Quote for the Windy Month of March:

“Just another beautiful day in Paradise!”
— Marion Halfacre, long-time usher of the Crystal Cathedral.
This was his standard reply whenever anyone asked him, "How's it going?"

New Quotes Added to quotes.htm this month:

• The more help a person has in his garden, the less it belongs to him.
  — William H. Davies

• Good government generally begins in the family, and if the moral character of a people once degenerate, their political character must soon follow.
  — Elias Boudinot

• The highest happiness of man is to have probed what is knowable and quietly to revere what is unknowable.
  — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

• We dance around in a ring and suppose.
  But the secret sits in the middle and knows.
  — Robert Frost

• Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable.
  But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.
  — H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

• Then I asked: "does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?"
  He replied: "All poets believe that it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of any thing."
  — William Blake, 1790 Part of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

• When you're down to nothing, God is up to something!
  — Robert A. Schuller

New Stuff about Website:

Dear Good Readers:

Thanks to generous contributions by Martin Rizzi of Mexico and Luciano Galvani of Italy, we will soon have some doyletics pages available in both Spanish and Italian.

Martin is native of USA but has lived in Mexico for twenty plus years, so he may need some help in Spanish idiom. Luciano is native Italian, but knows only a little English, so he may need some help in understanding the English well-enough to translate the doyletics concepts into Italian.

For now, all we have is the structure to add the Main Page in each language. Posted on both pages are the words written by Martin Rizzi with his goal of converting webpages into his language. Martin has converted his words into Spanish and Luciano into Italian on his page. My intent is to leave the words on the top section of the Main Page even after the translations are done.

I ask especially those of you fluent in Italian and Spanish to read the words and offer any suggestions to the writers. Please send any comments to me and I will forward them to the translators. I will send them your email also in case they wish to contact you directly.

Currently I am looking for someone to act as tranlator into German. Any volunteers?

most cordially,

Bobby

P. S. To view translated pages, simply look for the new languages available in the upper left corners of a webpage. (On Main Page: Italian and Spanish.)

The Top 5 ARJ1 Reviews in 2007
(Totals about 7,000 Readers) :

1. Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon — The Daring Novel of a Startling Human Experiment! .

Excerpt from Review:This novel is told in the form of progress reports by Charly Gordon, a retarded kid who always wanted to get smart. When the book begins, Charly is in his mid-thirties and has been working as a laborer for Mr. Donner's Bakery for fifteen years. During that time he was subjected to all forms of taunting and humiliation by the three guys he called his good friends.

One night Charly gets up the courage to attend a night school class to learn to read and write so he could understand what was going on in those balloons above Batman and Robin's heads in his favorite comic books. The teacher, Alice, takes him to a testing program at the university psychology department to see if they could help him. They test him with raw shark (Rohrshach) tests, where his only response is "Somebody spilled ink on those cards." They place him in competition with a white mouse to see who could finish a maze faster, and the mouse, named Algernon, wins every time. The researchers asks Charly to write in a diary at this time and this began Charly's progress reports which comprise the entirety of the book. Unfortunately as Charly gets smarter, he begins his own research project with his old friend, the mouse Algernon, and discovers some troubling aspects of the surgery that he and Algernon both had: it is only temporary. He writes up a scholarly report, has it published in an international journal, and then begins his sad journey back into his original retarded condition, but first visiting his mother so she could see her dream realized: her retarded son turned into an intellectual genius.

The ending is poignant and heart-rending. Worth a read any time.

2. Eudora Welty 's autobiographical One Writer's Beginnings

This book is a recounting of experiences of her life as they affected her becoming a writer. Stories such as her mother's getting a full set of Dickens books in exchange for getting her hair cut short ("long hair weighs a woman down"). Then later here mother charged back into the burning house to toss out the Dickens set and then herself. These books later formed the basis for Eudora's reading as she was growing up.

Her book is divided into chapters on Listening, Seeing, and Finding a Voice — which chapters seem to trace her progress from hearing and seeing to finally becoming a writer. One beautiful point she makes early in the book is about what voice she heard as she read books and then what voice she heard as she read her own writings. Her proofing and rewriting were accomplished by giving that voice the words that allowed it to sound right. One of the things I've learned in the 13 years since I first read this book is that if your sentences sound right to you during proofing, they will sound right to others reading it later. If they don't sound right, and you don't change them, you should really consider some other line of work than writing. Annie Dillard in The Writing Life says that one must like sentences to be a writer.

A journey into the past and into the mind of the writer. How she creates characters out of her experiences. How though she could never be a school teacher, she creates school teachers as characters. These are the essence of One Writer's Beginnings.

3. John O'Donohue's Anam Cara — A Book of Celtic Wisdom

Consider this cartoon-laden book a serious crash course in the urban samurai who populates the boardrooms and offices of modern Japan. Kasumi ("Out of respect for her ancestors and hairdresser, she does not reveal her last name.") reveals the facts and foibles of this modern bastion of Japanese manhood, the urban samurai, may he live a thousand years. (Banzai!) Her qualifications to write this book are:

1) She was married to one for nine years so got to observe one carefully (but not up close).

2) She is a woman so she brings a meta-perspective to the task that another urban samurai would necessarily lack.

3) She has a tremendous flair for the comedic juxtaposition of words and concepts, e. g., "the rice is in the mail," "saving face and other body parts," and "should one bow before sex?"

The book kept me laughing out loud on nearly every page. The cartoons are hilarious caricatures of Japanese life, such as the one on etiquette: "Should You Or Shouldn't You Bow Before Sex?" The correct question is exactly how low should one bow. And the answer she gives is: "Bowing levels, which are calculated to correspond to the Nikkei index, are listed daily in all major financial institutions."

4. Temple Grandin's Thinking in Pictures and Other Reports from My Life with Autism

The autobiographical aspect of this book repeats some of the things of her earlier book, Emergence: Labeled Autistic, and adds more details about her life. Having covered her life in my review of that book, I will take a different approach for this book: instead of reviewing the book per se, I will attempt to answer Temple's questions about the mysteries of autism using the theory of the nascent science of doyletics. The initial idea to investigate autism began with a comment that Henderson made: he said that he suspected that autism stemmed from the precocious onset of conceptual memory. The normal onset of conceptual memory is five years old, and this is known as the Memory Transition Age (MTA). What happens at the MTA is that one's brain has reached critical mass in the size and capability of the neocortex and begins storing all new events which happen in one's life as conceptual memories, what are called simply "memories." Before that transition occurs, all events are stored as bodily states or doylic memories. Those doylic memories are recapitulated later in life as feelings and emotions. Thus for the average person, all events before five are stored into a reservoir of feelings and emotions for one's later life.

In an autistic person, our theory postulates, an early or precocious onset of cognitive memory capability will cause the stopping of storage of doylic memories and they will have few feelings stored and an impoverished emotional life. This book provides exactly the evidence one would expect for an autistic person's life based on doyletic theory. Temple is very smart with great conceptual memory capabilities and yet has an impoverished emotional life. The few feeling states she does have are very strong and important to her.

This book and the review are important to understanding autism in a new and helpful light. It allows us to see autistic persons of all ages, not as retarded human beings, but rather as advanced human beings which culture is handicapped in dealing with, up until now.

5. David Macaulay's Motel of the Mysteries

Macaulay has a vibrant sense of humor which adds sparkle to each page of this funny look at archaeology and our own cultural icons.
Excerpt from Review:

In the 40th century the North American continent is covered with 200 feet of detritus from "pollutans literatus" and "pollutans gravitas" (junk mail and air pollution). The St. Louis Gateway Arch is useful for kissing for luck under the arch (now three feet above the ground) and the penthouse levels of the Bigapple extend like new Stonehenge monoliths from the ground.

Into this milieu enters Howard Carson who, like the Howard Carter of the early 20th century, stumbles into an archaeological funerary site and opens the door into ... "wonderful things." Things like the "porcelain shrine" which everyone will immediately recognize, but the poor archaeologists of the future are led to treat as a religious object, as all archaelogists of today do when they find remnants of ancient culture.

So, grab this book, sit your own local porcelain shrine and enjoy a good laugh while getting your daily business done.

New Stuff on the Internet:
• Widened Huey P. Long Bridge Website: Take a Ride from the West Bank to the East Bank in this Animation.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Movies we watched this past month:

Notes about our movies: Many of the movies we watch are foreign movies with subtitles. After years of watching movies in foreign languages, Arabic, French, Swedish, German, British English, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, and many other languages, sometimes two or three languages in the same movie, the subtitles have disappeared for us. If the movie is dubbed in English we go for the subtitles instead because we enjoy the live action and sounds of the real voices so much more than the dubbed. If you wonder where we get all these foreign movies from, the answer is simple: NetFlix. For a fixed price a month they mail us DVD movies from our on-line Queue, we watch them, pop them into a pre-paid mailer, and the postman effectively replaces all our gas-consuming and time-consuming trips to Blockbuster. To sign up for NetFlix, simply go to http://www.netflix.com/ and start adding all your requests for movies into your personal queue. If you've seen some in these movie blurbs, simply copy the name, click open your queue, and paste the name in the Search box on NetFlix and Select Add. Buy some popcorn and you're ready to Go to the Movies, 21st Century Style. You get to see your movies as the Director created them — NOT-edited for TV, in full-screen width, your own choice of subtitles, and all of the original dialogue. Often you get the Director's Cut Edition which adds back excellent footage that was cut from the theater releases.
P. S. Look for HD/DVD format movies which are now available from NetFlix.

“On Voyager” (1942 ) As soon as Paul Henreid completed this movie, he was forced by his contract to do “Casablanca.” Two spectacular movies in a row — each one a superb story masterfully acted. Henried and Bette Davis are the love interests in this movie which is more about individuation than romance. A DON’T MISS HIT ! ! ! ! ! !
“Perfect Stranger” (2007) Halle Berry learns to instant message and get in a relationship with a perfect stranger in order to pin a murder on Bruce Willis. She does this successfully, but there are some loose ends other than fornicating couples to be taken care of.
“Becoming Jane” (2007) Best bet is to watch this one followed by the PBS feature “Miss Austen Regrets” (2007) to get the chronological order. This movie is about her becoming Jane the writer and describes in details what it is Miss Austen will later regret. A DON’T MISS HIT ! !

“Miss Austen Regrets” (2008) Jane’s sister Cassandra, who took care of her so Jane could devote her time to writing, burned their letters to each other after Jane died, so we’ll never know for sure about what happened, but this screenplay reconstructs a plausible story based on the best evidence. Jane’s advice to young Fannie shows us how Jane herself saw the matter of matrimony. We see her ambivalence toward the vicar she did care for, but had decided never to marry by the time he asked her. Jane would be happy to know that her readers will be forever grateful that she chose the writing life instead of the marrying life. Watch for a replay on PBS. A DON’T MISS HIT ! !
“The Jane Austen Book Club” (2007) creates a realistic image of a book club as a group therapy session where each member takes turn being the leader. The six members each chose an Austen to lead the discussion on at their place. Listen carefully and you’ll hear each person telling their own story as they discuss the Austen novels. Makes one want to reread all her novels. A DON’T MISS HIT ! ! !

“The Martian Child” (2007) John Cusacks stars in this movie about a widower whose wife just died and he decides to continue the adoption process. In a curious juxtaposition of events, this writer of Martian science fiction adopts a son who thinks he is from Mars. Can Dennis ever come out of his Martian box and become an Earth man? That is the challenge Cusacks faces, that plus his sister’s negative attitude (played by real-life sister Joan). A DON’T MISS HIT ! ! !
“The Last Mimzy” (2007) quickly exceeded my meager expectations for a kid flick, it is a story about “remembering the future” and how the hope of the world really rests on our children if we would only listen to them instead of trying to fix them. A DON’T MISS HIT !
“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (2007) I read and reviewed this book in 1999. In recent months this review had zoomed to the top of my most popular webpages. I wanted to see how a movie maker would treat a first-person narration of a biographical book by someone who is only able to communicate by moving one eyelid. Jean-Do as he was called by friends was a 42-year-old vibrant publisher of Elle in Paris when one day he was out driving his new convertible with his son and became to stutter, then lean back as he stopped the car, look up staring into the sky, and hardly moved another muscle the rest of his life. The director chose to show us Jean-Do’s world through his dim and out-of-focus eyes and the effect was an eerie versimilitude that was riveting. Read this book and watch this movie. A heroic tale of a foreshortened life.

“Prime” (2005) A new, at times humorous twist blends an inter-religious with a May-December marriage plot. Add to that the 23-yr-old guy’s very Jewish mother as the therapist of his gentile 37-yr-old wife-to-be. The mother knows about them, but the couple doesn’t. Eu weh!
“The Bourne Supremacy” (2004) HD-DVD Having seen all three movies now, I have to rate this one as the best on many levels.
“On a Clear Day” (2005) you can almost see France from Dover and think you could swim across. Frankie’s ship has gone out, and now retired Frankie’s hankering for a try at the English Channel. A triumph of human spirit which overflows into his eclectic set of friends and his loving family.
“The Astronaut Farmer” (2006) Billy Bob Thornton stars as Charlie Farmer, aeronautics engineer and almost astronaut, who builds a spaceship in his barn, intending to orbit the Earth. Laughed at, ridiculed, and berated by everyone except his family, he carries on, and on, against all odds. A DON’T MISS HIT ! !

“The Ultimate Gift” (2006) James Garner gives his grandson Jason the gift of maturity in an inimitable fashion which we’ll call the “ultimate gift”.
“Invincible” (2006) In this movie an aging never-been from Philadelphia helps the Eagles make a prime-time comeback. Vince Papale played by Mark Wahlberg proves to be in-vince-able as the special teams and wide receiver rookie. From sandlot to Super Bowl in three years. A DON’T MISS HIT !
“Rocky Balboa” (2006) In this movie an aging has-been from Philadelphia makes a prime-time comeback. Rocky buries Adrian, but digs up his past glory and decides to fight the unbeaten reigning heavyweight champion in a ten round exhibition fight. “Exhibition? It should be called an execution,” one sports pundit avers. Run up the steps with Rocky one last time.
“A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries” (1998) Kris Kristofferson stars as the father of son and daughter growing up as ex-patriots in Paris. Wonderful in a Parisian classroom with her best friend who is her classmate and opera singer. Move back to USA brings no so good classmates and problems for the Daddy. (on ENCORE)
“We Are Marshall” (2006) Didn’t recall the tragic 1970 event until early in the movie when the Marshall football team began to enter an airplane from a game to return home. With only three members of the varsity remaining and one assistant coach, the college in W. Va. voted to quit football, but the students and residents of the town would not give up. This is another story of how “when you are down to nothing, God is up to something.” A DON’T MISS HIT! ! !

“3:10 To Yuma” (2007) One legged farmer takes a prisoner to Yuma. Can he single-handedly fight off 35 gunfighters to get his man on the train? Good old-fashioned Western with lots of gunfights.
“Before Sunrise” (1995) two strangers who met on a train agree to spend the night together walking through Vienna. These lovely friends become friendly lovers in the course of the night and agree to meet again in six months, but the sequel to this movie never rose to the heights of the original. Look for the excellent camera angles and cozy scenes of two people enjoying life and love together under the stars.
“Jesse Stone: Sea Change” (2007) Tom Selleck is back as the Police Chief of the bywater town of Paradise, Massachusetts for whom Johnny Walker Red is one of his main food groups. With things a bit slow, he digs up an old case involving a bank robbery. Will Suitcase come out of his coma? Will somebody go jail over the old case? It’s a mystery.

Misses (Avoid At All Costs): We attempted to watch these this month, but didn't make it all the way through on most of them. Awhile back when three AAAC horrors hit us in one night, I decided to add a sub-category to "Avoid at All Costs", namely, A DVD STOMPER. These are movies so bad, you don't want anyone else to get stuck watching them, so you want to stomp on the disks. That way, if everyone else who gets burnt by the movie does the same, soon no copies of the awful movie will be extant and the world will be better off.

“Madea's Family Reunion (2002 Stage Play on DVD)” Madea is a foul mouth broad who bosses everyone around. One can hear such a gal in many places in New Orleans — not a fun or novel experience for a native of this city to spend time watching or anyone else IMHO.
“Two Days in Paris” (2005) are like a lifetime of crap when your girl friend has old boy friends and parents like the New Yorker guy’s Paris girl friend. Two days for him, two hours for you. Why bother?
“Cyber Wars” (2006) inverts the “Matrix” — if you want to see how well “Matrix” did portraying two parallel worlds of reality and computer, just watch some of this movie, and you’ll know, otherwise Avoid At All Costs.
“Eastern Promises” (2007) Viggo Mortensen is once more masterful as the future King, this time of the Russian Mafia in London, in this dark and bloody series of executions. The baby doctor pulls an infant girl from her raped and murdered mother, and uncovers a vendetta piece-by-piece. If you must play this movie, we suggest you put all your children to bed, turn the DVD on mute, and then go to bed yourself. Sweet dreams.

“License to Wed” (2007) is manure. Wholly Cow! Waste of Robin Williams in an inane script better suited for sitcom Hall of Infancy (where all sitcoms today belong). Childish drek.
“Saving Face” (2005) and wasting a DVD.
“Margot at the Wedding” (2007) Nicole Kidman and Jack Black mix like toilet water and oil in this almost movie. Abrasive and crazy writer-sister attacks her sister’s choice of almost anything, but uses things she does as ink tracks for her pen. Takes dysfunctional family to a whole nutter level.

Your call on these — your taste in movies may differ, but I liked them:

“The Return” (2006) Something horrific happened to Joanne but she only has brief flashes of it and finally has to return to the scene of the forgotten events to remember them when suddenly they begin to happen all over again to her. Jigsaw puzzle movie editing. A barely Your Call.
“An Awfully Big Adventure” (1995) Worth a look to see Alan Rickman driving an old motorcycle. A story about Stella growing up at age 16 and learning about life between the sheets of the theater and the bedroom. It gets a strong Your Call.
“Michael Clayton” (2007) is back from inspecting the horses and throwing his watch and cell phone into his burning car. He’s got one more job to do as janitor before he can read the book his ten-year-old son recommended to him. It may win an academy award, but it barely gets a Your Call here.
“Onegin” (1999) Ralph Fiennes stars with Liv Tyler in love off-again, on-again. Enthralling period piece about a Russian prince who is a lazy frog and gets squashed by the princess instead of kissed.
“Behind the Sun” (2001) His father makes Tonio avenge the death of his brother. When the family of the man Tonio kills come for revenge, Tonio’s little brother has a surprise for them.
“Let’s Go to Prison” (2006) When Lyshitski gets thrown in jail three times by the same judge, he swears revenge but the judge dies and so he takes out his revenge on the judge’s son, Biederman, by getting him thrown into jail where Lyshitski can introduce him to prison life. What looks like a lugubrious tale turns into rollicking humor and human interest.

Boudreaux finally decides to take a vacation. He books himself on a Caribbean cruise and proceeds to have the time of his life until the boat sank.

He finds himself swept up on the shore of an island with no other people, no supplies.. Nothing. Only bananas and coconuts.

After about four months, he is lying on the beach one day when the most gorgeous woman he has ever seen rows up to him. In disbelief, he asks her, 'Where you come from? How you get here?'

'I rowed over from the other side of the island,' she says. 'I landed here when my cruise ship sank.'

'Dat's amazing,' he says. 'You beaucoup lucky dat rowboat wash up wit' you.'

'Oh, this? ' replies the woman. 'I made the rowboat out of raw material found on the island. I whittled the oars from gum tree branches; I wove the bottom from palm branches; and the sides and stern came from a Eucalyptus tree.'

'Mais .. dat's impossible,' stutters Boudreaux. 'You ain't got no tools or hardware. How you done dat?'

'Oh, no problem,' replies the woman. 'On the South side of the island, there is a very unusual strata of alluvial rock exposed. I found if I fired it to a certain temperature in my kiln, it melted into forgeable ductile iron. I used that for tools and used the tools to make the hardware.' Boudreaux is stunned. 'Let's row over to my place,' she says.

After a few minutes of rowing, she docks the boat at a small wharf. As Boudreaux looks onto shore, he nearly falls out of the boat. Before him is a stone walk leading to an exquisite bungalow painted in blue and white. While the woman ties up the rowboat with an expertly woven hemp rope, he can only stare ahead, dumbstruck.

As they walk into the house, she says casually, 'It's not much, but I call it home. Sit down, please. Would you like to have a drink?'

'Mais, no t'ank you,' he says, still dazed. 'Can't stood no mo coconut juice.'

'It's not coconut juice,' the woman replies. 'I built a still. How about a Pina Colada?'

Trying to hide his continued amazement, he accepts, and they sit down on her hand-woven couch to talk. After they have exchanged their stories, the woman announces, 'I'm going to slip into something more comfortable. Would you like to take a shower and shave? There is a razor upstairs in the cabinet in the bathroom.'

No longer questioning anything, Boudreaux goes into the bathroom. There, in the cabinet, is a razor made from a bone handle. Two shells honed to a hollow-ground edge are fastened on to its end inside of a swivel mechanism. 'WOW! dis woman is amazing,' he muses, 'what gonna be next?'

When he returns, she greets him wearing 'nothing but vines' strategically positioned, and smelling faintly of gardenias. She beckons for him to sit down next to her.

'Tell me,' she begins suggestively, slithering closer to him, 'We've been out here for a really long time. I know you've been lonely. There's something I'm sure you really feel like doing right now, something you've been longing for all these months. You know...'

She stares into his eyes. He can't believe what he's hearing!

'You mean ...', he swallows excitedly,

'We gonna watch de LSU game from here?'

Baked Sweet Potato

Background on Baked Sweet Potato: Call them Louisiana yams or sweet potatoes, they are delicious, plentiful, and inexpensive as well as good for you. Especially on a frigid February evening. Often Del and I will each one of these as our full supper. The method I use comes down to me from Daisy Babin, my maternal grandmother, who made them this way in her wood-burning oven when I was a baby.

I selected four or five smallest sweet potatoes so that they are just right for one person apiece. You will want to split open your own sweet potato like shown in the photo, place a pat of butter on each half and each the entire thing, skin and all. The sweet potato juices sometime crystallizes into what Del calls sweet potato candy which is an extra treat. The skin is made delicious by covering it with butter whose flavor also permeates the entire yam. If you've been taught to cover the yam with tin foil, try it this way, and you'll likely not go back to the old dried out yam method. Bake extra and save the leftovers.

Ingredients
4 to 6 yams, 1 per person
1 TBSP butter to smear over yams
2 pats of butter per half yam
Aluminum foil to cover baking tin

 Preparation
Cut a sheet of aluminum foil and wrap edges lightly over baking tin. This can be removed and discarded after removing baked yams to minimize cleanup. It will hold any drippings or sweet potato candy. Smear the butter by hand over each yam. Once the butter picks up your hand's heat, it will smear nicely. Use all the butter up by making a second pass if butter is left in your hands. Should look like this. When done with yams, rub leftover butter over your hands and elbows. Especially good for treating winter-dried hands and elbows. To remove greasy feeling from hands, simply run warm water over your hands and dry.

Cooking Instructions
Bake sweet potatoes in a 350 degf oven for about 45 to 55 minutes. Test by penetrating with skinny fork tynes to ensure center of largest yam is soft. Remove from oven and serve immediately while skin is still tight. Should look like this.Can be left in warm oven if dinner not quite ready. Best results if you plan for dinner to start when potatoes are ready.

Serving Suggestion
Place baked sweet potato on plate. Slice in half and place a pat of butter on each half. Best done by each person at the table.

Other options
Leftover yams can be placed in individual Ziplock Snack Packs and saved in the refrigerator for up to a week, then reheated for about a minute in the microwave, and they will taste almost like they just came out of the oven.

And for my Good Readers, here’s the new reviews and articles for this month. The ARJ2 ones are new additions to the top of A Reader’s Journal, Volume 2, Chronological List, and the ART ones to A Reader’s Treasury.

1.) ARJ2: Nothing Remains the Same — Rereading and Remembering by Wendy Lesser

My first reading of Dr. Zhivago was in 1958 at age 18 and before I re-read it in 2002, I had seen the movie several times. During my later reading, the scenes from David Lean's movie glowed in my mind when I came to them, and the scenes in the book missing from the movie appeared in a Lean form in my mind as I read them. This is the subject of Wendy Lesser's book.

The first two times that author Lesser read James' "The Portrait of a Lady" she was close to the age of Isabel Archer. The second time she was twenty years older, and that made all the difference in how she read the book and the effect the reading had on her. What Lesser found from her most recent reading led her to write this book: "The idea that a simple rereading could also be a new reading struck with me with the force of a revelation." One can reread a book after a long passage of time and get an "old feeling" or a "young feeling" or even a new feeling. As we grow older, we add meanings to our life which were not there earlier. When we re-read a book we read years earlier, those new meanings highlight themselves by the effect that events in the book have on us which earlier, we would have ignored. If one has taken up keeping a parrot as a pet, the appearance of one in "The Parrot's Theorem" will have a different effect than it would have before. For example, in its issue after the great disaster, "Parrot Monthly" had as its headline, "Titanic Sunk. No Parrots Died!"

In this next passage, Lesser describes the way I have chosen to live my life. I keep constantly busy, but include reading as an essential part of how I keep busy. I never say, "I wish I had time to read X" because if X is important, I schedule it to be read. When Lesser's book arrived, I had bought it because she dealt with a way of reading books similar to my own, and I began reading it immediately. I was not disappointed. She describes her life much as I would mine. I work efficiently, report only to myself, and set my own priorities. I keep an open schedule so that if anyone calls to have lunch, I'm available. I have a deadline each month to meet, a self-imposed deadline, and one that I treat seriously. If I have an otherwise busy month outside of my writing, I work long hours to catch up. When I'm writing and reading, I take breaks to do things around the house. I act as gardener, maintenance man, computer geek, flower arranger, grocery buyer, doyletics researcher, photographer, college student, and chef, among other things. My personal goal is to buy more books every month than I can read in a month and live long enough to read them all!

[page 3] Time is a gift, but it can be a suspect one, especially in a culture that values frenzy. When I began this book, almost everyone I knew seemed to be busier than I was. I supported myself, contributed my share to the upkeep of the household, and engaged in all the usual wifely and motherly duties and pleasures. But still I had time left to read. This was partly because I incorporated reading into my work life (I run a quarterly literary magazine), and partly because I work very efficiently (I run my own quarterly literary magazine, so there's no busywork whatsoever: no meetings, no memos, no last-minute commands from the higher-ups). I had constructed a life in which I could be energetic but also lazy; I could rush, but I would never be rushed. It was a perfect situation for someone who loved to read, but it was also an oddball role, outside the mainstream — even the mainstream of people who read and write for a living.

Lesser points out that there is something vertiginous about rereading and to demonstrate it dramatically, she chooses to re-watch the Hitchcock movie, "Vertigo." She called "vertigo" the "best word to describe what I felt when I looked again at the books I had first read a long time ago." I had a similar feeling when I reread The Fabulous Flight by Robert Lawson. When I finally located the book I remembered only as "Gus and Me", I decided to buy a copy that was identical to the Westwego library copy that I held in my hands as a ten year old. Here I was at sixty-six years old rereading the identical book. It was a dizzying endeavor, added to by the fact that much of the book is spent with a miniature Peter riding on the back of his friend, Gus, the seagull. There I was riding along with Peter, the ten-year-old me in the cabin on the back of Gus as he flew over the Atlantic Ocean, flew over London, into a castle window, retrieved a deadly bomb, and dropped it to detonate harmlessly into the middle of the ocean. During my rereading of the first part of the adventure, I took the part of Peter's dad who built the miniature sailboat, cannons, and cabin for Gus's back for him. But once Peter got on Gus's back, I was back alongside Peter on his fabulous flight.

Another book about meeting one's younger self is Richard Bach's book, Running From Safety in which fifty-nine-year-old Richard meets nine-year-old Dickie who is scathingly mad at his older self for not keeping a promise he made him fifty years previous. The book was Richard's way of keeping the promise he made back then. Reading his book has this dizzying effect that Lesser finds in her rereading some strong book after a long period of time.

Some people spend their whole life perfecting their faults, someone once said. For those people, rereading will have little effect on them because they have changed so little that they will notice no difference. They live a sanity which is as sad as Don Quixote's madness. The rest of us are more like Sancho Panza, "sensible and silly" — we will notice the difference during rereading and feel a touch of vertigo. (Page 10)

Lesser shows a great respect for Cervantes's novel, "Don Quixote" as the progenitor of the novel as we know it today. One might say, "Every novelist rides on Don Quixote's horse."

[page 12] The novel displays such an astonishing ability to anticipate its own future that one is almost tempted to give Cervantes credit for everything written after him.

Lesser uses the metaphor of a book as a telescope through which one can peer back through the years to ourselves when we first read the book, and then notice how what we find in the book prefigures the person we eventually have become. I read as a pre-teen lots of biographies of famous people, mostly inventors, and for fiction, I selected mostly science fiction. The tales of Doctor Doolittle was my favorite. The Westwego library had a shelf full of the these books, each one with a new tale of the doctor who could talk to animals. As an adult I wrote a novel about how humans can talk to dolphins and other cetaceans. My science fiction reading led me to take a degree in physics so that I might learn how these amazing feats of space flight and technology portrayed by Heinlein, Bradbury, Anderson, del Ray, and others. As I look down the telescope to Peter and Gus's adventures, I realize that Peter was a small boy whose feats outpaced anyone's expectations for him. Everywhere we look through the telescope of books during rereading, we find our life preforming itself during those early readings. One might ask, "How could we have known to select those specific books?" Or, "How can we as human beings trust our own growth path to ours as youngsters?" It's a mystery.

No one who is, like Sancho Panza, "sensible and silly", in other words, "normal", will confuse a character in a novel for a real person.

[page 43] But if you are someone who cares deeply about reading, you may find that you respond to the important books in your life, and especially to those early in your life, very much as you do to actual people. Sometimes you like them because they reflect exactly what you are at the moment you first encounter them, and sometime you like them for the opposite reason -- because they touch something in you that is hidden, or because they forecast something that you will be but aren't yet. Do the books actually cause you to develop in this direction, or are they simply markers along an existing route? The question piques and tantalizes but, like all questions about how we turned into who we turned into, it has no firm answer.

Last night we watched "Miss Austen Regrets" on PBS which dealt with the likely events happening behind the scenes to lead the vivacious and intelligent Jane to remain unmarried all of her life. She had a couple of early invitations which she turned down, one which came with a stuffed shirt and a big house, the other with a lovely man and a vicarage. The first decision she never regretted, the second she did. Lesser notes the consequence of such decisions.

[page 91] To choose a life by choosing another person is a very dangerous course of action, it is true, but to refrain from doing so out of fear of the consequences is more dangerous still. I didn't know, when I first met her, that this is what Isabel Archer was saying to me. It's only now that I no longer need her advice that I can hear it.

Thoreau commented in his Journal on September 9, 1859, "How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects! A man sees only what concerns him. A botanist absorbed in the pursuit of grasses does not distinguish the grandest pasture oaks. He as it were tramples down oaks unwittingly in his walk." Thus it come about that we only see the things that we expect to see or look for on our walks through the woods or our reading of books. The descriptive narratives of Thoreau are as valuable for the naturalist as Austen's novels are to the lovelorn. And yet there is a sense that in learning something new, as Lesser expresses it so aptly, that "we must know all about it before we start." Only after she had lived a life having but not understanding Isabel's advice could Lesser comprehend what Isabel's advice really meant.

In discussing The Tempest in the Chapter "Late Shakespeare", Lesser comments:

[page 143] Only an actor who felt immune to the conjuring forces, or truly believed himself to be at the end of his career, could comfortably deliver Prosper's renunciatory lines, from "this rough magic / I abjure" through the closing soliloquy that begins "Now my charms are o'erthrown."

Her comments reminded me of the great Hollywood actor, Charlton Heston, who used a passage of Prospero's words when he came to the end of his career. He gave a public announcement that his Alzheimer's progression made it necessary for him to say goodbye properly to his fans, so on August 9, 2002, he gave perhaps his greatest speech in a life of great speeches. He was playing himself, Charlton Heston, taking his final bow on the stage of life. He performed, as his closing speech, Prospero's words from The Tempest, Act IV, 1:

      Our revels now are ended: these our actors,
      As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
      Are melted into air, into thin air;
      And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
      The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
      The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
      Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
      And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
      Leave not a rack behind: we are such stuff
      As dreams are made on; and our little life
      Is rounded with a sleep.

Charlton Heston in his long career played many great roles, including among others: Marc Antony, Ben Hur, Moses, and God, and he played Prospero for his final act. This next passage was written as though Lesser was thinking of Heston when she wrote it.

[page 143] The actor not only needs to be very powerful and persuasive; he also needs to be a man of the theater, not just a movie star imported for this one occasion. And it's best if he is old enough to have a vast theatrical career behind him — preferably a career with which sticks in our memories, so that we at some level recall him in all those other roles as he is bidding adieu to this particular one.

Watching a movie, like reading a book, is like stepping in a river: it's different water flowing around your foot, your foot is different (all new cells every 7 years), and you yourself are a different person: you have lived, grown, and changed since the last time you did this deed. Everything is in flux, as Heraclitus said, and he means us in particular, not just his famous ever-changing river. In the case of Vertigo, it is the ever-changing and yet remaining the same city of San Francisco. We bring the changed and unchanged parts of ourselves and it is the changed parts of ourselves which permit to see aspects of the movie or the book which were there before and we had missed. Movies and books are like faceted gems which we must rotate to grasp with our eyes some new sparkle of delight. In the process of living we change and produce a rotation without even planning it -- suddenly you understand aspects of the movie or book you didn't before and you feel fulfilled after your contact with it. That feeling itself is a double sign that the film or movie is a strong one and that you are continuing to grow as a result of your latest contact with it.

If you have wondered why you reread books or re-watch movies, you will enjoy this book as Wendy Lesser shares her intimate reading and viewing self with you in a way that few writers have done and even fewer as well as she has.

Read the Review at:
http://www.doyletics.com/arj/nothingr.htm

2.) ARJ2: Three Lectures on Fairy Tales, Practical Thinking, and Categories from GA#108 by Rudolf Steiner

Fairy Tales

One of the big unanswered questions remaining from my childhood was: "What do fairy tales mean?" I grew up in the middle of the last century during a time when my parents read fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm to us and even allowed us to read the fairy tales on our own. I recall some vivid although brief glimpses of elves and fairies for a time during my childhood, but those images resided in some intermediate state of consciousness, close to dreaming. With those memories of fairy folk, fairy tales seemed very real to me, and at times scary. I trembled with Jack as the castle shook whenever the giant bellowed, "Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum!" But to this day, no one had ever explained satisfactorily to me the meaning of fairy tales with their giants and little people. Were they real? Where did they live? and Why did we make them up if they are not real? No one, that is, until Rudolf Steiner. If some of these questions have tweaked your curiosity over the decades since you were under five years old, read along with me and I'll share with you what I've learned about fairy tales from Rudolf Steiner.

A force is in each of us known as the consciousness soul, whose benefits to human evolution have become stronger and clearer with each passing century. If we attempt to explain how we accomplished something remarkable through the aegis of our consciousness soul, whose forces reach us from the spiritual world, we find ourselves using words like this: "What I have seen and related happened once upon a time, and is still happening behind the world of sense in the spiritual world, where there are different conditions of life." (Page 12) In other words, we use the language of fairy tales. Steiner explains how a genuine fairy tale begins:

[page 12] "Once upon a time it happened — where then was it? Where indeed was it not?" That is the correct beginning of a fairy tale, and every fairy tale must end with, "I once saw this, and if what happened in the spiritual world did not perish, if it is not dead, it must still be alive today." That is just the way every fairy tale should be related. If you always begin and end this way, you will create the right sort of sensitivity to what you are telling.

Here is a short fairy tale I would like to tell you, which illustrates the form of the genuine fairy tale as described by Rudolf Steiner:

Once upon a time it happened — where then was it? Where indeed was it not? There was a man who was alone in a new town, with a new job, and knew very few people. He was working very hard, had dated a few women, but loved none of them. He wanted nothing less than a wife who would be faithful and loyal to him, but he didn't know how to go about finding such a woman.

      One day a genie visited him and said, "I will help you. I will grant one wish for anything you want." The man decided that he would wish to fall in love three times before Spring. This seemed more impossible to him and more difficult to achieve than finding a loyal wife, which also seemed impossible to him. One August afternoon he wrote his wish down on a piece of paper with other goals, put it in the bottom of a drawer in his room, and forgot about the piece of paper.
      About three weeks later he was invited to a picnic in the city park and met a woman there. He dated her and was soon smitten by her beauty and charm. He was in love. They dated for a month or two, but began to separate. Then one evening he was at a friend's office and met another woman whom he began dating and soon he was in love again. He had forgotten about the piece of paper with his goal on it completely, so busy was he with his new love. But soon that love grew cold. At a Christmas party, he danced with a beautiful redhead and soon they were dating regularly and he was in love again. Again, he never thought about that piece of paper with his goals on it tucked away in his drawer.
      One night he was invited to a friend's house where some people had gathered and he met another woman. He had heard about this woman and had wanted to meet her, but things kept happening to keep him away from her. At last, he was introduced to her. They hugged each other as was the custom of the group of friends. It was a warm hug, a yielding hug, a hug, which it seemed to him, he had been waiting his entire lifetime for. He wanted to date this woman, to know her better. A week later, he called her for a date, and she told him, "No, I have plans with some girl friends of mine. But I'll give you a rain check."

      "No," he said, "I want a sunshine check." She laughed and they began seeing each other. It was Springtime. Soon they were living together and enjoying each other's company so much that they decided that a piece of paper to recognize their union would be appropriate. They got married.
      Only then did he find that piece of paper with his goals from that August day written on them. He recalled how his super-impossible goal had come true: He had fallen in love and out of love three times by the Spring. And after that was over he had achieved his impossible goal of meeting the woman who would become his faithful and loyal companion and wife for the rest of his life.
      He lived together with her in great happiness, and they were abundantly blessed with children and children's children for many generations. They lived for a long, long time. No one knows how long, but if they have not died, they must still be alive today.

This man had his deeper forces awakened in him by the mysterious genie who gave him his wish for his heart's desire. But first he had to endure three difficult tasks. This is the structure of a fairy tale.

Children love fairy tales because they still have an active memory of astral events, t