A Marine's view of being an artist (in this case, a writer)

Excerpt from "The War of Art" by Steven Pressfield:

"The Marine Corps teaches you to be miserable.

"This is invaluable for an artist.

"Marines love to be miserable. Marines derive a perverse satisfaction in having colder chow, crappier equipment, and higher casualty rates than any outfit of dogfaces, swab jockeys, or flyboys, all of whom they despise. Why? Because these candy-asses don't know how to be miserable.

"The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation.

"The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell."

Benefits and Fringes

After making reservations for this year's An Irish Evening benefiting United Cerebral Palsy, what to do with a recent $100 gift from Amazon?  Buy some stuff to support the economy, of course:

Nothing: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions), by Frank Close
Green Roof Plants: A Resource and Planting Guide, by Edmund C. Snodgrass, Lucie L. Snodgrass
From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, by Sean Carroll
Planting Green Roofs and Living Walls, by Nigel Dunnett, Noël Kingsbury
Wasabi Peas 5 lbs. (80 oz.), Sold by: JR Mushrooms & Specialties

I'll put off purchases of Rejcha, Vranický and Dolly Freed's Possum Living until another day.

For some reason, all of this got me thinking about Karl Haas, a former host of a classical music program, "Adventures in Good Music."  I always wondered what happened to him and just discovered today that he died in 2005.  A great loss.  He often remarked that the variety of lifestyles of his listeners kept him going.  We should all be so lucky, to impact people across the spectrum of living.

Piled To The Rafters

More books than I know what to do with.  Books given to me from my parents (mainly from my father's youth [special notes about the book or handwriting inside the book is detailed in brackets]), in no particular order:

• Kingdom Songs, The choicest hymns and gospel songs of all the earth, for general use in church services, Sunday schools, and young people's meetings, edited and compiled by I.E. Reynolds and Robert H. Coleman, published by Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, Nashville, Tenn., (c) 1921
• The Music Hour, Two-Book Course, Upper Grades, (c) 1934, 1938, by Silver Burdett Company
• The Modern Hymnal, copyright page missing [from Central Baptist Church, Fountain City, TN]
• Bible Picture ABC Book, by Elsie E. Egermeier, (c) 1924, 1939 by Gospel Trumpet Company [To Richard Capps/Hill, "From Mam-maw, Christmas 1942"]
• Billy Graham Campaign Songs, Singing Evangelism, Compiled by Cliff Barrows, (c) 1950 by the Rodeheaver, Hall-Mack Company
• Blaze of Noon, by Ernest K. Gann, (c) 1946 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc.
• On The Bottom, by Commander Edward Ellsberg, (c) 1928, 1929; (c) 1944 by Dodd, Mead & Company [from Springfield Hospital, Springfield, Mass.]
• Victory Through Air Power, by Major Alexander P. De Seversky, (c) 1942 by Simon and Schuster
• Aerial Warfare, The Story of the Aeroplane as a Weapon, by Hal Goodwin, (c) 1943 by The Garden City Publishing Co., Inc.
• Queen of the Flat-Tops, The U.S.S. Lexington and the Coral Sea Battle, by Stanley Johnston, (c) 1942 by E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc. ["The information herein has been inspected by the Office of Censorship, which found no objection."]
• Daniel Boone, Master of the Wilderness, by John Bakeless, (c) 1939, published by William Morrow & Company
• War Planes of all Nations, by William Winter, (c) 1943 [from USS Casa Grande - LSD 13]
• Bob and Alf Taylor, Their Lives and Lectures, The Story of Senator Robert Love Taylor and Governor Alfred Alexander Taylor, by Paul Deresco Augsburg, (c) 1925 by Morristown Book Company, Inc.
• The Philosophy of the Christian Religion, by Andrew Martin Fairburn, M.A., D.D., LL. D, (c) 1902 by The MacMillan Company ["Thelma Eldridge Senior 1934," Carson Newman]
• Masters of English Literature, Volume I, Edited by Paul Spencer Wood, (c) 1947
• English Writers, Revised Edition, (c) 1940 by Tom Peete Cross, Reed Smith, Elmer C. Stauffer, and Elizabeth Collette in the Philippine Islands ["Jean Raulston"]
• Someone Cares, The Collected Poems of Helen Steiner Rice, (c) 1972 by Fleming H. Revell Company ["To Rick with love from Nana, Christmas 1980"]

To paraphrase a popular saying, I don't have time to die - I have too many books to read!

Insufferable Bastards: The New Untouchables

In news that would startle even the most hardened Hollywood critics, anonymous authorities have revealed that the assassination in Dubai, contrary to common beliefs, was not carried out by agents of Mossad on behalf of the Israeli government.

No, my sources tell me, we live in a pre-post-post-sarcastic-modern era.  With a need to drum up sales for the DVD release of "Inglourious Basterds" and the upcoming cinematic release of a Matt Damon flick, producers of both movies hired professional assassins as a publicity stunt (see Kevin Smith and Michael Moore for similar acts of poor taste).  Apparently, the assassins were given a list of possible targets, including some key opponents of Western entertainment imperialism.  More news as this story develops!

Speaking of Western ideology, another source tells me that Iranian leaders have been using Hollywood/Bollywood entertainment promoters for years to create, print, publish and distribute idolatry images of the leaders in order for the leaders to avoid the issue of directly disobeying Mohammedan anti-idolatry teaching.  In lockstep, the Revolutionary Guards have become their own version of a cross between the irreverent inglorious bastards and the Nazi SS, crossing any and all religious/civil lines in order to meet their dastardly ends.  O, Canada, where's Dudley Do-Right when we need him, besides cleaning up the mess behind the U.S. Vice President Joe "I Like the Taste of Shoe Leather" Biden in British Columbia?

I learned the supposed origin of the word "snob":  s.nob. - sine nobilitate.  According to the folks at Oxford, such etymology ain't right.  Even so, there are those who fill the bill no matter how they quack or the colour and size of their plumage.

Speaking of interesting ideas, to show I am willing to give voice to those whose opinions greatly differ from mine, I share with you the title of a book that negates all I've been taught to believe: It's A Young World After All.  Given to me my Phyllis and John J. (neighbours and work colleagues of ours - Phyllis a computer programmer and John a physicist, I believe - they moved to Europe many years ago, John working for NATO in Brussels at that time).  Many in the Huntsville community, including those with advanced college degrees, hold to the same opinion, taking a literal view of Biblical teaching (including bushes that talk and astrological signs of stars from the East, notwithstanding the secular likeness).

So, if a community like this, with rocket scientists and missile fin designers, contains a mix of liberals, conservatives, Bible believers, atheists, and housing estate developers, all who depend and believe in large part on public funding of space exploration, how do we convince them to convert to a belief in support of private funding of space exploration?  Mr. Griffith, you have the floor to answer that question!

Quote for the day (from "Toward a Philosophy of History," by Ortega y Gasset, p. 196):

"Naturalism is, at bottom, intellectualism, i.e., the projection on to the real of the mode of being peculiar to concepts."

I have a pile of books to read and yet want to add others to the bottom of the pile for more analysis and comparison of this historic moment to other historic moments to remember in the next one, including books authored by Hegel, Comte, Leibnitz, Fichte, Henri Bergson and the Eleatics (Xenophanes, Parmenides and Zeno) as well as some Chinese, Indian and Middle Eastern authors I've neglected too long (including a rereading of Confucius' words).  If the conservative movement is a snowball rolling downhill, I want to be informed of its composition before it inevitably turns into an avalanche so I can determine if we're moving into the Ice Age (meaning I'm about to be crushed by a glacier) or just exactly what's causing my ears to perk up at the edges of private conversations in public about hooded knights meeting in woods once again.  The times, they are a'changin' and I want to be packed up and ready to move if the new kind of change ain't what I signed up to be an adult for.

How do we safely accelerate the private space business, anyhow?  I'll take the next rocket to anywhere anytime soon!

Pick A Dilly Of A Dalliance, Mrs. Dalloway

Let the dead die intravenously.  Let them soak in their solace alone.  Let the lives of those who wander the planet with nothing in the way of commercially-viable victual-earning credits worry about weather or whether the ether will either let them live or weather their bones to nothing.

More books on the loan shelf:

• In Praise of Idleness and other essays by Bertrand Russell
• The Way: An Anthology of American Indian Literature, edited by Witt & Steiner
• British Women Writing Fiction, edited by Abby H. P. Werlock
• Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
• History as a System and other essays toward a philosophy of history by José Ortega y Gasset
• A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

 We whittle our blocks of wood, we crochet our coils of yarns, we carve our symbols onto stone, and yet...

Yet, where are we going?  What's it all about?

A CD:

• Cikada String Quartet, in due tempi

More books:

• "And Another Thing... Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Part Six of Three" by Eoin Colfer
• "A History of Pi" by Petr Beckmann
• "Eats, Shites and Leaves, Crap English and How to Use It" by A. Parody
• "Bathroom Reader [22nd Edition]"

Piles of pylons piling up in the writings of Ernie Pyle.  Studying humour across the hummus-eating bodies of our species.  Reading much but little into what we write.  Seeing even less in who wins or loses a match, much less a match for the ages.  Getting just as much meaning out of the temperamental changes in our cyclical weather changes as what the plants in my yard say about what's going to happen next summer, knowing they really only reflect what happened in previous seasons past but recording their forecasts for fun's sake along with a small bottle of saké.

The movements are not mine to make or take away.  The movements to observe are yours to own and make anew.

So England beats Wales and Ireland wins while the Colts falter in the land of Little Cuba and the Saints go marching back to a perfect storm of a tickertape Mardi Gras parade that leads to Lent and then St. Valentine's Day.  What of cricket for India, Pakistan, and Australia this year?  What of the worldwide gathering of futbol players in South Africa?  Is there still a good chocolate shop in Vancouver to recover one's wishes for health and happiness after a poor showing in the mountainous Olympic mismatches nearby?  What day is it, again?

Why did Avocent accept a ~$25/share bid by Emerson and APC let itself go by the wayside for Schneider Electric?  Why was I not able to exercise options above $35?  Lack of vision.  Lack of clarity.  Leadership wanting someone else to lead for a while.  Forgotten deals and forgotten feelings.  Does anyone remember the cost of the Boer Wars?  Does anyone have an accurate count of the bodies thrown aside to create the empires of Russia, India, China and the United States.  Is anyone keeping count of the back-and-forth slaughter on the African continent?  Why is there no one left to speak for the people of Machu Pikchu?

Did I tell you about the time I worked for General Electric in their Aerospace Division where we designed test equipment (acronym: CASS) for the Navy?  Do you know why I have a jaded sense of trust of government contracts in general?  Because of the way the CASS contract was [wink-wink] agreed to, with the government paying GE for writing so many lines of code per deliverable, no matter whether the code worked reliably, made sense or not, guaranteeing that GE would get follow-on contracts to fix the bad code its employees wrote.

Would you buy a product you knew wasn't going to work right the first time?  The government did, for a while, until it got wise to the schedule slips and cost overruns.  Sounds familiar to you, doesn't it?  It happens every day, somewhere, between one government and one private enterprise all the time.  It happens with the commercial software you use, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on your relationship with the software manufacturer.  Part of it is built into our genes, because we aren't perfect and can't anticipate all the causes and effects of software algorithms and GUIs.  Part of it is intentionally messy.

That's where your smarts come into play.  If the deal smells too rotten or too sweet, then you know you're on one side or the other of a product design that's probably not going to look good in the light of day.  Either take your money and run or make sure the blame rolls uphill/downhill past your doorstop.  Or be like me and never put your money where your work is.  I call it freedom.  You call it whatever you like as long as I pocket the profit and can choose how to spend my untaxed earnings.

Time for a dry/wry philosophical story and let love linger in your thoughts for a more detailed tale of descriptive, contemplative, offscreen rendezvous later in your/our future...