I was drawn to all the wrong things

I read once that good writing (I’m going to narrow this down to fiction writing) is when the writing doesn’t seem like writing, rather, its as if we walked into the middle of a private conversation. For me, that’s how Bukowski writes (most of the time.)

“I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn’t have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone. On the other hand, when I got drunk I screamed, went crazy, got all out of hand. One kind of behavior didn’t fit the other. I didn’t care.”- Charles Bukowski, Women

Integrity

Family finds bags of money in the road

 (CNN)A Virginia family was just trying to get out of the coronavirus blues by taking a long drive when they found what turned out to be nearly $1 million in cash in the middle of the road.

A car in front of the Schantz family had swerved out of the way of what appeared to be a big bag of trash, Maj. Scott Moser of the Caroline County Sheriff's Department told CNN. The Schantz family, however, didn't have time to do the same.

The Schantz family went to church with one of the county's sheriffs. He told the family to call the office.

"We went out there and determined it was, in fact, cash. It was in two bags and the total was close to $1 million," Moser said.

Within the two larger bags were smaller ones, each containing some information on where the money should have been deposited.

The Sheriff's department conducted its own investigation before turning it over the United States Postal Service, which is now looking into the matter.

"It's really a credit to just the character and fiber of the family," Moser said. "I'm sure it'd be difficult to make that decision. It's almost $1 million in cash. But they did the right thing."

Pulp Covers, Painting by Tom Lovell

Norman Rockwell entering his Stockbridge studio, Massachusetts, 1966

Hercules and Omphale

The myth: Wishing to expiate the murder of one of his friends, Hercules consulted the oracle of Apollo, who advised him to enter the service of Omphale, Queen of Lydia.

Although Hercules was the son of Zeus and was famed for his invincible strength, he submitted to the tasks the queen devised for him to expiate his crime.

Omphale fell in love with Hercules for his strength and physical beauty, and the couple married.

This tale, found in both Greek and Roman mythology, is told with a number of variations.

It proved a great source of inspiration for French and Italian Mannerist painters, as well as the Venetian artists who influenced Lemoyne. François Boucher also painted a version of the same love scene.

On writing........

The Vacation

The Vacation

BY WENDELL BERRY

Once there was a man who filmed his vacation.

He went flying down the river in his boat

with his video camera to his eye, making

a moving picture of the moving river

upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly

toward the end of his vacation. He showed

his vacation to his camera, which pictured it,

preserving it forever: the river, the trees,

the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat

behind which he stood with his camera

preserving his vacation even as he was having it

so that after he had had it he would still

have it. It would be there. With a flick

of a switch, there it would be. But he

would not be in it. He would never be in it.

Hélène Bouchet

Hélène Bouchet (born 1980) is a French ballet dancer is a principal dancer at the Hamburg Ballet.  Bouchet was born in Cannes in the south of France. She studied ballet at École supérieure de danse de Cannes Rosella Hightower and at the École Nationale de Danse in Marseille under Raymond Franchetti and Dominique Khalfouni.

Vespers

Monteverdi’s – Vespers is a Baroque piece that some argue bridged the gap between the Renaissance and the early Baroque periods. The work is enormous in scale.

Sidney Bechet.

Sidney Joseph Bechet (May 14, 1897 – May 14, 1959) was a jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, and composer. He was one of the first important soloists in jazz, beating trumpeter Louis Armstrong to the recording studio by several months. His erratic temperament hampered his career, and not until the late 1940s did he earn wide acclaim

In 1919, Ernest Ansermet, a Swiss conductor of classical music, wrote a tribute to Bechet, one of the earliest (if not the first) to a jazz musician from the field of classical music, linking Bechet's music with that of Bach.

Bechet played a jazz musician in three films, Serie Noire, L'Inspecteur connait la musique and, Quelle équipe[

His playing style was intense and passionate and had a wide vibrato. He was also known to be proficient at playing several instruments and a master of improvisation (both individual and collective). Bechet liked to have his sound dominate in a performance, and trumpeters found it difficult to play alongside him.

On September 15, 1925, Bechet and other members of the Revue Nègre, including Josephine Baker, sailed to Europe, arriving at Cherbourg, France, on September 22. The revue opened at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on October 2. He toured Europe with various bands, reaching as far as Russia in mid-1926. In 1928, he led his small band at Chez Bricktop in Montmartre, Paris.

He was imprisoned in Paris for eleven months. In his autobiography, he wrote that he accidentally shot a woman when he was trying to shoot a musician who had insulted him. He had challenged the man to duel and said, "Sidney Bechet never plays the wrong chord." After his release, he was deported to New York, arriving soon after the stock market crash of 1929. He joined Noble Sissle's orchestra, which toured in Germany and Russia.

Shortly before his death, Bechet dictated his autobiography, Treat It Gentle, to Al Rose, a record producer and radio host. He had worked with Rose several times in concert promotions and had a fractious relationship with him. Bechet's view of himself in his autobiography was starkly different from the one Rose knew. "The kindly old gentleman in his book was filled with charity and compassion. The one I knew was self-centered, cold, and capable of the most atrocious cruelty, especially toward women." Although embellished and frequently inaccurate, Treat It Gentle remains a staple account for the "insider's view of the New Orleans tradition."

Bechet died in Garches, near Paris, of lung cancer on May 14, 1959, his 62nd birthday, and is buried in a local cemetery. 

Just had an interesting thought....

      Hope is a gift we give each other.....hope is purely human.

Enjoy!

Black white film

A London Pub, 1953.

Hippoplayground, Riverside Park, Photo by Carrie Boertz Keating, 1993

Beaver and Wall Street, Photo by Carrie Boertz Keating, 1994

En attendant l'autobus, Paris, 1967. Paul Almasy

Bizarre parallel universe

I had to research this to understand what the writer was trying to say or get information he left out. Despite the eye catching headline, the news is fascinating but there is not a “parallel universe” as laymen would understand it. There is (maybe, possibly, perhaps) a parallel universe of particles and gases etc. Still, the concept is remarkable.

NASA may have uncovered evidence of bizarre parallel universe where physics, time operate in reverse

University of Hawaii at Manoa

FRANK O'LAUGHLIN

(WHDH) — Scientists at NASA have reportedly uncovered evidence of a bizarre parallel universe where the rules of physics and time appear to be operating in reverse.

Researchers conducting an experiment in Antarctica discovered particles from a universe that was born during the same Big Bang the created the one we live in, according to NewScientist.

A NASA team was using a giant balloon to carry electronic antennas into the sky above the frozen wastes of Antarctica when they encountered a “wind” of particles from outer space that were “a million times more powerful” than anything they had seen before, the news outlet reported.

Low-energy particles have the ability to pass through Earth without any interaction, but higher-energy particles are stopped by the solid matter of Earth, the report stated.

High-energy particles are only detected if they are coming “down” from Earth, but NASA’s Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna detected the particles traveling “up.”

The findings suggest that the particles were traveling backward in time from a parallel universe, the experiment’s lead investigator, Peter Gorham, said in an interview with the University of Hawai‘i News.

Otherwise, the particles would have had to change form before passing through Earth and back again, something that Gorham described as an “impossible event.”

Gorham explained that the Big Bang, which happened nearly 14 billion years ago, likely resulted in the formation of two universes — the one that the people of Earth live in and another where everything operates in reverse.

The Three Fates.

In ancient Greek religion and mythology, the Moirai ( destinies, apportioners"), often known in English as the Fates, who were the white-robed incarnations of destiny. Their number became fixed at three: Clotho ("spinner"), Lachesis ("allotter") and Atropos ("the unturnable", a metaphor for death).

The Cake Shop, 1899, Edouard Vuillard.

Jean-Édouard Vuillard (November 1868 –  June 1940) was a French painter, decorative artist and printmaker. From 1891 through 1900, he was a prominent member of the Nabis, making paintings which assembled areas of pure color, and interior scenes, influenced by Japanese prints, where the subjects were blended into colors and patterns. He also was a decorative artist, painting theater sets, panels for interior decoration, and designing plates and stained glass. After 1900, when the Nabis broke up, he adopted a more realistic style, painting landscapes and interiors with lavish detail and vivid colors. In the 1920s and 1930s he painted portraits of prominent figures in French industry and the arts in their familiar settings.

On writing

Starky house, Duluth, Minnesota 1955. Arch. Marcel Breuer

Wagner - The Ring Cycle

At four hours, this is an immersive opera. The Ring  is a cycle of four German-language epic music dramas composed by Richard Wagner. The works are based loosely on characters from the Norse sagas and the Nibelungenlied. The composer termed the cycle a "Bühnenfestspiel" (stage festival play), structured in three days preceded by a Vorabend ("preliminary evening"). It is often referred to as the Ring cycle, Wagner's Ring, or simply The Ring.

Beauty in motion

Anna Valev, née Backman (born 1969) is a Swedish ballet dancer. Until her retirement from active dancing in 2012, she was a principal dancer with the Royal Swedish Ballet.[

Born in Täby in Stockholm County, she took an early interest in dance, attending ballet classes five days a week by the time she was eight years old. From the age of 10, she attended the Royal Theatre Ballet School, after which she spent two years at the Royal Swedish Ballet School, also completing her secondary education there in 1987.[2] She immediately joined the Royal Swedish Ballet, becoming a soloist in 1992 and a principal dancer in 1994. In her 25 years with the Royal Swedish Ballet, Valev danced leading roles in the wide-ranging repertory of the company, performing in both classical ballets and contemporary works. Her preferred roles have been those with strong personal content such as the title role in Romeo and Juliet (ballet) or Julie in Birgit Cullberg's Fröken Julie. Her final assignment was in Pontus Lidberg's The Little Match Girl Passion in April 2012.

On writing

The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink… His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste. Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself.

I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide. - Harper Lee

On writing

“Write. Don't talk about writing. Don't tell me about your wonderful story ideas. Don't give me a bunch of 'somedays'. Plant your ass and scribble, type, keyboard. If you have any talent at all it will leak out despite your failure to pay attention in English." The Instrumentalities of the Night: An Interview with Glen Cook, The SF Site, September 2005”

  

 “Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.” Vladimir Nabokov

“Short stories demand a certain awareness of one’s own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.” Joan Didion

 “A book in a man’s brain is better off than a book bound in calf — at any rate it is safer from criticism.” Herman Melville

“The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is … to help man endure by lifting his heart.” William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

 “In a country this large and a language even larger … there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.” John Updike

“To make your life being a writer, it’s an auto-slavery … you are both the slave and the task-master.” Susan Sontag

The difference between blind optimism and the urge to improve the world’s imperfection. Chinua Achebe

 “The test of one’s decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please.” Willa Cather: Writing Through Troubled Times

 “My belief of book writing is much the same as my belief as to shoemaking. The man who will work the hardest at it, and will work with the most honest purpose, will work the best.” Anthony Trollope: Witty and Wise Advice on How to Be a Successful Writer

 “For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write — like myself — college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.” William Styron: Why Formal Education Is a Waste of Time for Writers

 “We find what we are looking for. If we are looking for life and love and openness and growth, we are likely to find them. If we are looking for witchcraft and evil, we’ll likely find them, and we may get taken over by them.” Madeleine L’Engle: Creativity, Censorship, Writing, and the Duty of Children’s Books

 “The writer cannot make the seas of distraction stand still, but he [or she] can at times come between the madly distracted and the distractions.” Saul Bellow: How Writers and Artists Save Us from the “Moronic Inferno” of Our Time

 “Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes.” Schopenhauer on Style

 “There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored.” Flannery O’Connor: Why the Grotesque Appeals to Us, Plus a Rare Recording of Her Reading

 “The only moral that is of any value is that which arises inevitably from the whole cast of the author’s mind.” C.S. Lewis: The 3 Ways of Writing for Children and the Key to Authenticity in All Writing

 “Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it.” Nietzsche: 10 Rules for Writers

 “It’s the most satisfying occupation man has discovered yet, because you never can quite do it as well as you want to, so there’s always something to wake up tomorrow morning to do.” William Faulkner: Writing, the Human Dilemma, and Why We Create

 “It’s a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.” Zadie Smith: The Psychology of the Two Types of Writers

 “By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.” George Orwell: Writing, How to Counter the Mindless Momentum of Language, and the Four Questions a Great Writer Must Ask Herself

 “Success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search… for the sentence in which every word is unalterable.” Italo Calvino: The Art of Quickness, Digression as a Hedge Against Death, and the Key to Great Writing

 “All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.” Ursula K. Le Guin: Where Ideas Come From, the “Secret” of Great Writing, and the Trap of Marketing Your Work

 “If you’re going to be a writer you have to be one of the great ones… After all, there are better ways to starve to death.” Gabriel García Márquez on His Unlikely Beginnings as a Writer

 “I doubt I would have written a line … unless some minor tragedy had sort of twisted my mind out of the normal rut.” Roald Dahl: How Illness Emboldens Creativity: A Moving Letter to His Bedridden Mentor

 “The sidelong glance is what you depend on.” Robert Frost: How to Read Intelligently and Write a Great Essay

 “When you have made a thorough and reasonably long effort, to understand a thing, and still feel puzzled by it, stop, you will only hurt yourself by going on.” Lewis Carroll: How to Work Through Difficulty and His Three Tips for Overcoming Creative Block

 “It’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.” Mark Strand: The Heartbeat of Creative Work and the Artist’s Task to Bear Witness to the Universe

 “Just set one day’s work in front of the last day’s work. That’s the way it comes out. And that’s the only way it does.” John Steinbeck: The Diary as a Tool of Discipline, a Hedge Against Self-Doubt, and a Pacemaker for the Heartbeat of Creative Work

 “Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down.” E.B. White: How to Write for Children and the Writer’s Responsibility to All Audiences

Consolation for those moments when you can’t tell whether you’re “the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.” Virginia Woolf: Writing and Self-Doubt

 “If we think that our reader is an idiot, we should not use rhetorical figures, but if we use them and feel the need to explain them, we are essentially calling the reader an idiot. In turn, he will… Umberto Eco’s Advice to Writers

 “Luckily for art, life is difficult, hard to understand, useless, and mysterious.” Grace Paley: The Value of Not Understanding Everything

“All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind.” Joseph Conrad on Art and What Makes a Great Writer, in a Beautiful Tribute to Henry James

“In any art you’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better.” Hemingway’s Advice on Writing, Ambition, the Art of Revision, and His Reading List of Essential Books for Aspiring Writers

“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” James Baldwin’s Advice on Writing

“It’s by writing… by stepping back a bit from the real thing to look at it, that we are most present.” Alison Bechdel on Writing, Therapy, Self-Doubt, and How the Messiness of Life Feeds the Creative Conscience

On writing

“An unpublished writer should doubt themselves. They should constantly wonder whether what they’re creating has merit. And then, having doubted, they should take up their pen and see if they can’t make it better.”  Johnny Rich

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.  Catherine Drinker Bowen

T.S. Eliot on Writing: His Warm and Wry Letter of Advice to a Sixteen-Year-Old Girl Aspiring to Become a Writer; “Don’t write at first for anyone but yourself.”

 “The best kind of writing, and the biggest thrill in writing, is to suddenly read a line from your typewriter that you didn’t know was in you.”  

“A writer is a world trapped in a person.”

“The ending has to fit. The ending has to matter and make  sense.

I could care less about whether it’s happy or sad or atomic.

The ending is the place where you go, ‘Aha. Of course. That’s right.’”

                                                                                               Carrie Jones

“It’s a funny thing about writing. You get so balled up in a story idea that you lose your perspective and forget that human being might read your words someday.” Gary Reilly

“Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so far as they are personal, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They are only interesting in so far as we can see them as typical of the human condition.”  W.H. Auden

“Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself…It’s a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent”   Harper Lee

“It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer.”      Gerald Brenan

 “I was so sentimental about you I’d break any one’s heart for you. My, I was a damned fool. I broke my own heart, too. It’s broken and gone. Everything I believe in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn’t it?”  Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not

On writing

“The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave  anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the  genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in “Lonesome Dove” and had nightmares about slavery in “Beloved” and walked the streets of Dublin in Ulysses and made up a hundred stories in the Arabian nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in “A Prayer for Owen Meany.” I’ve been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language.” Pat Conroy

 “I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I’ve done that day. I can’t do it late in the afternoon because I’m too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It removes me from the pages. So I spend this hour taking things out and putting other things in. Then I start the next day by redoing all of what I did the day before, following these evening notes. When I’m really working I don’t like to go out or have anybody to dinner, because then I lose the hour. If I don’t have the hour, and start the next day with just some bad pages and nowhere to go, I’m in low spirits. Another thing I need to do, when I’m near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it. That’s one reason I go home to Sacramento to finish things. Somehow the book doesn’t leave you when you’re asleep right next to it. In Sacramento nobody cares if I appear or not. I can just get up and start typing.” Joan Didion

On writing

Writers last words. When you’ve dedicated your life to words, it’s important to go out eloquently.

1.         Ernest Hemingway: “Goodnight my kitten.” Spoken to his wife before he killed himself.

2.         Jane Austen: “I want nothing but death.” In response to her sister, Cassandra, who was asking her if she wanted anything.

3.         J.M Barrie: “I can’t sleep.”

4.         L. Frank Baum: “Now I can cross the shifting sands.”

5.         Edgar Allan Poe: “Lord help my poor soul.”

6.         Thomas Hobbes: “I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap into the dark,”

7.         Alfred Jarry: “I am dying…please, bring me a toothpick.”

8.         Hunter S. Thompson: “Relax — this won’t hurt.”

9.         Henrik Ibsen: “On the contrary!”

10.       Anton Chekhov: “I haven’t had champagne for a long time.”

11.        Mark Twain: “Good bye. If we meet—” Spoken to his daughter Clara.

12.       Louisa May Alcott: “Is it not meningitis?” Alcott did not have meningitis, though she believed it to be so. She died from mercury poison.

13.       Jean Cocteau: “Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking towards me, without hurrying.”

14.       Washington Irving: “I have to set my pillows one more night, when will this end already?”

15.       Leo Tolstoy: “But the peasants…how do the peasants die?”

16.       Hans Christian Andersen: “Don’t ask me how I am! I understand nothing more.”

17.       Charles Dickens: “On the ground!” He suffered a stroke outside his home and was asking to be laid on the ground.

18.       H.G. Wells: “Go away! I’m all right.” He didn’t know he was dying.

19.       Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “More light.”

20.      W.C. Fields: “Goddamn the whole fucking world and everyone in it except you, Carlotta!” “Carlotta” was Carlotta Monti, actress and his mistress.

21.       Voltaire: “Now, now, my good man, this is no time for making enemies.” When asked by a priest to renounce Satan.

22.       Dylan Thomas: “I’ve had 18 straight whiskies…I think that’s the record.”

23.       George Bernard Shaw: “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.”

24.      Henry David Thoreau: “Moose…Indian.”

25.       James Joyce: “Does nobody understand?”

26.      Oscar Wilde: “Either the wallpaper goes, or I do.”

27.       Bob Hope: “Surprise me.” He was responding to his wife asking where he wanted to be buried.

28.      Roald Dahl’s last words are commonly believed to be “you know, I’m not frightened. It’s just that I will miss you all so much!” which are the perfect last words. But, after he appeared to fall unconscious, a nurse injected him with morphine to ease his passing. His actual last words were a whispered “ow, fuck”

29.      Salvador Dali hoped his last words would be “I do not believe in my death,” but instead, they were actually, “Where is my clock?”

30.      Emily Dickinson: “I must go in, the fog is rising.”