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        ValidateMySkill  28, Female, Georgia - 4 entries
    16
    Oct 2012
    10:03 AM
       

    If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.

    I think that this particular quote is trying to say, that if you want to make the one you love happy, don't add to what is has already got, satisfy what he wants. If you try to add to what he already has he may get bored of it and throw it away.
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        louna  49, Male, United Kingdom - 18 entries
    14
    Oct 2012
    1:14 PM GMT
       

    Everytime i get money i just soend it all its like i need to buy things to make me feel happy like if i have a certain item ill be happy.

    But i get an idea in my head that if i haVE A CERTAIN item then ill be happy ill be cool.

    idk what im doing really im praying il get a job soon , ive lost my bus pass , debit card and student id so not very good.

    i had a dream last night that i wa moving house , also that i saved a lost cat and a abducted child
    Tags: feelings, knowing
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    1 comment(s) - 04:03 PM - 10/28/2012
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        RonPrice  80, Male, Canada - 60 entries
    13
    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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        RonPrice  80, Male, Canada - 60 entries
    13
    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 fatwā 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:� 1Salmon 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 20th 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
    �
    273
    �
    Tags: death, famous, personal, punish, writer
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        RonPrice  80, Male, Canada - 60 entries
    13
    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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        RonPrice  80, Male, Canada - 60 entries
    12
    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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        RonPrice  80, Male, Canada - 60 entries
    12
    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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        louna  49, Male, United Kingdom - 18 entries
    11
    Oct 2012
    12:01 AM GMT
       

    is love anything at all

    I often used to think i wanted someone to love me , to pine for me , to want me - but i realised as eventually everyone does , life is not like a film or a fairytale .

    I found someone who loved me and thought i loved them but really i didnt i just wanted it so badly i tried to forget what i really felt , i got wrapped up in my own emotions - emotions i forced upon myself ad finally when i realised i wanted to be my own not tied down it was to late.

    A few guys have fucked me over and i like to think theyre annoying sad wankers because really that makes me feel better - but in reality theyre not they just did to most resonable thing a guy would do - go for the easy option , i like to think theyre sick twisted men who did what they did just to hurt me but its not true theyre perfectly lovely guys that just made a mistake but i seem to choose to think the worse of them because it makes me seem like the victim which in a way i was but just because someone dosnt love you dosnt automatically make them a twat right ?�

    And then i realise i have fucked guys over to and you know what im not a bitch , i did not intend to fuck them over it just happned a colision of events that led to the mess that happened.
    So i suppose now those boys will think im a leading on , fake , bitch just as i see those boys that did the same to me as twats.

    I find myself comparing myself to my best freind far to much - and then comparing me and her and my life to films ?

    For instance perk of being a wallflower�
    charlie liked sam but wasnt conifden enough to go for her - the girl he really likes , loved.
    so he went for the other loyd annoying girl of whose name i cannot remember ( which shows how much she mattered in all reality ) who went for it , was conifdent , showed she wanted charlie so as any guy would charlie went for it but then realised she was not who he wanted.
    She felt as if he fucked her over right ?�
    Wrong he didnt he as just confused.

    And this is what happens in my life i am the annoying conifdent one who will go for it and be amazed that the guy went for me - when really all he wants is my best friend but is to shy - yes hes too shy - not what i would think an annoying pussy who was using me - no just shy and not ready to go for who he reallty liked.

    Also the film me without you -�
    two best friends one confident annoying selfish�
    one who wants to be liked who is intelligent and amazing�
    i am the annoying confident twat and its sad and i want to change but i cant i guess
    Tags: oerks of being a wallflower
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        Nana  59, Female, West Virginia, USA - 51 entries
    08
    Oct 2012
    9:10 AM
       

    TIME LIFE IS BUT A VAPOR!

    Time passes sooo swiftly by seconds turns to minutes and minutes to hours then to days that have so rapidly disappeared..... wondering how all has escaped...continuing on unsure of what lies ahead...wonderment, excitement, fear....I ponder yet another day.... a peace and contentment lies deep within...from knowing how very much i AM. loved and cherished ....smiles
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        Nana  59, Female, West Virginia, USA - 51 entries
    08
    Oct 2012
    7:24 AM
       

    TIME LIFE IS BUT A VAPOR!

    Time passes sooo swiftly by seconds turns to minutes and minutes to hours then to days that have so rapidly disappeared..... wondering how all has escaped...continuing on unsure of what lies ahead...wonderment, excitement, fear....I ponder yet another day.... a peace and contentment lies deep within...from knowing how very much i AM. loved and cherished ....smiles
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