What's This Blog For, Anyway?

On occasion I have been chided by readers for quoting the writings of others more often than publishing (here in this blog) my own thoughts and ideas. Well... if that is so then it is because the subjects being described in those written works by others are what have dropped in to dwell within my mind at the precise time that I sit and tap away at the keyboard. My personal thoughts and ideas (rarely presented here) can be found on the pages of other websites. Or in my private files. This blog is not a diary. it is a venue for jotting down my tittles -- instantaneous bits and pieces of random mental images, sometimes seeming perhaps profound and at other times being merely a routine recounting of what I am doing at any given moment.

Does that make any sense?

I hope so.

. . .

Banned Books Week:
Celebrating the Freedom to Read
September 25 -- October 2, 2010

Banned Books Week is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment. Held during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States.

. . .

Tea Parties

Rolling Stone describes a Tea Party rally in a four part article written by Matt Taibbi. Makes me wonder what all the media fuss is about. If it wasn't for such desperate-for-readers rabble-rousing news reportage, this foolish low-brow phenomenon would not even exist.

In my opinion.

In a short excerpt from the article the writer questions a man and his motorized-scooter-chair (medicare provided) riding wife -- a vocal team of tea-baggers protesting government welfare --

"Let me get this straight," I say to David. "You've been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?"

"Well," he says, "there's a lot of people on welfare who don't deserve it. Too many people are living off the government."

"But," I protest, "you live off the government. And have been your whole life!"

"Yeah," he says, "but I don't make very much."

Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it's going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of shit. All of them.

It's an interesting and eye-opening article, not necessarily regarding those trivial ragtag tea-parties themselves, but as a snapshot of the reality-show mentality of the news reporting (and reader acceptance) in today's world.

. . .

I have been looking back to earlier times at some of the novels I have enjoyed reading... and several come to mind. Re-reading seems more pleasurable to me these days than struggling through some of the newer ones... written by modern-day overly-enlightened, non-sexist, properly-programmed, socially-constrained, and perpetually-publishable authors.

Re-reading oldies such as . . .

The John Steinbeck books, for example: The Grapes Of Wrath, Tortilla Flat, Of Mice And Men, and the all rest of his classic works. And Kurt Vonnegut's weird and wacky stuff. Even From Here To Eternity by James Jones, which I read the first time from cover to cover in the late 1950s as I lounged around in the Casual Barracks at Scott Air Force Base near St. Louis while awaiting departure to my new assignment at Homestead AFB in Florida. There's a reason such things are labeled Oldies But Goodies.

. . .

Reading is so much more enjoyable than writing...

And that's the truth.

__________

"Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them."
--Nathaniel Hawthorne