Bowl of the soup of the wife of Kit Carson

Here's a holiday leftovers dish I used to make all the time and haven't in decades. Turkey soul with garbanzo beans, avocado and melted jack cheese. Yum!

Eureka!

For maybe twenty years I've been brooding about a modern adaptation of a classic holiday story with a point of view that struck me as very commercial and modern. However, there were plot points beyond my ability to adapt them, which meant dropping them, which ruined the essence of the piece, or keep trying to solve the problem. And so I did without success for some twenty years.

A moment ago, as I was thinking about this again for the simple reason it's a holiday story, the solution suddenly appeared in my head. I mean, it is perfect! It is modern and believable, which has been the challenge, and, man, I can't wait to develop this now, just for the satisfaction of it. I mean, I am astounded what a tidy and perfect solution this is, which appeared in my head without preface after twenty years of brooding without progress. The mind is an amazing tool.

Crunch time

Keeping on top of it. Last week of school, relatively easy for me but then the grading that counts begins, the busiest time of the year. But a month off until winter term, a nice break.

Eager to get into the rhythm of the novel. Moreso than the splay, actually, it's more serious material. The older I get, the less patience I have with "commercial" writing. I've already done too much commercial writing for one lifetime. Better, at this stage, to be serious and unread. Try to write something that actually matters. Now and again I succeed, at least by my lights.

The end of western civilization

The Just Made Love website and database.

2 book trailers

Big budget...


No budget...

Leftovers

It's become almost common knowledge that the best part of Thanksgiving are the leftovers. My lunch proves it: turkey-dressing-cranberrysauce sandwich and sweet potato-pecan pie.

Read papers this morning, still more to do. Two were so good I am not requiring a rewrite for final submission. Love it when students perform this well.

Rivalry week in football. The biggie here is Thursday. Today I'm most interested in UCLA-USC tonight. And coming up, the granddaddy rivalry, Army-Navy.

A playwright's disappointment

Playwright Christopher Durang has posted about his disappointment in Obama.

I guess I miss the oomph that LBJ had both in civil rights and in getting Medicare/Medicaid passed into law. Then he let his mistakes in fighting in Vietnam sink him.

Obama is cool and charming. But oomph? Seemingly not. Hip and appealing. Yes, but can he do aggressive arm twisting to get something passed? Can he bring some power and aggressiveness to explaining things the country needs, to get people on board?" Not so much. So far.

And if Obama isn't the one to change things in a major way for the better -- health care, environment, people's rights -- who is?

I am a disappointed idealist.

Read the story

As I've said less eloquently here many times. Obama may be too nice to be president.

Mr. Holland's Opus

Hollywood is in the emotion delivery business. Mr. Holland's Opus, which I caught on cable this afternoon, the 4th or 5th time I've seen it, is a case in point. This is not a great film but a good one that delivers what it promises. Three themes are at work here, in order of their resolution: the struggle of an artist forced to teach to make a living and be father to a deaf son; the older teacher and frustrated artist tempted to begin again by the admiration of a talented and beautiful young student; the teacher/artist at the end of his career, fired due to budget cuts, wondering if his life has been a failure. Richard Dreyfus is perfect in the lead role. The narrative develops with the focus and efficiency that marks the well-made Hollywood film. The emotional delivery is successful. I always enjoy watching it.

I Love My Ducks

For puzzling reasons that clearly are generational, this video has become a super hit on the net and controversial to boot because the university doesn't want it using the Oregon Duck, which is leased from but owned by Walt Disney. Now while old farts may think this is much ado about little, well, it appears to be a Big Issue on campus as the Ducks prepare for the Great Civil War Battle on Thursday.

Portland clobbers UCLA, 74-47

The University of Portland hit the national sports scene on the backs of the women's soccer team. Now the men's basketball team wants some of the action. Their game last night again UCLA in the Bruins' backyard was no contest. An impressive achievement for the Pilots!

Sketch

Take the dog to the vet this morning and hopefully get a clean bill of health.

I can't recall a Thanksgiving on which I ate so little. Another symptom of aging, I assume. I ate what I wanted but it was a fraction of what I've put down in the past.

The holiday was small but good.

Papers to read today and through the weekend. I'll do a few each day so it doesn't feel like a burden.

Brooding about the writing I haven't done lately. In the end, I suspect there is only brooding.

Everyone in Oregon is getting cranked up for the Biggest Civil War Game Ever, the winner going to the Rose Bowl. I have my last class but will tape it and see most of it live. I'd like to see it go to overtime. No blowouts, like last year.

I get almost a month off this break, the big one. Obviously I plan to do a lot of writing, maybe finish a draft of the splay and great progress on the novel.

Never before in 108 years

TEHRAN, Iran – Iranian authorities have confiscated Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi's medal, the human rights lawyer said Thursday, in a sign of the increasingly drastic steps Tehran is taking against any dissent.

In Norway, where the peace prize is awarded, the government said the confiscation of the gold medal was a shocking first in the history of the 108-year-old prize.

Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her efforts in promoting democracy. She has long faced harassment from Iranian authorities for her activities — including threats against her relatives and a raid on her office last year in which files were confiscated.

The seizure of her prize is an expression of the Iranian government's harsh approach to anyone it considers an opponent — particularly since the massive street protests triggered by hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed June 12 re-election.

Read the story

Military families

Deployment Diary: Military Wives Celebrate Thanksgiving in October

And birthdays and holidays and everything else.
Posted: Wednesday, November 25, 2009 9:10am By Alison Buckholtz

I remember the year we celebrated Thanksgiving on a Sunday evening in October. It was the fall of 2007, the night before my husband, Scott, left for his seven-month deployment on an aircraft carrier. Other military wives, far more seasoned than I, gave me the idea to whip up one giant festive dinner to mark all of the holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, and milestones that my husband would miss while his squadron was in the Persian Gulf. It was a long list: Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Ethan’s fifth birthday, Estee’s third birthday, and our wedding anniversary, to list just a few.

Read the story

Having been a Navy brat, with childhood memories of the fleet coming in with my dad, I appreciate the sacrifices made by military families. They don't get enough clear and apolitical support from ideologues of all stripes.

Noise pollution

A neighbor has decided that this holiday morning is a great time to clear his very small yard of leaves with the loudest goddamn blower in the universe. If he'd asked, I would have hand-raked it in about ten minutes. It took him half an hour to blow the leaves around and wake up the gods.

One doesn't have to be thankful for EVERYTHING on this day.

Remembering our fathers

My late soul brother Dick and I had the same experience with our fathers. I remember it when I'm feeling sorry for myself because all my closest friends have passed.

Each of us had our father take us aside and tell us how lucky we were to have such a close friend. The subtext was that neither of them had found friendship as close as we experienced. This surprised me because my father had a ton of friends and was much more gregarious than I am. But there are friends/acquaintances and there are very close friends.

So, yes, it's lonely to have outlived all my closest friends but, by the gods, how fortunate to have had them in the first place! Something else to be thankful for.

My Acer netbook

Now that I've spent some time with this, I can say I like it even better than my EEE Asus netbook, which I loved. I love its full-sized keyboard but mostly its Windows interface (by the gods I hate admitting this!) so I can load all my tools of the trade, like video editing software, etc, and the netbook now has become a fully portable office on which I can do 90% of what I do in my actual office. I've had no problems at all, knock on my wooden head, and the battery life is fine for my uses at present, though I might get a larger battery for road trips. I get 3 hrs now. And catching a sale to buy it, I must say it's a great value for $250.

Yes, we now have 5 computers in the house! 2 netbooks, 1 in H's office, 2 in my office.

Happy thanksgiving

Voltaire's advice at the end of Candide, his vicious satire of extreme optimism ("this is the best of all possible worlds"), is to hunker down and tend your own garden. More than one Zen master has suggested the same thing. Thanksgiving is the holiday when we traditionally give thanks for our personal and broader benefits, which is not a bad thing to do more often than once a year.

Our Thanksgiving will be small but nice. Nothing like the epicurean orgies of my youth ha ha but I doubt if I could survive those days. For a decade, from the late 60s to the late 70s, about half a dozen couples gathered on this holiday to celebrate friendship more than family, and I cherish those times. This continued even after some of us left L.A. The most memorable of the series for me was in San Jose, hosted by my soul brother Dick and his wife, we came down from Eugene, the rest came up from L.A., a motley group of close friends, white, black, Chinese, Hispanic, our own boisterous United Nations showing we all can get together and play music and eat and drink too much, a good time always had by all and a fat book of stories to remember as old farts like now.

So with this history, and having survived it, it isn't bad at all to sit back and have a small quiet turkeytime. H is doing this for her grandson, H with the largest heart I've ever seen. I'll help out as instructed.

Quotation of the day

Thanks to A.S.

"The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows, not by clarity and substance but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything,"

- Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain.

The fragile arts

Salem Repertory Theatre to cease operations on Dec. 20
By Kristi Turnquist, The Oregonian
November 25, 2009, 4:43PM

In a press release today, the Salem Repertory Theatre announced it will close on Dec. 20, after the conclusion of its holiday production, "A Christmas Memory." The troupe is the only professional theater company in Salem, and is closing due to lack of funds.

Story

Nature wins

Most likely the move to checkmate will happen as politicians are arguing this, that or the other, but doing nothing; and scientists are mostly united but ignored or dismissed; and a good many folks celebrate what they believe to be a Second Coming, but what I believe is a psychotic death wish; and all the while wonderful wise old Mother Nature ignores it all and does her law-abiding, predictable, inevitable thing. Mother Nature doesn't miss the dinosaurs, and she won't miss us either.

As the world turns

By Scott Learn, The Oregonian
November 25, 2009, 8:30AM

A group of climate scientists released "The Copenhagen Diagnosis" on Tuesday, saying that global ice-sheets are melting at an increased rate, Arctic sea ice is disappearing much faster than recently projected, and future sea-level rise is now expected to be much higher than forecast.

Read the story

Palin's m.o.

Here's what makes Palin dangerous and not just a joke: yesterday she criticized Obama for not appreciating the sacrifices made by our troops. I can't recall a president who has demonstrated more concern for the welfare of our troops and families! He shows up when caskets arrive, he goes unannounced to cemeteries to be with those who grieve, he goes to military bases to talk and thank the troops. He is far, far more visible in his support than Bush, Clinton, any president in recent memory ever was. Heartfelt support, not photo ops.

So Palin tells a blatant lie but by presenting it nonchalantly as truth probably convinces those who haven't been paying attention, when in fact the direct opposite is true. This makes her dangerous.

But maybe not. Deepak Chopra thinks not.

Fear of Palin is ill-advised on two counts. First, fear is what the shadow wants. Without it, the shadow has no power. Second, the left needs to learn how to win graciously. The current upheaval in American society, which has been an enormous threat on many fronts, called forth a president and a constituency that knows how to handle crisis. The voices of sanity are prevailing. The solutions that have emerged on all fronts -- economic, social, and international -- represent the best in the American character.

Read the story

Actually I hope he's right.

Every day is Thanksgiving

When you reach a certain age, just waking up in the morning is such a blessing that every day is thanksgiving. When there are troubles all around you, your own troubles don't look so bad, which is another reason to give thanks. If you pay attention to Nature, whether storm or sun, you can be overwhelmed with a sense of being blessed. Who is it who said there is more truth in the grass than in the newspaper? Sounds like Thoreau but I'm not sure it was. At any rate, an astute declaration.

It's long overdue

...and I'll believe it when it actually happens.

Obama pushes math, science education

Washington (CNN) -- A conversation last week with South Korea's president apparently showed President Obama the stark difference between how Asian nations and the United States value education.

Obama said Monday that the U.S. needs to restore the nation's leadership in educating children in math and science to meet future challenges, and he announced a new Educate to Innovate Campaign.

He told how President Lee Myung-bak explained that demanding parents are South Korea's biggest education problem.

"Even if somebody is dirt poor, they are insisting that their kids are getting the best education," Obama recalled the conversation, sounding almost whimsical in describing Lee's biggest education problem as parents wanting excellent schools for their children.
...
The goal, Obama said, is "expanding opportunity for all Americans in a world where education is the key to success."

Referring to his conversation with Lee, Obama noted the "hunger for knowledge, an insistence on excellence, a reverence for science and math and technology and learning" in Asia.

"That used to be what we were about," he said. "That's what we're going to be about again."

Source

In 1957 Sputnik went up and thousands of American kids wanted to become rocket scientists to beat the Russians. This was the coolest thing a kid could do. It was sexy to be a future scientist. Sigh.

Another anthology

I'll have a piece in an anthology about screenwriting coming out in fall, 2010, I just learned. My piece is called one of my mantras: "Don't Put Your Foot In Your Mouth." Which almost all beginning screenwriters do.

The Stiff

I love this early (1975) one-act dark farce of mine, about (it seems at first) a corpse with an erection. So I was excited to discover that someone did a search for it (ending up here at my blog, is how I know), and this someone is in Indonesia. It's a play in the Euro style, not American, to be sure. Has one of my favorite curtain lines: "What the people expect, they deserve. What they deserve, they get. Always."

Go to THE STIFF.

Hadn't thought of this one in a long time. It's a play with balls (as well as erections).

But the question is: how in hell did someone in Indonesia find out about this? Might my friend in Bali have something to do with this? (making the question, how did SHE find out about it?) Mysteries never to be solved but to be enjoyed nonetheless. The writing life.

Health

Feel like I'm coming down with something. Need to be careful for the rest of the day. At office hrs and do intend to hold class in 90 mins.

Police

I can't think of a more dangerous and difficult job in today's culture than being a policeman or woman. Not only violence in the culture makes the job so difficult but our present fashion of victimization, where no one takes responsibility and it's always someone else's fault, including the police's.

This said, the police in this city have done some regrettable things. There was a period when I was beginning to think they were trigger-happy. Everyone time I turned around, it seemed, a policeman had shot someone. Now I have no qualms about a policeman shooting at someone who shoots at him or her first. But this was not always the case. Police, as difficult as their job is, must be held to high civilian standards.

The latest and current controversy has a policeman relieved of duty for shooting a 12-year-old girl in the leg with a bean bag. Why? Because she was resisting arrest and punching out a fellow policeman. Well, moms and dads, in this instance I side with the police. A bean bag is not a bullet. And if you don't want your kid shot with a bean bag to get her under control, then teach the angel not to try and punch out her arresting officer. Teach her some manners and respect for law and order.

Of course, not many lefties like myself take this stance since this is yet another knee-jerk issue where liberals go one way and conservatives another. But sometimes the police actually are right. And in this case, I think they are.

One movement among police has them turning in the bean bags and going back to bullets. Funny, in a dark humor Kafka sort of way.

One woman's view of Palin

Sarah Palin is the peppy cheerleader in high school all the boys thought was so sweet but the girls knew was really a vicious shrew. She's the new girl in the office who wears tight shirts and three-inch heels, is super-friendly to her male superiors, ignores the other women, and gets promoted sooner than her more capable and hard working peers. She's the outgoing PTA mom all of the other women are scared to cross because they will find themselves put on the worst committees. Only a woman knows how to give another woman a sweet smile and at the same time cut her down to size with an artfully crafted "compliment" without male observers having a clue about what just happened. It's like a dog whistle.

Source

I don't think gender defines the Palin constituency so much as anti-intellectualism. This is an old bias, an old story.

Blogging

I began blogging in January, 2003, so I am coming up on 7 years. I have about 100 visitors a day, which has been steady for some time, dipping to 70 or so, climbing to 120 or so, maybe a quarter of the daily visitors coming back for more than one visit on the same day. These figures sound pretty large to me. Certainly they are more than I expected when I started.

Originally I saw my audience as younger writers curious about "the writing life" and so visiting a writer's blog the way I, as a young writer, read collections of letters to get a sense of the personal day-to-day life of various writers. Now and again I get an email telling me I've succeeded with a young writer in this regard.

I've been at this long enough that I catch myself repeating myself, telling the same old story again. Old men do that a lot.

I sense my relationship to this blog is changing, however. I already have a posthumous blog that serves more as a traditional journal, entries that are private but will become public after I pass (or will if my instructions are followed!). And I've started other blogs with a narrower focus, songs of political satire or raps between two old men. Meanwhile this one stumbles along, a public journal, a public diary, a public record of one writer's "writing life."

I'm not sure what I want to do with it in the future. I don't think I'll abandon it, so something will be going on, but I may be going in a new direction. A few things have come to mind:

• celebrations and explications of some of my favorite works
  
• advertisements for myself, as Mailer would say, excerpts from and pitches for some of my own work
  
• writing a new short work here, recording the steps and brooding that goes on in the process
  
• carrying on as I have been, doing whatever occurs to me at the time
  

The new year, of course, is a traditional time to begin a new direction if, in fact, one settles in.

Meanwhile, well, you get the picture. Here it is, right in front of you.

The Vatican Rag

My favorite aunt, Aunt Billie, almost laughed herself into a stroke every time I played this for her. She was a converted Catholic, which raised all the family Protestant eyebrows when it happened and was considered a tragedy because she did it in response to being "condemned to hell" by her sonofabitch father on his death bed. She was, at the time, a Big Band vocalist, of which he did not approve. So Billie converted, tried but failed to become a nun, and settled for giving most of her money to the church for the rest of her life. After her death, we discovered she also was a closet alcoholic -- literally, her tiny apartment absolutely filled with hidden empty liquor bottles. She died because she ran out of room to hide bottles.

But she was great all the same, my favorite aunt, with whom I played sports games and with whom I listened to jazz; even after converting and being condemned, she still loved music, bless her soul, and she went ape when she heard Tom Lehrer and especially thought The Vatican Rag was hilarious, which gave Catholics points in my secular universe. Aunt Billie was wonderful.

Thanksgiving

Having a small but somewhat special holiday, H's teenage son coming down from Seattle to join us for a day. He's had a troubled past and is in a special program up there. If it works out, he'll be down for Christmas as well.

It's been ages since I've been part of a large, boisterous, celebratory Thanksgiving. When I was much younger, spending it annually with the same group of friends, this for a decade, it was my favorite holiday. Now I sort of coast along for the ride.

Camus and Sisyphus

At the top of this blog is an animation suggesting the myth of Sisyphus. In his essay about this, Camus concludes that Sisyphus is happy, despite not reaching his goal, ever, because "the struggle itself is enough to fill a man's heart" (quoting from memory). This is precisely how I feel about living in the world today (and why I still call myself an existentialist). The struggle itself is enough to fill a man's heart.

Mean spirited and ignorant

It's hard to know how much the culture has changed in the past half century. Media makes so much known very quickly today. Maybe what seems to be change is merely increased visibility. Yet in my gut I think the culture has changed. I think it's more mean spirited and more ignorant than it used to be. I think much of the blame for this is the decline of our educational system and the decline of the family, which in the past valued education more than it seems to in today's broken homes. I also think the quicker pace of life has hurt the culture by undermining the values of silence, contemplation, slowness. We may know more "things" but we are far, far less wise, it seems to me.

The great irony is that it's much of the immigrant population that still embraces the value of education. Science fairs, spelling bees, scholarships and other measures of student achievement are represented by immigrant kids far in excess of their demographics.