3-14-13

    

Tucson Weather Today

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Last night I searched the sky for a glimpse of the comet but was not able to see it. I must be looking in the wrong direction, or else there is another reason I can't see it. Lots of locals here in Tucson are sending in photos to the TV News channel so it may just be my aged poor eyesight.

Oh well... who cares, anyway.


The temperature is supposed to reach 80 degrees Fahrenheit at noon today and 90 degrees at around two o'clock this afternoon.


So. How is the writing of my book progressing?

Don't ask.

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HISTORICAL CLIP

On this date, March 14, 1919, Max Brand, perhaps the most prolific writer of western stories, published his first novel, The Untamed.

Max Brand was one of 21 pen names used by the Seattle-born author Frederick Faust. Faust claimed to dislike the American West, and he spent most of his adult life in Europe. Embarrassed by his "lowbrow" stories, he never appended his real name to any of his popular works.

Unlike many western authors, Faust made no pretense to historical accuracy in his works. His novels concerned a mythic West of his imagination, and he rarely provided any identifiable geographical details or demonstrated any mastery of the minutiae of western life. His strength was his ability to tell a compelling story, and he had a keen sense of style.

In The Untamed, Faust created the hugely popular Dan Barry, a peaceable man who avoided trouble whenever possible. However, when Barry or those he cares about were attacked, he was transformed and was capable of wreaking violent vengeance on wrongdoers. Faust continued Barry's story in two bestselling sequels.

Besides gaining fame and fortune as the author of Max Brand westerns, Faust also created the character of Dr. Kildare for his medical thrillers. Faust died in 1944, having written an estimated 30 million words, including more than 500 western serials or short stories.

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WORD FOR TODAY

composition
noun
1.
a. The combining of distinct parts or elements to form a whole.
b. The manner in which such parts are combined or related.
c. General makeup: the changing composition of the electorate.
d. The result or product of composing; a mixture or compound.
2. Arrangement of artistic parts so as to form a unified whole.
3.
a. The art or act of composing a musical or literary work.
b. A work of music, literature, or art, or its structure or organization.
4. A short essay, especially one written as an academic exercise.

The term composition, in written language, refers to the collective body of important features established by the author in their creation of literature. Most often, composition relates to narrative works of literature, but may also relate to essays, biographies, and other works.

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BORN ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

Albert Einstein

 

Born March 14, 1879
Died April 18, 1955

Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the general theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics (alongside quantum mechanics). While best known for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2 (which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation"), he received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". The latter was pivotal in establishing quantum theory.

Frank Borman

 

Born Mar 14, 1928
Age: 84 years old

Frank Frederick Borman, II is a retired NASA astronaut, best remembered as the Commander of Apollo 8, the first mission to fly around the Moon, making him, along with fellow crew mates Jim Lovell and Bill Anders, the first of only 24 humans to do so. Before flying on Apollo, he set a fourteen-day spaceflight endurance record on Gemini 7, and also served on the NASA review board which investigated the Apollo 1 fire. After leaving NASA, he was the chief executive officer (CEO) of Eastern Air Lines from 1975 to 1986. Borman is a recipient of the Congressional Space Medal of Honor. In the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, Borman was played by David Andrews.

Michael Caine

 

Born Mar 14, 1933
Age  79 years old

Michael Caine (born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite) is an English actor and author. Renowned for his distinctive Cockney accent, Caine has appeared in over one hundred films and is one of Britain's most recognisable actors.

He made his breakthrough in the 1960s with starring roles in a number of British films, including, Zulu (1964), The Ipcress File (1965), Alfie (1966), The Italian Job (1969), and Battle of Britain (1969). His most notable roles in the 1970s included, Get Carter (1971), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), and A Bridge Too Far (1978). He achieved critical success in the 1980s, with Educating Rita (1983) earning him the BAFTA and Golden Globe Award for Best Actor, and in 1986 he received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Hannah and Her Sisters.

Caine played a British con-man in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988), and Ebenezer Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992). He received his second Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Cider House Rules (1999). Caine played Nigel Powers in the 2002 parody Austin Powers in Goldmember, and more recently portrayed Alfred Pennyworth, the butler in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Trilogy. He also appeared as supporting characters in Nolan's 2006 film The Prestige, 2010 film Inception and Pixar's 2011 film Cars 2.

Billy Crystal

 

Born Mar 14, 1948
Age  64 years old

William Edward "Billy" Crystal is an American actor, writer, producer, comedian, and film director. He gained prominence in the 1970s for playing Jodie Dallas on the ABC sitcom Soap and became a Hollywood film star during the late 1980s and 1990s, appearing in the critical and box office successes When Harry Met Sally... and City Slickers. He has hosted the Academy Awards nine times through the 84th Academy Awards in 2012.

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Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.
--Edward Gibbon
    

Tonight's The Night Before Christmas

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Tucson Weather Today

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I have finished a third draft of my novel's prologue, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2. but now I have run into a real snag: not with Chapter 3, but with the entire novel -- there is no story. Oh yes, things happen to the characters and the characters interact with each other, but... the thing itself has no underlying meaning.

Also, there is no single protagonist. In fact, every one of the characters seems to be the main character at the moment within his or her individual scene. The textbook Fiction Writing For Dummies states absolutely that a story cannot have more than one protagonist. There can only be one main character who is presented with a problem, seeks to overcome that problem, is thwarted in that quest time and again, and finally triumphs in the end. Other fiction writing textbooks say the same thing.

These How To books are not telling me how to write a novel. Not at all. What they are telling me is how to write a novel that will be published, one that will be bought by book buyers, and will be read by the purchaser.

Oh well. I can always stop writing and go off to read a book -- a book that has an interesting and well-plotted story, one written by a real author.

And I can then come back and write some more, perhaps finding some meaning in my manuscript that I had originally overlooked.

Perhaps.

#

Smokers Suck!

#

Still don't feel very well. My stomach is queasy, my muscles sore and joints stiff, eyesight weak and filled with dancing spots... occasional spells of light-headedness. Tired, no energy. Mentally sluggish. Congestion that comes and goes. Sporadic fits of coughing. Sudden sneezes, sometimes as many as six in a row.

And there's more, but...

Ah well, that's enough complaining.

After all, today is Christmas Eve.

#

Advanced Fiction Writing is another web site that claims the ability to teach a person how to write a novel that will be published. It raves about The Snowflake Method.

Sometimes I think I would be better off if I would just ignore all these "How To" offerings and just write whatever I want to write, and to write it my way and be happy with that -- just forget about getting the results published. After all, I have seen some of my stuff in print before, back in my younger years, and it's not such a great and wonderful thing. The Earth does not tremble. It does not stop rotating.

The feeling of pride in an accomplishment lasts for about a minute and a half... then life goes on.

#

Eva is requesting that I take her outside.

So...

__________

Three rules for literary success:
1. Read a lot.
2. Write a lot.
3. Read a lot more, write a lot more.
--Robert Silverberg

Last Month Of 2010

Since NaNoWriMo is now over, I have started work on the first revision of my novel. Strangely enough, the scene with which I opened the original story is the one I chose to use in the revision. But I did do some rewriting of the scene, and I appended to it two of the other scenes I'd used in the original, again with much rewriting. Who knows, this novel might work. It might actually become a publishable book.

If I don't wimp out.

. . .

I left myself a note on my desktop's *NOTES* page that reads: Recently I read somewhere, can't remember where:

Writer and physicist Alan Lightman, was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1948. He reportedly said that as a kid, "I was always troubled and awed by the big questions. Why are we here? Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the meaning of life? How did the universe begin?"

Well, don't we all ask those same questions at one time or another throughout our lives?

But it seems to me that the questions are meaningless. They have no answers beyond what we perceive within our individual minds (brain processes) by way of the interaction of chemical actions and their reactions. Asking such questions and expecting to eventually receive answers presumes that the human race is somehow special among Earth's multitudes of biological life forms. Because we think that our ability to think is something special in the universe. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity indeed.

Just because a person believes a thing does not make it so. Subjective beliefs are not objective facts. When Occam's Razor shaves away the Earth's minuscule stubble that is biological life, what remains is objective reality.

And I simply cannot understand why every reasoning man or woman capable of conceptual discernment is (apparently) unable to perceive that singular truth.

These are ideas I hope to incorporate in a novel.

Someday.

. . .

Another of the notes I found on that page is -- Quiz Question: Who wrote under the pen names Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, Sergeant Fathom, Rambler, and W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab"

Hint: another of his pen names was Mark Twain.

Yes, it was Samuel Langhorn Clemens. Mark Twain hated the writings of Jane Austen. He once said that every time he read Pride and Prejudice, he wanted to dig up Austen and "beat her over the skull with her own shin bone."

From Mark Twain's new autobiography: For many years I believed that I remembered helping my grandfather drink his whisky toddy when I was six weeks old, but I do not tell about that any more, now; I am grown old, and my memory is not as active as it used to be. When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying, now, and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the latter. It is sad to go to pieces like this, but we all have to do it.

If I had identified the source of the above notes I would mention them here. But I did not do so.

. . .

The Writer's Almanac for December 1, 2010 has some good stuff. You can take my word for it or you can read it yourself. It contains, for example, a short piece about Julia A. Moore, famous for writing really bad poetry:

She's sometimes referred to as a "poetaster, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as "a petty or paltry poet; a writer of poor or trashy verse; a rimester." This distinction usually entails things like the use of awkward meter, painfully sappy sentimentality, words that rhyme in an unpleasant way, or poor taste in subject matter.

There is also an insightful little piece about Woody Allen.

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"I love books, food, music, sleep, people who work, heated arguments, the United States of America, and my wife and children. I dislike politicians, preachers, genteel persons, people who do not work or are on vacation, closed minds, movies, loud noises, and oiliness."
--Rex Stout

To Heck With Titles

I managed to retain a few sentences from the mixed bag of pseudo-sensible nonsense that clicked and clacked from my keyboard at various intervals yesterday. Just exactly how long they will remain intact in my 'current' file is questionable, but my avowed intention is to keep (and not delete) the entire contents of this file until selected items can be incorporated into what--for lack of a better name--I have been calling my novel.

Here is one of those sentences:

Of course one man can make a difference; Adolph Hitler made a difference.

Here is another:

Sometimes as a last resort you just have to split yourself into two distinct entities and become both Strong Guy and Weak Guy; Strong Guy constantly reassures Weak Guy that Strong Guy will always watch out for, care for, and sustain Weak Guy.

. . .

Last night on the Writer's Almanac website I read a poem that I really liked, titled:
two nights before my 72nd birthday
by Charles Bukowski

It's the last link on the above marked site's list of his poems.

Maybe the reason that I liked it is because next year my own 72nd birthday will occur.

Maybe.

Another poem on that list -- a place in Philly -- might be of interest to at least one of my readers.

Or not.


Charles Bukowski reportedly said (or wrote). "The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life away to a function that doesn't interest you. This situation so repelled me that I was driven to drink, starvation, and mad females, simply as an alternative."

Imagine that.

. . .

The lyrics of an old song titled Don't Fence Me In have been bouncing in and out of my consciousness for the last couple of weeks. If my memory is correct, this song was the very first one I ever heard, from the very first record, played on the first record player my parents ever owned, back in the early 1940s. Here are those maddeningly-repeating lyrics:

“Let me be by myself in the evenin’ breeze
And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees
Send me off forever but I ask you please
Don’t fence me in."

--Cole Porter

Click HERE to hear Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters sing the complete song.

Or, if you prefer, Willy Nelson sings it HERE.

And Ella Fitzgerald sings it HERE.

Additionally, Louis Armstrong and his All-Stars perform it HERE.

I heartily recommend that you listen to all of these, especially those of you who are under 21 years old and not yet overly cynical, and also those older than 50. who have probably progressed beyond the bonds of pompous cynicism.

. . .

You have a great day now... ya' hear?

Stuff . . .

While browsing the blogs I read the following sentence:

Emily Dickinson’s father viewed his son’s work as near to Shakespeare. He didn’t see that his tiny daughter in her velvet snood was a great poet of her age...

I was immediately prompted (by my obsessive personality) to look up a word in that sentence that I should have recognized but did not; the word was snood.

Here is what I found:

snood: an ornamental net in the shape of a bag that confines a woman's hair; pins or ties at the back of the head

Old Style Snood

Modern Snood

. . .

I learned another new word today.

semiotics: The study of signs and symbols, especially as means of language or communication,

Fascinating.

. . .

According to an article in the Hoover Institution of Stanford University:

Today in the U.S. there are 77,000 clinical psychologists, 192,000 clinical social workers, 105,000 mental health counselors, 50,000 marriage and family therapists, 17,000 nurse psychotherapists, and 30,000 life coaches. Most of these professionals spend their days helping people cope with everyday life problems, not true mental illness. More than half the patients in therapy don’t even qualify for a psychiatric diagnosis. In addition,there are 400,000 nonclinical social workers and 220,000 substance abuse counselors working outside the official mental health system yet offering clients informal psychological advice nonetheless.

Now that amazed me. So I read the rest of it, and absorbed a modicum (a small, modest or trifling amount) of knowledge that I believe will help me to more easily inject a measure of verisimilitude into a troublesome (character) section of my novel.

The writer of the article, Ronald W. Dworkin, M.D., Ph.D., is the author of Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class (Basic Books, 2006).

. . .

DECLAWED

DOJ refuses to allow attorney to testify in Black Panther case

There has to be more in this Black Panther story than is being reported. But I suppose the press will not disclose it, even if there is.

. . .

For some reason Outlook will not allow me to send email this morning. It will receive email but displays an Error message whenever I attempt to send a message. I suspect it is a problem with my email server (Network Solutions) -- but who knows? Time will tell...


Ta ta . . .

Can't Think Of A Clever Title

There was no blog entry yesterday because I used that time to work on my novel.

Yes (almost unbelievably) I accomplished something in that area, in that space of time, something that I truly feel was worth the effort, something that will be of lasting worth, something that gave me pleasure in its creation -- and it has the potential to give others who will someday read the novel a measure of that same enjoyment... I think.

. . .

A friend and fellow (aging) writer is apparently suffering from the malicious malady that eventually strikes us all -- the 'woe is me' syndrome, the 'my life is nearly over and I am a failure' refrain of outrage and regret. It seems that he has fallen prey to that familiar insult to vanity known as 'Oh, poor poor me'.

Nothing can be said by those of us who have suffered this blight on our souls that will lighten his load. He will come through it and will eventually prevail -- or not.

. . .

Below are displayed 2 pics of JoAnn's plant.

and

During her two-week absence, I have been watering it and rolling up the blinds to allow the Arizona sun to shine upon her tiny flower each day, as I promised I would do.

. . .

Just a few minutes ago I was informed that Martin Van Buren was the first President Of The United States of America who was born a U.S. citizen.

(Very) interesting.


So now I'm off to my Novel pages . . .

Where Do The Weeks Go?

First, just for my own amusement, please allow me to present a picture of this morning's breakfast.

Nutritious And Delicious

I read in a learned paper that delusional psychiatric patients who believe themselves to be God, or Jesus, or some other Divine Being cannot be simply "talked out of" their delusions. Their certainties are considered to be pathological beliefs, reflecting a warped or broken understanding that is not, by definition, amenable to being reshaped by reality.

Does this then also include, I wonder, the great number of obviously delusional religious fanatics of the world?


Speaking of 'delusional' -- it occurred to me that talking to dogs can be rewarding if not overly-revealing... especially regarding the effective description of a character in your novel. Eva is an excellent audience for my explanations. She is a quiet and seemingly-contemplative listener. And she rarely offers an opinion.



Yes, I am still working on that book...been at it for around fifty years. So? It's not being stubborn; it's called persistence. I will fail only when I quit trying. Or so I've been told.

Today's purchases at Circle K were two small packages of Planter's peanuts (2 for $1) -- four bananas (20 cents each) -- two bottles of Yoohoo ($1.00 apiece) -- and five Powerball tickets ($1 each) and then I carried them (walking, of course) back home.


Last night Mike pointed out a well-camouflaged horned-lizard on the rocky path outside the swimming pool fence, and I managed to get a picture of it.

It sure blends into the background, doesn't it?

Nature is a curious phenomenon. It always fascinates me. Makes me think. Makes me realize how insignificant I am. And I wonder if others feel the same way.

And this is a picture of today's lunch.

A gourmet I am not.

...