An argument in favor of making a commitment to charitable works. Ten percent is suggested but is not inherently part of the argument. This document is presented copyright-free for fair use in the hope that others will feel free to pass it along. The wording is my original expression of old thoughts.
Category: Prison Diary
LGBTQ+, Vertigo, and Politics
Diary, 5/10 to 5/11/22: No Dr. Strange; Sony and Morbius; Richard Medhurst; too many syllables; photo memory? Recommended books; Hartmann; vertigo; macros; smoothie woo hoo!
Trashing Harold Bloom
This is from my Prison Diary. It's quite unnecessary and I suppose unfair, given that Prof. Bloom is now deceased, but for someone just getting into reading literary criticism, it might be, um, "liberating." Like hearing Wayne C. Booth say that Joyce's Ulysses is obscure. So, with apologies...
Amateur Haiku
Amateur haiku; a sample: Motorcycling: / Economical death trap. / Let’s dodge this bullet.
Prison Diary: On Writing Fiction
Here are some notes on writing and “my method,” especially related to producing first drafts; from March of 2010. This was written early in my prison career; I will post further material on writing from the Prison Diary (which continues for another six years) as I get it dictated into the computer; this particular material...
Prison Diary: Hemingway’s “Macomber” Story
The following selection from my Prison Diary assumes that the reader is thoroughly familiar with Ernest Hemingway’s famous story, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” Material in brackets was added for the convenience of blog readers.
Prison Diary November, 2009: Nabokov and Lolita
Reading Lolita, enjoying it but also by turns annoyed and bored. It’s a peculiar book, makes me think that Nabokov was so afraid of his theme that he was unable to handle it with complete freedom—though it is, in fact, franker than I remembered.
Epistemology: Models & Mysteries
Some of these, maybe all of these questions can be answered, but the sense of mystery remains: what am I that I can understand these things and ask these things? What kind of answer am I looking for? What kind of answer would not be “just words”? Must there be something unanalyzable, always, at the base of our knowledge?
My New Diary, 11/28/2018
If I cannot rely on my calm, reasoned judgment of how the world works, but must instead follow every will-o-the-wisp twinge to its illogical conclusion, then I don’t know how to live. I neither feel a need of any god, nor can I accept any intellectual argument that pretends to prove the existence of a god or anything supernatural, or to prove the “necessity of religion in life.” I don’t claim to have “all the answers.”
Prison Diary: Books and More Books
“The Danes in particular have made sloth a policy. Blithely unaware that Indians are working 35 hours a day [sic], the Danes average 22 hours a week. partly that’s the result of the ‘laziness’ written into law: employers must provide a minimum of 5 weeks paid vacation. The official week is 37 hours, but non-vacation weeks average 28. Worse, there’s paid maternity leave! The Danish minimum wage is $10 and health care is free…. Danes earned an average $26 an hour in 2001, a solid 61% more than Americans.”
Prison Diary: A Potpourri of Books
“Strange, looking back now over the years, how birds have again and again become meaningful to us. It was an owl’s call and an eagle’s feather that launched this journey of ours in the first place. There was the Maestro’s condor in Peru, which I now see as another kind of personal fortune telling."
My New Diary, 11/7 to 11/14/2018
Yesterday I had pretty well decided to start a Nietzsche Club; today, I’ve decided not to. Reading the Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche and finding that “experts disagree” on many important concepts in his works (including the “will to power” and the “superman”), I’m thinking that maybe he’s not worth so much attention after all. As it is, I’ve already read all his best books, and a couple of them more than once, though I am reading The Will to Power now as my bedtime reading. Perhaps I could start a philosophy reading group. I’ll think about it.
More Book Thoughts from My Prison Diary
{8/16/08} Finished Stephen King’s Bag of Bones, a fine but ultimately disappointing ghost story. The disappointment is with the overdrawn villains and some illogical plot points. Of the latter: a ghost assaults our hero with a 400 pound desk, but fails to make use of the many knives in the kitchen or the knitting needles … Continue reading More Book Thoughts from My Prison Diary
Joseph Campbell: The Power of Myth (Prison Diary)
Reading Joseph Campbell: The Power of Myth. Shall I call it poppycock? Or shall I call it another fairly crappy model? In either case, I don’t see much use for myth as a source of knowledge. Inspiration, yes; but not knowledge, not “power.”
My New Diary, 10/25 to 10/27/2018
My idea is to take cultural icons for the Major Arcana, and other bits of modern life as the other features, to remove the need for study and make richness of association readily available. I settled on Marilyn Monroe, Henry Thoreau, Muhammad Ali, the Automobile, the Atom Bomb, Adolf Hitler, Laurel & Hardy, Queen Victoria, Abraham Lincoln, and so on, as the Major Arcana, as I tried to adapt my personal interests and existing knowledge to the standard structure of the tarot deck.
Knowledge and “Christopher Columbus”
“Columbus discovered America in 1492.” This paradigmatic bit of knowledge was taught to me in the innocent 1950s (were they “innocent”? Or was this just another of the Lies My Teacher Told Me?). It might still be taught this way somewhere in the U.S., perhaps in a few schools in Tennessee or South Carolina as required by state law, but a likelier formulation might be...
Prison Diary: Bateson’s Peripheral Visions
Finished Bateson, and I must confess that I got a lot out of this third reading, as the wealth of quotes above make clear. She is no [Rabbi Harold] Kushner, pushing for his “authoritative” absolutes, but a rich and mature mind fertile with ideas. Her writing is sometimes troublesome, but there was ample reward in wrestling with her prose. An author to read again.
My New Diary, 10/9 to 10/11/2018
What I most like here is the idea that we learn to be bored. It may be possible to study our boredom to learn ways to turn it into something positive, either to increased self-understanding or as a cue to something subtle. [Mary Catherine] Bateson suggests, when bored, taking a closer look at what’s happening in the environment. But then, she wasn’t in jail. How about the Perfect Moment?
A Stack of Books: Prison Diary Excerpt
A Stack of Books: Prison Diary Excerpt. Comments on Diderot's Rameau's Nephew, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, Huxley's Brave New World, quotes from Goethe's Faust, and stuff about other books, mostly novels.
Four Books: Prison Diary
Comments on Robert Pirsig: The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs, and Steel, Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway, and a bit more on Henry James: The Turn of the Screw. Lots of quotes. Plus, some thoughts on thinking and writing after reading.
You must be logged in to post a comment.