RonPrice's Journal

Dec 2012
5:43 AM

Microsoft-Google

In 1998 two Stanford graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founded Google.com, a search engine that used a better technology than had previously existed for indexing and retrieving information from the immense miscellany of the World Wide Web

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Oct 2012
4:44 AM

Social Activism

Go to this link for several of my posts in relation to social activism: http://debatingchristianity.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21256

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Oct 2012
4:43 AM AEDT

MORE MEMOIRES

Part 1:

Salmon Rushdie(1947- ) is back in the news. Death threats were made against him including a fatwÄ requiring his execution which was proclaimed on Radio Tehran. The fatwa was issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on 14 February 1989. I was just settling in to the first year of my final decade as a FT lecturer in a technical college in Western Australia; 1989 was also my first year as the secretary of a local Baha’i community in a suburb of Perth, Belmont, beside the Swan River.

I was immersed in the task of dealing with 100 students a week, and serving as a secretary of a Baha’i group of some 30 or more in a wider Perth Baha’i community at the time of some 1500 Baha’is.� I was up-to-my-ears in a 60 to 80 hour week of wall-to-wall people.� The news of Mr Rushdie in 1989 was just an on-air bit of information to add to the many other happenings reported that day by the electronic and print media such as: (i) heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson’s divorce in the Dominican Republic, (ii) Union Carbide’s agreement to pay $470 million damages for Bhopol disaster, and (iii) the placing of the world's 1st satellite, the first of 24 satellites, of a Global Positioning System into orbit.

1989 was a very big year on the global agenda. �In the midst of everything else happening that year, from Tiananmen Square to the fall of the Berlin Wall, I didn't dream that the forces underlying this remote anti-Rushdie event far-out on the periphery of my psyche and of western civilization would eventually come to define our era in so many ways. At the time, the Rushdie affair just seemed to me like some weird historical sideshow as I ploughed through the all-consuming tasks that made-up my week.� I had a few hours left-over to give to: my wife and kids, a few friends, my daily-walk and other activity to keep body-and-soul together so that I might enjoy my 64 hours a week of rest and sleep---in order to get back to the 100 hours involved in getting through my weekly tasks.

Part 2:

The following decade was an all-consuming one for Rushdie who was in the belly of some beast that I watched, heard or read about, but only on the rare occasion, safely from my observation tower half a world away occupied, as I say above, with my own life’s all-consuming agenda. Rushdie has just published a new book which takes us inside that whale-of-a-beast for that decade of the 1990s.� The new book is his memoir, Joseph Anton, and it’s about his living-in-hiding for more than a decade. Filled with cameos by everyone from Bill Clinton to Christopher Hitchens to Warren Beatty, this literary page-turner, as one reviewer describes it, tells us in fascinating detail, says the same reviewer, what it means to have every aspect of your life overturned. Not all the reviews and reviewers thusfar have been fascinated and captivated. Check them out to get that balanced view the media is so concerned about---at least in some cases.

The ayatollah's death sentence meant that Rushdie had to choose a new, non-Asian identity. He did. He called himself Joseph Anton, a name which came from combining the first names of two famous writers: Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. He also had to adjust to live-in bodyguards and having to ask permission to do the simplest things, like meeting his son. More than Rushdie’s literary output, the death sentence against him turned the author into an international celebrity. In recent years, Rushdie himself has become a fixture on the New York social scene, with a reputation for keeping the company of glamorous women half his age.

Part 3:

Some readers, drawing parallels with the recent tabloidization of Rushdie’s own life, may cringe at how much his memoir peddles in publishing-world gossip, but like the author himself, Joseph Anton is an amalgam of high and low, salaciousness and profundity. As he has before, Rushdie proves himself a master at straddling the boundary between supermarket romance and philosophical treatise. The long rite of affairs and betrayals and divorces can’t obscure the fact that this is, ultimately, a wise book about some of the most important issues affecting the world today.

Foremost among those issues are the causes of free speech and free expression. Rushdie is an absolutist on these issues, arguing that free speech amounts to “life itself.” He suggests that the attempt by radical Islam to stifle The Satanic Verses was really the opening salvo in an ongoing conflict that has continued through the rise of al-Qaeda and the Sept.�11 terrorist attacks. The seeds of intolerance sown in 1989, when Khomeini’s fatwa was passed, have sprouted into a far more general—and violent—conflict between militant Islam and Western culture. Rushdie quotes the German poet Heinrich Heine: “Where they burn books, they will in the end burn people too.”¹

He insists on complexity and nuance where polemic and clich� so often reign. This is what writers do. And this, ultimately, is Rushdie’s triumph. In an age of rising intolerance and diminished literary confidence, Joseph Anton—like Rushdie’s own life—strikes a blow for the continued relevance of literature.–Ron Price with thanks to Akash Kapur, Book Review: 'Joseph Anton' by Salman Rushdie, in The Stackon October 04, 2012

We each have our own memoirs;
why I’ve got mine on 1000s of
pages and all over the internet, &
most people have them up in their
heads; others, still, are placing some
of their story on Facebook & twitter.
�
To each their own as we each tell our
story to others and to ourselves before
our final story goes before those pearly
gates, & we go into a hole for those who
tell no more story…….at least not here!
�
I won’t be reading your story, Salmon,
in its 600+ pages…..There are just too
many stories: cyberspace-&-real space.
�
There are stories in the humanities & social
sciences, the physical, biological, & applied
sciences and the result is an image-&-print
glut that keeps everyone busy working out
their own agenda. You’ve certainly had more
than your share, more than your 15 minutes of
fame, as old Andy once put it long ago back in
the 60s for all those hippies who were starting
to make their mark on civilization and who are
now heading into old-age. I wish you well, dear
Salmon, as you too head into old-age writing, as
you have been doing for decades: another hippy
who has made his mark on global civilization!!!

Ron Price

10/10/’12

�� REALLY REAL��
��
I wrote these two short paragraphs in my first month after retiring from FT paid-employment with 50 years in classrooms under my belt, 1949-1999, and after listening to an interview this morning with Salmon Rushdie.¹ �The interview and Rushdie’s words made me think about the pioneer in so many walks of life.� He or she should strive, as far as possible, to create home where it did not exist before wherever they go.� But this is not always easy work. In a city like Perth with over a thousand Baha’is I found there were pockets, groups, of Baha’is I was never at home with.��

Virtually all pioneers wherever they are found, it seems to me, are not able to ‘remove strangeness.’¹� There is always some sense of not belonging. The pioneer is in the position, Salmon Rushdie describes having two dreams: rootedness and journeying. He refers to people having two needs: community and group identity, as well as individuality and transcendence.² –Ron Price with thanks to:^{� 1}Salmon Rushdie, “Arts Today: Interview”, ABC Radio National, 3 May 1999, 9-10:00 a.m.; and ²Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, Four on an Island, Oxford, 1983, p. 62.
�

RUSHDIE and ME

A week after I retired from full-time work as a teacher and lecturer, after 32 years in the classroom and another 18 as a student, the website CNN Entertainment published an article entitled: “Rushdie’s new book out from under shadow of fatwa.”¹ �The book referred to was The Ground Beneath her Feet and it was about a completely different world than that of his 1988 book The Satanic Verses. The new world of Rushdie’s 1999 book was: rock ‘n roll music, New York and the crossover cultures between the east and the west Rushdie, an Indian-born novelist, in 1999 was still getting used to a more visible life.

A decade before, in 1989, Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a death edict against him for allegedly blaspheming Islam in that book The Satanic Verses. Khomeini died soon afterward, but Rushdie had to go into hiding for nearly a decade. It wasn’t until September 1998 that Tehran disassociated itself from Khomeini’s edict, as part of a deal aimed at restoring full diplomatic relations with Britain.-Ron Price with thanks to ¹the website CNN Entertainment, 15 April 1999.

Your book is a variation on the Orpheus/Eurydice
myth with rock music replacing the Orpheus lyre.
The myth works as a red thread from which you
sometimes stray, but to which you attach endless
references.� You gave us a sort of report on life at
the end of the 20^th century….I was far too busy to
read it getting-out from under 50 years of those
classrooms, Baha’i responsibilities in the big-city
and ready to take a sea-change from many jobs.
�
Your book provided a background and an alternate
history to those ‘50s to ‘90s period of rock music’s
growth….You give us, the reviewers said, humour
in a predictable unpredictability, a rat-tat-tat pace.
For clear shots of insight into the human condition
and the universe as it might be, you always moved
the ground beneath our feet.² …So perhaps during
these years of my sea-change, at 55+++, I may just
finally get ‘into’ you---but only time will tell since I
have had to recreate my life-style….my entire MO.³

¹On 10 May 1999, six hundred people attended a reading and book signing of author Salman Rushdie’s new bookThe Ground Beneath Her Feet.–Zarminae Ansari, “Salmon Rushdie’s “rock and roll” novel,” The Tech: Online Edition, 4 June 1999.� By June 1999 I had finished marking the last pieces, scripts, papers, I was given after my classroom teaching had come to an end.

^2� Linda L. Richards, “The Earth Moves,” January Magazine, April 1999.
³ modus operandiis a Latin expression used in who-dun-its. It means method of operating or way of going about things.

Ron Price

14 November 2011
�

SWIRLING
�
When I was working in a tin mine on the west coast of Tasmania in 1981/2 at one of the dirtiest, but emotionally challenging, jobs I’ve ever had, Salmon Rushdie was catapulted to literary fame.� I think I may have come across his name on the morning news before going to work on the bus in this little town on the west coast of Tasmania where it just about always rained.

I got on the bus early in the morning in the dark and the rain for, as I say, it nearly always rained on the west coast of this beautiful island state of Australia.� News of Rushdie and his Midnight’s Children(1981)was the beginning of his story in the narrative that is my own life and, over twenty-five years later, I still follow the writing and life of this acclaimed and controversial writer.

Yesterday I listened to an interview on ABC radio¹ with this Indian-British novelist and essayist, this Muslim-born and self-proclaimed atheist around whom have been swirling literary and political issues, especially since the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses(1988).�

I had left the tin mine by 1988 and was living in what is arguably the most isolated city on the planet, Perth, Western Australia.� The comparisons and contrasts between Rushdie’s writing and mine I found helped to place my own work in a useful personal perspective.� This prose-poem is just one of a series of pieces which examines these comparisons and contrasts.-Ron Price with thanks to “The Book Show,” ABC Radio National,� 21 April 2008, 10:05-11:00 a.m.
I tell stories, too, Salmon
but I don’t draw on the
deficit model of history¹
in the same way as you.
�
I, too, subvert linear history
with spacial, sacred, circular
and fragmented models, far
more transnational, not the
discreet national-local story
here, more the flickering film
of a phenomenal world where
a sense of unity is demanding
fulfilment on a tide of desire
for an outward and political
form mounting to a flood, to
a climax in these tempestuous
times of troubles and woes.

Writing for me was a second
choice, too, Salmon, after I
realized I could not make a
career of baseball and life
wore me out with forty years
of endless talking and listening
among other slings and arrows
of life’s outrageous fortune.

¹Camilla Nelson, “ Faking It: History and Creative Writing,” TEXT: Vol. 11, No.2, 2007.

Ron Price

22 April 2008

�

�

Tags: death, famous, personal, punish, writer

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Oct 2012
4:38 AM

Social Activism

Go to this link for several of my posts in relation to social activism: http://debatingchristianity.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21256

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Oct 2012
4:21 AM AEDT

DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

Part 1:

At the beginning of the Seven Year Plan, 1937 to 1944, the first systematic teaching Plan of the Baha’is of North America, Reinhold Niebuhr arranged a job for Dietrich Bonhoeffer in New York. Niebuhr(1892-1971) was an American theologian, public intellectual, commentator on politics and public affairs, and long-time professor at Union Theological Seminary. I just found this out today while reading an online edition of The New York Review of Books.¹ Now, in the evening of my life, I finally have the opportunity to read about things I simply did not have the time to read or the simplicity of access to information as I now have in cyberspace.

Bonhoeffer arrived in New York in late June 1939, more than two years after the beginning of that Plan, a Plan I have little doubt he knew anything about immersed as he was in Germany’s extreme social problems of the late 1930s. To oppose Hitler’s regime was rare, and to do so in order to protect the sanctity of law and faith was rarer still. One exceptional man who from the start of the Third Reich in 1933 opposed the Nazi outrages was that well-known pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

In that summer of 1939, though, Bonhoeffer was in spiritual turmoil: How could he contemplate living in a foreign country like the USA, a country which was at peace, when his own country, Germany, was on the brink of war and desolation? He decided he must go back to Europe. He explained to Niebuhr that:

“I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany…. Christians in Germany are going to face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose.”¹ He was back in Germany by September 1939 and the outbreak of war.

Part 2:

Bonhoeffer’s writings on Christianity's role in the secular world, in which he called for a "religion-less Christianity", have become widely influential, and many have labelled his book The Cost of Discipleship(1937) a modern classic. It was a study on the Sermon on the Mount. Apart from his theological writings, Bonhoeffer became known for his staunch resistance to the Nazi dictatorship.

Bonhoeffer strongly opposed Hitler's euthanasia program and genocidal persecution of the Jews. He was also involved in plans by members of the Abwehr, the German Military Intelligence Office, to assassinate Adolf Hitler. He was arrested in April 1943 by the Gestapo and executed by hanging in April 1945 while imprisoned at a Nazi concentration camp. It was just 23 days before the German surrender.² -Ron Price with thanks to ¹Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern“, The Tragedy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi” in The New York Review of Books, 25/10/’12; and ²Wikipedia.

I knew nothing about you,
Dietrich back in 1944….I
was just coming into this
world & you were on your
way out. I kept hearing about
your courage and resistance to
evil as I came to read at McMaster
university in the fields of religion
and philosophy in the mid-1960s.
�
Later in the 1970s, while teaching
in the social sciences, you again
came in to my intellectual life, but
you were always out, way out on
the periphery with so much of the
academic and popular culture on
its way over those last 4 decades,
1972 to 2012, as I taught in high
schools, colleges, & universities.
�
Today, though, Dietrich, I got an
idea of what you were on about.
I wish you well in your new home
In the land of lights more than 60
years now: what is it like, Dietrich?
�
�Ron Price
12 October 2012

Tags: famous, personal, war

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Oct 2012
4:19 AM

A Vast Continent

A VAST CONTINENT My poetic world of Pioneering Over Five Epochs is animated by a complex and simple, an inexhaustible life and paradoxically exhaustible life. We visit and revisit it as we might a great city, one of the vast continents of the planet or, indeed, the planet itself on a voyage from outer space. Gradually we come more and more to recognize certain places and certain faces, understand situations and grasp relations.

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Jul 2012
4:27 AM AEST

MEMORIZING: The Major and Minor Leagues

The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Lifeis a new book by Harold Bloom.¹Bloom at 82 is, arguably, the most famous American literary critic; he is also the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. Bloom says that his theory of literature “was the offshoot of his own reading habits, principally his freakish capacity for memorization.

He discovered this ability to memorize in childhood, and it never left him. In the early 1960s, after hearing the prolific American poet W. S. Merwin’s poem Departure’s Girl-Friend, a poem of some 40 lines, he was able to repeat it verbatim.� “Even now,” he says, “I possess almost all of the poetry of one of my favorite poets, Hart Crane, by memory.”

The ability to grasp poetry in this way is rare but not unprecedented. Bloom’s hero, the English author Samuel Johnson(1709-1784), had this ability as well. “His memory was so tenacious,” Boswell writes in his great biography of Johnson, “that he never forgot anything that he either heard or read.” �One of Johnson’s schoolmates remembers having recited to him 18 verses which, after a little pause, he was able to repeat, varying only one epithet, by which he improved the line.”

The scientific study of memory is part of cognitive neuroscience, an interdisciplinary link between cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Some principles and techniques that have been used to assist in memorization include: rote learning, mnemonics, mnemonics link systems, peg systems, cramming, vedic chants, and oral traditions.-Ron Price with thanks to ¹Sam Tanenhaus, Harold Bloom: An Uncommon Reader, �in The New York Times, May 20, 2011.

I had a good memory as a student

in primary and high school & was

able to go to the top of my class...,

but I was not in your league, Mr…

Bloom or Mr Johnson……I had to

work to get that information & facts

into my brain for future use usually

in exams: 99% perspiration and 1%

inspiration.� I am in a minor league,

a minor poet but, as the years went on

and my interests widened, I was able to

develop an architecture of information

in which to place a burgeoning quantity

of details as I headed through the stages

of adulthood and into old-age and its 3

phases: 65-74, 75-85 and beyond, if I

last that long!

Ron Price

26 June 2012

�

Tags: famous, history, impressive, memorizing

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Jul 2012
4:59 AM AEST

THE OLD TESTAMENT and ME

Note: I have tired to edit-out all the capitalization, but could not figure-out how to do it.-Ron
----------------------------------------------

The Hebrew Bible, called The Old Testament by Christians, is an extraordinarily difficult sequence of books.¹ This difficulty, too easily underestimated, is greater now than it ever was, partly because no contemporary reader, however specialized, shares in the psychology of the original readers and writers of The Bible. The first millennium in which anyone read any of the words in any of the books from 1000 B.C. to the time of Christ or, perhaps more accurately, 600 B.C. to 400 A.D.² �

My first memories of The Old Testament come from Bible readings in grade six when I was 11 and my mother reading passages from little booklets from the Unity School of Christianity as early as the mid-1950s. �Although some of the quotations had a broad ethical appeal to me even as a boy in my late childhood and early teens, I found the stories abstruse and distant: goats, sheep, tribes, and curious names like Balthazar and Nebuchadnezzar. They all occupied another universe far removed from my little town of 5000 in Ontario in that post-WW2 world of the 1950s. This distance existed then, as it does now, nearly 60 years later.

My individual understanding of The Bible, my biblical interpretations, rely primarily at the age of nearly 70 on my experience of nearly 60 years of intimate association with the Baha’i Faith. My interpretations and those of the Baha’i teachings are provocative, if nothing else.� But I have always found there to be a vast distance from the psychic universe of the biblical writers beginning as early as, say, 900 B.C.² and the contemporary society that is my world. I know I have lots of company; indeed I rarely meet anyone who actually reads The Old Testament any more.

However abstruse the language of biblical prophecy and eschatology, the prophets of The Old Testament, I believe, were given a foreknowledge of the events of our times in their visions, visions which I’m sure they hardly understood themselves.� �Still, there lies a sure presentation of the times we are living-through, as long as one does not take those prophecies literally.

Yahweh's choice of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their descendants as part of the Chosen People story was a permanent decision, intended to prevail into a time without boundaries, into our time.-Ron Price with thanks to ¹Harold Bloom, “Prose and Poetry,” in The New York Times, 17 October, 1982: a review of Dan Jacobson’s THE STORY OF THE STORIES: The Chosen People and Its God, and ²the final editor, or redactor, after the return from the Babylonian Exile in the 6^th century BC, put all the books of The Old Testament into something like their present form.³

When this review appeared in¹

The New York TimesI had just

arrived in Australia’s Northern

Territory & the heat of summer

was just beginning to make me

run for cover to air-conditioning �

in my office, my home & the cool

air of the car....The Old Testament �

was on my universe’s far-periphery.

�

There it had always been in heat and

cold since those first stories when I

was in grade six in that little town in

Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe where

everyone I knew was Catholic or Jew

or Protestant, or nothing; yes, mostly

nothing and there they have remained

with that Old Testament far removed

from everyone’s everyday life. Still…

�

I have time now to try to get into it in

this the evening of my life; �however

complex and abstruse it may be, I want

to make-up for the decades when it had

to remain far out on my life’s periphery.

¹Harold Bloom, “Prose and Poetry,” inThe New York Times, 17 October, 1982: a review of Dan Jacobson’sTHE STORY OF THE STORIES: The Chosen People and Its God.
³ See Frank Kermode, “God Speaks Through His Women,” in The New York Times, 23 September 1990: a review of Harold Bloom’s The Book of J.

Ron Price

5 July 2012

�

Tags: capitals, famous, history, journal, personal, posts, religion

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1 comment(s) - 05:03 AM - 07/21/2012

Jul 2012
4:49 AM AEST

A MINOR PLAYER WITH TOO MUCH TO READ

David Halberstam(1934-2007) arrived in Vietnam in the middle of 1962 to be a full-time Vietnam specialist for The New York Times. I was an 18 year old matriculation student in Ontario at the time and hoped to get into an arts degree program in 1963; I knew nothing of Halberstam. I also began my travelling-pioneering for the Canadian Bahai community in that year. I did not come to read Halberstam until I retired after a 50 year student-working life: 1949-1999. In the first decade of my retirement from FT work, 1999 to 2009, I began to read a host of essayists that I never had time to read in my working life as a teacher and tutor, lecturer and adult educator.

My reading-and-teaching load as well as my responsibilities as a member of the Bahai community, as a parent of three children, as a volunteer for various associations from the Lions Club to the Rec Cross, to say nothing of the inevitable social responsibilities that come from family and community activity also kept me far away from the major and famous essayists in the last half of the 20th century. Halberstam was always about a dozen years ahead of me, having graduated as he did in 1955 with an arts degree from Harvard University. I graduated in 1967 with a similar degree and so began my 60+ hour weeks involved as I indicated above until my retirement.

I wont tell you about Halberstams working life, nor mine other than to say: his literary life was highly distinguished. He wrote many books and received: (i) the Norman Mailer Prize in 2009 for Distinguished Journalism, and (ii) the Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for International Reporting.-Ron Price, Wikipedia, 7 July 2012. I read what I had to all through my primary, secondary, & post- secondary education: 1949-1967.

My interests began to fly at uni, but there were always so many books that had to get read if one wanted to pass & go to the next stage: & that was the way it was until I became a permanent flier in my role as a college teacher in several schools and universities in the continent of Australia: 1974-99. But I was & never will be in the race with people like Halberstam. I found my niche in the years: 1974 to 2012, but it was always a niche tangentially connected with so many other things in life that I will remain a minor poet, a minor player in the publishing game. On the internet ones writing gets lost among 380 million sites, and 2 billion players: time found in nanoseconds!!! Ron Price 7 July 2012

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Feb 2012
4:28 AM AEST

FOOTY and BASEBALL

On the ninth day of spring, just yesterday, I attended the first footy game in a big stadium in Australia-at York Park in Launceston.� I had lived in Australia for 36 years and two months--nearly 60 per cent of my life; I had watched parts of several games on small ovals across Australia and, of course, seen dozens of parts of games on TV.� But I don’t think I had ever watched an entire game.� I was married to a big football fan and having a son and two step-daughters who also enjoyed the game, it was difficult to escape its regular sound in our home for six months of the year, especially at the weekend.� Given the centrality of this game to the Aussie ethos, I felt my attendance and what it involved deserved a prose-poem to mark the occasion even though I only watched part of the game and even though it was only for the under 14s.� But the game was a grand final in the NTJFL, the northern Tasmania Junior Football League, my 14 year old step-grandson, Tobias Wells, was playing and my wife saw that it was an essential part of my grandfatherly role to attend.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 10 September 2007.
�
Back in what many saw as the quiet fifties, my attention, my spiritual and physical resources, my curiosity, was channelled into sport, school and an emerging interest in the opposite sex.� The energies of this young child and adolescent who had just begun the long race of life were, indeed, stretched to the full during those halcyon days by activities having little to no connection with any organized religion.� Organized religion in any form has not been a popular activity in Australia and Canada, at least in the places where I have lived all my life, although certain evangelical-fundamentalist groups did attracted large followings.
�
The following poem tells a little about one of the sports, baseball, its context in my life, in modern history and this new Faith whose connection with my life was a largely peripheral one during the years of my childhood and early to mid-adolescence.�� I wrote the following poem six weeks before leaving the classroom and retiring from employment as a teacher at the age of 55 in 1999.� So often in life I felt strongly that I just could not stay any longer in a place—a town or a city--in a work situation, in a marriage or in any one of the multitude of other relationships one can have in life. For one reason or another I just had to go, had to split, as we used to say colloquially. Sometimes the reason was obvious; sometimes it was inexplicable; sometimes the choice was not mine.
�
In 1953/4 I felt strongly that I had to leave softball for hardball and third base for the mound, the role of pitcher. In 1950 I had to leave our house in RR#1 Burlington. The former was my choice; the latter had nothing to do with me. Such is part of the nature of fate, determinism and free will. In August 1962, at the age of 18, I played my last game of hardball in the juvenile league for the Burlington All-Stars.� I pitched a full nine innings in that game and in the bottom of the ninth I was hit for three runs and we lost the game 3 to 1. The next week my family moved to another town and the next summer I worked for the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company to make money to go to university and did not play another game of baseball until I was 39 and lived in Katherine, Northern Territory, where is was so hot that after a few innings in one game I gave it up with an excess of sweat on my brow as a lost cause.
�
When a series of programs about baseball, a series called The Big Picture, began to unfold on television, I quickly came to realize the remarkable similarity between the story of baseball and the story of the Baha’i Faith, both of which grew up in the modern age. The game of baseball was born in America in the 1840s as a new activity for sporting fraternities and a new way for communities to develop a more defined identity.¹�� Indeed, there are many organizations, activities, interests which were born and developed in this modern age, say, since the French and the American revolutions.� The points of comparison and contrast between the great charismatic Force which gave birth to the Baha’i Faith and its progressive institutionalization on the one hand, and the origin and development of other movements and organizations on the other, is interesting to observe. I wrote the poem which follows about seven weeks before teaching my last class as a full-time Tafe teacher in Australia. -Ron Price with thanks to Ken Burns, “The Big Picture: Part Two,”� ABC TV, 18 February 1999; and ¹John Nagy, “The Survival of Professional Baseball in Lynchburg Virginia: 1950s-1990s,” Rethinking History, Vol.37.
�
They both grew slowly
through forces and processes,
events and realities
in the late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries:
baseball and the Baha’i Faith
along their stony and tortuous paths,
the latter out of the Shaykhi School
of the Ithna’Ashariyyih Sect
of Shi’ah Islam.
�
And it would be many years
before the Baha’i Faith would climb�
to the heights of popularity
that baseball had achieved
quite early in its history.
�
Baseball was a game
whose time had come,
a hybrid invention,
a growth out of diverse roots,
the fields and sandlots of America,
as American as apple pie.
�
And the Baha’i Faith was an idea
whose time had come, would come,
slowly, it would seem, quite slowly
in the fields, the lounge rooms,
the minds and hearts
of a burgeoning humanity
caught, as it was, as we all were,
in the tentacles of a tempest
that threatened to blow it--
and us--apart.
�
Ron Price
17 February 1999
�
A second poem about baseball, written about a year after retiring from full-time teaching to Tasmania, where I lived in its oldest town, George Town---also conveys something of the flavour of those ‘warm-up days until I was 18 when my curiosity about this new religion was exceeded by curiosity about other things.
�
A BASEBALL-CRAZY KID
�
In October 1956 Don Larsen of the New York Yankees pitched the only perfect game in post-season baseball. Yogi Berra was the catcher.¹� That same month and year R. Rabbani advised Mariette Bolton of Orange Australia, in the extended PS of her letter, that it was “much better for the friends to give up saying “Amen.”²� The following year Shoghi Effendi died and Jackie Robinson, the first Negro to play professional baseball, retired.� I was completing grades 7 and 8 when all of this took place and, even at this early age, was in love with at least three girls and possibly four in my class: Carol Ingham, Judy Simpson, Karen Jackson and Susan Gregory.� I found them all so very beautiful.� Karen was the first girl I kissed.³� -Ron Price with appreciation to:¹"The Opening of the World Series: 2000," ABC TV; ²Messages to the Antipodes, Shoghi Effendi, editor, Graham Hassall, Baha’i Publications Australia, 1997, p.419; and ³Ron Price, Journal: Canada: To 1971: 1.1, Photograph Number 102.
�
I was just starting grade seven
and still saying amen
occasionally when I went
to that Anglican Church
on the Guelph Line
in Burlington Ontario
with my mother and father
and saying grace
just as occasionally.
�
I watched the World Series,
a highlight of autumn
for a twelve year old
baseball-crazy kid, back then.
And I passed the half-way point
of my pre-youth days¹
when I was the only kid
with any connection
with this new world Faith
in these, the very early days
of the growth of a Cause
in the Dominion of Canada,²
a Cause that contained the seed
for a future world civilization.
�
^1� 1953 to 1959: my pre-youth days.
² In 1956 there were only about 600 Baha’is in Canada.� The 400 Baha’is that started the Ten Year Crusade in 1953 in Canada became 800 by the time I became a Baha’i in 1959. In southern Ontario, from, say, Oakville to Niagara Falls and Windsor, to several points north of Lakes Ontario and Erie in 1956 I was the only pre-youth whom I then knew, or later came to know.� There may have been other pre-youth but at this early stage of the growth of the Cause in Canada, year fifty-eight of its history, I was not aware of them.—See Canada’s Six Year Plan: 1986-1992, NSA of the Baha’is of Canada, 1987, p.46.
�
Ron Price
23 October 2000
_________________________

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Feb 2012
4:16 AM AEST

THE SUMMER OF ‘37: MY LIFE IS MY WORK

About ten weeks after I joined the Baha’i Faith the film Suddenly Last Summer was released. It was just at the start of the Christmas holidays. I was in the middle of grade 10 in a small town in Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe. I won’t tell you about the town, about that part of Ontario where I lived until my early 20s, or about the film since you can easily research all of this with a little effort in cyberspace.

One of the lines, the quotations, from the film, though, was: “Strictly speaking, his life was his occupation. Yes, yes, Sebastian was a poet. That's what I meant when I said his life was his work because the work of a poet is the life of a poet, and vice versa, the life of a poet is the work of a poet. I mean, you can't separate them. I mean, a poet's life is his work, and his work is his life in a special sense.”¹

I would not have appreciated those lines back in 1959 immersed as I was back then: in sport, in my studies, in the more accessible beauties than the ones in the film,² in the small world of my family and friends and in the new religion my family had become involved with by the late 1950s.² -Ron Price with thanks to ¹IMDb Website and Wikipedia; ²Elizabeth Taylor and Katharine Hepburn starred in this film and won Oscars for their acting, 24/2/’12.

You were so very successful,
Tennessee,¹ but what a grim
life you had; I’ve had quite an
easy trot compared to yours.
�
Set in the summer of 1937 at
the start of the Baha’i Seven
Year Plan…..little did anyone
know back then or even now.²
�
With the world getting ready
for another war…..they were
grim times for that grim story.³
�
Those words about a poet have
certainly come true for me now
in the evening of my life: my life
is my work & my work is my life.

¹Theatre scholar Charlotte Canning of the University of Texas at Austin, where Williams' archives are located, has said, "There is no more influential 20th-century American playwright than Tennessee Williams. He inspired future generations of writers, and his plays remain among the most produced in the world."
²1937-1944: the first organized teaching plan of the Baha’is of North America.
³ Michael D. Klemm,“Who's Afraid Of Sebastian Venable?” in CinemaQueer.com, December 2008.

Ron Price
24/2/’12

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Feb 2012
4:30 AM AEST

EDWARD WOODWARD: “Between Two Eternities”

Edward Woodward(1930-2009) died today.� He was born in Croydon, Surrey which, in 1965, became a part of Greater London. �It is the town where my grandfather was born in 1872. �We both had working-class parents. But it is there that a comparison between Woodward and me ends. He became one of England’s finest actors in the last half of the twentieth century. He was also a singer with a dozen albums and an author.� His 300 page memoir, One Brief Interval,(1) makes a good read. I, on the other-hand, became famous in micro-worlds, in classrooms across two continents, as a teacher.� I also became a Bah�'�.
�
Woodward started his acting career at the age of 16 in 1946.� At 16 I was in grade 11.� In his teens he aspired to being a professional footballer.� I aspired at that young age to being a professional baseball player. I won’t summarize the many highlights and achievements of Woodward’s career which readers can easily read about at Wikipedia(2), the online encyclopedia; nor will I summarize my life since the age of 16 in 1956.� This prose-poem will serve as a quasi-eulogy, a reminiscence, a reflection on a life, a life that existed beside mine in the world of celebrity, a world which exists beside all of us in the West, we who live with print and electronic media and their many and variegated forms. -Ron Price with thanks to (1) Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2005; and (2) Wikipedia, 16 November 2009.
�
It’s been quite a ride, eh Edward?
World War 2 starting when you
were only 9 and many more wars
since, eh? You seemed to weather-
it-all pretty well, Edward, as you
enriched the lives of millions with
your talents: your cool tenor voice.
�
There’s more to celebrity than just a name;
that’s for sure, eh Edward? I wish you well
wherever you are now: be it in oblivion----
a pretty safe place; or in your incarnated---
role wherever that may be; or in the world
beyond, that Undiscovered Country, between
two eternities, as you called it, Land of Lights,
as some call it.� They will be different lights
than the ones you enjoyed on the stage and
screen here on this earthly plane, Edward....
�
May you now enjoy days of blissful joy and of
heavenly delight in some garden of happiness,
beholding new splendours on lofty mounts that
the pen cannot tell nor the heart recount to us
who still labour in this petty pace from day to
day to the last syllable of our recorded time....
�
Your candle has gone out, Edward. No more
strutting and fretting your hours. You will be
heard no more—here.� But this tale, your life,
is not a story told by an idiot, full of sound &
fury, signifying nothing. What say you now,
Edward, what say you now in the language of
THERE?
�
Ron Price
17 November 2009
�
PS (1)There are many excellent lines from Woodward’s memoir, lines like:
�‘Childhood is measured out by the sounds and smells and sights before the dark of reason grows.’(p.3)
(2) ‘Leaving aside God and heaven, there is still much good teaching in religion, whether it is Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Aboriginal or any other’. The last chapter of Woodward’s memoir returns to the idea of life as “a brief interval between two eternities.”
�

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Feb 2012
4:41 AM AEST

UNDER THE CYPRESS TREES: THE BRILLIANT FIRST CEN

Bryn and Sherna Deamer, the chief librarian and the head of the publishing section in the Bah�'� World Centre library gave my wife, my son and I a private tour of the Baha’i Cemetery in the late afternoon of Friday 9 June.� It is a cemetery where Universal House of Justice members, Hands of the Cause and several workers at the World Centre lie buried.� I found the experience very moving because I had come to know so very many of the people who had passed away and who were buried in that place--not personally of course but through living in the first century of the Bah�'� Faith’s Formative Age(1921-2021) and studying its history.� I felt a closeness to many of these men and women.� It was the only place where I was moved to tears during my pilgrimage. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 9 June 2000.
�
So many familiar names here
under yet more cypress trees:
the Revell sisters’ final resting place;
and there’s Elizabeth Martin’s stone:
I knew her well, well not that well;
And there’s old Esslemont, well, not
that old really: died at only 51!
�
Quite a galaxy of servants to this Cause:
an elite cadre!� And a nicely kept place:
simple, small, accessible, not your orgy
of stone going on and on forever through
anonymous lines of very unknown people.
An intimate spot with several twisted trees,
souls beyond, now, beyond the twisted reach
of any of our sorrows as Bob Dylan once sang.
�
Men and women of the Formative Age and the
first five epochs of its brilliant first century.
�
Ron Price
10 June 2000

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Feb 2012
4:03 AM AEST

de Kooning: A Retrospective

Five of the most famous, or infamous, paintings of Willem de Kooning (1904-1997)---the Woman series from 1950-1953 ---were at a large-scale retrospective exhibition which concluded last month. From 18 September 2011 to 9 January 2012 de Kooning: A Retrospective could be viewed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. That Dutch-American abstract-expressionist painted what people found, and still find, shocking, truly wild canvasses.

Woman I which had pride of place at the centre of one wall in the MoMA was flanked by two equally riotous canvases on either side. It had taken de Kooning over two years to complete Woman I. He kept putting it aside. It was only the urgings of American art historian Meyer Schapiro that kept him from destroying it. By the early 1950s de Kooning, some argue, was onto something so new even to himself that he had to make a number of similar paintings before he knew enough to know when Woman I qualified as a finished painting. This meant as much scratching into, rubbing out, scraping back, and starting over as it did applying oil paint in every conceivable manner and viscosity.

Woman with Bicycle (1952-1953), another painting at the retrospective is a monster of a painting with a formless piece of pure red pigment at the centre of the canvas. That mark gives the impression, say some critics, as if de Kooning had just about given-up on this new art form. Perhaps in the green square-shaped smudges and scrapes at the bottom of the painting de Kooning found himself, momentarily redeemed by the dialectic between form and anti-form, the simultaneous contrast between red and green.

Perhaps the paint became, for de Kooning, a way of pinning down this figure to the picture-plane, literally a base on which to anchor the figure. Perhaps, too, the doubling of the teeth, lined-up above the formless piece of pure red pigment, and the resulting alignment along the central axis of the painting, was de Kooning mocking the seemingly irrational results of his enterprise. Form and anti-form may just be, in the end, a prison-house for de Kooning’s pictorial logic.

“Talent is a crushing burden, a curse, to the artist who would be modern, experimental, original, free,” wrote Rochelle Gurstein who reviewed this retrospective for The New Republic this month. “I couldn’t help feeling there was something tragic in the historical development that de Kooning represented”1 Gurstein wrote. What pressure was de Kooning under, with episodes of redemption, only to return to what must have felt to him like some kind of torture? Gurstein asked rhetorically.

I had just started primary school at the time de Kooning did this work. My mother had just joined a new religion that had come into town, the Baha’i Faith; my father had got a job closer to the centre of town, a town in Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe. I knew nothing of de Kooning and abstract impressionism immersed as I was in the years of middle childhood according to human development psychologists.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Rochelle Gurstein, “Abstract Expressionism's Most Traditional Artist,” The New Republic, 2 February 2012---for much of the above.

What was his inspiration, his creativity,
his intensity, capacity-extraordinaire as
an action painter to make psychic event
happen apparently spontaneously on his
canvases just after history’s worst war?

Was de Kooning’s apparent aim synthesis
of tradition and modernism? Did that aim
grant him more flexibility within the Late
Cubist confines of its canon of design???

The dream of a grand style hovers over all
this: the dream of a clearly grand & heroic
mix. He went so far as to draw with his left
hand, with his eyes closed, watching TV &
trying to get away, so I’m told, from talent.

Is this the pathos of what it meant to be a
modern artist of the ‘50s generation, a time
when a new and thrilling motion seemed to
be permeating the world of existence little
did he or virtually anyone else even know
back then in days when rock-‘n-roll was
about to wake people up from the dream
of Mr. Clean & Doris Day, General Ike &
luxury without stress, & no Negroes, & no
genitalia: please, not at all, pretty please!!2

1 From essays on de Kooning by Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg.
2 The Fifties: The Way We Really Were, D.T. Miller & M. Nowak, Doubleday & Co., NY, 1977, p.302.

Ron Price
19-2-12.

Tags: art, famous

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Feb 2012
5:10 AM AEST

MOZART AND SHAYKH AHMAD

The years from the 1770s to the 1790s were the last years of Mozart’s life and the first years of the adult life of Shaykh Ahmad.²� They were the years of the French Revolution, the beginning of modern history and the reign of terror before the rise of Napoleon. Mozart created in the last years of his life(1775-1791) an almost incomparably rich legacy of works for keyboard, beginning with the six solo sonatas of 1775 and extending to such pieces as the final Concerto in B flat, K. 595, from 1791.¹� My prose-poem here attempts to examine what defies comprehensive elucidation by any scholar or poet--the specificities of the lives and the brilliant repertoires of these two geniuses, these two men gifted beyond all measure.� Both of their lives remain complicated puzzles in their respective worlds of classical music and Islamic mysticism.-Ron Price with thanks to ¹ William Kinderman, Mozart's Piano Music, Oxford UP, 2006; and ²Nabil’s Narrative, Wilmette, Bah�'� Publishing Trust, 1974(1932) , pp. 1-3.
�
His¹ contemporaries found the restless
ambivalence and complicated emotional
content of his music difficult to understand;
and the ‘ulamas professed themselves unable
to comprehend the meaning of his² mysterious
allusions, but that movie³ enthralled audiences
and emblazoned the Amadeus theme blatantly,
claiming as it did a grand storyteller----license
to embellish that tale with a fictional ornament,
a surrealistic distortion, a metamorphosis, of a
life, the life of mirabile dictu Amadeus Mozart.
�
How does one characterize an unexplainable
phenomenon, the mind of a musical savant?
A rather ordinary turn of mind, silly jokes, an
irresponsible way of life distinguished him in
society; and yet what depths, what worlds of
fantasy, harmony, melody, feeling concealed
behind this unpromising exterior in which we
now freely interpret his biographical-psyche..
�
And the Shaykh from the town of Ahsa in the
district of Ahsa in the northeast of the Arabian
peninsula, luminous Star of a Divine guidance
who arose with unerring vision, fixed purpose
and sublime detachment at the age of forty to
prepare the way for a new Revelation of God---
what can we say about this controversial mystic,
this imaginative writer on metaphysical planes?⁴
�
^1� Mozart
^2� Shaykh Ahmad
^3� Amadeus, a film directed by Milos Forman, released 1984.
⁴ �Juan Cole, “The World as Text: Cosmologies of Shaykh Ahmad
al-Ahsa’i,” Studia Islamica, Vol. 80, 1994, pp.145-163.
�
Ron Price
30 March 2009

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Feb 2012
4:08 AM AEST

BARBIE DOLL

The popular doll, Barbie, artifact of female representation and identity, of depiction and posturing of women, has evoked a steady stream of critical attention since her debut in 1959.�� I have not been that conscious of this critical attention involved as I have been since 1959 with issues relating to my education, my career, my family and my religion. If millions of pre-pubescent girls have lived imaginatively and vicariously through Barbie this has not really concerned me.� The world is burgeoning with issues and this was one far removed from my flight path.� In 1959 I joined the Baha’i Faith and the agenda that has concerned me has only on rare occasions and only very peripherally involved the barbie doll. –Ron Price with thanks to “The Wonder of Barbie: Popular Culture and the Making of Female Identity,” Essays in Philosophy: A Biannual Journal, Vol.4, No.1, January 2003.
�
The essence of feminine beauty
is vigilance and artificiality.
Men may be expected to enhance
their appearance, but women are
supposed to transform themselves.
�
Who is the fairest of them all.
The mirror replies, “Before I
answer that, may I suggest an
alpha-hydroxy lotion?…this
Revlon spray?…this lipstick?
�
Where have you been Barbie?
You popped into my life when
I visited those kids in Whyalla
and when I went shopping more
than usual between marriages.
�
Images of maleness were many
and varied: my dad, grandfather,
uncle, those westerns on TV back
in the fifties and all those old chaps
in Baha’i history--unquestionably--
�
subtlely, insinuating themselves into
my imaginative faculty on cold
Canadian evenings; Jim Gibb
reading poems, John Dixon’s
quiet kindness,� Douglas Martin’s
clever use of words, so many
ordinarily ordinary men, artifacts
of identity, of depiction and posturing:
nothing like Dick, his relentless jollity,
his banklike security and his always
impeccable decorator and merry picnic.
�
Ron Price
2 October 2006
�
�
�
�

Tags: Baha\i, culture, history, personal, popular

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Feb 2012
4:22 AM AEST

CSI: SCIENCE AND SALVATION

Each episode of the most popular television series in the world - according to articles in The New Yorker and BBC online¹- begins where many stories end, at the death of the central character. Before the opening credits roll, the primary piece of evidence, this character’s body, appears lifeless and silent. Soon enough, however, the crime scene investigator, the CSI, begins his chief task; he must get this body to speak. He will, within an hour’s time, divine a true tale. And, in the retrospective portrait that emerges, the CSI confirms his mastery of the tools of truth telling and his ability to impose these tools on the world around him, whatever the circumstances.

I watched a few of the CSI: Miami episodes after they began to be released on my birthday, 23/7/’03, at the age of 59, here in northern Tasmania where the Tamar River meets the sea. �I had taken an early retirement after a 40 year working life, was the secretary of the small Baha’i Group of George Town Tasmania, and had begun to write full-time.-Ron Price with thanks to ¹Wikipedia: 2009-2011; ²"Dead Men Do Tell Tales:” CSI: Miami and the Case Against Narrative, Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, Spring 2009, Volume 8, Issue 1.

Since I took a sea-change in 1999

I’ve been watching more who-dun-

its than ever before, some with my

wife and some by myself. Today I

came across a study of CSI: Miami at

an online journal that I have taken an

interest in, one of those free journals

that are available on the world-wide

web which enrich my years in these

evening--times of my late adulthood

which some of the psychologists of

human development call these years

of 60 to 80 in the average lifespan.

Little gregarious chatter as each

episode unfolds weekly with its

faith in science and technology.

I watched a few programs when

CSI: Miamifirst came out & now

only when I am too tired to write.

The series has been voted the most

popular in the world perhaps, partly,

because of its propensity for a high

tech and its wordlessness: no juries,

no lawyers, just pretty people as well

as some, a lot, of instrumentation and

scientific methodology to provide the

view that science will save us if we can

just develop it to suit our social needs!!

Ron Price

25 January 2012

Tags: famous, popular, television

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Jan 2012
8:12 PM AEST

TIGHT CONTROL

As the third millennium entered and with it the 21^st century in 2001, the long economic boom of the 1990s came to an end. �By then I had just retired from my career as a teacher and a forty year working life. I was on a disability pension in Australia. In the decade, 2001-2011, there was an extension of the digital revolution of the 1990s.� At first that digital-computer revolution seemed that it would mark a definitive break with the manufacturing economy that had thrived in the United States and the West since the late-nineteenth century.
�
With the pervasive use of IT, information technology, by: banks, insurance companies, hospitals, clinics, even warehouses and retail stores, the era of industrial mass production, it was at first assumed, would fade into the past. Also redundant, so went the argument, would be the blue-collar workers who had manned the old assembly lines. With 80 per cent of the workforce employed in post-industrial white-collar service industries by the turn of the 21^st century, economists assumed that there would no longer be any need for a large industrial proletariat with limited skills, passively taking orders from above.
�
The findings of the three books mentioned below, along with much recent research, suggest that methods of production based on top-down standardization and tight control of work and workers are as influential in the digital economy as they were in the industrial economy. Drawing upon the virtually unlimited powers of computers to monitor the activities of employees and to use information, the old methods for blue-collar workers have simply been readapted for the white-collar workplace.-Ron Price with thanks to Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism, Yale UP, 2006; �John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information, Harvard Business School, 2000; and Barbara EhrenreichBait and Switch: The (Futile Pursuit of the American Dream, Owl Books, 2005.
�
If you don’t like the tight control and top-down
ordering, if you don’t like your boss or the work
in the fast-lane, you can join millions of white-
and-blue-collar unemployed. Armed with your
r�sum� or not, in transition from one job to
another, if you can—trying to land middle-class,
any-class, job with some career coaching, perhaps
personality testing thrown-in,trawling a series of boot
camps, job fairs, and networking events, job-search
evangelical government ministries. You get an image
makeover, workto project thatwinning attitude, yet
getproselytized andscammed, lectured at again-and-
again-rejected—so the story goes. There are millions
who’ve done everything right. They got their college
degrees, developed marketable skills, and built-up
impressive bio-data, a curriculum-vitae. They have
become repeatedly vulnerable to a financial disaster,
& not simply due to the vagaries of the business cycle.
�
Today’s ultra-lean corporations take pride in shedding
their surplus employees---plunging them, for months
or years at a stretch, into the twilight zone of white or
blue-collar unemployment, where job searching becomes
a full-time job in itself, with few social supports for these
newly disposable workers, & little security for those who
are fortunate enough to have a job at all..goes the story!

Ron Price
24 December 2011
�

Tags: job-hunting, personal, unemployment, workforce

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Jan 2012
5:02 AM AEST

GORE VIDAL: master essayist of our age

Gore Vidal(b.1925-), who has been called the best all-around American man of letters since Edmund Wilson(1895-1972), began his writing career at nineteen, the year I was born. In 1962, the year I began to travel for the Canadian Baha’i community and begin my own serious literary and academic study, Vidal published his first book of essays entitled: Rocking the Boat.

Books of his essays and interviews, novels and memoirs kept appearing as I entered the teaching profession in the 1960s and finally retired in the 1990s. He’s still going, although not as strong at 85 and often in a wheel-chair.-Ron Price with thanks to Harry Kloman, “Gore Vidal’s Essays, Interviews and Memoirs: 1963-Present,” 2005.

He always impressed me with
his remarkable wit and talent:
5 decades of scintillating words
in books & live whenever I saw
him in Australia on TV…He saw
the moral-intellectual hollowness
of American politics at the same I
did—in the early 1960s with those
Kennedys and so he spent the rest
of his life writing books and essays
& a lot of other stuff¹---thinking on
paper for a world slowly captured by
electronic distractions. Still, we go on
talking about books and writing them
pretending not to notice that the church
is empty and people have gone over to
attend to other gods in silence or new
words. ��Surely it’s not that bad Gore?²

¹ The Washington Post calls him “the master essayist of our age.” See David Barsamian, “Citizen Gore Vidal,” These Times, 3 November 2008
² George Scialabba, “Civic Virtues: Gore Vidal’s Selected Essays,” The Nation, 8 October 2008.

Ron Price
3 August 2011
�

Tags: essays, famous, history, personal, writer

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Jan 2012
5:00 AM AEST

ROBERT FROST: A PERSONAL RETROSPECTIVE

The famous national American poet Robert Frost(1875-1963) died on 30 January 1963, two months before his 89th birthday.� Three months later on 30 April 1963, the long-awaited crown of the Baha’i Administrative Order, the Universal House of Justice, sent its first statement to the Baha’i world and opened the second epoch of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s Divine Plan.

In January 1963, the last month of his life, Frost knew nothing, as far as I know, about the Baha’i Faith. He had no idea that, from a Baha’i perspective, the ninth part of the spiritual evolution of man, an evolution than began with the Adamic Cycle, was about to be concluded, and that the tenth part of a divine process destined to culminate in the Christ-promised Kingdom of God on earth was about to open in less than three months.

The tributes of President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev dominated the news stories as other final eulogies were pronounced on Frost in early February. Early in that month, too, the famous poet Sylvia Plath committed suicide and Barbra Streisand’s first album was released. �The last months and weeks of what to the Baha’is was known as the Ten Year Crusade concluded on 21 April 1963, bringing to an end that first epoch in the grand design of what to the Baha’is was “God’s Holy Cause.”¹�

I was finishing my matriculation studies in Ontario.� At the time, I knew nothing about Robert Frost and had little appreciation of that grand design of the Baha’i community. ��Since 1963, though, I have come to appreciate much more the significance of this Holy Cause I have now been associated with for nearly 60 years. The life and poetry of Robert Frost has become an inspiration.

"My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight."
--Robert Frost

¹ The Universal House of Justice, Wellspring of Guidance, Baha’i Pub. Trust, Wilmette, 1969, p.1.

I have come to appreciate you, Robert,
especially due to your fears, rages and
jealousies woven and muted poetically
as you wrote poem after poem over all
those decades. Your casualness and its
understatement in your simple pastoral
mode is something that I find difficult to
emulate since it reflects a person, as your
poems and life do: �disquiet, anxiety about
being in a world without any boundaries, a
darkness due the absence of life-assurances,
a fear of the awful silence of this universe &
its infinite spaces. Without a faith to comfort
you in the face of life’s ultimate bafflement &
confusion, with no vision just art’s safety net:
simple & rugged was your life and work, and
what you stood for is gone…….Is your poetry
of much use to us now? asks William Stafford.¹

¹William Stafford(1914-1993) was the poet laureate consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress in 1970.�He wrote “The Terror in Robert Frost” in The New York Times on the Web which appeared on 18 August 1974 and from which I draw in the above poem. �Stafford at the time was the author of several collections of poems, including "Allegiances" and "Someday Maybe," He was also a professor of English at Lewis and Clark College in Portland Oregon.�
�
I was, at the time this article was published, having my first successes as a lecturer and tutor in post-secondary education; I was reading and enjoying immense quantities of print for the first time in my life, having a whole new set of personal tests, and was far removed from writing poetry as I would be until the 1980s about the age of 40.

Ron Price
18 January 2012
�

Tags: famous, history, personal, poet, poetry

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About Me: EMPLOYMENT-SOCIAL-ROLE POSITIONS: 1943-2012 2010-2012-Retired and on a pension in George Town, Tasmania 1999-2009-Writer & Author, Poet & Publisher, Editor & Researcher. Retired Teacher & Lecturer, Tutor & Adult Educator, Taxi-Driver & Ice-Cream Salesman, George Town Tasmania Australia 2002-2005-Program Presenter City Park Radio Launceston 1999-2004-Tutor &/or President George Town School for Seniors Inc 1988-1999 -Lecturer in General Studies & Human Services West Australian Department of Training 1986-1987 -Acting Lecturer in Management Studies & Co-ordinator of Further Education Unit at Hedland College in South Hedland WA 1982-1985 -Adult Educator Open College of Tafe Katherine NT 1981 -Maintenance Scheduler Renison Bell Zeehan Tasmania 1980-Unemployed due to illness and recovery 1979-Editor External Studies Unit Tasmanian CAE; Youth Worker Resource Centre Association; Lecturer in Organizational Behaviour Tasmanian CAE; Radio Journalist ABC---all in Launceston Tasmania 1976-1978 -Lecturer in Social Sciences & Humanities Ballarat CAE Ballarat, Victoria 1975 - Lecturer in Behavioural Studies Whitehorse Technical College, Box Hill Victoria 1974 -Senior Tutor in Education Studies Tasmanian CAE Launceston, Tasmania 1972-1973 -High School Teacher South Australian Education Department 1971-Primary School Teacher Whyalla South Australia ----------ABOVE THIS LINE AUSTRALIA AND BELOW THIS LINE CANADA-------------------------------------------------------------------- 1969-1971 Primary School Teacher Prince Edward County Board of Education Picton Ontario Canada 1969-Systems Analyst Bad Boy Co Ltd Toronto Ontario 1967-68 -Community Teacher Department of Indian Affairs & Northern Development Frobisher Bay NWT Canada 1959-67 -Summer jobs-1 to 4 months each- from grade 10 to end of university 1949-1967 - Attended 2 primary schools, 2 high schools and 2 universities in Canada: McMaster Uni-1963-1966, Windsor Teachers’ College-1966/7 1944-1963 -Childhood(1944-57) and adolescence(1957-63) in and around Hamilton Ontario 1943 to 1944-Conception in October 1943 to birth in July 1944 in Hamilton Ontario --------------------------BELOW THIS LINE-----------------------BIO-DATA----------------------- 2. SOME SOCIO-BIO-DATA TO 2011 I have been married twice for a total of 44 years. My second wife is a Tasmanian, aged 65. We’ve had one child: age 34. I have two step-children: ages: 46 and 41, three step-grandchildren, ages 18, 15 and 1, as well as one grandchild aged 3 months. All of the above applies in December 2011. I am 67, am a Canadian who moved to Australia in 1971 and have written several books--all available on the internet. I retired from full-time teaching in 1999, part-time teaching in 2003 and volunteer teaching/work in 2005 after 35 years in classrooms. In addition, I have been a member of the Baha’i Faith for 52 years. Bio-data: 6ft, 230 lbs, eyes-brown/hair-grey, Caucasian. My website is found at: http://www.ronpriceepoch.com/ You can also go to any search engine and type: Ron Price followed by any one of a number of words in addition to: poetry, forums, religion, literature, history, bipolar disorder, psychology, sociology, Baha’i, inter alia, to access my writing________________________

Interests: TMTL(too much or too many or too myriad to list)

Favorite Music: TMTL

Favorite Movies: TMTL

Favorite Television: TMTL

Favorite Books: TMTL

RonPrice's Journal

Microsoft-Google

Social Activism

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Social Activism

DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

A Vast Continent

MEMORIZING: The Major and Minor Leagues

I had a good memory as a student

in primary and high school & was

able to go to the top of my class...,

but I was not in your league, Mr…

Bloom or Mr Johnson……I had to

work to get that information & facts

into my brain for future use usually

in exams: 99% perspiration and 1%

inspiration.� I am in a minor league,

a minor poet but, as the years went on

and my interests widened, I was able to

develop an architecture of information

in which to place a burgeoning quantity

of details as I headed through the stages

of adulthood and into old-age and its 3

phases: 65-74, 75-85 and beyond, if I

last that long!

Ron Price

26 June 2012

�

THE OLD TESTAMENT and ME

When this review appeared in1

The New York TimesI had just

arrived in Australia’s Northern

Territory & the heat of summer

was just beginning to make me

run for cover to air-conditioning �

in my office, my home & the cool

air of the car....The Old Testament �

was on my universe’s far-periphery.

�

There it had always been in heat and

cold since those first stories when I

was in grade six in that little town in

Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe where

everyone I knew was Catholic or Jew

or Protestant, or nothing; yes, mostly

nothing and there they have remained

with that Old Testament far removed

from everyone’s everyday life. Still…

�

I have time now to try to get into it in

this the evening of my life; �however

complex and abstruse it may be, I want

to make-up for the decades when it had

to remain far out on my life’s periphery.

Ron Price

5 July 2012

�

�

A MINOR PLAYER WITH TOO MUCH TO READ

FOOTY and BASEBALL

THE SUMMER OF ‘37: MY LIFE IS MY WORK

EDWARD WOODWARD: “Between Two Eternities”

UNDER THE CYPRESS TREES: THE BRILLIANT FIRST CEN

de Kooning: A Retrospective

MOZART AND SHAYKH AHMAD

BARBIE DOLL

CSI: SCIENCE AND SALVATION

Since I took a sea-change in 1999

I’ve been watching more who-dun-

its than ever before, some with my

wife and some by myself. Today I

came across a study of CSI: Miami at

an online journal that I have taken an

interest in, one of those free journals

that are available on the world-wide

web which enrich my years in these

evening--times of my late adulthood

which some of the psychologists of

human development call these years

of 60 to 80 in the average lifespan.

When this review appeared in¹