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These Are the People I Deal With

I don’t expect anyone to read this except for search. And I don’t expect anyone to sympathize with my complaints, either, because this is the way the world is arranged. I’ve was raised to be a nice person but there are too many mean people to overcome. This is not something I can win. And, given my constant nightmares since 1988, not something I can cope with.

 

[00:00:03.650]
This weekend at a community picnic, I was introduced to an old cowboy who asked me what I did for work. I told him that I work part time online, at which point the conversation quickly drifted south because of him. He told me that the greatest computer was between our two ears, the human brain. And I said, I agree with that.

[00:00:39.770]
He then went on with a whole series of statements and questions that were aggressively going after. I think I think when I start talking about computers and what I do online, it’s so far out of reach of most people that they think that I’m trying to be smarter than them, or somehow they feel inferior. I think that’s a great deal of it. They have an inferiority complex to anybody that’s working with computers. They act as if I’m trying to prove that I’m smarter than them, when in fact, I usually don’t start the conversation at all because I’m so far out of reach with what I’m doing, with what most other people do that it’s not even worth bothering to talk about.

[00:01:31.860]
Like all of the work that I’m doing with AI and Chat right now. And it’s very discouraging because I had a friend say to me recently that it was possibly economic, because not everybody can afford a computer or the resources that I have, and that’s not really the case at all. I should probably stop at this point and refresh everyone’s memory that early on, before the Internet went commercial, back in about 94, 95, with the advent of Mosaic. Mosaic was the first graphical based Internet browser that you could see images with that became relatable to people. Images provided a boost to advertising, but librarians had been on computerizing, their catalog, card catalogs, for years before.

[00:02:42.790]
And so when personal computers came out, they started populating libraries with them. Especially, really around 84, when IBM came out with its own personal computer for the masses. There was this Charlie Chaplin advertising campaign that was hugely successful. But years before, Apple had been trying really, really hard to place computers in the school to get these lucrative contracts, and they did a good job. They started about 1980 with the Apple II.

[00:03:18.270]
So by the end of the 80s, computers were basically in every library and school. And so everyone’s had an opportunity since then to use computers in one way or another. Night school classes, adult education classes since really the late 80s, early ninety s. And I’ve actually been on computers since 1978. Over 40 years.

[00:03:46.230]
Everybody’s had a chance. But an idiot like this that I was talking to, he doesn’t want to go to the library. I’m sure he hasn’t been to the library in decades. He probably can’t remember when he checked out a library book last. I have many computers.

[00:04:02.350]
I think I have two desktops, two laptops, two tablets. I also have a library card from Pahrump. A library card from Goldfield and a library card from Tonopah. And I am in those libraries, actively. I’m checking out books.

[00:04:22.130]
All of those libraries have a computer. I think it’s just laziness on most people’s part and not having an interest. It’s easier to put down somebody for what they do than to ask about it or just say simply nothing at all. These are the people that drive me crazy. There’s so much amazing stuff going on and I don’t mind if they’re not interested, but it’s the librarians that I’m infuriated with.

[00:04:53.090]
They’re the gatekeepers in education and they don’t want to know about Chat or AI. So it’s not really economic. It is a deliberate decision on many people’s part not to engage, not to learn, to let the things go by. And people that are actually interested, that are burning to create, that are trying new things, that are experimenting with new things, those are people that are something to be put down on because I think it might remind them of how little they want to know, how content they are with their own little world. And that’s fine as long as you don’t go out and bully people or put people down.

[00:05:38.570]
This is the way I can make some money. I can make this money part time. I’m doing a good service and yet I have people people commenting who don’t even know the basics of writing and business writing.

[00:05:55.970]
Self-sustaining freelance writers are maybe four or 5% of the population. That’s it. Everybody else is doing a second 3rd, 4th job to enable their hobby or their passion the and as far as nonfiction writing goes, nobody understands that. As far as business SEO, there’s nobody that I know, haven’t known for a couple of decades that has any idea of what I’m doing. But if they ask, if I try to explain, it’s just an immediate putting down of what I do.

[00:06:40.750]
It’s just this prejudice against the unknown, which is really the root cause. If you don’t know something, if somebody knows something you don’t, you don’t want to hear it. Instead of asking questions about it or letting it go, they want to put it down because they’re bullies. That’s all they can do. They’re trolls.

[00:06:59.990]
And maybe it reminds them of the fact that they’re dead to the world, that they have no interest in inquiry.

[00:07:10.170]
Anyway, I just wanted to put down what I have to deal with almost every day in my effort to be creative. I really have to keep it hidden. Can’t discuss it because it’s like we’re going back to the Dark Ages. One idiot, in fact, who’s in charge of something historical, he was talking about computer literacy, computer literacy in such a way that I asked him this:

[00:07:43.400]
You’re not holding out computer illiteracy as a point of pride, are you? And this guy’s a former engineer and he thought about it and said, that’s a good question, actually. I am. This is a living, breathing, talking luddite. He doesn’t want to learn.

[00:08:02.380]
He wants to put down people for learning. We’re going to go back 300 years into the Dark Ages when people were prosecuted and killed for trying to learn things, for trying to advance science. We’re going to try to discredit them. Or Mao’s Cultural Revolution, in which anybody with higher learning or higher ambition was killed. That’s what we’re going to get.

[00:08:29.090]
We’re going to go back to the Dark Ages and then we’re going to take 300 years to come back again. At the end of the Dark Ages, they had to reinvent all the math that the Greeks had done, what, 1500 or  2000 years before, because people were criticized and killed for trying to learn new things. And now we have people writing about chat and AI who don’t actually use it, haven’t experimented with it, but don’t want to learn. They just want to put it down. So it’s frustrating, but that’s the world we live in.

 

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What Is Photomontage?

My Etsy powered website is here: https://www.thomasfarleydesigns.com

 

What is photomontage? What do you want it to be?

 

 

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I Think This Says it All

As long as people remember what manifest destiny means.

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Are Writers Made or Born? by Jack Kerouac (transcribed for the first time!)

I transcribed this article from two image files at the Writer’s Digest website. I have introduced line breaks of my own to make the text more readable online.

This is a six minute read. Kerouac reserves the word “genius” (and his attendant praise) to those who originate a writing style, those “born” to write. As he puts it, anyone can write but not everybody can invent a new way of writing.

This is a well planned piece by Kerouac. Notice how he echoes or repeats the use of ‘five thousand’: “five thousand writing class students, “five thousand university trained writers,” and “five thousand ‘trained’ writers plus Joyce.” These echoes are all made at distinct, different points in his work.

Notice, too, the depth of Kerouac’s study and reading of the Great Books. You might think a Beat writer would have laughed off the classics when developing a new way of writing but Kerouac didn’t. This man _studied_. Only the Great Books provide a wellspring deep enough to inspire new thoughts. Although Tom Clancy is an excellent writer, no one will ever pen a Great American Novel by reading how Jack Ryan breaks into a locked file cabinet.

[Thomas Farley, thomasfarleyblog.com (link to this post) September 18, 2022]

The text of this article and post is available here in .pdf format (internal link)

ARE WRITERS MADE OR BORN?

BY Jack Kerouac

Writer’s Digest, January 1962.

Paragraph 1

Writers are made, for anybody who isn’t illiterate can write. But geniuses of the writing art like Melville, Whitman or Thoreau are born. Let’s examine the word “genius.”

It doesn’t mean screwiness or eccentricity or excessive talent. It is derived from the word gignere, (to beget.) And a genius is simply a person who originates something never known before. Nobody but Melville could have written Moby Dick. Not even Whitman or Shakespeare.

Nobody but Whitman could have conceived, originated and written Leaves of Grass. Whitman was born to write a Leaves of Grass and Melville was born to write a Moby Dick. “It ain’t what you do,” Sy Oliver and James Young said. “It’s the way atcha do it.”

Five thousand writing class students who study “required reading” can put their hand to the legend of Faustus but only one, Marlowe, was born to do it the way he did.

Paragraph 2

I always get a laugh to hear Broadway wise guys talk about “talent and genius.” Some perfect virtuoso also who can interpret Brahams on the violin is called a “genius,” but the genius, the originating force, really belongs to Brahams; the violin virtuoso is simply a talented interpreter – in other words, a “Talent.”

Or you’ll hear people say that so and so is a major writer because of his “large talent.” There can be no major writer without original genius. Artists of genius like Jackson Pollock, have painted things that have never been seen before.

Anybody who’s seen his immense Samapattis of color has no right to criticize his “crazy method” of splashing and throwing and dancing around.

Take the case of James Joyce. People said he wasted his talent on the stream of consciousness style when in fact, he was simply born to originate it. How would you like to spend your old age reading books about contemporary life written in the pre-Joycean style of, say, Ruskin or William Dean Howells, or Taine?

Some geniuses come with heavy feet and march solemnly forward like Dreiser. Yet no one ever wrote about that America of his as well as he. Geniuses can be scintillating and geniuses can be somber, but it’s that inescapable sorrowful depth that shines through – originality.

Paragraph 3

Joyce was insulted all his life by practically all of Ireland and the world for being a genius. Some Celtic Twilight idiots even conceded he had some talent. What else could they say, since they were all going to start imitating him? But five thousand university trained writers could put their hand to a day in June in Dublin in 1904 or one night’s dreams, and never do with it what Joyce did with it: he was simply born to do it.

On the other hand, if the five thousand “trained writers” plus Joyce, all put their hands to a READER’S DIGEST-type article about “Vacation Hints” or “Homemaker’s Tips” even then I think Joyce would stand out because of his inborn originality of language insight.

Bear well in mind what Sinclair Lewis told Thomas Wolfe: “If Thomas Hardy had been given a contract to write stories for the SATURDAY EVENING POST, do you think he would have written like Zane Gray or like Thomas Hardy? I can tell you the answer to that one.

He would have written like Thomas Hardy. He couldn’t have written like anyone else but Thomas Hardy. He would have kept on writing like Thomas Hardy. Whether he wrote for the SATURDAY EVENING POST or CAPTAIN BILLY’S WHIZBANG.”

Paragraph 4

When the question is therefore asked, “Are writers made or born?” one should first ask, “Do you mean writers with talent or writers with originality?

Because anybody can write, but not everybody invents new forms of writing. Gertrude Stein invented a new form of writing, and her imitators are just talents. Hemingway later invented his own form also.

The criterion for judging talent or genius is ephemeral, [ed. note – added the comma] speaking rationally in this world of graphs, but one gets the feeling definitely, when a writer of geniuses amazes him by strokes of force never seen before and yet hauntingly familiar (Wilson’s famous “shock of recognition”).

I got that feeling from Swan’s Way as well as from Sons and Lovers. I do not get it from Colette, but I do get it from Dickinson. I get it from Celine, but I do not get it from Camus. I get it from Hemingway, but not from Raymond Chandler, except when he’s dead serious. I get it from the (sic) Balzac or Cousin Bette, but not from Pierre Loti. And so on.

Paragraph 5

The main thing to remember is that talent imitates genius, because there’s nothing else to imitate. Since talent can’t originate it has to imitate or interpret. The poetry on page 22 of the New York Times, with all its “silent wings of urgency in a dark and seldom wood” and other lapidary trillings, is but a poor imitation of previous poets of genius like Yeats, Dickinson, Apollinaire, Donne, Suckling . . . .

Genius gives birth. Talent delivers. What Rambrandt, Brandt or Van Gogh saw in the night can never be seen again. No frog can jump in a pond like Basho’s frog. Born writers of the future are amazed already at what they’re seeing now, what we’ll all see in time for the first time, and then see imitated many times by made writers.

Paragraph 6

So in the case of a born writer, genius involves the original formation of a new style. Though the language of Kyd is Elizabethan as far as period goes, the language of Shakespeare can truly be called only Shakespearean. Oftentimes an originator of a new language forms (sic?) is called “pretentious” by jealous talents. But it ain’t whatcha write. It’s the way atcha write it.

–30–

Writer’s Digest’s image files.

External Link (s)

Interesting discussion of this essay: https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/10/17/are-writers-born-or-made-jack-kerouac/

Notes:

Wilson’s “famous shock of recognition”? More fully, Melville, “Genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round”.

Samapattis: The Britanica offers this on Buddhist meditation, “[F]our further spiritual exercises, the samapattis (‘attainments’): (1) consciousness of infinity of space, (2) consciousness of the infinity of cognition, (3) concern with the unreality of things (nihility), and (4) consciousness of unreality as the object of thought.”

Celtic Twilight idiots: Followers of the material Keats and his like penned regarding Irish folklore.

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Fear Follows Like a Shadow

This is really odd. The green screen trade in still or static photography is well developed and has been steadily growing over the last ten years. Weddings, conventions, special events, all of them have been incorporating green screen booths as possibilities in their plans. It makes money. Video could make money. A lot of money.

But the video green screen trade is in such infancy that I am now the expert, with conventional film producers running away from all of my emails and telephone calls asking if they would like to collaborate. I am, to use an ugly term, on the bleeding edge of this technology. The unspoken response seems to be: We don’t know this, we don’t know you, and we’re the experts. If we don’t know this, if we don’t know you, then it is worthless because we know everything and everyone of value in our trade. You are, and all of your strange ideas, worthless by extension.

What’s happening? With film, and like the still photography trade, most camera people have been using software to adjust things like white balance and exposure and color correction. They have not, for the most part, used software to bring out special effects or an artistic side to their work. They remain squarely within the traditional role of editing in film and stills. No matter how many years in the trade.

Which is fine if you want everything the same with no chance of developing any new ways of making money or gaining creative insights. And God no, never ask an outsider a question or ask for advice. Remain always the acolyte of the trade, as Adobe wants you to be.

Adobe has always kept their software so expensive and so difficult to use that anyone needing assistance in the graphic arts must go to someone paying their outrageous subscription fees every month. Like these professionals who won’t respond to my polite emails and calls. I pay these fees because I’m interested in different media and in film but very, very few hobbyists can afford to be an amateur graphic artist. I am discouraged that Adobe discourages the trade to young people coming along with their prices, can a young artist afford to learn this field?

Interestingly, the green screen trade in Hollywood has been around for over forty years. It’s just a process of adding and overlaying film tracks, much the way one does with adding and overlaying layers in Photoshop. Just watch the old Patty Duke Show or Counterpart on Amazon for something new.

There’s no CGI or A/I involved here or mainframe computers in the cloud. No. For the video below, just me, a ten year old computer, a consumer grade camcorder, software that costs less than a hundred bucks. And I’m old, 64, shouldn’t you youngsters be showing me this?

People run away from this like I represent everything they have run away their whole lives from: the shock of the new, creativity, the effort it will make a single mouse click or to watch two minutes of video that fascinates but repels because it represents something different and hence represents learning, that scourge of scourges, an acidic anathema; yeah it looks fun but I won’t take a chance on fun if its something I’d have to think about for two seconds. Besides, that rerun of Gilligan’s Island just came on.

Begone Ye; and don’t come back unless you bring something relatable to our dead mind and spirit. Like a Sony Walkman, a rotary phone or a six pack of Tab. As Hunter Thompson would say, “We don’t need your kind in Kentucky!”

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Bob Dylan and T.S. Eliot

Dylan read Eliot for the most part not at school. Voluntarily, the best way to go. As I understand it, Dylan read lightly and not deeply, as he did with the Bible. It reminds me of Bono with U2, his Bibilical references sound more out of Bartlett’s Quotations than from the actual text. Whatever.

With both writers there is a fascination with word play and imagery and symbols. You don’t necessarily have to go too deep with Eliot to enjoy many of his references. And, in many cases, Eliot is so brilliant that he can sometimes put an incredibly complex thought into a sentence you can grasp without grasping your Spark notes. Look at the metal sculpture of classic Ferraris or the sculpture of the Greeks. Even if you can’t sculpt, you can appreciate the form. Similarly, as writers, we can appreciate great allusions and turns of phrases by themselves if need be.

As for me, I like the Book of Revelation in the New Testament for its imagery, where the writer is trying to describe how Heaven looks as a physical place, using every kind of language to describe a location in the next world which is more probably a glimmering, somewhat opaque thought of God. In writing on such an impossible subject, the writer does invoke a sense of majesty which is undoubtedly the best one can hope for.

I think the New Jerusalem Bible, first edition, is the best version to have. Hard to find, look for it. Only the first edition! It was a product of Vatican II in the 1960s, with the authors determined to continue the poetic writing style of the King James with the scholarship derived since that was written, especially the findings produced after the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered shortly after World War II.

I have many posts on Eliot at this site. Prufrock and the Wasteland are two favorites. Search and ye shall find.

Great poetry often leaves questions, cryptic remarks meant for each reader to divine their own answers. Commentators suggest Eliot may have been referring to the holy fire on the Day of the Pentecost, when the Lord fulfilled and enabled the early Christian church. Perhaps.

These are just a few lines from “Little Gidding,” the last part of his larger “Four Quartets.”

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always–
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Full text here:

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/history/winter/w3206/edit/tseliotlittlegidding.html (external link)

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And This is How You Get a Nobel Prize

Idiot Wind by Bob Dylan

Selected lyrics:

Someone’s got it in for me
They’re planting stories in the press
Whoever it is I wish they’d cut it out quick
But when they will I can only guess
They say I shot a man named Gray
And took his wife to Italy
She inherited a million bucks
And when she died it came to me
I can’t help it if I’m lucky

Idiot wind
Blowing every time you move your mouth
Blowing down the back roads headin’ south
Idiot wind
Blowing every time you move your teeth
You’re an idiot, babe
It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe

In the final end he won the wars
After losin’ every battle

I woke up on the roadside
Daydreamin’ ’bout the way things sometimes are
Visions of your chestnut mare
Shoot through my head and are makin’ me see stars

Blood on your saddle

It was gravity which pulled us down
And destiny which broke us apart

The priest wore black on the seventh day
And sat stone-faced while the building burned

I waited for you on the running boards
Near the cypress trees, while the springtime turned
Slowly into autumn

Down the highway, down the tracks
Down the road to ecstasy
I followed you beneath the stars
Hounded by your memory
And all your ragin’ glory

You’ll never know the hurt I suffered
Nor the pain I rise above
And I’ll never know the same about you
Your holiness or your kind of love
And it makes me feel so sorry

Idiot wind
Blowing through the buttons of our coats
Blowing through the letters that we wrote
Idiot wind
Blowing through the dust upon our shelves
We’re idiots, babe
It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves

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Rhodesia Repost from Last Year

This needs to be said again. And again. Before free speech and accurate histories are regarded as only important to white racists.

Updated September 22, 2021

As Long As a Free Man Breathes There Will Always Be a Rhodesia

When I was growing up I admired plucky little Rhodesia from afar. It is now called Zimbabwe. Like the Weimar Republic or perhaps Camelot, it lives only in memory and myth.

Rhodesia was a colony of the United Kingdom in the 1960s until it broke away to form an independent nation. It became a pariah state like Chile under Allende or Israel under Golda Meir or Ariel Sharon or anyone else.

Everybody hated Rhodesia. Why?

It had white supremacists. Racial injustice. Continuation of colonial rule. Blah, blah, blah.

Rhodesia’s origins go back as far as the 1650s with the establishment of Cape Town to the south by the Dutch. And the subsequent settling of southeast Africa by these people and other Europeans.

The native people of this thinly populated land were nomadic and for the most part hunters and gatherers. They built little in keeping with their constant hunt for food. All sub-Saharan Africa was this way, with no buildings of note in pre-Colonial times until you reached north to Giza and the Pyramids.

Rhodesians turned tractless scrub and veldt into a modern civilization which superpowers and future despots coveted for their own.

In the 1970’s two thugs named Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo led armies against Ian Smith’s government. Mugabe had money and munitions supplied by China and Nkomo was financed by the Soviet Union.

Everyone knew that both men would fight each other to control Rhodesia once whites were thrown out of power.

This racial injustice stuff was all nonsense and fraud.

The fighting was a power grab, a money grab. It was all about winning a nation possessing valuable natural resources and a vibrant, profitable economy. Mugabe and Nkomo claimed to be freedom fighters. Hardly.

Africa consistently produces oppressive and brutal strongmen who destroy any built up economy through corruption and in so doing plunge that country back into poverty. A nation’s treasury winds up in a Swiss bank account and the dictator goes to live abroad in a foreign country that he pays to protect him.

Critics charged that the black man did not fairly share in the wealth of Rhodesia that they helped create. Rhodesia was indeed largely built on the labor of the black man because they were the local work force. Would critics have preferred a Philippine or Malaysian workforce like the Saudis employ?

Besides enjoying regular employment, blacks were paid better than any other Africans except those in the R.S.A. Another country run by white folk.

But it’s not just labor. A country must be expertly managed and led. The administrators of all British Empire colonies, for example, had a low tolerance for bribes and corruption and an innate skill for running things. The Rhodesians also had these qualities which are essential to building up a country and going forward.

After the Roman Empire fell, villagers in every part of the former holdings tore down Roman walls and and buildings for stones to make their houses. They didn’t construct aqueducts or hot spring heated swimming pools or infrastructure to bring in water or take out sewage. No vision and no discipline existed to carry out the future and Europe plunged into the Dark Ages. But I digress.

The world agreed regime change was fine as long as blacks came into power. This was reverse racism endorsed and agreed upon by the entire world and the United Nations. Black man good, white man bad. All based on skin color.

China and Russia acted for their own strategic reasons. Rhodesia was just another piece in a giant cold-war game of chess. China still has their eyes on Africa. They may eventually control the continent with blacks in government just for show.

The Rhodesian Army gallantly fought against the world in a bush war of legend but the outcome was always certain.

Many foreigners enlisted in the Rhodesian army. Like the pilots who volunteered to help Great Britain before the United States entered World War II. Or like Orwell and others who fought with Spaniards against Franco in the Spanish Civil War.

End of Days found civilians taking automatic weapons with them before going to play golf or tennis. It was that bad.

And so The Great Experiment failed and another despot was installed. Another dictator who ruined everything positive that the former colonial power had brought about. Rhodesia is now a basket case and another welfare child nation of too many in Africa. Worse, it enslaves people and subjects its own countrymen to conditions never seen under white man rule.

This is from from the widely respected World Factbook I understand that it is a long quote:

“Current situation: Zimbabwe is a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children subjected to forced labor and sex trafficking; Zimbabwean women and girls from towns bordering South Africa, Mozambique, and Zambia are subjected to forced labor, including domestic servitude, and prostitution catering to long-distance truck drivers; Zimbabwean men, women, and children experience forced labor in agriculture and domestic servitude in rural areas; family members may recruit children and other relatives from rural areas with promises of work or education in cities and towns where they end up in domestic servitude and sex trafficking; Zimbabwean women and men are lured into exploitative labor situations in South Africa and other neighboring countries.”

It didn’t have to be this way.

Europeans were criticized for carving Africa into colonies whose country boundaries did not reflect tribal boundaries, thus causing chaos and inciting misery. Well, white governance is long gone and the murderous thugs who control many parts of Africa don’t care about boundaries.

The World Factbook quotation above shows how freely human trafficking goes on between Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique, and Zambia. These slave traders go anywhere they want to loot and pillage and war. Against other blacks.

Black on black violence has dramatically increased in all forms since white governance ended on the African continent. Blacks enslaving blacks, blacks killing blacks, blacks warring against other blacks. This isn’t racist invective, these are just the plain facts.

Rhodesia was making progress toward a more equal society but that is not discussed today. History is always written by the victors. (And their politically correct sympathizers.)

Gandhi’s nonviolence movement achieved independence for India because, ultimately, the British were a civilized people and would listen to reason. It wasn’t the power of Gandhi’s convictions. Forget that. After too many stupid and tragic mistakes to keep India within the Empire, Britain listened. Mountbatten could be talked to. Negotiations could happen because the British allowed them to happen.

Not so the Taliban, the Chinese communists or the illiterate and ultra-violent butchers that now control Rhodesia. Working toward equality could have been possible under Smith’s government but that was all thrown away in favor of people who would kill you for your wrist watch. After they force you to watch your wife being raped.

Is the black community in America and around the world happy now?

Cecil Rhodes was scurrilous and a white supremacist but he was also an empire builder. Note the word ‘build.” He left behind cities and roads and power plants and telephones in the wake of his never ending greed.

Nothing is getting built anew or maintained in Africa anymore. Leaders instead prey on their own people and existing resources. Burn down the Amazon rain forest for easy money. With no revegetation except a few pitiful replanting schemes financed by kind hearted people outside of Africa.

White rule was unacceptable to the world but it’s always good with the bad. Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) once asked how many Central and South Americans would renounce Roman Catholicism in favor of going back to the religions practiced before the Spanish introduced them to Christ and the Pope. I’m not seeing many hands going up.

Soldier of Fortune Magazine presented the only accurate reporting at the time and most of that writing is still available on eBay. Colonel Brown’s Paladin Press produced SOF and without it the memories of a gallant people fighting for their homeland would be completely lost.

As a final note, I had to look up how to spell Zimbabwe for this post. I don’t use it.

As long as a free man breathes there will always be a Rhodesia.

—

.

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The NYT, Ukraine, and The War

The New York Times still cannot condone war under any conditions, even with the complete justification that Ukraine has to defend itself.

“All across the United States, small groups of military veterans are gathering, planning and getting passports in order. Many are hungry for what they see as a fight to defend freedom against an autocratic aggressor with a conventional and target-rich army.”

What they see? What does the NYT see? The New York Times does not want to approve any kind of war under any kind of circumstance. Even when a country defends itself.

There’s a point at which one’s own moral preferences must end. Any predilection for non-violence must die when you start endangering the world by that belief.

“I don’t believe in killing.” Well, it’s not all about you, sister. There’s some other people involved.

You don’t reason or try to reform a rabid dog which is running down the street biting people. You take out a gun and shoot it.

Similarly, no tolerance can be shown for anyone who starts an unprovoked war which displaces millions, lays waste to cities, and kills still uncounted numbers of soldiers and civilians.

Jesus may hold to his beliefs and remain true. We can’t. We’re human and not a god. No matter what the NYT believes in their heart, for the good of the world, they need to clear their conscience and then help in hunting down that running dog.

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The Poetry of Sara Teasdale as Read by Ghizela Rowe

I’ve mentioned Sara Teasdale’s simply worded poetry but before (internal link) but not at length. Like A.E. Housman (internal link), no Greek, Latin, or Great Literature is required to understand their poetry.

Much tragedy in her life, own ended by too many sleeping pills. Rest easy and thanks, Sara, we continue unwrapping your writing gifts every day.

The Poetry of Sara Teasdale

Introduction

Read by Ghizela Rowe, today’s finest female poetry narrator.

Introduction

Barter

“Spend all you have for loveliness.”

Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children’s faces looking up
Holding wonder like a cup.

Life has loveliness to sell,
Music like a curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,
Eyes that love you, arms that hold,
And for your spirit’s still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.

Spend all you have for loveliness,
Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstasy
Give all you have been, or could be.

Advice to a Girl

“Nothing worth possessing can be quite possessed.”

No one worth possessing
Can be quite possessed;
Lay that on your heart,
My young angry dear;
This truth, this hard and precious stone,
Lay it on your hot cheek,
Let it hide your tear.
Hold it like a crystal
When you are alone
And gaze in the depths of the icy stone.
Long, look long and you will be blessed:
No one worth possessing
Can be quite possessed.

Lessons

“Unless I learn to look at Grief . . .”

Unless I learn to ask no help
From any other soul but mine,
To seek no strength in waving reeds
Nor shade beneath a straggling pine;
Unless I learn to look at Grief
Unshrinking from her tear-blind eyes,
And take from Pleasure fearlessly
Whatever gifts will make me wise
Unless I learn these things on earth,
Why was I ever given birth?