Thursday, August 28, 2014

Why Travel?



Grandson, one-year old, at Black Sands beach Hawaii—he may not remember the caviar-black sand, the warm pools, the delight he had that day, but I do.

Clark Vandeventer answered a question that had been rattling around in my brain for the last few years. Could the world become a school house for your child? For our child—for my grandchild? What about traditional schooling? What about making lasting friendships?

My friend June said she attended 13 schools by the time she was in the 6th grade. Did that help or hinder her development? June is one of the happiest, friendliest people I know. She in ninety-one years old and most every day her answering machine will say, “I may be here or I will be out in the Universe having fun.”

I am reminded of something Pat Parelli, a horse trainer I admire and consider a mentor said, “Whatever the general population is doing, do the opposite.”

This was after he got what he called a “macho-ectomy.” “It’s like being a dance partner with your horse,” he said, “You ask don’t tell.”

Now he is a master trainer who can ask a horse to pirouette, and within that horse’s abilities, he will do it. Soon it will be without a bridle or ropes. Now isn’t this contrary to established ways of training horses where you jerk them around by the mouth?

Oh, I’m not encouraging anyone to be a rebel–rouser, or a non-conformist just to be obstinate or obnoxious. I mean to look at the way things are done, and consider that they might be different. Be reasonable!

Here is the blog title that motivated me:
Why I Took My Daughter on a Trip She Will Never Remember
www.FamilyTrek.org
We’ve loaded our kids up on planes, trains, and automobiles to far corners of the world for a reason. I know my daughter Abigail will never remember this recent trip to Thailand or any of the other trips we take in the next few years. That’s not the point, though. I want our travels to shape the woman she becomes. I want her to see, before she is able to develop an idea of what’s “normal,” that America isn’t the world. I want her to see people living differently than we do in America and speaking different languages and eating different foods. That’s no judgment of America. I just want my kids to understand the world is bigger, and if I have the power to expose them to these things (and I do), I want them to see this while their view of the world is still very much being formed.

There is another reason, though, that we travel with our young kids.
My daughter will never remember this trip, but
I will.


Monday, August 25, 2014

Can You Put Your Writing First?

This is a tough one.

“Well, I’ll do the dishes first.”

“The clothes need folded.”

The child wakes up, time to fix breakfast. He wants to use my computer.
These are the sort of things that peck at you, and you wonder if your writing is a waste of time after all. Who wants to read my words? And why am I expending all this energy putting words on a page when there are smarter, wiser, more skilled people doing it already.

Stop It!

This is your self-expression. This is your gift. Did Michelangelo say, “Whoops, my chisel slipped, guess I’m a lousy sculptor?” No, he said “If people knew how much I worked at this it wouldn’t be so wonderful.”

I didn’t know he said that. I figured he always knew he was a genius.

So, hop to. Get with it. Write!



Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Mark Twain

When we moved onto our farm in Hawaii I found a gem of a book among the rubble. It was Mark Twain’s book Roughing it In The Sandwich Islands. What a find. It further enamored me with the genius that was Mark Twain.

This morning upon hitting author-zone.com  #amwritingakasthomas, I found a link to Mark Twain.  Could I not follow it? Nope. I did, and found the following essay “Concerning the Interview.”

It's a must-read.

Enjoy!



Thanks to the Mark Twain Foundation and its trustees, the PBS NewsHour brings you for the first known time in print an essay by the American literary giant on a topic dear to our hearts -- the journalistic interview. In the course of Twain's career, he was frequently interviewed by reporters. The 10-page handwritten essay has been sitting for more than 40 years in the archives of the Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley. It was written in either 1889 or 1890, a time that coincided with the rise of "yellow journalism."


“Concerning the ‘Interview.’”
No one likes to be interviewed, and yet no one likes to say no; for interviewers are courteous and gentle-mannered, even when they come to destroy. I must not be understood to mean that they ever come consciously to destroy or are aware afterward that they have destroyed; no, I think their attitude is more that of the cyclone, which comes with the gracious purpose of cooling off a sweltering village, and is not aware, afterward, that it has done that village anything but a favor. The interviewer scatters you all over creation, but he does not conceive that you can look upon that as a disadvantage. People who blame a cyclone, do it because they do not reflect that compact masses are not a cyclone’s idea of symmetry. People who find fault with the interviewer, do it because they do not reflect that he is but a cyclone, after all, though disguised in the image of God, like the rest of us; that he is not conscious of harm even when he is dusting a continent with your remains, but only thinks he is making things pleasant for you; and that therefore the just way to judge him is by his intentions, not his works.

The Interview was not a happy invention. It is perhaps the poorest of all ways of getting at what is in a man. In the first place, the interviewer is the reverse of an inspiration, because you are afraid of him. You know by experience that there is no choice between these disasters. No matter which he puts in, you will see at a glance that it would have been better if he had put in the other: not that the other would have been better than this, but merely that it wouldn’t have been this; and any change must be, and would be, an improvement, though in reality you know very well it wouldn’t. I may not make myself clear: if that is so, then I have made myself clear–a thing which could not be done except by not making myself clear, since what I am trying to show is what you feel at such a time, not what you think–for you don’t think; it is not an intellectual operation; it is only a going around in a confused circle with your head off. You only wish in a dumb way that you hadn’t done it, though really you don’t know which it is you wish you hadn’t done, and moreover you don’t care: that is not the point; you simply wish you hadn’t done it, whichever it is; done what, is a matter of minor importance and hasn’t anything to do with the case. You get at what I mean? You have felt that way? Well, that is the way one feels over his interview in print.
Yes, you are afraid of the interviewer, and that is not an inspiration. You close your shell; you put yourself on your guard; you try to be colorless; you try to be crafty, and talk all around a matter without saying anything: and when you see it in print, it makes you sick to see how well you succeeded. All the time, at every new change of question, you are alert to detect what it is the interviewer is driving at now, and circumvent him. Especially if you catch him trying to trick you into saying humorous things. And in truth that is what he is always trying to do. He shows it so plainly, works for it so openly and shamelessly, that his very first effort closes up that reservoir, and his next one caulks it tight. I do not suppose that a really humorous thing was ever said to an interviewer since the invention of his uncanny trade. Yet he must have something “characteristic;” so he invents the humorisms himself, and interlards them when he writes up his interview. They are always extravagant, often too wordy, and generally framed in “dialect”–a non-existent and impossible dialect at that. This treatment has destroyed many a humorist. But that is no merit in the interviewer, because he didn’t intend to do it.

There are plenty of reasons why the Interview is a mistake. One is, that the interviewer never seems to reflect that the wise thing to do, after he has turned on this and that and the other tap, by a multitude of questions, till he has found one that flows freely and with interest, would be to confine himself to that one, and make the best of it, and throw away the emptyings he had secured before. He doesn’t think of that. He is sure to shut off that stream with a question about some other matter; and straightway his one poor little chance of getting something worth the trouble of carrying home is gone, and gone for good. It would have been better to stick to the thing his man was interested in talking about, but you would never be able to make him understand that. He doesn’t know when you are delivering metal from when you are shoveling out slag, he can’t tell dirt from ducats; it’s all one to him, he puts in everything you say; then he sees, himself, that it is but green stuff and wasn’t worth saying, so he tries to mend it by putting in something of his own which he thinks is ripe, but in fact is rotten. True, he means well, but so does the cyclone.

Now his interruptions, his fashion of diverting you from topic to topic, have in a certain way a very serious effect: they leave you but partly uttered on each topic. Generally, you have got out just enough of your statement to damage you; you never get to the place where you meant to explain and justify your position.

Read by permission of Richard A. Watson and JPMorgan Chase Bank as trustees of the Mark Twain Foundation.

P.S. In those days long paragraphs were common. Now they say that readers don't have the patience to follow long verbiage.

What do you think?

Saturday, August 16, 2014

Put yourself and Your Writing First



This is a tough one.

Can you do it? Can you put yourself and writing first?

“Well, I’ll do the dishes first.”

“The clothes need folded.”

The child wakes up, time to fix breakfast. He wants to use my computer.

These are the sort of things that peck at you, and you wonder if your writing is a waste of time after all. Who wants to read my words? And why am I expending all this energy putting words on a page when there are smarter, wiser, more skilled people doing it already.

Stop It!

Writing is your self-expression. It is your gift. Did Michelangelo say, “Whoops, my chisel slipped, guess I’m a lousy sculptor?” 

No, he said “If people knew how much I worked at this it wouldn’t be so wonderful.”

I didn’t know he said that. I figured he always knew he was a genius.

So, hop to. Get with it. Write!






Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Wow, This Man Made Us Laugh






I was so shocked and saddened when I discovered that Robin Williams had passed. I had to put this clip on my site. Robin "Captain my Captain"* we loved you.

The Best Robin William Moments / Mashable
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1uWvvMsL5w
(COPY AND PASTE)

What can I say? We can't see into another person's life, how Robin, one of the funniest men to grace this planet, could suffer from depression and take his own life. He achieved greatness, success in his chosen field, financial awards, and was sad. It shows me, once again, that we have to learn to manage our own state--by that I mean our state of consciousness.


LIFT SOMEONE UP TODAY!

*I loved, loved, loved, The Dead Poet's Society










Tuesday, August 5, 2014

It's Greek To Me



This blows me away. 

Did  the Greeks ever imagine this?




Old Pi visited me last week. Remember him from those old days in math class? I had not seen Pi in decades, and he hasn't changed a bit, still 3.14 (and on and on), and he decided to show up in my Real Estate Course.

The course gave us a measurement in feet and inches and a diameter.  The circumference of a circle is diameter times Pi--how did the Greeks determine that? Now, said the study course, fill the area with cement—in cubic yards.  (Radius (1/2 the diameter) squared times Pi equals the area.)

Am I studying to be a contractor or what?

I never thought to ask my Real Estate Agent how many cubic yards of cement it would take to pour my driveway, and don’t you dare ask me.

I got to wondering about the Greeks. Probably Pi it was discovered before Aristotle, Plato or Socrates for those philosophers focused more on the human being than on mathematics or science. They could be called the fathers of metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. And we think metaphysics is new-age...

(Metaphysics simply means "Beyond physics." Wow, imagine, the physicists have much yet to discover.)

You might ask why the Greeks influenced us more than some others who were equally brilliant. 


Those others often used Oral tradition. The Greeks advantage was, they used the Alphabet. 


They wrote.



It was the Greeks that educated the Romans and, and after the dark ages, it was the records of the Greeks, kept and studied by the Moslem, Jewish, and Christian monks, who educated Europe once again.

Thanks Greeks.We appreciate it.

Now, use the alphabet and write! 

Forget the driveway—the cement contractor can do that.