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Literature Network Forums - Blogs - title by Ron Price https://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?2768-title The largest classic literature discussion forum on the Internet. Read Write Teach Share. en Thu, 04 Jun 2026 06:08:13 GMT vBulletin 10 https://www.online-literature.com/forums/images/misc/rss.jpg Literature Network Forums - Blogs - title by Ron Price https://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?2768-title ROBIN WILLIAMS ...a wake-up call for mental illness https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?14994-ROBIN-WILLIAMS-a-wake-up-call-for-mental-illness Mon, 14 Sep 2015 01:01:45 GMT

Originally Posted by Ron Price

Thanks, folks, for your responses. Before leaving I'll post some general thoughts from one of my favorite psychoanalysts.-Ron
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ERICH FROMM

Part 1:

Erich Fromm(1900-1980) was a theorist who brought other theories together. He also emphasized how one's personality is embedded in class, status, education, vocation, and religious and philosophical background, among other social determinants. Fromm held the view that humans need to live and feel part of a genuine community. Fromm was a medical doctor and practising psychiatrist; he explained people's drives in terms of social interaction, and mental illness in terms of the failure of the individual to relate properly with other individuals. The role of biological and genetic determinants in mental health problems and individual behaviour was not part of his focus.

Since my autobiography and my personality is embedded to a great extent in the same factors that Fromm describes and, since I have come to the view that this same autobiography and personality is also a result of biological and genetic factors, it is timely to say a few words about Erich Fromm's ideas in my prose-poetic.

Part 1.1:

Erich Fromm is known not only as an author and significant humanist of the 20th century, but also as a psychoanalyst and social psychologist. Erich Fromm affected the world like almost no other German-born social scientist. His writings and realizations are read and recognized worldwide. The International Erich Fromm Society works to maintain, to research, to develop further and to pass on Erich Fromm’s scholarly findings and ideas as the fitting continuation of his international work and in recognition of his worldwide significance.

The year I began my pioneering experience, 1962 at the age of 18, Erich Fromm, American psychoanalyst and prolific writer in the field of existential psychology, stated his 'credo' in his book Beyond the Chains of Illusions. I have written some of his Credo below since it was consistent with my views back in 1962 and it still is. I have commented on some of his Credo expressing views that have remained part of my beliefs during this lifelong pioneering venture spanning, as it does now, more than fifty years. I read Fromm's books for thirty years, from the 1960s through the 1990s.-Ron Price with thanks to Michael Maccoby, "The Two Voices of Erich Fromm: The Prophetic and the Analytic," Society, July/August 1994.

Part 2:

"The most important factor for the development of the individual is the structure and the values of the society into which he has been born." Given this fact, my role as a Baha'i has been to spend my life trying to build the kind of society fit for human beings to be born into. For, as Fromm says in his Credo, "society has both a furthering and an inhibiting function. Only in cooperation with others, and in the process of work, does man develop his powers, only in the historical process do humans create themselves.

Only when society's aim will have become identical with the aims of humanity will society cease to cripple man and to further evil." In attempting to transform society, Fromm underestimated the need for individuals to adapt to their society. For the Baha'i to be an effective teacher, propagator, of the New Society he has become associated with, he needs to adapt to the larger society in which he has been born and in which he lives his life. The difficulties I had in the first decade of my pioneering experience came, it seems to me in retrospect, from a slow adapting to my society. Later, in the following decades, my effectiveness was due significantly to my more effective adapting to my society.

Part 3:

This adaptive process is slow and arduous work and, for Baha'is, it takes place in the context of action toward goals using a map provided by the Founders of their religion and the legitimate Successors. "I believe that every man represents humanity. We are different as to intelligence, health and talents. Yet we are all one. We are all saints and sinners, adults and children, and no one is anybody's superior or judge. We have all been awakened with the Buddha, we have all been crucified with Christ, and we have all killed and robbed with Genghis Khan, Stalin, and Hitler.

Man's task in life is precisely the paradoxical one of realizing his individuality and at the same time transcending it and arriving at the experience of universality. Only the fully developed individual self can drop the ego." Perhaps this is one way of defining the nature of 'Abdu'l-Baha and the reason for his effectiveness and efficiency. -Ron Price, Pioneeering Over Four Epochs, 9 October 2002.

Part 4:

There is much truth here, Erich, and
I must thank you for your wonderful
and illuminating books,1 enriching as
they did my life, & approximating the
jewelled wisdom of this lucid Faith, a
Faith that I set out with in '62 when I
moved to Dundas and began to pray
in those back streets on afternoons in
the small town to which I had moved,
to read from sweet-scented streams, &
taste of the fruits of His tree in years
when my father's white hair blew in the
wind for the last time, my mother was
driven to the end of her tether, and that
charisma became institutionalized at the
apex of this wondrous, and new Order.

1 Erich Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusions, Simon and Schuster, NY, 1962, pp.174-182, and many other books to 1994.

Ron Price
9 October 2002
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Part 4.1:

Freud’s life’s work had been devoted to understanding as fully as possible the world of man’s soul. To Freud psyche and soul were the same, conscious and unconscious mental life, although this subject is complex and highly nuanced. Psychoanalysis is the science of the soul. -Erich Fromm, The Art of Listening, Constable, London, 1994, p.75.
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Part 5:

In the 15 August 2013 issue of The New York Review of Books Alan Ryan, in his "The Art of Being Erich Fromm", reviews The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet by Lawrence J. Friedman, with assistance from Anke M. Schreiber, Columbia University Press, 410 pages. Friedman begins his review as follows:

"Some readers will recall being given a copy of Erich Fromm’s popular The Art of Loving in high school or college, usually remembering it with gratitude, but sometimes with a sense that its reliance on the ideas of Freud and Marx now makes it not only unfashionable, but old-fashioned." I was not given this book but I read it while at university in the years 1963 to 1967.

"Still others may recall their first reading of Escape from Freedom," continues Friedman, "one of the earlier attempts to explain what became known as the authoritarian personality: it was provoked by astonishment that so many otherwise rational people followed leaders such as Hitler, but it was much more wide-ranging in its exploration of the fear of freedom and the longing to be dependent." I had also read that book in those 4 years at two universities in Ontario.

"Still others may remember Fromm as a political activist, prominent in the antiwar movement from the early 1950s, and visible for the last time on the public stage as an adviser to Eugene McCarthy during his campaign for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1967–1968." I was getting ready to teach Inuit kids at the time, and then recovering from teaching them back in those years. Erich Fromm was not on my horizons.

]]> Ron Price https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?14994-ROBIN-WILLIAMS-a-wake-up-call-for-mental-illness Another Interview https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?14966-Another-Interview Fri, 17 Jul 2015 06:55:17 GMT INTERVIEW 15 I was impressed recently by the art work of Richard Long. I saw a demonstration of his stone work on television several years ago and... INTERVIEW 15

I was impressed recently by the art work of Richard Long. I saw a demonstration of his stone work on television several years ago and last week I borrowed his Walking in Circles from a library. The following interview which I have ‘choreographed’ is a result of reading about his philosophy, reading an interview with him and looking at his wonderful work in stone, wood and his own ‘choreography’ of art.

This interview was also influenced by the words of Robert Creeley about poetry in The American Poetry Review(Sept/Oct, 1999, pp.17-18) and Thomas R. Whitaker’s analysis of the poetry of William Carlos Williams(Twayne Pub., NY, 1968). This framework of ideas was outlined on my arrival in Tasmania in August 1999. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, August 1999. This interview has been revised for the Art Exhibition in George Town in November 2003
and several additional times, the most recent being on 13/5/'15.
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Interviewer(I): Do you think that artists are difficult to get to know, that they are virtually invisible.

Price(P): Yes, most artists are virtually invisible; very few make it into the media, into the world of fame and publicity. As far as those who do get to be known by the masses it is largely a superficial knowing. Occasionally, a biography is written about someone’s life, then some depth is possibly revealed. The biography industry has unearthed increasing numbers of good quality work, though often the artist is dead by then. I think people generally are difficult to get to know to any depth. That is why I have pursued autobiography as I have. “Know thyself” has quite specific and profound meanings to me. After living in so many places and ‘knowing’ so many people, I can’t think of anyone whose biography I would want to write. Henry James and Anthony Trollope became disenchanted with the biographies they wrote. I have come to settle for pleasant conversation when human interaction is unavoidable. To a large extent I avoid human conversation, having had enough for a lifetime. Each artist’s invisibility has different roots.

To a significant extent the answer to this question depends on the type of person the poet is, when in their life they came to writing poetry, the environment around them and the general receptivity to poetry. The main company I had in the first dozen years of writing poetry, my formative years, was Roger White. It was ‘a company defined by letters,’ as Robert Creeley might have called it.(The American Poetry Review, Sept/Oct, 1999, p.18) In the years 1993 to 1999 the company I had was, for the most part, books: ‘a company defined by books,’, dozens and dozens of them. I found email, public reading in cafes, etc., publishing, unrewarding, even though I was a successful entertainer in public. After thirty years of having a listening audience as a teacher I had come to derive little enthusiasm from a form of interaction that resembled the role of a teacher. Even feedback from individuals, ranging as it did from glowing praise to outright indifference and disinterest, was generally not useful. My wife’s feedback I found most helpful. She was critical: ‘a company defined by affinity’.

I have many meaningful email relationship on the internet. The internet has led to the publication of my first chapbook, three books of prose and poetry and dozens of sites where my work can now be found. There is an enriching dialogue on the net. I suppose this is essentially ‘company by email.’ Email has its dangers, though; one must be sensitive to its use or you can be dumped with piles of garbage you don’t want to read.

I: Richard Long says that artists are map-makers of human consciousness and of the spiritual world as well as measurers and describers of the natural world. Do you agree?

P: Everyone’s life is a map and everyone makes maps. When I was in my teens I bought a religio-philosophical map that has guided my journey for over forty years now. I make my own map from this master-map. This map is used as the basis for my exploration. My poetry reveals just how I use this map.

I: How are your ideas born, where does the energy come from and how do they develop into poems? Do you know what you’re doing? Are you perfectly secure in your writing?

P: Ideas for poetry are born of intuition, there’s a lightness right at the start, a quickness, a feeling of “connection, of yes, of aha, there’s something here, this is good, I like this.” The poem is an effort at taking these feelings, this brightness and giving it form, development, substance, more than the airy-nothing, the vagueness, the potentiality which it is at that starting point and which it will be, if I don’t work on it and give it shape.

The energy comes from books, from experiences, from being in a room alone and being with others in social situations. Ideas come in a myriad of ways. The poem becomes a stopping point in my journey, a brief visible moment, a resting place in that same journey, a sustained note, a punctuation mark, a point I can look back on later in life in quite a different way than the normal memory trip. The whole exercise of writing the poem is usually quite spontaneous, quite fast, although on occasion the poem takes two or three hours to take form.

I feel a strong sense that I know what I am doing. I also have an equally strong sense of security. With each poem, or group of poems, I define the process more sharply, more definitively, more comprehensively. In writing poems I pay a lot of attention to what I am doing, to giving the process a description. I would say, looking back over what must be at least two million words now, that there is an ongoing poetic analysis of process, of content, of relationships between what I am doing and both myself, my Faith and my society which are the three corners of the geometric triangle that is my poetry.

The sense of security is not arrogance, superiority, or self-righteousness. It is a composite feeling that is firstly inspired by my religious commitment, the faith that is built on this commitment, something that is reflected in all the appropriate protocols of piety I know as a faithful petitioner and practitioner. It is also a feeling that also takes me out to sea, with my spirit wrung, with remorse on my wings, with an open wet world beyond which I do not always approach with courage, often with sadness, for I am aware of my cowardice, for I am human.

I: Would you go so far as to see your own life as your poetry?

P: Yes, I often feel I am the path which is outlined in my poetry. It is a line of movement between the many places I have travelled, the many experiences I have had. It is a path, a line, conditioned by my thoughts, feelings, indeed everything that has happened to me. Not all of it is down on paper, but what is not there will disappear into oblivion and be no more, eventually. What is there is my line; I walk my line. We all walk our own line; it is the easiest thing a human being can do to put our mark on a place—and the hardest! My words have a substantive actuality about them for my poems are autobiographical and I bring my society and my Faith into relation with my self. I don’t do this in all my poems but many of them I do.

Every work of art, every poem, has its own mysterious sense of purpose about it, except for the works of those, I suppose, who see their work as devoid of purpose. This purpose comes partly from the traces of energy used in the making of the work. There is an energy connected with the spiritual path. There is an energy in aloneness and its simplicity. Purpose is also connected with a withdrawal of energy and its defining, delimiting, function. Purpose also comes from the viewer’s own inner journey in relation to mine, to me, the provider of the poetry.

I try to keep all channels of sensitivity open, to experience things as keenly and immediately as possible and to explore as deeply into reality as I can. My poetry, in the end, should be a conveyor of this feeling ; for, as Pound once said, only emotion endures.

I: The novelist and critic William Gass said in an interview in the Paris Review in 1976 that there is no way of communicating inside your head but speech. He went on to elaborate by saying that if you can’t talk well to yourself, who can you talk to? You simply aren’t anybody. Some people, of course, get bored with their own talk; some don’t talk to themselves very much. Talk is essential to the human spirit. It is the human spirit. Speech. Not silence. That’s also Beckett’s point.

P: I certainly agree with the general gist of what Gass has to say, although I once read that Gass does not like 'gists'. But there is something to be said for contemplation; the sign of contemplation is silence. Writing is, for me, a form of talking to myself. Gass also said that: "it is probably impossible to teach anyone to be a good writer." I think he is right but that should not stop those who want to discuss the subject in a school or university from doing so.

I: Tell us a little about some of your thoughts on poetry.

P: Writing poetry is like finding your place in a room, in a group, on a street, in a town, in a state, in a country, in the world. Finding your place, bringing the physical things around you into the right, the most suitable, relationship. The process is dynamic; so is the process of writing poetry. You have to find the right set of words and when you find it, you move on to another poem, to another part of life. It’s like making everything your friend, making it familiar, even when you’ve never seen it before. You do the same with people, so you are comfortable wherever you go in the world, as long as you’re not freezing or roasting. The process of writing poetry is a poeticizing of your world, of a translation of the familiarization and the estrangement, yes, estrangement, because you can’t win it all. You are going to hurt, be hurt, feel alone, afraid, joyful, et cetera.

I: Do you always feel happy when writing poetry?

P: Most of the time is is an exercise in concentrated pleasure. Effort, my life, my world, come together in a pleasing mix. This is what keeps me at it day after day, year after year. Also, by the time I had started writing poetry seriously, I was tired of a lot of things in life. Poetry was clearly a new lease on life. I’m happy and relaxed when I write; occasionally, when something has got under my skin and I’m feeling sad, despondent, unhappy, or whatever, writing poetry is like a conduit for this negativity. I usually work it out, like someone else might do a physical workout. I do it also because it has deep meaning to me; the most profound, sublime feelings come to me when I work in the privacy of my chamber. I hope this sublimity comes through to the reader.

8 December 1999

I: William Carlos Williams once said that a poem is “the lifting of an environment to expression” and that the value of this exercise was to be found in the “minute organization of the words and the relationships.” Do you agree?

P: Of course, it’s simple; it’s obvious. Willaims said a great deal about poetry that makes a lot of sense. He said poetry was “a dramatic structure of attentive speech” or “a continuing act of attention .” Although this is also obvious, it is so important to say it. The very creative faculty, the very growth, of man is to be found in “extreme attention.” Blake, Yeats, Emerson would have totally agreed. The imagination focuses on some “thing” and produces a true account of the actual. In this true account he found, for himself and his readers, a radiant microcosm. This is what must be renewed, redressed, re-examined , reaffirmed, to make new poetry.

I: Do you think that what you are saying there is just another way of stateing that the truth in a poem is a kind of truth that is perennial but not archaic; or as Emerson put it once: poetry must be as new as the foam on a beach and as old as the rocks.

P: Yes that’s good. It is also another way of saying that there can’t be any rules in poetry; there can’t be any correct definition of poetry; you can’t say the way it should be like. It’s something like what John Coltrane does: there’s sound in his head and he has to get it out. He occupies a certain emotional territory; there is improvisaton and spur of the moment stuff. This is also part of poetry. It is all part of that refining, clarifying, intensifying, of the eternal moment in which we alone live with a mysterious force behind us, a force that some call imagination but I think it is a composite of imagination, memory, thought, insight, interpretation, the heaven of mystery, the riddle of life, creative thought, the vibration of utterance. It is a freeing of the bonds of banality or just a simple contrast with the ordinariness and simplicity of existence with all its enigmas, contradictions and difficulties.

I: Williams says the poet should “get to the revelations which will restore values and meanings to our starved lives.” Do this, he goes on, in the context of an attitude to the writing of poetry that it is “the only work.” Contemplation of “what is” and losing one’s life in writing poetry, is the secret of creativity and renewal. Be nothing and be unaffected by the results of your writing, he goes on. What do you think of this philosophy of poetry?

P: I think it is brilliant. I would not claim to be able to restore values to civilization. I think that is the function of the Baha’i Faith; of course my poetry can help, can play a small part, at this state of play, quite an indefineable part. Baha’u’llah talks about an attitude to self which emphasizes “powerlessness” and “nothingness.” “The secret of self-realization”, He says, “is self-forgetfulness.” Rodin and Rilke talk about “the work” in the same vein. I was very much influenced by Rilke; White told me about his Letters to a Young Poet. This idea and Rilke’s general philosophy had influenced me strongly by 1992 when I began writing poetry seriously and extensively.

I: Williams says that writing poetry is the perfecting of “the ability to record at the moment when the consciousness is enlarged by the sympathies and the unity of understanding which the imagination gives.” This, he says, is what it means to unify the experience. “Style”, he says, is a living statement, a motion of the person who has suffered and given the poem birth, a witnessing and an adjusting. “Form” involves reshaping, opening and the re-entry of attention or imagination.

P: Succinct, to the point. There are so many definitions of form and style. I like this one. There’s a pithy freshness to it. It places the emphasis on a personal realization of actuality, the actual events in one’s life or as one knows them to be in history. One tries to penetrate with poetry some crevice of understanding in a fresh and unique way. This gives a richly organic coherence to one’s work; it results in a constantly rediscovered life. This is how Williams puts it himself. And it expresses what I have been trying to do all these years.
I rather like what Williams says in the last paragraph of his book. He says that life is “the longest journey.” We all face that journey and we all face a “must.” We are all called in life and we all must respond. Sometimes the call and the response is distorted by fear or denial; sometimes the call is never heard at all, or it is heard so faintly and obscurely that anything that could be called a coherent and sustained response is never forthcoming. The poet is faced with a clear response, a simple ‘must.’ This is the primary meaning of my encounter with the actual world. This is how I have seen the ‘must.’ This is the description of my own particular “longest journey.”

William Gass has some useful things to say about style. In an interview in the Paris Review in July 1976. He said that if he was to write about his own writing he would in the end write another essay on style. He said that: "If I am anything as a writer, that is what I am: a stylist. I am not a writer of short stories or novels or essays or whatever. I am a writer, in general. I am interested in how one writes anything. So if I were to write about my own work, I would write about writing sentences.

23/2/'00 to 13/5/'15. ]]> Ron Price https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?14966-Another-Interview With Thanks to Laura Riding https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?13664-With-Thanks-to-Laura-Riding Fri, 06 Feb 2015 10:30:36 GMT AN ELOQUENT BREVITY Part 1: Laura (Riding) Jackson(1901-1991) was an American poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer whom I... AN ELOQUENT BREVITY

Part 1:

Laura (Riding) Jackson(1901-1991) was an American poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer whom I came to know about in the first years of my retirement after a 50 year student-and-paid-employment life: 1949 to 1999. In 1938 W.H. Auden called her "the only living philosophical poet, and in 1939 another American poet, Robert Fitzgerald, expressed the hope that with the 1938 publication of her Collected Poems, "the authority and the dignity of truth-telling, lost by poetry to science, may gradually be regained."1

For the last two days I have spent many hours reading about this most philosophical of poets who has come onto the radar of many writers and poets since the early 1990s, partly due to the extensive publication of her work which has continued since her death in 1991. I began reading and writing poetry seriously, myself, in the early 1990s. I first heard of Laura Riding back in the 1990s, but time and circumstance, responsibilities and health issues, prevented me from taking a serious look at her life and work.

Part 1.1:

Jack Blackmore, in a paper given at The Laura (Riding) Jackson Conference in 2010 expressed the view that: "There are affinities between Riding, Coleridge, and William Blake. There is a common optimism and conviction: that one’s self, one self, through the most intense scrutiny of and engagement with language and life, can take the measure of the universe."2 Blackmore included the following quotation from Coleridge to support that poet's affinity with Riding: "The Poet is not only the man who is made to solve the riddle of the Universe, but he is also the man who feels where it is not solved and this continually awakens his feelings …"-Coleridge, Lecture on Poetry, 12 December 1811.

Blackmore went on to say that "more than any poet in recent times Laura Riding conceived of her poems as a whole work, a universe."2 And so, too, do I in relation to what has become a vast corpus, a very large personal oeuvre. There are many aspects of Riding's philosophy of poetry, her view of writing, literature and life that provide parallels with my own way of going about my literary enterprise. It is for this reason that I write this prose-poetic piece.

Part 2:

Even in her earliest days as a poet in the 1920s, she felt that literature offered opportunity for the interpretation of individual experience as a contribution to the realisation of the highest aspirations of human existence.2 Her lifelong quest was for a way of right living, based on right speaking. Though serious in her dedication to finding solutions to the problems of human existence, she refused to be aligned with any 'isms,' insisting that human beings should abjure what is divisive and temporal and concentrate their efforts toward communicating to one another the innate spiritual knowledge that is their human legacy.1

To put this another way, "for this poet nothing but heart-felt meaning finally matters.’3 I came to an appreciation of literature in a much different way than Riding. The social sciences took my attention until my 30s; literature, both prose and poetry, made intellectual inroads into my life-narrative by degrees in my 30s and 40s. By my 50s my academic and literary agenda was packed-to-the-rafters in a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, headset and mindscape, panorama and prospect.

In the 1920s Riding wrote about what she called "a new race of poets...rough-edged and stalwart beings, pioneers equipped for both static ecstasy and the ability to progress into unexplored territory, possessing an extreme idealism, the belief in organic growth and an inner core of necessary meaning."4 She saw the poetic enterprise, at least for most of the years in the 1920s and 1930s, as a collaborative and pleasurable activity requiring fellow poets to adjust their interests to central themes and a unity of values, to sacrifice their individuality to a pervasive and unifying totality of poetic meaning.

These words had particular resonance for me since it was in the 1920s and 1930s that the first pioneers arose in response to Abdul-Baha's teaching Plan as outlined in His Tablets of the Divine Plan written during the Great War. This was a Plan I have come to be associated with for more than 60 years of my life. The entre deux guerres generation, sometimes known as the silent generation from the mid-20s to the early 1940s, was the first generation of pioneers to take part in that Plan. In the 1960s I became part of what was the third generation of pioneers. These words of Riding's were more than a little apt as a descriptor of "the new race of men" called forth in the Baha'i community to put that Plan into action. In the 1990s, after the death of Riding, I became one of that "new race of poets." Or so I liked to think. I thank Riding for helping me gain a helpful, a quite personally meaningful perspective on literature in general, poetry in particular, and especially the literary history of the last century.

Part 2.1:

Riding felt that poets were, by constitution and inclination, fragmented in a multitude of contrasting selves who present at any one time only a temporary approximation of meaning, and only a temporary but often, if not always, an unstable coordination of selves.5 The older I have got, and particularly as I got into my 60s and 70s, the more I became aware of the nature of the constitution that has carried me through life and the inclinations that have determined so much of what has happened to me; these contrasting, these fractured, and only partly coordinated selves have certainly been characterized by the temporary in relation to all sorts of activities and an evolving meaning structure in my life.

From the late 1920s to 1940 Riding worked closely in a fertile but volatile relationship with the prolific English poet, novelist, critic, and classicist Robert Graves(1895-1985). He had his own views of writing prose and poetry. He saw the writing of poetry, among other things, as "a complex experience in which the poet must always drag about the dead load of sense with him."5 These two poets collaborated in varying degrees of intensity and success for two decades.

Part 3:

There was what Riding called in her Collected Poems of 1938: “an uncovering of truth in writing poetry, a truth of so fundamental and general a kind that no other name besides poetry is adequate except truth?”5 In that same 1938 preface to her Collected Poems she wrote, “One reads to uncover to oneself something that would otherwise remain unknown—something that one feels it is important to know”5
"The goal of poetry to Riding," wrote Andrea Rexilius in her analysis of Riding's work, "is to reach the edge of our capacity to know ourselves, to lean as far outside of the body as is possible without collapsing in on the self. Poetry is a telescope, or a microscope, that focuses awareness of the body, and through the body focuses an awareness on self, not an individual self, but the 'self-ness of being', perhaps even a selflessness, a nothingness."6

Part 3.1:

There had developed in the 20th century, Riding observed, a distinction between audiences which on the one hand wanted their poetry real and grounded in the vernacular, so to speak, and on the other audiences which wanted poetry to be a transcendent practice of truth-telling, but in a different, a more elevated and unreal musical register. Riding came to the view before WW2 that both poetic registers or styles were examples of truth-telling. Keeping poetry colloquially real and grounded in the vernacular was one type of truth-telling.

This type involved ordinary men and women writing ordinary messages to the world. Words defined the essence of poetry, and its subject matter was just ordinary life; the emphasis was on meaning rather than a poetic artifice of language.

Part 3.2:

When just 61, in April 1962, Laura did a reading for the BBC. The reading involved her first formal and public statement of her reasons for renouncing poetry. She rejected, or renounced, poetry for many reasons; she came to see most of it as artifice, and artifice compromised truth-telling which she had previously seen as the major function of poetry. I was but 18, when Riding made this statement on the BBC. I was in the last months of my high school life, the last months of my adolescent baseball, hockey and football careers, and the first months of my romantic-erotic life. This was just before I left my home town and before I began my travelling-pioneering days for and in the Canadian Baha'i community; it was also just before the first signs of bipolar I disorder were apparent in my psycho-social life. The roller-coaster of my emotional life gradually settled-down by degrees and, by my 50s and 60s, it had settled-down sufficiently for me to engage in a literary-writing life. As I look back from the perspective of my 70s, I see the improved treatments for my mental-health issues, as an important factor in helping me develop my poetic, my literary, sensibility.

Part 4:

Riding came to see truth-telling as essentially a biographical process involving the finding and refining of her “real voice.” This real voice was found in her Brooklyn background; she came to feel by degrees throughout the 1940s and 1950s that, when she had previously written poetry, she had been putting-on an exaggerated voice; this voice was a substitution for what she came to see as her real voice, a voice expressed in her bio-social, bio-psychological, life and in her Polish-Jewish Brooklynese.

Riding continued throughout her life to explore what she regarded as the truth-potential of language, free from any of the artificial restrictions of poetic art. "My faith in poetry was at heart, and in the long run, a faith in language as the elementary wisdom", she wrote in 1976.5 I was just starting my three year stint at the University of Ballarat as a lecturer in the social sciences, and in the Ballarat Baha'i community as its chairman and secretary. My only son was also born during this time. I was, then, in my early 30s, and still battling with episodes of BPD. I knew nothing of Riding in the 1970s. I had not really begun to seriously engage in either studying poetry or writing it.

Part 4.1:

Riding came to feel that poetry disappoints its readers because “all is suffused with the light of drab poetic secularity.” She also questioned poetry as a craft because it was nearly always rooted in individualism’s “claim to self-sufficiency." "Is that all there is?", she asks. "Poets are just like Santa’s helpers tinkering with their toy-poems and constantly talking about 'process' as the 'natural and legitimate' concern of the poet.” Her final apprehension of the flawed nature of poetic utterance came as the result of an arduous intellectual journey that spanned at least two decades,1 the two decades that were my life, from the time my parents met in about 1940, until the early '60s when I began my travelling-and-pioneering for the Canadian Baha'i community.

In the 1960s and 1970s Riding's poetry became too abstract, too intellectual, too based in ideas for many poets and critics. “If your central motive as a writer is to put across ideas,” the American short story writer and essayist Steve Almond(1966-) stated, “write an essay.” The novelist and critic Stephen Koch warned that poets should not be too intellectual. The result of these views among the many views of others, Riding thought, was that knowledge had been pretty much removed from poetry. Poetry was sidelined into creative writing departments at universities. Sticking poetry into creative writing departments was part of Riding’s critique of much of modern poetry. Poets who focus heavily on craft-making, and who court verbal sensuosity at the expense of truth-telling, these are the poets in the creative writing departments.3

Part 5:

In 1995, four years after her passing, and fours year before my early retirement, my sea-change, after a student-and-paid-employment-life of 50 years: 1949 to 1999, the following words of Riding's were found in the London Review of Books:7

"Another way of describing my point of view is to say that I am trying to function in the field of human criticism rather than in that of literary criticism......During my career as a poet I became increasingly an advocate of poetry." In the final stages of her poetic career which had ended by the 1940s, she claimed and she believed that "poetry was the way of truth, and to truth, the ‘of’ and the ‘to’ being mingled in my mind in a fond hope that somewhere along the way approach would turn into arrival."

"Lest my use of ‘truth’ in the preceding sentence throws a religious mist over my meaning, let me recast my phrasing: I believed that poetry was the way of speaking true and the way to speaking true, both a path of the ideal in language and a place of its realisation. This double focus was the result of my not having a categorically literary conception of poetry."

Riding came eventually to believe, certainly by the 1960s if not well before, that "there was something ineradicably wrong with the activity of poetry, and that this was reflected in poetry, the matter, as I call it. I arrived at this belief not from disapproval of the cultivation of extraordinary linguistic powers to which poets are professionally dedicated, not with any priggish bias towards the plain-ordinary verbal level, but in the persuasion that poetry involves a distortion of a natural human ambition of linguistic self-fulfilment, and that poets delude themselves into feeling that they attain a verbal serene above the murk of commonplace articulateness, and that they obstruct the general vision of human linguistic potentialities with the appearance of doing so."8

Part 5.1:

"As a poet," wrote Riding, "I am a participant in a worldly epic in which significance can be found in living and dying, together with everything and everyone else. My higher self deals with this epic. Everyday language and discourse was just so much social rhythmic clutter." "Poetry," she wrote in 1962, "is not the natural spiritual speech of human beings....she called this kind of speech in poetry "linguistically freakish."

"In the ordinary way of speaking, and the ordinary way of writing, called ‘prose’, which is modelled on this ordinariness, there is an obvious murkiness; the ‘good’ speaker or prose-writer is one who is able to keep this murkiness minimal. In the poetic way of writing, which is at once a non-ordinary way of speaking, there is no escape from murkiness, but such murkiness is concealable; the ‘good’ poet is one who keeps this murkiness so inconspicuous that it makes no overt problem for his or her or anybody else’s intelligence."

Part 6:

Riding wrote that her concern above all was to “the conduct of life itself.” The poet is called upon to remind people what the universe really looks and feels like. This is the function of the language of the poet; this is what language means: the poet must use language in a fresh way or even invent new language. As the poet reads or writes, the audience-readers, ideally, become the poet, and the poet the audience. They are all suddenly one. Here the reader touches the poet and vice versa.9

"Much of the magical effect that poetry gives of rendering everything it touches pellucid comes from the necessity of compression that it imposes. The impossibility of pausing in poetry, except in order to make sense and clarity, causes many a set of words actually deficient in linguistic workmanship to pass for an eloquent brevity.-Ron Price with thanks to:1Elizabeth Friedmann in the preface of A Mannered Grace: The Life of Laura (Riding) Jackson, Persea Books, Inc., 2005; 2Jack Blackmore in a paper given at The Laura (Riding) Jackson Conference in 2010; 3 Introduction to A Selection of the Poems of Laura Riding, 1994, p3; 4Carla Billitteri, "Riding-Graves: The Meaning of Collaboration", internet site; 5Laura Riding, Collected Works, 1938, Preface; 6Andrea Rexilius, "Laura (Riding) Jackson: Against the Commodity of the Poem (part 1), essays, features', Nottingham Trent University, 22/2/'14; 7Laura Riding, "The Road To, In, And Away From, Poetry", Reader, p. 251; 8Laura Riding "The Promise of Words" in the London Review of Books(Vol. 17, No. 17, 7 September 1995), and 9Benjamin Hollander, "Looking for (Mrs) Laura (Riding) Jackson, the anti-social people’s poet, from Jamaica (Queens) to Woodruff Avenue (Brooklyn)" in The Brooklyn Rail: Critical Perspectives on Arts, Politics and Culture, 14/7/'15.

Part 6.1:

Making everything I touch
pellucid, clear, bright, plain,
simple, luminous, explicit;
comprehensible, transparent,
pure, limpid, translucent, and
distinct, perspicuous.........one
can but try as one engages in
in the act of compression, and
a so very eloquent brevity!!!!1

1 In A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 1927, p.84, co-authored by Robert Graves, she/they write: "The quarrel now is between the reading public and the modernist poet over the definition of clearness. Both agree that perfect clearness is the end of poetry, but the reading public insists that no poetry is clear except what it can understand at a glance; the modernist poet insists that the clearness of which the poetic mind is capable demands thought and language of a far greater sensitiveness and complexity than the enlarged reading public will permit it to use. To remain true to his conception of what poetry is, he has therefore to run the risk of seeming obscure or freakish, of having no reading public; even of writing what the reading public refuses to call poetry, in order to be a poet.

I have become aware of this problem, the problem of the reading public, in the last three decades, 1985 to 2015, when most of my poetry has been written. One of my responses has been to remove as much of the obscurity from my work as possible, but still maintaining a certain academic, serious, somewhat elite-and-exclusive, elevated style and content.

Ron Price
2/2/'15 to 6 /2/'15. ]]> Ron Price https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?13664-With-Thanks-to-Laura-Riding THOMAS MANN: LIVING TO WRITE not WRITING TO LIVE https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?13653-THOMAS-MANN-LIVING-TO-WRITE-not-WRITING-TO-LIVE Fri, 30 Jan 2015 03:14:15 GMT Part 1: During the years 1999 to 2005, I retired by stages after a 50 year student-working life from: FT, PT and casual/volunteer work. It was an... Part 1:

During the years 1999 to 2005, I retired by stages after a 50 year student-working life from: FT, PT and casual/volunteer work. It was an early retirement at the age of 55. I had come to find the demands of job and family, Baha'i community and society in general with their 60 to 80 hour weeks of nose-to-the-grindstone stuff more than I could cope with. I remember, in the last months of employment taking monthly shots of testosterone. The decline in testosterone levels that occurs by aging is sometimes called "andropause" in men, as a comparison to the decline in estrogen that comes with menopause in women

In the first years of my sea-change, as an early retirement is sometimes called, I also went on a new cocktail of medications for my bipolar disorder and this added to my sense of well-being and gave me better sleeping patterns. I found that I was able to watch a marvelous range of educational and visual material on TV for, perhaps, two hours a day. I had drawn on TV, video and film resources as stimulus in my work as a community and classroom teacher, adult educator, tutor and lecturer in the years 1967 to 2003; I had watched my share of TV and cinema in the years 1948 to 1967 as a child, adolescent and young adult in that first generation, 1950 to 1970, to be able to enjoy both mediums.

One docudrama I watched in 2007, just as I was about to go on two old-age pensions at the age of 65, was made by a German television director Heinrich Breloer: The Manns: Novel of a Century. It was aired on German television in 2001. It is the saga of an extraordinary family that stamped Germany, its culture and its era like no other. Six hours of viewing, it examined the history of Germany’s most celebrated literary family: the Manns. This program made its TV debut in Australia in 2007 in the early years (60-65) of my late adulthood as human development theorists define the years 60 to 80.

Part 2:

Thomas Mann, his writing and his career have interested me since I first come across his diaries in the 1990s while still a teacher in Western Australia. Mann's diaries, unsealed in 1975, tell of his struggles with his bisexuality, and they came into my reading when I was teaching English literature to matriculation students in the city of Perth. Like many subjects that came across my desk and my reading as a student, as a teacher and as a member of society living through the tempestuous decades from the 1960s through the 1990s, my study of the life and writing of Thomas Man had to go on hold. This man had to be put in the pending, impending, in the “to be examined later in life” category.

This TV mini-series-docudrama, renewed, awakened and enhanced my interest, precipitated and refreshed my curiosity, about a life that was “a striking example of the repeated puberty characteristic of genius.”1 These were the words of the great philosopher Goethe. In literary technique as well as in the work of the rational faculty, Mann experienced a richness, a daring and a purely intellectual excitement to a greater depth and with much more significance than has been generally realized.

Mann’s work continues to be examined and reread, as though the key to it remains in some furtive, cloaked part of his dark and exotic psychosexual being. ‘It is as well,’ Mann wrote in Death in Venice, ‘that the world knows only a fine piece of work and not its origins.’ The ability to entertain conflicting points of view, essential for a novelist, rendered him incapable of personal intimacy or loyalty so wrote one reviewer.2

Part 3:

Thomas Mann wrote about death obsessively; his son Klaus allowed the aura of death to enter his own spirit. As early as 1932 Klaus wrote in his diary that he had thought about suicide. In February 1933 he wrote: ‘In the mornings, nothing but the wish to die. When I calculate what I have to lose, it seems negligible. No chance of a really happy relationship. Probably no chance of literary fame in the near future . . . Death can only be regarded as deliverance.’3

I took an interest in this due to my own dance with the topic of death that seems to have been linked to my bipolar disorder.--Ron Price with appreciation to 1Henry Hatfield in Thomas Mann, New Directions, 1962(1951); 2 Theodore Ziolkowski's review of Thomas Mann: A Biography, Ronald Hayman, Illustrated, 700 pages, NY, 1995, and 3 “I Could Sleep with All of Them,” Colm Tóibín, a review of In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story by Andrea Weiss in the London Review of Books, 6 November 2008.

Part 4:

Even with my well-developed,
highly enhanced skepticism
which nearly fifty-years of
television watching1 & seventy
years of living has produced in
the application of my rational
faculty to life's complexities......

Even though I am more than a little
aware of the fundamental difference
between: stage, printed page and TV,
all of which have some unmistakable
politico-social & potentially distorting
point of view arranged for an audience;

Even though I knew little about this figure:2
his diaries, his novels, his letters, his life,
his eloquent and outstanding humanism,
his courageous espousal of democracy,
his transcription of the raw materials of
his experience & personal history into form,
his literary and autobiographical writings
as novels, his utter-productive absorption
in self and society, his observational skills,
his transcription of the dull, the quotidian
aspects of existence with a clarity and his
pitiless gaze, his relentless reporting as well
as invention anchoring his imagination and
his discomfort in the soil of fact & fiction,
his very living to write, not writing to live........3

In spite of all of this—my interest was piqued
about a man who wrote three pages every day,
who read ravenously, who sought harmony
among the peoples of the world, who tried
to express the tenderness, beauty and the
profundity of life; who strove to create an
inner unity out of all his creative powers in
the great experiment that is existence itself.4

He was, indeed, a world citizen, an heir to
Goethe, Heine and Kant whose writing was
a type of autobiography so different than my
own, and who knew he was a writer when he
was still young; whereas I had to wait by a
series of steps & phases, degrees & epochs
for the last decade of my middle-age & my
late adulthood as 1 of the models of human
development used by psychologists call the
years from 60 to 80 in the human lifespan!!

You were, like me, far removed from the
political agitation and distraction of the
times, and you faced yourself and your
humanity by concentrating on your work
contributing, as I do, to the causes you
held dear until your death in 1955 when
my childhood was ending, as my life's
adolescence just about to begin with its
controlled post-puberal eroticism. 5

1 1950-1957, and 1977 to 2015
2 The German writer Thomas Mann
3 Peter Gay, “A Life of Thomas Mann,” a review of Thomas Mann: The Making of an Artist by Richard Winston, A.A. Knopf, NY, 300 pages, in The New York Times, 3 January 1982.
4 Associated Press, “Thomas Mann Dies At 80,” 13 August 1956 in The New York Times On The Web.
5 In 1955 I was just 11 years old, at the start of my adolescent baseball and hockey careers as well as my pre-puberal eroticism. At the age of 12 I kissed my first girl.

Ron Price
19/8/’08 to 30/1/’15.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE RIGHT MOMENT

On May 3rd 1937 Time Magazine reported the following item: “Last fortnight in Manhattan Dr. Thomas Mann, the greatest of exiled German writers, finally spoke out against the Nazi regime in Germany. The right moment had come at last. Mann started his 12-day visit to the U. S. by striking back with a stinging denunciation of Nazi censorship; he carried on his attack with lectures, mass meetings, an impressive barrage of speeches and statements. Dr. Mann's most telling blast was in his pamphlet, An Exchange of Letters, which critics recognized as belonging to a history of classic literary rebukes, in this case a rebuke of German universities for not opposing Nazism-Ron Price with thanks to Time Magazine, Monday, May 3, 1937.

The same week that Time Magazine’s article on Mann appeared, Shoghi Effendi, the then appointed leader of the international Baha'i community and resident in Haifa Palestine, the Baha'i spiritual and administrative centre, sent a cablegram to the 1937 National Convention of the Baha’is of the United States and Canada informing them of the gift conferred upon them by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá twenty years before in the Tablets of the Divine Plan.

That gift was to “prosecute uninterruptedly” the teaching campaign inaugurated at the Convention the week before. Shoghi Effendi advised the Convention to extend their sessions in order to formulate a feasible Seven Year Plan.-Ron Price with thanks to Shoghi Effendi, Messages To America: 1932-1946, Wilmette, 1947, p.9.

The time had indeed arrived
to speak out for you and they
had done much speaking out
already in different ways as
bidden by those mysterious
dispensations of artistic and
spiritual providence which
seem to affect some people
more than others like a call
of destiny which inhabits
some souls, but not others.

Could we and they take sober
stock of ourselves and gird up
our loins for the endeavours
ahead? Well, we did and they
did and the Plan was completed,
the war was prosecuted and the
victory was won, the preliminary
task was accomplished to enable
my rising generation to labour to
fulfil destiny in the century ahead.1

1 Shoghi Effendi, Messages To America: 1932-1946, Wilmette, 1947, p.13.

Ron Price
17/4/'07 to 30/1/'15.
-------------------------------------------- ]]> Ron Price https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?13653-THOMAS-MANN-LIVING-TO-WRITE-not-WRITING-TO-LIVE Arthur Rimbaud: A Personal Reflection https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?13606-Arthur-Rimbaud-A-Personal-Reflection Sun, 21 Dec 2014 09:03:38 GMT RIMBAUD Part 1: One hundred years after the death of Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud(1854-1891), a French poet, I was just beginning to find my way... RIMBAUD

Part 1:

One hundred years after the death of Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud(1854-1891), a French poet, I was just beginning to find my way in the world of poetry. Rimbaud influenced modern literature and arts, inspired various musicians, and prefigured surrealism. He started writing poems at a very young age while still in primary school, and stopped completely before he turned 21. He was mostly creative in his late teens. His "genius, its flowering, explosion and sudden extinction, still astonishes."1-Ron Price with thanks to 1Cecil Hackett, Rimbaud: A Critical Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, (1981).

In 1991, on the 100th anniversary of Rimbaud's death, I was teaching English Literature at a polytechnic in Western Australia and had begun to turn to studying and writing poetry. Unlike Rimbaud I did not really find my home in poetry until well into my middle age, and after I had turned away from novel-writing. I also turned toward poetry as several fires were also beginning to go out in my career-life, my sex-life and my emotional life. By 1991 I was fully compliant on my medications for bipolar disorder. In these last two decades my emotional life has gone through a series of smoothing-out of the edges due to changes in my medications. There were some difficult transitions but, as I write these words, my intellectual-emotional-sensory world has become more balanced than in all the previous stages and phases of my life-narrative.

Part 2:

I gradually came to know more about this French poet in the last two decades as I studied more and more of the western intellectual-poetic tradition. But Rimbaud's work is far too eccentric, wild, and lacking in common sense for my liking. The French poet Paul Valery made this same point in Graham Robb's book, Rimbaud, New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
I find that making comparisons and contrasts between myself and other poets provides insights and understandings into my own life and my own poetic work. It is this desire that has led to this particular prose-poem and many others of a similar nature.

Rimbaud, like me, was a restless soul who traveled on three continents. I, too, had a restless quality especially in my young adulthood. I traveled extensively on two continents from my 20s to my 50s; in later life, after taking an early retirement at the age of 55, I traveled briefly in Europe and the Middle East.

I had bohemian and libertine tendencies in my late teens and early 20s, but they were nothing like those of this French poet whose tendencies continued to a wide range of excesses; he died before he was 40. My tendencies to excess were largely curtailed, muted, conventionalised, by my two marriages, my career in the teaching profession, medications for my mental health problems, and my religious proclivities by sensible and insensible degrees over several decades.

Rimbaud's mother was authoritarian and controlling. He ran away from her as soon as he could. My mother, on the other hand, was kind and understanding; indeed, she was a liberating and encouraging force in my life. Still, as I look back to my early 20s, it seemed that I had to break the umbilical cord, and it was not easy. My publishing life was just beginning in my late 30s as Rimbaud was heading into a hole for those who speak no more, as that prolific Iranian figure, the Bab, put it so succinctly.

Part 3:

Rimbaud's poetic philosophy had several facets quite unlike my approach to poetry. "The idea," he stated, "is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses." Any derangement of my senses, which was the result of my bipolar disorder, was not something I wanted to replicate and encourage and, by the age of 24, I began a lifetime of medications that kept my sensory experience in the bounds of normality.

"Being a real poet involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet," so wrote Rimbaud. "I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer," he continued; "the poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. To be a seer he also must experience every form of love, of suffering, and of madness.

The poet must search himself, consume all the poisons in him, and keep only their quintessence. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed, and the great learned one, among men."

Part 3.1:

"Only then will be he arrive at the unknown because he has cultivated his own soul, which was rich to begin with, more than any other man! He reaches the unknown; and even if, crazed, he ends up by losing the understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die charging through those unutterable, unnamable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where he has succumbed."2-Ron Price with thanks to 2Wikipedia, 21/12/'14.

Part 4:

I can go with you, Arthur,
on some of your ideas, but
my approach to unknowns
in life has taken a different
course with senses firmly in
tact, and not at all deranged.
I, too, will die charging into
and through my visions and
all those named & unnamed
things.....And, yes, Arthur...
there is a madness in it all,
but the world knows much
more about madness now.

I have had to deal with the
poisons you mention, but
now I only keep a little of
their quintessence as I go
into the evening of my life.

Ron Price
21/12/'14. ]]> Ron Price https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?13606-Arthur-Rimbaud-A-Personal-Reflection John Ashbery: Some Personal Reflections https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?13579-John-Ashbery-Some-Personal-Reflections Sat, 29 Nov 2014 04:09:11 GMT JOHN ASHBERY Part 1: Stephen Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English, has compared the now famous poet John Ashbery(1927- ) to T. S.... JOHN ASHBERY

Part 1:

Stephen Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English, has compared the now famous poet John Ashbery(1927- ) to T. S. Eliot, calling Ashbery "the last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible." Ashbery's ncreasing critical recognition by the 1970s transformed him from an obscure avant-garde experimentalist into one of America's most important poets, though still one of its most controversial.

I am in the group who has always and at least, thusfar, found him incomprehensible. He and his work intrigue me more and more since I first came across him while teaching English Literature in the 1990s to matriculation students in Perth Western Australia and now, in these years of my retirement from the world of FT, PT and casual-paid employment: 2006 to 2014.

The play of the human mind, which is the subject of a great many of his poems, is also the subject of my poems. Ashbery once said that his goal was "to produce a poem that the critic cannot even talk about." I, too, find it difficult to talk about his poetry, but I talk about what others say and have written about his work because I find their talk, their writing, throws light, in an indirect sort of way, on my pieces of poetic-writing.

Part 2:

John Ashbery's poetry is about the experience of having subjective experience: Ashbery’s poetry is about 'aboutness'. This is an obscure way of putting it, but Ashbery’s ways are obscure. My poetry is also about my subjective experience, but in quite a very different sort of way to Ashbery's. Both he and I recognise that poetry is a vehicle for thinking about mental action; his poems live in the history of poetry the way a turtle lives in its shell. I am not sure how my poems live in the history of poetry. Time will tell when I leave this mortal coil; for now, though, I and my work are as obscure in the fame and celebrity world as Ashbery's poetry is obscure in popular culture.

Though he has always had a goofy and difficult side, Ashbery is one of the great poetic explorers of the human interior, diving into the human cognitive wreck and returning with weird phenomenological salvage. On the cover of his second, highly disjunctive, book, The Tennis Court Oath, he announced: ‘I attempt to use words abstractly, as an abstract painter would use paint.’

That book of poetry came out in 1962, the year I wrote my first poem at the age of 18. That same year I: entered matriculation studies, brought my eight year baseball, hockey and football careers to an end, went a little further in the intimate world of sex than I had done to that point in my adolescent life, and began my travelling-pioneering life for the Canadian Baha'i community.

Part 3:

Not a straightforwardly autobiographical or confessional poet, Ashbery has kept his real self withdrawn from the poems. Both W.H. Auden and Marianne Moore, with their ironically projected and protected poetic personae, have been important in this respect and they are acknowledged by Ashbery as major influences. Ashbery clearly does not revel in self-promotion.

Although I do not aim at self-promotion, my work is explicitly autobiographical, and mildly confessional. Ashbery’s poetry has always accepted the aspiration of music toward a degree of formal perfection and toward maintaining an air of making sense without incurring the obligation of any particular meaning. That is also part of the aim in his poetry.

Helen Vendler, the famous poetry critic, sees the development of ‘poetry’ as a form of re-negotiation of the self’s relationship with shifting ‘reality.' She is interested in the nature of renegotiation itslef rather than in the terms arrived at in the end. Vendler says that most contemporary American poetry wants to offer ‘an interior state clarified in language’.

In Ashbery’s case the wordage trembles with a perpetual delicacy that suggests meaning without doing anything so banal as to actually attempt to introduce meaning and narrative, direction and purpose. Poetic syntax for Ashbery is constructed to express, with a certain intensity, a notion of the meaningful. But it does not actually convey any meaning. My poetry, too, is a continuous renegotiation of self with the shifting reality of existence, although I do not eschew meaning.

Part 4:

Ashbery’s poetry is warmly admired by that erudite Harold Bloom(1930-), the American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. Ashbery's work perfectly illustrates Bloom’s own thesis that ‘the meaning of a poem is another poem.’ The ghost or shadow poetry of that other famous poet of recent times, Wallace Stevens, as well as Ashbery among others, can equally claim the title of art, but that claim is based upon the premise that: we can never see the object or the poem as it really is; we can never quite know what we see or see what we know.

Such art in modern times is born from a uniquely American mixture of at least two influences: (i) the metaphysical climate of Coleridge’s, of Wordsworth’s and of Shelley’s poetry as transmuted by Thoreau and Emerson; and (ii) the scientific climate of physics and semantics which has de-stabilised the confidences of art. The American poet knows that nothing exists on its own and in its own self; Heisenberg’s electrons cannot be objectively observed because the act of observation changes their nature. Such mental attitudes produce their own techniques, which rapidly become as conventionalised as any other attitudes in the history of poetry.

Part 5:

John Berryman and Robert Lowell were great contemporary poetic narrators who I came across long before Ashbery; they were compulsive tellers of stories about the self, and their style was sharply and wholly comprehensive, comprehensible, and perfectly expressing what Berryman’s mentor R.P.
Blackmur called ‘the matter in hand’, as well as ‘adding to the stock of available reality’. This is not where Ashbery is at. His stories do not add to the stock of available reality and, if it is argued that they do, they do so in a highly complex and highly convoluted way.

I have begun to read Ashbery's prose, and I've had much more success with it than with his poetry. Ashbery's art criticism has been collected in the 1989 volume Reported Sightings, Art Chronicles 1957-1987, edited by the poet David Bergman. This prose came onto the market just as I was settling-down to teaching a range of humanities subjects at a Polytechnic in Perth Western Australia.

I have no intentions of trying to read his novel, A Nest of Ninnies. I have never been a novel reader at the best of times, and especially not now in the evening of my life. I do not intend to have a look at his several plays which he wrote in his 20s and 30s, three of which have been collected in Three Plays (1978). Ashbery's Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University were published as Other Traditions in 2000.

A larger collection of his prose writings, Selected Prose came out in 2005. I'm on my way through these works. His poetry volume Where shall I wander? appeared in 2005. In 2008, his Collected Poems 1956–1987 was published as part of the Library of America series. But they will both go unread.-Ron Price with thanks to 1several reviews of Ashbery's work in the London Review of Books, 28/11/'14, and 2that useful encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

Part 6:

Some people find my poetry
strange but, compared to this
work of John Ashbery I'm as
clear as the sun at noon-day.

I, too, have been writing for a
half a century, but, compared
to this poet, I am an unknown
poet about as obscure as this
poet's incomprehensible work.

Some find him maddeningly
beautiful....like some diarist
with an intriguing charm &
an elliptical text with some
psychic history implicit in
his multitude of metaphors.

He is like an autobiographer
in an abstract form telling us
where we are and where he is.
Sadly, he's so indecipherable
in his obscurity; he perplexes,
neither serenades nor comforts,
provides no vision or chronicle
of our time as he thrives on the
oddities, slang, slogans, jargon
of our age, difficult to penetrate.1

1 Helen Vendler, "The Democratic Eye," The New York Review of Books, 29/3/'07. This is a review of A Worldly Country: New Poems by John Ashbery.

Ron Price
29 November 2014 ]]> Ron Price https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?13579-John-Ashbery-Some-Personal-Reflections John Ashbery: Some Personal Reflections https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?13578-John-Ashbery-Some-Personal-Reflections Sat, 29 Nov 2014 04:08:30 GMT JOHN ASHBERY Part 1: Stephen Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English, has compared the now famous poet John Ashbery(1927- ) to T. S.... JOHN ASHBERY

Part 1:

Stephen Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English, has compared the now famous poet John Ashbery(1927- ) to T. S. Eliot, calling Ashbery "the last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible." Ashbery's ncreasing critical recognition by the 1970s transformed him from an obscure avant-garde experimentalist into one of America's most important poets, though still one of its most controversial.

I am in the group who has always and at least, thusfar, found him incomprehensible. He and his work intrigue me more and more since I first came across him while teaching English Literature in the 1990s to matriculation students in Perth Western Australia and now, in these years of my retirement from the world of FT, PT and casual-paid employment: 2006 to 2014.

The play of the human mind, which is the subject of a great many of his poems, is also the subject of my poems. Ashbery once said that his goal was "to produce a poem that the critic cannot even talk about." I, too, find it difficult to talk about his poetry, but I talk about what others say and have written about his work because I find their talk, their writing, throws light, in an indirect sort of way, on my pieces of poetic-writing.

Part 2:

John Ashbery's poetry is about the experience of having subjective experience: Ashbery’s poetry is about 'aboutness'. This is an obscure way of putting it, but Ashbery’s ways are obscure. My poetry is also about my subjective experience, but in quite a very different sort of way to Ashbery's. Both he and I recognise that poetry is a vehicle for thinking about mental action; his poems live in the history of poetry the way a turtle lives in its shell. I am not sure how my poems live in the history of poetry. Time will tell when I leave this mortal coil; for now, though, I and my work are as obscure in the fame and celebrity world as Ashbery's poetry is obscure in popular culture.

Though he has always had a goofy and difficult side, Ashbery is one of the great poetic explorers of the human interior, diving into the human cognitive wreck and returning with weird phenomenological salvage. On the cover of his second, highly disjunctive, book, The Tennis Court Oath, he announced: ‘I attempt to use words abstractly, as an abstract painter would use paint.’

That book of poetry came out in 1962, the year I wrote my first poem at the age of 18. That same year I: entered matriculation studies, brought my eight year baseball, hockey and football careers to an end, went a little further in the intimate world of sex than I had done to that point in my adolescent life, and began my travelling-pioneering life for the Canadian Baha'i community.

Part 3:

Not a straightforwardly autobiographical or confessional poet, Ashbery has kept his real self withdrawn from the poems. Both W.H. Auden and Marianne Moore, with their ironically projected and protected poetic personae, have been important in this respect and they are acknowledged by Ashbery as major influences. Ashbery clearly does not revel in self-promotion.

Although I do not aim at self-promotion, my work is explicitly autobiographical, and mildly confessional. Ashbery’s poetry has always accepted the aspiration of music toward a degree of formal perfection and toward maintaining an air of making sense without incurring the obligation of any particular meaning. That is also part of the aim in his poetry.

Helen Vendler, the famous poetry critic, sees the development of ‘poetry’ as a form of re-negotiation of the self’s relationship with shifting ‘reality.' She is interested in the nature of renegotiation itslef rather than in the terms arrived at in the end. Vendler says that most contemporary American poetry wants to offer ‘an interior state clarified in language’.

In Ashbery’s case the wordage trembles with a perpetual delicacy that suggests meaning without doing anything so banal as to actually attempt to introduce meaning and narrative, direction and purpose. Poetic syntax for Ashbery is constructed to express, with a certain intensity, a notion of the meaningful. But it does not actually convey any meaning. My poetry, too, is a continuous renegotiation of self with the shifting reality of existence, although I do not eschew meaning.

Part 4:

Ashbery’s poetry is warmly admired by that erudite Harold Bloom(1930-), the American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. Ashbery's work perfectly illustrates Bloom’s own thesis that ‘the meaning of a poem is another poem.’ The ghost or shadow poetry of that other famous poet of recent times, Wallace Stevens, as well as Ashbery among others, can equally claim the title of art, but that claim is based upon the premise that: we can never see the object or the poem as it really is; we can never quite know what we see or see what we know.

Such art in modern times is born from a uniquely American mixture of at least two influences: (i) the metaphysical climate of Coleridge’s, of Wordsworth’s and of Shelley’s poetry as transmuted by Thoreau and Emerson; and (ii) the scientific climate of physics and semantics which has de-stabilised the confidences of art. The American poet knows that nothing exists on its own and in its own self; Heisenberg’s electrons cannot be objectively observed because the act of observation changes their nature. Such mental attitudes produce their own techniques, which rapidly become as conventionalised as any other attitudes in the history of poetry.

Part 5:

John Berryman and Robert Lowell were great contemporary poetic narrators who I came across long before Ashbery; they were compulsive tellers of stories about the self, and their style was sharply and wholly comprehensive, comprehensible, and perfectly expressing what Berryman’s mentor R.P.
Blackmur called ‘the matter in hand’, as well as ‘adding to the stock of available reality’. This is not where Ashbery is at. His stories do not add to the stock of available reality and, if it is argued that they do, they do so in a highly complex and highly convoluted way.

I have begun to read Ashbery's prose, and I've had much more success with it than with his poetry. Ashbery's art criticism has been collected in the 1989 volume Reported Sightings, Art Chronicles 1957-1987, edited by the poet David Bergman. This prose came onto the market just as I was settling-down to teaching a range of humanities subjects at a Polytechnic in Perth Western Australia.

I have no intentions of trying to read his novel, A Nest of Ninnies. I have never been a novel reader at the best of times, and especially not now in the evening of my life. I do not intend to have a look at his several plays which he wrote in his 20s and 30s, three of which have been collected in Three Plays (1978). Ashbery's Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University were published as Other Traditions in 2000.

A larger collection of his prose writings, Selected Prose came out in 2005. I'm on my way through these works. His poetry volume Where shall I wander? appeared in 2005. In 2008, his Collected Poems 1956–1987 was published as part of the Library of America series. But they will both go unread.-Ron Price with thanks to 1several reviews of Ashbery's work in the London Review of Books, 28/11/'14, and 2that useful encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

Part 6:

Some people find my poetry
strange but, compared to this
work of John Ashbery I'm as
clear as the sun at noon-day.

I, too, have been writing for a
half a century, but, compared
to this poet, I am an unknown
poet about as obscure as this
poet's incomprehensible work.

Some find him maddeningly
beautiful....like some diarist
with an intriguing charm &
an elliptical text with some
psychic history implicit in
his multitude of metaphors.

He is like an autobiographer
in an abstract form telling us
where we are and where he is.
Sadly, he's so indecipherable
in his obscurity; he perplexes,
neither serenades nor comforts,
provides no vision or chronicle
of our time as he thrives on the
oddities, slang, slogans, jargon
of our age, difficult to penetrate.1

1 Helen Vendler, "The Democratic Eye," The New York Review of Books, 29/3/'07. This is a review of A Worldly Country: New Poems by John Ashbery.

Ron Price
29 November 2014 ]]> Ron Price https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?13578-John-Ashbery-Some-Personal-Reflections An explosive prodigality https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?13521-An-explosive-prodigality Wed, 15 Oct 2014 05:16:47 GMT AN EXPLOSIVE PRODIGALITY The following prose-poem arose is a result of reading a review of The Book of Disquiet published posthumously in 1982 as... AN EXPLOSIVE PRODIGALITY

The following prose-poem arose is a result of reading a review of The Book of Disquiet published posthumously in 1982 as I was beginning that portion of my life north of the tropic of Capricorn in Australia. The work is by Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935). It is a fragmentary lifetime project which was left unedited by the author. He introduced his book as a "factless autobiography."1

This volume was reviewed by George Steiner in The Observer on 3 June 2001 just as I was settling down into my retirement years and beginning the reinvention of myself as a writer and author, poet and publisher, online blogger and journalist. The book was published by Penguin and at 550 pages it is a useful resource for writers like myself.

Francis George Steiner(1929), is a French-born American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist, and educator. He has written extensively about the relationship between language, literature and society, and the impact of the Holocaust. An article in The Guardian described Steiner as a "polyglot and polymath", saying that he is "often credited with recasting the role of the critic".

Part 1:

I did not come across this review until 14 October 2014, the epi-centre of spring in the Antipodes, as I was completing the third month of my 71st year with the evening of my life galloping by on hurried-wing with the poet Andrew Marvell's chariot of time hurrying near and "yonder all before me lying the vast deserts of eternity."2 At other times that chariot plodded along at a pleasurable and leisurely pace.

Steiner's review opened as follows: "Was 18 March 1914 the most extraordinary date in modern literature? On that day, Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessoa took a sheet of paper, went to a tall chest of drawers in his room and began to write standing up, as he customarily did. 'I wrote 30-odd poems in a kind of trance whose nature I cannot define. It was the triumphant day of my life, and it would be impossible to experience such a day again.'"

Steiner, one of the world's more brilliant reviewers, continued: "Other poets, notably Rilke, have experienced such hours of explosive prodigality. But Pessoa's case is different and, probably, unique. There are a range of personae, of quite distinct personalities, of voices, which are found in this book. The first set of poems in this book is by one 'Alberto Caeiro.' Pessoa refers to him as: 'my Master who appeared inside me'. The next six were composed by Pessoa struggling against the 'inexistence' of Caeiro. But Caeiro had disciples, one of whom, 'Ricardo Reis', contributed further poems. A fourth individual 'burst impetuously on the scene. In one fell swoop, at the typewriter, without hesitation or correction, there appeared the "Ode Triumphal" by "Alvaro de Campos".

Part 2:

Pseudonymous writing, that is writing which appears under a fictitious name, is not rare in literature or philosophy. Kierkegaard provides a celebrated instance. 'Heteronyms', as Pessoa calls and defines them, are something different and exceedingly strange as they appear in his writing. For each of his 'voices', Pessoa conceived a highly distinctive poetic idiom and technique, a complex biography, a context of literary influence and polemics and, most arrestingly of all, subtle interrelations and reciprocities of awareness. Octavio Paz defines the voice of Caeiro curiously as: 'everything that Pessoa is not and more'.

Passoa is a man magnificently at home in nature, a virtuoso of pre-Christian innocence, almost a Portuguese teacher of Zen. The personality of Reis is that of a stoic Horatian, a pagan believer in fate, a player with classical myths less original than Caeiro, but more representative of modern symbolism. De Campos, yet another voice, emerges as a Whitmanesque futurist, a dreamer in drunkenness, the Dionysian singer of what is oceanic and windswept in Lisbon.

None of this triad of distinctive literary styles resembles the metaphysical solitude that is Passoa; there is a sense of being an occultist medium which characterises Pessoa's intimate verse, verse which is his own voice and not the voice of the other and diverse personae.

Part 3:

I do not have different and distinctive poetic idioms, at least I am not conscious of their existence. The entire notion of my literary voice is, if anything, something which I see as an evolving entity or reality. I certainly have a complex and highly varied set of biographical influences, many literary interrelations and reciprocities of awareness and appreciation, comprehension and understanding. My solitude is not possessed or characterized by a variety of metaphysical presences, as Pessoa's solitude and writing clearly seems to have been.

Other masks follow in this book, notably one 'Bernardo Soares'. At some complex generative level, Pessoa's genius as a polyglot underlies, is mirrored by, his self-dispersal into diverse and contrasting personae. He spent nine of his childhood years in Durban. His first writings were in English with a South African tincture. He turned to Portuguese only in 1910. There are significant analogies with the poet Borges. Pessoa earned his living as a translator. His legacy, enormous and in large part unpublished, comports philosophy, literary criticism, linguistic theory, writings on politics in Portuguese, English and French.

I am no translator; I do not deal in masks; I do, though, roam across a wide field of knowledge. In the process, I do not cultivate contrasting personae, although I am conscious of dispersing myself in such a way as to take advantage of many literary insights from the work of others.

Part 4:

The fragmentary, the incomplete, is of the essence of Pessoa's spirit. The very kaleidoscope of voices within him, the breadth of his culture, the catholicity of his ironic sympathies - wonderfully echoed in Saramago's great novel about Ricardo Reis - inhibited the monumentalities, the self-satisfaction of completion. Hence the vast torso of Pessoa's Faust on which he laboured much of his life. Hence the fragmentary condition of The Book of Disquiet which contains material that predates 1913 and which Pessoa left open-ended at his death. As Adorno famously said, the finished work is, in our times and climate of anguish, a lie. After more than half a century of an evolving literary oeuvre, I can appreciate the wisdom of Adorno's words, at least insofar as my writing is concerned.

Theodore W Adorno was a German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin,Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse. For these writers the work of Freud, Marx and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society.

Adorno is widely regarded as one of the 20th century's foremost thinkers on aesthetics and philosophy, as well as one of its preeminent essayists. As a critic of both fascism and what he called the culture industry, his writings—such as Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Minima Moralia(1951) and Negative Dialectics (1966)—strongly influenced the European New Left. I became more than a little familiar with Adorno's work in the 1990s when I taught sociological theory in a Tafe college in Western Australia.

Part 5:

It was to Bernardo Soares that Pessoa ascribed his Book of Disquiet, first made available in English in a briefer version by Richard Zenith in 1991. The translation is at once penetrating and delicately observant of Pessoa's astute melancholy. What is this Livro do Desassossego? Neither 'commonplace book', nor 'sketchbook', nor 'florilegium' will do. Imagine a fusion of Coleridge's Notebooks and marginalia, of the philosophically Valery Diary, and of the voluminous Robert Musil Journal. Yet even such a hybrid does not correspond to the singularity of Pessoa's chronicle. Nor do we know what parts thereof, if any, he ever intended for publication in some revised format.

What we have in this work of Pessoa's is a haunting mosaic of dreams, psychological notations, autobiographical vignettes, shards of literary theory, criticism and maxims. If there is a common thread, it is that of unsparing introspection. Over and over, Pessoa asks of himself and of the living mirrors which he has created, 'Who am I?', 'What makes me write?', 'To whom shall I turn?' The metaphysical sharpness, the wealth of self-scrutiny are, in modern literature, matched only by Valery or Musil or, in a register often uncannily similar, by Wittgenstein. I leave it to readers to place these writers, to whom I have just referred, in a modern and personal context.

'Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other's presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define.' This very scrutiny, moreover, is fraught with danger: 'To understand, I destroyed myself. To understand is to forget about loving.' These findings arise out of a uniquely spectral yet memorable landscape: 'A firefly flashes forward at regular intervals. Around me the dark countryside is a huge lack of sound that almost smells pleasant.'

Part 6:

Throughout, Pessoa is aware of the price he pays for his heteronomity, that is, the influence of others on his thoughts and actions. 'To create, I've destroyed myself... I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.' He compares his soul to 'a secret orchestra'. There are shades of Baudelaire in this notion of an inner orchestra whose instruments strum and bang inside him: 'I only know myself as the symphony.' At moments, suicidal despair, a 'self-nihilism', are close. 'Anything, even tedium', a finely ironising reservation, rather than 'this bluish, forlorn indefiniteness of everything!' Is there any city which cultivates sadness more lovingly than does Lisbon? Even the stars only 'feign light'.Yet there are also epiphanies and passages of deep humour.

In the 'forests of estrangements', Pessoa comes upon resplendent Oriental cities. Women are a chosen source of dreams but 'Don't ever touch them'. There are snapshots of clerical routine, of the vacant business of bureaucracy worthy of Melville's Bartleby. The sense of the comedy of the inanimate is acute: 'Over the pyjamas of my abandoned sleep...' The juxtapositions have a startling resonance: 'I'm suffering from a headache and the universe.'

A sort of critical, self-mocking surrealism surfaces from time to time as in: 'To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation.' There are many fragments of a sentence, one of which may come close to encapsulating Pessoa's unique reckoning: '....intelligence, an errant fiction of the surface'. This is not a book to be read quickly or, necessarily, in sequence. Wherever you dip, there are 'rich hours' and teasing depths. But it will, indeed, be a banner year if any writer, translator or publisher brings to the reader a more generous gift.1-Ron Price with thanks to 1George Steiner in The Observer on 3 June 2001, and 2Andrew Marvell(1621-1678), English metaphysical poet and author of the poem "To A Coy Mistress."

What is there here that
describes my means and
ways of going about this
literary life of mine now
in the evening of my life
as time's winged-feet are
running after me faster it
seems than they ever did
in earlier decades of life?

Mine is certainly no mere
factless autobiography in
its several genres that are
my modus operandi, nor
am I in some trance in these
triumphant days of my life
with their prodigious, their
long-lasting, and explosive
prodigality from which, I'm
inclined to think I will never
emerge from their rich hours,
their teasing unknown depths
where sadness and joy mingle.

There is but one persona and
voice, although a slowly and
subtly evolving one across a
vast landscape of people and
places, things and influences.

I, too, am magnificently at home
behind a host of reciprocities in
this oceanic and windswept situ
with its metaphysical solitude,
its known & unknown presences
possessed of such power that the
many worlds can be a beneficiary.

There is a leaven here than seems to
leaven the world of being & furnish
some force through which the arts
and the sciences are made manifest.

And so I write fragments and forests
of words which flash forward at many
different kinds of intervals within the
context of some secret orchestra that
is not, and is, of my making, and there
is a resonance that is not so much one
that is startling but is quite reassuring.

Ron Price
14/10/'14 to 15/10/'14. ]]> Ron Price https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?13521-An-explosive-prodigality The Latest, the Most Updated, Interview With Writer Ron Price: Part 1 https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?13381-The-Latest-the-Most-Updated-Interview-With-Writer-Ron-Price-Part-1 Mon, 16 Jun 2014 02:49:03 GMT QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS Preamble-Part 1: I began to put the following sequence of questions and answers together as I was about to retire from... QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Preamble-Part 1:

I began to put the following sequence of questions and answers together as I was about to retire from full-time employment as a teacher and lecturer after 32 years in the classroom, and another 18 as a student. In the first 15 years of the reinvention of myself as a writer and author, editor and researcher, a poet and publisher, an online journalist and blogger, a scholar and reader, the years from 1999 to 2014, I added more material to what you could call this simulated interview.

This is the 26th simulated interview in 19 years, 1996 to 2014. There is no attempt in this particular series of Qs & As to be sequential, to follow themes in some logical pattern, or simulate a normal interview. I have attempted a more logical-sequential pattern in my other 25 interviews over those 19 years.

I have posted literally millions of words on the internet at 100s, indeed 1000s now, of sites. Readers who come across this particular interview of more than 15,000 words and more than 38 A-4 font-14 pages, will gain some idea of the person who writes the stuff they read at whatever sites on the world-wide-web where they come across my literary effusions. Readers wanting access to these sites and my work, my posts at these sites, need to simply google my name RonPrice followed by any one of dozens of other words like: forums, blogs, poetry, literature, philosophy, history, religion, cinema, popular culture, inter alia.

There are some 4000 to 5000 other Ron Prices in cyberspace. Readers must ensure they are accessing my posts and my writing, and not those of some other chap with the same name as mine. I have posted this interview for the interest of what has become an extensive readership, my constituency of readers, and others who come across my work for the first time, or for whatever number of times, and for whatever particular reason.

Preamble-Part 2:

2.1 The questionnaire concept which I utilize below was originated, so I am informed, by French television personality Bernard Pivot after what was called the Proust Questionnaire. The Proust Questionnaire is about one's personality. Its name and modern popularity as a form of interview is owed to the responses given by Marcel Proust(1871-1922), the French novelist, critic, and essayist.

At the end of the nineteenth century, when Proust was still in his teens, he answered a questionnaire in an English-language confession magazine belonging to his friend Antoinette, daughter of future French President Félix Faure.

The magazine was entitled "A Place to Record Your Thoughts and Feelings." At that time, it was popular among English families to answer such a list of questions that revealed the tastes and aspirations of the talker.

2.2 James Lipton (b.1926) an American writer, poet, composer, actor, and dean emeritus of the Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University in New York City, utilized the following questionnaire in his series of interviews entitled Inside the Actors Studio. The series premiered in 1994 and has been broadcast in 125 countries around the world reaching 89,000,000 homes, so I was informed several years ago on Wikipedia.

2.2.1 Lipton asked the following ten questions:

1. What is your favorite word?
2. What is your least favorite word?
3. What turns you on?
4. What turns you off?
5. What sound or noise do you love?
6. What sound or noise do you hate?
7. What is your favorite curse word?
8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
9. What profession would you not like to do?
10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

2.2.2 My answers were/are:

1. God
2. ****
3. My instinctual and human needs for: food and drink, silence and sounds, sensory and especially sexual stimulation, oxygen and physical comfort, shelter and work, love and kindness, as well as the pleasures that come from the satisfaction of these instinctual and human needs.
4. Noise, loud and aggressive people, conversation after one to two hours; most of the TV currently available to me, a great deal of printed matter. When the needs referred to in #3 above are not satisfied.
5. Some classical, jazz and popular music, some human voices and silence.
6. Any loud sounds, some human voices.
7. ****
8. I was a student and scholar, teacher and tutor, lecturer and adult educator from 1949 to 1999. Now I am enjoying new roles: poet and publisher, writer and author, editor and research, online journalist and blogger.
9. Law and medicine, work in the biological and physical sciences as well as the trades.
10. Well done and now tell me about your troubles in life while trying to serve Me.

Preamble-Part 3:

Below readers will find my own 35 questions, questions I began to ask and answer back in 1998 and 1999, as I was about to retire from FT teaching, and a teaching-student life going back to 1949, half a century. These questions were last updated on 8 May 2014.
___________________________________________
1. Do you have a favourite place to visit? I’ve lived in 25 cities and towns and visited over 100. I have lived in 37 houses and would enjoy visiting both the houses and the towns again for their memory, their nostalgia, their mnemonic, value. When writing about these places as I do from time to time, I would benefit from such visits, but it is not likely that I will visit any of them now in the evening of my life for many reasons not the least of which is my lack of funds and my disinclination to travel any more.

There are dozens of other places I’d enjoy going as a tourist or travel-teacher, circumstances permitting, circumstances like: plenty of money, good health, lots of energy and if I could be of some use to the people in those places. My health, my new medications for bipolar disorder, medications I’ve now had for over five years, prevents me from travelling.

1.1 Tell us a little more about your health both before your writing began in earnest in the 1990s and before. Rather than go into detail here I will simply refer you to my 90,000 word and 200 page(font-14) account of my experience of bipolar 1 disorder as well as the section of my website on the same subject. You can google “Ron Price BPD”.

2. Who are your favourite writers? The historians Edward Gibbon and Arnold Toynbee, Manning Clark and Peter Gay, among a long list of historians I keep in my notebooks; the philosophers Ortega y Gasset and Nietzsche, Buber and Spinoza, among another long list I keep in my notebooks; the Central Figures of the Baha’i Faith and Their successors Shoghi Effendi and the Universal House of Justice; the poets Rainer Maria Rilke and Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth and Roger White; the psychologists Rollo May and Alfred Adler, and a host of others notes about whom I keep in my notebooks, as well as writers from many other disciplines.

3. Who are your favorite artists?

Part 1:

There are several dozen art movements and hundreds, if not thousands, of artists that can be accessed in both libraries and now, with a click or two, on the internet. I will name two famous artists whose work I like, and two whom I have known personally: Cezanne and Van Gogh, and Chelinay and Drew Gates. I find it just about impossible to answer a question like this given my eclectic tastes. In question #2 above I named several of the many writers who were and are "my favorites", but I found there were too many names. That is also the case here, and so I do not intend to make a long list.

Part 2:

As my years of retirement from the world of jobs and family commitments, community and volunteer work, the nose to the grindstone stuff, so to speak, lengthen as they have since 1999 to 2005--by which time I had relieved myself of most of the activity that had kept me busy for decades, I find there are more and more artists in the history of art whose work I am just finding out about and learning to appreciate. I did not feel, and I do not feel now, as some writers and poets felt after completing their major life-work: ‘The work that I was born to do is done.’

George Chapman said repeatedly that the publication of the final volume on Homer left him nothing more to do; he would now (at 71) ‘do nothing forever and ever’. After 15 years of my retirement from FT work, I felt, in some ways, that my learning about artists, and all sorts of other people in other fields, had just begun.

4. Who are your favorite composers, musicians, vocalists and singer/songwriters? How can one choose from the thousands in these categories? It is the same problem as in the previous two questions. Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninov, Hayden come to mind as composers but, goodness, there are simply too many to list. I placed a list of my favourites at several sites in cyberspace. The list had more than 100 people and 100s of their works. Over the years, I’ve had at least a dozen different favorite composers including: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Brahms, Debussy, Stravinsky, Dvorak and Rachmaninoff. My favorite composer seems to be the one whose musical world I’ve been immersed in most deeply at any given time.

Sergei Rachmaninoff was a master of translating melancholy and nostalgia into a musical language. He was cured of a profound writer’s block through hypnosis, and he dedicated his beloved Second Piano Concerto to his psychiatrist, Dr Nikolai Dahl. I dedicate my love for music to my mother and father both of whom played the piano in our home as I was growing-up.

5. Who are your heroes? The Central Figures of the Baha’i Faith, Beethoven, Emily Dickinson, a large number of men described in ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s Memorials of the Faithful(1970, 1927) and many more that I come across in reading history and other social sciences, the humanities as well as the physical and biological sciences. Again, the list is too long and its getting longer with the years as I head with what seems the speed of light to the age of 70 in 2014.

6. Who has been your greatest inspirations? Roger White and John Hatcher in my middle age, Jameson Bond and Douglas Martin when I was a young man in my teens and twenties as well as a host of others, too many to list, in these years of my late adulthood, 60 to 70. Now in my late adulthood, the years after 60 in the lifespan according to some human development psychologists some new inspirations include: the essayist Joseph Epstein, the writers Bahiyyih Nakhjavani and Udo Schaefer, a number of poets and writers whose works I had never had time to read or did not know even existed---again the list is getting longer since reading and research, writing and editing have become much more central to my life, to my daily activities than during my years of employment: 1961 to 2001.

7. If you could invite several people for dinner from any period in history, who would you choose and why? I would not invite anyone because I don’t like to talk while I’m eating. After dinner these days I like to watch TV for a few minutes and then go to bed. I’d chose the following people to have a chat with at some other time during the day, but I would not have them all come at once. I would take them as follows:

7.1 Pericles: I’d like to know what went on in Athens in the Golden Age, as he saw it. I’ve come to know a great deal about Athens in the 5th century BC since I taught ancient history and I have many questions which, of course, I could answer by reading. But there are so many views of the man and the times.

7.2 Roger White: I’d like to simply enjoy his gentle humor and observe that real kindness which I could see in his letters and in his rare interviews.

7.3 My mother and father and my maternal grandparents: The pleasure of seeing them again(except for my grandmother whom I never saw since she died five years before I was born) after all these years would, I think, be just overwhelming.

7.4.1 Douglas and Elizabeth Martin, 7.4.2 Jameson and Gale Bond and 7.4.3 Michael and Elizabeth Rochester. These people were all university academics or the wives of academics who had a seminal influence on my developing values in the formative period of my late teens and early twenties.

7.5 There are many others in another list too long to include here.

8. What are you reading? In 1998, my last year of full-time employment, when I began to list these questions and provide the answers, I had fourteen books on the go: eight biographies, four literary criticisms, one book of philosophy and one of psychology. Now in these early years on two old age pensions, 2009 to 2012, I am reading mostly material on the internet and that reading list is too extensive to list here. I never go to libraries any more and, due to a lack of money, I never buy any books, although my wife does occasionally and I browse through what she buys. The internet is overflowing with enough print to keep me happily occupied until I die. My son bought me David Womersley’s 3-volume edition(1994) of Gibbon’s famous work in 2010 and after 3 years I’m up to page 140 underlining as I go the passages that I may use one day in my own writing.

9. What do you enjoy listening to in the world of music? I listened mainly to classical music on the classical FM station while living in Perth in the last dozen years of my FT employment(1988-1999) as well as some from the folk, pop and rock worlds. Now that I live in George Town northern Tasmania in these years of the early evening of my life(1999 to 2012) this is also true only hardly any pop, rock and folk and much more jazz and classical. I have written about my tastes and interests in music since my adolescence in other places and I refer readers here to the section of my website on music for the kind of detail that would lead to prolixity if I included it here.

10. What food could you not live without? I would miss my wife’s cooking and Persian and Mexican food if I was cut off from them. It must be said, though,(answering this question 14 years after beginning to answer it) now that I live in northern Tasmania I rarely eat Persian and Mexican food. Now that I am retired I hardly miss these foods. I enjoy the food I get, that my wife and I prepare and only eat a Persian meal or a Mexican meal perhaps once a year now. Do I miss it? Yes and no. I enjoy eating when I am hungry; hunger is the driving force and I enjoy many, many foods when I am hungry. If I could not have some of these foods I’d be happy with many others. ]]> Ron Price https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?13381-The-Latest-the-Most-Updated-Interview-With-Writer-Ron-Price-Part-1 Thoughts on: Essayists, Poetry and Shakespeare inter alia https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?13378-Thoughts-on-Essayists-Poetry-and-Shakespeare-inter-alia Sun, 15 Jun 2014 12:45:00 GMT SOME FINE ESSAYISTS Preamble: Section 1: The world has had, and now has, some fine essayists. I am not in the same league as the finest,... SOME FINE ESSAYISTS

Preamble:

Section 1:

The world has had, and now has, some fine essayists. I am not in the same league as the finest, but they set the bar for me. An essay is an experiment, not a credo. It is an exercise in working out what one thinks at a particular time and in a particular place. It is something made up, to a certain extent, in response to an excited imagination, what some might see as an overheated brain, what I see as the product of decades of living and thinking, reading and writing.

It is a type of short story told in the form of an argument or a history or even, once in a great while, an illumination. These are not my words, but the words of Cynthia Ozick, one of the many fine essayists whom I have come to read in these years of my retirement without 60 to 70, and often more, hours a week of job, family and community responsibilities breathing down my neck.

I don't mean to imply that job, family and community were not good for me. I would not want to have missed that half century of wall-to-wall people, say, 1949 to 1999, for the world. But now that those 5 decades are gone another me has emerged and is emerging, a reinvented me, reinvented as a full-time writer and author, poet and publisher, online blogger and journalist. Yes, full-time, with time-out of course to: sleep, eat, drink, take care of ablutions and hygiene, chat to my wife, family and friends, edit and do research, read and engage in scholarly activity.

There are many writers capable of creating those sometimes glittering and occasionally bewitching contraptions, pieces of prose, known as essays. It has taken me many years to come up with a short list of the best, at least the best from my point of view, from the myriad people who now write, and who once wrote, essays. But, even if all I did was read, I would never be able to read all the best of the best. Selectivity is, as it always has been, an essential pre-requisite even more now in this 21st century.

The essay is only one literary form; the world is now the home of a pantheon of literary forms which will keep me happily occupied until the roll is called-up to the proverbial "yonder." Clive James, an essayist himself whom I have only come to appreciate since my retirement, has a list of some very fine essayists and some of their essays at his website.

Section 2:

I have found Clive's website a useful one to bring some of these essayists as well as some of the best newspaper journalists into my reading life. Today I read an article in The Guardian, 16/10/'10 by Don Paterson entitled Shakespeare's sonnets. Don Paterson teaches in the school of English at the University of St Andrews and is poetry editor for the London publishers Picador.

I first came across Shakespeare's sonnets in high school back in the early 1960s, but the experience was short and, at the time, not that sweet. Then in the late 1980s and early 1990s when I was teaching English literature to matriculation students, I had a more full experience of his 154 sonnets. They are popularly synonymous with courtly romance but, in fact, says Paterson many are about something quite different. Some are intense expressions of gay desire, others testaments to misogyny. Wary of academic criticism, Don Paterson tries to get back to what the poet was actually saying.

After reading Paterson's article in The Guardian today, I decided to put together some of my reflections on poetry and on Shakespeare written since the 1990s when I began to eye my retirement from 60 to 70 hours a week of various forms of social and employment responsibilities. The following is a summary of most of my reflections involving Shakespeare and some of my reflections of my own writing of poetry.

SOME REFLECTIONS ON MY WRITING POETRY

Part 1:

Two of the many significant influences on my poetry, influences which have given great pleasure over the years to my mind and spirit, admired immensely now, only began to be appreciated in the years of my middle age and in the early evening of my life. Those influences were Wordsworth and Shakespeare. They helped me to see nature in all its forms. But it was not only nature in its external forms: flowers, trees, the entire geology and geography of place, that provided for me the deepest satisfactions and fascinations.

I found that nature’s external forms permitted my rational mind to attain a renovated and renovating vision of the organic world--and particularly my own personal world. This was achieved by means of the metaphorical nature of physical reality. My second wife, Chris, and nature programs stimulated my interest in and appreciation of the external aspects of nature.

This appreciation, this vision, was difficult to achieve; it developed very slowly over the decades; the pitfalls surrounding the acquisition and development of this vision, were many, obscure and subtle. But as one of Canada's poets, perhaps Canada’s greatest 19th century poet, Archibald Lampman, expressed the challenge: “the poet must not cease from the mental effort required both to obtain this renovated vision of external nature and to return, restored, to the world of men.”

Part 2:

This renovated vision found and now finds its chief conceptual home, its guiding hand, one of its chief tools and aids, one of its fertile sources and bases, in a view of physical reality in all its forms as a metaphorical construct whose value, use and importance is an inner, symbolic, dramaturgical, one. To put this another way: words and metaphors are not mediums which copy life. Their true work is to restore life itself to order, pattern and meaning. Metaphor persuades and illuminates because it integrates pragmatic, cognitive and linguistic knowledge with awareness of culture, ideology and history. This idea is a difficult one to put into words and, I know from my own experience and from years of trying to get students to understand the concept, that this brilliant source of insight is simply never grasped by millions of people. For the most part it never even comes onto their agenda.

The value or function of the metaphorical, or what can also be called the analogical, process is immense. On the obvious level, it is a useful way to explain the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar and the abstract in terms of the concrete. In addition, it has the capacity to compress a great deal of meaning into a few words and, because it offers a variety of meanings, it can be an expansive description rather than a limiting or restrictive one; it can counteract narrowness of thought, literalism, imitation and dogmatism’s many fundamentalist forms. But probably the most important feature of the analogical process is its ability to educate.

That is, when a person is forced to examine X in order to understand Y, he is exercising one of his most important capacities as a human being. “The ability to see the relationship between one thing and another is almost a definition of intelligence. Thinking in metaphors,” says Louis Simpson in his An Introduction to Poetry, “is a tool of intelligence. Perhaps it is the most important tool.” Indeed, a view of the existential world as metaphor is, for me, a key methodology for unlocking the world’s meaning, for moving from abstract concepts to concrete things and back again, a key device for providing a narrative framework for and conceptualization of life and one that is not imposed, one that is not based on something we are told to think.3

Part 3:

In the years 1995 to 2005, as I approached my retirement from so many forms of engagement with the world: full-time, part-time and volunteer work as well as an engagement with what was often a seemingly endless set of social and community obligations, I came quite clearly to understand the benefits and insights to be gained from excursions into this world of metaphorical reality, of inner reality and its renovating vision. But, as I have indicated repeatedly in many pieces of my writing and again in this prose-poem, there are correct and there are incorrect attitudes to nature and to vision, to metaphor and analogical thought. The liberty and the moderate freedom which our Age is seeking is embodied in and defined by an Administrative Order whose operating principles derive from the teachings of Baha’u’llah and provide the very structure of freedom for our Age. This is, though, a complex question and I will deal with this under separate cover, as they say. Neither nature nor vision, analysis nor creativity, should take the writer and poet away from a concern for man and society nor from his support of those institutional safeguards of this new Faith. But this is an issue for the Baha'i, a Faith I have been involved with now for more than 60 years.

I have taken a keen interest in the social sciences and humanities, the latter only in the last 25 years. These subjects or disciplines have, along with decades of observation and experience, some of it based in outrageous fortune, some in despondency, some in joy and much in immense quantities of the quotidian, assisted me in: (a) strengthening my spirit and mind and in exhausting them; (b) giving me an increased veneration and respect for certain portions of the world’s immense corpus of poetry and prose; and (c) acquiring a resolute contemplation of life developed over what seemed, and were, epochs of time.

My stance vis-à-vis the great poetry and literature of history as well as much of the social sciences and humanities has been more active especially since those social and occupational demands of life have diminished in recent years. This active stance, though, is necessarily a highly selective one rather than a passive and accepting method and mode. The resources available now for students and writers like myself are simply staggering in their magnitude. Life is short and time is fleeting; the hour is urgent and, let there be no mistake, ours in the duty to labor serenely and to lend our share of assistance in whatever way circumstances may enable us to assuage the fury of the tempest of our times.4

Part 4:

I must admit and acknowledge that my precursor models and their styles, those I have drawn on for my various and several literary purposes, have increased with the years. I qualify as a result, it seems to me, as a practitioner, as a legitimate Canadian/Australian hybrid participant, in the tradition that leads from the great Romantics to the great Moderns and the Postmoderns. My perspective rests on: (a) a resolute contemplation of my time and place, (b) a broad synthesis of much from the social sciences and humanities and (c) a noetic integrator that interprets large fields of reality, that is the ontological and theological, epistemological and teleological framework and construction of my religion. And because of this my perspective is—I can safely say--distinctly my own.

It is a perspective that includes man, nature, society, every atom in existence and the essence of all created things. It is the perspective of a man with a wide and, insofar as I am able to envisage and articulate, a coherent range of concerns. It is the perspective: (i) of an imaginative observer of both the external world and the world of the unseen; (ii) of one who is and has been for half a century committed to the gradual, evolutionary building of a new world, the foundations of a global society, the City of God, through the charismatic and prophetic figure of Baha’u’llah; (iii) of an adherent of a new and independent religious system with a detailed and verifiable record of its history and development; (iv) of a participant in a system whose growing influence is arguably the most remarkable development in contemporary religious history; (v) of a man who has not, as many might think, attached himself to a utopian, an unrealistic, dream; (vi) of a person who endeavours to see life simply as it is and to estimate everything at its true value in relation to: (a) a view of universal truth which is perennial but not archaic, (b) a view which accepts that no fortuitous conjunction of circumstances will make it possible for the human community to bend the conditions of life into conformity with some set of human desires—that such a hope, is illusory; and (c) a view that the world is one country, has one common homeland and humankind are its citizens.
--------SOME REFLECTIONS ON SHAKESPEARE-----------------
I will not deal with Wordsworth, one of those two influences I mentioned earlier. What follows deals, in the main, with Shakespeare and things I have written in the last two decades since the internet became part of my life: 1994 to 2014.
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In April 1937 Vivien Leigh, one of the most popular actresses of the 20th century, had been in a rapturous sexual relationship with Laurence Olivier for nearly two years. At the time both of them were married to someone else. Olivier was a major actor-interpreter of Shakespeare for his time. Leigh had just begun her acting career. In that same month, April 1937, the Baha’i teaching Plan opened, a Plan I have now been associated with in one way or another for more than 60 years. Leigh moved in with Olivier 8 weeks later. And so began one of the famous romances of the twentieth century. Leigh had the intuition, sometime in May of 1937, after reading Gone With the Wind which had won the Pulitzer Prize that year, that she would play the part of Scarlett O’Hara in the movie Gone With the Wind. And so she did: on Christmas Day 1938 she was offered a contract for the part. And so began her life of Hollywood fame.
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Henrik Johan Ibsen(1828-1906) was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of realism." He is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre. His major works include: Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, A Doll's House, HeddaGabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, and The Master Builder, among others. He is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare. A Doll's House became the world's most performed play by the early 20th century.
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Some critics have come to view Jane Austen's novels as the writing of “a prose Shakespeare,”(1) a writer who exposed with her acid solution of words the empty foundations of social and personal morality in a violent and repressive age in English society.-Ron Price with thanks to (1)William MacAuley in Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, Vol. 2, B.C. Southam, editor, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., London, 1987.
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MY RETIREMENT

When I retired from a 50 year student-and-working life, 1949-1999, I slowly went about reinventing myself, as they say these days. It was a somewhat unconscious process at first in the late 20th century and the first years of the 21st but, gradually, several roles emerged and increasingly consciously. They were roles that enabled me to pleasantly occupy myself in the evening of my life. Only time would tell how many years remained before I shuffled off this mortal coil and suffered or enjoyed the sleep of death, as Shakespeare puts it in Hamlet. Whether these years, thus far, were early evening or late, I did not, although I might in time, come to know. As I write these words I am six weeks short of my 70th birthday on 23/7/'14.

In the first dozen years(2002-2014) of my retirement from FT and PT paid-employment, as well as most volunteer work and any formal educational study, I became, by sensible and insensible degrees: a writer and author, an editor and researcher, a poet and publisher, a scholar and student, an online journalist and blogger. In the years from 2002 to 2014 I organized, as systematically as I was able, a reading and writing program around my many interests. One of the categories of my interests was the literary world of: writers and poets, novelists and essayists, playwrights and letter-writers, biographers and autobiographers, diarists and journalists. Some call this field, which includes all literary works, and especially: fiction, poetry, drama, or essays, belles-lettres. It is a vast field of general literature and it is valued for its aesthetic qualities, its originality of style and tone, and often for the lighter branches of literature.
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In 1953 Isaiah Berlin(1909-1997) published a book called The Hedgehog and the Fox. Foxes, he wrote, are people who know many things; hedgehogs know one big thing. It was in part a study of Berlin's literary hero, Leo Tolstoy(1828-1910), whom he described as a fox who wished at times that he was a hedgehog. Foxes draw on a wide variety of experiences and they do not boil down the intellectual world to a single idea. Such foxes include: Herodotus, Aristotle, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce, Anderson)-Ron Price with thanks to several internet sites especially Wikipedia on the topic of Isaiah Berlin.
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I first came across Thomas Hardy in grades 11 and 12 in Burlington Ontario. His novels The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the D’Urbervilles were the novels we studied in those last two years at Burlington Central High School, 1960 to 1962. I was a good student, near the top of my class, but I remember finding Hardy: heavy, cumbersome, difficult reading, although nowhere near as difficult as the Shakespeare play we also studied each year back then. I did not come across Hardy, or Shakespeare, again until some thirty years later in the early 1990s when I taught matriculation English at a technical and further education college, now a polytechnic, in Perth Western Australia. It was Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Hamlet, respectively.
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As a now retired teacher of ancient Roman and Greek history, among other subjects I taught from 1967 to 2005, I enjoyed today's ABC Radio National program on Seneca the Younger(5 BC to 65 AD). I have always found the aspect of Seneca of most personal interest was his influence on Shakespeare.

The closest to Greek tragedy that Shakespeare got was to Seneca's tragedies which Shakespeare rehabilitated. Classical tragedy means the ten Latin plays of Seneca not those of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. As one analyst put it: Hamlet is inconceivable without Seneca. These are just some thoughts from someone who is no expert on Seneca, Shakespeare or either classical or Renaissance cultures/civilizations. But the subject is of interest to muse about in these years of crisis in a world, a crisis not unlike that faced in the times of Seneca, in the first century of the Roman empire(31 BC-69 AD).
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"To sleep, perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub." What dreams, Shakespeare asks, may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil?” “That sleep of death,” may give us hellish dreams for all eternity.” That is the rub. This thought gives us pause and puzzles the will and ultimately makes cowards of us all. And so we bear the ills we have rather than fly to others we know not of.
---------------------------------------------------------------------- ]]> Ron Price https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?13378-Thoughts-on-Essayists-Poetry-and-Shakespeare-inter-alia <![CDATA[Shakespeare's Measure of Civility]]> https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?13377-Shakespeare-s-Measure-of-Civility Sun, 15 Jun 2014 12:33:39 GMT ---Quote (Originally by Ron Price)--- SILENCE If gentleness is the quality of civility, acceptance of choice in the judge and allowance of...

Originally Posted by Ron Price

SILENCE

If gentleness is the quality of civility, acceptance of choice in the judge and allowance of choice in the judged is Shakespeare’s ultimate measure of civility.-W.G. Zeeveld, The Temper of Shakespeare’s Thought, Yale UP, London, 1974, p.257.

Listen to the silence of this garden
in the early morning where the sun
touches everything with its tint of gold.
Birds fly high into the blue sky and their
notes of song dance over this golden-green
here before my eyes in nature’s theatre.

Where are we here? Some garden of Eden
where the tree of knowledge has brought
endless fruits beyond my dreaming? Some
fruits of communion in these green gardens
which grow in the land of knowledge
bring a deep down peace, a joy of the flashing
light in the Centre of Realities.

I am lifted to a plane where I soar
with those birds in the air even as I am
rooted as these trees in this brown earth.
But even with this upligting beauty,
even with this golden tint of joy as deep
as the very rock of ages Precambrian
I can not, yet, take leave of self,
nor reach that ocean of nearness
just down the road and across the sands,
nor can I drink the peerless wine from
goblets just within my reach. I have yet
many valleys to cross and the long journey
has seemingly endless roads.

Meanwhile, birds will sing in this garden
and golden lights will delight my eyes
in the morning in this green garden
near a great, immeasureable ocean.

Ron Price
8 October 1995

*Baha’u’llah, Seven Valleys, Introduction.
_________________________________________ :banana:

]]> Ron Price https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?13377-Shakespeare-s-Measure-of-Civility Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez(1927-2014): Notes on His Passing https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?13329-Gabriel-José-de-la-Concordia-García-Márquez(1927-2014)-Notes-on-His-Passing Sat, 19 Apr 2014 04:18:12 GMT SOLITUDE And The Frenzy of Renown Part 1: Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez(1927-2014) was a Columbian novelist, short-story... SOLITUDE
And The Frenzy of Renown

Part 1:

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez(1927-2014) was a Columbian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, arguably the greatest writer in Spanish since Cervantes, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the 1982 the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died yesterday: 17/4/'14.

García Márquez started as a journalist, and wrote many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but he is best known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). The book and its successors unleashed a worldwide boom in Spanish language literature and the literary genre of magical realism. The subject of solitude is, and arguably was, the centre-piece of his literary oeuvre.

Solitude is a subject that has interested me, in one way or another, since my first memories in the late 1940s when, as an only child, I had to learn how to occupy myself, how to deal with solitude, with no playmates around much of the time and, of course, no brothers and sisters to give me pleasure or annoyance. Marquez's career in journalism also began in those same late 1940s.

Part 2:

Marquez's maternal grandparents had a significant influence on his life in ways similar to the influence of my maternal grandparents, especially during the years of my childhood until the late 1950s when I was in my mid-teens. García Márquez's political and ideological views were shaped by his grandfather's stories. My own grandfather, an autodidact, wrote a 400 page autobiography which I first read as my essays were first being published in a remote backwater of the most remote continent on Earth(not counting Antarctica): Australia's Northern Territory in the early 1980s.

Marquez was 40 when novelistic success finally arrived. At the time, the year 1967, I had just graduated with a B.A. and a B. Ed., and had begun both my marital life and my professional career as a teacher in Canada's summer months in the Arctic on Baffin Island. The publication of my own literary work had to wait until I was 40, and living in one of the many dry-dog biscuit parts of the world's terrain, that same Northern Territory in the small town of Katherine. I turned to writing autobiographically throughout my 40s. Marquez did not write so explicitly in an autobiographical mode until 2002 when he was 75. He published his first memoir, the first of a projected three-volume autobiography, in 2002.

I was just finishing my FT and PT employment life, and gradually reinventing myself as a writer and author, poet and publisher, online blogger and journalist. I leave it to readers to follow the career, the biography, the life-narrative, of this famous novelist who died just 24 hours ago. I have taken an interest in Marquez especially during these years of my reinvented self and what I write here in this quasi-eulogy is partly due to a certain synchronicity between his life and interests and my own.

Part 3:

In 1999, the year I retired after a 50 year student-and-employment life, García Márquez was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. Chemotherapy provided by a hospital in Los Angeles proved to be successful, and the illness went into remission. The miracles of modern medicine entered my life via pharmacology or pharmacotherapy as far back as the late 60s when Marquez was achieving his first literary successes as a novelist. I knew nothing of him back then occupied, as I was, at the time with my academic and professional career as a teacher, the first years of my marriage and a new religion, as well as the rigors of bipolar disorder.

This cancer crisis prompted Marquez, in that last decade of his late adulthood, the years from 70 to 80, to begin writing his memoirs: "I reduced all relations with my friends to a minimum, disconnected the telephone, canceled trips, and brought all sorts of current and future plans to an end", he told El Tiempo, the Colombian newspaper. "Then I locked-myself-in to write every day without interruption," he said firmly.

In 2002 he published Living To Tell the Tale, the first volume in that projected trilogy of memoirs. This episode, this radical change in his life-style, his life-narrative, was of particular interest to me because, by my 60s, my desire for solitude increased. Perhaps it was a desire to return to my first years of solitude as a child in the 1940s. I also began to disconnect from the telephone, and from the high level of social life that had been part of my very raison d'etre for existence for decades. A radical shift in my daily MO gradually took place, from my mid-to-late 50s to my mid-60s, when I took a sea-change, an early retirement, and was able to go on an old-age pension in Australia at the age of 65.

Part 4:

At the age of 80, Márquez told fans at a Guadalajara book fair that writing had worn him out. But in 2009, 5 years before he died, he told the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo that his writing career was far from over; the only thing I do is write."1 By my 70s, in 2014, that was also true of my own life-style, my own MO, my own daily, quotidian, routine, although perhaps I did not write as obsessively as Marquez. Of course, fame and wealth would be denied me and with it "the frenzy of renown."2 And thank god for that.-Ron Price with thanks to (1)Wikipedia, 18/4/'14, and (2) Leo Braudy,The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History, Vintage Books, NY, 1997.
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TALKED AND LISTENED OUT

Section 1:

There are unearthly tidings, not quite the magical things that Gabriel Marquez writes about in his novels, in a genre that is now called magical realism, that the Baha’is have been bringing to others for nearly 80 years as part of their several Plans. These Plans are systematic programs to implement a Divine Plan set out by the Successor of the Prophet Baha'u'llah, His Son 'Abdul-Baha, in His Tablets written during the Great War. I have watched the process and been part of it now for more than 60 years.

There is a boundless realm, or so it has always seemed to me, an historic enterprise set in motion more than 150 years ago, of spiritual forces shaping and impelling the work of the mind and the spirit, the heart and the body. For decades I have seen a quiet resourcefulness, an unending obstinacy, a spirit that has born fruit and that blurs into legend leaving traces that may last for millennia, maybe forever. My mother always said that the Baha’is were the only ones who would go for a picnic in the rain. Persistence is, and has been, a critical trait during the implementation of these Plans.

I have often said to my fellow Baha’is, at opportune moments in our myriad conversations, that things of importance take time. This is especially true in the growth of the Baha'i international community in the 150+ years since its birth in 1863, and arguably in the decades before 1863 back to 1844, or even back to the 1790s, when the first major precursor to the Babi-Baha'i Faiths, the founder of Shaykhism, began his travelling and teaching work in the Middle East.

Section 2:

Modern democracies took at least 2500 years to evolve to their position today. This model of democracy which we have in its several forms in the global community has come a very long way since its origins at least as far back as the Greeks in the 5th century B.C. and, I would hasten to add, as the Hebrews perhaps as far-back as the second millennium B.C.. London took three hundred years to build its first city wall, and three hundred years more to acquire a bishop. Rome labored in a gloom of uncertainty for twenty centuries until an Etruscan King anchored it in history. The peaceful Swiss of today, who feast us with their mild cheeses, and for decades their apathetic watches, bloodied Europe as soldiers of fortune, as late as the sixteenth century1.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Acceptance Speech for The Nobel Prize in Literature, December 1982.

Garcia, there’s an infectious logic
all its own in this writing business
which attempts to make sense of
our world and, in doing, may leave
posterity traces of an immortality.

And, if you can come to it late
enough in life, you might prevent
that downhill slide which seems
to get to so many people who made
it big in their youth and middle age,
made it in sport in their early years,
made it in careers--the middle ones.

Of course, death gets us all in the end,
doesn’t it Gabriel Garcia? Of course!

Eventually, life is about loss, failure,
going down hill, getting sick, the list
is long and you have to deal with it
somehow, eh Garcia? My inglorious,
and partly glorious, athletic career
ended at 18 and my teaching career
at 58 with that Disability Pension.

This was all very useful for the final
career in my life which was writing.

No name, no fame, no rank here,
but discovery of gold, tinsel, base
metal, a new, a fresh something
born of my own learned obstinacy
from men and women I have had
endless cups of tea with, argued,
talked and listened to until I was
absolutely talked & listened out.
Ron Price
5/2/'06 to 18/4/'14.
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SOME REFLECTIONS: WITH THANKS
TO GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

Part 1:

Resentments, it seems to me, stir up resentments; they reopen old scars, turn them into fresh wounds and nurture rancor. I have often hoped, and thought to myself that, when we rounded the corner of old age, we would laugh at the bitter-sweetness of life, more sweet than bitter I also hoped, of so much that had made us want to abandon our relationships and their attendant responsibilities and begin a new life without their incessant demands. Perhaps in some old and more placid state, we would simply avoid talking about old wounds fearful that they might begin to bleed again.1 Time would tell as I head into this last decade of late adulthood, 70 to 80, and old-age, the years after 80, if I last that long.

In this context I might add that I have come to depend on my wife in so many areas for advice: in my work, for companionship at home, for someone to share solitude with. I have always liked that definition of marriage as "the sharing of solitude." When I am separated from her for a day or so, and that is about all these days, I become conscious of the words of Huxley in relation to his wife, namely, that "nobody, children or anyone else, can be to me what you are. Even another man of fame, Ulysses, preferred his old woman to immortality." When I am away from you, from my wife, I am led "to see that Ulysses was as wise in that matter as in many other things."

Again Huxley writes, "Against all trouble, and I have had my share, I weigh a wife-comrade 'trew and fest' in all emergencies."2 The closeness I have achieved with my wife has little to do with sex and much to do with common values, a spiritual bond, shared experience and, perhaps, those mysterious dispensations of a watchful Providence that Gibbon, that greatest of all historians at least to some, described so aptly.

Part 2:

Although this everyday trivia may not reveal a substance, a core, of life, some of it does reveal a curious, at times interesting and humorous, aspect of one's life worthy of comment, worthy of inclusion, in a book, a set of volumes, like my autobiography. More importantly it may not be worthy, but somehow it seems appropriate. Once upon a time, I might have shrunk from the act of self-revelation and self-exposure in my memoiristic writing.

But some fundamental creative impulse moves me to include an anecdote here and another there. I was reminded of this smallest of impulses, this most trivial of details, with little or no literary value, of supreme banality, very private, secret, intimate, but quite universal, by my wife when she was reading an account of a similar experience described by Gabriel Marquez. Marquez describes the situation better than I could and so I will simply quote him here:

"Ferminia Daza could never resign herself to Dr. Urbino's wetting the rim of the toilet bowl each time he used it. Dr. Urbino tried to convince her, with arguments readily understandable to anyone who wished to understand them, that the mishap was not repeated every day through carelessness on his part, as she insisted, but because of organic reasons:.....with the ravages of age his stream was not only decreasing, it was also becoming oblique and scattered, impossible to control despite his many efforts to direct it.....On the eve of old age this physical difficulty inspired Dr. Urbino with the ultimate solution: he urinated sitting down.....which kept the bowl clean and him in a state of grace."3

Having to deal with a urological surgeon and the perils of the prostate with their associated urinary flow infirmities, as well as a renal physician in these my latter years, my retirement years, I could fully appreciate Marquez's references to "the ravages of age" and "the decreasing stream, the decreasing urinary flow" which my surgeon warned me about only recently in early 2014.

Part 3:

On the eve of old age or, more accurately, the last decade of late adulthood, I am in the process of applying the same ultimate solution, but with great difficulty. I see my own autobiography as the story of a life that suggests, exemplifies, a psychological reality that opposes and withstands as much of the plague of popular fantasies that bombard consciousness as I have been able in these epochs. My identity is not associated with an image, an image that is ultimately empty, of another's demand in an image-conscious society. I accept that image has become a central aspect of life today; indeed to some extent I revel in it. I play the game, but I realize it's a game. I know that much of what I desire I have been taught to desire through my only partly avoidable immersion in society's realities.

I have been hooked, as we all have been to varying extents, by the "aesthetics of consumerism." "Coolness," "glamorousness," a host of images I am aware of, but I know my reality and the reality of others is not this. Still I must admit that all this surface piffle, surface reality, has influenced me in much of my life. Of course, I am not the only one to realize this; so, too, do millions of others who sit and take in what some have called 'secondary reality.'4 In the last two centuries these electronic media products have bathed society, and now billions of its citizens, in a cornucopia of products and pleasures. Parenthetically, I might point out that 200 years ago this year, in 1814, and due to the industrial revolution's role in print media, The Times of London acquired a printing press capable of making 1,100 impressions per minute. In the last seven decades I, too, have found that they are not been without their value.

Part 4:

Given the quantity of time in my life in which I have absorbed products from the print and electronic media: from books and journals, from newspapers and magazines, from film and TV, from radio and musak, from advertising and hi-fi sound-music systems, from video and CDs, from VCRs and DVDs, I would guesstimate a minimum of one-eighth of all the hours of my life and, perhaps, as much as a quarter, or even one half, they really deserve a separate study of their own. I give them all their separate study in my now voluminous autobiographical memoirs across several genres: poetry and prose, narrative and letters, diary and internet posts, essays and emails, life itself and the accounts of friends and family,inter alia.

In every book you tried to take a different path;
I do the same with each of my non-books, my
essays and prose-poems. As you say, Gabriel,
one doesn't choose the style; one investigates
and tries to discover what the best style is for
a theme...Yes, style is determined by subject,
by the mood of the times. As you say, if one
tries to use something that is not suitable....
it just won't work. I, too, only respond to a
way of life, in your case that of the Caribbean,
and in my case a fast-emerging planetisation.

The participation of the reader in what I write
is as crucial to me as it was to you, but I'm not
into magical realism, Gabriel...Solitude, as you
say, is a problem everybody has. Everyone has
their own way and means of expressing what is
in some ways a highly enigmatic reality of life.

The feeling, this solitude, pervades the work of
many writers, although to each very differently.5
1 G. Marquez quoted in What's So Amazing About Grace, Philip Yancey,
ePub Format, 1997
2 T. H. Huxley, Letters and Diary, 3/11/1892.
3 G. Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, 2003.
4 Martin Pawley, Private Future, 1975.
5 In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Solitude of Latin America, Marquez relates the theme of solitude to the Latin American experience, "The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary." I find the implications of this idea, for me as a writer and author, poet and publisher, are fascinating, even staggering, and far too extensive to deal with here in this brief(not brief-enough I can here the critics say) prose-poetic quasi-eulogy.

Márquez is now recognized, in the words of Carlos Fuentes, "as the most popular and perhaps the best writer in Spanish since Cervantes." Fuentes was the famous Mexican novelist and essayist who died less than two years ago, and whose novels began to take him to heights of popularity in 1962, the year I began my travels for the Canadian Baha'i community. Among the many tributes that have flowed-in during the first 24 hours since his passing were the words of Barack Obama who said: "the world has lost one of its greatest visionary writers".-Quoted in today's eulogistic piece in The Guardian, Friday 18 April 2014.
----------------------- ]]> Ron Price https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?13329-Gabriel-José-de-la-Concordia-García-Márquez(1927-2014)-Notes-on-His-Passing <![CDATA[Description of Ron Price's Blog at this Literature Network Forum]]> https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?12796-Description-of-Ron-Price-s-Blog-at-this-Literature-Network-Forum Wed, 16 Jan 2013 02:04:16 GMT PIONEERING OVER FIVE EPOCHS A. MY TYPE OF SOCIAL NETWORKING 1. Everything I do with other people online is part of my particular type of social... PIONEERING OVER FIVE EPOCHS

A. MY TYPE OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

1. Everything I do with other people online is part of my particular type of social networking. My social networking is associated with three basic activities: (a) the creation of a personal webpage that serves as a home base, a central hub, for my writing, for teaching and consolidation, for service and social activism, as well as for feedback from others---should they wish; (b) the creation of a detailed personal profile(see Appendix 1 below) which I post at over 8000 internet sites which readers at these sites can access, again, if they wish; and finally (c) posting my writing at these 8000+ sites, and interacting with others about my posts and theirs. In the process I promote my website, and my writing, at these 8000+ internet sites.

2. In the last decade, 2003 to 2013, I have created an extensive audience or readership. I address myself to a circle, a crowd or single individuals. I try to make of my interactions more than the typical ones found at sites like Facebook and twitter. The interactions or connections at such popular social networking sites often reduce friendship to a feeling or an image, a sense of connection to faraway or nearby friends about everyday things based, for the most part, on very short, pithy posts. Such connections involve posts that often contain little about one’s true difficulties in life. A world of privacy and an image is created. There is nothing wrong with that, with this type of site and networking style, but it is not my style, not my approach, not my MO, modus operandi, to use a who-dun-it term.

3. I post a great deal about what I think in the form of prose and poetry, generally more extended pieces of writing than the posts found in the Facebook and twitter world. My posts are far beyond the one-liners and the jokes, the what I did today and what I ate for dinner, the I poke you and I like this, but I don’t like that, the ‘here are some photos of this’ and ‘here are some pictures of that’, ‘here is a video of this’ and ‘here is a piece of music,’ etc.

B. MY WEBSITE

1. My website has been on the internet for the last 17 years: 1997-2013. It is part of a tapestry, or perhaps a jig-saw puzzle is a more accurate word, for all my poetry and prose both at my website and elsewhere in cyberspace at those 8000+ sites mentioned above. I have dozens of links at my site, some linked to my writing at other internet sites, and some linked to resources created by others. I have created a large thread of words across the internet since leaving the world of jobs in the late 1990s and taking a sea-change at the age of 55. These last 14 years, 1999 to 2013, have been busy ones of self-publishing, to use a quite appropriate term for my extensive internet posting.

2. My cyberspace creation is made by a now self-employed individual: a retired teacher and lecturer, tutor and adult educator, taxi-driver and ice-cream salesman. I am now a poet and publisher, writer and author, editor and scholar, researcher and reader, online blogger and journalist, scribbler and sampler within the immense commentariat and blogosphere that is the world-wide-web.

3. I am now 69 and I attempt to endow various themes and a wide range of subjects in the arts and sciences with many layers of meaning. In these last 17 years on the world-wide-web I have evoked a complex range of responses in readers who come upon my work, responses which range from lavish enthusiasm to utter indifference and quite intense criticism. The solitary work of literary creation requires a type of talent, some earned ability or unearned gift of grace which is almost never collaborative, except in the sense that I borrow ideas and special phrases and sentences from the works of others.

Social networking by most people at SNS like Facebook expose readers to this or that book, this or that video, this or that piece of music, this or that restaurant or food dish, this or that pleasurable activity, quotation or pithy post of some kind, this or that idea or cause. For the most part my social networking is of another kind.

3.1 The solitude I require to create an essay, a poem or a book requires my ability to draw on the globally interrelated, interdependent and interlocked system of the WWW to market my wares. Until my work is ready to be placed in cyberspace the activity is intensely private, although I often draw on the work of other writers in composing my own literary creations. The marketing of my work is also private, and then the feedback comes in or it does not as the case may be. Not everything I write in cyberspace is commented on by others.

B.1 MY WEBSITE AND OTHER INTERNET SITES

I will continue to use my website as the central hub for my literary work, for my internet teaching and learning activity, for my now several million words and many books on the internet in this 2nd decade of the 21st century. My writing is found in the form of: essays and blogs, poems and articles, ebooks and message boards, threads and special topic sites, indeed a myriad types of discussions. I do not engage, though, in any sort of aggressive proselytising or heated exchange at those 8000 websites that are part of this personal and industrious exercise. When what I write produces vehemence and invective, heated criticism at some site, I simply leave if I am unable to cool the emotional climate at the site. Sometimes I am banned before this occurs for a variety of reasons.

C. MY WRITING STYLE AND MY VALUES

1.I have tried over the last several decades of my life, looking back as far as my own junior youth in the 1950s, to develop a writing style which, while fusing together material from many academic disciplines, from my own life as well as from my value, belief and attitude base, aims to be both provocative and intellectually stimulating on the one hand and light and entertaining on the other. In writing, as in daily life though, one wins sometimes and one loses at other times; one’s writing appeals to some and not to others. One’s value, belief and attitude base is simply, or not-so-simply, another word for one’s religion. Faith, to put this another way, is a set of assumptions around which one places one’s emotions and then proceeds to act and argue one’s case before the court of life.

2.I possess an obvious enthusiasm for my evolving values, beliefs and attitudes as well as the several causes I promote or I would not have been associated with them in their overt form---for nearly 60 years; nor would I be promoting my ideas in a multitude of forms, subtle and not-so-subtle, on the internet as I do and have done since retiring from FT work in 1999, PT in 2003 and most casual-volunteer work in 2005.

D. MY READERSHIP

1.I now have several million readers on the internet. It is difficult to guesstimate readership precisely in cyberspace when there are now nearly 300 million sites and over 2 billion users, and when one writes at as many sites as I do. Many of the sites at which I post my writing and interact with others keep me informed about how many people click-on to what I have written.

2.I am engaged in varying degrees of frequency and intensity, in parts of this tapestry, this jig-saw puzzle, this literary product, this creation, this immense pile of words with hundreds of people with whom I correspond on occasion as a result. I keep most of this correspondence as infrequent as possible or I would drown in this new form of letter writing: the email and the internet post.

E. THE WWW AND PUBLISHING

1.This amazing technical facility, the world wide web, has made this literary success, this form of publishing, possible. This teaching and learning exercise, this form of service and often social activism, among the many other functions of my writing in the now wide and extensive dialogue I now have with diverse publics is an enriching one. If my writing had been left in the hands of the traditional hard and soft-cover publishers, where it had been without success for the most part from 1981 to 2001, these publishing results with my now extensive readership would never have been achieved.

2.It is my hope that what I write as a result of this self-employment, this literary vocation and avocation, this pleasurable occupation of my leisure time, resonates with both the novitiate and the veteran on the one hand and the great diversity of people who are on a multitude of paths in their journey through life.

F. NOTE

When accessing what I write in cyberspace you can Google: Ron Price, but be aware that there are more than 4000 other Ron Prices now on the web. Some of them are men of fame and others of notoriety. You can also Google: Pioneering Over Five Epochs or 'Ron Price forums' or 'Ron Price' followed by…..many other words and phrases literally several 1000 possibilities to access what I have written. My website, to reiterate, is found at: http://www.ronpriceepoch.com/ My email address is: ronprice9@gmail.com is you want to write to me.

APPENDIX 1:

EMPLOYMENT-SOCIAL-ROLE POSITIONS: 1943-2013

2010-2013-Retired and on a pension in George Town, Tasmania
1999-2009-Writer & Author, Poet & Publisher, Editor & Researcher. Retired Teacher & Lecturer, Tutor & Adult Educator, Taxi-Driver & Ice-Cream Salesman, George Town Tasmania Australia
2002-2005-Program Presenter City Park Radio Launceston
1999-2004-Tutor &/or President George Town School for Seniors Inc
-----------ABOVE THIS LINE ARE MY YEARS OF RETIREMENT FROM FT EMPLOYMENT--------
1988-1999 -Lecturer in General Studies & Human Services West Australian Department of Training
1986-1987 -Acting Lecturer in Management Studies & Co-ordinator of Further Education Unit at Hedland College in South Hedland WA
1982-1985 -Adult Educator Open College of Tafe Katherine NT
1981 -Maintenance Scheduler Renison Bell Zeehan Tasmania
1980-Unemployed due to illness and recovery
1979-Editor External Studies Unit Tasmanian CAE; Youth Worker Resource Centre Association; Lecturer in Organizational Behaviour Tasmanian CAE; Radio Journalist ABC---all in Launceston Tasmania
1976-1978 -Lecturer in Social Sciences & Humanities Ballarat CAE Ballarat, Victoria
1975 - Lecturer in Behavioural Studies Whitehorse Technical College, Box Hill Victoria
1974 -Senior Tutor in Education Studies Tasmanian CAE Launceston, Tasmania
1972-1973 -High School Teacher South Australian Education Department
1971-Primary School Teacher Whyalla South Australia
--------ABOVE THIS LINE ARE MY YEARS IN AUSTRALIA AND BELOW MY YEARS IN CANADA--
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
1969-1971 Primary School Teacher Prince Edward County Board of Education Picton Ontario Canada
1969-Systems Analyst Bad Boy Co Ltd Toronto Ontario
1967-68 -Community Teacher Department of Indian Affairs & Northern Development in Frobisher Bay NWT Canada
1959-67 -Summer jobs-1 to 4 months each- from grade 10 to end of university
1949-1967 - Attended 2 primary schools, 2 high schools and 2 universities in Canada: McMaster Uni-1963-1966, Windsor Teachers’ College-1966/7
1944-1963 -Childhood(1944-57) and adolescence (1957-63) in and around Hamilton Ontario
1943 to 1944-Conception in October 1943 to birth in July 1944 in Hamilton Ontario

2. SOME SOCIO-BIO-DATA TO 2013

I have been married twice for a total of 46 years. My second wife is a Tasmanian, aged 66. We’ve had one child: age 35. I have two step-children: ages: 47 and 42, three step-grandchildren, ages 19, 17 and 2, as well as one grandchild aged 16 months. All of the above applies in January 2013. I am 69, am a Canadian who moved to Australia in 1971 and have written several books--all available on the internet. I retired from full-time teaching in 1999, part-time teaching in 2003 and volunteer teaching/work in 2005 after 32 years in classrooms as a teacher and another 18 as a student. In addition, I have been a member of the Baha’i Faith for 53 years. Bio-data: 6ft, 230 lbs, eyes-brown/hair-grey, Caucasian.

My website is found at: http://www.ronpriceepoch.com/ You can also go to any search engine and type: Ron Price followed by any one of a number of words in addition to: poetry, forums, religion, literature, history, bipolar disorder, psychology, sociology, Baha’i, inter alia, to access my writing________________________
End of document ]]> Ron Price https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?12796-Description-of-Ron-Price-s-Blog-at-this-Literature-Network-Forum <![CDATA[Ron Price's Blog]]> https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?4999-Ron-Price-s-Blog Sun, 30 Mar 2008 09:11:21 GMT A NEW LIFE AND A NEW LARA Ten weeks after I had come to the firmest and most realistic of decisions I had yet made regarding my future career—the... A NEW LIFE AND A NEW LARA

Ten weeks after I had come to the firmest and most realistic of decisions I had yet made regarding my future career—the decision to become a primary school teacher--the film Dr. Zhivago was released. During my pre-adult life(1963-1944), I had wanted to be a bricklayer, a fireman and a professional baseball player--in that order. My career as a primary school teacher also proved unrealistic and was short-lived, although it proved to be much more realistic than those other three alternatives mentioned above, all of which were early life enthusiasms born of childhood and adolescent play and dreams.

On 22 December 1965, the day that the film Dr. Zhivago was released, I was on my way to a Baha’i youth winter school at the University of Waterloo campus in Waterloo Ontario. The film was shot in the previous months while my father lay dying in Dundas Ontario, while my mother was finishing her working life and retiring and while I was majoring in history, philosophy and sociology at McMaster University in Hamilton Ontario. In the first year(22/12/65-22/12/66) of the release of Dr. Zhivago, a film that became one of the most popular 20th century movies, I moved to Windsor to study under Dr. Jameson Bond, an anthropologist at the University of Windsor and a Baha’i who had lived in the high Arctic for a dozen years; I also began my teacher training and started a relationship with Miss Judy Gower whom I married in August 1967.

After pondering with some anxiety for eight months(12/65-8/66) the decision to teach school in the Canadian Arctic and after finishing my degree; after selling ice-cream for the Good Humour Company for three summer months and after attending a one week Baha’i youth training institute in Michigan, I left my home town, family and friends and started teaching career on Baffin Island among the Inuit. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 30 March 2008.

I knew nothing of Dr. Zhivago
until years later and little of the
Russian revolution or communism,
for that matter, although I had studied
Marx’s Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts.1 I had discovered my
own romance not unlike Zhivago’s in
a revolution of quite another order in a
snow-bound world of quite another time.

With tragedy and a new high-seriousness
built into my daily life and with decisions
made---the enterprize all came to naught:
the north, the Arctic, the Eskimos, health,
marriage, career and, like Zhivago, I found
an inner poetic beauty, a new life and--like
Zhivago--I created one with my own Lara2
and life went on and on toward my own
mysterious end which has not yet come.

1 Written by Karl Marx in the summer of 1844.
2 While married, but separated from my first wife, I formed a relationship with a woman who became my second wife in December 1975.

Ron Price
30 March 2008 ]]> Ron Price https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?4999-Ron-Price-s-Blog <![CDATA[Leonard da Vinci's Notebooks: An Inspiration]]> https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?4998-Leonard-da-Vinci-s-Notebooks-An-Inspiration Sun, 30 Mar 2008 09:09:46 GMT AN INTRODUCTION TO MY NOTEBOOKS In his work from day to day Leonard da Vinci concentrated on one thing at a time and, while he concentrated on... AN INTRODUCTION TO MY NOTEBOOKS

In his work from day to day Leonard da Vinci concentrated on one thing at a time and, while he concentrated on that one thing, that thing was the most important in the world. Not much got done in the short term because da Vinci seemed interested in everything but, over a lifetime, da Vinci accomplished many great things, albeit unfinished.

After his death Leonard da Vinci’s Notebooks were hidden away, scattered or lost. His wonderful ideas were forgotten; his inventions were not tested and built for hundreds of years. It was largely due to his wide interests that the things he started were never finished.

These casual, passing, fleeting, but intense, interests can be found described, outlined, in those Notebooks. These Notebooks record his observations, his sketches, his notes. They are all scattered through 28 Notebooks in over 5000 pages from 1490 to 1519. The Notebooks are a fascinating mixture of philosophy, scientific enquiry and art with, arguably, four major topics: painting, architecture, mechanics and anatomy made when he was 37 to 67.-Ron Price with thanks to ABC TV, “Leonardo da Vinci,” 7:30 to 8:30 p.m., October 31st, 2004.
____________________________
Some may see it a little presumptuous to compare my Notebooks to those of one of the greatest geniuses of history. But, as Bahiyyih Nakhjavani writes in her article "Artist, Seeker and Seer", our greatness “rests not in ourselves as much as in our ability and desire to circle around the great.”(1) ‘Contrast’ is a better word than ‘compare’ because my Notebooks are so very different than da Vinci’s.

I won’t ennumerate all the differences; perhaps the main difference is a visual bias in his work and a print bias in mine. Mine were collected some 500 years after da Vinci’s. Perhaps the first Notebook I created was in 1949 in kindergarten and from that year until 1962 I created many a school Notebook.

None of these notes now exist except two essays from English class in 1961-2 and now located in my Journal Volume 1.1. I have some other notes going back to the early to mid sixties, to the start of my pioneering life in 1961-2, newspaper columns by Richard Needham of the Toronto Globe and Mail, and the 1970s, mostly (a) photocopies of material given to me by students at Box Hill Tafe, (b) from Baha’i books which I keep in my Notebook: “Notes/Quotes file B,” (c) from a sociology of art course I taught in 1974 and (d) from media studies courses I taught in Ballarat in 1976-7.

The vast bulk of my notes comes from the 30 year period 1982 to 2012. Many notes and Notebooks from 1982 to 2002 were given to the Baha’i Council of the Northern Territory as part of the History of the Baha’i Faith in that territory.(2)

What exists now in my study are notes and Notebooks for the nearly 30 year period, 1984 to 2012, from the age of 40 to 68. The collection of 260(ca) Notebooks, in the form of two-ring binders and arch-lever files, consists of written notes and quotes from books on a multitude of subjects, photocopies and typed copies of the works of others and notes taken mostly from my reading and to a far lesser extent my observations and experiences.

There are many categories of these Notebooks: (i) journal and diary Notebooks, (ii) Baha’i Notebooks and (iii) Notebooks on a multitude of humanities and social science disciplines/topics. I have made a list of these and previous Notebooks in Section IX.1 of my files. They are found in the same file as: Section VI, Volume 2: Part 1: Unpublished Writings. I have also added additional information on the notebooks of other writers to help provide perspectives on my own notes and note-keeping.

I should add, too, that there are many (iv) poetry Notebooks which occupy an extensive category unto itself. One could say that these are the four main categories of Notebooks that I have in my study twenty-one years after I began to keep notes that became the collection that now exists.(3)

New ideas are incubated, to some extent, in these Notebooks. I have squeezed brief writing periods, sketches of varying lengths and tasks of different kinds, into my frenetic life out of necessity because I was teaching a particular subject, out of interest because it was associated with my involvement in the Baha’i Faith or because I wanted to write about a subject, an idea, an experience, if not at the time I recorded the words, at least later on. I rarely recorded observations of nature in any detail, although occasionally I did in my poetry. The accounts of my experiences can be found in my journals and my poetry.

There are 1000s of pages of notes; I would not even want to begin to count them. Over time I hope to write a more detailed outline of their origins, their evolution and their present contents. I’m not sure they are worth preserving as da Vinci’s were hundreds of years after they were written. I think it unlikely, although I will leave that to a posterity that I can scarcely anticipate at this climacteric of history in which I am living. For now, though, this brief statement is sufficient.(4)
__________FOOTNOTES________________
(1)Bahiyyih Nakhjvani, “Artist, Seeker and Seer,” Baha’i Studies, Vol.10, p.19.
(2) My Notebooks from the age of 18 to 39, from 1962 to 1984, are so minuscule as to hardly rate a mention. Those from the age of 5 to 18, although extensive, have disappeared into the dustbin of history. My first notes from the period 1984 to 2004 come from January 19th 1984, a journal entry. A more extensive analysis than this cursory one here may reveal a different timetable, a different history of my Notebooks.
(3) Of course the whole note-taking process could be said to begin in the early years of primary school, say, 1949-1953 bu which time I was in grade 4 and nine years old.
(4) Ron Price, “In Commemoration of the 47th Anniversary of the Passing of the Guardian in 1957,” Pioneering Over Four Epochs, November 4, 2004.
___________________________
Ron Price
July 31st 2005 and
Updated On: 26/2/'12 ]]> Ron Price https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?4998-Leonard-da-Vinci-s-Notebooks-An-Inspiration