Based on the written works of a formidable tradition of writers like James Agee, Shakespiere, Moliere, Flaubert, Bernard Shaw, Jonathan Swift, J.R.R. Tolkein and Miguel Cervantes, what would you say distinguishes men from Rowling’s muggles or Tolkein’s hobbits?

I’ve felt that the most damaging event in American cultural development was the censure of Al Capp related to the popularity of his character, the shmoo, which caricatured the cupidity of a culture of people who derive their core values from mass media, a description that fits the psychological conditioning of nearly all Americans since the 1940s.

Because Capp’s caricature so perfectly revealed the imbecility of the compliant creatures we become as consumers and willing participants in the infantile military orientation of our society, rendering us hilarious in our absurd willingness to be ourselves consumed, living to be consumed by dint of our worship of consuming products, Capp was considered “bad for business”. He was told by his publishers to cut the shmoo or lose his contract, this despite that the shmoo made Capp’s comic strip the most successful cartoon in history.

Nathaniel West’s Day of The Locust, Woody Guthrie‘s and Bob Dylan’s songs, like those of Patty Smith and Pete Sieger, and the monologues of Lenny Bruce and Richard Lord Buckley attacked the tattered fabric of our cupidic values and resonated with something deeper in our souls: our aspiration to feel and express life, no less than the does the flower of the field aspire to bloom. This was the message of William Blake, Wordsworth, Byron and all the romantic poets and composers.

As a culture, what we have become in our worship of cupidic values might at first glance appear to be a race of idiots but at birth, we are no different now than in Whitman‘s time, with the exception that the muggles of the 19th century at least were made aware, ironically by their religious institutions, that they are muggles and so they knew and supported Whitman, Blake and Poe and their spirit surmounted ignorance. We live in a culture that disdains the enterprise of art like Blake’s because its not good for business.

Read. By all means, read. Read the subversives of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Russians, French and Italians; read Dinesen, McCullers, Garcia Marquez, Mann, Faulkner,  West, Ionesco, Stendahl, Cummings… Alternatively, shut up and eat your Disney.

Fmod is actually a supercool if somewhat clunky, probably very early version of a Graphic User Interface (GUI) for software called, middleware, in the process of inserting sound into game programs.

What fools these software engineers be! Or maybe they know and its the marketing people, as usual, who have their heads in the past or some other dark place.

Maybe the engineers realize that, what they have on their hands with Fmod, a creative tool for modifying, merging and remixing tracks on the fly, is a new kind of music/sound sequencer that automates the scoring of media. I wouldn’t bet on it.

From the perspective of the engineers that make it, Fmod is an app running on a Mac or PC that game developers can use to program sounds and music into a game so they will be triggered by input from players and adapt to changes in the “game state” caused by the progress of the game or if a player goes up or down a level, wins or loses, goes from one scene to another, fires a weapon, misses or hits the target,  and so on.

Fmod is an off-the-shelf sound programming GUI that saves you the laborious trouble of writing code that triggers sound into the game by writing the code for you. You lay in audio tracks using the graphic user interface by dragging and dropping audio files and by setting automation for the audio files is triggered by game states and player input.

If your mind can contain the concept and try looking at Fmod as a purely musical tool, a  sequencer that uses audio files instead of midi controlled samples and with a modest range of DSP plugins. Instead of just having a single timeline as in a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), which is a one-dimensional view, Fmod has a vertical axis as well, call it the y axis. Music occurs sequentially, one note or arrangement of notes after another. With Fmod, you can also program notes or changes to notes on a perpendicular coordinate, which isn’t time based. For lack of a better simile, call it world-based.

You may imagine it in a colorful way somewhat like this: you are making love to a woman (or man), doing this, doing that and things are moving along in the direction of orgasm and suddenly, you change partners or reverse roles or change genders, maybe flip back and forth in a tempo. The sensual example isn’t just for humor or venal interest but to be honest about the sensual qualities and purposes of music and the part that music plays in our lives and especially in manipulating viewers in advertising, promotion and propaganda. I speculate that in the near future, since scoring for media has been reduced to cliche musical solutions, a program like Fmod will be programmed by engineers to score TV melodramas, ads and YouTube videos automatically, programmed by machines.

However, the hidden value of Fmod, which is of little interest to the marketing department of Fmod, whether or not the engineers understand it, is that this GUI is an interesting tool for other kinds of users than game developers, people who are artists for whom the facility Fmod provides for real-time adaptation, interactivity provides an ability to eventually take Messaien to the stars.

The moral of this story is that all marketers live in the past, worshipping success rather than the source of the success. They revere Mickey Mouse, Forest Gump and Lady Gaguh as if the human circumstances that gave these invention life. Check out Fmod.

On the ground floor of a turn of the century commercial building in Hoquiam, Washington (a cultural landmark, ignored today but with a possible great future), in what was originally a plush lobby of a major bank, replete with Italian marble floor and polished redwood coamings, there is today an ad hoc museum of vintage curiosities for sale, a business operated by the owner of the building, a congenial man of about 50, who in his own better times, before the most recent economic crash, was an important  professional before his budding IT company failed. An educated man, he is one of three sons of a dentist, who with his wife, a scientist, came to America from Hungary during the brief interval of freedom before Stalin sent the tanks. His son, now also out of work, is a Harvard MBA. He bought the building with his personal bonus after the IPO for the failed enterprise with the intention of restoring it to prominence. After the collapse of the real estate market, unable to sell the building because of an environmental issue he wasn’t aware of when he bought it, he began to use the former bank lobby to sell furnishings he’d imported from Hungary for his home, which is 30 miles away in the state capital. Through his many contacts with others trying to survive similar defaults, he branched out to help them liquify their wealth.

Ken is a good man, frank in his politely spoken, slightly midwestern accent. I liked him immediately when we met because he is curious about people in a way that only those who withhold judgment are able to be. There’s a comfortable steadiness in his composure and movements on which a film director could rely and he has a quietly witty, dry sense of humor, suggesting possibilities for the imagination of a writer.

About him and this building and this small town at the mouth of the Hoquiam river, at the base of the Olympic Peninsula, a rich panoply of stories may be imagined and during the 30 days I visited Hoquiam, I imagined a few that are suggested in images like the one above that I captured with my Canon digital camera.

So, here is this image, or scene, if you will, and in the story, we are, so far, introduced to a character, this man, whose name is Ken Myroslav, and his environment, and a few aspects of his history, his family, the town, including its geographic, political and cultural location, in fact a significant amount of detail, each of which is a pathway leading to a myriad possibilities. The story could go anywhere. But it doesn’t. Music could shape that.

My considerations regarding the music in this case might be: 1) to evoke a compassionate sense of this character and how he views his life in the fractal edge of time when this image was made, which could include his relationship to a person taking the picture that frames him; 2) the word spoken, action or image that immediately precedes this one and 3) the next thing that happens.

An economic recession is what happens when people are not rewarded for fitting in. A person who doesn’t fit in feels alienated, like they don’t belong.

Experience of community is conjured as a myth held by those who fit in and those who want to fit in. People that believe in the myth and don’t fit in are depressed.

This is the link between economic and clinical depression.

The San Diego Union Tribune editorial staff, no longer having Bob Filner’s neck around to stretch, ran an editorial by a Sacramento neocon columnist, Steven Greenhut, in which he confuses the motivation behind a faux secessionist movement in Northern California.

North state secession vote is not just a ‘stunt’

Aside from Mr. Greenhut’s neocon political indoctrination, his comments on Norcal secessionitis misconstrues the irony as well as the weight of the idea that bigger, at least, when it comes to government, isn’t usually better. Neocon ideology must constantly run a-foul of such inconsistencies, having to worship Jefferson, a man who was as ruthless a selfish hypocrite as they come albeit no better or worse than most other politicians in recent political history. (The farce of the politician who promotes ideals that are not his own is an exhaustible comedic subject. Chaplin and Moliere merely touched the issue.)

In this case, the agenda of loggers and other marijuana growers in Northern California, which Greenhut cites as fueling the current argument for secession, is using the name of the 1941 movement to take advantage of name recognition. Jefferson’s face was printed on $2 bills and this Southern slave-holder is lionized to cupidic grade school children, just as Mao’s name was in China and Lenin’s in the USSR.

Today’s secessionists oppose dam removal and restrictions on timber clear-cutting in the Sierras. Dams in the north are being removed to restore water levels for watersheds and streams that are critical for salmon and steelhead populations (and the ecological systems of northern forests that includes thousands of indigenous species of flora and fauna, many near extinction because of the dams that have benefited few people, while the water levels downstream of dams adversely affects many more.

Today’s secessionists, Mr. Greenhut points out, want freedom from federal regulations of timber cutting. The forests protected by these regulations belong to the entire nation, not only those who want to exploit their timber value. If not for federal protection of forested watersheds and parklands that were protected by Franklin Roosevelt’s administration in 1938, the Olympic Peninsula would now be barren hills, like much of Oregon, a state that not only still permits clear-cutting, but also, finances education by selling state forests to clear-cutters. Mid 19th century, San Francisco and the bay area was redwood forests.

Greenhut’s neocon idealism views environmental and economic concerns as the proper concern of responsible local self-government but the interests Mr. Greenhut cites as backing this particular secession movement include those who would control local politics in order to clear-cut the Sierras.

Better known to people who live in rural areas north of Sacramento than here in Southern California, is the public subsidy of timber interests that began when, under Ronald Reagan’s reign as governor, the Department of Forestry was merged into the California Fire Department (now known as CalFire). State forest management since that merger has served the interests of timber production and attempted to deprive our forests of periodic natural burns that make a redwood forest possible, while transferring the cost of forest fire prevention and the risk to timber assets from those who invest in timberland securities sold on Wall Street to the taxpayers of the state.

Now, however, CalFire’s subsidy of timber interests has been subjected to cuts in the state budget. (Money is needed for pension funds and the burgeoning prison population.)

State forest management remains under the thumb of state fire department bureaucrats that know nothing about watershed ecology and less about forestry, while marijuana enterprises throughout the woodlands, which now produce the bulk of annual income in Norcal, pulls enough water from small streams to significantly lower river water levels, endangering previous investment in fish repopulation and dam removal. Secession is a smokescreen or in Greenhut’s own words, a ‘stunt’.

Matt Damon’s motion picture, Promised Land, is effectively, promoting fracking, while pretending to be critical. It washes the burden of guilt from the hands of the perpetrators, making the viewers accomplices, as if people living in suburban communities with no public transportation and a 20 mile commute have a choice about putting fuel in their cars or about where the fuel comes from.

Promised Land promotes the idea that you are responsible, as if as a voter in a democratic process, you had a say, as if government in the U.S, is responsible to the needs of the many, while in fact, the “Pigs At The Trough” as Ariana Huffington calls them in the eponymous book, those who fund expensive election campaigns, control your government’s mineral development policy and you know it.

Damon’s movie suggests that fracking technology is the problem, when it doesn’t matter how destructive a technology is for the ecosystem—the problem is that, due to other policies, people have no other way to feed their families and even though they must pull up stakes, abandon communities, they head for the fracking fields, presently the Dakotas, but the plan is to continue to exploit buried petrochemicals across the continent.

The argument made by those who benefit from fracking is economic independence from oil fields in the middle east but economic independence is but a myth in a global economy, in which international corporations and giants of government enterprise in China operate without regard for local or national political or geographic boundaries.

Economic recessions that eliminate employment opportunities are described as arcane fluctuations in the market place but in hindsight, recession has been exploited to make people more accepting of risks and ecological damage of development that led to disastrous engineering decisions, from the Salton Sea to Katrina and Fukushima.

Nuclear fission power plants are under construction with no acceptable plan for risks associated with storing nuclear waste. Hoover dam in Nevada and similar constructions in China, Egypt and Europe, have in common that they are publicly funded and built by workers who had no other opportunities. Those now employed in North Dakota know they are destroying the future habitability of the planet but they have no other choice if they are to enjoy the lifestyles promoted in the media and public education.

Examine your own values. Are you thrilled about living in a modest rustic home or would you rather have an SUV in the garage and a Seadoo in the driveway? Self esteem of children that watch TV depends on living the vision of their lives they see in sitcoms and social media, since birth and there’s nothing legal they can do to obtain the funds to support the lifestyle they’re conditioned to desire and they gladly go to North Dakota.

Some don’t because of family ties or affinity for homes in small towns but young people leave every small town as soon as they are able in hopes of finding a foothold, with a prayer things will improve, while politicians tell them that affordable gasoline will solve their problems. Those, who oppose fracking near their homes are characterized in the media as a lunatic fringe. Concerns about poisoning the Mississippi, the Delta and the Gulf of Mexico are paranoid.

Promise Land ultimately convinces viewers they are powerless to change the course of history, exonerating them from taking action, while comforted with the illusion that someone is paying useful attention, so they can feel better about being powerless. “It is hopeless and we are doomed.”  (Emoticon)

“Environmental issues” are semantic manipulations for thinking people but only those who have nothing better to do with their time are thinking and for most people, something better to do amounts to washing the car, smoking a joint, screwing a stranger, riding a bike or personal watercraft, generally narcissistic endeavors.

In hindsight, it’s as difficult to believe human beings are capable of the stupidity of the holocaust, engineering Fukushima, Salton Sea, Mono Lake, developing in the Mississippi delta that led to the destructive effect of Katrina as it is to imagine the hundreds of years and lives that went into building the great pyramids of Egypt and Aztec sacrifice. Yet at this moment, a dozen nuclear fission plants are under construction in India and China, an army is using munitions supplied by factories in Europe, China, Russia and the U.S. to destroy every city in Syria, tens of thousands of new homes are proposed in areas with no transportation infrastructure or water to support them.

The myth of modern media is just as strange. Those who produce and distribute media are no different from the legions that work in fracking fields. In both cases, it’s the only paid work they are offered. The proliferation of media on the internet serves ignorance and misinformation by promoting a multiplicity of partial truths without the benefit of a philosophic orientation. What leadership benefits from public ignorance?

Stupidity in leadership has been falsely attributed to technological advancement without the balance of a moral or ethical compass provided by a spiritual tradition, however, it is simply due to information technology designed to enable centralized management of huge populations. The combination of surging population growth and centralized control exaggerates effects of perverse stupidity, which on a local level, might be laughable. The problem is actually related to the elemental nature of human beings, who since they are social creatures, are guided by identification with shared core values if a community.

People decide what they like and who they are based on close relationships, which is why politics is local and when development policies are made by a distant central authority over which the individual has no direct say involving policies that affect them. Activities, like fracking, are employing engineers and laborers to carry out destructive development with no regard for risks or the ecological damage. This kind of thinking destroyed 95% of the forests of California and the Pacific Northwest and even though clear-cutting has been condemned for destroying a critical part of an ecosystem, the managers of Sierra Pacific, are clear-cutting in the Sierras today as if there were no tomorrow.

We see such things in hindsight but media of all types barrages the populace with ideas and values that overwhelm the senses and meanwhile, instill core values that are essentially a promotion of the narcissism common among youthful people. Older people, who are usually and traditionally regarded in small communities as possessors of wisdom of experience are portrayed in entertainments as incompetent and incapable, discrediting those who have the longest memories. This conditioning has convinced most people in America to anticipate incapacitation after the age of 55 or 60 and since young people accept this view of their elders, they naturally accept their own incompetence with relief and do their best to live up to this image since it removes their accountability.

In earlier times, communities respected the wisdom of age. Traditions determined the core values of the culture. Today, when the culture derives these values from media, in which incompetence is erroneously portrayed as an effect of aging, rather than application, just as people have enough experience to begin to understand how things work, they are not only encouraged to retire, but also, respected for giving up their dreams and denying their own values. Younger people, with little experience and less knowledge, who haven’t figured out the economic connections between climate change and unemployment lines are hired to shape the way their peers perceive the world.

Matt Damon, like the young lions and lionesses of Wall Street, Yale, Harvard, Hollywood, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, UCLA and so on, don’t have the experience to see the big picture but huge salaries suggests to them that they should, while the result of their work provides leadership in a culture to support fracking and whatever else.

Is this too simplistic? Do you think a tanking global economy is a naturally occurring disaster over which no one ever had control? Are billions invested in fracking now for some other reason than because nothing else pencils out?

Sinking the global economy only coincidentally drives responsible people to employment that does the worst damage to the ecosystem, reducing the capacity of the planet to sustain the life of most species, rather than just human beings but fracking is a symptom, the disease is that capitalism nurtures policies of development, the priorities of which are based on profiting from population growth rather than development to accommodate human needs within locally sustainable boundaries.

Generally, it’s bad to make fun of the deformed and to speak ill of the dead but exceptions are made for dead freaks like Mussolini, so where exactly is the line drawn?

For instance, when people seem more piggish than humanish, this does a disservice to the porcine species. Their faces stand out in my memory: a schizophrenic lawyer and a similarly afflicted professor of justice studies. Otherwise, alike in many ways. The lawyer, for instance, is an incorrigible thief, while the professor wouldn’t steal a pencil as a policy. If he  steps on your foot, he’d probably not notice it, while the lawyer would, and make an  insincere apology in her thing, cigarette stained voice.

And, while schizophrenia isn’t the element of their personalities that reminds me of pigs, it must be mentioned because their propensity for schizophrenia led them to lie. Many liars are talented people. It is the piggish quality that, when added to schizophrenia, creates a sort of malignancy, exemplified in both lawyer and professor, whose similarities of outlook, style, intellect, morality, ethics and  avarice made for an unusual story if their egos weren’t both so large, I can’t fit them together into the same story. Thankfully, their genetic trails are regressive and will die out. The relevant part of this story begins, not when I met them but when they met each other, which as you might expect, happened at a feeding trough.

The flowering dream

Carson McCullers


WHEN I WAS A CHILD of about four, I was walking with my nurse past a convent. For once, the convent doors were open. And I saw the children eating ice-cream cones, playing on iron swings, and I watched, fascinated. I wanted to go in, but my nurse said no, I was not Catholic. The next day, the gate was shut. But, year by year, I thought of what was going on, of this wonderful parry, where I was shut out. I wanted to climb the wall, but I was too little. I beat on the wall once, and I knew all the time that there was a marvelous party going on, but I couldn’t get in.

Spiritual isolation is the basis of most of my themes. My first book was concerned with this, almost entirely, and all of my books since, in one way or another. Love, and especially love of a person who is incapable of returning or receiving it, is at the heart of my selection of grotesque figures to write about — people whose physical incapacity is a symbol of their spiritual incapacity to love or receive love — their spiritual isolation.

To understand a work, it is important for the artist to be emotionally right on dead center; to see, to know, to experience the things he is writing about. Long before Harold Clurman, who, bless his heart, directed The Member of the Wedding, I think I had directed every fly and gnat in that room years ago.
The dimensions of a work of art are seldom realized by the author until the work is accomplished. It is like a flowering dream. Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses. A seed grows in writing as in nature. The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them.

I understand only particles. I understand the characters, but the novel itself is not in focus. The focus comes at random moments which no one can understand, least of all the author. For me, they usually follow great effort. To me, these illuminations are the grace of labor. All of my work has happened this way. It is at once the hazard and the beauty that a writer has to depend on such illuminations. After months of confusion and labor, when the idea has flowered, the collusion is Divine. It always comes from the subconscious and cannot be controlled. For a whole year I worked on The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter without understanding it at all. Each character was talking to a central character, but why, I didn’t know. I’d almost decided that the book was no novel, that I should chop it up into short stories. But I could feel the mutilation in my body when I had that idea, and I was in despair. I had been working for five hours and I went outside. Suddenly) as I walked across a road, it occurred to me that Harry Minowitz, the character all the other characters were talking to, was a different man, a deaf mute, and immediately the name was changed to John Singer. The whole focus of the novel was fixed and I was for the first time committed with my whole soul to The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

What to know and what not to know? John Brown, from the American Embassy, was here to visit, and he pointed his long forefinger and said, “I admire you, Carson, for your ignorance.” I said, “Why?” He asked, “When was the Battle of Hastings, and what was it about? When was the Battle of Waterloo, and what was that about?” I said, “John, I don’t think I care much.” He said, “That’s what I mean. You don’t clutter your mind with the facts of life.”

When I was nearly finished with The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, my husband mentioned that there was a convention of deaf mutes in a town near-by and he assumed that I would want to go and observe them. I told him that it was the last thing I wanted to do because I already had made my conception of deaf mutes and didn’t want it to be disturbed. I presume James Joyce had the same attitude when he lived abroad and never visited his home again, feeling his Dublin was fixed forever — which it is.

A writer’s main asset is intuition; too many facts impede intuition. A writer needs to know so many things, but there are so many things he doesn’t need to know — he needs to know human things even if they aren’t “wholesome,” as they call it.

Every day, I read the New York Daily News, and very soberly. It is interesting to know the name of the lover’s lane where the stabbing took place, and the circumstances which the New York Times never reports. In that unsolved murder in Staten Island, it is interesting to know that the doctor and his wife, when they were stabbed, were wearing Mormon nightgowns, three-quarter length. Lizzie Borden’s breakfast, on the sweltering summer day she killed her father, was mutton soup. Always details provoke more ideas than any generality could furnish. When Christ was pierced in His left side, it is more moving and evocative than if He were just pierced.

One cannot explain accusations of morbidity. A writer can only say he writes from the seed which flowers later in the subconscious. Nature is not abnormal, only lifelessness is abnormal. Anything that pulses and moves and walks around the room, no matter what thing it is doing, is natural and human to a writer. The fact that John Singer, in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, is a deaf-and-dumb man is a symbol, and the fact that Captain Penderton, in Reflections in a Golden Eye, is homosexual, is also a symbol, of handicap and impotence. The deaf mute, Singer, is a symbol of infirmity, and he loves a person who is incapable of receiving his love. Symbols suggest the story and theme and incident, and they are so interwoven that one cannot understand consciously where the suggestion begins. I become the characters I write about. I am so immersed in them that their motives are my own. When I write about a thief, I become one; when I write about Captain Penderton, I become a homosexual man; when I write about a deaf mute, I become dumb during the time of the story. I become the characters I write about and I bless the Latin poet Terence who said, “Nothing human is alien to me.”

When I wrote the stage version of The Member of the Wedding, I was at the time paralyzed, and my outward situation was miserable indeed; but when I finished that script, I wrote to a friend of mine, “Oh, how wonderful it is to be a writer, I have never been so happy.

When work does not go well, no life is more miserable than that of a writer. But when it does go well, when the illumination has focused a work so that it goes limpidly and flows, there is no gladness like it.
Why does one write? Truly it is financially the most ill-rewarded occupation in the world. My lawyer has figured out how much I made from the book The Member of the Wedding, and it is, over the five years I worked on it, twenty-eight cents a day. Then the irony is, the play The Member of the Wedding had made so much money that I’ve had to give eighty per cent to the government — which I’m happy, or at least have to be happy, to do.

It must be that one writes from some subconscious need for communication, for self-expression. Writing is a wandering, dreaming occupation. The intellect is submerged beneath the unconscious the thinking mind is best controlled by the imagination. Yet writing is not utterly amorphous and unintellectual. Some of the best novels and prose are as exact as a telephone number, but few prose writers can achieve this because of the refinement of passion and poetry that is necessary. I don’t like the word prose; it’s too prosaic. Good prose should be fused with the light of poetry; prose should be like poetry, poetry should make sense like prose.
I like to think of Anne Frank and her immense communication, which was the communication not only of a twelve-year-old child, but a communication of conscience and courage.

Here truly there was isolation, but physical rather than spiritual isolation. Several years ago, Anne Frank’s father made an appointment to see me at the Hotel Continental in Paris. We talked together and he asked me if I would dramatize the diary of his daughter. He also gave me the book, which I had not yet read But as I was reading the book, I was so upset that I broke out in a rash on my hands and feet, and I had to tell him that under the circumstances I could not do the play.
Paradox is a clue to communication, for what is not often leads to the awareness of what is. Nietzsche once wrote to Cosima Wagner, “If only three people could understand me.” Cosima understood him and years later a man called Adolf Hitler built a whole philosophical system around a misunderstanding of Nietzsche. It is paradoxical that a great philosopher like Nietzsche and a great musician like Richard Wagner could have contributed so much to the world’s suffering in this century. Partial understanding for an ignorant person is a warped and subjective understanding, and it was with this type of understanding that the philosophy of Nietzsche and the creations of Richard Wagner were the mainstay of Hitler’s emotional appeal to the German people. He was able to juggle great ideas into the despair of his time, which we must remember was a real despair.

When someone asks me who has influenced my work, I point to O’Neill, the Russians, Faulkner, Flaubert. Madame Bovary seems to be written with divine economy. It is one of the most painfully written novels, and one of the most painfully considered, of any age. Madame Bovary is a composite of the realistic voice of Flaubert’s century, of the realism versus the romantic mind of his times. In its lucidity and faultless grace, it seems to have flown straight from Flaubert’s pen without an interruption in thought. For the first time, he was dealing with his truth as a writer.

It is only with imagination and reality that you get to know the things a novel requires. Reality alone has never been that important to me. A teacher once said that one should write about one’s own back yard; and by this, I suppose, she meant one should write about the things that one knows most intimately. But what is more intimate than one’s own imagination? The imagination combines memory with insight, combines reality with the dream.

People ask me why I don’t go back to the South more often. But the South is a very emotional experience for me, fraught with all the memories of my childhood. When I go back South I always get into arguments, so that a visit to Columbus in Georgia is a stirring up of love and antagonism. The locale of my books might always be Southern, and the South always my homeland. I love the voices of Negroes — like brown rivers. I feel that in the short trips when I do go to the South, in my own memory and in the newspaper articles, I still have my own reality.

Many authors find it hard to write about new environments that they did not know in childhood. The voices reheard from childhood have a truer pitch. And the foliage — the trees of childhood — are remembered more exactly. When I work from within a different locale from the South, I have to wonder what time the flowers are in bloom — and what flowers? I hardly let characters speak unless they are Southern. Wolfe wrote brilliantly of Brooklyn, but more brilliantly of the Southern cadence and ways of speech. This is particularly true of Southern writers because it is not only their speech and the foliage, but their entire culture — which makes it a homeland within a homeland. No matter what the politics, the degree or non-degree of liberalism in a Southern writer, he is still bound to this peculiar regionalism of language and voices and foliage and memory. Few Southern writers are truly cosmopolitan. When Faulkner writes about the R.A.F. and France, he is somehow not convincing — while I’m convinced in almost every line about Yoknapatawpha County. In-deed, to me The Sound and the Fury is probably the greatest American novel. It has an authenticity, a grandeur and, most of all, a tenderness that stems from the combination of reality and the dream that is the divine collusion. Hemingway, on the contrary, is the most cosmopolitan of all the American writers. He is at home in Paris, in Spain, in America, the Indian stories of his childhood. Perhaps it is his style, which is a delivery, a beautifully worked out form of expression. As expert as Hemingway is at producing and convincing the reader of his various outlooks, emotionally he is a wanderer. In Hemingway’s style some things are masked in the emotional content of his work. If I prefer Faulkner to Hemingway, it’s because I am more touched by the familiar — the writing that reminds me of my own childhood and sets a standard for a remembering of the language. Hemingway seems to me to use language as a style of writing.

The writer by nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer. How, without love and the intuition that comes from love, can a human being place himself in the situation of another human being? He must imagine, and imagination takes humility, love, and great courage. How can you create a character without love and the struggle that goes with love?

For many years I have been working on a novel called Clock Without Hands, and will probably finish it in about two more years. My books take a long time. This novel is in process day by day of being focused. As a writer, I’ve always worked very hard. But as a writer, I’ve also known that hard work is not enough. In the process of hard work, there must come an illumination, a divine spark that puts the work into focus and balance.

When I asked Tennessee Williams how he first thought of The Glass Menagerie, he said it was suggested by a glass curtain he saw at the house of one of his grandfather’s parishioners. From then on it became what he called a memory play. How the recollection of that glass curtain fitted into the memories of his boyhood, neither he nor I could understand, but then the unconscious is not easily understood.

How does creation begin in any art? As Tennessee wrote The Glass Menagerie as a memory play, I wrote “Wunderkind” when I was seventeen years old, and it was a memory, although not the reality of the memory — it was a foreshortening of that memory. It was about a young music student. I didn’t write about my real music teacher — I wrote about the music we studied together because I thought it was truer. The imagination is truer than the reality.

The passionate, individual love — the old Tristan-Isolde love, the Eros love — is inferior to the love of God, to fellowship, to the love of Agape — the Greek god of the feast, the God of brotherly love — and of man. This is what I tried to show in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe’ in the strange love of Miss Amelia for the little hunchback, Cousin Lymon.

The writer’s work is predicated not only on his personality but by the region in which he was born. I wonder sometimes if what they call the “Gothic” school of Southern writing, in which the grotesque is paralleled with the sublime, is not due largely to the cheapness of human life in the South. The Russians are like the Southern writers in that respect. In my childhood, the South was almost a feudal society. But the South is complicated by the racial problem more severely than the Russian society. To many a poor Southerner, the only pride that he has is the fact that he is white, and when one’s self-pride is so pitiably debased, how can one learn to love? Above all, love is the main generator of all good writing. Love, passion, compassion are all welded together.

In any communication, a thing says to one person quite a different thing from what it says to another, but writing, in essence, is communication; and communication is the only access to love — to love, to conscience, to nature, to God, and to the dream. For myself, the further I go into my own work and the more I read of those I love, the more aware I am of the dream and the logic of God, which indeed is a Divine collusion.

Esquire, December 1959

“To put the influence of Jews in context keep in mind that the current population of the United States is 301 million, and although the estimated Jewish population in the USA varies considerably by source, 5.5 million is mid-range.

So Jews make up 1.8% of the United States population.

The current worldwide Jewish population is approximately 13 million, and the total world population is estimated to be over 6.5 billion, so that makes Jews 0.2% of the world population.

http://www.holology.com/who.html

I had no problem getting it up last Thursday, when I consulted a professional.

Keeping it up was disconcerting…

“It’s been awhile,” I said, “maybe I should ask my doctor for Viagra.”

“No, you’re fine,” she said, “it’s a habit, stop masturbating.”

It takes about three weeks to break a habit. We’ll see.

I feel like I lost my right hand.

I was thinking of getting a bumper sticker, “Writers Do It Quietly”.

Then I realized it should be “Actors Do It Out Loud and Writers Only Do It Quietly When They Are Writing”.

I decided to send this as a joke for an Asian friend of mine, Long Huyhn Droop, to use in his stand up comedy act at a bar in Shanghai.

Google didn’t translate it correctly and he got something like, “just shut the fuck up” instead.

Ironically, he penned a book called, “Shut the F–k Up”, a self help concept as a way of dealing with self doubt and he is now making tons of money leading empowerment courses for his publisher, High House.

Suffice it to say, it wasn’t the first time, nor apparently the last.

My mother’s frequent lamentations, when I was a toddler, that her life would have turned out fine if she’d avoided 1939, the year of my conception and birth, possibly led my brain to the certainty that I will die on or perhaps, shortly following my 39th birthday. Our brains might make this connection logical when we are that young and new to language.

Fate decided that on my 39th birthday, I was in a large hotel room that Stewart Emory and Associates had rented at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco with twenty nine other  volunteer “communicators” who assisted with enrolling participants in Stewart’s and Carol Augustus’ Actualizations workshop.

It was about 8pm and having returned from eating dinner together in Chinatown, we were seated in a big circle on the carpeted floor of our meeting room when I began to experience scotoma, vibrant, vibrating visual effects produced by constriction of capillaries that feed the retina, a common symptom at the onset of a migraine headache. The scotoma partially blinded me and I knew this would be followed shortly by excruciating pain and nausea. Anticipating this angered me.

I was enraged to have to be interrupted once again by this phenomenon. Without thinking, acting with tearful emotion, I stood up and surprised everyone and myself by declaring, “All my life I thought I was going to die at the age of 39! Today is my 39th birthday and now I’m practically blinded by a migraine!”

Stewart looked horrified, Carol looked like she expected me to jump through a window or drop dead, in any case leaving them with a liability lawsuit.

Instead, I said, “I don’t care whether or not I live through this year. I will not be deterred  by one more damn migraine headache!” I sat down again.

Someone beside me offered an aspirin and suggested I should lie down. “Did you not hear me! No! Just, continue. Please!” They did and I did and ever since, though I still get migraines starting with colorful scotoma, I never again experienced the pain that follows them. Isn’t that interesting? However…

I didn’t understand, when I gave up the pain of migraines, that to do this, a lot more was also set-aside. I didn’t know that to turn off the pain of migraines I had to exclude a class of memories: all extreme pain, including psychic pain, that pain associated with fear of loss of self and of self-esteem.

In fact, I had surrendered an enormous part of myself. It was in this way, like a death…

Americans were blind to racism in stories and characterizations of mainstream media during most of the 20th century and we are blind now to bias against older people in mainstream media. Our values are transparent, like the air we breathe. When a recent entrant in a field is over 50, even if he has 40 years of productive life ahead, he won’t be hired over a less experienced and less talented younger individual. The same is true of people of color who face economic biases but age bias is unique in the way it affects everyone who doesn’t die young.

If not now, one day, this will be important to you.

We live in a culture of many unexamined economic priorities. They show up as customary and they are discrimination. Age-related bias is now more prevalent in North America than is bias based on ethnic provenance. Albeit, racism is alive and well in some sectors, even among people of color, Agism is so common, it goes unnoticed. Agist jokes are far more prevalent than Polish or any other kind of ethnic slurs.

As a category, older people in America receive no consideration for career-oriented education, few employment or housing opportunities, less consideration in the design of entertainment and little consideration in everything related to standard of living and quality of life.

Like slaves resigned to bondage, people are conditioned to accept Agism when they are very young. The idea that to be old is to be infirm and mentally lame or rigid is a myth built into our language and fables, reflected in words and expressions, embodied in some of our greatest works of literature and drama.

Unlike other social value biases, Agism is a bias of a young person inflicted against their older self. It is like a suicide plan made in advance, analogous to ingesting a toxin, like arsenic, that accumulates over time until it’s too late when it strikes. When we’re young, striving to attain our dreams, reveling in hormonal excitement, we accept without consideration so much that we can’t know, happy to take a job from a person we believe is “over-the-hill”. We’ll gladly work for less and for the opportunity to show our skills. Meanwhile, that older person, having believed in age-related decline, refrained from a discipline of healthy exercise, perhaps, recovered from a brush with deadly illness, reluctantly steps-aside.

When we are young, we are conditioned to believe that at the age of 55 or 60, we will retire and enjoy the “twilight” of a life well lived despite the fact that this is counter-intuitive and not at all consistent with everything you see. Since the most pleasure in life is in participation and the most satisfaction from rewards for contribution, to benefit from having no possibility of monetary reward is an oxymoron. On the other side of this, the attitude that it is better to contribute nothing idealizes sloth and a life that makes no difference. It’s self-defeating.

A logical conclusion is that age-related bias (Agism) is a self-inflicted con on its perpetrators, akin to people of color biased against people of color, which, although this too is counter-intuitive, is hardly uncommon, when people of color expect protagonists in narratives to be white, teutonic types.

Agism affects the greatest number of people, with the worst effects and more kinds of discriminatory practice and ironically, it North Americans not citizens of European countries and worse than citizens of many lesser developed places. Moreover, agism affects people of every ethnic background in America ubiquitously: every economic status, ensuring exclusion from employment advancement, fewer housing opportunities; and as a consequence of greater health-related needs, older people receive the least competent medical attention.

While we cry out when similar bias is inflicted on categories of ethnicity and gender, discrimination against older people is a taken-for-granted fact of life in America in the same way that slavery was in the 18th century and child labor in the 19th century and the greatest effect is economic. There are reasons to suspect that the economic priorities of America that are destroying our society can be turned around by addressing the damaging elements of age-related bias.

For instance the projected productive work of a person over 50 is equal to the time a typical young person, who retires at 55 or 65, stays in a chosen field.

Assuming that a person who has lived 60 years, has the potential of 20 to 40 useful years ahead plus the advantage of 40 or more years of experience and education, even the most physical of jobs, for instance, a trapeze artist, if the artist stays in shape, unless injured, might be performed better. However, the more relevant likelihood is that the trapeze artist will become curious to try a new career that utilizes the experience and discipline of the trapeze and requires less physical prowess. Because of age-discriminatory hiring, it is next to impossible for an older man or woman to begin a career in a new field past 60, which defeats realistic ambition.

Conformism promoted in media addresses age-discrimination as a fact of life, as if remuneration for contribution isn’t important past 60 and this places less value on wisdom derived from experience. There’s one advantage: by eliminating older people from the workforce, jobs are made available for younger people at lower wages but the economy is collapsing and Agism may be the canary in the mine.

If the strategy of age-related hiring discrimination was working, the robust economy would make it unnecessary for congress to abrogate cost of living increases mandated in Social Security legislation during the last six decades.

Age bias eliminates career opportunities at 55, when people who have taken care of their health and have experience can look forward to 30 or more years of productive, creative practices and pursuits.

Even if the economy of America improves (doubtful on account of the double-bind of population growth and the mounting expenses of an aging population), this will effect your life no matter where you reside. It will affect you more immediately if you live in the United States. Everyone is subsumed into the category of age-related discrimination here. When you talk to older people confined in the warehouses optimistically called, “residential care,” “long term care” and “senior residences,” you hear resignation similar to the remarks of “happy” slaves on Thomas Jefferson’s 18^th century southern plantation. As people age in America, they are taught to pretend their fate was pre-ordained, as if discrimination was sanctioned by a higher power instead of custom.

Media is the greatest source of agist values. In the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, social scientists unraveled how societal values are formed in America. They observed that people absorb their core values in the 20^th century differently from earlier times. Much of this research has been used in commercial media, especially advertising and in propaganda for political campaigns at all levels. The most important key to American value formation was revealed in a book published in 1950 called, The Lonely Crowd. Amazingly this social science textbook, written by David Reisman, a scientist who had first been a successful lawyer, became a New York Times best-seller, selling 1.5 million copies in two years.

The kernel of Reisman’s study is that Americans were absorbing their core values from media but he also explains how and why and how this also makes us less absolute about our values and more likely to modify them based on images, symbols and ideas we’re exposed to in media and regarding these values we are less trusting of parents and other relationships. Circumstances, such as, childhood trauma complicate how the values we absorb from media lead to an array of behaviors, including unrealizable expectations in mating, marriage and child rearing, various forms of addiction and bizarre acts of violence.

While, the acceptance of the idea that older human beings are less capable of learning and participating than are their younger counterparts in the business, arts and economy of society, has also created an expense that cripples society and damages everyone, the primary value promoted in both commercial and noncommercial media has been promotion of youth. The piquant beauty of youthful beings of all kinds is a limbic response, which can be easily exploited.

The problem is that, in promoting and selling youth, commercial media instills with it, a negative view of maturity, which is then repeated in the culture. It’s not intentional but it’s the predictable outcome since, if it’s good to appear young and beautiful, older and wiser is to be avoided. In promoting youth, there’s a correlative pejorative created about non-youth. The same is true about promoting ideal physical proportions, or white skin over dark. Predominantly casting Anglo-Saxons as heroic protagonists gave the impression that the skin color of heroes is lighter. In the same way, youth is preferable to maturity.

While media is unwittingly complicit, the medical profession, which should know better, has been practicing age bias despite the science. (This may be the strongest argument for requiring that doctors be educated in the humanities, history and social sciences.) From scientific experiment, we believe that genetic information contained in our cells mutates after repeated iterations, producing observable physical effects but the way this occurs and the areas affected varies widely among individuals.

With respect to cognition, we now know that our brains contain many more cells than we use and recent science shows that areas of the brain can take over the tasks of other areas when they are damaged and thus mitigate or even enhance some effects of mutation. Some effects on cognition, which were previously assumed to be age-related, have turned out to be produced by lifestyle, pollutants and hormonal unbalance. New therapies defeat increasing numbers of specific mutational effects but there’s an economic reason why the mentality of the medical profession in America remains stuck in the 19th century.

The most lethal effect of age-related bias has been promulgated in the justice system in America, in which tort awards are the primary check against the excesses of the economically powerful against the poor.  There is a precedent that advises juries to quantify awards when a patient has died based on the percentage of a span of life lost by a victim based on span of income-producing life and the potential earnings lost. Thus, the parents of a 2 year old child of a middle class family, who dies on account of medical neglect or malpractice, will be entitled to compensation that interests attorneys in pursuing a lengthy case against a hospital’s well-heeled insurance company, while the children of a 72 year old field worker won’t find an attorney to help them since the “retired” 72 year old in this actuarial analysis, has not lost much.

Doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and medical product manufacturers can and frequently do get away with gross negligence and malpractice when an older citizen dies because intent to kill must be proved or there is no monetary damage large enough to interest an attorney. Ironically, even though lawyers, doctors and lawmakers must see their own vulnerability, they have accepted the personal risk in return for financial support from insurers.

Age-related bias is thus the greatest economic cost born by Americans.

Ironically, people are constantly told to exercise and to challenge their minds while the economic system and entertainment media constantly tell them they don’t count, they’re over-the-hill and in the way. By not ensuring a healthy, productive lifestyle for older people, the society incurs a huge cost because human beings suffer anxiety and depression when they feel they have no future worth living into and treating the symptoms and illness that results from depression is the greatest cost of medical care.

The depression that afflicts older people in America is not a product of aging but of lifestyle and it is known to lead to conditions that are expensive to treat.

An even greater loss to the contemporary American economy is the loss of the contribution of people with the most experience, knowledge and perspective.

A review of contemporary video games and other entertainment media will reveal little brilliant talent and expertise as compared with a similar review of comparable media from earlier decades when older artists, writers and producers were more prevalent in the entertainment industry than they are now. A look at recent Hollywood media shows this is nowhere more evident than among writers.

People who possess qualities of intellect, wit and perspective are critical to the economic health and development of any society. To discriminate against employment and education of older citizens denies the greatest number of potentially great artists, technicians and craftsmen and women.

Just as white Americans were blind to blatant racism in the dialogue, stories and characterizations of mainstream media during most of the 20th century, we are generally blind to matter of fact bias against older people in mainstream media and even AAU courseware. It is unnoticed, transparent, like the air we breathe, however, the idea that a recent entrant in this field, even if he has twenty or thirty years or more of professionally astute, productive life ahead, would be foolish to assume he’ll be hired over a younger, less experienced and far less talented individual. That’s the way it is today, just as people of color still face different economic opportunities.

This is important to me now and because, one day it will be just as important to you, I’m sharing with you what I’ve seen because it relates to the issue of careers available in media that depend on your circumstances more than your talent or ability.

We live in a culture of unexamined economic priorities that show up as discrimination. Extremes are less apparent in North America in comparison with Rio, San Juan and parts of Latin America, Asia, the middle-east and Africa, however, by dint of age, ethnic provenance and/or economic status people categorically receive few opportunities for education, health care, employment mobility, housing, entertainment and almost everything related to standard of living and quality of life in our culture. I’m paying attention to this because I feel that those, like me and you, who are privileged to participate have a greater obligation than just our own survival.

Agism is a discrimination that includes the greatest number of people that suffer the worst effects and more kinds of discriminatory practice and ironically, it affects people in North America far more than residents of European countries and lesser developed places. Moreover, agism affects people of every ethnic background in America, including the widest range of economic status, with highest degree of exclusion from employment advancement, fewest housing opportunities; and as a consequence of greater need, older people in general receive the least competent medical attention. While we cry out when bias is inflicted on categories of ethnicity and gender, discrimination against older people is a taken-for-granted fact of life in America in the same way that slavery was in the 18th century and child labor in the 19th century and the greatest effect is economic.

The future productive work life of a person over 50 is substantial and probably equal to the time a young person stays in the field.

Statistically, a person over 50 has the potential of twenty to fifty useful ahead of him/her plus the advantage of 30+ years of applicable experience and education, yet based on the discriminatory hiring practices, it is difficult and some would say, impossible for an older man or woman to begin a career in a new field. This circumstance definitely colors my outlook but I shall not let discriminatory practices and attitude prevent me from pursuing my wish to fully participate and contribute and share the wisdom of my experience.

An outstanding characteristic of age-related discrimination for you to consider now, is that the bias of agism will effect your life. Everyone in America, including those who will die young is affected. Everyone is eventually subsumed into the category of age-related discrimination. If you talk to older people who have been confined to the warehouses we call, “residential care” and “senior residential communities,” you will hear resignation that is like the parlance of “happy” slaves on Thomas Jefferson’s plantation. As people age in America, they are taught to pretend their fate was pre-ordained, as if discrimination was sanctioned by a higher power. But it isn’t.

Media is the unwitting source of agism.

In promoting and selling youth, commercial media validates the bias by instilling values that negatively condition views of maturity. It’s not intentional to implant such values but it’s the predictable outcome since, if it’s good to appear young and beautiful, it must be less good to be older and wiser. It seems obvious that by promoting youth, there is a correlative pejorative created about non-youth. The same argument is made about the negative effect of promoting ideal physical proportions, or white skin vs black. Predominantly casting Anglo-Saxons as heroic protagonists leaves the impression that the skin color of heroes is lighter. In the same way, youth is preferable to maturity.

While media is unwittingly complicit, the medical profession practices age bias in the face of science. This is the strongest argument for requiring that doctors be educated in the humanities, history and social sciences. Genetic information contained in our cells mutates after repeated iterations, producing observable physical effects but the way this occurs and the areas affected varies enormously among all individuals and our brains contain enormously more cells than we use and we now know that areas of the brain can take over the tasks of other areas when they are damaged and mitigate or enhance types and effects of mutation. There are even enhancements due to this mutation. The medical profession is beginning to think differently about aging because new therapies defeat increasing numbers of specific mutational effects but there are economic reasons why the mentality of the medical profession in America remains stuck in the 19th century.

Effects of agism are becoming the greatest direct economic expense in America.

The most lethal age bias occurs in U.S. courts of law, where juries are instructed to base awards for liability when a patient has died, not on the enormity of the neglect or malpractice that caused the loss of life or the pain inflicted on victims and families but instead on the percentage of a span of life that was lost based on actuarial tables and the economic status of those who suffer. The parents of a two year old child of a middle class family, who dies on account of medical neglect or malpractice, will be entitled to compensation that interests attorneys in pursuing a lengthy case against a hospital’s well-heeled insurance company, while the children and grand children of an 72 year old field worker won’t find an attorney. As a result, doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and medical product manufacturers can and do get away with murder. Ironically, even though lawyers, doctors and lawmakers must see their own vulnerability, they have accepted the personal risk in return for financial support from insurers.

Not ensuring a healthy, productive life for older people has a huge cost for society because human beings become depressed when they feel they have no future and treating the symptoms of depression is rapidly becoming the greatest cost of medical care and depression is now known to lead to other conditions that are very expensive to treat.

When I review the great variety of media produced these days, I don’t see all that much brilliance, knowledge, talent and expertise in most of the product. We need people who possess such qualities and statistically, to discriminate against employment of older citizens denies us a greater number of artists and craftspersons.