary enemies even today. Doesn't seem to bother him.

 “It was nearly winter. I had just seen a friend die, and was again beginning to take pleasure in my own existence. This friend, who thought of himself as the "first man to experience pain", had nevertheless tried up to the last moment to wish death away. I was thankful for all things and decreed: Enjoy yourself, take advantage of your days of good health.” 

― Peter Handke, Slow Homecoming

Told ya

(CNN)President Donald Trump won't release the Democratic rebuttal to the Republican intelligence memo alleging FBI abuses of its surveillance authority at this time, and has sent it back to the House Intelligence Committee for changes.

The Prez has been indicating he would all week, but this made no sense whatever because it seemed very out of character. So now he says the FBI doesn't want it released. Duh. They didn't want the Repub version released either. What a two-faced blatant contradiction the guy is. His lying is so undisguised, and his supporters don't care. As the man said, he could shoot someone on the streets and he'd keep his supporters.  

Another dissertation

University of Antwerp, 2000, a dissertation by Nele de Roy entitled "A Dutch translation of Charles Deemer's The Last Song of Violeta Parra with an introduction to hypertext."

OK, it was 18 years ago and I just found out tonight  but, hey, a perk is a perk. So dissertations about my work (hyperdrama) in Belgium, Sweden, Egypt, Spain that I know of. An American writer?

The day progresses

The bread is out of the oven and looks great, the base for stew is lightly simmering, the fish ingredients are coming to room temperature, and all is good in the household. Even Sketch has recovered from a minor digestive problem. No work on the novel today, but that's fine.

Fisherman's Stew

I was in the market,  buying wine for Harriet, when I got the urge to make fisherman's stew today. Yes! So I bought salmon, cod, scallops, clams, shrimp, okra, knowing I had bacon, shallots and spices at home ... baking bread, making stew, a day in the kitchen!

Photo from Internet

One never knows

Not sure why the hell I made this video some time back. Maybe I was practicing some Burns effects for another project. At any rate, got an email requesting permission to use it in a "mild Trump satire." I said ok but too bad it's mild.

Retirement is ...

... eating ice cream on the sofa at 10 a.m.

The Sadness of Einstein

One of my grandiose projects that never got finished I thought of as The Quantum Quartet, four plays about two young male physicists, lovers, with one getting a sex change operation in the middle of the sequence. In the 1980s I got a lot of press even for projects that were gestating, and the quartet, or plans for same, got a surprisingly large write up in The Oregonian. I had just finished the first of the four, called THE SADNESS OF EINSTEIN. "Two students track down Einstein at the Solvay Conference in 1927 in order to tell him The Oregon Interpretation of the new quantum physics." A poet friend thought it was my best play. (Hard to imagine there was so much interest in my work in progress then, considering how invisible I would become soon enough. Ah, fame is fickle.)

A theater in Seattle had selected this play for a grant-supported "new play festival", and I was excited to get a premier production there. Alas, at the last minute the expected grant did not materialize and the festival was cancelled. The play never has been produced.

I didn't finish the quartet because writing it coincided with a new obsession for what is now called hyperdrama. I discovered my infatuation with the New Physics was better served there than in this quartet of traditional "Newtonian" plays. So Sadness ended the project.

Parades

The President wants a grand military parade. How about a grand DIVERSITY parade instead? As in, let's celebrate what America really should be about.

Silliman's Blog

An earlier tribute to my brother.

Friday, October 21, 2005

I’ve never been clear if Bill Deemer ever lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, where so much of the New Western poetry of the 1960s came together, or whether he has always been up in the Eugene, Oregon area where he lives now. In the 1960s, Deemer was a name one saw frequently in periodicals like Jim Koller’s Coyote’s Journal & it was obvious that Deemer had a considerable ease with the formation of line & stanza. There were at least two books in the 1960s, Poems from Auerhahn Press, one of the prestige fine presses in San Francisco, and Diana, from Coyote’s Journal, the book that originally introduced me to Deemer’s work. There was, or so suggests abebooks.com, at least one self-published volume that decade – I never saw it. There was one book in the 1970s that I also never saw, then two in the 1980s from Coyote – which I believe is what Jim Koller’s press had evolved into – and more recently a trio of things from Bob Arnold’s Longhouse Press up in Vermont. I would be surprised – shocked even – if any edition had more than the 525 copies of that first Auerhahn volume, tho Deemer was shortlisted for the Oregon Book Awards for Variations. Longhouse’s catalog, which still has copies of the 250-copy run available at $25 apiece, says this of Variations:

I wouldn't be an American if I didn't do a little self-promotion. In that tricky vein of remembering just what it was like when you first read a Richard Brautigan poem during that time (50s-60s) or a Philip Whalen poem, or in further time a Louis Jenkins poem, and now Jim Dodge poem, and Eileen Myles poem, that flash. Never take a flash lightly. Bill Deemer is our Han-Shan and has lived for decades in a quiet corner of Oregon making these well-built poems of flash. There is nothing like them any where. Bill doesn't talk to us anymore since we did this book and had to raise the price a few dollars. I wouldn't want it any other way. It's a Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea sort of thing. We hand-made this book of hand-made poems.

Deemer comes very close these days to being a haiku-ist – his impulse for the short poem constructed around consciously counted syllables & a two- or three-part logic is broken only when he gathers several of these together, as in what I take to be the title work, “Variations on a Theme”:

Swallow
no bigger than that
flies all the way south

Crocus
no bigger than that
pushed winter aside

Insect
no bigger than that
needs so many legs

Splinter
no bigger than that
won’t be ignored

Tear
no bigger than that
ruins her makeup

Antno bigger than that
plunders & wars

Piaf
no bigger than that
but all Paris listened

Mosquito
no bigger than that
puts lumps on my head

Haiku
no bigger than that
made Basho famous

Nest
no bigger than that
shelters a family

Puddle
no bigger than that
reflects the sky

I can get into the efficiency of these stanzas almost instantly, a poetics with clear affinities with Phil Whalen & Anselm Hollo, say. They’re deliberately anti-ambitious, which I suspect must raise up a whole range of emotions when other poets read these works.¹ It takes a particular kind of gall to write without ambition & Deemer knows it:

FAME & FORTUNE

Fame:
the cows stop eating
to watch me pass.

Fortune:
more blackberries
than I will ever pick.

There are numerous homages to Issa & Basho, and a suite of six poems all offering variations on Williams’ “Red Wheel Barrow.” There is room for sentiment, humor, a little grumpiness. What there isn’t room for is excess or waste – this book’s primary value is an economy of precision. On its own terms, it’s a delight.

For the record, my brother did live in SF for a while, which is where he got married, in the Park, on his 21st birthday. I believe he befriended Lew Welch there, hence "A Few For Lew."

These stressful times

A Yale course on happiness, called Psychology and the Good Life, has become this most popular class in the history of the university. Says something about the world today.

I attended the first national hypertext conference at Yale some years ago and had an incredible time. I also fell in love with the school, rather wished I had gone to their famous Drama School. I went to conference events, met a lot of fascinating folks interested in hypertext (but no other playwrights!), and had free time to hang out at coffee shops and sidewalk cafes. Man, just a great experience. Yale impressed me.

A fantasy (one of many)

I wrote Varmints: A Libretto, based on my stage play of the same name, for a young composer in LA, on request, someone I had worked with before and whose music I greatly admire, but some personal complications on his end interfered with moving the project forward.

So I have a libretto with no music. I have a libretto I really like with no music.

And one of my several fantasies is that a composer will read it, love it, and bring it to life! Maybe even while I am still living, though that is a minor part of the fantasy. Life after death is just fine with me.

Household

Through most of our married life, Harriet pretty much ran the household. She did most of the grocery shopping, most of the cooking, managed most of the bills (she liked doing it, I hated it). Since her heart event, I've taken over everything and now pretty much run the household myself, top to bottom. I've learned to take it in stride, if not quite "enjoy" it. I love cooking breakfast but the other meals, except for a few of my specialties, can be a chore, and vegetables are a challenge for me. But I do the best I can.

To ease the burden, and balance meals better, I've been trying out various prepared food delivery services. Kaiser had one I thought was fine but Harriet didn't like it. Now I am trying another.. A few prepared meals a week can make the difference, in terms of my own comfort. We also go out once or twice a week. It's nice to be able to afford to (not so in the retirement center).

On another note, did some good work on the novel this morning, qualitative still, not moving the pages forward but making their focus clearer. But it is time to let them go and move forward. The real rewriting begins when I have a complete draft.

Looking forward to the winter Olympics. Anything to pass the time ha ha.

Advertisements for myself: The Death Cycle

3 one act plays about the theme of death: a farce, a war drama, a Buddhist comedy.

An ending

The ending of my very early political farce, THE STIFF, long has been a favorite curtain moment, and it speaks much to today's politics. The leader of a country is dead. His widow is ready to appear before the People to show her (false) grief.

CHARLES: Do you want me to come back?

MRS. JONES: No. We can come back later. First I must make my appearance. I must show my grief.

NECK: The people would expect grief, madam.

MRS. JONES: What the people expect, they deserve. What they deserve, they get. Always.

(All exit and BLACKOUT.)

Worth repeating

Eric Hoffer on Germany ... and yes, it can happen here. But it won't. Movements led by women and immigrants will make sure that it doesn't. Oh, and a few sane white guys.

Headline of the day

No Children Because of Climate Change? Some People Are Considering It

Quotation of the day

Iraq War veteran and U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) criticized President Donald Trump for calling Democrats who did not clap during his State of the Union address “treasonous” on Monday.

“We don’t live in a dictatorship or a monarchy,” Duckworth tweeted soon after he made the comment. “I swore an oath ― in the military and in the Senate ― to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, not to mindlessly cater to the whims of Cadet Bone Spurs and clap when he demands I clap.”

A disturbing understanding

I never really understood how the German people could let Hitler happen -- until now. I'm not saying we are repeating the dance but I gave too little credit to the power of persuasion, however irrational,  when an audience is desperate, frustrated, unhappy with their world.

Trump can call Democrats treasonous and unAmerican for not applauding him, and it's a big joke. We have an idiot for a President. How funny. How far can he go before a Republican or two finds a spine to act in the interests of the country?

A test is coming up. I don't think Trump will release the Democratic memo.

I just hope this gets resolved before a hot immediate war starts. I don't want this guy with his thin skin with nukes at the ready.

I wish I were an optimist

I could imagine the Trump era as "a learning moment" when citizens learn how our government is supposed to work, what checks and balances mean, and so on, this because of the chaos that follows a large disregard for these very principles by the man in office. But no, a more likely alternative, moving into more severe autocracy, seems likely unless spineless Republicans and supporters look in the mirror and realize how badly they've been duped. 

The dog and I

Sketch is 15, so he doesn't have too many years left. If still reasonably mobile after he passes, I hope we can take a long train trip in mourning and transition, return, and Harriet wants to get a cat.

With luck, all this is a few years down the shaking American decaying road.

Need a good week on the novel for my morale.

Super Bowl

An entertaining game, especially offensively, and my relatives in NJ had something to cheer about.

I don't know why I don't like Tom Brady. He's a super QB. Seems like a nice guy in interviews. But I have never liked him.. Something about his manner or body language? Reminds me of a genius I had in a class at Cal Tech, Survey of World Drama, who read all the scripts in the original translation! Prof would start class by asking him about the translation. A physics major with movie star looks and a hot girlfriend. Couldn't find anything wrong with the guy. Hated his ass.

Eric Hoffer

Anyone remember the longshoreman-philosopher? In 1951 he published The True Believer: Thoughts on  the Nature of Mass Movements, which is as timely today as then, at the beginning of the  McCarthy hysteria. Hysteria has returned, on both sides of the political spectrum.

Vacuum

It's been a long time now since my two closest friends passed but I miss them no less. Their absence leaves a real vacuum in my life. No more venting over coffee, no more shared laughter at the absurdity of so much, no more re-energizing from common understanding. Being the Last Friend Standing has little to recommend it, in this context.

My last friend on my wave length lives in L.A., and we often exchange emails and occasionally talk on the phone. Her laughter is infectious, always sardonic, always accurate about whatever absurdity is in focus. She herself has a large family down there.

Well, I play the hand dealt to me.

Thought police

This Sunday Morning opinion piece really made sense to me: Free speech includes speech by those with whom one disagrees.

Katie Roiphe on the #MeToo thought police

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An article published online today is already bringing heated criticism down on the head of its author, Kaitie Roiphe:

A few months ago Harpers magazine asked me to write a piece on the #MeToo movement. I'm a feminist writer and professor who has disagreed with other feminists in the past. Usually, people wait to read what I have to write before getting angry over them. Not this time.

Before the magazine article had even been published, thousands of people took to Twitter, furious at me for rumors about what might be in the piece. Total strangers called me "a garbage person," "a ghoul," "human scum." They threatened that my career was over and said obscene things not fit for Sunday morning, or any morning. My children, of course, were reading and hearing all of this.

The feminist writer reacts to "Twitter feminists" who accuse her of not adhering to a presumed orthodoxy about the movement to out sexual harassers.

CBS NEWS

What was my crime? Having doubts about the excesses of #MeToo, even as I shared its goals? Departing slightly from the officially-accepted feminist position? 

What happened to speaking my truth?  It felt like there was a mob with torches outside the window.

In his novel "1984," George Orwell created a phrase for my accusers: "Thought police."

If we as a culture are going to sort through the very tangled question of what constitutes an abuse of male power, we need to be able to hear -- really hear -- lots of different opinions.

Is asking a woman for her phone number an abuse of power? Does the distinction between sleazy behavior and a criminal act matter? Is it OK to try people in the press?  Lots of good and reasonable people will disagree about the answers to these questions.

If we want a true reckoning, it means listening to authentically conflicting points of view, from both women AND men. 

Anyone whose feminist activism consists largely of hurling abuse at other women might want to take a look in the mirror. If we are calling other women "human scum" because they have ideas or politics that are different from ours, are we any different from Trump supporters tweeting "lock her up" at Hillary Clinton? With their politics of personal destruction -- the hate and nastiness and name-calling -- are these Twitter feminists any less bullying than the people we say we oppose?

Isn't silencing women what we are fighting against?

The Woody Allen case history, for example, has resurfaced in a simplistic version, made more difficult by the personal tragedies involved. I wrote about this earlier.

Mob rule is mob rule. The ends don't justify the means.

New title

The new working title for my novel is LAST RIGHTS. It feels like a keeper. This is the central theme: who should be the final manager of one's death? The medical profession? The state? The individual? Most, I think, would say the individual but without thinking it through. Because if the individual is the manager of his death, then suicide (assisted for humane reasons) should be sanctioned. We only embrace this, if at all, for terminal folks.

At any rate, this is the issue that CJ gets involved with in the story. And he faces his own mortality for the first time.

Oops of the day

Hope you didn't miss this:

House Speaker Paul Ryan deleted a tweet Saturday afternoon that had drawn immediate and widespread ridicule for advertising a woman’s $1.50-a-week raise as an impressive result of the GOP tax cut. (Daily Intelligencer)

You can't make this stuff up. 

Super Bowl

Little interest, though I'll likely watch a bit and root for Philly since I have relatives there. Haven't been interested in pro football for fears. Who can like a sporting event where tickets start at three grand? But nobody is boycotting something so outrageous, so there you have it. We get what we deserve, including the President.

Headline of the day

Calling Trump Nixonian? That’s not fair to Nixon.

An enlightened citizenry

Near the end of AMERICAN GADFLY, my one-man play about Sen. Wayne Morse of Oregon, the senator says this:

 MORSE

            So if you asked me, Wayne Morse, name

            the one thing in our country that you

            think will do more to strengthen

            American foreign policy in the next

            half century, you might be surprised

            at my reply. I would say, Do something

            to protect the educational standard of

            American boys and girls.  Do something

            to protect American brain power. 

            Because the only sure and lasting

            defense of peace is a highly educated

            and enlightened citizenry.

Words to make one cry today, given the rise of the opposite into positions of great power.

Consider the controversial Republican memo released today. More than one commentator has noted that it may backfire since a close reading gives credence to the opposite meaning given to it by Trump and cohorts. This may be true among the intelligentsia and close relatives. But such nuances will fly over the understanding of many Americans, including the voters who believe Trump is a gift from heaven. The new status quo depends on an uneducated and unenlightened citizenry. And a comment like this would be dismissed as "elitist" by them! Education has become elitist.

Another quotation that comes to mind:

 On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. H. L. Mencken

Ain't it the truth.

Slow is good

In old age, moving slowly is the norm. So my slow progress on the novel is fine. At least I am inching forward most days, keeping at it.

I listed a thirty year old screenplay at Ink Tip, a marketing site. Inexpensive and the script is just gathering dust and suddenly the story is topical. For a small investment, I can keep a script "out there" with a kind of passive marketing, and if something happens, a long shot, well, I've had long shots pay off before, so who knows? A small expense if not, the likely outcome. And I get to visit some old stories I very much own up to, still.

Feeling good, all things considered. Hobbling through the day ha ha. Certainly could be worse.

In the novel, Trump drives CJ crazy. A mirror, a mirror.