Mum’s Melons Joke
When I was a child at home, our family sometimes began breakfast with cantaloupe or honeydew melon slices.
One morning my wonderful mother (for some reason called “mum” as if we were British) quoted from the Roaring Twenties a gentle little joke.
Mum smiled and, always a witty woman, recited…
“His girl-friend says: ‘I can’t elope,’ but her beau says, “Oh, honey, do!”
It was just so innocent and funny, out of nowhere, we all laughed and, of course, never forgot the melons joke.
I hope you won’t, either 😉
Riddle Revealed
Here is yesterday’s riddle repeated…
You are a pilgrim on the road to Truth. You come to a fork in the road. One fork takes you to the Village of Lies; the other, the Village of Truth. A local boy sits at the crossroads, so you ask for directions. If he comes from the Village of Lies, he lies, and if from Truth, speaks honestly. You ask one simple question, one sentence long.
What do you ask?
“Would you please point to the village where you were born?”
If the boy comes from the Village of Lies, he points to the Village of Truth, since that is the lie. If instead he comes from Truth, he unhesitatingly points to his own hometown. Either way, you get good directions.
Riddle You This
You are a pilgrim on the road to Truth. You come to a fork in the road. One fork takes you to the Village of Lies; the other, the Village of Truth. A local boy sits at the crossroads, so you ask for directions. If he comes from the Village of lies, he lies, and if from Truth, speaks honestly. You ask one simple question, one sentence long.
What do you ask?
My answer tomorrow.
Trotsky said, “If the end justifies the means, what justifies the end?”
Oldest Unbroken Chain of Human Learning
What say you about black belts?
In his Christmas card, my Korean grand-master told me I will be testing at mid-year for international certification as a master taekwondo instructor. To be certified as a fifth-dan black belt by the Kukkiwon, that splendid shrine outside Seoul, is to hold rank at the world headquarters of taekwondo — a signal honor.
Clearly, the arts are not for everybody. My standing joke: a martial artist is someone with a taste for ordeals, who wants to be a hero. But make no mistake, martial arts are the world’s oldest unbroken chain of human learning.
Let’s say, poetically, today’s martial arts are nothing less than the fruit of an immortal tree whose roots grow back into the unimaginable mythic darkness out of which mankind itself appears. Fighting styles are documented in Chinese written chronicles for nearly three thousand years, having been taught mostly by men to boys, from generation to generation, the chain unbroken, while entire civilizations rose up, conquered the world and then slowly crumbled back into dust.
So our traditional martial arts schools rival the world’s great universities as storehouses of humanity’s accumulated wisdom. Martial institutions of higher learning differ only in housing layers and epochs of mankind’s most meaningful motions — and not only those which harm. Books are read by eyes — martial arts, with bodies. No professor speaks every language ever spoken; and yet only the fact of our training being dumb-show disguises from masters the inconceivable pan-historic babble we are enacting.
Here is my truth. A hung-over strip-mall master teaching a small morning class in a failing school is more profoundly connected to the mystery of human being than is a priest. I say this, not as cheap blasphemy, but anthropologically, simply as a way of emphasizing that our arts are older than our 2,000 year old gods.
Un Cahier du Herbork
Unlike their diaries, so often concocted with an eye to posterity, the notebooks of working authors tend to be pragmatic and unselfconscious. These jottings (cahiers as French intellectuals call them) are meant to keep track of stray thoughts, bits of dialogue, plot ideas, telling details, touches of human observation — whatever might prove valuable to some later literary project.
The Notebooks of, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Albert Camus or Somerset Maugham permit their readers to station themselves inside a genius at the precise point where Art’s sacred fountain first bubbles up from below. This sounds exciting, but, of course, the waters there are not always champagne-y with effervescent inspiration; often these notations have that allusive emptiness of night-thoughts scrawled half awake on a bedside pad.
In truth, the vast majority of the material authors squirrel away is never used, so a notebook becomes an inadvertent sort of fragmentary Modernist poetry, like Ezra Pound’s Cantos. The central locus lies within the mind, heart and sensibilities of an individual talent rather than the coherent development of any single publicly-stated theme. So these disconnected serials of short sentences are less a magic fountain and more like a wine-tasting of somebody else’s stream of consciousness.
Permit me to offer you a few sips of vintage Herbork…
Un Cahier du Herbork
Furthering Tradition is the future of our past.
There is a name for postmodern people who think only in images: prey.
First-timers always have idealistic excuses. It’s only the second time and the third when we begin to realize who we are.
Our old band — The Thudding Duds.
“We don’t know each other well enough for me to lie to you.”
Hemingway (Letters) asked Fitzgerald: “If nobody can tell when a book is good, why the hell write them?”
The Jamaican police officer scorned lax discipline and “all manner of fuckery…”
What the kids don’t understand is how we are bought and sold over and over, and whatever we think is true, is who bought you last.
Nighside cannot do daywatch business. Dark isn’t simply left-handed light. Evil doesn’t make good.
You do not need religions to define good and evil. Good brightens, lightens and sets you up. Evil hollows you out, under-cuts and lowers down on you.
Street fighters, remember this trick: throw pocket change in his face as you close in.
Dear Mrs. Nietzsche: No, your “superman” certainly doesn’t sound like a very good husband. I can only beg you to remember: What doesn’t make you cry, makes you drier.
I want to perfect my own understanding of matters, not fill my mind with a generality of the opinions of others. I am an individual, not the crossroads of a million private lives.
Even Hangmen Mean Well
…the guns of ego…
“Even kings and their armies cannot stand against the power of a natural man.” Old folk-saying
Forced Collaboration #1 (First stanza by Ralph Waldo Emerson; second by Herbork.)
“I am the owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Cesar’s hand and Plato’s brain
Of Lord Christ’s hand and Shakespeare’s strain.”
When I pick my nose,
Nations tremble.
Look at me, you see God
Whom I resemble.
History’s made when I get laid —
A natural man displayed.
Second Best Quip By A Movie Mexican Bandit
“You can’t chase success.” — Old English proverb
My thanks to all who liked yesterday’s “Enter Stage Right.” I take courage from your comprehension of what might horrify conformists as somehow being too controversial or perhaps yawn even racist.
Today, bypassing touchy truth-telling for the simply silly, let’s go from Black and White actors to Mexican ones — not, say, great old John Ford stock-company regulars like Pedro Amandariz, pere et fils, but everybody ever lensed playing a cliche old-west bandit. What’s at stake here is nothing less than a Blue Ribbon.
Pop culture pop quiz
The single most famous line ever spoken on-screen by a Mexican bandit is from John Houston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
“We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!”
Question: What is the second best?
Answer: From Richard Brook’s still-splendid The Professionals…
“Do I have to kill you to prove I like you?”
Bonus Quote: This movie’s famous last two lines of dialogue are between bad-guy Ralph Bellamy and, in ripost, uber-cool hero Lee Marvin.
“You bastard!”
“In my case, an accident of birth, but you, sir, are a self-made man.”
My apologies to deep-dish film buffs for not having the time today to Google up the names of the two fine Mexican actors cited.
Enter Stage Right
Let’s talk about actors — the first and bravest of all artists…
By the way, I’ve written some movies. One was an HBO prime-time premier that Entertainment Weekly gave a B-. Another won first-place Gold at the Houston International Film Festival. As a teenager I was groomed to go on the stage by a Broadway player, but ended up on TV instead. So, anyway, my point is, I know a bit whereof I speak.
After watching too much television and far too many recent movies, I am forcibly reminded of Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis — whom I always think of as the Black Lunts — and of how they used to challenge young African-American actors back in the Civil Right Movement days of the late Fifties and early Sixties.
In person this activist couple argued that above all else what these Colored tyros and ingenues owed to the Movement was how they chose to depict their own kind. Yes, actors must work to live, and nobody wants a reputation among casting directors as being prickly. But Ossie and Ruby believed that to prolong in the public eye the demeaning stereotypes of stepin-fetchit Negroes amounted to a betrayal of, not only their own people’s human dignity, but of the highest aspirations of a serious Thespian.
I imagine a world where Brad and Angela pause to impart this same perspective to up-and-coming white actors, especially and above all the guys. Why? Because nowadays it is common for editorialists to speak solemnly of a “crisis among males.” Yet young men today are rarely encouraged. Whites, especially, are relentlessly portrayed to themselves in media as being fool, jerks, dweebs, simpletons, geeks, pansies, slackers, ignoramuses, cowards, etc. etc. ad nauseum.
And the reason Ossie and Ruby come into this is because the way white boys are written to be played today has just as much to do with a passe political agenda as ever did the coon-acting. This is, I’m afraid, a fact. And, as a screenwriter and a huge fan of actors, I wish for these dedicated fearless artists better roles in finer productions set in a recognizable world where they can at last unleash the finest possibilities of their craft unhindered by the production’s unacknowledged agenda of demoralizing men.
Sidney Poitier, listening to Ossie and Ruby and his own brilliant heart, changed the face of Black acting forever simply by refusing to depict a character, however good or bad, as being anything less than a true person whose dignity is inborn as a human, however silly or stupid or limp the character might be.
Whew! Okay, now may I suggest we all go stream Lawrence Olivier’s Henry V — the movie that brought Shakespeare to the masses — and marvel at obliteratingly great acting again. Thank God, the show must go on.
Super Bowl Edition
May the best team best the worst team, and may the best be your team, too.
ENJOY, DEAR FRIENDS!
HOORAY FOR THE SUPER BOWL!
Here endeth the lesson.
Snippeteria
Freelance thought — cannot be bought.
Reason is the softly-spoken suggestion from the back of the room which nobody listens to because they are too busy Solving The Problem.
Knowledge is common property; only ignorance is truly personal. Hence, our human failing for warm, cozy ignorance.
“All too easily we blame,/ The politicians for our shame.” W.H. Auden
Publicity campaign motto: Ripe is the tripe when the hype is bright, right?
“Of Burymeleg and Bindmerollingeyes and all the deeds in the woe.” James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”
Einstein said of Gandhi: “The example of a morally superior life is invincible.”
Conformists love their hive. The important thing is to keep buzzy, don’t you agree?
Conformists die apart.
Atheists are proponents of a preposterous standard of proof.
“What I do wish to affirm is that the whole of modern literature is corrupted by what I call Secularism, that it is simply unaware of, simply cannot understand the meaning of, the primacy of the supernatural over the secular life: of something which I assume to be our primary concern.” T.S. Eliot, 1935
19th century Tombstone, Arizona, epitaph:
“Here
Lies
Lester Moor
Four Slugs
From A 44
No Les
No More.”
Get a “Piece,” Please
When fedgov won’t help, it’s everyday guys versus punk jihadists.
Men are back. Tell your neighbors.
Herbork 