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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~ In Memoriam: John Updike (1932 — 2009) ~~~~
~~~~~~~~ American Writer, known for his Rabbit novels and essays. ~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
For newcomers to the Digest, we have created a webpage of all the Violet-n-Joey cartoons!
Check it out at: http://www.doyletics.com/vjtoons.htm Also note the rotating calendar and clock
that follows just to the right of your mouse pointer as you scroll down the page. You'll also see
the clock on the 404 Error page if you make a mistake typing a URL while on the doyletics.com
website.
The Violet-n-Joey Cartoon page is been divided into two pages: one low-speed and one high-speed access. If you have Do NOT Have High-Speed Access, you may try this Link which will load much faster and will allow you to load one cartoon at a time. Use this one for High-Speed Access.
This month Violet and Joey learn about Getting Over It.
Each month we take time to thank two of our good readers of Good Mountain Press Digest, books and reviews. Here's our two worthy Honored Readers for this month. One of their names will be in the TO: address line of your email Digest notification. Our Honored Readers for July are:
This month got off to a bumpy start with someone sending a nastygram to my internet service provider
claiming I was sending out spam. I explained to my provider that I was sending a monthly email
reminder to a list of subscribers, but it seems that was not an acceptable usage according to my
agreement with them. The bad news is that this requires me to purge my entire list and requires everyGood Reader to re-subscribe. The good news is that I am moving the Digest Reminder List to a
commercial service which will send out the email to all the members of the list for me. Sorry about the
inconvenience to all of you, but I'm reminded of the saying that the Wizard had inscribed inside the
King's ring to bring him down to Earth if he got to feeling too good and to cheer him up if he got to
feeling too bad: "This too shall pass."
Hopefully, all of our Good Readers will know by now that the email is simply a monthly reminder, and
that they can view the Good Mountain Press Digest at any time by going to the Home Page at
www.doyletics.com or saving a Bookmark or Favorite of any Digest issue and going to the Archives
Page which is updated for all issues when a new Digest is published to the website.
We will continue the Honored Readers Section of the Digest, even though its original reason no longer
exists. When my subscription list got over 350 subscribers, I had to split the list in half and send two
separate emails, a TO: one Honored Reader with a BCC: to everyone else.
I don't think I've ever
mentioned what constitutes an Honored Reader in a Digest before, so this would be a good time to do
so. To become an Honored Reader, one need only mention to me that they have read or looked at one of
my Digests and hint that they enjoyed doing so. I was amazed as I checked the Honored Reader data
base to find that we have honored over 400 readers over the years. I will endeavor to notify all the
Honored Readers first thing after the first of July. I expect it will take me several days to do so, and
perhaps most of the month, so please be patient, knowing that our staff consists of only four people, our
capable copy-editor, Del, in addition to me, myself, and I. Twenty-hours a day and two hands can only
do so much.
I would like to thank the person who wrote the nastygram for encouraging me to migrate to a
professional list provider, something that I have wanted to do for so long anyway. The list provider is
Topica.com, and I have used them for nine years for the Doyletics Discussion List and have been very
satisfied with them. The new Good Mtn Digest List is a one-way List and will be used solely for
sending out the new Digest Reminder email once a month around the first day of each month. As of
June 26, we have only 9 subscribers to the list, so we have a long way to go to reach the 700 plus
members of the previous homemade list I reached by two simple emails with BCC's.
We will send invitations to our Honored Readers and other current Digest Subscribers to join the Topica.com service over the next few months and include a link to the latest Digest in the invitation. After that initial subscribe period, any reader not subscriber will not receive a reminder email thereafter.
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This month has a lot
of wild life photos. Egrets along a canal, a baby owl on the ground, a red-eared slider turtle about 18" long,
two anoles
making babies, a cardinal in a loquat tree, two wasps doing the wild thing (it is Spring until June 21st, you know), and two squirrels noisely imitating the anoles about ten feet in front of my eyes, but as luck would have it, my camera was inside. Just a few minutes ago while typing these notes at my workstation, I noticed a large bird fly into the live oak tree. I could see its tail and
shoulder, and suspected a red-shouldered hawk, but had to carefully walk outside with camera ready
on Zoom, lean over far to my left and shoot the photo with rain dripping down to get the photo you can
see above.
When it flew away, I saw it was carrying some prey in its claws, a squirrel most
likely. On the reading side, we have three new reviews and five old favorites you have probably not
read before for your edification and enjoyment. Much thanks for coming back to the Digest, especially
since it took a special effort on your part this month to do so. Please know we also have made a special
effort to get the Digest to you this month.
BUM BUNN AND NEW BUNN
About a year ago, we received a recall notice about our BUNN coffee maker, but I decided it was unnecessary to get it repaired, but kept the information in case ours broke and we needed to buy another one. Our current one began leaking on the first of the June, so I was on the phone with Bunn to get a replacement at half-price as part of the recall. When I called Bunn about the recall of coffee maker, they said to call back with the Model and Date Code and a credit card to order a replacement which would come with a pre-paid package to mail in the other one. After considering my options, I decided to buy new one locally so we don’t have to put up with a leaking one while waiting for the new one. We could maybe return the other one and have a backup ready. Del brought home a photo of the new ones at Target in her cell phone. Not good enough to see much, but she got practice taking a photo and saving it, and that’s a handy skill to have.
She and I drove over to Target and bought the new BUNN coffee maker for $124. It looks spiffy, has a smaller footprint on the counter — and shorter under the counter, while maybe a bit wider at the rear where the new Stainless Steel tanks are located. BUNN makers have a hot water tank for very quick coffee making. Its tanks are great for warming the honey dispensers. With the new tanks, as many six of honey drippers can lean with their side touching against the warm tanks. This is great for winter time usage of the honey when the house stays from 70-72 degrees and the honey gets sluggish if not warmed a bit. If you want a coffee maker that can make up to 20 cups of coffee in under 2 minutes, or 4 cups in 20 seconds, this one’s for you.
BEAR STEAKS, OWL STEW, AND GROUND LONGHORN ROUND
From the title, this will sound to most Readers as some exotic wild game cook-off, but no, it’s only a quick culinary-like summary of LSU’s run through the competition from the State of Texas to win its 6th National Championship in Baseball this month. First the Tigers had to chew up the Baylor Bears in the Baton Rouge Regional. Strange thing about NCAA rules is about half-the-time LSU had to sit in the Visitors Dugout because the role of Home Team rotates, even if LSU is playing in its home stadium.
Those Bear steaks on the grill for the Regional were kinda rare and tough, therefore, for the Super Regional (also in the brand new Alex Box Stadium, say it ALEC BOX), the tailgaters cooked up for the Tigers a delicious gumbo with the Rice Owls, which tasted good and lasted only two games, cutting down on the calories. The banquet was set for Omaha, and the Tigers had a full course meal beginning with Horsemeat Shish-Ka-bobs thanks to the Virginia Cavaliers who walked back to the airport, followed by some BBQ’ed Pork Ribs from Arkansas, and for the main course, a large Hamburger Steak made of Ground Round Longhorn Steers, with all the trimmings, of course. That main course took three meals to finish it all, the second meal causing a bit of Jungian indigestion, but the third going down smoothly. To finish off the huge banquet, the Tigers played an enthusiastic game of Fifty-Two Pickup in the middle of the baseball diamond with Louis Coleman getting first crack at the playing cards.
Needless to say needless to say, so I won’t — it was a great year for LSU baseball. The pitcher, who was the closer last year, (the one off which the Rice Owls hit a grand slam to knock LSU out of the 2008 Championship Round) Louis Coleman, was chosen to be the first pitcher in the new Alex Box Stadium against Vanderbilt. Coleman was also the pitcher who threw the last pitch to strike out the Texas Longhorn batter in the bottom of the ninth inning to win the 2009 College World Series National Championship. In between these bookend performances there was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears shed by the team and their coach, Paul Manieri. And a lot of great strategic and tactical moves during the year by Manieri.
Strategically, Manieri moved three freshmen into the starting lineup mid-season, Nola, Hanover, and Mahtook, which raised a lot of eyebrows and the number of double-plays and timely hits. Tactically, in the last game against Texas he moved Jared Mitchell ahead of Mikie Mahtook, from batting sixth to fifth. Jared hit a three-run home and Mahtook struck out to end the side that inning. Without Manieri's tactical switch of his batting order, zero runs instead of three.
Another impressive strategic move was pitching Chad Jones in relief. About mid-season, when Manieri first sent Jones to the bullpen to warm up, two long-time LSU Radio Announcers, Jim Hawthorne and Charlie Hanegriff, were verbally scratching their heads. “Maybe Jones is there to just there to warm up some pitcher by catching for him.” This was late in the season, and a few minutes later when Jones did come in as relief pitcher, Jim and Charlie were scrounging around for his statistics, and all they could find was something like 175 yds in punt returns and 3 interceptions, all football statistics. I was not surprised at Jones pitching because one of the boys who called Del “Mom” because they were at our Marcie house in Metairie so often, Norman Pineda, had told me during a Saints game last year that Jones, who I only knew as a Safety and Punt Returner on the football squad and an occasional outfielder on the baseball team, was a pitcher, that he was drafted out of high school by the Majors as a pitcher.
I asked Norman what kind of a pitcher Jones was, because I couldn’t understand why Manieri wasn’t using him if he were good. “He throws a pea,” was Norman’s laconic reply. I waited a second or two and then asked Norman sheepishly, “Is that good?” “Oh, yeah, that’s great.” Later I found out that to throw a pea means to throw so hard, the baseball looks like a tiny pea coming at you, impossible to hit. So, at soon as they announced Chad was in the bullpen, I knew he was coming in to pitch, almost a year and a half after Norman and I had talked. In the last game against Texas, Chad Jones proved his worth in keeping Texas scoreless in two and two-thirds innings.
HOT AND DRY JUNE
Not completely dry, but nearly so. First rain came on June 3rd and the next rain came on June 25th. In between the sun shone brightly nearly every day and the temperatures reached 90 to 95 by early afternoon several times. One day it even ranged over a 100 briefly, something which has only happened less than two dozen days in the long history of recorded weather in New Orleans, mostly due to our usually dependable Good Mountain cloud cover and cooling afternoon thundershowers throughout the summer months.
Heavy rainstorm early morning of June 2 with a burst of high wind which left our newly transplanted 8 foot high pipe cactus standing, but tore three arm-thickness limbs off one of the two cypress trees along Timberlane Road between the south side neighbor’s house and ours. Largest branch fell on my shrubs, breaking the center of the round bush which had just begun growing well since the large loquat tree south of it had been chopped down.
I spent the morning sawing the limbs into chunks small enough to move and for the garbage men to haul away. Little did we suspect we would not get a single drop of rain again until the end of June. Good news is the planting job my friend Guntis and I did on the large cactus held it in place just fine, even with heavy gusts of wind rushing past it. By the end of June, new growth is clearly obvious on the tops and sides of the cactus. Lucky that cacti can go for a year without water, so there was no need to water the cactus before the rain fell three weeks later.
JUICY CREOLES, BELLS, ZYDECO VERT, AND TASTY CUKES
By the time June arrived, we had eaten all the radishes, and eaten most of the green beans (haricot vert, the origin for music named zydeco which is what haricot sounds like in French). But the cucumbers were climbing up the arbor and the cucumbers, some longer than a foot, were hanging down, volunteering for a tasty salad.
The luscious Creole tomatoes began to ripen and make it into our evening fare in various ways: salt and pepper, Blue Plate Mayonnaise, or Del’s Creole Tomato sauce made with Wishbone Italian Dressing whipped with equal parts of the BP Mayo. Sometimes sliced cukes and sliced tomatoes with just a tad of vinegar, salt and pepper. Del’s favorite is a Creole Tomato sandwich with stone-ground whole wheat bread toast topped with sliced Creoles that have been soaking in her Creole sauce. Talk about good! Nowhere else on Earth I want to be in June than in South Louisiana when those Creole tomatoes are turning red on the shelves in the kitchen, as you can see in the Banner Photo of this issue of the Digest.
Here’s what we had to eat one evening during the Super Regional. With the last of our garden haricot vert and potatoes, I had made green beans and potatoes using the leeks as adjunct to onions and it was delicious. I was waiting for the LSU — Rice baseball Super-regional game to start at 4 pm and couldn’t start writing anything in the meantime. Instead I read for a while, then worked in the garden. The baseball game was incredible. LSU took a lead and didn’t let it go. Coleman pitched a masterful game and Matty Ott came on in the ninth to relieve him. Got the first two guys at the bottom on the order out and with the ninth batter at the plate with 2 out, he hit the batter with a pitch. Now the top of the batting order was at the plate representing the tying run, but Ott took care of business: with two strikes on the batter, on these instructions from Manieri: “Don’t throw him anything good”, Ott gave him one almost in the dirt which the batter struck at and missed to send the Tigers to Omaha! WOW!
Del had earlier taken some green beans and rice to Rosie and stayed to play Rummy Cube with her, so I began watching the FIFA Finals with the USA playing Honduras. Luckily it came on immediately after the game was over on ESPN-HD because I would have otherwise not known about the game. Our local newspaper hardly even gives the scores of FIFA games, much less announces any games in advance. USA had just lost to Costa Rica the previous day after allowing an early lead of 1-0 and never catching up. Unfortunately in this game, Honduras likewise gets a 1-0 lead 4 minutes into the game, but this time, the USA came storming back, first on a PK, Penalty Kick by Donovan, and later on a masterful shot to lead 2-1, and win the game to take second place in the standings behind Costa Rica. WOW! By the end of the month, the USA had gone on to beat Spain in the semi-finals in South Africa, and after Brazil narrowly escaped losing to South Africa, the USA will meet Brazil in the FIFA Finals in South Africa.
I learned about soccer when I was in Germany for ten days during the 1998 World Cup and I enjoy watching great soccer being played. By the time you read this, we’ll know if the USA was able to beat Brazil. Followup: USA took a 2-0 lead into the first half but were unable to stave off Brazil who won 3-2. A valiant effort which bodes well for USA's chances in the next World Cup.
HORROR SHOW AT THE RAVE THEATER
One Sunday afternoon, Del and I drove up to our son John’s apartment where he was fixing lunch for us. It was the first time we had visited him there when his two sons, Kyle and Collin were there, and we were all going to see the new Night at the Museum movie. Along the way to Gonzales, Del and I stopped at Tanger Mall and she got two new shoes and so did I. She bought me two pair of new shoes for my birthday and wanted me to be sure to remember that when July 20 rolls around. Here it is, Del, I remember! Some Nike beach uni-strap flops, and some Dr. Scholl deck shoes with memory foam inside the shoes. All for $80. I said ersatz because later when I was tying the shoes on my feet, I noticed that the shoe strings did not go through to the back of the shoe like real deck shoes, so there was no way to tighten the shoes properly. Hope the memory foam does the job that the shoe strings are supposed to do to keep wet deck shoes on one’s feet tightly. Would not have bought them had I noticed the ruse in time. We left the Outlet Mall to drive to John’s, and I mentioned to Del as we drove out thru the Crackerbarrel Restaurant parking lot that it was the first time ever we drove away from the Crackerbarrel still hungry! The sequel to the first museum movie got a Your Call, but the Rave Theater in Baton Rouge in which we viewed the movie got an AVOID AT ALL COSTS.
Some teenage boy in the row front of me and off to my left was doing TEXT messages during the movie and the bright light from his open cell phone was glaring in my eyes. My foot began subtly bouncing off his rockable seat and he finally shut it down. Makes me think fondly of old man Paul Boudreaux who used to walk up and down the Gordon Theater in Westwego when I was that age and made sure no distracting behavior was going on. Like so many other things, prices have gone up and service has gone down. Were it not for the chance to go with our grandsons, I would have stayed out of any movie theater. A month or so ago, we went to the local Palace Theater, a gal sitting one seat over to my right answered her cell phone during a critical part of the movie and kept talking! That did it for me. No more first run movies. Blu-Ray on the plasma screen at home with the surround sound and anyone who answers a cell phone will be gently kicked out of the Timberlane Screening Room.
CLOSER AND CLOSER
There is only one first run Network program we watch and we wait for it to arrive every June since we fell in love with Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson and her pugnacious, charming, ingenious, and lovable crew in the Major Crimes department, in fact, we consider it a major crime to miss a single episode in first run. Thanks to DVR, we are able to begin watching halfway into its hour run and then fast-forward over all the commercials and obnoxious previews of wannabe Closer’s. This year the wait till June was ameliorated by a spate of original episodes of The Closer which were broadcast in January. Hopefully the trend continues.
Along with The Closer premiere, we watched two fine 2008 movies about precocious dark-skinned boys, “Australia” and “Slumdog Millionaire” one night. I’ve noticed how often we have two movies of similar themes surprise us during a double-feature night. This was one of the better synchronies we’ve encountered with our Netflix DVD’s. I do most of the selection and avoid ordering two movies of similar themes, so these similarities are hidden in the movies and one must watch them all the way through to notice. In advance, I thought “Australia” was about a beautiful white woman, but the small aboriginal boy stole the show. Two other memorable movies on the week of The Closer premiere were “Daniel Deronda” and “Noble House”. See Movie Blurbs below for more info on these.
CAT & MOUSE DINNER, MOTHER’S BIRTHDAY, FATHER’S DAY
Our Annual Cat & Mouse Dinner, a Black Tie Banquet in the Rex Room of Antoine’s Restaurant was another great evening. After a superb banquet topped off by an autographed Baked Alaska for dessert, the men read poetry to their ladies, included a 1950s rock song written and sung by Ric to his lady, Dolly Dean. With us singing Doo Wop behind him, Ric was the hit of the evening. My poem to Del is featured as the Poem of the Month in this Digest.
Summertime began on Father’s Day this year, which was also our remaining Mother’s Birthday, Doris Richards, and Del had planned a get together of Doris’s two kids (Del & Dan), their spouses (Bobby & Karen), and Dan’s local kids (Cherie and Randy), spouses, and their kids (Heather, Brandon, and Brooke). So the day was a joyous celebration of the summer solstice and the giving and receiving of Birthday and Father’s Day cards and presents, and the traditional blowing out of candles on a Gambino’s Chocolate Doberge Birthday Cake for Doris.
My day began with a Happy Father’s Day card, first in a long time from someone who lives in the house with me, namely our Schnauzer Steiner, who just passed his 12th birthday. His card was so cute, I thought you would like to see it. Wish I had Del here to read it to you like a dog would say it, panting quickly, tail wagging, with eyes wide open, with an Ahrooo or two thrown aptly in. Steiner gave me a present of wrapped chocolate truffles, too. How did he know how good these taste to humans? “It’s one of the great myskeries of the sea”, as Popeye once said.
My day ended with having supper with Buster, our 91-year-old dad, and then playing Pay Me! with him. All the Matherne’s will be familiar with the game, but few else. You start off with three cards in your hand with 3's wild, and move up one card at a time to 13 cards in each round with Kings wild. Almost 92 and Buster still manages to hold, sort, and win with 13 cards in his hand. The game is a combination of fun, physical therapy, fun, mental conditioning, gambling, memory exercise, and fun. Buster plays on Sunday and again on Monday, whenever we visit (once a month usually), or whenever any Matherne’s stop by for a visit. We brought him some of the goodies from the Richards’ gathering earlier in the day and he ate heartily. The second Pay Me! game ended about 10:45 pm, an hour or so past his normal bed-time, and I helped him get ready for bed. After I pulled the covers over him and kissed on the forehead, he opened his eyes and said brightly, “Happy Father’s Day.” We drove home quietly, Del and I each thinking over the busy day we had, and ready to tuck ourselves into bed.
MAMA MIA! THE LITTLE MERMAID & BILLY ELLIOT: WICKED
The final week of June saw Del taking her grand-daughter Katie Gralapp on a trip to New York City to celebrate her graduation from high school. When Doris took Kim, Katie’s mother, to London for her graduation, Del was working and unable to go along, so Del promised she would take her daughter along on this trip. Why NYC? Katie’s choice of where she wanted to go. Also the choice of Broadway Plays which grace the title. Plus they saw “Billy Elliot”, which stars the son of Rick Bologna who with his wife ran the Bologna Gallery for many years. Those two artisans framed many of the artworks which grace our home today, and apparently they moved to NYC to help their son get started on the stage. I gather from Del’s telephonic description of “Wicked” this morning, a lot of you will be watching this musical back story of the life of the wicked witch of Oz in the coming years, both on stage and in movies. Where are they staying? On Bloomberg Beach or rather right next to it. It’s the name NY’ers give to the blocked-off from auto traffic section of Broadway complete with lawn chairs for visitors to sit and enjoy the sights.
So far I’ve heard of a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to Grimaldi’s for pizza, dinner at Tavern on the Green, watching LSU in the College World Series at the ESPN broadcast headquarters, a visit to St. Patrick’s Cathedral to view the spot on the corner of Fifth Avenue where Del and I locked ourselves out of my car during rush hour on Friday. Plus a visit to the M&M store and to the place where the diamonds come out: Tiffany’s. On Saturday Del called from Soho, which she explained means “SO of HOuston Street” and as any crossword puzzler knows, there is also a very handy NOHO section of NYC as well.
Originally manufacturing district, it turned into an artist’s colony when the garment industry went South in more ways than one — now it’s been kicked sideways all the way to China. This has been a very comfortable visit to New York City for me. I get to learn about NYC while eating food from our garden and I get detailed on-the-scene reports in the air-conditioned comfort of my home with no one jabbering away at the next table, looking over what I’m eating or drinking, or hailing a taxi.
RAIN FINALLY
No rain from June 3rd till June 25th at Timberlane, over three weeks of hot, dry, and sunny. On the 24th, I was moving the sprinkler from one place to another all during the day to cover the St. Augustine grass. The only care this marvelous green carpet requires is watering in those rare group of days when it doesn't rain: it grows by itself without fertilizer, aerating, pesticides, hay-bale mulch or any of the other expensive and time-consuming lawn treatments I’ve found that grass in other parts of the country require. I’ve only lived in Tennessee, California, and New England, but that was enough. All our wonderful St. Augustine needs is rain, and a lot of it, which makes it perfect for New Orleans and South Louisiana. I learned as a buyer of a bare lot with a new house on it back in 1965, all you have to do to create a lush Bermuda grass lawn in New Orleans is wait. About a month or so of summer will do the trick, and soon you will have Bermuda everywhere covering the dirt. If you decide you want St. Augustine, you’re in luck, because your neighbor may have it and if so, no matter what you do, you’ll soon have St. Augustine as well, as it migrates like a bushel of spilled blue crabs, and soon your lush Bermuda will be completely replaced by St. Augustine and the good news is: there is nothing hardy enough to replace St. Augustine!
Only one thing to watch out for. Remember the “lot of rain” part? There is an insidious bug hiding beneath every St. Augustine lawn waiting its chance, it’s a cinch you’ve heard about it already, it’s called a “cinch bug”. When we get these rare mini-droughts of two weeks to three weeks, savy lawn owners know it’s time to sprinkle because if the water table gets too low below the surface of the ground, the cinch bugs are a cinch to munch on the St. Augustine grass. How low a water table is too low? When the brown circular spots appear in the middle of the lush green grass. They are caused by the cinch bug. So water preemptively and no problem. If you’ve waited to find out “how long”, then here’s what you do. Take a large juice can, cut out the top and bottom, hammer slightly into the grass, hopefully surrounding all of the cinch bug dinner plate (brown spot), and fill it with water several times a day. It’s an engraved invitation for the cinch bugs to go back into hibernation and leave your St. Aug alone. Or you can wait till the next widely scattered thundershower to come your way, and the one to two inch downpour will keep your precious St. Aug safe for another week or so. On the 25th and 26th we got one of the two-inchers so I can safely pack away the sprinklers for another year.
My friend Guntis, who also has his wife in New York and New England, invited me to hear some music on Wednesday night at an Algiers Point Music Evening, but the Tigers were playing the last game of the series and I wasn’t leaving the Screening Room till that game was over. Later that night while checking local news, I saw a TV anchor interviewing our long-time friend, Carol Osborne, who was in charge of the Algiers music series at the Point.
On Thursday I took our friend Rosie Harris to lunch. That night her two nieces were coming to take her to dinner. The next day around noon I called to see how Rosie was doing, thinking to take some of my shrimp stew which I had just eaten. I realized without Del to help me finish it off, I would have a lot extra shrimp stew left. Well, Rosie’s two nieces, Judy and Dawn, offered to do something for their beloved Aunt Rosie, insisting on it despite Rosie’s protests, so finally she said her windows needed washing. That’s what they were doing when I called. I packaged up the rest of the shrimp stew and took it over for the three ladies, since they were going to work through lunch and be very hungry. They protested about my offer to get a photo of them, but I said they look just like the helpers they are, and that would be very appropriate. Soon as I got home, about three blocks away, Rosie called back to say Dawn had gotten stung by a wasp and what could she do? I suggested the old home remedy I learned as a child for stings: grab some green grass, crush in your hands, and rub on the spot of the sting. Then I remembered the Neosporin-Plus which has a pain killer in it and took the tube over and administered some of the ointment to Dawn’s leg.
JUNGLE GYM FIG PICKING AND SNOWBALL STANDING
Out of the two events, picking figs or standing in line for snowballs, I'll pick fig picking any day. Especially if the snowball stand has a twenty-minute queue and is not air-conditioned on a 90 plus degree day like Sunday. My friend Gus loves Hansen's Snowball stand, which I have passed by on many occasions, never stopping because of the twenty-minute line of folks waiting outside. But Gus told me this stand has the best snowballs in New Orleans, and on the way home from an event on a Sunday late afternoon, there was no line, so we stopped in to buy a snowball, only to find that there was a twenty-minute line inside the shop, which had only one cool spot — behind the ice-shaving machine. Sans air-conditioning, it would have been sans my business, but Gus said at least four times or more, "This place has the best snowballs in town." Later on the way home after I had polished off a $3.50 snowball which Gus treated me to, covered half with fruit punch and half with limeade, which was very good by the way, Gus admitted that Hansen's was the only snowball stand in New Orleans he had ever bought a snowball from.
Well, Hansen's didn't have soft-serve, ice cream-filled snowballs and they didn't have Dreamsicle flavor, so their product doesn't make to the level of Cool-Hand Luke's which was a short walk from my work-station and its queue was always fully visible from the street, and our grandkids could climb on low-hanging tree limbs in the shade while waiting. The truck outside my club on Sundays always has Dreamsicle flavor for its snowballs, but no ice cream, so I'm still auditioning replacements for Cool-Hand Luke, a great name for a snowball maker, ain't it? Paul Newman, the original Cool Hand Luke would agree, given his natural sense of humor and penchant for the best-tasting foods of any genre.
My figs were drying on the vine, then the daily rains came and they're plumping up large and sweet. I'm hoping to fill my large pot and turn them into fig preserves before July 4th. I'm picking a basket each day and that seems a doable goal. What's with the jungle gym thing? Well, climbing inside the tree is the best way of picking figs that are otherwise too high to reach. Sure, I know about ladders and got all sizes, but the ground is soft under the tree and muddy, as it should be for growing great figs, and ladders have a way of sinking into mud, but the tree is already sunk into the mud and stays there.
So I carefully place my size 10 feet, in my old sandals, and reach and twist everyway my body can twist, and some ways I didn't now it could twist. I carefully pull down the branches smaller around than my thumb — the limbs bend like bow, and brings the ripe figs to the tips of your other hand and fingers. Don't the limbs break when I step on them or pull them too far? Sure, if I was foolish enough to step in the wrong place or pull too far on a limb, but, no, for me, they don't break. I wouldn't recommend this procedure that I use to someone going to pick in my fig trees — I would have a ladder ready for them. But taking out a ladder and putting it up every time I pick figs, in the morning and the afternoon would be onerous to me, and not as much fun as challenging myself to pick every ripe figs without breaking a limb by stepping or pulling. And the exercise is terrific.
Do I wear long sleeves while picking figs? Sure, if the temperature is in the 70's which is a New Orleans way of saying, "No." No, short pants and short sleeved shirts. Don't you get scratches? Sure, and very sticky fingers, and my arms itch when I'm done most every time. But a good soaping in the sink, rinsing with water does wonders. Any leftover itching on some spot on my arms or fingers gets a dousing with good ole Dr. Tichenor's and in a minute or two, I'm ready to tap away on some keys if that's what's waiting for me, which in these last days of the month, is what is usually waiting for me. Wonder why so few movies reviewed this month? Del has been gone the last week of the month to New York City, and six NetFlix DVD's are waiting for us when she returns.
We ate the last of our fig preserves (from 2005) and are ready to lay in some new fig preserves for next year by the end of this next week. Enjoying figs from our own fig tree is a nutritious treat we can enjoy throughout the year.
TILL NEXT MONTH
That’s it from out our way for another Digest. Till next month, by the Grace of God, and the Mississippi River don’t rise! Enjoy the end of school, vacations, and the balmy breezes of Summer (or the chilly winds of Winter in the Southern Hemisphere). Make it a great month for yourself, however and wherever in the world you celebrate the joys of Summer ! ! !
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New Stuff on the Website: This is one of a series of five artworks sent to me by Cynthia Waters this month. Each one has hidden images of human beings within the artwork. In the sample below, "La Vie En Rose", ask yourself where the stockings and the red shoes that are on the window sill came from. See rest on the Tidbits Grab Art Page here: http://www.doyletics.com/tidbits/grabart.htm#hidden
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We learn to swim in the winter and to ice skate in the summer.
William James,
US Pioneer in Psychology, writing about how our unconscious works in our learning process.
New Stuff about Website: My Reviews of Five Whimsical Books
1. Tom T. Hall's The Songwriter's Handbook
Excellent book for beginning songwriters: light, easy reading with lots of tips
on getting published, recorded and best of all, paid. The chapter on how to write hit
songs was deleted at the last minute when the publisher remembered his money back
guarantee.
Rule 1: There are no rules for writing hit songs.
Given that paradoxical requirement, old Tom T. comes up with an excellent
rule for song/poem writing: make each line complete in itself. Here's my first attempt
at following that advice:
It's a nice trick
Try it for yourself
A poem's both smooth and slick
Take one from your mental shelf.
When I was halfway through the book several mornings ago, I started my daily
free writing exercise and it came out in poetry. The three pages became more and more
poetic until I had about three poems laid out in front of me. The first punctuation or
parsing was to give a title to the third page, "The Song of Freedom" which is about a
country where the freedom bell is not cracked. The first page became the poem "Write Away" and the second page, the poem "Conquer the World." Not bad dividends for a
twelve dollar investment in this book.
Here are two of the poems. Note how Tom has influenced my style right away in the complete thought per line, especially notable in the second one:
SONG OF FREEDOM
An epic song of freedom calls to me,
to leave my moorings on this murky sea
To set my tattered sails for brighter climes,
to where the crackless bell of freedom chimes.
A land of earnest volunteers,
bereft of bureaucrats for years:
They left because their lawful force
found no one willing to coerce.
We cannot fight for liberty you see
is not consistent with bureaucracy.
It's only by our joint consent
we do on freedom's shores relent.
We lose our declared independent roots
by pursuit of democracy in polling booths.
Conquer The World
You never wrote a song before — what of it?
Alexander never conquered the world
before he did it.
He crossed the sea in harmony
and stayed until the land was won;
His only goal was just to see
what lies beyond the next horizon.
He won the world but not with might,
The evidence is now at hand,
he won it with his rag-time band.
So heed the lessons one and all
the world is at your beck and call
To conquer the world without a casualty
you must first set your bodies free.
Free to dance and free to sing
will bring you joy in everything,
For bodies free will ne'er lie
and let your carefree spirits fly.
Now for my extended attempt at following his advice that every line express
a complete thought. Read it and decide for yourself if I achieved that or not.
Tips from Tom T. Hall
To write a poem every time,
Write a fully stated design.
The listener will hear what you say.
Thoughts will upon his psyche prey
A sentence must express a complete thought —
A fragment is like half a boat —
No matter how titanic, it will sink of its own weight
Half an auto will not go, half a driver also, no.
Half a loaf will nourish some,
Half a friend means no chum.
Writing lines in half a minute
Half a moon and half a sum
Have a heart or halve a heart
Broke in half is not much fun
So you read a book by Tom T. Hal1
He displays no modesty at all.
You decide that you can write some songs
Tell tales of her to whom your love belongs.
I was nearly through the book when I listened to the June 13, 1987 broadcast
of Prairie Home Companion, which was supposed to be its last show. I heard Roy
recite the following line: "It's better to be good and over, than rotten and hanging on."
He'd been a regular on PHC and his brand of humor is aptly described as "one fell
soup."
From "Is the Pope Capitalized?" he quotes the UPI stylebook: "burro, burrow:
A burro is an ass. A burrow is a hole in the ground. A journalist is expected to know
the difference." From "The Times: no SH*T": "And Sports Illustrated once turned my
'crap' to 'baloney' and Esquire my 'F*ck' to 'Forget.' And he closes with: "Since then,
there has been a 'sh*t' or two in the New Yorker and other publications have eased their
dung restrictions."
In "The Family Jewels," a column devoted to testicles (from Latin root
'testify'), he points out that "pubescent teenage boys appearing at their girl-friends's
doors with orchids for their ball gowns" takes on a new meaning when you realize
'orchids' means 'testicles' in Greek.
And so the book goes — a delight to pick up and read anywhere — maybe a three-page article or two just to experience the mental whiplash of entering Blount's brain
for a couple of minutes. "Be sure to fasten your seatbelts before reading" should be
place in fluorescent orange at the beginning of each story, article, or column. Reading
Blount's writing is like watching Jimmy Piersall play baseball: you can never tell when
he might hit a home run and then run the bases backwards.
Note the subtitle of this book is The Pursuit of Unhappiness. Knowing that happiness is
something that happens spontaneously, Watzlawick devotes this book to a study of ways for folks
to carefully pursue unhappiness. By cataloging the most popular ways that folks make themselves
unhappy and giving intricate details on how to do it, those folks who recognize their own strategies
for creating unhappiness as they read this book, will be unable to perform the tasks as well as
before, their careful processes for making themselves unhappy will be broken!
When confronted with a desperate predicament, the Northern German is said to take the
attitude that "the situation is serious, but not hopeless" whereas the Southern German, confronting
the same predicament, would take the attitude that "the situation is hopeless, but not serious".
With the southern attitude, Paul Watzlawick offers a simple solution to seemingly impossible
predicaments.
One predicament is choosing to operate on the world the way one thinks it should be
instead of the way it is. Watzlawick says of such a person, "As captain of his ship, which the rats
have already abandoned, he heroically steers into the stormy night."
Of another favorite predicament, "Games with the Past", Watzlawick details four
variations for the reader to consider:
1) Glorification of the Past: Seeing one's youth as Paradise Lost and "making it into an
inexhaustible reservoir of nostalgic misery."
2) Mrs. Lot: Looking back obsessively on the past so as to avoid any possibility of
discovering something new in the present, in effect, turning oneself into stone.
3) The Fatal Glass of Beer: In this predicament, the single act of sinning starts an
irreversible decline (like the young man drinking his first glass of beer in W. C. Fields' movie, The
Fatal Glass of Beer). "Then I sinned, but now I am the victim of my own sin." Watzlawick tells us
in the voice of the hopelessly lost sinner.
4) More of the Same: The story is of Nasruddin, the Sufi joker sage, who was crawling
around the campfire in front of his desert tent when a friend walked by.
"What are you looking for?"
"My key" At this his friend got on his knees and joined in the search, soon another friend
came by and there were three of them helping, then a fourth. Soon, a fifth friend came by and asked, "What are you looking for?"
"My key"
"Oh, where did you lose it?"
"In my tent."
"In your tent? Then why are all of you looking for it
out here?"
"Because the light is better here."
Sounds absurd, doesn't it? If you look in the wrong place, you will never find what you're
looking for, right? Yes, but continuing the game of "more of the same, is one of the most effective
recipes for disaster that has gradually evolved on our planet."
The only hope for the irrepressible "more of the same" player is to follow these two
directions explicitly: [Liberally reworded from the author's text.]
1) You must keep doing what you're doing the same way, since only one way of doing it is
permitted, and if the way you choose to do it is not working, just apply yourself more forcefully.
2) Under no circumstances doubt the assumption that there is only one way to do it; only your
application of that one way and its effectiveness may be questioned and refined.
After these playful romps with the past, Watzlawick examines other ingenious ways that
people use to make themselves unhappy. As Margaret Mead pointed out, while an American
would pretend to have a headache to avoid an unpleasant social engagement, a Russian would
have to have a headache. The American suffers from a hurting conscience, and the Russian from a
hurting head.
For persons unfamiliar with the tools of the average paranoiac, Watzlawick, in The Story of
the Hammer, gives details on how to convert floaters into failing vision, tinnitus into hearing loss,
and one's friends into co-conspirators. It only takes a little practice with the detailed exercises to
become proficient.
Given that all these simple tools may never allow one to achieve the true unhappiness of
Oedipus, Watzlawick points out how the self-fulfilling prophecy, conscientiously applied, can save
the day. He leads us to see Karl Popper's point that "the very actions that Oedipus took in order to
avoid the horrifying predictions of the oracle led to the fatal fulfillment of those predictions."
Need stronger ammunition? Try mixing messages at the object and relationship level,
Watzlawick suggests. "Do you like the soup I made especially for you?" If it tastes bad and you
say, "No" honestly, the relationship will suffer. Some folks spend their entire lives nourishing
themselves on bad tasting soup rather than risk upsetting the relationship by telling the truth.
The author finally unsheathes the most powerful weapon of all in his armamentarium, the
"Be Spontaneous" Paradox. It's use is demonstrated below by two unhappiness experts:
"Do you love me?"
"Yes."
"If you really loved me, you'd say so without my asking you."
Any request or command for a spontaneous act will cause other persons to be unable to
perform the act spontaneously. Whether it's to: "Go to sleep", "Show me you love me", "Be
happy", or even "Do a good job", the mere gracing of their ears with the request will make it
difficult or impossible for them to perform as requested. This is the reason why actors before a
stage performance are told to "Break a leg". Since breaking a leg can only happen spontaneously,
it will not happen on command, and the actors are not stuck in the exquisite "Be Spontaneous"
paradox of being wished to "Perform well tonight". Even the simple request by a photographer to
"Smile" will evoke a faked or posed smile in place of a genuine one. True unhappiness enthusiasts
are experts at the "Be Spontaneous" paradox.
With so many effective ways to create unhappiness, small wonder that one can continue
along unhappy for a lifetime, when merely stopping one's pursuit of unhappiness would allow one
to be happy in a moment. "The situation is hopeless," Watzlawick ends his small book saying,
"and the solution is hopelessly simple."
"Consuetudo Peregrinadis — the habit of wandering is endemic in cats" might be the theme
of this mystical novel and it would surprise no one. Instead the theme is that of a cat who is a
philosopher, not the cat of a philosopher. Lucas Fysst (rhymes with "diced" not "Christ" — that would
be irreverent, Lucas claims) is an historian of science who had unearthed and dutifully researched
an ancient Irish poem c. 900 AD about a Celtic monk's cat named Pangur Ban. When the title cat
appears in Lucas' world he names her Thomas Gray after the famous "Elegy in a Country
Churchyard" poet who wrote a poem about his cat that died in a vat of goldfish and, by the way, had
a conscious tail. He named this peregrine cat Thomas Gray, but he affectionately called her Pangur
Ban — which may mean "furry white" unless you punctuate the name Pan Gurban which turns the
furry feline into a hairy hunchback, an abomination that Lucas considered more irreverent and less
poetical.
Thomas Gray's subsequent disappearance (one of many) from the Halls of Cambridge brings
sadness to the dons, commentary by the Prime Minister during Questions, and the lowering of the
Pembroke flag for an hour. But Dr. Redding spies Thomas in King's Lynn and the chase is afoot.
Lucas retraces Redding's exact steps, including ordering gooseberry fool from the waitress who
Redding only remembered as having a name beginning with a 'B.' After a lot of fool and fooling
around, Miss B. becomes Mrs. Fysst and Lucas discovers Thomas Gray once more on a scow in the
Wash off King's Lynn. She wants to retrace her grandmother Katrina's quintessential experience of
the specific wavelet out of the myriad of general wavelets on the rippling sea. To discover for herself
infinity in the gap between the specific and the general. Once having done so, she can rest at peace,
with occasional peregrinations, of which we shall not speak, in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Lucas
Fysst.
A delightful novel from beginning to end — most likely to surprise those who think of cats as
untrainable dogs and are embarrassed by the thought of having coming into possession of a whole
book about one.
Get ready for a pafnutying good time as you follow this mathematical thread that begins
with a letter questioning the author's spelling of Tschebyscheff in his book on numerical
approximations. While tracking down the variety of acceptable ways of spelling this surname, the
author begins also tracking down the unusual Russian first name of Pafnuty.
Soon the author has developed a mania for tracking names that takes him to reading the
story of the Desert Fathers, hippopotami in the Nile, the pharaoh's pyramid builders, and traveling
to Tasmania, Jerusalem, among other exotic places. In this book he changes the mania into a series
of delightful stories.
In the crumbling coffin, the remains were surrounded by a number of
religious objects not characteristic of other tombs in the same cemetery. There
was a sacrament case of palm fibers, an ancient rosary of wood and ivory, a
rose of Jericho, the symbol of immortality and resurrection, and, found
between the fingers of the skeleton, a cross in the form of an ankh, the symbol
of life and rebirth. There were also some palm leaves signifying a martyr's
triumph.
In a nearby grave, they found the remains of a monk in a brown robe. No inscription but on
a potsherd nearby they found the inscription "Serapion, son of Kornosthalos." In the various plays
about Thaïs, the Man of God is either Paphnutius or Serapion.
For those verbophiles among us, who do not consider a book or article complete unless we
learn at least one new word from it, I offer Philip Davis's contribution: "pafnuty, v. i., to pursue
tangential matters with a hobby-like zeal."
Footnote 1.
In a new book on Thoreau, Kevin Dann notes a connection between Hrosvitha and Rudolf Steiner's mentor in Vienna.
"Steiner had researched the karmic history of an extremely important mentor in his
own life — Karl Julius Schröer, his teacher at the Institute of Technology
in Vienna, the man who in 1882 recommended Steiner to write the
introductions to Goethe’s botanical, zoological, geological and color
theory writings for an edition of Goethe’s collected works. From his
research, Steiner discovered that Schröer had been the tenth century
playwright Hroswitha, and before that, Plato."
This was our favorite venue during the 1940s and early 1950s, and we spent many a night watching great acts on the Midway Stage. For 21 cents I could amuse my ten-year-old self for hours in the Penny Arcade. Great memories of the Zephyr roller coaster, the Laughing Clown, the Carousel with the Flying Horses, and those shelters where our large Matherne clan could gather for the day before they began charging admission and we could park our cars a few feet from the shelter.
At right is a watercolor of the famous lighthouse which was there before the Amusement Park was built and remained a landmark after it was gone. I bought this watercolor from John Goodwynne who specializes in nautical theme paintings, especially paintings on top of navigational maps. See Photo of Goodwynne with one of these watercolors.
Hits (Watch as soon as you can. A Don't Miss Hit is one you might otherwise ignore.):
“Last Chance Harvey” (2009) a marvelous chick-flick with Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman. Makes fathers supplanted by step-fathers giving away their daughters think and weep. A DON’T MISS HIT ! ! “Speaker” (2004) about a young girl entering the ninth grade after a summer party went bad and she called 911. The police came to break up the party, but no one asked why she called, and all her friends turned on her. Can she survive the year without telling a soul? A good time to be an art student.
“Zack and Miri Make a Porno” (2008) and each other for the first time. A life-long friendship threatened by falling in love? Prepare to laugh while you send the kids over to the in-laws for the evening. There are words and scenes you don’t want to have your kids explain to you. Plus you’ll be too busy rolling on the floor laughing to hear the explanations! Seth Rogen is a hoot! A DON’T MISS HIT ! “The Stone Angel” (2007) Ellen Burstyn stars, says this line, “Time is unstuck from me now — I am filled with memories” as she wanders through the last days of her life. We see the memories flooding her life that no one else does. What a lesson for those with aging parents. A DON’T MISS HIT ! ! ! “Australia” (2008) with the awesome sweep and epic scope of “Gone With the Wind” will be remembered that way in seventy years. Uses “Over the Rainbow” from “Wizard of Oz” which opened in 1939 with GWTW. Storyline: Can a thoroughbred mate with an outback brumby? A DON’T MISS HIT ! ! ! !
“Slumdog Millionaire” (2008) A Chai Wallah, tea server for Telemarketers, answers every question and wins 20 Million Rupees. How could he do this? Thereupon hangs a story, a long story of love and poverty during his childhood in the slums of Bombay. A DON’T MISS HIT ! ! ! “Magic of Fellini” (2002) One cannot understand the man’s movies without understanding the man: he was crazy, he was a cartoonist, he was an inspired artist, he improvised everything, even dubbing a line for a guy with his mouth closed in post-production. A kaleidoscope of genius for 55 minutes.
“Noble House” (1988) Disk 1 of 2 Pierce Brosnan takes over Noble House as Tai Pan and must battle his nemesis to maintain his place as leader of the most powerful company in Hong Kong. Powerful tale masterfully portrayed. A DON’T MISS HIT ! ! “Daniel Deronda” (2002) George Eliot’s last novel brought convincingly to the screen portrays the struggle of a young man to find meaning as an English gentleman in the nineteenth century. Daniel rescues two women from drowning, which one will he marry? A DON’T MISS HIT ! “Marley & Me” (2008) the happy and poignant life story of a rambunctious Lab who expanded the limits on what’s edible. A DON’T MISS CHEW! ! !
“Noble House” (1988) Disk 2 of 2 Stock market runs, bank runs, mudslide, boat fire, love affairs keep the Tai Pan busy trying to keep the too-big-to-fail Noble House afloat in Hong Kong. A DON’T MISS HIT ! ! “Revolutionary Road” (2008) A look at middle class mores and challenges in the middle Fifties. Off to Paris or sell computers? Or have a baby? Decisions loom large in this Titanic rematch of DiCaprio and Winslet. Who will sink and who will swim this time?
“Jesse Stone: On Thin Ice” (2009) Tom Selleck is shot at the beginning of this thriller and is ordered to stay away from his assailant. But when has that stopped him? He is on thin ice all the way to the surprise ending. A DON’T MISS HIT ! ! ! “Defiance” (2008) Ever wondered why Jews didn’t escape from the ghetto and live out the war in the woods? Here’s a story of some who did & the incredible challenges they faced. A DON’T MISS HIT ! ! ! “My Sassy Girl” (2008) Drunken gal nearly does a Karenina in front of a train. Boy rescues her from train, but not from the drink — that was her job. Halfway through the 95 minute flick, a movie breaks out.
“The Winslow Boy” (1948) Excellent drama about a young naval cadet accused of stealing and how his father stuck behind him all the way to the highest court to prove his innocence. There is a more version done in 1999.
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.
“Hollywood Stories” (2005) stares at its lint-filled navel and bores the audience. AAAC
Your call on these — your taste in movies may differ, but I liked them:
“The Day the Earth Stood Still” (2008) and logic flew out the window. Earth was created for humans and the idea that some aliens would eliminate humans to save the Earth is ludicrous. I liked the new method of razing stadiums and skyscrapers, but it seemed a little non-selective. Missed Michael Renne and his elegant Klatu and a metallic Gork who didn’t fly to pieces. Can’t take Cleese seriously as a Nobel scientist after his underwear performance in “A Fish Called Wanda”. But it’s Your Call on whether this is a hit or an overstuffed turkey. “Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian” (2009) follow up to Ben Stiller’s first hit and a bit too talkative at times, but still fun.
“Snow Angels” (2007) are two females who die in the snow and how it happens to them.
“JCVD” (2008) aptly named since Jean Claude van Dam plays himself as an aging and broke actor who is trying cash a check in a bank when a bank robbery breaks out. Everyone on the outside thinks he’s heading the robbery. Will he escape the clutches of the robbers? Will we see his patented kicks? Not soon enough for it to be a hit. “Burn After Reading” (2008) Close cover before striking. Shoot without thinking. Who do you work for? A web of intrigue. Everybody’s in bed with somebody else. All around my base is it. It’s a hatchet job. Prepare to be surprised and laugh a lot. Filled with great stars in unexpected roles. A DON’T MISS HIT ! ! ! “Robinson Crusoe” (1997) Pierce Brosnan is Robinson at his hairy best in this classic tale worth another look.
At a tailgating party for an LSU football game in Tiger Stadium, a bunch of tiger fans from all over the state were gathered and a discussion began as to which was the best bar in Louisiana.
"Well," said the alum from Shreveport, "I think Sullys Tavern is the best. The bartender is friendly and fun to be around. Plus he goes out of his way for the locals so much that when you buy 4 drinks he will buy the
5th drink for you."
"Well, that's nothing", said the alum from Uptown New Orleans, ""at my local drinking hole, Duke's Tavern on St. Charles Avenue, the bartender will buy you your 3rd drink after you buy the first 2."
"Mais, dat's nothing," Boudreaux exclaimed, "at Mulate's in Breaux Bridge, now dat's a place where dey treat you real special. Lemme told you sumpin! Soon's you step in the place, dey buy you a drink, whatever you like,
den another, all the drinks you want. Den after beaucoup drinks,
dey take you upstairs and see dat you get laid. All on de house. Ah guarantee!"
The Shreveport and Uptown alums immediately scorned the Cajun's claims, saying, "Oh, come on, Boudreaux!" and "That sounds phoney to me" etc, but Boudreaux swore every word he said was the God's truth.
"Well, Boudreaux," said the Uptown alum thoughtfully. "Tell me, did this actually happen to you?"
"Mais non, not me," Boudreaux replied, "but it did happen to Clothilde, mah sister-in-law."
== == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == ==
5. RECIPE of the MONTH for July, 2009 from Bobby Jeaux’s Kitchen: (click links to see photo of ingredients, preparation steps) = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Maman Nette's Bread Pudding
Background on Maman Nette's Bread Pudding: This is bread pudding the way my mother, Annette Babin Matherne, made it for us. It was one of the few official dessert items we had as kids when I was under 15. Use left over French bread. Here in New Orleans I've found that our French bread will keep for a year if simply left in its paper tube with the end wrapped. I usually keep some for oyster dressing for Thanksgiving this way. I gets nice and dry and ready to crush into bread crumbs. We never had whiskey sauce when I was a kid probably because it wasn't popular then or we couldn't afford to "waste" whiskey that way.
Whiskey Sauce Ingredients 1/2 cup water 1/2 cup sugar 2 TBSP Butter Whiskey, to taste
Meringue Ingredients 1/2 cup water 1/2 cup sugar 2 TBSP Butter Whiskey, to taste
Preparation
Tear apart or crumble the French bread. Add milk and cream to soak bread until soft. Should be juicy or add more milk or cream. Separate egg yolks, save egg whites for meringue. Mix well: brown sugar, egg yolks, cinnamon, 1/2 tsp vanilla, and grate 1/2 nutmeg into mixture. Then fold into soaked bread. Spread into baking pan. Slice 2 TBSP butter and place pats on the top of the mixture. Place bread pudding pan in water for baking.
Bread Pudding Cooking Instructions
Bake bread pudding in preheated oven 300 degf. for about 60 minutes. Until top is slightly browned.
Meringue Cooking Instructions
Whip egg whites till fluffy, then add 1 cup Confectioner's Sugar while whipping, 1/8 tsp cream of tartar, and 1 tsp vanilla. Whip until the meringue stays in high peaks when you remove the mixing blade. Spread over top of cooled down breading pudding. Then bake at 250 degf oven till top has brown peaks. Remove from oven fifteen minutes after heat turned off and coo
Serving Suggestion
Cut into two inch cubes to serve. Can be kept covered in the frigerator over night.
Other options
Make an easy Whiskey Sauce to pour over each piece before serving. NOTE: Alcohol is highly volatile and will evaporate away from the warm sauce quickly. I like to use Bushmill's Irish Whiskey, but any good whiskey will add its distinctive flavor. Melt the butter, stir in the sugar, add the water, and heat in microwave till all sugar dissolved. Add whiskey to taste. Pour over each serving of bread pudding.
For our Eighth Annual Cat & Mouse Dinner in the Rex Room of Antoine's Restaurant, I honored Del with this Sonnet that I wrote especially for her on this occasion. The Rex Room honors Rex, the King of Carnival and is filled with crowns of Rex and his Queen, sequined memorabilia, and photos of Rex of past years. To the gathered gentlemen and ladies, I introduced the sonnet thusly:
Tonight I have for you a little ditty,
A Sonnet to stick . . . in your Bonnet.
What it's called I should give you just as well
Its title is:
Queen Adele
Here in this room of Kings, no Nobler Queen
Has ever sat before a banquet fare
Nor better breathed the sequined Regal air,
Than she who sits by me tonight serene.
How came this Dear to grace my presence here
T’would require Homeric stanzas forthwith
Verses, to wit, of gargantuan length,
The Muse Erato whisp’ring in my ear.
How came she first to give my heart a tug?
One Full Moon night a call came from afar
A maiden sent me flying in my car
To meet my sweet Adele in tender hug.
The rest is wedded bliss and history
And how it came to this, sweet mystery.
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. NOTE: these Blurbs are condensations of the Full Reviews sans footnotes and many quoted passages.
For too long we have separated the mind and the body and then wondered about whether some
linkage exists between them. This kind of abstract logical reasoning is the hallmark of our current
scientific paradigm and curiously, it goes back to the Scholastics around the twelfth century who
argued about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Such reasoning is useful in dealing
with inanimate objects, but of questionable use when dealing with human beings. Why separate mind
and body in the first place, when we have no examples of living human beings without minds? Those
who are thought to be without minds, such as those in comas or brain damaged, we have no
mechanism whatsoever for probing whether their mind is working or not. Their mind may be fine, but
they are helpless to demonstrate that fact to others, because all their mechanisms of communication
are malfunctioning. If we assume the mind is gone if the brain doesn't work, then we are admitting
there is no distinction between brain and mind at all.
Doctors and experts in medical science are loath to admit that they know little about the mind,
and, by adopting the hypothesis that the mind (or consciousness) is an emerging property of the brain,
they are spared that painful admission. But if mind is only an emerging property of the brain, how can
changing the way people think about something as important as health cause an improvement in their
health? Yet, that is precisely what the abundance of evidence shows in Langer's book.
This book could also be read as providing many hints on how to think and act in the world to
keep you healthy. It contains many examples of studies and experiments to test out hypotheses of the
author and others about how the way we think impacts our health, and either they are all very lucky
at choosing hypotheses or there is some basic principle at work which affects everyone or, rather,
allows every one to affect one's own health. You want proof that the author is right? You're not
going to find it in this book. But, by following the approaches suggested in the many studies, you
might find proof in your own life as you enjoy a long and healthy life. I always think of the guy who
said, "I have discovered the secret of immortality, but it will take me forever to prove it." If you live
a very long time, rest assured that all the people you would like to prove this to will likely not be living
at the time you would consider yourself as having satisfactory proof.
The work from which this book got its title comes from a study suggested by work by Langer
and her colleagues back as early as 1979. It took these thirty years for the results of this work to
come to light in book form because of the radical nature of mind-body unity which it suggests, among
other reasons.
[page 5] In 1979, several years after that initial investigation with plants and
nursing home residents, it seemed natural to continue testing the question
of limits with an elderly population. My students and I devised a study-which
we would later come to call the "counterclockwise study" — to look at what
effects turning back the clock psychologically would have on people's
physiological state. We would re-create the world of 1959 and ask subjects
to live as though it were twenty years earlier. If we put the mind back twenty
years, would the body reflect this change?
In short, the answer came back a resounding, "Yes!" There was something about the way
people thought about their life when they were twenty years younger that made them actually feel
better and stay healthier. When we are young, there may be parental figures around us admonishing
us to "Act your age!", but as we get older, into our fifties and sixties, we rarely hear that from older
people anymore. We don't have to. That injunction lives inside of us and fires off without anyone
outside around to remind us, unless we mindfully challenge the presuppositions behind the injunction
each and every time we hear it or act as if we had heard it. Act your age can be fine if you interpret
it to mean, "Act as the healthiest possible person at whatever age you are." But, injunctions and their
presuppositions can be introjected at an early age, swallowed whole, and taken to mean, "Act like
all the people you know who are your age." Given the state of mindlessness in our society today, that
would be a ticket into ill health and discomfort over the long run. How long does it take you to
recover when hit by a presupposition? Presuppositions blind-side us. We don't see them coming.
We may miss that they ever hit us. We may notice their effects, like the "Act your age!" one, but we
may never consciously connect those effects with the presupposition until someone like Langer points
them out to us.
After the study, all members of the group showed improvements in independent action, joint
flexibility, finger length, manual dexterity, and score on intelligence tests. Every one of the group
looked noticeably younger at the end of the study according to judges unaware of the purpose of the
study. (Page 10) What are we to make of the results of this study? Perhaps we need to question all
the presuppositions about aging that we have swallowed whole from those around us all of our
lifetime.
[page 11] If a group of elderly adults could produce such dramatic changes
in their lives, so too can the rest of us. To begin, we must ask if any of the
limits we perceive as real do exist. For example, we largely presume that as
we age our vision gets worse, that chronic diseases can't be reversed, and
that there is something wrong with us when the external world no longer
"fits" as it did when we were young.
If the world no longer fits, then perhaps it is because we have grown rigid and inflexible due to
the hidden presuppositions which feed our expectations and shape our lives, up until now. Instead
of fixing our lives, we should flex and stretch our expectations, our mindsets — these are only maps
of the territory of aging, not the unique territory which you and I move about within. Someone told
me that the key to successful engineering is to get the customer to relax the specifications. In the case
of aging, you are both the customer and the engineer. The engineer holds the specifications of your
mindsets and tells you what you can do, given the mindset you have chosen. Change your mindset
and you can open up the territory of your life. You will be able to do much more than you ever
dreamed possible — all the while living inside the reality of the territory of your specific maturation
as you age.
With these prefatory comments, we arrive at what I think is this book's theme. What Langer
calls "taking back what is yours", I call removing your unthinking limitations. If you want a tool which
allow you to do this on a daily basis, try my limitation eraser. Simply adding the words "up until now"
to the end of any sentence or thought you have which might contain a limitation will open your mind
to new possibilities for health and even more.
A hypothesis can be a theory to account for something not understood, and therefore may not
be provable. But like Langer's studies, a good hypothesis can be tested and open up possibilities.
My basic hypothesis about life is that if there is a process any living human was ever able to do, we
can all do it, and are doing it all the time, often out of our awareness. A process can be used to
create a limitation (a mindset) or free us up for new possibilities like Langer's studies.
A baby boy was born without eyes, without functional legs, and with shortened arms that can
only be raised as high as his shoulders. What hope could that boy ever have to be the star trumpet
player in the University of Louisville Marching Band? The mindset of limitation to his son's activities
never occurred to the boy's parents and they had cosmetic eyes surgically implanted, taught him
music, and his dad pushes him across the field during half-time performances. Patrick is the star of
the band! And a great vocalist as well, accompanying himself on the piano. Can such a baby ever
be a star member of a marching band? Yes. Del and I witnessed in person this young man perform Amazing Grace in the Crystal Cathedral in 2008.
Once we have accepted that something was impossible, we may spend our lifetime convincing
others that it would be impossible for them and thereby instilling in them our own mindset. Mindsets
are like viruses and we live within a pandemic of such thought-viruses in our time, up until now.
Mindfulness is the enemy of mindsets — one can kill a mindset by the simple act of challenging
whether a given mindset need be true for you, as Patrick's parents did for their son.
Cynics, like a Greek chorus, are no doubt singing their laments as they read these words, and
warning the actors on the stage, "It can't be that easy or everyone would do it." And yet what
everyone knows or everyone does rarely proves to be a healthy guide for one's own life.
The naysayer is like the Dragon called "Paradigm" which determines what is possible and what
is achievable. Langer is fighting this Dragon, and like all paradigm-fighters throughout history, the
Dragon is fighting back. But she is not alone in this fight. Each one who reads her work and
understands it becomes a fighter in this battle, and each personal victory against the Dragon makes
it weaker and the victor stronger. The Dragon operates out of certainty and a true human being
operates out of possibility. Certainty makes the Dragon stronger and Possibility makes the human
being stronger. There is no doubt that possibility is stronger than certainty because, rightly
understood, certainty is merely a map, a mindset, and it can be a cruel mindset.
Langer details three mindsets which limit our possibilities if we accept them mindlessly. The
option: review them mindfully along with Langer.
Mindset 1) We are either ill or healthy. What a lovely certainty the either-or choice gives us, but it is better to consider the more
complex uncertainty: that we are either tending towards illness or healthiness and our attitude can tilt
us towards healthiness.
Mindset 2) The medical world knows best.
Doctors know a lot about a lot of things, but they know very little about you, no matter how
many tests they run. The tests give them a static image of a dynamic human being which you know
from the inside-out, intimately, with all of its dynamic changes that no test can reveal.
Mindset 3) Health is a medical phenomenon.
Once that mindset gets inside, one has given over control of oneself to some medical
practitioner. I recall my internist from 1964, Dr. Peter Everett, whose office was on the 18th floor of
the Pere Marquette Building in downtown New Orleans. I was a bit of a hypochondriac at the time.
I was 24 and he was about 75 or older. Two things he said stick out in my mind. I had a bout of
amoebic dysentery which necessitated my taking a stool sample to his office for analysis repeatedly.
I would also describe in detail what my stools looked like, and one day he said something very wise
to me, "Bob, there is no Silver Standard for Stool Specimens in Paris." The other thing was that he
always made a comment about my low blood pressure as he unstrapped the gadget from my arm.
I finally asked him why he kept saying that, was it good or bad. He replied, "It just means you'll
probably be cursed with a long life." Dr. Everett was a very wise man and taught me a lot about
taking control of my own health during those appointments I had with him. I also remember a joke
that went around about that time about a hypochondriac who had chiseled on her headstone, "See!
I told you I was sick!" Dr. Everett, the joke, and several other writers, Norman Vincent Peale, Don
Curtis, and Robert H. Schuller, among others, helped me to transcend this excessive concern about
my health, which was clearly based on my accepting the three mindsets that Langer details for us on
page 25 and I have summarized here.
There are always skeptics. These are people who can be skeptical about anything except their
own skepticism. When Langer worked with a paralyzed woman in an ingenious way, one baby step
at a time and got her to have considerable movement in her arms again, she probably heard from the
skeptics.
[page 37, 38] Skeptics will cry out, "Her paralysis was probably
misdiagnosed, and so there isn't any proof that there's always a step one can
take." To the first, my response is that yes, there may have been an error
in her diagnosis, which meant that trying to get her to move her arm was
exactly the right thing to do. Moreover, how many of us are similarly
misdiagnosed? To the second I would reply that even if our efforts had not
worked, it would not mean that for anyone else the attempt would not work.
Negative results only mean we have no evidence for a hypothesis, which is
a very different thing from saying we have evidence against it. By assuming
misdiagnosis whenever the "impossible" happens, we rob ourselves of the
chance to question the original presumption.
In other words, by assuming misdiagnosis, we and medical people can achieve a feeling of
certainty, but we thereby feed the Dragon Paradigm with a repast of certainty and it grows stronger.
Why should we call such well-meaning folks in the medical establishment Dragons? They don't
kill people, do they? No doctor was ever executed for discovering a cure for an uncontrollable illness
or epidemic, right? None that I know of, but consider the case of Dr. Ignatz Semmelweis who
stopped the needless deaths of over 100,000 women a year in Austria in his time.
The doctors who
ridiculed his findings, can we not lay some of those thousands of deaths at their feet? How about the
doctor who had Semmelweis committed to a mental hospital to keep him shut up literally? What was
it that Semmelweis wanted doctors to do? Simply wash their hands after taking them out of a cadaver
and before putting them into a live woman's vagina while delivering a baby. He had proven that doing
so would stop the epidemic of puerperal fever or childbed fever which had slain so many young, new
mothers in Vienna. It only happened in the city hospitals, not in the country where doctors did not
teach interns how to give birth using cadavers.
Around 1978, a series of five-minute speeches appeared in the Co-Evolution Quarterly and one
speech by a Dr. Ellerbrock caught my attention. The thrust of his talk was that we maintain our illness
states by turning a process into a content, i. e., we reify a living process. When we do so, we turn
something we do into something we have. Then naturally we search around for someone to help
us get rid of it. He tried an experiment to test his hypothesis. When teenagers came to him saying,
"I have acne." He would say to them, "I hear you say that you are acne-ing. Is that so?" Note how
he changed the thingacne into the processacne-ing. After his patients learned to talk that way, their
acne-ing began to alleviate or disappear entirely. None of them had to disclose why they were acne-ing, but once they acknowledged that they were acne-ing aloud, they clearly began to search
internally for why they might be acne-ing and soon they stopped acne-ing.
Langer discusses a similar issue in the process of experiencing back pain versus the content
of having arthritis. The applications possible for Ellerbrock's idea are enormous — it is definitely
a tool in the kit of mindfulness. The lesson is this: turn a process into a content and it will turn into
something you have instead of something you do. Something you have is hard to get rid of;
something you do only requires that you do something else. For example, something as simple as
changing your mattress could eliminate the bursitis you thought you had in your shoulder.
Memory loss as we grow older is one of those mindsets that most everyone seems to accept
and even blow up out of proportion. My father is 92 and he still plays cards with us two or three
times a week. The game we play requires him to hold from 3 to 13 cards in his hand at various times
during the game and to sort them into groups of three, four, five by like numbers or by runs in the
same suit. He manages to pull this off flawlessly, only occasionally asking how many cards we are
dealing with for the current hand, or having to be reminded it's his turn to play. Often as not he wins
the game.
Here is a poem about memory and growing old from my 1995 book of poetry, "Rainbows & Shadows". In
it I deal with the increasing number of memories as the number of balls a juggler can keep in the air
at one time. Jugglers who try to push the envelope by adding more balls or plates or bowling pins will
be seen to drop one occasionally. Memory is like that the longer one lives. If my wife leaves the
house and tells me all the places she's going to: hairdresser, massage, club meeting, doctor's trip for
her mom, etc., I only bother to remember the time she says she will come back, not every detail of
her daily appointments. Memory, rightly understood, is a juggling act and the more balls you have
in the air at one time, the more difficult it is to keep them all in the air.
Juggling Act
When you grow old
as the story's told,
"two things happen:
one, you lose your memory
and two, ...
and two...
how forgetful of me!" >
I wonder about this story's verity —
It doesn't seem that way at all to me.
At seventeen I could recall
just about any memory at all
And handle each one with dexterity
like a juggler does each ball. But now at one and fifty
my memory seems not so nifty — When a ball falls from its apogee
it occasionally gets away from me.
But I worry less why one falls
than marvel at the amount of balls — For seven plus or minus two
represents the best that we can do — Whether seventeen or fifty two.
Let us trust that when they fall
It was ones we didn't need at all.
Why is this important anyway, this business of how we remember and how much? For one thing,
it is a measure of our mindfulness, and Langer shows in many of her experimental groups an
increased longevity attends increased mindfulness.
Another thing is that the world itself grows more forgettable as we age. Things we used to care
about when we were younger become less interesting as we get involved with activities which we
didn't care about when we younger. For me, my studies, my research in doyletics, my reading, the
college lectures I attend, my photography, my writing, and my web publishing — all these are things
I did but little up until fifteen years ago when I began working at this full-time. Any part of the world
which does not contact or impact one of my interests today no longer interests me and has become
forgettable. Thus the world has become more forgettable to me than it was a mere twenty years ago.
One last note from Chapter 3 in which Langer reminds us about the activity of
mindfulness, an important point for those of us who already feel rundown from all the
activities our month fills up with.
[page 52] Noticing differences is the essence of mindfulness. Don't imagine,
however, that all this noticing need be exhausting and leave little time for
anything else. Mindfulness is actually energizing, not enervating.
If we are usually energized, the world will seem an energizing place for us. As the quote by
Anaïs Nin says, "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." Projection is the root of
all perception. The more I focus on my range of interests in the world, the more the majority of the
world is forgettable to me since so few people in the world have my set of interests.
In some countries in Europe, people over the age of 62 are not allowed to rent automobiles.
Given that the pupils do not open as wide after 62 as they did before, an effect which at 68 I am
aware of, this is a prudent, if rather an extreme measure. A more prudent approach would be to
caution over-62 renters about driving at night. A better approach would be to hire over-62 people
as consultants to highway departments of the various states to help them improve the lighting and
striping of highway and street edges so that older drivers might drive safely and more comfortably
at night on highways currently designed by 27- to 45-year-old engineers. To those youthful engineers,
for what good it might do, let me say that the edges of roads and streets are the great priority because
as the paint fades, it becomes very difficult to tell the road from the shoulder, and one lane from
another. Of course, you have no idea about this until you are already retired from the business and
have to navigate roads and streets in the dark that looked just fine to you when you designed them
earlier.
I also like Langer's section heading from page 55: None of us is "Us" To those of you who
might not have studied General Semantics or read Korzybski's books, you may benefit from a bit
of translation. "None of us" means "No one of us" naturally, but what does the second "Us" mean?
It refers to the collective set of all of us, and that "Us" is a map, a mindset, a generalization of all of
us distilled into an abstract logical form which may not resemble some one of us. Kenneth Keyes
wrote a fine book inspired by Korzybski's work called How to Develop Your Thinking Ability which
will be useful to those who have trouble understanding this distinction in its practical applications.
Person1 is not Person2 (the Who Index) and Thing1 is not Thing2 (the What Index) are the
important principles to assimilate in connection with Langer's None of us is "Us" phrase.
When I read Dr. Axel Munthe's book, The Story of San Michele, I was tickled by his story
about appendicitis turning into colitis right before his eyes as he was working in Paris as a young
doctor treating rich matrons. If one came to see him and he told her there was nothing wrong with
her, she would leave upset and angry. But if he said she had a mild case of appendicitis, he could
prescribe some medicine for her to take, and she would leave very happy. As a beginning doctor,
he almost went broke before he learned from his older colleagues this way of treating his women
patients. But later, an unexpected thing happened: in America, doctors had found a cure for
appendicitis! They simply removed the appendix. This surgery was not something his matrons wanted
to be done to them, so he decided to use the label colitis to describe the sensations they felt. New
name, new medicine, and everyone, both doctors and patients were happy. Today, from talking to
some doctor friends of mine, I am led to believe that the latest phrase is "irritable bowel syndrome"
which means the same thing as nineteenth century appendicitis and twentieth century colitis.
According to Langer (See Page 130) the latest term seems to be "gastroenteritis." And the treatment
is very much the same as in previous centuries.
This next advice or prediction by Langer may sound a little far-fetched to those with the standard
mindsets about health and medicine, but I can say from my own experience, that this works for me.
Rightly understood this is the goal of mindfulness. And notice it does not involve getting advice from
a medical practitioner about what to do about colitis.
[page 80] Eventually — and only eventually — we may get to a place where
we don't need the continua; we may one day be in a place where we
spontaneously notice subtle signals our bodies give and make the necessary
corrections as part of our ongoing lived experience.
What if the plants, the fruit and vegetables that we sow, harvest, cook, and eat with our own
hands absorbed the sweat from our heads, hands, and feet, etc., and transposed their genetic
structure to produce specific proteins our body needs to remain healthy? Can plants actually do that?
No one thought it possible for over 30 years after Barbara McClintock's research showed that
transposable genes were happening in her maize plants. No one much believed her right up until she
received the Nobel Prize for her genetic work in transposing genes in maize. But it is not McClintock
who talks about the possibility that plants can transpose their genes to create specific beneficial
proteins for one person and other beneficial proteins for another person, no, it is a young woman in
Russia named Anastasia. (Anna-stass-see'-ya) One need only read a couple of the books of the
Ringing Cedars Series to understand how important her revelations are to the world, to you and to
me. Her work led me to begin planting a vegetable garden to go along with the citrus, figs, and other
fruit trees on our property.
By absorbing the toxins from one's body, the plants are able to diagnose what the body is
lacking and manufacture the proteins it needs. Thus the plant becomes the doctor, the pharmacist,
and the prescribed drug all in one. All one has to do is consume the vegetables and fruit planted,
tilled, and harvested by one's own hands. This is truly the most individual approach to health
available, very much in line with the goal Langer expresses throughout this book. There is no better
way for "you to open your mind and take back what is rightfully, sensibly, and importantly yours"
than for you to plant, grow, harvest and eat plants grown with your own hands. Once you do, you
will have also taken control of maintaining your own health, your body will remain healthy, and your
use of the medical profession can be relegated to its proper role of helping with "extreme health
symptoms".
I love the quote by George Bernard Shaw which heads Chapter 5: "The only man I know who
behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on
with their old measurements and expect me to fit them." Old measurements are mindsets or maps.
We all make them as a shorthand way of finding our way through the world. But, as my supervisor
in the Research Dept. of the Foxboro Co. told me once, "In the Norwegian Boy Scout Handbook
in the section on map reading, it said, 'When the terrain differs from the map, believe the terrain.'"
In a land punctuated by steep cliffs falling away into icy fiords, this is exceptionally good advice. But
it equally applies to tailors, to cross-country drivers, to jet pilots, and to you and me whatever our
occupation or endeavors in life may be.
Moms — perhaps the largest percentage of daily workers in the country — need to know that
98.6 degrees was calculated and set as the normal temperature of the human only once in history.
In 1856 in Nancy, France, 1000 people had their temperatures taken and the average came out as
98.6 degrees. That became the Silver Standard for human temperature ever since. That map, that
mindset, that measurement is over 150 years old. Yet today, moms, who must deal with a huge
variety of temperatures in their children, even when they are healthy, treat it as a magic marker of
healthy versus sick.
Don Robinson, as part of his memory course, I took in Los Angeles around 1970, had us take
our body temperature every 15 minutes over the course of a week and plot it as a scatter plot of time
of day versus temperature. My temperature, as did all the other two dozen adult members of our
class, wandered from 95 degrees to 103 degrees over the course of a week. That's eight degrees
without any of us being sick! Moms should know this, but what doctor is going to tell them that
information? Not any, likely. Why, because most moms today will call their pediatrician for an
appointment if their child has a temperature of 99.1 degrees. A temperature swing without any other
symptoms may be just a normal variation of bodily temperature. Sometimes taking too many
measurements is not useful, but even counter-productive. Using a measurement that is 150 years-old
as a magic level just because it's given with a decimal place, 98.6, is not very useful, wouldn't you
agree?
One child's 99.6 may be a fever and another's 99.6 may be normal. Same words, different
outcomes.
Individual experience is multi-ordinal, full of "buzzing confusion" as William James called it. But
when we describe it, we tend to create flattened views of our experience, focusing on one aspect of
our experience and thereby creating a naive realism which removes all multi-ordinal aspects of the
experience. In most situations in life, people can deal with such impersonal and absolute language.
I note this phenomenon a lot when I explain a complicated multi-ordinal situation which is unique, and
the other person immediately tosses off a response like, "That happens to me a lot." or perhaps, "I
hate it when that happens." Somehow they have abstracted, squeezed all the life out of, what I told them. They automatically equated what I said to their own experience at a trivial level and then communicated to me that they understood very little of what I had shared with them. To me, that signals a person living inside a
world of naive realism. Someone who lives in such a world would naturally expect their doctor to talk
to them in absolute terms rather than conditional terms, and would convert anything conditional into
an absolute anyway.
People who live in naive realism are less likely to recognize the conditional aspects of the world
in which they live. Naive realism acts like a one-way sign which they obey, no matter if it is leading
them in a direction they do not want. What Langer found in her research and experimental studies
is that people get along better if they use or are presented with conditional language.
One of the powerful metaphors used by both doctors and patients is that of "fighting a disease".
What few people realize is that the use of that metaphor empowers the disease. It establishes a win-lose scenario in a situation where a win-win scenario would be preferable. If we treat the disease as
an enemy, we may fight and lose, but if we choose to treat the disease as a teacher, we may learn
from it by changing our behavior in such a way that the disease ceases to operate and disappears.
People who understand that God gives us problems to learn from them have no trouble learning from
problems which appear in the form of diseases.
About thirty years ago, I had a young man, Tom, who came to several of our weekend groups.
He talked almost constantly, scarcely letting anyone else get a word in. His ability to talk incessantly
served him well as a telephone recruiter, but not as well socially. He was a lonely man when he was
off the phone. One week he was sick and unable to work. When he returned to our group, I asked
him the two questions I recommend to people who have been sick, as a way for them to learn about
the reason for their illness.
One: what happened during that week that would not have happened if not for the illness?
Two: what did not happen that would otherwise have happened?
The first question explores the aspect of permission; the second the aspect of protection. What
did the illness give Tom permission to do? Only I couldn't ask him in that direct way, so I asked him
what happened that would not have happened. "Nothing" came the reply. So I probed further, "What
did you do?" "Stayed in bed." "Did anyone come visit you?" "Yes." "Did you talk?" "Yes, but I
mostly listened." To the second question, nothing came up. Clearly the illness gave him permission
to sit quietly and visit with a good friend and allow the friend to do most of the talking. This was an
experience he could achieve only by being sick, up until then. Mindful of this process, he could
schedule such times of quiet conversation from then now. Sometimes illnesses occur for such a
seemingly unimportant reason, but, rightly understood, for the soul and well-being of the person, it
is a very important reason.
Let me tell you a story about myself. In 1975 I got a case of red measles at age 35. Rare, but
not unheard of, except for one thing: I had red measles as a child and doctors hold absolutely that
one can not repeat red measles. My mom had five boys and a girl and that made her an expert on
red measles before the time of vaccinations for the disease, so I believed her report that I indeed had
red measles. Years later, when I applied the two questions to my red measles bout, I came up with
an amazing answer: "Being home that week gave me important information on my wife's behavior
that I would not have gotten had I been at work." We divorced about a year later because of that
behavior. I learned from a lot from that second case of measles conjured up by my body at just the
right time.
Langer discusses the placebo effect in this next passage:
[page 109] The placebo effect extends much further than many of us realize.
It comes in many forms: subjects exposed to fake poison ivy have developed
real rashes, and people imbibing placebo caffeine have been shown to
experience increased motor performance and heart rate (and other effects
congruent with the subjects' beliefs about the effects of caffeine and not with
its pharmacological effects).
How can folks who are exposed to fake poison ivy develop rashes? By my basic hypothesis,
if one person can do this general placebo process we all can and are doing it all the time, out of our
awareness. And not just with poison ivy, but all of the rashes, allergies, and many other illnesses.
What is a disease? Some toxin or bug gets into us and our body develops healing states to overcome
the toxin or bug. What we label the disease is actually the healing states which arise in the presence
of the toxin or bug. My red measles case at age 35 was a recapitulation of the healing states which
occurred to me at age 4. My body stored those healing states, and when the need arose, was able
to generate the healing states of fever, sensitivity to light, and red spots on my chest. My family
doctor couldn't figure out what I had after several visits and he sent me to an internal medicine
specialist in another city. I was amazed to look down the hall after the doctor had left the examination
room to find him consulting with a colleague and both of them looking into a large medical reference
book! Naturally I was worried, but when the doctor returned, he said, "Don't worry. It's just not
often we get a case of adult red measles."
If my body could produce the healing states of red measles, it seems clear to me that the healing
states of poison ivy can also be recapitulated. There is no need for the ivy's poison to enter
the body for the healing states to be re-created upon the stimulus of poison ivy and so fake poison
ivy may work as readily as real poison ivy. I have never had poison ivy, so far as I know, and I doubt
whether the real stuff or the fake stuff would have any effect upon me.
There is another type of rash which adults get called shingles, which I have never had either.
Shingles are the healing states of chicken pox which are stored as doylic memories if one had chicken
pox before the age of five. If you had chicken pox at age six, seven (as I did), or older, no shingles.
But if you had chicken pox before the age of five, you may have recurrent bouts of shingles, and you
have the possibility of eliminating them by a simple memory trace to convert the doylic memory of
the healing states into a cognitive memory.
What is curious to me is that mindsets, rightly understood, are cognitive memories of some
information stored and capable of being triggered by various events in our external environment.
Mindsets therefore, like any cognitive memory, are capable of triggering doylic memories which may
include various healing states stored before five years old. As such our mindsets are capable of
triggering various diseases whether the operant toxin or bug is present in our body or not. This will
seem ridiculous to those with a naive realism view of the world, but for those can accept a multi-ordinal view of the world, they may wish to hold this as a possibility.
I mention these things and also note that Langer seems to be open to a multi-ordinal view of the world. Note
the thrust of the questions she asks in this next paragraph:
The answer, I believe, is Yes, but try proving it and you have to take on Dragon Science in a
big way. But you don't need proof to operate on your hypothesis that it works. Some thirty years
ago when I returned to New Orleans after living for almost nine years in various spots from California
to New England, I decided to begin drinking Mississippi river water, which was easy to do as it
comes from our tap. It is water that drains the middle of this great land, and I consider it a blessing
to ingest trace elements from this river's watershed. I consider it the healthiest water I could drink,
much better for me than water which sat for hundreds and thousands of years underground like that
sold in bottles. We keep plastic bottles for convenience, but refill them with our tap water. In an
astounding taste-test, New Orleans water won a taste-off against other waters from around the
country, including water from high mountain streams in the far northwest. What I have learned is that
what tastes good for me is good for my body and my health. Someone said facetiously in a workshop
I attended that Mississippi River water in the purest in the country, having been purified by the
kidney's of five Midwesterners before it reaches New Orleans. Those whose stomachs turn at that
thought have mindsets which may be ruling their lives and should seek more of the mindfulness which
Langer urges upon her readers.
[page 120] Placebos are wonderful things, it seems. We accept a pill along
with the lie that is effective, and so we adopt a beneficial mindset and heal
ourselves (it can't be the pill, after all, because it is a placebo). And then
attribute the success to the pill. Wouldn't it be more advantageous to
recognize that when placebos work we are the ones controlling our health, to
learn how to exercise it directly, and to see ourselves as efficacious when we
do?
How can one go about this consciously? Placebos are no use because they only work if we are unconscious of the pill being a placebo. So, what can one do starting from where one is today? One could say this sentence: "I am unable to adopt a beneficial mindset and heal myself, up until now." This is a direct application of the limitation eraser — one of the most powerful tools for self-change I have discovered. It can be applied over and over, every sentence of the day, if necessary, to break up every form of limiting mindset, can it not? You think not? Then say, "I doubt that the limitation eraser can break up my mindsets, up until now." You think it might work for others, but not for you? Then say: "I doubt it will work for me, up until now." And so on, making sure to take a deep breath at the comma break before "up until now". Keep working on every statement of limitation you hear yourself thinking or saying, and eventually your negative mindsets will give up and simply fade away. Then the real challenge will begin as you learn to replace the negative mindsets with positive ones from now on. This is your life — the mindsets you acquired from others may no longer suit you. Thank those mindsets for sticking with you for so long and bid them Adieu, Adios, and let them "Go with God" which, rightly understood, is where they originated from to give you problems from which you would learn the right way to a healthy life eventually.
The book cover leads off with a volley of questions to which this book promises to provide
answers:
What is the one quality possessed by all geniuses?
How can we acquire creative courage?
What takes place in the creative instant?
How can creative power make your life richer and more satisfying?
As we proceed through this review we'll see how close May comes to fulfilling its promise to
answer these questions. These are all subjects which I have thought long and hard about, and for
all I know these are unanswered questions which I first began to hold after reading May's book.
My first reading of this book began when I read it on November 7, 1978 in about two hours
according to a note on the inside cover page. In preparation for this review I gave the book
another reading in May of 2009 to refresh my recollection of its contents. This second reading
gives the review a place in A Reader's Journal, Volume 2.
Rollo May himself was aware of the unanswered question which he held about creativity,
admitting his reason for hesitating to publish his thoughts on the subject was due to what he called
their "unfinished" nature. Holding something in its "unfinished" state is a way of holding on to an
unanswered question.
[page viii, Preface] These chapters are a partial record of my ponderings.
They had their birth as lectures given at colleges and universities. I had
always hesitated to publish them because they seemed incomplete — the
mystery of creation still remained. I then realized that this "unfinished"
quality would always remain, and that it is a part of the creative process
itself. This realization coincided with the fact that many people who had
heard the lectures urged that they be published.
On May 5, 2009, this passage inspired me to write this poem on creativity that I
entitle, "Art":
Art is always unfinished —
it is but a map,
Our map of terra incognito —
the round Earth
on the flat paper
Which hides more
than it reveals.
If you look at art, true art, and focus only on what it reveals, the mystery for you will be: Why
does it exist at all? Art, true art, does not meet our expectations, but rather destroys them
because, rightly understood, art is the process of destruction, the destruction of the sameness
which exists when art comes into the world. This aspect of art is not understood by the majority
of people and leads to much confusion, especially when some truly new artist arrives on the scene
and the universal cry seems to be, "It is ugly!" Ugly, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder of the
art work, but projection is the root of perception — as I see it — and what is being projected
upon the new artist's work is that it does not conform to the currently accepted standards of art.
What new art does is unleash exciting possibilities which other artists will grab onto or build off of
— what seems ugly at first glance gradually becomes viewed as the seed from which an entirely
new tree of art has sprung.
Rollo May, writing in 1975, begins by calling his time a time of transition. Rightly understood,
we are always in a time of transition, but some times, such as in 1975, the transition is more
obvious than others.
May goes on to describe various kinds of courage: physical courage which he claims needs
the added dimension of sensitivity, moral courage to perceive evil, social courage to achieve
intimacy, courage to recognize we might possibly be wrong, creative courage to live out our
imaginations. Creative courage is what is required to create new art in whatever medium one
works, whether it is painting, film, photography, poetry, stage, sculpture, music, etc. He gives us,
among others, the example of James Joyce:
[page 20] Consider James Joyce, who is often cited as the greatest of
modern novelists. At the very end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, he has his young hero write in his diary:
Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the
reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul
the uncreated conscience of my race.
I read this book when I was a young man, identifying with Stephen Daedalus at the time,
somehow grabbing onto what he wrote in his diary as a scenario for my life, but I was not
consciously aware of having done so until reading this again in 2009. Did Stephen give me the
thrust for the rest of my life back then at 16? Joyce's words are so powerful in that passage that it
makes me wonder.
When May comments that "genius and psychosis are so close to each other", it gives me
pause to consider what deep meaning might be hidden in that passage. Psychosis is defined as
some "non-organic based distortion of the sufferer's concept of reality" and I have studied many
innovators who were deemed crazy and some were even hospitalized. Take, for example, the
case of Ignatz Semmelweis, who was thrown in a mental institution because his clear concept of
the benefits of prophylaxis reality did not match the distorted version of those who forced the
government of Austria to hospitalize him. Who was crazier? Semmelweis, who saved hundreds of
thousands of women from childbed fever in Vienna or the hospital administrator who hospitalized
him? Giordano Bruno, whose clear vision of the arc of heaven did not match the distorted version
of the authorities in Rome who ordered him burnt at the stake? Joan of Arc, who saved France as
a nation or the church fathers who killed her likewise. No wonder it takes courage to create: one
does it at the fear of one's life or livelihood being taken away by those whose distorted vision of
reality is thereby threatened by your creativity!
The primordial innovator was Prometheus, and just look at what Zeus did to him for giving
fire to human beings.
[page 24] He decreed that Prometheus be punished by being bound to
Mount Caucasus, where a vulture was to come each morning and eat away
his liver which would grow again at night.
Here is a beautiful metaphor for what happens to a human being each night: tired from a
day's work and activities we slip into sleep and disengage from conscious activity in the physical
world so that our body may be spiritually re-enlivened. No one ever goes to the doctor while
asleep, only while awake. Doctors do not study live bodies while they are sleeping and
recuperating, only awake patients who are in the process of running down their bodies. The only
unconscious bodies most doctors ever encounter are either cadavers in the dissecting room or
etherized bodies on the surgical table. Neither example is that of a vibrant human body recovering
life like Prometheus did at night.
True art as the process of destruction of sameness (conformism) is the theme of an essay I
wrote to describe the fight an artist must go through against the gods of culture which resist any
innovation. I may have unconsciously gotten the initial idea for this essay ten years earlier from this
next passage by May, who explains the root of the various myths of creativity being born by
rebellion against the gods:
[page 26] The most obvious explanation is that the creative artist and poet
and saint must fight the actual (as contrasted to the ideal) gods of our
society — the god of conformism as well as the gods of apathy, material
success, and exploitative power. These are the "idols" of our society that
are worshiped by multitudes of people. We human beings know that we
must die. We have, strangely enough, a word for death.
The popular TV show, American Idol, apparently sees its job as creating idols, but as
May's analysis shows these idols are symbols of conformity to the norms of society not that of
true artists.
Rollo May makes the assertion that "Creativity is a yearning for immortality." I rather see
creativity as a tapping into our immortal essence. As human beings we have a spiritual essence
which is immortal which resides in each of us in what is best called our "I". It survives and
precedes this life and personality we find ourselves in currently, I as I type these words, and you
in your "I" as you read them. Creative inspiration comes to true artists, not the shopping mall
artists or the handicraft weekend artists, but the artists who transcend the conformity of today's
art and brings something completely unexpected into the world. Such a person has tapped into
their immortal essence and received inspiration directly from the spiritual world.
We have a word for death and we have a word for surviving death as a spirit, namely
immortality. But we have no equivalent words for any life of spirit preceding birth, nor do we have
in current usage, the word unbornness to refer to the condition of immortality which precedes our
birth on Earth as a physically embodied being. It seems time for us to recognize the reality of
unbornness as much as that of immortality, and to learn the significance of such condition for our
life on Earth.
May asks a great question on page 36, "If by psychoanalysis we cured the artists of their
neuroses would they no longer create?" Freud worked with psychoanalysis to remove neuroses
from people, artists included, but, on the other end of the spectrum, Jung worked with his depth
analysis to cure people in order to release and encourage their creative urges.
Plato understood the true artist, and wrote of it in his Symposium: "they are those who give
birth to some new reality." Rollo May says about Plato's writings on true artists:
[page 38] These poets and other creative person are the ones who express
being itself, he held. As I would put it, these are the ones who enlarge
human consciousness. Their creativity is the most basic manifestation of a
man or woman fulfilling his or her own being in the world.
True artists are the people who engage in the evolution of consciousness because they leave
behind an enlarged human consciousness. They destroy the sameness they find in art and release
exciting possibilities. It is from these exciting possibilities that what is normally called art is created,
the weekend hobbyists type of art. Rightly understood, they are replicating examples of the new
forms of art unleashed by the true artists. Rarely is this aspect of creativity as replication taken into
account, but Rollo May makes the distinction.
[page 38] Now we must make the above distinction clear if our inquiries
into creativity are to get below the surface. We are thus not dealing with
hobbies, do-it-yourself movements, Sunday painting, or other forms of
filling up leisure time. Nowhere has the meaning creativity been more
disastrously lost than in the idea that it is something you do only on
weekends!
On page 45, May says, "William James once said that we learn to swim in the winter and to
skate in the summer." There is a delay between one first encountering an idea and one coming to
grips with it wholeheartedly. We put on our ice skates in winter to try them out, but it is only over
the summer that our skill on the ice skates get honed and smoothed out in our unconscious
processes. On page 63 May talks about breakthroughs as destroying something. If I had read this
some twenty years before my insight came to me in a flood that "art is the process of destruction"
— I cannot say, but it is certainly plausible that I put on those skates during that winter and after a
twenty-year summer, I learned to skate with them.
[page 63] The guilt that is present when this breakthrough occurs has its
source in the fact that the insight must destroy something. My insight
destroyed my other hypothesis and would destroy what a number of my
professors believed, a fact that caused me some concern. Whenever there
is a breakthrough of a significant idea in science or a significant new form
in art, the new idea will destroy what a lot of people believe is essential to
the survival of their intellectual and spiritual world. This is the source of
guilt in genuine creative work. As Picasso remarked, "Every act of
creation is first of all an act of destruction."
When that thought arose in me two decades later, it shook me up enormously. I couldn't
believe what I was seeing so clearly. What I thought was an artist being creative was actually an
act of destruction! The destruction would release exciting possibilities which others would hang
their hat on and call their work, creation. But none of the subsequent creation would be possible
without the initial act of destruction which unleashed the possibilities for creating in a new way.
Rollo May experienced a similar shaking up from his breakthrough in understanding the flaw
in his hypothesis about the presence of anxiety in unmarried mothers. (Pages 58 to 60)
[page 63] The breakthrough carries with it also an element of anxiety For
it not only broke down my previous hypothesis, it shook my self-world
relationship. At such a time I find myself having to seek a new foundation,
the existence of which I as yet don't know. . . . it is not possible that there
be a genuinely new idea without this shake up occuring to some degree.
In addition, my shake up was accompanied by everything around becoming suddenly vivid as
May points out on page 64. I can remember where I was sitting, what I was looking at, the
diagrams I drew to help me understand the polar opposite relationship of destruction and creation,
how destruction releases the possibilities which creation then picks up and produces what is
usually called art. Of this special clarity I had, May says, "I am convinced that this is the usual
accompaniment of the breakthrough of unconscious experience into consciousness."
Before that breakthrough can occur, however, one must have somehow asked themselves a
question, one for which they had no answer, but which was presented to their unconscious mind
for an answer, sometimes days, weeks, months, or years before. It is the process of holding an
"unanswered question" as I name it, but in reality it is the holding of an incomplete Gestalt, as May
describes it, which is the seedbed of the new form or breakthrough.
[page 66] The idea, the new form which suddenly becomes present, came
in order to complete an incomplete Gestalt with which I was struggling in
conscious awareness. One can quite accurately speak of this incomplete
Gestalt, this unfinished pattern, this unformed form, as constituting the
"call" that was answered by the unconscious.
My process of "holding an unanswered question is equivalent to placing a call to one's
unconscious for an answer to some incomplete Gestalt. I was not aware of my holding that
unanswered question about the true nature of art, or of the possibility of its being placed in me by
the reading of this book back some twenty years earlier, but the answer came through, breaking
through the sameness of what I held to be the world of art, revealing to me that "art is the process
of destruction" and that creativity as we know it is but the cleaning up process of implementing the
exciting possibilities unleashed by that destruction. One needs less courage to create some
weekend art than to come to grips with true art which appears as a break through the conformity
of all current forms of art when it first appears. My breakthrough was understanding for myself the
process of breakthrough, and my hope is that my breakthrough will show others how to come to
breakthroughs for themselves.
My nephew Keith married a woman named Tatiana who came from the Ukraine. I got to meet her only
once, on Christmas Eve at my father's house. She seemed shy, probably daunted by the crowd of relatives of
Keith's that she was confronted with for the first time. I sensed a strong will and intellect beneath her shyness
and her beauty. When I listened to lectures on Russian literature classics, I learned about another Tatiana who
stars in this novel who is first rejected then wooed by they title character, Eugene Onegin. His first name is some
times spelled Evgeny and his last name is pronounced AHN YEA' GHIN. From the resemblance of Keith's wife
to the Tatiana in the story, it seemed to me that she was named after this famous beauty of Russian literature
who inspired many writers after Pushkin.
[page xvii, John Bayley's Preface] It is quite true that Tatyana does seem more real
than Onegin; the Russian novelists who followed Pushkin took her accordingly as a
prototype, and perhaps almost unconsciously. We can see Tatyana in Dostoevsky's
spirited Dunya, the sister of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, who is in a sense
a figure evolved from Onegin. And her influence on Tolstoy's Natasha of War and
Peace is just as evident. All through the nineteenth-century Russian novel there runs
the theme of the strong and spontaneous woman, and the uncertain, unsatisfied male
who is frustrated in the pursuit of personal and social ideals, pinned down by
abstractions, 'like a man under a stone' — rejected by life. And the growing self-awareness of Russian intellectuals identified this pattern with the primary analysis that
they felt Pushkin had made in Eugene Onegin.
There is a problem with reading this version of the great novel by Pushkin, and it has to do with its being
written entirely in verse form, in fact, as a series of stanzas. Anyone who has tried to translate even a short poem
from a foreign language into English and preserve either the rhyming scheme or the form knows how difficult that
is. But to attempt an entire novel, as Charles Johnston does herein, is a Himalayan feat, and he mounts to the
summit in grand fashion.
Johnston succeeds so well that soon a reader can forget this is translated verse and get involved in the
lyrical beauty of the novel. He takes a charge and blows away the "sound-proof wall separating Pushkin's
poetic novel from the English-reading world." (Page liii by Johnston)
One of the added joys to my reading of this novel in verse comes from my long-time favorite poet, Samuel
Hoffenstein, whose witty and insightful verses pleased me as early as my eighteenth year when I first discovered
him in a college bookstore. Pushkin writes like Hoffenstein or perhaps I should acknowledge a possible
inspiration and say Hoffenstein writes like Pushkin. Here's a pointed example of the synchronism of their styles:
[page 21 CHAPTER I XXIX ]
In days of carefree aspirations,
the ballroom drove me off my head:
the safest place for declarations,
and where most surely notes are sped.
You husbands, deeply I respect you!
I'm at your service to protect you;
now pay attention, I beseech,
and take due warning from my speech.
You too, mamas, I pray attend it,
and watch your daughters closer yet,
yes, focus on them your lorgnette,
or else. . . or else, may God forfend it!
I only write like this, you know,
since I stopped sinning years ago.
For comparison I offer you a short quartrain by Hoffenstein:
I shall pluck the moments now —
Only folly weeps to miss one;
Let some later lover's brow
Wrinkle at the thought of this one!
This sonnet sings the praises of Tatyana and ends with a humorous Hoffensteinian couplet that is too
delicious to miss sharing with you, dear Reader:
[page 171, CHAPTER 7 LII ]
The night has many stars that glitter,
Moscow has beauties and to spare;
but brighter than the heavenly litter,
the moon in its azure of air.
And yet that goddess whom I'd never
importune with my lyre, whenever
like a majestic moon, she drives
among the maidens and the wives,
how proudly, how divinely gleaming,
she treads our earth, and how her breast
is in voluptuous languor dressed,
how sensuously her eyes are dreaming!
Enough, I tell you, that will do
you've paid insanity its due.
When Onegin returns after many years to find the young maiden Tatyana grown up into a majestic woman,
he is upset to discover that she has married in his absence. In Sonnet XXI of Chapter 8, Pushkin writes about
what ails him, referring to love as youth's derangement. "What ails him? he's in some strange daze! what moves
along the hidden ways in one so slothful, so hard-bitten? vexation? vainness? heavens above, it can't be youth's
distemper — love?"
One cannot spend hours reading Pushkin without the Muse Erato flitting around and flirting with one's pen.
That is the only excuse I can offer for writing these two quatrains to say goodbye to Pushkin:
In closing now, it's fitting that I end
with a poetic tribute to our friend.
You see, dear Reader, you and I must bye,
but let it not be said we didn't try
To read these Pushkin sonnets carefully —
glimpsing the Tanya only he could see.
But I must let the Master have his say
to wish Adieu to you and me today.
[page 200 CHAPTER 8, XLIX ]
Reader, I wish that, as we parted —
whoever you may be, a friend,
a foe — our mood should be warm-hearted.
Goodbye, for now we make an end.
Whatever in this rough confection
you sought — tumultuous recollection,
a rest from toil and all its aches,
or just grammatical mistakes,
a vivid brush, a witty rattle —
God grant that from this little book
for heart's delight, or fun, you took,
for dreams, or journalistic battle,
God grant you took at least a grain.
On this we'll part; goodbye again!
Pushkin claimed to be Russia's Mozart, but after reading his epic poem of the odyssey of Onegin, I find
Pushkin worthy to have the title of Russia's Homer.
I hear often from my Good Readers that they have bought books after reading my book reviews.
Keep reading, folks! As I like to remind you, to obtain more information on what's in these
books, buy and read the books — for less information, read the reviews.
In this section I like to comment on events in the world, in my life, and in my readings which have come up during the month. These are things I might have shared with you in person, if we had had the opportunity to coverse during the month. If we did, then you may recognize my words. If I say some things here which upset you, rest assured that you may skip over these for the very reason that I would likely have not brought up the subject to spoil our time together in person.
1. Padre Filius Notices another Bumper Sticker this Month:
Padre Filius, the cartoon character created by your intrepid editor and would-be cartoonist, will appear from time to time in this Section of the Digest to share us on some amusing or enlightening aspect of the world he observes during his peregrinations.
This month the good Padre Notices another Bumper Sticker.
2.Comments from Readers:
EMAIL from the Pirate Blackbead out of Port Worth: Ahoy there, shipmate!
How goes it? Things are going great here in "Port" Worth! My mind wandered in your
direction the other day — I think I'm going to have to get a Skype account. You recall the time
you offered to connect that way to read your poem. Well, I think I'm going to check into the
possibility and see how it all works.
Speaking of reading poetry, we finally got our CD out. It's called "A Night at Devil's Tavern"
and includes eleven poems and five instrumental tracks. This coming weekend it will be
showing at Two festivals, one in Texas and one in Wisconsin. If we can sell a few maybe I'll
try and get them on the web. It was fun (and more work than I wanted it to be!) reading the
poetry and putting it all together.
Okay, let me get into the newsletter. Have a GREAT day, Capt'in!
Blackbead
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ta other Pirates or Wannabees out there, Ye can spend a night or so yerself at Devil's Tavern by ordering yerself a copy of this CD of Pirate Poems read by the sonorous voice of Blackbead by CLICKING HERE or Album Cover.
EMAIL from Véro in Europe: Hello Bobby,
I am fairly new to Doyletics (sic) however I have done a successful speed trace on ...oysters. I have just done a speed
trace on hunger pang and will definitely let you know how I get on.
The reason why I am contacting you is because I am an EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) practitioner, and
although I have successfully helped people loose weight with EFT, I find I am unable to loose the weight myself no
matter how much EFT I do (and I have done hours of it so far over the past 5 years). So I am constantly on a quest
for the solution. In my search, I have come across various healing modalities (some good some less good) and have included some
in my practise as a holistic healer.
I am impressed with Doyletics (sic) and would like to use it with my clients. My question to you is: how can I legally use doyletics in my practise? I did not see any copyright or limitation on your website. However, whenever I decide to use a modality in my own professional practise, I feel it is only the minimum that I should ask for approval fromtheir creator.
I am very grateful for your help in this matter and also grateful for making this amazing technique so readily and
generously available to all.
Kenavo (Bye in Breton)
Véro
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Bobby's Reply to Véro ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Bienvenue a doyletics, Véro!
Thanks for the feedback. I would be delighted to hear how the hunger
pang trace works out for you. It has worked for me, but I have had scant
feedback from others who have used it.
About your use of doyletics, note it is not capitalized. I studied NLP
in the early days and wanted it to be a science, but they capitalized
it and now sell it. I didn't want to do that with doyletics. I thought long
and hard before I made this decision. I involved both Doyle Henderson
(whose original research it is based on) and his wife Betty in the decision to release this information
without charge to the public indefinitely. It is a science of how the
human being matures. Its basic hypothesis is that all original events
are stored in the brain from conception to 5 years old as doylic
memories (bodily memories) and thereafter only as cognitive memories
(just plain memories). The speed trace is a way of converting stored
bodily memories into cognitive memories which forever removed the bodily
effects the original doylic memory had associated with it. Rightly
understood the speed trace is a memory technique, not a therapy, but it
can be used on oneself and to assist others in reaching therapeutic
outcomes.
I wholeheartedly appreciate your asking me permission to use doyletics
and can only say, Meric Beaucoup!
Bobby
P. S. to Digest Readers: There is no charge, now or ever, for using doyletics.
EMAIL from George Parigian in Massachusetts:
Hi Bobby,
Check out my review here of Ellen Langer's "Counterclockwise" book here:
Congratulations to you on LSU's winning the CWS beating Texas 2-1. I always have mixed
emotions when Texas plays outside our conference. For the sake of the conference it is good for
them to win, but within the conference they are a lion to deal with for Texas Tech.
What a treat! I am in the process of reading it, something I had neglected to do, so thank you for the thought.
Thanks again for making my day,
Renee
EMAIL from Marathon Walker, Professor Kevin Dann: Hello Bobby,
Thanks for the heads up on Lamothe-Cadillac; it sure will be nice to
get some reading done when I get home.
Well, today again is not good walking weather — today's New York Times has an
article about how everyone in New York City is in a rage because there has been
so much rain in June.
As you can see from these photos, the map has truly become the real
celebrity of the pilgrimage. I came into town just before there was a
parade to fete the local girls softball team — state champions! —
and they were kind enough to pose with my map.
I'm in Rhinebeck, NY, staging to go meet the New Age folks of the
Omega Institute, where I have a speaking gig tonight. I am wrestling
with whether to tell them feel-good tales from the road, or challenge
us all a little and speak about the incarnation of Ahriman. . .
Yours,
Kevin
EMAIL from Beverly Matherne in Michigan:
I had sent an email to Beverly asking about how her book about “Cadillac” was coming along. She replied,
“Bobby I can't believe you're writing today. Advance copies of the book arrived at my front door yesterday. They did go into press with it
immediately this summer, while funding was still available. Why the summer?
Because the editor in chief is a professor and can't work as fast as a big
commercial press to get books out. He goes into full gear in the summer.”
She sent me a copy of the book to review and my review of it will appear in the August Digest. The book is done in both French and English on facing pages. Catholics in south Louisiana will recognize the origin of many of their religious festivals as young Cadillac relates them from his childhood.
3. Hellenic Culture
Perhaps some of you who haven't studied Greek culture thought as I did that the Hellenic name for Greece came from the famous Helen whose "face launched a thousand ships" and the Trojan War which aimed to return the Greek Helen to Greece. Not so, it turns out. And the real reason for the name "Hellenic" with its two L's instead of the one L in Helen sheds light on the two famous column designs which came down to us from Greek culture, the Doric and and the Ionian.
Our porticos at Timberlane are lined with Doric columns, apropos of the house being designed by and built for Del's mother whose name is Doris. This is truly a Doric house, whose layout of kitchen looking out over a projecting bar into the Great Room was designed by Doris Richards. This handy bar is where Del and I have most of our meals. The layout of kitchen/Great Room allows me to prepare meals while working on my writings, photography, and website. A simple buzzer reminds me of the next step in cooking, and I can smell and hear the progress of the cooking as I type at workstation in the Great Room looking away from the kitchen.
The three double-wide glass sliding doors allows me to see the North, East, and South Porticos and gardens from my desk seat by a simple glance while I work. For these reasons and many others I love this house with it great indoor and outdoor spaces. Its long Doric-column lined porticos are my favorite reading spaces, either on the teak rockers on the West Portico or the Louisiana Cypress swing on the Northeast Portico. I love the swing which catches the sea breezes from the Southeast, and equally I enjoy the rockers, blocked off from the stiff SE breezes, which offer very pleasant reading spots at twilight on the warmest summer days.
Hellen, as I discovered in my latest Teaching Company lecture series by Prof. Robert Garland of Colgate University, was a man, the original Greek, who probably got his name from Hellas where his father came from. Hellen had a son named Dorus and a grandson, from another son, named Ion. From these two offspring, the Doric and Ionic cultures, languages, and columns proceeded. To indicate this connection, I created a drawing showing Hellen and his offspring's columns. Doric has the simple capital and pediment, and the Ionic column has the elegant curled over capital. Hope this helps you, as it does me, to remember the difference between the Doric and Ionic columns and to know that the origin of the Greek culture stemmed from the pater familias, the mythical patriarch of Greece, the man named Hellen.
Thanks to all of you for providing the chemistry which has made this site a success.
— Especially those of you who have graciously allowed us to show your photos on this website — you're looking good!
In 2011, its tenth year of existence, the doyletics website will top the EIGHT MILLION VISITORS MARK ! ! !
Our hits are averaging about ten times the number of unique visitors. A unique visitor is defined by our collection agent, Urchin, as a visitor who reads at least one page, leaves the website, and doesn't return for at least 20 minutes. So multiple page reads by the same person are not counted as new visitors. This is a conservative way of counting visitors.Our Hits average over 10X the number of Visitors.
As of February 1, 2012 we have received over 8.8 MILLION VISITORS to the Doyletics Website since its inception in August 1, 2001, over TEN YEARS AGO.
Over 1 Million in the past 12 months. We are currently averaging about 89,000 visitors a month [Over One Million a year].
IMPORTANT NOTE: With the new Urchin Logs after an Earthlink Upgrade, our numbers seemed to have fallen dramatically, and it was hard to tell if the new numbers were simply wrong or if the old numbers were artificially high. To complicate matters, the engineers worked for the entire summer to get the Urchin logs to begin to work, and they were undependable until mid-September, 2011. It appears to have started working again in October, but full data seems to take a month to arrive. By January, the data became dependable again, but Urchin has redefined what constitutes a Visitor and that is what has caused the apparent fall in Visitors. With eleven years of data, I know that my Hits to Visitors ratio was 10, using with the previous definition of Visitor as a connection by someone who is not returning within 20 minutes. Now the ratio has risen to 20X because Urchin has redefined a Visitor as a Unique first visit by someone. I have adjusted for the change in Visitor definition, and my Daily and Monthly Adjusted Visitors will continue to rise as they have in the past with no discontinuity.
We especially want to thank you, our Good Readers, in advance, for helping our readership to grow. NOTE our new name for future Digests: DIGESTWORLD. Continue to send comments to Bobby and create links to DIGESTWORLD issues and Reviews on your Facebook page and other Social Media. Email your friends about the reviews, the doyletics speed trace, the cartoons, the jokes, the recipes, the photos in all the DIGESTWORLD Issues archived on our website. Urge them to subscribe to the DIGESTWORLD Reminder so they won't miss a single issue! The Subscription Process has been simplified so that no Reply Confirmation is required. An email to the Editor with your First and Last names is all that's required. There is never a charge for viewing any page on our website, nor for any of the guidance we offer to people asking for help with doyletics or other areas.
~~ NOTE: DIGESTWORLD is a Trademark of 21st Century Education, Inc. ~~
The cost of keeping this website on-line with its 18 Gbytes of bandwidth a month is about $25 a month. Thank you, our Good Readers, for continuing to patronize our advertisers when they provide products and services you are seeking as you visit any of our web pages. Remember the ads are dynamically displayed and every time you read even the same page a second time, you may find new products and services displayed for your review. Our reviews, digests, tidbits, etc, all our webpages act as Google magnets to bring folks to the website to learn about doyletics and frequent our advertisers, so they support one another in effect.
We welcome your contributions to the support of the website and research into the science of doyletics. For our street address, email Bobby at the address found on this page: http://www.doyletics.com/bobby.htm. Every $25 contribution helps keep this website on-line for another month.
We wish to thank all Good Readers who have made a contribution to the doyletics.com website! A special thanks to Chris and Carla Bryant of Corpus Christi!
NEW ! ! ! You can read a description of how to do a Speed Trace:
Or Watch Bobby extemporaneously explain How to Do a Speed Trace on Video:
To make a connection to the Doyletics website from your own website, here's what to do. You may wish to use the first set of code below to link to the site which includes a graphic photo, or to use the second set of code for a text-only link. Immediately below is how the graphic link will look on your website. Just place this .html in an appropriate place on your website.
<CENTER> < — with graphics link — >
<A HREF="http://www.doyletics.com/index.htm">Learn to Do a Speed Trace Here<BR>
<IMG SRC="http://www.doyletics.com/doylepb.gif" width="309" height="102" border="2"
ALT="Learn to Remove Doyles — all those Unwanted Physical Body states of fear, depression, migraine, etc." ALIGN=middle><A/></CENTER>
<CENTER> < — text only link — >
<A HREF="http://www.doyletics.com/introduc.htm">Learn to Do the Speed Trace at doyletics.com <A/>
</CENTER>
My reviews are not intended to replace the purchasing and reading of the reviewed books, but rather to supplant a previous reading or to spur a new reading of your own copy. What I endeavor to do in most of my reviews is to impart a sufficient amount of information to get the reader comfortable
with the book so that they will want to read it for themselves. My Rudolf Steiner reviews are more detailed and my intention is bring his work to a new century of readers by converting his amazing insights into modern language and concepts.
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IMPORTANT NOTE Good News for Good Readers and Good Friends
who have not joined the DIGESTWORLD Reminder List! ! !
WE HAVE MADE IT SIMPLER to SUBSCRIBE to DIGESTWORLD REMINDERS
As of August, 2011 we have begun using a Contact Manager with an Email Merge feature which allows us to send personalized Emails to everyone in our Contact List. For the time being the Topica.com e-mail List Subscription List will remain active, but you will receive the colorful Email containing the DIGESTWORLD Reminder beginning with "Dear [Your First Name]". It is important that we have your First Name, so if the name you are addressed by in your Reminder is not your first name, please notify us of the name you wish us to use. For convenience you can send a quick email to give us your name by Clicking Here. To Contact Bobby, his Email address is visible on this page.
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Maman Nette's Bread Pudding
3. Hellenic Culture
