Music - SINGALONGS AND MY TWO-2 RING BINDERS: 1948 TO 2008
2009-03-24 07:52:54
This 2000 word essay explores the story of the gradual evolution of the singalong booklets in my life: 1948 to 2008.  The first booklets of music in my life, at least those I remember, go back to 1948 when I was four years old.  The first booklet of music, though,  that I put together myself in order to run singalongs was in the late 1960s, in 1968 when I was twenty-four.  From about 1948 to about 1968, then, I ran along on the singalong booklets of others: my parents’, my friends’ and, of course by the decade 1958 to 1968, TV’s many-idiomed and formatted aural-texts.  During the period of some 60 years, then, from 1948 to 2008 I have been involved in singalongs in one form or another.  In the last ten years though, 1998 to 2008, singalongs using booklets of songs I created took place for the most part at an aged care facility, an Australian government-funded aged care home, called the Ainslie House.  This collection of buildings is located beside the Tamar River, an estuary, that runs beside George Town and Low Head in Tasmania.  The residents of this home in this the oldest town in Australia, live in a modern and attractive facility about one kilometre from the Bass Strait, an extension of the Great Southern Ocean at the other end of the world from were I was born and grew to maturity in Canada. I have been in at least two dozen aged care buildings in my life.  These places where home means living with many new people under one roof, getting used to other people doing some of the everyday things you might have previously done for yourself and by yourself as well as working out new balances between one’s need for privacy and the inevitable community nature of such a life are now an increasingly burgeoning presence across our civilization as war-babies like myself and baby-boomers all come into their late adolescence(60 to 80) incrementally year after year.  Any child born in the first year of WW2 in 1939 will be seventy in 2009. As a lecturer in  aged care studies, programs in which I finished my teaching career in an Australian technical and further education college dealing with students studying aged care and other specialist training programs in various human services certificate and diploma courses, I became as I had so often before become “an instant expert.”  I am now an expert in more and more subjects and know less and less, or so it seems, as the years go on.  A range of different levels of care as well as specialist services are available here in these buildings by the sea under one management and organizational structure: high and low level care, short and long term care, independent unit and shared accommodation, transition as well as particular and multi-service care are all available under one roof.  Care and services such as: respite care, care for particular cultural needs and health conditions, care for end-of-life clients, for war veterans, for the socially and financially disadvantaged, for the mentally ill and for people living in rural or remote areas. To a lesser extent I also led singalongs in the decade 1998 to 2008 in the Baha’i community I had, by then, been associated with for six decades. My final singalongs in classrooms took place as my teaching in FT, PT and volunteer teaching wound down in that same decade.  These singalongs became rare events in my last years in Perth Western Australia in large Baha’i communities and the smaller ones in northern Tasmania where I lived after 1999 and in the several classrooms where I taught.  In the decade that I lived in Tasmania, 1999 to 2009, guitar-playing and singalongs slipped to the periphery of my life with one main bastion of activity—with the old and dieing.  In some ways it was fitting that the last few years of the singalongs in my life, 2002-2008, involved mostly senior citizens, the aged, old people, those in the last decade of late adulthood(70 to 80) and old age(80++)--here in George Town.  I used large-print songbooks published in the UK with a small singing group, choir was not quite the right word, until 2005.  I say “fitting” because the content of these booklets was mainly for the two generations born before WW2--in the first four decades of the twentieth century—the earliest years in Canada and Australia of the activity of the Baha’i community, the religious community I have been associated with for more than 50 years. In 2008 though the material in my two volumes, my two 2-ring binders, that I used for singalongs was for all age groups.  There are very few songs that originated in the period, the two generations that were born in the years from 1970 to 2010, circa.  The group born in the years after about 1970 will find few songs that were popular from their years of listening experience in these two binders.  I did not listen to the music of those two generations.  For the music of some two generations(1970 to 1990 and 1990 to 2010), of a great mass of popular music; for example, the songs of groups like Abba, among a host of others, I never bought the sheet music nor did I learn how to play the songs in some personally inventive way by figuring out the chords.  So it was that by 2008 I did not know the songs of those under forty well enough to sing them in groups informally in the Baha’i community or in any other communities of which I was a part as a teacher in primary, secondary and tertiary educational institutions, as an adult educator, as a quasi-entertainer or one of a number of other roles I have had during those years. These resources here in these booklets, these files, this collection, are here for singalongs in the groups I am involved with as I head into the last six months of the early years(60 to 65) of late adulthood(60 to 80) the middle years(65 to 75) of late adulthood and the last years of that stage(75 to 80) and finally, old age(80++), if I last that long.  I have multiple copies of what I have come to call the music of other interest groups--for those not familiar with the Baha’i musical experience, booklets of songs I put together for students in classrooms where I used to teach as well as other groups.  I have many editions of song books in multiple copy form that I made for Baha’i groups, as I say, as far back as the late 1980s.  Songbooks from the previous two decades, the years 1968 to 1988, and the two decades before that, 1948 to 1968, have all been lost, thrown away or disappeared into the sands of time, the time that has been my life, as it has slipped irretrievably from my grasp. These musical experiences called singalongs have returned to my life now here in George Town in the last six months.  In July 2008 I put together a package/booklet of 75 songs as requested by the local aged care centre.  Who knows when and who knows where and how these singalongs will develop in these years of late adulthood.    My wife and son became a little tired of hearing the same old stuff back in the 1980s and 1990s for I am not a particularly talented guitarist and it is understandable that they have got tired of hearing all these old songs, this repertoire of mine.  Singing in groups seemed to become passe, perhaps even to become seen as declasse or lower in social status/standing in the wider society or at least many sectors of the wider society that I came to live and have my being in by the 1990s and 2000s.  This form of self-entertainment and group entertainment that does not rely on the electronic media, though, is far from dead, though, and I feel it will be part of my life in these years before my demise, my passing from this mortal coil. In some ways it has been fitting that most of the singalongs I have been part of in the last ten years, 1998 to 2008, have involved residents of a home for those in aged care, for people on their last legs.  I often thought that American writer William Faulkner's spirit may have been present in those sing alongs.  I often thought, too, as I led these old folks in song that the spirit Faulkner had when he wrote his now famous book "As I Lay Dieing" may just be at the back of the leisure-social-room where we had our singalongs; perhaps this great writer, this winner of a Nobel prize in literature, hangs around the ceiling or occupied another place in these rooms and outside which the poet-historian Arnold Toynbee says peopled our lives, these  unseen, unknown, unobserved souls, millions upon billions of souls at just one remove, one step, beyond our senses in a land of lights never to return to this earth, its beauties and its uglinesses, its bitter-sweetnesses and its joys.  These people who now singalong once each month all lay, sat up or palely loitered about, dieing slowly.  Each month that I went back to this old folks home during these latter years of these singalongs someone else had died, sometimes two or three had died or had moved to the very edge of their final hour. Some sat in some state of increased decrepitude to that state I had observed in my previous visit and some looked brighter and more alert. Sometimes I was brighter and more alert.  The term ‘old folks home’ was what we used to call these places for the old and dieing when I was a kid.  And of course it was just that, a home, their last.  It was their home, their last home on this earthly plane.  Slowly I got to know many of the names of these souls, got to know their life stories, their particular ailments in great detail—as old people are want to tell you to the nth degree of finitude. I also got to know a little of their philosophies and their religious proclivities. The resources in my personally prepared, tenderly fostered, oft-used-and-repeated booklets of singing material that are here in my files, my collections are getting a new lease on life.  They had often been kept, in this last decade, tightly sealed with a big rubber-band around them, in keeping for a future time when singalongs would once again return to my life and to the groups I was involved with in these years of my late adulthood and what would become, finally, old age.  Now the rubber bands are off the its action-stations for singalongs once again.  Old age begins, say some human development psychologists, at the age of 80.  I've come to like that model since the 1990s when I was a teacher of a course on human development.  This model gives me now as it has given me in the last decade many more years before the onset of old age.  As things stand now in 2008, I have another 16 years before I'm actually, officially, or shall I say psychologically, in theory at least, de facto, old.  And I have plenty of years left for singalongs. Perhaps they may still be in my life in the 2040s, the decade when I become a centenarian.  We shall see what those mysterious dispensations of a Watchful Providence provide in this the evening of my life as nightfall gradually approaches and “I go into a hole for those who speak no more,” as the Báb once wrote it graphically and literally in His voluminous writings back in the 1840s. Ron Price 16 December 2008 2000 Words

General Discussion - Re: Trying To Find Matisse Forum
2008-08-23 08:22:46
Goodness, Britneysucks, it has been early two years since you posted those "words of praise." So, it's a belated thanks from Ron in Tasmania. You can come for coffee any time, although I probably live about 15,000 kms away.-Ron

Celebrities - The Concept of Celebrity: A General Comment
2008-08-23 08:17:48
The famous poet William Wordsworth said he found the desire for fame decreased as he got older.    I can’t remember if I ever had much desire for fame. I don’t think I did but, whatever the case, I have little to none now.  Looking at the stars, the famous, the celebrity, now involves looking underneath their skirts, inspecting their pants, sniffing their bedsheets and spying through their bedroom keyholes. Today the biography of a celebrity is expected to chronicle not just their lavish homes and priceless jewelry but the personal anxieties and emotional tensions, the drunken collapses and nervous breakdowns that lead to frenetic and distasteful contests of luridity between the tabloids, gleeful at the misfortunes of the rich and famous. How could anyone want that?  There are many styles of celebrity-watching. Indeed, the industry is burgeoning. One of the major styles is a standard mix which emphasizes certain formulaic features such as veneration and magnification. But it is a veneration so extreme as to rewrite history, even at the cost of refusing to acknowledge sometimes fairly well-known facts. Though presented as biographies, these glossy-portrayals are in fact disturbingly reductive rewritings of history: official portraits, glossily sliding over the surface of events.  They vastly magnify the significance of some rather ordinary people, with melodrama, with good and evil stylization, with musical-sound affects and visual-stimulus-background with little nuance and little probing into the motives or psychologies of their purported subjects.  A showbusiness-like style, a host of stock phrases,  a documentary and reporting ethos and  often all one has is a type of promotional video. The net result so often is: reality kept at far at bay. Inevitably autobiography--and this one of mine--requires an element of assertiveness of the self. Writing is a way of engaging the entire self and all the senses-and both sides of the brain I am told. Deep impulses, deep inspiration, are involved at the same time as one orders one’s life on paper. One could also refer to it as tinkering with one’s life, writing about it to work it out, to transform life into art. If the process of personal growth is, as James Joyce said, linguistic then what I do here links my own growth with my writing. Certainly autobiographical writing makes more vivid those parts of the everyday one chooses to probe. The placcid surface or the not-so-placcid surface of ongoing life gets an underpining of some kind, perhaps with the deeper currents of the past.  In so many of the biopics in the media the personality in question is portrayed as both one of the best of the human race and just an average person.  I would like to be seen as neither. I am neither a man of the people nor an outstanding person/ality/a.  In some ways I come from quite ordinary stock and in other ways the generations which proceded me had outstanding qualities. The bag is mixed, complex and far beyond some simple stereotyping. I find much of my past richer now. Many of my recent poems are about the act of pioneering, the beginning of the pioneering process, back in 1962, as if I can only get some just appreciation of it from a distance. Perhaps, too, this is part of a longer process extending into eternity when one can begin to judge one’s life the further one gets away from it, like some shooting star or distant galaxy.  I'd like to include here a poem I wrote during the last months of my teaching career about fame.  In a strange way I sense that if I achive any fame in life it will come to be associated with this pioneering process for the Canadian Baha'i community.  This poem provides, for me anyway, a helpful perspective on the subject, a subject I've dealt with, gone into, early in this autobiography and in my poems as well.  Readers should keep in mind that when I insert poems into my text it is based on a view of poetry not unlike that of Robert Duncan who wrote: “We begin to imagine a cosmos in which the poet and the poem are one in a moving process.”  Duncan goes on to say that the poet is part of one long historical process beginning with creation, going through both his own long journey and the world’s.  “The real is what is given to us,” says Duncan.  In the case of celebrities "the real" is often a world that is "very unreal." Enough for now and apologies to those on this site who like to read only a few lines. See yas all lateRon--from Tasmania

Harlem Renaissance: The Music & Rhythms That Started a Cultural Revolution
2008-05-26 00:41:02
(This post is free of all the "squiggles."-Ron Price
-------------As a philosophical mid-wife to a generation of younger Negro poets, writers, and
artists, Alain Locke was the ideological mastermind behind the Harlem Renaissance, an artistic explosion in the decade following World War I. In its mythic and utopian sense, Harlem was the race capital and the largest Negro American community in the world. The Harlem Renaissance, consequently, presented itself as a microcosm or self-portraiture of black culture to America and to the world. The movement was an effusion of art borne of the experience of even ordinary living that has epic depth and lyric intensity. As editor of the anthology known as The New Negro, published in December 1925, Locke contributed the title essay, which served as a manifesto. For Locke, art ought to contribute to the improvement of life a pragmatist aesthetic principle Richard Shusterman calls ameliorism. The Harlem Renaissance known also as the New Negro Movement sought to advance freedom and equality for blacks through art. It was not just a great creative outburst in the stimulating atmosphere of the 1920s, it was actually a highly self-conscious modern artistic movement. Locke himself spoke of a race pride, race genius and the race-gift. This race pride was to be cultivated through developing a distinctive culture, a hybrid of African and African American elements. Googler "Alain Locke: Baha'i Philosopher" for more info.-Ron Price, Tasmania
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Harlem Renaissance: The Music & Rhythms That Started a Cultural Revolution
2008-05-26 00:35:27
As “ philosophical mid-wife to a generation of younger Negro poets, writers, and
artists,� Alain Locke was the ideological mastermind behind the Harlem Renaissance,“ an artistic explosion in the decade following World War I.� In its mythic and utopian sense, Harlem was the “ race capital� and the largest “ Negro American� community in the world. The Harlem Renaissance, consequently, presented itself as a microcosm or “ self-portraiture� of black culture to America and to the world. The movement was an effusion of art borne of the experience of “ even ordinary living� that has “ epic depth and lyric intensity.� As editor of the anthology known as The New Negro, published in December 1925, Locke contributed the title essay, which served as a manifesto. For Locke, art ought to contribute to the improvement of life— a pragmatist aesthetic principle Richard Shusterman calls “meliorism.� The Harlem Renaissance— known also as the “ New Negro Movement� — sought to advance freedom and equality for blacks through art. It was “ not just a great creative outburst in the stimulating atmosphere of the 1920s,� it was “ actually a highly self-conscious modern artistic movement.� Locke himself spoke of a “ race pride,� “ race genius� and the “ race-gift.� This “ race pride� was to be cultivated through developing a distinctive culture, a hybrid of African and
African American elements. Googler "Alain Locke: Baha'i Philosopher" for more info.-Ron Price, Tasmania
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Michael Jordan
2008-03-03 16:12:15
MOVING
Nine weeks before the tenth and last stage of history began, from a Bahai perspective, a stage which would in the fullness of time see the coming of a golden age, the greatest basketball player of all time,(1) at least up to these first years of this new millennium, was born. Michael Jeffrey Jordan had his 45th birthday last month. My son, Daniel, bought the 20th anniversary collector�s edition: Ultimate Jordan-3-Disc Set(2004). We watched several segments, perhaps two hours of examples of the unparalleled heights of this athlete and sports icon. Michael Jordan is, without question, an inspiration both as a player and as someone who was dedicated, obsessed, possessed of a highly gregarious nature and yet had a natural and relaxed personality off the basketball court.-Ron Price with thanks to my son Daniel Price for giving me the enjoyment of Ultimate Jordan, this 3-disc special collectors edition; and to 1the NBA Association: see The Wikipedia Encyclopedia.




He came into prominence
while I was slogging it out
in the heat of the Northern
Territory of Australia in 84.
I was too busy to find out
about him, then; we only
had two or three stations
up there in the NT back
when I was just passing
the age of forty, entering
adulthoods second stage:
the middle---which would
be with me for twenty years
as he came, went and came
again and again. I would not
have missed him for the world
and thanks to my son I didnt.
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Mamas and the Papas
2008-01-01 07:04:00
THE SENSE OF CERTITUDE
By the time I graduated from university in 1966 at the age of 21 I owned two LP albums. One was given to me by my mother after my father’s death in May 1965. The LP was Handel ’s Messiah. That LP was symbolic of the classical music influences from my parents in the years of my life from 1944 to 1966. The other LP I bought in the late summer of 1965 or early autumn, the first weeks of my final year at university in an honours sociology course. The album was Barrie McGuire’s The Eve of Destruction. On 25 September 1965 the song went to #1 on the charts while the LP topped at #37.
Tonight, in the last hour of the year 2007, I heard some of this song as part of an ABC TV special California Dreamin’: The Songs of the Mamas and the Papas. I got a hit of nostalgia or perhaps more accurately an excitation of the nerves, a movement, an awakening, an increase of feelings in my heart1 and so wrote this prose-poem. -Ron Price with thanks to ABC TV: 10:50-11:45 p.m. 31/12/’07, California Dreamin’: The Songs of the Mamas and the Papas; and 1Shoghi Effendi, Letter to an Individual Believer,� 4 November 1937 in Baha’i Writings on Music: A Compilation, Baha’i Publishing Trust, Oakham, England.
All these songs lingered
on the edges of my life
and even penetrated into
the core from time to time
from those halcyon days
of the fifties to the seventies.
Clive James and Peter Porter, in their discussion of 'books of the forties and fifties,’ talked a
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Gary Larson
2007-12-22 07:27:55
A Prose-Poem in Celebration of the Work of Gary Larson-Ron price, Tasmania
________________
SHAPING
Causing offence, causing confusion, not being understood, not seeing one’s audience as, say, a comedian, a stage actor or a teacher does; not being shaped by your writing in the same way as that same comedian is shaped by his unsuccessful jokes or that teacher is shaped by the blank faces of his pupils; not knowing if a reader liked or did not like your poem, having readers who are as alone when they read your poem as you were when you wrote it; a solitariness, quietness and, at times, an existential angst in your psyche and/or working environment; a favourite chair, familiar tools of the trade and items of memorabilia around your workplace comparison---these comparisons are all part and parcel of being a cartoonist and a poet—at least some poets and some cartoonists.-Ron Price with thanks to Gary Larson, The Complete Far Side:Volume Two: 1987-1994, Andrews McMeel Publishing, Kansas City, 2004.
How did all this come about?
This endless poetising—what
were its embryogenesis, its
developmental phases and
now to what purpose, end?
A grandfather and a mother
both people of words, books,
who were there, always there
in childhood and then in my
teens and twenties; and some
fragrant breezes, fruits, sweet
scented streams and springs,
melodies and meadows of
nearness, some invisible spirit,
some habitation, dwelling-place,
some unmerited grace, infinite
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Celebrities - Re: Clint Eastwood
2007-10-14 05:19:23
FAIR MANSIONS--BUT NOT YET In 1973 Clint Eastwood starred in a film called Magnum Force. The film presents a picture of urban life consistent with the Baha'i view that society is in "the dark heart of an age of transition." When the film was released in 1973 I had just finished five years of teaching primary and secondary school. I was more than a little conscious of the moral vacuum and the social and behavioural disorders within the society I had grown up in and now lived as a young adult-a rapidly westernizing, rapidly globalizing, rapidly populating one. Magnum Force graphically underlined some of the disorder in urban life through a narrative with Clint Eastwood as a cop in Los Angeles. -Ron Price with thanks to WIN TV, 9:30-11:55 pm, 14 February 2002, "Magnum Force(1973)." Clint, there was an alternative to all that violence and confusion, all that corruption and absurdity. It was just then spreading around the world, embryonic, first steps, just stuck its head above the ground and the apex of a new System still shrouded in obscurity--far, far from the light of public recognition....... But this wasn't much use to you back then, the cop that you were. Clint, we had begun to raise the fair mansions of a new Age wherein all the chaos and ruin would cease. And I was moving or so I thought, to a safer place and free of these disorders. Sadly I found, as you found, Clint, another form of disorder in my own house, under my own roof. For there was no escape for all of us in this dark heart, except to sink deeper into the firm earth of the perennial wisdom of the Ages..... and their sacred and resplendent tokens.(1) (1) Baha'u'llah, Seven Valleys, USA, 1952, p.3. ___________________________

Stephen Sondheim
2007-08-06 14:12:44
Part 2:(not enough space in comment #1 for these last words)
____________
This is especially the case since retiring from FT work in 1999, PT work in 2003 and most volunteer/casual work in 2005. Although there is a certain music in my words, my writing, I do not associate my words with music, with lyrics or even, for that matter, with performance poetry. Attending a poetry reading has, for me, as much in common with reading a poem on the page as reading a screenplay has to do with seeing a movie. A poem performed in public is one thing; reading a poem in private is another.
_______________________
One cant be too self-critical
when youre writing it down,
as you say, Stephen. Youve
got to let it flow and tidy it up
later. And you cant let those
critics, well-meaning friends,
that panoply and pageantry of
people at varied assignations--
with words on how to do things
better, how not to do things
who dont like what you do,
put you in some sardine-can,
some fishbowl of examination.
As you say, Stephen, its best to try
to use muscles you haven't used before,
that's the fun of writing, building on
whats there; although, I must say,
I often go over territory Im familiar
with in a new take--in the process
of exploration one always learns.1
_________________
1 Stephen Sondheim quoted by Robert Berkvist, Stephen Sondheim Takes a Stab at Grand Guignol, New York Times on the Web, February 25, 1979.

Ron Price
5 August 2007
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Stephen Sondheim
2007-08-06 14:10:30
USING NEW MUSCLES
In an interview in July 2005, when he was 75, Stephen Sondheim said: Poets generally make poor lyric writers.(1) Sondheim, perhaps the best-known artist in the American musical theatre, with its niche status, made the point that this is generally the case because the language of music is too rich. Musical lyrics are over-enriched in order to drown listeners in words and sound. At the same time the lyrics have to breathe and give the audiences ear a chance to understand what's going on. This is particularly true in the theatre where you not only have the music, but youve got choreography, costume, story, acting, orchestra, a whole team of people trying to bring an experience to an audience. Theres a lot for an audience to take in. The whole idea of poetry in contrast, Sondheim emphasized,is denseness, concision, abutment of images.You can't do that when you've got music going on and expecting the audience to take it in.
-Ron Price with thanks to 1Stephen Sondheim,Interview, Academy of Achievement, Internet Site, 5/8/07.
_____________
1 For perhaps thirty years, from 1962 to 1992, when I played the guitar for therapy and sing-alongs, I tried to write lyrics. But I never felt even remotely successful. During those years I would never have called myself a poet, not remotely. But in the last 15 years(1992-2007), the assignation, the label, poet or prose-poet has become one I can wear.
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Dead Poets Society
2007-07-29 01:15:38
DEAFENING SILENCE & LOUD NOISE
In my last decade as a full-time professional teacher, the film Dead Poets Society was released(1989). I saw the film some time in the 1990s just before retiring. I saw it again tonight on a DVD my son brought on one of his weekend visits. The film was set in 1959 the year I joined the Bahai Faith. I wont summarize the story-line here, but I will contextualize it in terms of my own life and of societys in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

There is a strong emphasis in the film on the poet, the individual, finding his own voice, his freedom, his liberation from tradition; a philosophy of thinking for ones self, a giving-in to impulse, to feeling is at the centre of this film. In 1959 the notion of self-realization was not yet the pop-psych cliche it became in the 60s and sheer impulse had yet to become the bi-word of the freewheeling rock-and-roll sixties. Walt Whitman, the supreme poet of personality, is the only poet quoted at length in the film. -Ron Price with thanks to Pamela A. Rooks,Woo who? Exclusion of otherness in Dead Poets Society, and Australian Journal of Communication, Vol.18, No.2, 1991, pp.75-83.

Still, Peter, I liked your film.1
I did not even know about the
Ivy League schools back then,
but school was about doing what you were told to do & keeping your passions well-hidden with sport and studying.....and a new
religion which came onto the block back then in those quiet 50s(no more room here)
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Albert Camus
2007-07-08 13:38:36
Part 2:
Yes, Eugene, I write for my time
and a future time.
This is no dead mass of letters,
but things from inside my head,
from all over the place,
a unique concatenation
of form and content,
as I renew my vision of the world
and help lay that foundation,
for that apotheosis which I saw
several weeks ago on a warm day
up on a hill in a city in Israel.
The inner essence thereof
I knew was for my time.
I knew this, partly,
from something He wrote,
something eternal, yes, Eugene:
and I was only eighteen, then.
And, now, I'm getting old
and closer, it seems, to the eternal.
Ron Price
24 July 2000
GIVING THE POEM FORM
Much of the writing in western civilization since I became a Bahai in 1959 and went pioneering in 1962, is what one could call post-Canadian, post-Australian or post-American, post everything except the world itself. A global culture, which had been emerging slowly, perhaps as far back as the period 1475-1500,1 with a global technology which brought the various centres of culture around the world so much closer than they had ever been. The literary sensibility is no longer dependent on a national environment, although writers continue to be influenced, consciously or not, by their predecessors and the cultural climate in which they are socialized. To give a poets sensitivity and expression a form suited to his personal proclivities he could study the classical and contemporary literary monuments,2
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Albert Camus
2007-07-08 13:28:19
My 1st prose-poem here draws on another absurdist writer,Eugene Ionesco; I then go on to deal with the wider context, a context that Camus was concerned about in his Nobel Prize speech in 1957. I will post this in parts since the 1500 word maximum has been exceeded.
_________________
THE ONENESS OF FORM AND CONTENT
We must write for our own time, as the great writers did. But this does not imply that we must shut ourselves up in it. To write for our time does not mean to reflect it passively. It means that we must will to maintain it or change it; therefore, go beyond it toward the future; and it is this effort to change it which establishes us most deeply in it, for it can never be reduced to a dead mass of tools and customs. What the poet writes should not correspond to anything outside the mind of the poet. It should bring together apparently unrelated phenomena in a unique world that is the writers own, freed, as far as possible, from the rusty hegemony of angst. What results is a written expression which is both form and content. They are one and the same. The general context is an independent search for knowledge and a continual renewal of ones conception or ones vision of the world.1 -William V. Spanos, A Discussion of Eugene Ionesco,A Casebook on Existentialism, Thomas Crowell Co., NY, 1966, pp.151-157.
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Albert Camus
2007-07-08 13:18:04
ARK OF THE COVENANT: A Prose-Poem In Honour of Albert Camus
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There are such a variety of notebooks, diaries, journals, records, work-books, quarries and resources kept and used by writers and poets for their writings. Albert Camus, to mention but one, began a literary diary in ordinary school exercise books at the age of twenty-two in May 1935 and in 1954 typed them into seven notebooks. Back in 1935 he had no intention of publishing his jottings, his diary entries, but when he typed them in 1954 he did. Camus did not view these notebooks as fragments, as a part, of an autobiography. Entries of a personal nature recording private feelings and inner experiences came into his notebooks more and more as the years went on, thus changing the original character of his originally quite impersonal diary. But, even then, we learn little about what he did. Because he only made periodic, episodic entries, readers get no comprehensive picture of either his day-to-day life or his thoughts. He jotted down only what he thought might be useful to him, partly due to problems of memory, partly due to what he called his profoundly anarchic temperament and partly for a host of reasons we will never know. His notebooks can be found in three volumes: 1935-1942, 1942-1951 and 1951-1959.-Ron Price with thanks to Philip Thody(trans, intro and notes), Albert Camus, Carnets: 1935-1942, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1963.
___________
You just finished your notebooks,
Albert, when I was getting on board
a new ship-of-state that had had its
start in Canada sixty-years before.1
Your anti-autobiographical notebooks,
so unlike mine...where learn so little about you,
your family, the events of your time.
You built-up your sense of
self as writer, piece by piece, solitary.2
Your indispensable solitariness, your
modus operandi, modus vivendi, your
style and consciousness--even if sociable
and conscientious, wholeheartedly genuine,
passionate, cuing into the historically real,
relevant from 1935 to 1960 through two
dozen years of the start of that Plan--epoch
quite beyond the ken of most men, but not
the angels who helped our generation build
that Arc of the Covenant3, rising now
everywhere in the world, Albert, slowly.....
do you see it now, Albert, do you see it?
1 I joined the Canadian Bahai community in 1959, then in its 62nd year.
2 For some ideas and information in this prose-poem, I have drawn on Susan Sontags The Ideal Husband, The New York Review of Books, 26 September 1963. Sontag reviews Camus Notebooks: 1935-1942. Her review was published just five months into the tenth and last stage of history, to draw on one of the Bahai historical paradigms.
3 In a world threatened by disintegration, in which our grand inquisitors run the risk of establishing forever the kingdom of death, it knows that it should, in an insane race against the clock, restore among the nations a peace that is not servitude, reconcile anew labour and culture, and remake with all men the Ark of the Covenant. It is not certain that this generation will ever be able to accomplish this immense task, but already it is rising everywhere in the world to the double challenge of truth and liberty and, if necessary, knows how to die for it without hate. Wherever it is found, it deserves to be saluted and encouraged, particularly where it is sacrificing itself.... We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.Albert Camus, Nobel Prize Banquet Speech, 1957.

Ron Price
6 July 2007
[Report]

Movies - Play It Again 'Sam'
2007-03-23 21:37:53
SAM Sam Peckinpah came into my life in the 1950s as a scriptwriter and director of several Western genre television series like The Westerner, Gunsmoke and The Rifleman.  My mother sold our TV in 1957, after a six year life history in our house while I was in grades two to six.  Occasionally I saw these westerns at the homes of friends during my late primary and high school days.  I don’t recall seeing any of these Westerns after 1963.  And Peckinpah was an unknown quantity.  Knowing who a director was did not play a part in my knowledge inventory in primary and high school. When my pioneer life began in August 1962 on the homefront in Canada, Peckinpah’s film Ride the High Country had just been released in the USA(20/6/62). Again, if I knew anything about Peckinpah it is doubtful and if I even saw the film, I can not recall after 45 years.  The same was true of his film Straw Dogs released six months after I arrived in my overseas pioneer post in 1971. Watching a 90 minute BBC documentary tonight Sam Peckinpah: Man Of Iron on ABC2 in Australia put this director’s life squarely in the context of my own.  I had not seen this TV doco made some 15 years ago.  Peckinpah was born 19 years before me and I have now lived 23 more years than he.  But we shared the stage for 40 years: 1944 to 1984.  I don’t want to outline his entire biography. But it was clear that we shared some aspects of our life: obsessiveness, the theatrical element in daily life, mental illness, a world of major value shifts, the personal search for meaning in a violent and absurd world, the feeling of a need for redemption or deliverance from self, an emphasis on action and the poetic, the roller-coaster ride of reputation, health and career,  the singular direction to our careers. –Ron Price with thanks to “Sam Peckinpah Internet Sites,â€� 23 March 2007. It was good to know you, a little, Sam; better late than never, I suppose, even if you had to be dead for twenty-three years: your life was rockier than mine, more troubled and your mental-illness more horrific than mine.  You were more successful in the wide-wide world, more obsessive, more famous, your relationships so very troubled: how did you stand it, Sam? Did you find any redemption, deliverance in all your living?  I found, quite early in my life when you were starting your first film & churning out those westerns, a Man who concentrated His energies on a pivotal purpose—to transmute His tribulations into instruments of redemption and to summon all the peoples of the Earth to the banner of unity through the copiousness of His writings.1 1The Universal House of Justice, 28 May 1992. --Ron Price  24 March 2007

General Discussion - Amy Lowell, Poetry and the Baha'i Faith
2007-01-11 09:41:42
THE DOME While 'Abdu'l-Baha was on his western tour, Amy Lowell(1874-1925) was promoting poetry in the USA.  Her first book of published poetry appeared during 'Abdu'l-Baha's trip in 1912.  Poetry had become the consuming passion of Amy Lowell’s life.  When she was not writing poetry, she was promoting it—both her own and that of her contemporaries whose projects complemented hers.  In magazine reviews, short articles, two prose volumes of poetry criticism, and most especially on the lecture circuit, Lowell preached the gospel of the new poetry.  Almost from the street corner, she cried aloud, ‘Poetry, Poetry, this way to Poetry.’ When she died in 1925 interest in her poetry died with her because her poems needed her flamboyant personality and vigor, her demonstrative theatricality to give them life.  She aggressively marketed herself and her poetry as high culture. She was the Liberace of modern poetry. She made of poetry, itself an intimidating art form for most people, accessible, popularized.  She repackaged it for a middle-class audience. In recent years there has been a recrudescence of interest in her work.-Ron Price with thanks to Melissa Bradshaw, "Outselling the Modernisms of Men: Amy Lowell and the Art of Self-Commodification," Victorian Poetry, Vol. 38, No.1, 2000. You converted them left and right by the relief of hearing verse they could enjoy without getting into any special-suspect state of mind.  You surprised audiences by being clear, sincere, direct,  intelligible. Your extravagant persona, theatrical, fit for stages all over the country was not your poet stereotype. The poet, you argued, should have a passionate desire for truth and a dispassionate attitude toward  whatever his search for truth may bring him.  He records you said. He does not moralize. He is the champion of our everyday speech.1 And you socked-it to 'em when that tremendous figure, that mysterious and magnetic personality, that unique branch grown from that sacred root with His styles and titles--you knew Him not.  That Dome of Many Coloured Glass2 had just begun to colour the world. 1 Melissa Bradshaw, "Outselling the Modernisms of Men: Amy Lowell and the Art of Self-Commodification, Victorian Poetry, Vol. 38, No.1, 2000; 2 The name of her 1912 book. For me this Dome serves as an allusion to the new Administrative Order that had just begun to take form in the last two decades of Lowell's life. Ron Price 11 January 2007

General Discussion - John Steinbeck: A Conversation
2007-01-10 01:42:25
STEINBECK In December 1962, three months after I began my pioneering life, part of my contribution at the time to the Baha’i global teaching plan, John Steinbeck spoke the following words as part of his Nobel Prize speech: “I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.â€�  At the time that Steinbeck spoke these words I was 18 and had joined, three years before, a movement which believed in the perfectability of man.  That movement was the Baha’i Faith and in 1962 it had some 400 thousand members worldwide, most of them in Iran.  As I write these words this movement claims to be the emerging world religion on the planet,  has five to six million adherents and is the second most widespread religion on earth. Assumptions like the one made by Steinbeck are supported by Baha’i teachings and they are critical to anyone involved in the betterment of human beings anywhere and the planet everywhere.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, June 18th 2006. Ron: I claim a membership in literature, John, would you let me be a member, let me in? John: Do you believe in the perfectability of man? Without this belief a man has no dedication. Ron: Yes, John, yes! I believe—and have these many years-over 40 since you spoke them. John: This assumption does not seem very realistic. A lot of the facts seem to indicate otherwise. Ron: That’s true, John, but it’s part of the Baha’i vision of a golden age and far beyond, John. It was part of my belief then, back in 1962 and it is still with me in spite of the tempest that has afflicted these epochs of my life. John: Of course, you don’t expect perfection, yet. It’s a long road; it’s a long road. Ron: As Chardin says, it’s the utopians whom make scientific sense, not the realists—in a million years, he says, in a million years. Anyway, John, I suppose it’s any man’s guess as things  stand. Ron Price June 18th 2006

Celebrities - Marlene Dietrich in TV Doco in Australia 25/12
2006-12-24 23:48:36
LASTING MEMORY 29 May 1992 was the solemn, historic occasion of the centenary of the ascension of Baha'u'llah.  For the lovers of Marlene Dietrich there was also a certain solemnity in the air.  She had been buried in Berlin just two weeks before.  One of the greatest female stars of all time, Marlene Dietrich had died at the age of 90.  She had begun her film career in 1923 at the start of the formal establishment of the Baha'i Administrative Order, at the opening of the first epoch(1921-1944) of its Formative Age and the first year of the formation of National Spiritual Assemblies in the Bahá’í world, the first being in Germany in that same year, 1923. At the start of the formal teaching Plan, during the year of discussions preceding the inauguration of that Plan and the beginning of the first epoch of 'Abdu'l-Baha's divine plan in April 1937 Dietrich became an American citizen, in March 1937.  While working on a film in London later that year, Marlene, a German by birth, was invited by the Nazis to support their work, but she turned them down.  She cultivated, all her life--at least until her final 12 years(1980-1992)--an aura of perfection and glamour.  She was an icon and possessed an idealized image in, and for, society's imagination.  This image was her creation, her persona; but it was not her. -Ron Price with thanks to "Living Famously: Marlene Dietrich," ABC TV, 10:55-11:50 p.m. 24 December 2006. …or was this image--her? Was this what kept her a recluse in Paris in her apartment years before her death, wanting this image, this beauty, to be the only lasting memory-- a natural result, perhaps, of her view that: "When you're dead, you're dead. That's it." She missed the Holy Year, that tribute to a life beyond, infinitely beyond, compare, a life Whose prophetic career was framed by superlatives and Who drew His last breath on earth back one hundred years before inaugurating a 5000 century Bahá’í cycle. She missed that Year by a hair's breadth after her lifetime of 90 years, on the threshold of that Year just begun: she died then at what was a remarkably dynamic period with its amplified potential, with its onrushing, quickening wind blowing, a mysterious, rampant force.  And for us… a rendezvous for our soul with the Source of its light in His retreat of revivifying and deathless splendour.2 "'Cause when you're dead your life has just begun. That's it!" 1 Marlene Dietrich died on 6 May 1992 and the Bahá’í Holy Year began on 29 May 1992. 2The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan message, April 1992. Ron Price 25 December 2006.

General Discussion - Re: Trying To Find Matisse Forum
2006-11-30 10:20:07
Thanks for the feedback, folks! Here is a little more on our friend, Matisse: 8) _______________________                                           ONE OF LIFE’S WAR ZONES The major theme of the artist Henri Matisse was the female model. For Matisse the female was, in some ways, too ideal to even have a body. She was a sublime cathedral, a disembodied presence, idealized into pure form, into cosmic proportions, into ecstasy. Woman was a whole universe for Matisse.  But, in other ways, she was also an intensely erotic child of nature; she was beauty; she was meant to be looked at.  In painting, Matisse tried to clean out, put behind, deal with, his intense impulses toward, turbulent feelings about and the overwhelming presence of woman’s flesh.  He was afraid of her absorbing and disturbing presence.  He found the erotic too irresistable to completely transcend. The female body was a war zone where he struggled against his attraction to woman’s body.  In order to be the pure artist he felt that he was he needed to deny the erotically exciting and alluring, which sullied and diminished the female aesthetic. He saw the erotic as the last distraction before the frontier of transcendence, the last obstacle to the beyond. To Matisee, serious art should approach the erotic with disinterestedness. The erotic should be contemplatively remote and unapproachable, not sensuous and emotionally engaging.  Still he was secretly excited by the recalcitrant flesh of the female; the instinctual seemed inescapable. He always seemed  ready to plunge into the depths of her instincts. -Ron Price with thanks to Donald Kuspit, Signs of Psyche in Modern and Post-Modern Art, Cambridge UP, 1993, pp.18-41.           For Price the female body was also a battleground, a war zone, not unlike that of Henri Matisse.  Price’s religious philosophy required that he struggle with his concupiscible appetite, on the assumptions that self control exercised a positive affect on his soul and that it was important to keep one’s secret thoughts pure. If he had not regarded this philosophy with some importance it is likely, he had often thought, that he would have yielded to the great weight of that secret excitement, that intensely pleasureable impulse and feeling and that overwhelming presence of female form and flesh.  So, too, did Price seek to understand himself, most of all, as Matisse put it in a letter in 1938. Matisse said his nature remained mysterious. It was a wall, although he had put a little order into his chaos over the years.  The task of art, Matisse felt, was to help him participate in life not to isolate him.  It’s role was therapeutic not aesthetic. His artistic aim was to generate the luminous.  Price agreed with all of this, although thusfar his art form, his poetry, had an isolating function, a necessary isolating function; indeed his poetry’s therapeutic role was tied up with this isolation.   -Ron Price with thanks to Donald Kuspit, Signs of Psyche in Modern and Post-Modern Art, Cambridge UP, 1993, pp.18-41.     Such beauty is an itch, much more impact than is kitch. And here I am an old man and it still plagues my land. This daemon, this disorder, this befuddled border. I stagger and I contradict, this labyrinthe, this addict. Will I ever sort it out? Will it forever leave me in doubt?    Ron Price 29 November 1999 __________________ That's all folks!

Movies - Re: Film Comment: The Passion of The Christ
2006-10-08 08:49:29
When I posted that article I had no idea that there would be so much comment. People like me who do a good deal of writing always like to have readers whether people agree with them or not. I enjoyed the commentary and leave this thread. If moderators want to close it down I leave that to them. But I thank you all for your response; it makes posting here seem worthwhile.-Ron Price, Tasmania

General Discussion - Re: Hemingway: Some Thoughts
2006-10-08 08:35:30
It has been more than six months since I made that last posting. Thanks for your responses. I can't remember quite how the "invitation" came my way. There has been too much water under the proverbial bridge since then. As far as 11 year olds discussing this or that--or, indeed, any age discussing any book--to each their own I always say. There are so many books that you simply "pay your money and make your choice," whatever your age.(or I suppose it's "make your choice and then pay your money!) I have always found Hemmingway's life and thoughts about writing more interesting than the books themselves. In fact I rarely read fiction any more. There are so many books that I could put in the "might look at one day" category. By the time one gets to the age of 64, one realizes the infinite quantity of print on the planet. Best wishes to you both in your reading life.-Ron Price, Tasmania, Australia.

General Discussion - Trying To Find Matisse Forum
2006-10-08 08:27:53
I was trying to find the Matisse discussion but, unable to do so, I will post this prose-poem inspired by some words of or thoughts about Matisse.-Ron Price. ::) UNCHECKED BY ANY MAYBE The theme of the reclining nude preoccupied Henri Matisse throughout his career, and particularly in the 1920s, not only in his drawings but also in his paintings, prints and sculptures. The equivalent theme for my art is its tripartite division of self, society and religious sensibility.  Matisse's method of working was one of constantly anthologising his own work, that is, he would wipe out his first work and start again and do this again and again as he searched endlessly for a balance of colours and forms.  I too searched for a balance between the three components of my theme and I wrote again and again about aspects of this theme producing one vast anthology.  Matisse judged the correctness of what he made not by any external criteria but solely from the reaction it produced in him.  This, too, was the basis of my judgement of my work. The engine that drove Picasso, on the other hand, was the feminine, the mystery of the female as well as his inner life, inner self, the innerness of things.  Sexuality is indisputably depicted in his art; indeed, it is, arguably, his main concern in life.  Picasso shows an ugliness, a repellant quality in his portrayal of women not to humiliate them, but in order to hide their identities and protect them from the viewer and himself.  I rarely write about women to protect myself because I find women generally and so very many women in particular the most beautiful forms in the world of creation.  The feminine is without question a primary engine in my life as well.  The inner life is also a critical drive, a major motivation, behind what I write and I portray it in words not images.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs. 4 September 2006. Artistic work needs solitude, memory and observation, perspective, converging lines of sight and thought as you move from part to part, sometimes unaligned. It all burgeons through multiple associations, interdependence of diverse points of view, no single, no total image or thought, random points: historicity, symbolic poetry, logical proof, passionate expression, lieing along linking lines inviting total response unchecked by any maybe. Ron Price 4 September 2006

Music - 40 Years of Leonard Cohen: Thanks
2006-08-02 06:38:45
COHEN’S SHISH KEBAB After finishing my writing and reading last night it was a little after 2 a.m.  I went downstairs and turned on the TV to rest my eyes and brain before going to bed.  I was surprised to see Leonard Cohen in an interview on one of the Australian TV stations.1  The interview inspired me that same afternoon to read about Cohen on the internet.  The material here comes from several interview sites.2  “I feel tremendously relieved,â€� said Cohen in 2005 at the age of 70, “that I’m not worried about my happiness. There are things of course that make me happy…..But what I am so happy about is that the background of distress and discomfort I had had in my life has at last evaporated.  It’s not that I don’t feel distressed or sad about things that I see and know and what happens to people around me.  It’s not that the emotions don’t come, it’s just that the background is clear.  Before…it was very dark. I could pierce the darkness.  Before…..there was a kind of mist, a kind of distress over everything, but that has lifted at last. –Ron Price with thanks to 1Leonard Cohen, Interview with Leonard Cohen, August 2nd 2006, 2:00-3:00 A.M. TV; and “An Interview in 2005,â€� Kari Hesthamar, Los Angeles, 2005. You’ve been writing poetry as long as my life’s been associated with the permeation of that light, with that most wonderful and thrilling motion with the very inception of the Kingdom of God on earth when the manifest Standard began waving in the centre of the great continent where we were born and raised. It’s been a heavy trip for you, Leonard, and I’m so pleased your distress and discomfort has evaporated at last—me too, Leonard, me too: at last a lifting, an ease,a tranquillity never known, forgiveness and an early peach with all labour put away---well, not quite all, eh Leonard, eh?--- the heart still cooks, sizzling like, how did you put it—shish kebab? Ron Price August 2nd 2006 ____________________ I saw a TV program last night about Leonard and I first heard him sing in 1966. So, it's 40 years-a tribute--thanks again Leonard!

Celebrities - John Updike: 1950s to 2000s
2006-06-24 22:50:12
A bit of perspective on Updike's 'Rabbit Books.' __________________________________ UPDIKE John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy chronicles reflectively the decades since I first had contact with the Baha’i Faith back in 1953.  With the help of  a Guggenheim Fellowship Updike was working on the first of these four books, Rabbit, Run, when I became a Baha’i in October 1959.  The book was published a few months later in 1960 and is the story of a young man, one Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, from a small town in the USA. The book concerns Harry’s attempts to escape the constraints of life.  In my teens I, too, lived in a small town and, although I could see the attractiveness of escaping from social constraints, I also left the need for a set of limits.  I was only too well aware of just how easily I could go beyond the appropriate limits.  By the late fifties I could see what happened to those who did escape from life’s, from society’s, constraints. I knew from personal experience by my early teens, by 1957, what it was like to be caught stealing, breaking and entering, going too far sexually, misbehaving around the family home, at school or with my play-mates and pushing the envelope of life.  Had I read Updike’s book, Rabbit, Run I think I would have had my need, my desire, for limits reinforced.  The Baha’i Faith provided that framework, those limits, at a critical stage in my life, my mid-teens.  This Faith also provided that sense of the sacredness of life which is at the centre of Updike’s work. When I was preparing to leave North America for Australia in 1970/1 people were watching the movie Rabbit, Run. It had opened just as I began planning to leave Canada in 1970.  Rabbit Redux, Updike’s sequel to Rabbit, Run came out four months after I arrived in Sydney for what became my life in Australia.  Harry Angstrom took to the road in 1971 in Rabbit Redux as I took to a different road in the southern hemisphere.  Updike’s final two Rabbit books took Harry Angstrom into the 1990s and his rather bleak retirement and old age.  The following prose-poem compares and contrasts my life with Harry’s. –Ron Price with thanks to “Articles on John Updike’s Works,â€� in The New York Times on the Web. You didn’t think much about politics back then in the ‘50s, did you John?  Private destiny was your concern, then and now--not that partisan game. And your then theories about how to write are now forgotten, eh John? When Rabbit is Rich was set in ’79, I was living in Tasmania fighting another bi-polar episode; Harry was fighting his many losses in life or was it life’s pleasures--sex, booze, marital infidelity and having fun? Then Harry got old--at just 55-- in 1990 in Rabbit At Rest, a decade before I headed into quieter pastures where death and age awaited--- inevitably long down life’s road, but not with fear, emptiness and Harry’s downward slide with its world inhabited by ghosts and demons of his past. Ron Price  June 24th 2006 8)