Now here in the shade of the Coven Tree--
Just Bilbo, and Thorin, and Gandalf and me.
Bound for trouble--sic transit gloria--
Our quest simple--a taste of euphoria.
We welcome all bravehearts to journey along--
Just bring an old dirk, your pack, and a song.
These crooked paths--so lonely, dark, and deep--
Trolls, goblins, and dragons, shall make you weep.
We shall seize the day and worthier rise--
Bilbo, Thorin, Gandalf, and I, surmise.
It turned out to be an excerpt from a forthcoming memoir into which I was drawn. I learned that Pacino and I went to the same Junior High School, Hermann Ridder*, in the South Bronx, and we even had the same English teacher, Blanche Rothstein. She had the same lifelong influence on him that she had on me. We both became avid readers and lovers of English literature. We studied, Scott, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others in depth. She even required us to memorize the entire "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and would call on us to recite it to the class by rote memory. Do not try this at home: It's more than 600 lines long!
Although Pacino and I were a couple of years apart we went to the same neighborhood movie theater and playhouse, The Dover on Boston Road, and The Elsmere on Crotona Parkway. We both took trains into Manhattan to attend special High Schools, he went to the School for Performing Arts and a few blocks away I attended the New York School of Printing. We each followed those trades throughout our lifetime.
We both swam, well I swam, and he fell through the ice while skating and into the Bronx River. Both activities were risky in that truly turdy waterway.
We both had childhood friends that came to early senseless deaths, his buddies by drug use, mine had died in a stolen car crash during a police chase. Our pals were Italian, Irish, Jewish, and Puerto Rican. Juvenile Delinquency was rampant in those early days after WWII.
There are even more ties that bind Al and me, but those will have to wait for my memoir. My wife tells me that I've got plenty of time left.
Meanwhile, we have Blanche Rothstein to thank for setting us both onto paths where the possibilities were, and are, endless.
Today's the 5th anniversary of my son's death from a stroke.
He was 49 years old.
His mother had just turned 50 when she died of heart failure.
I'm a survivor--
haunted by multiple lifetimes of dissolving memories.
As long as my heart beats,
Conscious or unconscious--
In dreams awake or in dreams asleep--
Aware of all that they have lost and I--
For where there's life there's
It's been two scorched, flooded, twisted, bat-shit crazy months since I last web-logged, and I'm not talking about the weather--I'm talking about our chaotic political landscape. The Republicans had their 10 minutes of euphoria when they sensed an easy victory looming against a doddering incumbent who seemed bent on humiliating himself by staying, foolishly, in a tight race--which he hadn't a snowball's chance in Hell of winning--against a demented, albeit non-decrepit opponent. Then something quite unbelievable happened in the world of modern political action--the people spoke truth to power--and they were heard and obeyed!
We the People should try this more often. Want liberties sustained? Want tighter gun laws? Want justice served? Want fairness in hiring, housing, healthcare? Want the right to choose what's right?
Vote Democratic. That's the ticket!
It's been more than six years since I resurrected 10 B-Words that I had once looked up.
They reminded me of how many words are out there.
Unlike someplace else, in the dictionaries you can find a there there--
and further--there you can lose yourself.
Now--C's The Day!
coprolalia-involuntary obscene talking as a symptom of mental illness or brain-damage
contumely-insolent or reproachful language or treatment; disgrace
confabulate-to converse formally
coffle-a line of tethered animals or slaves
chirography-handwriting; calligraphy
cayuse-a feral horse or pony
cathartidae-vultures; birds of prey
cacogen-white trash
currier-a groomer of horses; a tanner of leather hides
crustie-an anti-work, dumpster-diving, anti-authority, anti-civilization, anti-religion type of person
They undulate themselves as
the Corinthians remain unfazed
by all that commotion,
all that intense bantering
upon the dusty proscenium.
Behold your future--
Doctors of Bellys and Heads!?
Aren't they Ionic, though?!
Fascism Versus Democracy
The current experience of the United States will show, I suspect, that Fascism is not the inevitable form which a non-Bolshevist society must take, but rather that it is abnormal and pathological. Philosophically, Fascism is a movement whose leaders are civilians in riding boots. Politically, it is an entirely new type of tyranny, both personal and demagogic--a tyranny which for the first time in history exploits the mob spirit in an era of universal suffrage and gives to the supreme leaders irresponsible power as limitless as that of the modern state. In contrast to this picture, we now see in America a leader who has never played for the role of hero or savior and whose greatest ambition appears to be to look like a common human being, a member of the middle class by voluntary affiliation. Without frowning or putting on a mask of ferocity, he has taken on his shoulders the heaviest burden that any President ever assumed; he does not shirk the responsibility, and he stands ready to give an account of his stewardship when the time comes . . . perhaps the most appropriate term for this new American way of grappling with social and economic unrest is still the good old word "democracy."
--"Fascism in the Making" by Max Ascoli, November 1933
