In this section are thoughts on whatever comes to mind,
no limit on topics, written for this web site. When
I get the impulse, I’ll write thoughts and add them to
what’s already here (I don’t plan on ever deleting any
thoughts). For each thought, there will be a title,
length, the month and year I wrote it, a blurb on what
it’s about, and a PDF of the thought.
To get a sense of who I am and how I see things and
what's going on with me, you could read these thoughts in
order beginning with "On Foucault," the June, 2007
thought. The thoughts are self-contained, however, and you
can read them in any order.
If the PDFs are oversize, adjust them to accommodate your
reading preference.
Beginning in 2018, I'm going go put the latest thought
at the top rather than at the bottom.
• On the Death of James Whale
Revisited, 10 pp., June, 2019.
Out of nowhere it seemed, this week I felt a strong
desire to see the 1998 film “Gods and Monsters,” which I
had seen
before,
eleven years ago.Read
the complete thought here.
•On
Arthur Godfrey and Haleloke, 6 pp., May, 2019.
When I was twelve or so, I watched Arthur Godfrey and Haleloke on television.Read the
complete thought here.
•On Growing Up Well, 3 pp.,
April, 2019.
Dear Dee— A big part of growing up is finding out what
you are good at and like to do.
Read the email portion here.
•On Getting Our Needs Met,
6 pp., April, 2019.
This week,
I’ve been perusing a book about the French-born
intellectual René Girard (1923-2015). Reading the
book has
prompted me to recall a book I read a
year ago, What
Day is Today?The
Story of My Life in the Minor Leagues, and to
reflect
on how we go about satisfying our
needs.Read
the thought here.
•
On Mindfulness. 2pp.,
March, 2019.
I don’t know if it’s the biggest choice we make in our
lives, but a crucially important choice is to be happy.Read the
complete thought here.
• On a Role Model for Dee, 5 pp., March, 2019.
My daughter Dee is fourteen now, a freshman in high
school. Like
every parent, I think about who in Dee’s world she can
look up
to and emulate.It was
reassuring this past week to find just such a person:the singer
Miley Cyrus.Read the thought here.
• On Kurt Vonnegut, 4pp,,March,
2019.
About a week ago, I looked through the biography
and autobiography section of my local library’s e-book
collection, and a book of letters
by the writer
Kurt Vonnegut caught my eye.Read the
complete thought here,
• On Jean Arthur, 4pp., February, 2019.
This week, I read a biography of the
old-time movie actress (she did some stage work after
her movie career ended) Jean Arthur (1900-1990)
that has
stuck with me. Read
the thought here.
• On “Lyle
Mitchell,” 6pp., February, 2019
I was taken
with “Escape at Dannemora,” a seven-part series on
SHOWTIME which aired in November and December of 2018
and I binge
watched in January, 2019.“Escape at
Dannemora” is based on the breakout from a prison in
up-state New York by two life-sentence murderers.
They were abetted in
their escape, as well as sexually serviced, by a prison
employee, Joyce “Tilly” Mitchell.The focus here
is on the
relationship between Tilly and
her husband Lyle.Read the thought here.
• On Getting Better at Golf (and
Other Things Too), 4 pp., January, 2019.
My
fourteen-year-old
daughter Dee, as I call her in public expressions, lives
in another state with her mother.Dee is very
involved with golf
and shoots in the mid-70s and hopes
to play on her high school team and in college.During the
2018 Christmas break from school, she and
her mother traveled to Arizona to
compete in a junior golf tournament.Dee wrote me a
long email just after she returned from the Arizona
trip.She
reported that she didn’t do well in the tournament.A visit to the
Grand Canyon (including the rental Mercedes to get
there)
was a great time.With a bit of
editing, this was my emailed reply to Dee’s message.Read the email
here.
•
On the Interminable Ending of Basketball Games, 4 pp.,
December, 2018.
I’m a regular reader of Phil Mushnick’s sports columns
in The New York Post online.I find him a
breath of fresh air amid all the cheerleading and
inanity
that passes for sports
commentary in our time.Read the thought here.
•
On “First Reformed,” 5 pp., December, 2018.
I’ve written favorably about screenwriter and director
Paul Schrader on this site (see the thought “On Paul
Schrader,” October, 2014). I’ve
changed my mind.Read the
complete thought here.
• On “Just a Sigh,” 3pp., November, 2018.
I suppose to the world, the 2014 French-and-English
language film “Just a Sigh” is three-and-a-half, perhaps
four, stars out of five. But
to me personally, its five stars.I can’t
get enough of it. Read the review here.
• On Dreams as
Life Lessons, 4 pp., October, 2018.
I keep a
notebook and pen on the bed stand and record my dreams.If I don’t write
them down, very often I don’t recall their particulars.I
seek
to
remember dreams because I find them personally educative,
informative, directive.Read the complete thought here.
• On Dealing with Reviews, 3 pp., September, 2018.
After
viewing
a film, I often check the internet to see what
professional critics have to say about it, as well as
look over viewers’ comments.Read the
complete thought here.
• On Jack Jarpe, 4
pp., August, 2018.
It’s a little after 5:00 a.m., and the
image of Jack Jarpe from
my high school teaching years just popped in my
consciousness, however that
happens--this was fifty years
The past year, every couple of months it seems, I
give over a couple
days to
an “It’s Only Make Believe” pre-occupation.Read the complete thought
here.
• On Dee’s AirPods, 3 pp., July, 2018.
My 13-year-old daughter Dee lives with her mother in
another state.Dee emailed me asking me to get her some AirPods,
wireless earplugs
that serve as earphones.This is my emailed reply to her.Read the reply
here.
•On Guilt,
5 pp., June, 2018.
A week or
so ago, I read a novel by William Maxwell (1908-2000), So Long, See You
Tomorrow.It
is a very good book; I’d put it in the
bottom half of the top rank.That’s
all I’ll say about the worth of the book.This isn’t a
book review.Rather,
it is about what an episode
in the book brought up for me about my own life.Read the
complete thought here.
• On Anna May Wong, 4 pp., May, 2018.
For the past week, I’ve been caught up with Anna May
Wong.Who’s
Anna May Wong?A week ago, I
didn’t know either.Read the
William Stoner is the protagonist of the eponymous novelStoner,
published in 1965, the author John Williams (NYRB
Classics, 2010).The
book has gotten a lot of attention in the last few
years--decades after its publication,and long after the
death of its author.
Read my
commentary here,
I played the baritone horn in the Monroe High
School band.A
baritone horn looks like a small tuba and sits on your
lap.
Read the full thought here.
•On
Dr. Toni Grant, 6pp., March, 2018.
A couple of weeks ago, I guess it was, the memory of a
radio show I listened to just about daily many years ago
popped into my mind,
seemingly out of
the blue.Read
the thought here.
• On Dad’s Stories, 15 pp., January, 2018.
I read a book on the magician and escape
artist Harry Houdini (1874-1926). The Houdini book
reminded me of an anecdote involving him
my dad
recounted to me frequently as a kid.Read the
complete thought here.
On Foucault. 19 pp. June, 2007.
Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
was a philosopher who taught at the College de France and
other universities, including in the United States. He
authored critical studies of social institutions,
including psychiatry, medicine, and the prison
system. He also wrote about the history of sexuality
and the relationship between power, knowledge, and human
discourse. I first read a biography of Foucault by James
Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, in, I believe,
1995, and have revisited it regularly since, once or twice
year, reading a chapter or two or three and browsing
sections here and there before setting it back on my
library shelf. This last time I pulled the book off
the shelf—in June of 2007--I noted the phrases and
sentences, sometimes a paragraph, I had underlined, I
suppose, ten or twelve years ago. For this thought,
I reproduce the underlines and offer my comments.
This thought provides a sense of the impact this book has
had on me, including my writing, this past decade, and
gets across something of what I am like in 2007.
Also, I hope this thought will prompt readers to reflect
on their own lives, as well as look into Foucault and the
other philosophers mentioned in these
pages. Read the
full thought here.
On Mishima. 8 pp. July, 2007.
Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) was
a Japanese author and playwright, who gained international
recognition and acclaim, including being on a short list
for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is most
remembered, however, for his ritual suicide at 45 by
seppuku (disemboweling oneself with a knife and then being
beheaded by a colleague). I’ve read a good bit of
Mishima’s fiction, but I have been most drawn to his
outlook as an artist and as a man and to his personal
story. Every couple of years for the last fifteen,
I’ve checked out from the library two biographies on him
and his philosophical essay and memoir Sun &
Steel. In this thought I comment on excerpts from
Sun & Steel. I hope I explain Mishima some here
and encourage readers to look into his writings and
personal example, but most of all I use Mishima’s writings
to explain myself. Read
the full thought here.
On the New McCarthyism. 18 pp. July,
2007.
The topic here is the current
attacks on racially conscious and active white people by
those who would marginalize, silence, and punish them for
their beliefs, expressions, and actions. I use a
memoir on the McCarthy era, as it was called, in the 1940s
and ‘50s, written by Walter Bernstein, Inside Out: A
Memoir of the Black List, and an encounter I had in late
2006 with the Southern Poverty Law Center to frame an
analysis of this phenomenon, drawing parallels between
what went on in the McCarthy years, and at other points in
history, and what’s go
