April 13, 2022 · 9:55 pm

What Good Does Philosophy Do?

I am often told that I think too much. I spout quotes from philosophers too often. And sometimes, while contemplating my navel, I have seen the abyss gazing back.

So, you are probably fine with tossing all philosophy books in your possession into the nearest trash bin. You don’t need to worry about why evil exists in the world. Or what the purpose of life is. Or how you can benefit your fellow man. Stupid people live perfectly happy lives more often than gifted intellectuals do. Of course they also punish themselves by electing Donald Trump and thinking Bernie Sanders is a Communist, because they don’t know how much that hurts their own interests, and they are happy as long as the people they hate are being punished more than they themselves are.

It is possible to be perfectly happy by letting someone else do all the thinking, choosing, and planning for you. Let someone else define who and what you are, what you need to be happy, and how your life is to be lived. Then, when things go totally wrong and you are severely punished by life in general, they will probably tell you who to blame and hate for it too.

Fotografi efter blyantstegning udført ca. 1840 af N. C. Kierkegaard

Nobody ever told you that Kierkegaard once thought that every man makes his own meaning in life, and you don’t have to accept every daft thing that some smarty know-it-all says is the best thing for you. You can learn to think for yourself. You can learn to test and verify the important points laid out before you. You are not too dumb to follow what Mickey is saying right now. After all, aren’t you smarter than him? Surely you are. That fool thinks he doesn’t really know anything at all. Well, maybe one thing. He thinks he knows he exists, like Descartes says.

And once you know the important thing is realizing you do exist, then maybe you are beginning to grasp what Existentialism means. Existence comes before everything else. You know you exist, so now you can begin thinking about what things are good for you to think about, choose to explore, choose to do, and… hopefully… choose to preserve your own existence in the best way possible.

Philosophy is merely thinking. There are many stupid philosophies. Some are even deadly. But there is good thinking out there too. Look at who Caesar Marcus Aurelius says you should rely on when thinking about what is good for you. He was apparently a smart guy. Not all the Caesars of Rome were, by the way. But you don’t have to rely on a Stoic thinker like him. You are the only one who can effectively think for you. You need to create your own philosophy. But everyone who wants to build a wagon does not have to reinvent the wheel for himself. You can find old, dead smart-guys who have invented philosophical wheels that you can put on your own philosophical wagon. And why settle for a Radio Flyer when your philosophical vehicle can be a Rolls Royce or a Porsche? Thinkers have come up with philosophical engines in the past too. And it is not that hard to understand some of the best ones. After all, Mickey can do it. And aren’t you smarter than him?

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April 13, 2022 · 2:55 pm

Wisdom From a Writer’s Life

Don’t get too excited.  I searched every box, trunk, bag of tricks, safe, closet, and jelly bean jar that I have in my rusty old memory.  I didn’t find much.  In fact, the old saying is rather applicable, “The beginning of wisdom is recognizing just how much of a fool you really are.”  The little pile of bottle caps and marshmallows that represent the sum total of my wisdom is infinitely tiny compared to the vast universe of things I will never know and never understand.  I am a fool.  I probably have no more wisdom than you do.  But I have a different point of view.  It comes from years worth of turning my ideas inside out, of wearing my mental underwear on the outside of my mental pants just to get a laugh, of stringing images and stupid-headed notions together in long pointless strings like this one.

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Mason City, Iowa… where I was born.  River City in the musical “The Music Man“.

One thing I can say with certainty, nothing makes you understand “home”, the place you grew up in and think of as where you come from, better than leaving it and going somewhere else.  Federal Avenue in Mason City looks nothing now like it did when I was a boy in the 1960’s going shopping downtown and spending hours in department stores waiting for the ten minutes at the end in the toy section you were promised for being good.  You have to look at the places and people of your youth through the lenses of history and distance and context and knowing now what you didn’t know then.

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Grandpa Aldrich’s farm in Iowa is now Mom and Dad’s house.  It has been in the family for over 100 years, a Century Farm.

The only thing that stays the same is that everything changes.  If I look back at the arc of my life, growing up in Iowa with crazy story-telling skills inherited from Grandpa Aldrich, to going to Iowa State “Cow College” and studying English, to going to University of Iowa for a remedial teaching degree because English majors can’t get jobs reading books, to teaching in distant South Texas more than a thousand miles away, to learning all the classroom cuss words in Spanish the hard way, by being called that, to moving to Dallas/Fort Worth to get fired from one teaching job and taking another that involved teaching English to non-English speakers, to retiring and spending time writing foolish reflections like this one because I am old and mostly home-bound with ill health.  I have come a long way from childhood to second childhood.

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                                                                                      If “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is really true, I should be Superman now.  I look like I’ve seen a lot of Kryptonite, don’t I?

Six incurable diseases and being a cancer survivor since 1983 have left their marks upon me.  Literally.  Little pink bleedy spots all over me are the mark of psoriasis.  The fuzzy-bad photo of me spares you some of the gory details.  The point is, I guess, that life is both fleeting and fragile.  If you never stop and think about what it all means then you are a fool.  If you don’t try to understand it in terms of sentences and paragraphs with main ideas, you are an even bigger fool.  You must write down the fruit of your examinations and ruminations.  But if you reach a point that you are actually satisfied that you know what it all means, that makes you the biggest fool of all.

If I have any wisdom at all to share in this post about wisdom, it can be summed up like this;

  • Writing helps you with knowing, and knowing leads to wisdom.  So take some time to write about what you know.
  • Writing every day makes you more coherent and easier to understand.  Stringing pearls of wisdom into a necklace comes with practice.
  • Writing is worth doing.  Everyone should do it.  Even if you don’t think you can do it well.
  • You should read and understand other people’s wisdom too, as often as possible.  You are not the only person in the world who knows stuff.  And some of their stuff is better than your stuff.
  • The stuff you write can outlive you.  So make the ghost of you that you leave behind as pretty as you can.  Someone may love you for it.  And you can never be sure who that someone will be.

So by now you are probably wondering, where is all that wisdom he promised us in the title?  Look around carefully in this essay.  If you don’t see it there, then you are probably right in thinking, just as I warned you about at the outset, “Gosh darn that Mickey!  He is a really big fool.”

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April 12, 2022 · 1:32 pm

He Rose on a Golden Wing… Canto 11

Adagio for Strings – Samuel Barber

After lunch in the school cafeteria, Valerie found her former Pirate crew by Ricky’s locker.

“I didn’t tell you this before, but I invited Dilsey Murphy to our next confessional at the skinny-dipping pond.”  She then found herself looking into two shocked and dismayed faces.

“I don’t think I can do the naked-truth thing in front of any girl but you, Val,” Ricky said with a slight shudder in his voice.

“I can’t do that in front of anybody,” reminded Billy.  “And while we all need the chance to talk about what’s hurting us, I don’t think Dilsey will understand any of it.”

“Yeah, she hasn’t gone through the crap we have.  She won’t get what we’re talking about,” added Ricky.

“I think anyone can understand about being depressed.  And anyone can benefit by talking through it.”

“Well, maybe.   But shouldn’t we cancel the naked-truth thing?” asked Ricky.

“Cancel it,” said Billy.

“We’ll see what’s possible.  But if she comes, we can postpone getting naked.  It may be too cold anyway.”

“Yeah.  That’s a good point,” said Ricky.

“I suppose it won’t hurt to talk about Francois in front of Dilsey.  She remembers him too, I’m sure.”  Billy stuffed books in his locker as he was headed to P.E.

“Sure, of course she remembers him.”

“But she wasn’t with us during the blizzard.  And she never met Tommy or Denny,” reminded Ricky.

“I never met them either, but I remember the stories about them,” said Billy.  “But I gotta go now.  I have to dress out for P.E. or risk another failing grade.”

“So, go.  Have fun with the nakedness in the locker room, Billy.”  Valerie grinned at him as she enjoyed his annoyed grimace.

“I gotta go too,” said Ricky as he slammed his locker shut and took off towards Berensen’s room, completely forgetting his History book in his locker.

Valerie was going to head to her class when a slamming locker door eight lockers down caught her attention.

“You had some nerve ruining the dance last week.  You made yourself the center of attention and took all the joy out of the entire place.”

“You wouldn’t understand, Char.  You only understand your own selfish stuff.”

“Don’t you think I can see the selfishness in you?  Needing to be the focus of attention because you lost your daddy.  We all pity you, but it doesn’t make everything always about you.”

They were alone in the hallway.  The bell rang for fifth period.  It was a good thing the hallway was so quiet.  It meant neither girl was willing to yell and draw everybody out of their classrooms again.

“We are going to be walking on eggshells all week this week, and probably next week too, just so the crazy girl won’t have another hissy fit in the middle of everything.”

Valerie was instantly exhausted.  Her arms and legs were now full of lead.  And there was a crushing pressure in her chest.  She knew this was going to happen.  She just needed it to end more quickly than it was going to.

“You got your wish because of it.  You’re head cheerleader now.”

“I have wanted to be that since I was little and didn’t know Valerie Elaine Clarke even existed!  I worked hard for it all through junior high and high school.  And when I got it, it was not because I won it for myself, not because I beat you out for it… but because you just gave it up.  You got it all so easily.  And you threw it away.  You didn’t even give me the chance to earn it.  I will never forgive you for what you took away from me.”

“Don’t forgive me, then.  I ain’t asking.”

“And you get all the best boys, too.  Ricky is so handsome.  And he doesn’t have eyes for anybody but you.  And you don’t even bother to see it.”

“Ricky’s my friend.  Not my boyfriend.”

“See what I mean?  You threw that away too.”

“Go ahead and hate me, Char.  You are probably right to hate me.”

“I don’t hate you, Val.  I always wanted to BE you.  But I have to get over it now.  I’m sorry your father died.  But that doesn’t give you the right to act the way you do.”

Valerie no longer had the power to continue the conversation.  She hung her head.  She turned slowly towards class and the inevitable tardy slip.  Charlotte walked off in the other direction, even though she had the same class that Val did.

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April 12, 2022 · 1:13 pm

What the Heck is this Blog About?

I read a lot of other people’s blogs for a lot of reasons.  As an old writing teacher and retired Grammar Nazi, I love to see where writers are on the talent spectrum.  I have read everything from the philosophy of Camus and Kant to the beginning writing of ESL kids who are illiterate in two languages.  I view it like a vast flower garden of varied posies where even the weeds can be considered beautiful.  And like rare species of flower, I notice that many of the best blossoms out there in the blogosphere are consistent with their coloring and patterns.  In other words, they have a theme.

Fox logic

So, do I have an over-all theme for my blog?  It isn’t purely poetical like some of the poetry blogs I like to read.  I really only write comically bad poetry.  It has photos in it, but it isn’t anything like some of the photography blogs I follow.  They actually know how to photograph stuff and make it look perfect and pretty.  It is not strictly an art blog.  I do a lot of drawing and cartooning and inflict it upon you in this blog.  But I am not a professional artist and can’t hold a candle to some of the painters and artists I follow and sometimes even post about.  I enjoy calling Trump President Pumpkinhead, but I can’t say that my blog is a political humor blog, or that I am even passable as a humorous political commentator.

One thing that I can definitely say is that I was once a teacher.  I was one of those organizers and explainers who stand in front of diverse groups of kids five days a week for six shows a day and try to make them understand a little something.  Something wise.  Something wonderful.  Something new.  Look at the video above if you haven’t already watched it.  Not only does it give you a sense of the power of holding the big pencil, it teaches you something you probably didn’t realize before with so much more than mere words.

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But can I say this is an education blog?  No.  It is far too silly and pointless to be that.  If you want a real education blog, you have to look for someone like Diane Ravitch’s blog.  Education is a more serious and sober topic than Mickey.

By the way, were you worried about the poor bunny in that first cartoon getting eaten by the fox and the bear?  Well, maybe this point from that conversation can put your mind at ease.

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Mickey is tricky and gets good mileage out of his cartoons.

You may have gotten the idea that I like Bobby McFerrin by this point in my post.  It is true.  Pure genius and raw creative talent fascinate me.  Is that the end point of my journey to an answer about what the heck this blog is about?  Perhaps.  As good an answer as any.  But I think the question is still open for debate.  It is the journey from thought through many thoughts to theme that make it all fun.  And I don’t anticipate that journey actually ending anytime soon.

 

 

 

 

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April 11, 2022 · 7:36 pm

Dreariness

Today the day is seeming drear…

The dreariness is coming near…

But the time is not to fear, my dear…

It’s merely dreariness almost here.

So dry those eyes and shed no tear…

The sun comes back real soon, I hear…

And it comes no sooner with lots of beer…

For only time cures looming drear.

But as we try to spy and peer…

And see through gloomy dark so drear…

Hoping we will hear the cheer…

For darkness ending, the dark lords sneer.

And sunlight fades beneath the fear…

That now there’s only darkness near…

And gloomy faces frown and leer…

For now the dreariness is truly here.

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April 11, 2022 · 4:12 pm

Gooseberry Pie

I would like to contend that a blog is a form of self-portrait.  Do you want to argue with me?  Have a piece of Gooseberry Pie….

You see, gooseberries aren’t made from geese.  They don’t look like gooses… er, goosei… um, geese.  They aren’t the favorite food of a goose, unless, maybe…  Mother Goose.  The name is a corrupted form of the Dutch word kruisbes , or possibly the German Krausbeere.   You know, because people who speak English don’t know how to talk right.  They don’t have anything to do with geese.  In the same way, a person’s name doesn’t really help you understand the person that wears it.  You have to dig deeper.  Do you know, I have never actually tasted gooseberry pie?  I have seen and even picked the gooseberries.  They are danged ugly, spikey-furred snot-green berries.  I am not tempted in any way to put one in my mouth.  And yet, I should not judge gooseberry pie before I taste a piece.  I know people who adore gooseberry pie.  Maybe you are one of them.

The point is, blogs are exactly the same thing.  An artist, a writer, a producer of something, or a day-dreamy noodling goober has put together a blog to display their wares, show off their creations, and share their words and wisdom.  You have to look at them, warts and all, and actually take a bite.  You have to try them out and test them.  Follow them over time.  Read, absorb, and appreciate… not merely zoom through and look at the pictures… and maybe click “like” at the bottom of the post.

Of course, I admit, I do the very thing I am advising you not to do.  The first few times I visit a blog, I scan through and only focus on a few things that catch my falling stars.  (oop!  Shame on me… I should say “catch my fancy”.  Forgive me for lapsing into Mickian brain farts for a moment there).  But if I am lured into coming back, I dip deeper and read more… tasting it thoroughly, as it were…  And much of what I taste there will end up in my own recipe somewhere down the line.  I begin to learn who that blogger is, and their writing style… sometimes even their thinking style (though I don’t read minds… only smell brain farts and odoriferous mental cooking smells) and I picture them as people in my minds eye.  Sometimes I wonder if they match in real life the person I am picturing.  Of course, the answer is no.  People don’t look like what you think they should look like.  They don’t even look like what they think they look like either… even in photos.  So let me end this goofy pie-based argument about why blogs are self portraits with a few self portraits I have created that aren’t really what I look like , even if it is a photo.

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Me in the mirror, 1980

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Scary pictures of the artist as a creepy old man…

 

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The novelist me…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A wizard selfie taken at Mad Ludwig’s Castle in Bavaria.

 

 

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Who I am and who I was…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Seriously grumpy me…

Gag!  Enough of the gooseberries already!  Or are they gross-berries?  I think that I really don’t look anything like me anymore.

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April 10, 2022 · 4:37 pm

Notes From Outer Space

I try to follow up on the lives of the characters I have created and set in motion through the stars. But mail service from distant planets can be a problem. And a lot depends on whether you are travelling via faster-than-light photon drives or the lumbering sluggishness of generational travel.

Davalon and Tanith, the Tellerons pictured here, promised to keep in touch with me and update me about their adventures on the planet Galtorr Prime.

You may remember, if you are one of the three people who actually read the novel Stardusters and Space Lizards, that Dav and Tanith were on one of the colonized moons of Galtorr where they now basically owned the planetoid due to having material synthesizers with which to feed the starving survivors of the planet’s collapse into civil war and environmental disaster.

In their last letter, they were still unaware that power-mad politicians and man-made climate problems are doing to this planet the same things that nearly destroyed the planet Galtorr Prime when they arrived there back in 1991.

George Jetson in 1991, named by Captain Xiar after a favorite Earther cartoon character from the 1960’s.

Davalon tells me that young George Jetson is becoming a pilot. The more he crashes space ships and survives the disaster, the more he learns about what not to do. And his learning curve has definitely caused his more mechanically-minded siblings to get better faster at repairing crashed ships.

Sizzahl, the Galtorrian Lizard-girl, is now the premiere biologist on the planet, although she was still a child… a child genius, in 1991. She is working on genetically evolving the Galtorrian race by combining their DNA with Earth humans, trying to get the best of both races and praying to the Crocodile God that she doesn’t get the worst of both races in her new Fusion Galtorrians.

Sizzahl the Scientist still insists on working in the nude. Harmony Castille, the group’s human church-lady warrior leader protests this heathen behavior, but Sizzahl is immune to religious objections to her methods.

Sizzahl wants to argue with me about forcing Earth humans to evolve in a similar fashion. She points out that if we continue to treat the planet the way we are currently doing, we will need to breed in genetic abilities to resist heat and evolve lungs that have a capacity to filter out acids, carcinogens, and poisons, as well as extract oxygen directly from carbon dioxide. She has a better argument than she knows as this last letter was sent out at the speed of light in 1991 and only arrived yesterday. She is older and smarter by now. But we are also dumber and more poisoned as a species.

Brekka’s psychic link to the man-eating plant called Lester has proved to be a boon to the planet. The plant can eat scabby-zombies that are bad for the environment and create new buds which he/she gladly donates to the food supply. (New buds are not technically children because the only mind they have is Lester’s.)

Brekka enjoys a unique psychic link to Lester the man-eating plant because he/she tried to eat Brekka, but had to cough her up because Tellerons taste bad. Lester’s digestive juices seeped into Brekka’s brain, forging a telepathic link.
Pilot Farbick and young Davalon (picture from Mars orbit, 1990)

So, I sent them a reply letter. It will get there in 21 years at the speed of light. So, in 42 years I should get the information I need to write a sequel. I will only be 107 at that time.

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April 10, 2022 · 1:46 pm

Pirate Novels

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My first novel-length piece of writing was attempted in college.  I finished it in four years.  It was a pirate tale about a young man, a pirate named Graff the Changeling.  You see him in this illustration I created in 1980 with his two young sons, Rene and Emery.  Because their mother was a fairy, the boys have pointed ears and horns.    It was an attempt at serious fantasy adventure fiction that was so awful, it became a comedy before it was through.  I called it The Graff Tales, and I still have it.  But I promise you, I will never, ever try to publish the horrible thing.  My sisters served as my beta readers for this story.  They both liked the oral stories I told, and they eagerly awaited something like they remembered from our shared childhood.  They both were a bit disappointed by my first prose attempt.  There was a knight called Sir Rosewall in the story.  He was a hapless knighted fool who lived in poverty and swore to reclaim his honor with great deeds, but as he goes to sea as a kidnapped sailor, all he manages to do is fall down a lot and bump his large head frequently.  In the first scene when he enters the story, long about chapter four, he exits a cottage and has to punt a piglet to get out without falling down.  This pig-punting thing was repeated more than once with this character.  My sisters joked that the “pig-in-the-doorway” motif would be my lasting contribution to literature.  Fortunately for me, it was not.  I am probably the only one who even remembers there was such a novel.

But my biggest failing with writing and storytelling was always that I could be too creative.  The story featured a flying pirate ship that was raised from the bottom of the ocean by fairy magic.  The crew were re-animated skeletons.  The gorilla who lived on the island where the ship’s survivors had been marooned would also join the crew.  His name was Hairy Arnold.  One villain was the pirate captain Horner, a man with a silver nose-piece because he had lost his real nose to a cannon shot.  Another was a red-bearded dandy named Captain Dangerous.  But the biggest villain of all was the Heretic, who turned out to be a demon in human guise.  It was all about escaping from pirates who wanted to kill you and hitting soldiers with fish in the fish market.  There were crocodile-headed men and little child-like fairies called Peris that lived in the city where Graff was trapped and transformed into a monster by the Heretic.

My plot was too convoluted and my characters too wildly diverse and unlikely.  The result was something far too bizarre to be serious fiction.  The only way it could actually be interpreted was as a piece of comedy.  There-in lay the solution to my identity problem as a writer.  I had to stop trying to be serious.  My imagination too often bent the rules of physics and reality.  So I had to stop trying for realism and believability.

 

In the end all the main characters die.  All except for young Rene who becomes a pirate hunter.  Of course, I follow Graff and Emery through to heaven because, well, it was a first person narrative and the narrator died.  So, I vowed to myself that I would never let this horrible piece of nonsense see the light of day.  I would never try to publish it, rewrite it, or even tell anyone about it.  And so to this very day I… oopsie.

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April 9, 2022 · 4:27 pm

Pictures I Like Whether I Drew Them or Not

The key factor in having an artist’s eye is being able to find what is beautiful no matter what or where you look.

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April 9, 2022 · 3:44 pm

Jungle Book

This is a re-post of my review of the Disney movie Jungle Book directed by John Favreau.  It was the movie version I have been waiting for all my life.

MOWGLI_AND_SHANTI_by_FERNL

The amazing thing about this movie is the way it took the book and layered its themes and central idea on top of the classic 60’s Disney cartoon.  The music is still there and intact, though mostly moved to the end credits.  The kid is still cute and mostly vulnerable, at least until the conclusion.  And they have still given the Disneyesque comedic touch to the character of Baloo the bear, voiced by comedian Bill Murray in the this incarnation.  But this is a live action movie and the kid-friendly Bowdlerization of the original story is a thing no longer.

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A classic book illustration by E.J. Detmold

Fortunately for the young actor, Neel Sethi, they don’t require him to play the entire movie naked as would be required by a strictly by-the-book approach.  They allow him the Disney-dignity of the cartoon red loin cover.  But the sense of a human child facing the violence of the jungle naked, armed only with his creature-appropriate natural defenses, has been put back into the story. This version literally has teeth and claws.  We see the boy’s body wounded and scarred during the course of his life in the jungle.  And at a time of crucial confrontation, Mowgli takes the defense stolen from man village, a torch of the feared red flower, and throws it away into the water, facing the terrible tiger with only his wits and the abilities of his fangless, clawless human body.   Thus, an essential theme I loved about the book when I was twelve is restored.  Man has a place in the natural world even without the protections of civilization.

The story-telling is rich and nuanced, with multiple minor characters added.  Gray Brother has been restored to Mowgli’s family.  The fierce power of Mowgli’s wolf mother has been written back into the screenplay.  And the character of Akela is given far more importance in the story than the cartoon could even contemplate.  Although his role in aiding Mowgli to kill the tiger Shere Khan has been taken away from him, Akels’s death becomes the central motivation bringing Mowgli and Shere Khan together for the final inevitable confrontation.  And this movie does not shy away from the reality of death as the cartoon did, resurrecting Baloo at the end, and Kaa’s attempts to eat Mowgli being turned into a joke (though I would like to note if you have never read the book, Kaa is not supposed to be a villain.  He was Mowgli’s wise and powerful friend in the book).  Even the tiger survives in the cartoon version.  This is no longer a cute cartoon story with a Disney sugared-up ending.

I will always treasure the 1960’s cartoon version.  I saw it at the Cecil Theater in Mason City, Iowa when I was ten.  I saw it with my mother and father and sisters and little brother.  It was my favorite Disney movie of all time at that point in my life.  I read and loved the book two years after that, a paperback copy that I bought with my own money from Scholastic book club back in 1968, in Mrs. Reitz’s sixth grade classroom.  That copy is dog-eared, but still in my library.  But this movie is the best thing that could possibly happen to bring all of that love of the story together and package it in a stunning visual experience.

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