Archive for past blast
LeAnne Flaherty
A few days ago I had the good fortune to chat (via Skype) with advanced undergraduate students at Brooklyn College. Our topic was “parapsychology.” The gifted and nimble instructor of Psych 3585 was LeAnne Flaherty, who was a student in that same class the last time I was invited (by my genius brother-in-law Frank Grasso).
It is such a good class and important topic to study and discuss.
The syllabus says, “Students in parapsychology will learn and practice the concepts and methods of critical thinking used in the science of psychology. Parapsychology is a branch of empirical psychology that has made controversial and not widely accepted claims about the nature of the human mind and human mental abilities. … Through the critical examination of the peer-reviewed parapsychology literature and lectures on the history and methods of parapsychology, students will develop the background knowledge and use skills psychological scientists and scholars use to judge the evidence for extraordinary scientific claims.”
This is a superb way to teach some of the most important things you need to learn at university: critical thinking, the scientific method, and intelligently and ethically communicating findings and argument across disciplines and cultures. …
Brooklyn College knows how to do it right. Thank you to Leanne Flaherty for the invitation and to her students for being so involved and amazing.
LeAnne passed away a few weeks ago. Her friend Daniella wrote on the GoFundMe page she set up for LeAnne: “We all loved Lea so much and will miss her terribly. Let’s carry on her spirit of love, kindness, and silliness in our hearts as a way to keep part of her with us, and to help navigate a world that can be so unfair and difficult.”
I found LeAnne to be a charming and generous and truly friendly person – a terrific colleague, too. I liked her very much. And I could see how much her students loved and admired her.
She was still young. This really hurts.
Marilyn Suriani
From 2016 (a post called “Big Art”):
“What gets installed in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” My friend photographer Marilyn Suriani is preparing a huge installation there – the largest piece is 54-feet wide. It’s beautiful, a continuation of this remarkable phase in her career, which sees Suriani creating nature- and waterscapes in shimmering, rhapsodic colours. This work feels both abstract and earthly.
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I learned a couple of weeks ago that Marilyn had passed away, in Atlanta, where she had lived and worked for decades. Marilyn was a Sicilian live-wire originally from Philly whom I truly really loved. I had acquired her photo-book Dancing Naked in the Material World in 1991 or so, in my Buffalo, New York publishing days. We got to know each other over the phone; listening to her voice made the sun shine; and she taught me a ton. At my desk right now, I face seven photographs by Marilyn on the wall.
Hers was the first photogallery published in my old e-zine Ellavon, in 1998 or so. You can find a wider array of her work (scanned and printed at a much higher res) on SurianiPhoto.com.
20 years of basil.CA
This week basil.CA celebrates its twentieth anniversary. With some variations, I’ve kept the four-column format used from the beginning (thank you for the inspiration, Arts & Letters Daily!). The main change over the years: Once I shuttered Basil Communications Inc., I wrote about business and the market (and political controversy) a good deal less.
Between 2002 and 2022 I’ve used basil.CA not only as a blog but as a hub connecting to a range of projects: No Contest Communications, my iPhone Blog, photography (general and “straight up“), and … various … other … thingamabobs.
I’m grateful to my readers for swinging by. I’ve tried to keep the place tidy but filled with whatnots to look at and think about, as if you were visiting my apartment as a guest.
Lincoln Clarkes
Anvil Press just published Heroines Revisited, by Lincoln Clarkes. Looking at this series of photographs will always be an overwhelming experience for me.
The photograph below was part of the original photographic exhibition in 1998 at Vancouver’s Helen Pitt Gallery.
Here’s an interview I did with Lincoln for my old ezine Ellavon, in which many of the Heroines photographs first appeared.
ask forgiveness w/ last breath
14 July 04: Rush Limbaugh actually said this today: “If you’re down, turn off the partisan media. Just turn off the TV, don’t read anything. Just listen to this program for three hours every day and be done with it, and go to my website. This is not a plug. I’m just thinking of you.” Hilarious. I should confess that for a few months there, back in the early nineties, my media intake *did* consist solely of Limbaugh three hours a day. I had no TV, I was in between jobs (and in between girlfriends, obviously), and I was trying to “learn conservative.” At any rate, Limbaugh had not yet become the blowhard he is today; he still made honest attempts to persuade.
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Addendum: Early on, Rush Limbaugh wrote and published actual books – ‘The Way Things Ought to Be’ was worth reading – attempting to make his conservative case. Starting in about 1994, though, with the rise of Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, Limbaugh put aside persuasion – a real skill he had, that impressed me – and focused solely on enflaming his listeners.
Reminders
16 Mar. 06: This Tuesday I taught my three Kwantlen classes, starting at eight in the morning and ending after nine at night, accomplished with maybe half a brain [due to a concussion] and, truly key, the forbearance and consideration of my students. Throwing oneself at their mercy is the name of the game (if you want everybody to win).
20 Mar. 06: As I was walking down Georgia Street to a meeting with the new director of communications and education at the BC Securities Commission today, it occurred to me that her first impression would be of a guy with a big fresh Frankenstein scar on his forehead who was at an occasional loss for words. Within seconds of this thought, I saw a woman with an almost featureless face walk by: a little hole for a mouth, two nostrils but no nose, and two slitty eyes, that was all. Not that I need reminders as to how fortunate I am, but reminders are always there.
Happy to help
Leonard Bernstein died thirty years ago today. I always think of Stefan Bauer-Mengelberg on this anniversary. I wrote this ten years ago:
Twice in the last week I have helped to prevent a calamity from befalling a colleague. One colleague was irritated and the other was infuriated to receive my editorial help, though they each requested it. Both will come out “smelling like a rose” (to use an expression my Dad has always loved and that I now love, too).
In my last couple of years in book publishing back in the early 1990s, I spent more than half of my time, it seemed, addressing legal matters: Making sure that my authors weren’t going to get the company I worked for, Prometheus Books Inc., sued for defamation, libel, invasion of privacy, copyright infringement, and the like. Although I did not become an editor so that I could act as an ersatz lawyer, I did enjoy the role, especially because I got to talk to a REAL lawyer, and a great one, Stefan Bauer-Mengelberg, a lot.
Stefan provided his services for free, because he liked the books we published. He was a wonderful and brilliant and eclectic man, who reached the highest levels of accomplishment as a musical conductor and mathematician and teacher before starting his career in Law. I didn’t know he’d been a conductor until I called him one afternoon regarding a lawsuit. Leonard Bernstein had died the day before, and for some reason I brought that up with Stefan. “I was his assistant conductor for a year,” he said. “This sounds more impressive than it was. My main job was to have a cigarette lit and ready for Lenny when he came offstage.”
Back to my point: Because of Stefan Bauer-Mengelberg, many of my authors *didn’t* besmirch their reputations and *didn’t* get their butts sued. To a person, they were unhappy receiving the help they received, because they believed they didn’t need it. They all asked: What could go wrong?
A calamity is smaller than a comma when it’s born.
Remembering Stefan – and remembering my mentor Paul Kurtz, the difficult boss who introduced me to him – fills me with gratitude. Some very gifted people have shared their time with me.
The Greeks and Us
Lately I’ve been beginning my mornings reading the Greek Tragedies. It has been a joy! Perhaps the biggest theme in the Aeschylus and Sophocles I’ve read so far: the pressure of justice upon children. I’ve been reminded of something I wrote on that topic awhile ago about more modern times:
Compared to how often parents denounce and disown their children, it is remarkably rare to see them do so in print. Why? Perhaps because, to anyone outside the writer’s particular family orbit, slagging one’s offspring utterly undermines one’s standing as a parent, and hence one’s authorial credibility, too. (The father of cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, Lionel Dahmer, saves his harsh judgments for himself.)
I can think of only one example in the genre: Famous atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s rejection of her first son, William Murray, after he became a born-again Christian. (This son was the “Murray” in the Supreme Court Case Murray v. Curlett in which the court banned prayer in United States schools.) O’Hair wrote: “One could call this a postnatal abortion on the part of a mother, I guess; I repudiate him entirely and completely for now and all times. He is beyond human forgiveness.”
Books by adult children attacking their parents, on the other hand, are everywhere. Parents, even if they are not dead, can’t fight back without bringing upon themselves righteous fury and dishonour. This genre, then, allows justice for those children among us who could never defend themselves before, but for the rest it provides a template for cowardice and disgrace that is tempting for a time. [4 June ’04]
Reading
Basil.CA entered its nineteenth year as of a couple weeks ago. The two little posts below convey the tone of the early years. (My interests seem to have stayed steady …)
9 July 02: “How comes it,” asks my man Francois duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613 – 1670), “that our memories are good enough to retain even the minutest details of what has befallen us, but not to recollect how many times we have recounted them to the same person?” I know that my own friends wonder, often and out loud, why I never seem to notice that I’m repeating myself, so it is really pleasing to read that Mr. La Rochefoucauld and his salon-mates shared this particular cognitive deficit. I finally bought his Maxims last November, and the book might never leave my bathroom. The man’s skeptical appraisals of human vanity, self-love, envy, and romance are wry and perfect. “When it comes to love, the one who recovers first recovers best” — “En amour celui qui est guéri le premier est toujours le mieux guéri” — was a favourite in my old Buffalo days, not sure why. Today I am a businessman with many clients who are involved in financing and promoting various speculative ventures. It is a world in which, if skepticism is not always rewarded, then naivete is pretty much always punished. The following La Rochefoucauld maxim comes to mind most every day: “Our promises are made in proportion to our hopes, but kept in proportation to our fears.” (It is no more sentimental in the original French: “Nous promettons selon nos espérances, et nous tenons selon nos craintes.”)
24 September 02: As my readers know: When I get into a funk, I read and read and read. Sometimes this improves my mood; it rarely damages it further; and, because I have a very expansive view of education, I believe it elevates my mind. The best experience is when my reading makes me laugh out loud, as a recent item did [link no longer active, alas!]. In a Canada.com story about Vancouver officials trying to close down three bars in the city’s downtown eastside neighborhood, we get this paragraph:
“The bathrooms are shooting galleries,” says one. “Cops are always here raiding the people for dope, drugs and hookers and shit,” speculates another.
The faux-journalistic use of the word “speculates” is so wittily Canadian that I will live to read another day.
My prodigal URL
When I moved to Vancouver in 1996, I became a communications specialist for public and private companies mostly headquartered in this city. I wrote management discussions for annual and quarterly reports, literally hundreds of news releases, and lots of material for online audiences in chatrooms on Usenet and elsewhere. With a couple of partners, I also created two or three dozen websites for clients; these were among the first in their industries.
Part of the fun of these latter projects was registering not just appropriate domain names for these companies, but other URLs that *might* be appropriate for them one day. On top of that, we made sure to register domain names that could possibly be confused for those our clients used, so that their competitors couldn’t get ahold of them for the purpose of confounding investors and regulators.
I thus spent a fair amount of capital collecting URLs, mostly for clients and potential clients but also for many for my own endeavours. This week I learned that I almost lost one – PigeonPark.net (used for various literary projects) – that I have had for 15 or so years. (Its expiration notice landed in my spam folder – yikes!) With the help of my friends at Uniserve Communications (which hosts most of my websites), I saved it in the nick of time – whew!
Here’s a blast from the past, from when I first announced the site on basil.CA:
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16 August 03: In You Don’t Look 35, Charlie Brown! the late Charles M. Schultz writes, “There must be different kinds of loneliness, or at least different degrees of loneliness. … The most terrifying loneliness is not experienced by everyone and can be understood only by a few. I compare the panic in this kind of loneliness to the dog we see running frantically down the road pursuing the family car. He is not really being left behind, for the family knows it is to return, but for that moment in his limited understanding, he is being left alone forever, and he has to run and run to survive. It is no wonder that we make terrible choices in our lives to avoid loneliness.”
Comix artist Seth illustrates these words in a remarkable series of panels called “Good Grief!” published in Drawn and Quarterly (Volume 2, Number 4). I came across these panels many years ago and have been looking for them ever since, locating them in my disorganized files only this morning. I now realize that my Pigeon Park Sentences were variations on Schultz’s theme, that I could not have even started without its echo in my imagination.
“It is no wonder that we make terrible choices in our lives to avoid loneliness.”
Responsibility Project/ Father’s Day
This is an updated link to one of the greatest short videos I have ever seen. Love and pain and memory and family. Beautiful.
The video won the Silver Lion at Cannes. Ernie Schenk writes, “I did the story and co-wrote the screenplay with director Laurence Dunmore. Shot this in 2 days in Devore, California. Does anyone have any idea how cold it can get in the San Bernadino Mountains. My toes are still numb.” Here is more of Schenk’s fine work.
Principles of Profanity
“What would a theory of foul language look like?” Jonathan Mayhew does some beautiful brainstorming on the topic for you.
July 4
On this day five years ago I wrote:
After American Thanksgiving, July 4th – American Independence Day – was always my favourite holiday when I lived in the States. There were no obligations beyond conviviality and bringing bean dip and the like to pot luck BBQs in your friends’ back yards or in the park nearby. Friends always seemed to bring someone new to these happy events, and sometimes frisbees, too.
I’m blessed to be back in the States for the summer, among cherished friends, and for today’s celebrations of what is good in the nation in which I was raised. “To be with those I like is enough,” said Whitman.
This year I’m gazing over the border from my home in British Columbia, and I’m imagining the lives of “those I like” in the States. I can feel their alarm.
Obviously not obvious
If you throw everything *but* the kitchen sink at your problem, you will surely fail. You always need a kitchen sink.
Two thoughts on 2017
Contempt – even at its most hateful – is a form of *audacity* – and it can animate the creative imagination as truly as any other form.
That person over there doesn’t need to speak in order to beat you in an argument, only spit. You overvalue nuance and number in your vocabulary.
And one from 2015, apropos:
Liberals loathe the political Right’s hypocrisy and unfairness. Conservatives loathe the Left’s immorality and weakness. The groups’ estimations of their own qualities, though, are less precise.
The question of “hypocrisy” is particularly interesting. La Rochefoucauld noted that “hypocrisy is the respect vice pays to virtue.” One can’t be a hypocrite without recognizing that virtue – that morality – exists. This recognition it itself makes hypocrites superior (in their minds) even to decent, noble liberals who discount “morality” as dogmatic and unrealistic. Think of fundamentalist Christians who think that belief in Jesus is the sole criterion to enter heaven; one’s behaviour is beside the point. So, to the Right hypocrisy is a good thing, though they don’t say so.
Apropos
As a young man, running was right up there with hitch-hiking as one of my favourite things to do. By the time I was in my mid-twenties several of my running partners could no longer run; their knees or feet or back had finally buckled; road-running’s no good on the joints. I knew that my time could be up in a day or a year or in ten years.
One day while visiting my parents in Fairport, NY, I went out for a long run down by the Erie Canal, then along some paths dividing farmers’ fields, then out to my old high school. It was a hot hot HOT; and no wind; it was *lovely*. Heading home on Ayrault Road I was running up a hill and felt the sun just burning the back of my calves; this elated me. I knew how lucky I was to be able to run. I knew that I had enjoyed every step of every run in my life.
Then I realized something. I saw into my future, to a time when I would no longer be able to run: I would have no regrets, because I had never taken my gift, such as it was, for granted. I had always thanked my lucky stars.
Sometimes I find myself running in my dreams – and when I do, I *know* that I am dreaming; I am having a lucid dream, and I can run anywhere I want. And *do* – having been given a gift from my younger self and from the magic of life.
Poetic aspersion
My friend Kat once described a guy this way: “He has a pickle shoved so far up his butt that it makes him hiccup dill.” That still cracks me up.
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