Broken countries

[Written but not sent to a friend.]

Italians. No, they're not that bad, nor is anyone else, my idealist self insists. Only this. If you live in a foreign culture, you will step unintentionally into the smelly stuff you can't clean off your shoe, plus you will never change "them". The foreigners--to you--have their ways of doing things, as an old German friend of mine reminded me often: "They know what they do." The subtext was and is you are not one of them and will never be, so get used to their ways and adapt as best you can without grossly offending, or getting thrown out of the community or country.

Such has been life for me abroad for over twenty-five years. Stepping in it, "Oh, shit!" And do you really think I would settle a purchase in two meetings here at the lawyer's office? one private (without counsel) where a certain amount of cash changes hands, and another where the same thing happens but for the (adjusted) total to seal the contract--with legal witnesses--to be transmitted to the tax office? I did that. There was no other way to get the deal done to put a roof over my head and later get rid of it (did not take place in Italy by the way).

So discovering the ways these people do things is my daily classroom with, most of the time, no dire consequences, except perhaps some embarrassment and constant self-realizations about who I am and where I find myself. Never a dull moment. That's the juice of living outside one's own culture without native level language skills: Ever a classroom and self-guided psychological therapy tour. Oh, and education and therapy always come at a cost.

I do find Italians amusing, and I have written about both the ups and downs of residing in this country and my local area with fantastic panoramas and cultural lessons aplenty. But I walk softly. . . . And I have Italian friends, one or two. It is a friendly and inviting place. Lots of positive stuff, including the food which is more than pizza, pasta, and pane--and the daily obligatory religious ritual at 13.00 sharp, pranzo. I won't elaborate here. It is easier to complain or feebly explain. Just know, I love a lot about Italy including my friends and daily encounters, which are always interesting, often amusing. Celebrating Eataly? goes without saying.

You mentioned that someone you knew had a kind of systemic health problem from which s/he died. Could have been saved with the right intervention(s). So too I find Italy. The country is hobbled if not broken, not easy for ordinary people to cobble a living. A systemic problem. Fundamental changes needed in politics, government and culture--society--so that one can have a meaningful and productive life as well as get on well enough economically.

In the US, with regard to guns and violence, I think it also a systemic problem. Why do people have 'em? and use them, abuse them, and have unwanted accidents and tragedies? Many factors, many causes. Some with guns, perhaps you, collect them, care for them (weird?), trade them, go and practice on paper targets, hunt game, etc. But why do ordinary people feel the need to have a gun? Ordinary people where I have lived in Europe do not feel they need a gun. Of course there are intruders and bad people. But this is not a gun culture, nor a particularly dangerous or violent one--in part I would argue because guns are not a right (also weird!) to have and hold.

Here in the CZ just yesterday we had a shooter killing several. This is so rare in my experience here that to see that in the news is shocking. The same is not shocking in the US. Kind of business as usual I'd argue--because of the multiple things that need to change such that such incidents in the US become out of the ordinary, not common, rare, shocking again.

I am not qualified or smart enough to tell anyone what to do to solve guns/violence/threat to person and property in America. But it is more of a problem than it should be. Given who and what America is, make-my-day is every day and no one is or should be surprised. When you are a fish in the fishbowl, what else is there? You have to get out of the water and breathe different air differently from the tacit ways you have accepted as normal, that is experience life beyond familiar waters. America needs a new normal . . . but I fear that will not be anytime soon. We are so polarized, and I agree with some that we are not very bright as a nation (but if nudged--don't do it--could name a few names).

I find the article linked below interesting in regard to both of these subjects--living in a culture and making needed socio-cultural changes. Not optimistic but seems to sum up where we are. Read if you are interested, or we can just move on and set these more serious subjects aside. I for one am unable because of age, location, and other factors to make any difference. And there's the rub.

The article begins:

The United States is sick with income and other forms of social inequality. It suffers from cruelty, loneliness, greed, gangster capitalism, white supremacy, violence, sexism and a culture of ignorance and distraction. Our broken political system does not encourage critical thinking or nurture a capacity for responsible, engaged citizenship.

Here is the link.

https://www.salon.com/2019/12/09/author-chris-hedges-on-trump-the-democrats-and-the-dying-american-empire/

Birthday voucher

[Give your squeeze new underwear for her birthday along with this voucher  to redeem.]

Birthday Coupon

30 plus, but who is counting?

and said you can't be a mounting?

Happy Birthday to the girl

at her age can have a whirl:

And feel something hot and sexy,

say, eating food, some Tex-Mexy.

But it's up to you to decide.

Have spicy food, or lose those pants--for a Ride!

Silly ditty

If each other we would see,
set a time to make it be.
For time is life, don't you know,
without its measure we must go.
Our days are undeser'ved gifts
within the which--admit--we ever shifts:
From that to this and back to that,
after what?--ain't it true--back we sat,
wondering if wise and best we chose.
Shared we moments with those . . . so dear we hold?
before the gifter says, "There, there. Be bold."
I would shout indeed a yea:
Let not reticence waste a day.
If you're like to think the same,
let us quit the bench and join the game.
I would ring to enter at your gate
and en'tain long and mutual discourse--
well, at least enough gossip us to sate
till next we meet thus absolved, no remorse.
So when we knocks, do let us in.
Won't stay long, too much info is a sin.

Re-framing and re-affirming

_A Puma in the Tree_ is about the importance of kindness and identity. We are flawed and get together, and do stuff,  regardless of whether it is the best course ahead judged subjectively, by our self-narrator, or objectively--by the you reader/observer.

A revised edition is due soon and will be free to download.

Having escaped The City, Eh-em cautiously reveals himself in fictional Upton. Art and attachments as well as real and imagined traumas prevent rapid progress. But this nice guy wins and gets the girl. Is it another dead end or their beginning? A second coming of age mixes postmodern bits with recurrent images. One's story and kindness might fix who they become in the spaces uncovered.

_A Penny Drops_ is about lack of self knowledge and clarity of action-decision in the running course of things. Only experience and mounting social pressures do we, sometimes, open our eyes and take the next best step.

The draft will be finished soon and will be free to download.

He can have the wholesome girl next door, the pretty nympho-psychologist, the wealthy spirit guide, or a flawed beauty queen. What must he discover to have his heart's desire?

Headlines and teasers, their effects

[Yes. After consideration and no space to just place stuff, here we go again . . . I re-framed why I shut this thing down exactly two years ago.]

from Hyperallergic Weekend, July 28, 2019, with >>s

In Praise of Painting's Ambiguity: The literalism of 1960s Formalism has been replaced by an insistence on the factual, which leaves little room for the imagination or for speculation.
John Yau

 >>The factual is always and everywhere provocation to imagine and speculate.

The Defiant Undercurrents of Feminine Art: While many of Julia Kuhl’s paintings are funny and provocative others are more troubling, alluding to the ways women’s personal, professional, and sexual boundaries often go broadly unacknowledged.
Megan N. Liberty

>>And how would a painting allude if not only through an interpretation? Let me see/decide for myself. Key-tag for visual scrutiny, _boundary_.

Our Love for Fetishes: Sculptor Margaret Wharton and painter Issy Wood are both open to the irrational currents flowing through our lives.
John Yau

>>How much like me would they, or their works, be? Or if flowing through (all) our lives, what's the big deal?

A Curator's Perspective on Davide Sorrenti's Fashion Photography: The photographer captured the currents of hip hop, skater, grunge, and rave culture that flourished in downtown Manhattan in the 1990s.
Nicole Miller

>>Only voyeurs who wish to expand their breadth of visual coup count need peep.

An Unlikely Marriage of Science and Art: In the hate-convulsed worldscape of today, Heather Dewey-Hagborg proposes oxytocin as that long looked-for potion: The Love Drug.
Anthony Haden-Guest

>>The differences in responses to "different types" of oxytocin among males and females suggests Heather may not be onto something, at least as far as males are concerned. And she can't be suggesting we have more amourous females than males running around. What images come to mind with that solution to the hate-convulsed worldscape? Okay, many if not most males are so easily distracted. But after the post-coital smoke? er vape? What then?

Jamila Woods and Her Ancestral Spirits: Woods’s new album Legacy! Legacy! is framed by the presence of a larger community — the enacted community of choir singing and an imagined community of Black artists.
Lucas Fagen

 >>How present, or large, can "a larger community" be if confined to a choir, much less combined with an imagined group of whatever sort? Read, or dismiss for lack of coherence.

Dora Maar, More than a Surrealist Muse: The Centre Pompidou’s Dora Maar honors Picasso’s famous muse for the pivotal part she clearly, and often daringly, played in the establishment of the European avant-garde.
Eileen G'Sell

>>An almost unknown--to me--muse had a pivotal part to play and I am just now re-minded of her name? Bold claims for establishing if even partly something pan-european . . . I should have been aware . . . 

Shut this blog down

The two novels, A Puma in the Tree and A Penny Drops, written over a three year period, show remarkable similarities such that I should revisit several questions as to themes and origins, these now in some conflict with earlier assertions.

Each novel features a heterosexual male around thirty obsessed with reflecting on past and just-passed events or interchanges, thereby convincing himself he has become more aware, maybe enlightened--he thinks so because of "discovered," quasi-touchstone principles he articulates not as well as the first or famous who did so. The distant past does not figure in retrospections except to suggest each "hero" should take a more careful look to see what if anything is really there to deal with, or that figures in who he is now.

The protagonists encounter in the course of their days people, mostly women, who intrigue and interest them, finding in the end that the most human among the women is the logical choice for deeper involvement. They, our heroes, abandon, for the most part, contacts with friends and girlfriends. Each is both predator and predatee and can't decide what or who to blame for acts and impulses they feel. Each suspects hormones, or whatever other physiological chimera to point to as excuse for never-outrageous yet to each extraordinary moments.

Each protagonist is drawn to beauty in people and places but they reveal little of their own attractiveness that others seem to find in them. Each thinks his some measure of sweeter-than-thou kindness, un-realistic openness and restraint, and hyper-protestant earnestness will save him, and the world? but salvation from what they don't seem to know. Each is subject to emotional setbacks, but return to persist in moral-like behavior without religious affiliation or other anchor.

Both characters find themselves in featureless rural towns in the western U.S. as newcomers starting again. They are prone to make observations about people and places that over time must be revised. Although work or career figure into plot progression, the stories are more about working through relationships and discovering each's identity. The importance of friendship and older, more experienced characters figure in both accounts. Eating and drinking at bars and restaurants provide settings for forgetting, avoiding, and superficial connecting. Each describes what he sees in details corresponding to needs and wants, including limitations because of age and stage of life. There is little notice or judgment as to gender or race or other demographic characteristics. Also, there is no violence or unpleasant character that the protagonists need encounter.

The titles for each work are telling in the use of the indefinite pronoun. Thus the tentative nature of things, uncertainties, unknowns pervade life as each character lives it. People somehow struggle through, evidentially revealing their essential goodness, and that is a foundation for acceptance and love to be valued in the end.

Enough already--thus to say in effect the two books are more the same than different. The experiment to create a second novel different from the first has failed, although one story might be more literary than the other (meta-fictional), or more interesting to follow the short journey to its conclusion (testosterone drives choice among three or four mate-material candidates).

This blog has been to sort me out. At the outset, I left that to the reader, should there be one, thinking that if interested:

Here is a bunch of stuff. People are complex. Now, see if you can get a picture of who is talking here. I hope you find in the process something interesting or entertaining or both. Or, please agree or disagree with me.

As evidence for sorting myself out, given that I gave the time and focus to what I have posted thus far, this post could be along the lines of,

Hey, I figured something out, that the so-called novels I was playing with also during this process, artificial things that they are, are just stories from flow states, or the recorded up-wellings from somewhere inside me. End of story and stories. They are as reflections or propaganda, not what I would have had them be, things outside myself to hold up and contemplate. Works of an impersonal nature, not reflections of my deeper self. 

I was wrong.

Writing for no audience proves instructive again. I am okay having come this far, but there is yet something more to be learned, and harder work to be done . . . to create and discover a truth or two without artifice.

In view of this milestone, it will be soon time to shut this blog down and let the next project take me to, please, a different and less navel-gazing posture.

Yet, it's been fun and challenging.

Danny, the true(?) fragment

One has good fortune if in earnest s/he catches refreshment from the font of imagination now and again issuing forth from dream-like states that insist, "Hey this is pretty good. Record and develop it."

This appears to be that from August 2010. Did I write this? if so, why did I abandon it? Seems promising now, including some of the wording. Evocative I would say, and with enough story paths to take with any of the characters named. It is a document called Danny.

Or did I copy it from somewhere and thus not really creative. I don't think so. I had to go through and correct typo-mistakes, signaling to me that I must have been writing and stopped.

If I am in error, enlighten me.

George, Danny's father, was the culprit, but no one except him knew that, although he has long since passed, and not that he had the  intelligence of what he did when he left Danny there. Danny became a foundling, and George made him so by setting him as a babe of ten days in that bush on the dogcart road between upper Sesson and Sesson proper on an early October morning. Once he assured himself that Danny was wrapped tightly against the cool morning air, George plodded off without so much as a kiss or wave good-bye. He disappeared like the morning dew, and no one saw him again, and we don't know what became of him.

George was indeed a plodding sort. A bit slow, some thought. Stubborn, his brother later said, and sufficiently alienated from his young wife and neighbors as to be almost invisible. No one missed him except Mary, at first, that is, for he was her lifeline to the world outside the house. She was a shut-in, as the locals described her. For her it was dread of the world and all she knew about it, which wasn't much.

We can think of George as having made a decision and carrying out his own disappearance and effectively Danny's and leaving others to sort out any complications. But as things were, the complications were few, the consequences great if measure we could.

Just after the disappearances, people in upper Sesson talked, which means they created plausible causes, conjectures really: that George stole Danny and left for another woman and mother; that he killed himself and the boy out of idiocy and desperation, life not being very interesting or tolerable with a wife like Mary; that George's relatives came and whisked him and the boy away deeming the life of a shut-in was contagious and that would be no way for the boys to live out their days. Other stories arose and fell with the wavering interest in things unexplained, but as with other events not fed by a few facts or creative gossip, the disappearance of son and father soon ceased to take up the time of the village gossips; and life returned to near normal, that is to the rhythm of uneventful lives being carried out by rote and resignation.

And why didn't upper Sesson folks take notice when Lara and Johan in Sesson proper began showing off their newborn son? In short, the Sesson's intelligentsia didn't talk, and Lara's claim of hardly showing during her pregnancy, plus Kathy, the midwife's verification of "a spotless delivery" where she did little more than counsel and advise the new parents of what to do in the first days after birth, well, there seemed to be little to notice, less to talk about. The proud parents went from childless to a threesome in a flash and each counted as blessing and a miracle that Danny, now Fitch, had figured in what God had intended by the holy sacrament of matrimony.

His Mother

Mary was always a kind and quiet girl, and when she married the village dolt, few, except her parents, commented. Comment. Seems too benign a word. Mary's parents accepted their daughter's choice of saving and educating her husband, but they never shut up about how stupid it was. It was a comment never far from the nicety of greeting that forever s

Sally was simple.

Mary