Oppenheim Arts & Letters

Published! For Kindle.

Oppenheim, James S.  A Younger Soul: Seven Short Stories.  Hagerstown, Maryland: Communicating Arts, 2013.

The busyness enabled by the web -- the Facebook thing and its 570 buddies; the several blogs; the unbridled span of artistic and intellectual interests -- finally staggered me, and the whole "Bertha-the-Printer" thing (she's checking herself out by spitting ink as I type) feels like the last straw: I've done enough for glory! My environment may be rich, but I seem to remain ever the bohemian rattling around inside of it. I haven't set down the cameras, far from that, but am more inclined to license images than print them (unless there's an order out there tall enough to cover the complete costs of the work and produce some pizza on the side), to continue shooting for fee (of course), and then, using Amazon's vendor program, to get started on the next e-book.

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Note: reblogged from Communicating Arts - The Journal.

Book Excerpt - Isak Dinesen on Islam and Feminine Beauty

When, on the farm, I was called upon to give judgment in matters between my Mohammedan people, I looked up rules and regulations in the manual of Mohammedan law, Minhaj et Taliban.  It is a thick and heavy, highly imposing book to have carried about with you, a surprising work as well to a North European mind in its taboos and recommendations, enlightening as to the Mohammadan view of life, infinitely detailed in its regulations on legal purity, prayer, fasting and distribution of alms and particularly upon woman and her position in the community of the Orthodox.  "The law," the classic states, "forbids a man to clothe himself in silk.  But a woman may wear clothes of silk and should do so whenever this be in all decency possible to her."  The Somali whom I knew did, however, wear silk, but Farah explained to me that they would do so only when outside their own country and in the service of other people--and surely my old valued friend Ali bin Salim of Mombassa, or the old Indian high priest who came to see me on the farm, wore but the finest and most delicate wools.  The book also lays down as law that a husband shall supply his wife not only with the necessary nourishment, lodgings and clothes, but that he shall also give her such and such luxuries, within his means, which are truly worthy of her and will make her truly value her husbaqnd.  "In the case, however," it adds, "of a woman of remarkable beauty, jurists may find themselves not entirely in accordance and will have to weigh the matter between them."  The very grave and somewhat pedantic book thus registers woman's beauty as an indisputable, juridical asset in existence.

Dinesen, Isak.  Shadows on the Grass.  30-31.  New York: Random House, 1961.

I've carried my library forward from childhood -- indeed, I have all of my Hardy Boys books around here -- and have most, possibly all, of the high school to college to graduate school complement plus the inheritance from father's smaller and perhaps ego-revealing collection with its small blue volumes of Shakespeare's plays and the cumbersome brown hardcovers of Durant's mighty strivings. 

With such an asset, something like a 19th Century gentleman's library, books may call to me from my own shelves, ensuring, as is the way of books, that they will be read when the time is right.

For mise en scene:the mansion (with a garden) inside a cabin inside an apartment in the countryside -- in fully voiced snoot, call it the northwest province of the Capital -- provides me my theater in the head.

As spring warms to summer, the cabin simile seems in force, and I am camped out in my own space: 'tis the season for sandals, light jeans, and Madras shirts.  For one or another of the many motives attending indulgence in books -- but trust me, with me, atmosphere counts! -- I managed to pull from the shelves Dinesen's book, Shadows on the Grass, an unread volume -- probably from my father's library as it has no penciled in price on the unadorned tan recto inside cover.

I thought I'd escape the Jihad, anti-Jihad, peace, and hate-peace crowds online.

Enough with religion!

I meant only to lay my leukemic fatigue-oscillating self on my bunk and travel a while in the tracks of an accomplished writer's memoir.

Hmm.

New Arrivals

It's not like I hadn't had other and perhaps more immediately enticing choices around the place.

From the perspective of my shelved books with their always visible spines and titles showing off (something else Kindle can't do), the odds of being chosen are a little better than 1:2,000 (because you know I'm not going to pick up, say, 501 French Verbs on a whim . . . but you never know), and down to brass tacks, I've new arrivals!

While Dinesen has me with her in Kenya, which seems to have a whole different relationship with Somalia today, Joyce Carol Oates' Zombie waits to the side.  Also: the final pages of On Rereading by Patricia Meyer Spacks (I borrowed a copy from the county library, and then purchased one for my own) and, for starting fresh, Spacks' annotated edition of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (no need to guess at the effects of reading On Rereading on that purchase). 

What awaits?

Among still recent arrivals:

Howard Bloom's The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History.

Erich Fromm's The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness -- this is another library-starter and owner-ender.

Marvin Harris's The Rise of Anthropological Theory.

James Carroll's Constantine's Sword.

Hrederick Smith's The Russians.

Maziar Bahari's Then They Came for Me: A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival.

From the last days of Borders: Dominic Tierney's How We Fight; Shannon D. Beebe and Mary Kaloor's The Ultimate Weapon is No Weapon: Human Security and the New Rules of War and Peace; and Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin's Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time.

That's not a complete list of unread volumes acquired within the past year or so, but from it, and the bit of extra data transmitted, on might see the many collisions involved in career focus, cyber-realspace relationships, intellectual motives, and so on.  Given the conditions of my constraints -- or I would not be typing from an apartment -- and the so many things to do (there will be whole sets of prints from my Antietam photography series and I'm still singing Tuesday nights down at the Georgia Boy Cafe on the south side of town), to read, and accomplish, one might also understand the irrestable urge (proven) to pull an old volume from a shelf, have the windows open to the rain, a Casablanca fan spinning slowly in the dining room, and to cast away into Kenya on Dinesen's prose and there encounter, first thing, the pleasant surprise of her comment on Islam in Somalia.

* * * * *

# # #

Excerpt on the Nature of Judgment- from Spack's _On Rereading_

"If we laugh at Miss Bates, we of course have done nothing wrong.  We are not on the scene; we do not insult anybody.  But we have briefly let amusement trump judgment, failing to make the kind of discrimination that Austen advocates and by subtle plot intricacies inculcates.  Rereading, we are more likely to realize that even a smile involves us imaginatively in Emma's error.  A crucial episode in Emma's moral education thus becomes an element in ours--and our education will continue through many rereadings.  It is an education, one might say, in the substance of civilization: the feelings and attitudes necessary to support the behavior of civilized human beings, who avoid the barbarity of willfully hurting others."

Spacks, Patricia Meyer.  On Rereading.  P. 62.  Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.

The multiple dimensions encountered in literary educations and experiences include the detection, definition, and internalization of social norms and manners.  Such now strikes me as a thing dearly obtained.

Start off the web, for one thing, with leisured time, a peaceful room, a body content with its health and neutral state, and then the book, whichever one whose author, cover, and cachet have from the library shelf spoken to the reader.

Calls may be returned.

E-mail can wait.

Turn a page.

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Photography - Snaps - Spring 2012

Those who may wish to follow my photography may do so via my Flickr account.

For the most part, I've been carrying a Panasonic Lumix Lx5 "point-and-shoot" with an extension on it for both UV and Circular Polarizing filters (although the shot below was made with a Nikon D2x) and taking snap shots as I go through the routines of my day.

Of course I would like to travel, and you may imagine, whether armed with a Nikon DSLR or the Panasonic Lumix, what I might come up with in fresh surrounds.  Truly, I love the garden I have on the balcony and still find something to shoot down at Fairgrounds Park, which I have to walk around some for health, but I've got that urge to be somewhere else.

Advancing age, declining health -- but not so bad at this time -- uncertain financing, although I might say "steady as she goes" with my lifestyle (my propensity for Amazon book purchases and Orvis wear notwithstanding, and not to mention my getting in decent coffee and a good bottle of wine now and then), and just plain old cussed bachelor singleness (not that I haven't deserved it) gets into the mix and the thought of just walking around somewhere just to walk about -- or, worse, dine with the wine and steak in a strange town -- leaves me a bit flat.

My pony, call it the "Silver Mustang 2000" (with chrome bullits and 16-inch Eagle RSAs) sits in the lot, ever ready to be driven to other than work, the coffee shop, the park, and the grocery store.

How did this happen!?

I am quite aware "in here" that there is an "out there" out there.

Most of "out there" I import through books and through the web, but neither complete a soul: we need our small adventures in realspace too. 

I've never failed to find a picture, perhaps "the picture", in my vicinity, but I have had a hard time latching on to compelling subjects, whether "Gardens Down the Road" -- one of the photography themes started and abandoned here (the category's listed to the left) but available for revisiting -- or events fit for "coverage" at a local or regional (road warrior) level.

And it has been years since I've worked with models!

What a shame.

I've become the "Accidental Dilettante".

Not that I am not enjoying it -- the truth is I never imagined being able to be myself, finally, until just about . . . now.

End of a Digital Era

Anyone remember the Univac?  PC Junior?  Kaypro?  Pong?  Mosaic?  "Nutscrape"?  Those 5.25-inch "floppies" from America Online?

I may have been the last--very close to it--in 1985 to have run a deck of 80-column cards through the University of Maryland's mainframe, or to have worked up a thesis on it using its plain text editor (ASCII), DOS commands, and paper chained through a printer by sprockets.

Here is the end of another digital era.

Between the composing of more than 250 WordPerfect macros back when (yes, I confess: I lived in the present and I believed it would last!) and this day where more than 60 advertisements, world news headlines, notices (some real, some scammy) arrive in my e-mail inbox each morning -- from the Daily Beast to Mediabistro to The Los Angeles Times to Orvis and Pendleton,  I delete them en masse while searching for that special something one might call "actionable personal mail" -- a bit of bureaucratize referring to the rare gift of a letter one might respond to as one person to another -- I have seen The Digital Revolution (not televised), and may say, "It is done."

I am leaving its avant garde, however deeply entwined my existence may be with my blogs, portals, Facebook accounts (why struggle with just one?), and the online vendors that like small virtual pirahna school around my e-mail address primarily to chew on my wallet.

I had hoped to network to work and with that objective obtained, telecommute to it too; I had hoped to build my brand for works of mind and soul, wihch I am sure I've done "posterbating" up some 30,000 (or more) notes (from personae photographer) to the likes of models.com, modelmayhem.com, and zoetrope.com (back when my comments were brilliant for hewing close to an ambitious aesthetic experience and my English still colorful).

I had hoped for sales.

Writer - Musician - Photographer

Ah, the bohemian glamour . . . .

So I look around to find I have a couple of short stories online here (though I've never seen them "hit") but not a volume of them, much less a bound one.

In music: well . . . now that's realspace! 

Here in Hagerstown, I have found not only a congenial and mildly ambitious community of amateurs and professionals but have even been gigging at The Georgia Boy Cafe at Park Circle for a couple of months -- oh smell that fresh air -- also the beer and the fried shrimp! 

It's a good thing, but . . . my last set of recordings are on DAT with a friend who seems to have lost the wherewithal for recovering them from their hideaway in his basement, and in the digital marketplace, I've yet to create my "ReverbNation" account and join again another virtual fray.

In photography: last year, this using Fine Art America, one somebody I don't know bought a postcard, an Antietam photo that may have reminded him of home in that it was the Piper Farm, a working private inholding, and so helped me produce from the sale of a single 5x7 inch print a gross profit of $1.

There has been yet this other wrinkle of a writer's life engaged in war and peace, would that I would read Tolstoy's damned thing already, and, oh my, has that sprawled across the globe, a fine spatter of impossibly naive comments from the early days -- around 2006 when "blogging" plus access to foreign news in English translation became available at Everyman's Desktop, mine at least -- to a virtually existential (um, how does that work?) knock-down, drag-out over Israel.  The first thing I wanted to know was why Greenpeace and others weren't hot on cleaning up the littoral mess in Somalia . . . .

Now I have friends who want me to "cover" -- well, at least comment on -- the latest in assassination or "intellicide" in Rawalpindi.

Borrowing Joni Mitchel's classic line, I once sang "real good for free" (still do but, but little by little, there are more and more paid nights out on the calendar) -- now, from conflict analysis to economic development, everybody gets a little "real good for free" (from outside my old primary focus areas too, although I've built my own university-grade library, and thanks to Amazon and half-decent bodily and financial health, may catch up with the histories of remote locales given appropriate interest and incentive).

Since the advent of the World Wide Web -- let's really kick it off with the aptly named "Mosaic" experience to which I was introduced at the Office of Naval Research in 1995 (a hire made not long after posting on AOL about a screenplay involving "the assassination of unconscienable business people by a small middle-class terrorist cell") -- novelty and hope have served for motivation: we could float our personalities and resumes out across the (English language) universe with hopes of being somebody else's dream, a somebody who might, could, and would do us some good.

The Mosaic Era passed into web history about 16 years ago.

In retrospect, I might say it changed my life experience but did not improve the fundamentals of the same, which is not its fault alone but nonetheless part of a deeper and perhaps now more difficult situation in the realm of failed expectations, for not only have I blogged and posterbated up a first-class storm -- a writer writes, so one might expect as much from one of the breed -- but by doing so, I've also elected to support a daunting array of time devouring social contexts and relationships in correspondence, online showmanship, punditry, and reportage.

Now I've a signal that wants to keep old girlfriends (whom I thought I'd never "see" again) happy when I put in facetime on Facebook.

Now I've a signal that confronts the anti-Semitic internationalist mindset in Ramallah while also seeking to improve lives in places as different (and perhaps alike) as Quito, Mogadishu, and Port Moresby.

Then too, albeit without explicit reference, that same starving signal, Out There and influencing other minds from time to time, chatyping at about 80-WPM, hunting and gathering throughout the the digital mosaic of the world (in English) from which it may generate a few thoughts of its own has been also depleted, dissipated, wrecked on distractions flickering endlessly, mindlessly, vacuously across the Internet.

Truly, speaking but for myself, the online honeymoon is over.

The thrill is gone.

My eyeballs have been captured, my reserves tapped, my existence undoubtedly and multiply profiled and mapped, aggregated with the similar data of dozens to hundreds to thousands to millions of others for the appreciative delectation of advertisers and enshadowed and lurking others.

Whatever the industrial and perhaps political interests involved in the creation of my life online, I'm sure I have done my part "real good for free", and, baby, having come this long way, I'm going back down the mountain.

 # # #

In Stone -- _In the Memory of the Forest_

"World War II 1939-1945: Under Nazi rule, six million Polish citizens, many of them Jews, are murdered."

Between the covers of the Penguin paperback edition of Charles T. Powers' 1996 novel In the Memory of the Forest, that above might be both the only and most egregious sentence in the volume, and praise be the Gods for this excellent book, the author is innocent of having written it.

For the record, the Holocaust took about six million Polish lives, three million of them Jewish, and in demographic terms, the latter figure has represented 90 percent (or more) of Poland's Jewish community as it existed before the Holocaust.

What that diminishing sentence tells about, however, may be the delicate matter of being "balanced" or "politically correct" about a history that has left Poland a now long haunted land, and that not least so by the memories of the horrific decisions made in the blood dimmed duress promoted by both Soviet and German barbarism.  Powers' novel finds as much sustained by modern Poles in the ghosts that have lived through them by way of legacy as well as those that have dwelled within individual memory of family identity, old relationships, legends, and secrets.

For readers who percieve Russia still up to its mid-20th Century tricks, albeit by way of thugocrats; who sniff the east European air and find in it the faint sharp reminders of local anti-Semitic brutality--or, perhaps worse, a quaint but vicious second buriel in efforts to restore Jewish life as an artifact best suited to eternal confinement by way of library, museum, and scholarlyl notes--In the Memory of the Forest well illustrates a still living, still unfolding, still engaged and engaging national story.

What to do with so much ugly baggage?

As Hitchens would go on to say by way of praising Orwell and Orwell hiimself might have said through Powers to a contemporary audience: "Face it."

My friends at our local monthly "Books and Bagels" circle will ask, "Is it a Jewish book?"

My answer would and will be that it is both a fine novel in the guise of a rural detective story as well as one much about our own times in which the Polish national experience and its legacy not only may rediscover old neighbors and sometimes uncomfortable truths but has been doing so slowly, painfully, joyously, unevenly.

Credit British photographer Richard Schofield with this image of a public school wall built partially with the grave stones taken from a a Jewish cemetary (reference: Kotz and Schofield 2011).  Schofield's own web states, "I'm an Englishman currently involved in a number of projects in the former USSR that include both the taking and collecting of photographs. My photographic practice focuses primarily on the veiled peculiarities of everyday life in all its splendid forms" (http://www.richardschofieldphotography.com/).  Indeed, memory and ghosts are what "straight photography" have often been about.  (Photo republished here with the photographer's permission).

Reference

Hitchens, Christopher.  Why Orwell Matters. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

Kotz, Dovid and Richard Schofield.  "Old Stones Speak to Young Pupils: Jewish Gravestones in the Walls of a Vilnius School Yard."  Defending History.com, December 10, 2011.

Powers, Charles T.  In the Memory of the Forest.  New York: Penguin,1997.

The Polish Jews Heritage - Geneology Research Photos Translation.

Wikipedia.  "Charles T. Powers". 

Related

Cowell, Alan.  "A Poet on Deadline, a Traveler Who Left Too Soon."  The New York Times, July 4, 1997.

Gordon, Julie.  "Polish drama "In Darkness" sheds light on Holocaust.  Reuters Entertainment, September 14, 2011.

Marzynski, Marian.  Shtetl.  DVD.  PBS, Frontline.

McIntyre, Mary.  "The Ghosts of Europe: Journeys Through Central Europe's Troubled Past and Uncertain Future by Anna Porter." Book review.  Washburn Island: Memoir of A Childhood, March 4, 2011.

Oliver, Myrna.  "Charles T. Powers; Won Awards as Times Reporter."  Los Angeles Times, October 3, 1996.

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.  Image Before My Eyes: A History of Jewish Life in Poland Before the Holocaust.  DVD. 

Vasager, Jeevan and Julian Borger.  "A Jewish renaissance in Poland: There are signs that Poles are discovering their lost Jewish heritage and that antisemitism is in decline."  The Guardian, April 6, 2011.

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Photography: Pricing Up, Limiting Production

Reposted from my Fine Art America Blog: http://fineartamerica.com/blogs/consideration-for-price-up-and-print-run-limited.html

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Consideration for Price Up and Print Run Limited

November 9th, 2011 - 09:07 PM

I confess to neglecting my Fine Art American showcase. Of the reasons why, the nagging question as to whether this venue can or will pull the sales I want (while I'm out playing with a camera or at my computer playing with Lightroom) for each gallery conceptualized has been foremost. For one who has been in and around fine art and art making across a lifetime (creative writing, singing and songwriting, photography -- and for kicks, some waltzing and two-stepping besides), working each art several relationships outside the self, the first being with God and nature: it's good, no, great, playing a guitar and singing to perfection whether or not anyone else happens to be around: just me and you, God, and, by the way, thank you for the chops and the voice.

The same may apply to looking at things--being within and exploring environments visually; sometimes importing objects and working with them in studio conditions--until they look either their best or strange; and I suppose working a character in language, something I haven't done for a while, has also its deeply focused and immersive character. Still, however indulged by fate and indulgent by inclination, artists who have talent, who stick with it, whatever they do, may get awfully good with their tools, and it's natural to wish to seduce the reader, listener, or viewer of the work.

If it engaged me--if it appears here, it did--I wonder did it engage you? And what does that mean to you?

I understand perfectly the compulsion to produce beautiful and fine things, to rest a while in a lovely mystery. I'm less certain of the motives for collecting work with one exception: the owner's appreciation of the exclusive possession of exceptionally expressive works that may engage intimately, if very good and near ineffable, or ineffable, or with a pleasing effect on surrounds. A fair part of what I do may suit for commercial or personal decor, e.g., all those cream-toned garden photos: put them on canvas and hang them in the coffee shop or along the hallway leading to sauna, sun room, or conference room. Then there's work that's not particularly happy or pretty but should have its effect near close to a nexus involving subject, culture, and time or history: that's where I would place the Antietam series. Priced as they are: tourist momento for a boy's room. But say I priced the same at $950 each and sold them at one specified size and removed them from this market after 15 sales?

With a few of the Antietam images, I've produced my own archival ink jet works on 13x19 sheets, but I've been struggling with a miserably cantankerous printing unit, HP's B9180, infamous for its challenges as well as the superb results on gets when, as another photographer said, "it decides to work." My objective is to replace the printer, resume custom production, and move on; for the time being, for most assured printmaking,my work is here, and I'm inclined to control the size of the print, raise my margin, and arbitrarily limit the number of sales per image from Fine Art America.

The more atmospheric and sentimental work: perhaps that should be priced for those who might make a business expense deduction of it.

Whatever I do--for sure, I'm going to continue producing art for a long, long time--I'm not hanging around or hanging out for the ten bucks.

# # #

A Note on Photography at Antietam National Battlefield Park

Reposted from my Fine Art America blog: http://fineartamerica.com/blogs/a-note-on-photography-at-antietam-national-battlefield-park.html

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A Note on Photography at Antietam National Battlefield Park

March 7th, 2011 - 01:56 PM

Web search "Antietam tranquil" and your search utility will return an appropriate page right quick, but "tranquil" though it be, "haunted" yet may be more like the truth. In the vicinity of the property illustrated in the photo accompanying this note, " . . . William Roulette had over 700 soldiers buried on his farm. Grave markings were haphazard; stone piles, rough-hewn crosses and wooden headboards . . . ." [1]. Even if thoroughly reinterred in the Washington Confederate Cemetary at Rosehill Cemetary in Hagerstown, Maryland, their presence seems yet to me within the land.

Supporting the character of the 19th Century landscape and its history have been the efforts of battlefield preservationists. This note comes from Tom Clemens writing for Civil War News: " . . . not only is Antietam the best preserved battlefield in the East, and possibly in the National Park Service, but it is a model of national, state and private partnership" [2]. That the park is quiet and its landscape from many positions and perspectives minimally altered by evidence of the 20th Century, much less our 21st, has come about through deliberate effort to keep it so.

Reference

1. WHILBR. "Confederate Soldiers Who Died in Maryland."
2. Clemens, Tom. "Success at Antietam." Civil War News, December 2009.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Electronic Attention Deficit Disorder Revisited

I'd like to say, "I'm done with the Internet."

However, for writers, photographers, and musicians, not to mention everyone else chatyping online, one cannot be done with it: one may only corral or shape the character and stretches of time spent working on and uploading art, if any, and then time engaged n community with one's cohort, co-hobbyists, co-religionists, co-inhabitants of cyberspace.

And corraling and shaping time are what I'm doing.

More than "time online" may be involved here, although time online may include myriad endeavors, good and sinful or both at once, but in aggregate, they have this common feature: every page, every YouTube clip, each and every Facebook interaction, as advertisers well know, every single web search, fractures time if not slicing open presumptions about privacy, and if that, then that too.

After a while, one wants to get through the meal, not work on its enjoyable contributing parts across time: the shopping list, the shopping, the setting out, and the slicing and dicing and baking, braising, frying, and roasting.  That would be too much, and, well, one has to check one's e-mail, or the latest order in transit with UPS, or work one something at the desktop, including working on working.

The cut may go deeper.

There may be, for example, the movie you're about to watch shadowed by all the other potential movies Netflix suggests you watch.

And who has time to watch that movie anyway?

There are so many other things to do -- and we're doing them!

At our computers, or with computing devices, including phones, and online.

Let me not stop with this bleating about info-gluttony and the web's cornucopia:

It has been proven that sedentary lifestyles are an important cause of mortality, morbidity and disabilities.  According to preliminary results of a study from WHO on risk factors, sedentary lifestyles are one of the 10 fundamental causes of mortality and disability in the world.  Information from that organization reveals that approximately two million deaths can be attributed each year to lack of physical activity.  (From LatinSalud.com: http://en.latinsalud.com/articulos/00621.asp).

From Wikipedia:

A sedentary lifestyle and lack of physical activity can contribute to or be a risk factor for:

• Anxiety^[3][4][5]
• Cardiovascular disease^[6][7]
• Mortality in elderly men by 30% and double the risk in elderly women^[8]
• Deep vein thrombosis
• Depression^[3][5]
• Diabetes^[3]
• Colon cancer^[3]
• High blood pressure^[3][9]
• Obesity^[10][11]
• Osteoporosis^[3][12][13]
• Lipid disorders^[3]
• Kidney stones

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedentary_lifestyle

While here I'm working on scaring myself (oh: that translates to something like "helping others in similar straits"), ways forward may have their own razor wire, starting with turning the romantic's wan melancholia into something a little more positive and energizing so that for each mouse potato there is something "out there" to go out there too.

I'm fortunate to have some options with music plus a fine community of local musicians with whom to play -- in fact, I think music may yet be the thing that saves me from a completely dismal end -- but one needs more than that, and with age (and serious enough illness plus a kind of circular and silly psychology engaged in this), the challenge may rise some: out for a run, a jog, a walk?  How about a pony ride (AKA Mustang) to a decent restaurant and a decent meal where someone else has been paid to list, shop, assemble, slice, dice, bake, braise, fry, and roast? 

Now you talkin' my lingo.

That silly psychology: the more quiet the life, it seems the more one wants more quiet; the more one enjoys that good meal out, well, the more sojourns in restaurants one may want.

Sitting still and eating really well: the habit of either really can turn out deadly.

So here I set out two or three continuing problems and issues:

• 1) the natural subdividing of time associated with computers, really cool software, and virtual mind-to-mind opportunities for research and, clinically and formally speaking, engaging with others in something approaching the full suite of mankind's social activities and communicating behavior, all of which may make it difficult to spend three or four hours of a day in thrall to a book or a small project in the arts--we need to focus, and part of "focus" has to do with shutting out (and shutting down) distractions;
• 2) the development of physical lifestyles congruent with the overall investment in electronics for communicating, entertainment, and research, for whether watching market tickers in realtime while managing trades, or attending online events involving realtime chatyping or, coming to us hoi poloi real soon, group Skype, every hour may cheat one of responding to the necessity of enjoying the body in nature--God must bless those who golf, but there are many other things one may do as age climbs;
• and, as with all change, 3) the necessity of producing a higher level of energy or energized state to overcome an inertia defined by the introduction of multiple electronic devices and alterations in physical lifestyles enabled or inspired by them, and that to the effect that they serve us and our health and longevity a great deal more than we serve them!

Want to get away?

I do.

I'm going out for a walk.

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# # #

Excerpt From a Note on My Ageing

Shared this morning with a correspondent:

 . . . but you have kept yourself from becoming part of an  . . . organization in which there would be many other social structures and "fish feeding" rewards (I'm thinking about how fish rise to the top of the tank when the owner scatters food on the water).

 Perhaps taking a good step back from the field would be best.

 

I've noticed that instead of churning out prints, songs, and short stories, or their equivalent for our communicating environment, I've been (love this old word) "posterbating" all over the place and on myriad topics.  Given my immediate circumstance, it's not really exhausting, but there gets to be a "what's the point" to it: my time on earth is passing; my cancer's not going away; I'm running down my reserves; and while I may be doing many things to attract interest, I'm not right now engaged in serving a paying client or audience.  I'm just back in the barracks looking over the news, typing an opinion, reading a book, tidying up, and on some evenings going out to get out and thanking God I have a gift in music for doing that.

 

This must be mentioned: having gone through some initial "man-oh-pause" and the onset of the CLL/SLL leukemia, I've come to understand the meaning of "reduced drive" (that other category is working fine, but the career-climbing thing is definitely off its feed): I understand, as a man might, the retirement concept.  There comes this day when we wish to put on nice clothes, go for a long drive, have a good supper our, and return home to a well kempt place with a den for serious hibernating.

 

I don't think I'm that far gone.

 

However, the urge to get a passport and fly out to Mogadishu to "witness" starvation and political chaos firsthand seems to me somebody else's property.  It's past 10 a.m., I'm wearing a robe, a now just warm cup of coffee beside the mouse -- very cool!  :)  I just don't have the "jones" for the commute and office, the campus and the kiddies, or the pursuit of magazine fame.

 

What I would like to do is settle into some creative composition process -- writing, music, photography -- and let the world pass by while I create new material.

 

I want to go back ten years, or more, but in the environment and with the resources I have today and on the schedule dictated by whatever mix of biology and circumstance happen to contain me.

 

You might have a snappy quick response (or denial) that age has nothing to do with the perception of whatever mission or work we have put on our own plates, but I think it does.

 

Even transitioning in my forties, I felt the earth a thing reaching up to grab my ankles and slow me down.

 

If we follow that metaphor, the last things to go will be my mouth, my ears, and my eyes.

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