Parts of Speaking Publishing

Published  January 27, 2025 Read Online The Morning Dispatch By Charlotte Lawson, Grayson Logue, James P. Sutton, and Cole Murphy Happy Monday!  The final four of 43 monkeys who escaped from a research facility in South Carolina in November have been  captured and returned  to captivity. We give it a week before they receive their presidential pardons and are back on the street. Israel on Saturday  welcomed home  four female hostages—Israeli soldiers Liri Albag, Daniella Gilboa, Karina Ariev, and Naama Levy—from terrorist captivity after 477 days in the Gaza Strip. Their return  coincided with  Israel’s release of some 200 Palestinian prisoners, more than half of whom had been serving life sentences, into the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and— in the case  of serious offenders—the neighboring countries of Qatar and Turkey. On Monday morning, Hamas  confirmed  that displaced Palestinians had begun to return to northern Ga...

 I just finished what I suppose is the first season of Dark Matter , on Apple TV. I kept watching, so that says something for it. I liked it.  Even though it is preposterous.  I love that word. It sounds like a medieval monster, or maybe a dinosaur.  The show is based on the idea of multiverses. Multiverses come from the idea that every decision we make starts a new course of a life split off from the one we are following.  I choose to take a different route to my job one morning. I get into a wreck I wouldn't have if I had stayed on the usual way, or maybe I see a sign about tryouts for a play and decide I need to get back into theatre. What happened to the me who could have gone the usual, no-accident route or not seen the sign? She's still there, but living a different time line in her own "-verse." So, theoretically, there are millions of me living parallel to me but I can't see them.  So we get to see a lot of versions of the actor Joel Edgerton, who i...

 I get a number of newsletters, and one in particular from the Georgia Writers Association.  The writer of this edition's column, Anthony Grooms, links to the website of a writer I had never heard of (no surprise), David Jauss. He writes short stories, poems, and essays, and he appears to be pretty well recognized.  His books are expensive, though, discouraging me from purchase.  But he has a lot of his work on his website, so I picked through it, reading "Glossalalia", and some parts of essays.   In discussing the topic of "write what you know" in fiction, he pooh-poohs it a bit, and tells of responses he got from readers who concluded that his fiction was so life-like and touched them so much that he must have experienced what they had.  The other phone call was from a Vietnam vet who had read my short story "Freeze," which is about a soldier in Vietnam who steps on a mine that doesn't explode, yet nonetheless has devastating effects on his life....

  A colleague sent me this quote the other day. He said that it had really helped him through life and as he faced changes and retirement, and it also helped him follow his bliss and find what he really wanted to do.  “The problem in middle life, when the body has reached its climax of power and begins to decline, is to identify yourself, not with the body, which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. This is something I learned from myths. What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light? Or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle? One of the psychological problems in growing old is the fear of death. People resist the door of death. But this body is a vehicle of consciousness, and if you can identify with the consciousness, you can watch this body go like an old car. There goes the fender, there goes the tire, one thing after another— but it’s predictable. And then, gradually, the whole thing drops off, and consciousness rejoins consciousn...

President Trump is doing a number of things we can be concerned about.  But at least he doing something. He is touring the two disaster areas and dealing with both the victimized and political enemies.  Some of his controversial decisions have two sides to them and perhaps are not as pernicious as they seem. Some seem hasty and just "I'm doing it because I said I'd do it" in mentality.   Sigh. We will survive. 

Common sense—neither common nor sensible President Trump said he would return to Common Sense. Well. Maybe. Growing up, my mother used to try to motivate or cajole me with the phrase, “That person has book knowledge but no common sense.” Sometimes the implication was that I was in that category of person. As I grew up I came to hate the phrase and notice that people lacking of book knowledge didn’t act like they had common sense either. The other quip is “Nowadays common sense is not too common.” But I would say the “sense” part, meaning sensible and wise, of what is considered “common sense” is also not sensible and wise. Some would say it’s common sense that the birthright citizenship should be ended. Why should a person who violated the law to enter our boundaries be able to tie themselves to their offspring born here because of an amendment designed for ex-slaves after the Civil War?  Well .... a constitutional amendment is a constitutional amendment, you know.  F...

I don’t want to make a choice here. I only want to explore the differences. P.D. James wrote from the perspective of a career in health care administration and UK bureaucracies, as well as Parliament. She was not as prolific as Christie in terms of books. Agatha wrote from her experience in WWI as a nurse working in a pharmacy. Poisons proliferate in her stories. PD brings us a wider range of people in English society, and more recently—1960s through 1990s. They are less stock and are more likely to be three dimensional. Especially her main detective, Adam Dalgliesh. He is a poet, brooding at times yet fair and egalitarian, resolute to find the murderer but compassionate. She tends to have a formula of three murders, sometimes four, occurring in each book. Some of Agatha’s stories are 100 years old, and in their originals some racist material can be spotted. It seems that she fixed her sights on the gentry class in English, which was declining. So many of her stories hav...

 This morning a colleague had a conversation with a student about her upcoming "biography" informative speech assignment.  "You could give your speech about Helen Keller." "Helen Keller wasn't real." He was flabbergasted, as was I when he told me. How could anyone think Helen Keller wasn't a real person? So, I of course looked it up.  Apparently this is a trend on Tik-Tok. Either denying she existed (despite piles of evidence) or rejecting that she was deaf and blind. Why? Because she achieved things, including flying an airplane (what? a new one for me) that a deaf and blind person couldn't do.  So much to unpack here. That persons with disabilities have to sit in a corner and not achieve anything because that doesn't fit my worldview. That anything that happened before I was born didn't exist or happen. That science, history, and research are lying. That Tik Tok is reliable as a source of information.  This explains a lot.   

From reading Pastor Vroegop’s book, I was led to Lamentations. How did I overlook this powerful book of poetry and humanity, history and emotion, theology and hope, despair and endurance? Jerusalem and the temple are destroyed. Thousands killed, enslaved, starving, even to the point of cannibalism of children, and that by mothers . The people of God are reduced to barbarians, the chosen humans to beasts. They have no allies, only a conquering nation. Women are raped—no need for semi-euphemisms like “ravished” and “violated.” In fact, Jeremiah does not leave the women out of his images. He starts the poem with the image of a princess reduced to a vassal. The men were supposed to protect the women and children. Their fall makes that impossible. The kings are powerless. Their subjects have been removed by death or exile. Young high-born men are in Babylon, perhaps eunuchs in Nebuchadnezzar’s court, perhaps slaves, perhaps just dead on the side of the long road they had to walk in...

 Unusual inside venue.  Have there really only been 60?  Only 13 or 14 repeat presidential terms? FDR had four! Who would have thought four years ago that Elon would be on the platform. That's really bizarre when you think about it.  I don't know why they are all standing for so long.  That is hard. But at least they are not in 10 degrees.  Actually, who would have thought, twelve years ago,  Donald Trump would be inaugurated for the second time after being out of the office for four years.  That's even more bizarre.  Anyone who thinks they can predict the future should know better by now.   Good singer. Don't know that song.  The opening curtain thing is ... odd. But heh, the U.S. needs some kind of pageantry, I guess. Vance's wife is a beauty. Hillbillies can go far. Does Steve Scalise limp because of the shooting? Of course. What a tragedy.   Boy, Orange Man is really super Orange today.  They get to sit down ...

For almost 30 years, I have used a Franklin Covey Planner. I will probably stop this year; they are more than a retired person needs. It's just a habit now, and an expense. But I do recommend them for busy professionals.  Every day it provides a quote. Some are quite sagacious, some are sort of "Norman Vincent Peale-Joel Osteen" types of advice, and some are just plain weird.  On the 14th, this was it: "The power of a book lies in its power to turn a solitary act into a shared vision. . . As long as we have books, we are not alone." This is attributed to Laura Bush. It's not original though (and her speechwriter penned it anyway, I am sure).  C.S. Lewis wrote, "We read to know we are not alone."  She should have given him credit.  Bless her heart.  As a reader in my soul, I do not understand how others do not like to read.  How does one understand the world, interact with it, think through ideas, know where we came from, and most of all, hear from ...

 Just to note: my goal was to write a post a day.  Some days I will double up, or triple up. Today is one of those days. A friend and I have been emailing back and forth about the frustrations of writing.  She is about to publish her first book a memoir about riding her bicycle in every state and her adventures at that. I am having trouble focusing as I face retirement from 47 years in higher education.   She wrote this morning:   One of my good friends keeps telling me, "you do you."  Tonight I pass those words of wisdom on to you. "You do you."  Ultimately, it doesn't seem you need to make a living with your writing. You've made your living teaching in the classroom. So if you write because you like to write, then write what you want to write. Find your joy in the process. Yes, everyone would like to make a little money from their books, but that doesn't happen for most writers. So, I say to both of us, let us write what we want to write. I...

Allowing Tik Tok to start up again.  Tik Tok is evil. It is crack cocaine. It is stealing our brains, our children, our data, and our national security.  Trump is a fool to make this decision.  But no surprise there.  And these are his words: "By doing this, we save TikTok, keep it in good hands and allow it to [stay] up. Without U.S. approval, there is no TikTok. With our approval, it is worth hundreds of billions of dollars - maybe trillions," Trump wrote. "Therefore, my initial thought is a joint venture between the current owners and/or new owners whereby the U.S. gets a 50% ownership in a joint venture set up between the U.S. and whichever purchase we so choose."  Soooo.  Tik Tok will be owned, in his mind, by the U.S.  Where does freedom of speech go? The US government does not own media (well, there is Voice of America, but that is something else).  Would not the US government have to censor some parts of Tik Tok, then?  Thos...

That title is an overstatement, and click-baity. But it's close to the truth.  I am not new to writing fiction, even literary fiction. But I recently finished The Bluest Eye, one of Toni Morrison's earlier novels, and it took my breath away. I can't even explain why fully, so her powers of literature are and will always be beyond mine  Or I should say, since she has passed away, that my powers will never come close to hers. Yes, the book is brutal and raw.  Too much? Well, I don't know if I am in a position to say that about her depiction of a homely African American eleven-year-old girl growing up in Lorain, Ohio, a real town near Cleveland situated on Lake Erie.  How much more symbolic can you get for a cold society. I shiver just sitting here, thinking about it, and it's only 45 degrees outside in North Georgia. And cold is an image in the book, along with so much more.  Pecola is a victim not just of her callous and uncaring parents and over poverty but of t...

 I work with a scholar of humor, and we often discuss this.  I submit the following from comedian Steven Wright. What makes them funny? The incongruity (killing for a Nobel Peace Prize), the fresh realization what a word means (pessimists), and the unexpected.  Also saying the truth others don't want to, are reluctant to, or are afraid to say (#6).  (Why we laugh at inappropriate words in certain contexts.) Wright points out the foolishness of how we hold to pretty much unproveable beliefs--psychics, telekinesis. And some are based on the fact that some words have two very different meanings and we live with that everyday. (How do we communicate?) Gene pool v. swimming pool--pool as collection of resources v. pool as body of clean water.  But humor is serendipitous.  Jokes can't come with instructions. Like dissecting a frog, you learn something but have destroyed something more.  The Quotes of Steven Wright: 1 - I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize. 2 ...

Facebook is an interesting place. It allows everyone to express their opinion no matter how ill-informed and conceived.   One I have seen recently is the comparison between the effects, aftermath, and federal help for the victims of Hurricane Helena and those of the Los Angeles fire.  Definitely an example of apples and oranges, or maybe apples and ham.  There is only a superficial connection, and I don't mean geographically.  First, fires in Los Angeles are, well, common.  This is not the first time this has happened.  As a podcaster pointed out, Joan Didion wrote eloquently of this problem in 1972- -that is, the problem of the Santa Ana winds, the lack of rain, and the regular fires. One of the best movies ever made (despite the director), Chinatown, is about this subject, or its origins. Despite its beauty and amiable climate--that is, dry rather than the humidity we Southeasterns suffer--it's a desert and living in a desert is perilous.  Becau...

I was listening to a podcast “The Habit” by Jonathan Rogers with a writer named Quina Aragon. She told the story of her struggling with writing a book on God’s love while going through severe traumatic illness. The writing struggle was not just because of the suffering, but because the suffering made her question God’s existence, much less His love. I think I will listen to it again. First because I did not give it my full attention and I really like Mr. Rogers’ podcast. I actually have a goal on getting on there, but I need to get more serious about my art and stop playing around. Second because she had some things to say that I need to hear again. I don’t want to use words like impactful and powerful . I just need to say that her life has been different from my own and I believe she has a wisdom I require. Because of her struggle, she said that she didn’t think God liked her. There are two ways to look at that, and I need to listen again to fully understand. Did she think Go...