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shy children

3/9/2014

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3/15/14.     I miss my mom. I miss my dad.  I miss Fats Waller.  It's sad.  It's not right.  Think of all the rent parties he could still play if he were around.  That sly smile and the wit.  If someone dies in their 90's people say he led a long, full life.  100 years is not a long time. Even in modern history.  
 
      3/12/14  I was remembering when I visited a friend when I was about in third grade.  It was unusual for me to visit someone because the class I was in was tracked so it had kids from all over the city instead of one neighborhood and also I was very shy so I didn't have many friends.  I had a really good one when I wasin first grade who lived next door.  We would howl like wolves when we wanted the other one to come outside.  So no ringing doorbells and dealing with parents.  I even went with him to his Granpa's farm once.  Then we moved. I had another one in fifth grade.  We were disaffected intellectuals avant la lettre.  Then we moved.  Then one in tenth grad, but that's another story.
         I was far to shy to be asking his parents anything so when I strained my elbow--subluxated the joint-- I didn't let on.  I held it in a weird protective position for while and it was hard for my friend to interest me in any of his proposed entertainments for a while.  Then his Mom asked if there we something wrong with my arm.  "No," I said and ran off with it in a normal position.  It had long since popped back into place so that went fine.
       Then I had to go to the bathroom.  I figured out where it was myself, being too shy to ask, went in, and locked the door behind me.  After I finished, I discovered to my horror that I couldn't get the door open again.  The lock was stuck.  The prospect of banging on the door and yelling for help was a fate worse than death.  I would have sooner stayed in the bathroom the rest of my life.  
        So I climbed out the window.  I'm sure, being well behaved within my lights, I closed the window behind me.
        Fortunately I was picked up and went home before anyone else had to use the bathroom. 
        I can't remember ever being invited back.  I can imagine retrospectively that for them I was probably that weird kid who held his arm funny, was hard to play with, and then played that mean trick with the bathroom.
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         This blog is writing.  It has no pictures or video.
         When I was in high school I decided writing was the greatest art, in fact the most memorable contribution a person could make, pace the Lacaune  cave paintings.  I knew film was the growth industry, and in college I had the opportunity to hook up with film makers--New American Film notables had just moved into the college I was attending--but I still thought writing was the greater art.
    Consider these arguments:  
    1. A camera is a fantastic invention, especially when backed by computer capabilities.  But humanity's greatest invention without any doubt is language.
    2. Vision is the most powerful sense, and in film, hearing is added too.  But the imaginations is more powerful yet.  Writing drops into the mind like one of those Japanese clam shells, opens and releases a flower more fabulous than any image from nature. 
    3.  Rhetorical arguments are all very well but we have learned to trust empirical facts more.  So there are many great films.  But do any of them really compare well to Ulysses or Remembrance of Things Past?  The book is always better than the film.  Further, even the best films date severely.  The styles of acting change, the fashions, the technology becomes obsolete. But any educated person can still read Homer and Shakespeare, and changes in mores only make them even more interesting.
          Far from becoming outmoded, writing has entered yet another golden age.  Novels may have become epigones of those past, poetry obscure, but never have more people written more words for more readers.
          Everyone has a phone.  It can transmit voice, images and video, and yet even the marginally literate text and text and text.

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