...shout out to the Greeks...

...the world should turn again to logic as the basis of life.  I would only say the limit of such a cultural shift would mean that we take on Aristotle's ideal of a well-rounded structure of logic and aggressiveness - in the classical sense of course.  When you examine the Organon, you have to imagine a savage world all around Greece, with the epicenter of humankind's extension into strengthening the mind as tool, developing in the genius of one man.

In Prior Analytics http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/a8pra/, the concept of syllogisms - where an argument can be structured with its conclusion being found sound/valid - puts the foundation of science, philosophy and politics upon solid ground.  It is pure genius on a scale that would probably be found again 2200 years later in Einstein.  Where the germination of an idea, so wildly off base, could even generate a ground breaking affectation today...it puts to shame the struggle for feeble minds to express something even close on that scale.

Yet, that is what we have now.  Empty thoughts blasted without either the inherent genius of a Greek philosopher, or the struggle of truly taking a thought and fully meting out its implication.  Longstanding influence of such thoughts are mere fashion.  Cultural basket cases are deemed newsworthy - we don't hear from the top minds any more.  That's where fashion fails and the lemmings follow suit.

Take Socialism, not as a philosophical argument, but as a logic argument.  It has failed so many times, in so many corners of the world, with the consistency of an atomic clock - yet, you'll find the philosophical mindset extant.  It's a blatant disregard to the uses of history, all to the tune of millions upon millions of lives that socialism has taken.  It's inevitable outcome creates disharmony, dictatorship and death.

The ideas behind it are groundbreaking, but they lack the truth of human nature.  Pope John Paul, who is neutral to economic affairs, even remarked that, as imperfect as capitalism is, it, at least, embraces and excels the human condition.  It's a generalization of a general statement, but, if you look around you in the Western World, the conditions of health, science, education and technology prove that an imperfect system can be used to the overall good - although, yes, we need to ensure that it provides for those that will fall inevitably short.

But we argue.  We ignore the blatant facts of history and shoehorn our ego into the argument.  But there are only very few men that will make it 2000 years into the future and be recognized for going beyond themselves and reaching closer to truth.

...little did I know about Frank Yerby...

I have been a fan of the book The Golden Hawk (1948) since I started taking a real liking to reading when I had just turned 11.  The story is thrilling - following the exploits of a privateer, Kit Gerado and his father figure, Bernardo, as they fight aristocracy, lust for riches and falling for women from Cartagena to Spain.  My copy is one of the old originals from Dial Press, NY.  It has a wonderful map in the front endpaper, with a cacophony of almost unrelated graphics, probably culled from other sources by the binder.  It's yellowing more today, with a large bite at the bottom of its the spine.  (It twas not I.)

The tale is heavily reminiscent of the swashbuckling genre from Hollywood in the late thirties/early forties.  The style relies upon the baroque language of a Reader's Digest, but in a fashion that, for me, at 11, was full of overabundance of breathy bosoms and swordplay.  Even today, I enjoy the exuberance of Yerby's early work.  It will remind you of the romance stories you'll find in Wal Mart today: torn dresses, musculature that is described in painstaking detail...

"The dress was caught about her waist and clung like the clasp of a lover; at one and the same time it shielded and flaunted the proud upflare of her full, young breasts; from her waist it arched down like the inverted bell of a black orchid plucked in a dream garden in a season of fevers and delirium." [92]

That's just a random sample.  The language is best taken in spurts, but, overall, it is a raucous tale.  For a young one, it was an early form of acceptable pr0n. :)  (Although I had access to a copy of Coffee, Tea or Me? http://www.amazon.com/Coffee-Uninhibited-Memoirs-Airline-Stewardesses/dp/0142003514.  Man, was I a naughty kid - only knowing half of what was going on in that book.)

What struck me today, having never looked up the author - I assumed that, by the style and its exhaustive descriptions of fair-skinned women - Frank Yerby is a black author [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Yerby].  My surprise was that, being it was written in '48, and my experience with black literature was a much different experience than something that I had read as a child.  Baldwin, Ellison, Hughes, Walker were my primary relationship.  Tooling around wikipedia, I found that Yerby was the first African-American author to become a millionaire from the pen, and the first to sell a book to Hollywood (Foxes).  He was at odds with the segregationist culture of the US and finally moved on to Spain.  He would eventually die there.  (It must have been his passion to be there.  In the Hawk, he describes Spain with such vivid asides, he must have found a place that resolved his passion.)

The anachronism is what threw me off tonight - he wrote such splendid 'costume' pieces.  He even stated this was the sole purpose of entertainment.  Considering the time period in which Yerby lived, that was a fascinating  act.

You could pick a copy up for a few bucks at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Golden-Hawk-Frank-Yerby/dp/B001KUVJA4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1314949393&sr=1-1.

...the summer comes to an end, soon...

...punched out the second part of a chapter for Miss Kitty...http://ohmisskitty.blogspot.com/2011/08/miss-kitty-chapter-2-part-2.html...if you want to read it so far, from the beginning...http://ohmisskitty.blogspot.com/2009/02/explanation05feb09.html...

...anthology number two is resolving itself...also going to go back and edit a bit of "Powder Blue" for a re-release (with corrections - performing edits oneself is like trying to vacuum during dodge ball).

...Pace, the comic is next up, along with a short novel, "Filipino Cookbook"...hopefully all done by the end of the year...

Thanks for visiting, and I'll intersperse with some meaningful sundries in the meantime...

...night sound mix tape one...

Hard to define, but the "night sound", to me, is the music that defines the quieter pop melodies for those of the nocturnal persuasion. It's music of introspection while driving around in the dead of night. Local stations in the late seventies/early eighties, like KBIG or KOST, would just stack them up. Nicely, the DJs didn't interrupt too often. The music, windows down, late summer breezes mingled with ocean and dry brush so well.

The song that I identify most is Paul Simon's "Slip Sliding Away". It clearly typifies all of my criteria above. It is a song of introspection. It just stops short of being melancholy, and more about the way things are.

I drove all around Orange County in the family's yellow Dodge Horizon. It had a working cassette player and radio - which is all that was needed. The seats were flat - and you would get shin splits from the unresponsive gas and over-done brakes. The smell of my mom's coffee, all over that car, would constantly push out the vents. There was still residual odor from the days she used to chain smoke.

As long as I had the music, it didn't matter much. There are great places to drive through Sunny Hills, Anaheim Hills, Huntington and Newport. Gas was cheap - cheaper than food. It was easily the one thing you could rely on getting in the late eighties without issue.

Here's a sampling of songs that still make great mix CDs today for me:

PENULTIMATE NIGHT SOUND:

- "Walking After Midnight" - Patsy Cline

- "Overkill" - Men at Work

- "In Your Eyes" - Peter Gabriel (also "Don't Give Up")

- "Walking in Memphis" - Marc Cohn - but he doesn't have an official/allowable version on yT

- "In the Air Tonight" - Phil Collins (also "One More Night")

- "Don't Stop Believin'" - Journey

- "Free Bird" - Lynyrd Skynyrd

- "Easy" - Commodores

- "Oh, What a Night" - The Dells

OTHERS:

- "I Drove All Night" - Cyndi Lauper

- "Tempted" - Squeeze

- "Nothing Compares 2 u" - Sinead O'Connor

- "It Keeps You Runnin'" - Doobie Brothers

- "Father Figure" - George Michael

- "Don't Fear the Reaper" - Blue Oyster Cult

- "Could've Been" - Tiffany

- "Moondance" - Van Morrison

- "These Eyes" - Guess Who

- "Wonderful Tonight" - Eric Clapton

- "Hello Again" - Neil Diamond

- "Just When I Needed You Most" - Randy Vanwarmer

- "Rosalinda's Eyes" - Billy Joel

- "Vincent" - Don McLean

- "Lonely Town" - Freddie Hubbard

- "Twilight" - The Band

- "Take the Long Way Home" - Supertramp

- "We're All Alone" - Rita Coolidge

- "Groovy Kind of Love" - The Mindbenders

- "She's Gonna Let You Down" - America

- "Bookends Theme" - Simon and Garfunkel

- "Ride Like the Wind" - Christopher Cross

- "Hey Tonight" - Creedence Clearwater Revival

- "It's Only Make Believe" - Conway Twitty

- "Give It All You Got" - Chuck Magione

- "Woman Tonight" - America

- "Running with the Night" - Lionel Richie

- "Somebody's Baby" - Jackson Browne (also "The Load Out")

- "Don't Lose My Number" - Phil Collins

- "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" - Elton John

- "Love's Lines, Angles, and Rhymes" - The 5th Dimension

- "Do You Believe in Love" - Huey Lewis and the News

- "Died in Your Arms Tonight" - Cutting Crew

- "Africa" - TOTO

- "I Ran" - A Flock of Seagulls

- "America" - Simon and Garfunkel

What's it for the next mix?

...strange goings on kind of sneaking up behind you...

Meandering through Facebook and Twitter, the sense I get is that the turmoil and morass that's seeping into everyone's life isn't hitting home, I guess. Perhaps it isn't - then we are lucky for it. The world is (and has been) on the edge for a few years and we're only hoping a panacea is found that cures it. Problem is, these issues are to the core - it will take some serious self-reflection on everyone's part to turn it around. Hard decisions are going to have to be made or anarchy is a possibility. Scary, but either we change the system or the inevitability is going to stare us in the face - and I'm going to guess it isn't going to assume the form of the Stay Pufft Marshmallow Man. Something scarier - like ABBA.

In other 'end of world' chatter, two stories, a month apart, caught my eye. The first is that Philip K Dick's personal bible is up on ebay: http://io9.com/5828459/philip-k-dicks-bible-is-on-ebay-for-6500?comment=41637724#comments and http://cgi.ebay.com/PHILIP-K-DICKS-BIBLE-HOLOGRAPH-NOTES-/230653765080?pt=Antiquarian_Collectible&hash=item35b40925d8 . The comments on io9 are interesting in that it's seems far-fetched that a sane, science fiction writer can become Christian. Many of the great works of fantasy and sci-fi come from self-avowed lovers of Christ. Great Scott!

The real question is why do secularists find it so ponderous; that genre writing somehow has to be written by pure agnostics? Are PKD's novels less worthy because he found God?

For me, who has a haphazard Faith at best (I try) and only recently 'religious', even when I was not a believer, it never entered my worldview not to read C.S. Lewis, Dick, Tolkein, Stevenson, Shakespeare, Einstein, Burgess, et. al. Nor did I feel the need to put away Twain or Heller or stop listening to George Carlin. If my worldview were to change simply because I read or heard a diatribe in either direction, then my self-knowledge is deeply and irrevocably harmed. I hope that my opinion is based on a handsome experience of introspection and hate of fashion.

Before the PKD Bible, this article was early from last month: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110714103828.htm. A scientific study that determined we are predisposed to faith and a belief in god. I'll not dive into my own theories, but remark on my mind's first blush upon reading it: "we believe we know so much now, and, perhaps, we really don't know everything yet." A more recent article found that 20% of atheists have spiritual leanings.

Either way, as the world seems to burn around us, let's be humble, either for God or for Science and eat a bit of dust, tear at our clothes and remember that we don't know shit. Maybe a little humility is in order, all of ye. The other poem stuck in my head the last couple of days is from Shelley:

'Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".'

...waxing nostalgic about the 70s...

Running through the best capitalism has to offer, the late 70s and early 80s were the height of guilt-free luxury - so suck it 2000s, you kinda suck so far (thanks, terrorism).

I remember riding my Huffy off-road bike through Tara Hills off of Brookhurst and Crescent, just across the street of Brookhurst Junior High. It used to be a dirt lot, now a combination of crap mini-malls that don't keep a business for more than 2 years at a time. The neighborhood kids and I would get up early and develop the lot a little at a time - the apex of which was the giant hill in the center where you could get some decent air. The guys with the light bicycles could get up 6-7 feet and end up in a heap below. It was decent.

Down the street and to the right on Lincoln was the primary strip back then. You had your cloth store next to Gemco. You had your Jack in the Box (now gone), but one of the only ones in Anaheim at the time. Ole's was down the way from Top's Auto, which is across the street from Linbrook Bowl. Used to ride the bike up to the corner of Lincoln and Brookhurst, but never had an interest in crossing the street. That was about 3/4 of a mile away from home and I must have instinctively knew my limit.

Down the other way, where I would go constantly, another bowling alley just off Lincoln next door to Fedmart. The Fedmart center at the time had a pizza joint (the best), a Big and Small and some other small brick and mortar shops (I think one was a vacuum shop). Across from there, where Crescent turned back into Lincoln, there was a Computer Store (only recently closed), a model train store and I think an ice cream joint. It would eventually become the Lincoln Antique mall until that bubble burst a decade ago. Now it's a mash-up of forgettable little 99 cent stores and nothing.

The pizza was under a buck a slice and a great big drink, those clear red plastic buckets filled to the brim with Coke, had to be under .50. If you had two bucks, you ate, drank and had enough to hit a greasily handled video game. Two bucks wasn't the easiest to come by, but once a month you could get away with it. The place was dark, with wood accents, no windows and only the fluorescent signs to light it. It was a good place to hang out for an hour with my foul-mouthed friends - who always a few years older than me and getting into trouble. Bastards.

Fedmart became Target, which closed four years ago or so, to move down the street on Euclid. That location used to be a used car lot, an Arby's, and, at one time, a Bob's Big Boy. The only thing left on that street is a shoe store, car wash, Denny's and a bar further south. Oh, and El Taco is down that way too.

Just logging it, since I remember riding on my dependable black Huffy. Thing never got stolen, probably because it weighed like a tank. Couldn't break the damn thing - good old bike.

7. Gemco commercial

6. Federated Group commercial

5. Tops Auto Supply link

4. Fedmart commercial

3. Ole's Home Center commercial

2. Anaheim Plaza - hardly knew ye

1. Linbrook Bowl - a taste of Anaheim kitsch

Add me on Facebook and Twitter if you've the chance!

...people in the summertime want sonnets...

Had to renew the library card, since they won't leave it active if you don't show up for a year. Snagged anything interesting in the New Books section near the check out counter so I didn't have to make a circuit through the tenseness of the place. For some reason the adult floor has this almost stunning expectancy in the air. It's not an inviting place and I don't think it's the decor. It has the periodicals, so the guys come out and park there - I'm sure saving a hundred bucks going that route.

Grabbed "The Art of the Sonnet" (2010) by Stephan Burt and David Mikics. I was just happy to see something that was worlds apart from the intellectually anemic book sections of Walmart or Target (I know who buys those books, so they are surely filling its intended need). "Sonnet" is a survey of the poetic form from 1557 to 2009 taking examples and lightly explaining their essence and place historically. The sections are only a few pages per each sonnet, like little petit'fours, always done with a great appreciation of this specially appointment closet of writing.

Of particular interest to me was the Petrarch tradition and how much like a song in its native Italian:

"Nessun mi tocchi," al bel collo d'intorno

scritto avea di diamanti et di topazi.

"Libera farmi al mio Cesare parve." - Poem 190"A pure white hind..." 'The Canzoniere'

["No one touch me": around her beautiful neck

this was written in diamond and topaz.

"It pleased my Caesar to set me free."]

Then, to my poetry stand-by book ("Poetic Meter and Poetic Form" (1965), Paul Fussell, Jr.). This was found in the old Book Baron in Anaheim (now gone to make way for another Latin grocery store, can't have enough apparently). "Writing a good Petrarchan sonnet is difficult; writing a superb one is all but impossible."

Having put myself through the ringer to pound one of these out, and acknowledging how they easily fall short, sonnets are a pain in the ass. But, in their way, extremely addictive to wrangle with. Arranging words in one way, putting the stressed notes here, less forced quatrain development (or at least, attempting to make it look less forced) - how many frustrating moments spent seeing that desired thought in one's mind, only to fail miserably in describing it well.

I recommend "The Art of the Sonnet", with a bit of rich chocolate, and equally rich Andy Williams. Now back to assuming I know what I'm doing over here.