LOL certainly doesn't do this justice. LMAO is lame. As is ROFL . My response: a full throated gut laugh for about 3 minutes. Thanks for brightening my day.
Marriages are like cats. Anyone can end up with two. But at 3 or more, and more so with each addition, it's reasonable until proven otherwise to assume a defect in sanity.
I finally read this. As as one who has written through my long life for the sole purpose of writing rather than publishing or gaining fame, I've come to believe writing is an attempt to capture in 100% precision, the thought in my mind. Sometimes it happens and it's like finding true love for the first time. I guess that makes my writing more like Don Quixote searching for the next windmill.
I have a completely different approach to revision: I never revise, at least not if it's fiction or opinion. Here's how I learned that: long, long ago, I wanted to write something really good for an obscure literary publication. So I wrote the thing, and then I started to rewrite it. Scribble scribble scribble. After some days of this, a "friend" came to visit and looked at my drafts. After contemplating them, he picked up the first draft and said, "This is much better than the others." "That's just what every writer wants to hear," I said, "I already washed up as a writer." "No," he replied, "your first draft is pretentious crap, but it has vitality. Your other drafts are pretentious crap, but now, no vitality." From this I learned not to rewrite. However, for those who can't resist the temptation, I suggestion the following method: 1. Write your first draft, as quickly as possible, but don't sweat it. Just write it. 2. Set the first draft aside. 3. Write the second draft, from memory if possible, but if you must pick and snip, pick and snip. 4. Now take the second draft and throw it out. 5. Recover the first draft, correct the spelling errors and solecisms (or don't), and present it as your finished work. You're done.
I have feeling this is EXACTLY how I should be working - "revisions" just mean flailing about in the weeds. It's why I've always worked best under deadline - but who wants to live that way? I stopped writing because I couldn't sustain the way I was living. Thank you!
Yes, I recently dug out an old short story I wrote long ago and proceeded to edit it into something horrible. It was a complete waste of several hours.
I have decided that I want to write my first book. I have saved all the letters from my British pen pal since we were randomly put together in a Teen Magazine application. I think it would be great to expose how a random selection created a lifelong close friendship from two people who live halfway round the world from each other.
That's America's solution to student underachievement; hence, grade inflation. Hence, also, American underachievement in international scholastic competitions. You can call a rock a jet, but it will not fly.
To lift off the ground and move through the air under your own power is to fly. To be launched off the ground and fall back to it is to be thrown. Different concepts, hence different words. Of course, we get lazy and talk about the flight of a ball or an arrow, launched by an arm, bat or bow, but this doesn't eradicate the difference. No one attributes the power of flight to rocks, balls or arrows.
Sorry to have miss spelled the word and I will now correct it.
G U F F A U W.... Guffauw.
There used to be a cartoon strip in the major newspapers many years ago, say in the 60s and earlier when the papers had a full page or more dedicated to cartoons. Lille Abner, Blondie, Popeye the Sailor Man, Mr.Jiggs, The Katzenjammer kids, Dick Tracy and so on as well as one that I laughed at a lot, it was called Colonel something and consisted of two characters an old moustached grandpa type always sitting in a large armchair and a kid of about eight years old with only two vertical hairs on his bald head. The kid would stand by the armchair in the first frame and either tell the old man something that the kid was proud of or ask a question. In the second frame the old man would open his gigantic toothless gaping maw of a pie hole and begin a long tirade of talk about something totally irrelevant: when I was in Innnjjaaa hunting the deadly tigerrr.... blah... blah. In the third frame the kid has his hands on his hips looking disgusted and squinting his eyes while the old man just keeps rolling along exercising his flapping lips. In the fourth frame the kid has his back to the frame and is walking away, the old man is still verbiose but his words finally end with Guffauw Guffauw ... The old man has been fibbing again imagining a past that he never had.
The encouraging news, from your point of view, is that the lack of conceptual clarity at the root of an inability to express oneself clearly in print announces itself only to thinkers astute enough to receive this message. They're the ones who sense something is wrong--the necessary preliminary to possibly realizing, sooner or later, just what it is. Those who know intellectual clarity only by hearsay remain blithely unaware of how incoherent and unreadable their writing is (you don't have to look far for examples).
Intellectual stuff doesn't sell these days. The little money that you will get isn't worth the work. Worst is that you will get ring fenced with the rest of the wink wink intelligentsia and then you will discover that boredom and bullshit can make you wish for terrible things.
I will consider myself a writer when a stranger walks up to me and says that I am.
(?) Your 'reply' addresses nothing in my post. However...
a) Even a cursory perusal of the offerings of the world's finest publishers (Knopf, Oxford, etc.) confirms that the market for "intellectual stuff" remains as strong as it ever was. Furthermore, if you check the backlists of these same publishers, as well as the secondary market for used books on sites like ABE, you'll find that heavy-duty intellectual books not only hold their value but increase it. A copy of Israel's Radical Enlightenment or Husserl's Logical Investigations, for example, will now set you back several hundred dollars.
b) Whether what you choose to market qualifies as intellectual or non-intellectual, if you're unclear in your mind just what you're trying to say, your writing is bound to reflect your confusion. Making this point is the sole reason the phrase 'intellectual clarity' made it into my post, which doesn't concern itself even slightly with what sells and contains no recommendation as to what level of intellection writers should aim for. The necessary precondition to becoming a writer, I should have thought, is being able to understand what one reads, words and their meanings being indispensable tools of the writer's trade, yes? This stranger's opinion anyway.
I generalized of course and I did not mean to criticize your post. We could have a conversation sometime regarding the current western culture of materialism the great lubricant of all means of motion and activity including becoming a successful writer and making a living at it. As well as what writing will or will not be acceptable by the current publishing houses who now are political and cultural censors.
I am up in years, retired comfortably and I write when I feel like it about anything which my mind/emotion/intuition feels a need to engage the keyboard as a means to express a personal and lately pissed off opinions. A far greater amount of anger is now part of my comments posts and writings than in the past, especially in the last 2 to 3 years.
I fully agree with you on this quote: The necessary precondition to becoming a writer, I should have thought is being able understand what one reads, words and their meanings being indispensable tools of the writers trade.. ..
Thanks, WBJ, for your gracious reply. We're fellow travelers, "retired comfortably." Funny... making money was never my priority (I submit as evidence the fact that I devoted six university years to acquiring a philosophy M.A.). Yet we're part of a generation where, if you followed the rules and your parents' advice and invested in a house, you probably now collect more in dividends from the company that heats that house than you pay them to heat it. Things worked out for us to the extent that we're now able, quite easily, to help our children buy houses too, something that might otherwise be impossible for them. What's gone wrong for them and their era? Here's one of the more entertaining takes on the matter (once you get past the turgid introduction to Blyth himself):
I fear there's still a slight misunderstanding between us. I have no objection to anybody criticizing any post of mine. What I wanted to alert you to was the irrelevance of your observations to anything in the post to which you were ostensibly replying, a reflex response for which you can blame my philosophy background (I specialized in logic and epistemology and still find instances of logical irrelevance jarring--sorry). As for anger and disappointment at the state of the world, I think the state of the world warrants such response. When I was young, 2023 was a science fictional date, and I had much higher hopes for the future that 2023 would deliver if I ever made it that far, as I suspect you did.
Good luck with the writing, if that's one of your retirement projects. I wrote a novel after I retired, just to see if I could do it, and did manage to finish and get it printed. The process was interesting, almost a collaboration between the person who goes to bed thinking he's done good work, and the one who gets up in the morning realizing what needs to be fixed. ;-)
As to us being fellow travellers ( perhaps fellow spirits ) but feet on the ground life experience our paths could not be more different. I haven't spent a day in a University other than to watch our children get their degrees. I did not complete even grade 8 in school here in Canada after my parents decided to emigrate here. The day I got kicked out it was the happiest day of my life up to then. I was doing the Wiley E Coyote high kick for the rest of the day. No more government sponsored Eddikashion for me. I look back sometimes and know that it could have been so much different. WW2 got in the way, a whole generation of children born in the thirties in Germany wound up not getting even a basic education, there were no real teachers just old men too old for fighting, and old women who must have been Nuns. I got so much religion and Jesus that I began hallucinating that Jesus was waving at me sitting on a branch of a bomb burned old tree outside the window. When I told the teacher this I was hauled out and whipped on the buttocks with a nasty cane. Our one and only school room had a large hole in the ceiling and when it snowed or rained all the desks were moved over against the wall. The male teacher, the only one we had had a huge dent in his forehead and would have awful seizures out of the blue and collapse in a heap on the floor. A true believer I suppose in the Prussian style of education he was a disciplinarian who relished violence delivered by caning to drive the message home. He had a cabinet I imagine designed to his own specifications, low on one end high on the other to accommodate all the different gages of bamboo canes in thickness and length. I feared this man a lot as he could explode at any time, and having been caned by him more than once, but I wanted that one cup of fresh milk and either a banana or an orange that was given at school each day. God, we were all skin and bones. I am talking in terms of the time at about 1947/8/9 but actually it was really rough until we left Germany in 1954. We lived in Koln Deutz a suburb of Cologne just across the Rhine river, everything around us was bombed to smithereens including the building we lived in. My job was to pick up scrap Iron and other metals from the bombed out buildings at about the age of eight I had a little hand cart along for the job. I was witness to some strange things going on in those mostly destroyed wrecks. I always think that there is a story here but I can't bring myself to write a work about it because I am the only actor in the play, there are no fellow participants to liven up a depressing story just the thoughts and musings of a young boy... I can say for certain that nobody cared at the time, thats what war does to the vanquished the only important thing is survival no time for questions and answers.
Once we came to Canada and spending less than a year in school I went to work to help support the family. Eventually my wife and I found each other and we raised our family of four boys and one girl. Right now you know more about me than my own children do. I saw no point in telling them. I just revelled in the fact that we were able to keep them well fed needing nothing more than the love we gave them to be happy little beings enjoying the one important thing that they will only experience once in their lives... a happy Childhood.
I have couple of talents given to me by biological tom foolery through ancestry as does everyone. A photographic memory, an inborn sense of right and wrong, and a talent for successful and objective speculation. I taught myself higher mathematical skills and strategies of determining probabilities and their convergence. Stocks and Options have been my key to monetary success in the past. I would be the rabbit in the story of the race which the rabbit although faster eventually looses to the turtle. This Rabbit won. Today life is not that exiting and I draw a decent salary on top of a pension out of a very safe non speculator fund.
What also has been a life long passion for knowledge and thus reading a lot of books on just about anything. According to my mother I could read by the time I was three, because as she was reading a large print news paper I would look at the pictures and then ask her what the letters and words meant. I do recall this event at a hospital of some kind where I found some books and began reading. My mother said to the doc that I was actually reading to which he said in German: Mine Frau ein kind auf drei jare alt kanst nicht lesen. He got a big surprise when he handed me a newspaper and said: Lesen duh, so I went ahead and read out loud. Jaa... Ach du lieber sie haben ein wunderkind.
And know it is time for me to enjoy a nice cup of tea and a biscuit, as well as biting off another chunk of my giant bar of marzipan given for fathers day, while the wife isn't looking.
Fascinating, WBJ. Thanks for sharing so much of your story... you should indeed write it down for posterity, and definitely for your children's sake. I'm sorry your experience of school wasn't more positive. Through no virtue of my own I not only passed my childhood in comparatively congenial environments, in an era that offered more rewarding possibilities, but also had the opportunity in my mid-twenties to live and work for a year and a half in much better times in Germany. I remember my days there with fondness. German history had always interested me, and at university German philosophy ended up attracting me even more. For a couple of years before getting the chance to go and become a Gast Arbiter, I had a large map of Germany tacked to a bulletin board in my bedroom in Toronto. What for you was grim experience has been for me, several steps removed, romantic tragedy. I feel for Germans and the hardships they've endured, but I also admire their competence and genius and found the Germans I met and worked with interesting and friendly.
Books, coupled with a thirst for knowledge, are indeed the keys to education. Ich war kein Wunderkind... aber... I had kind and canny relatives. When my grandparents, aunts and uncles realized, when I was in grade four, "Hey! The kid likes to read," they started giving me books for Christmas and birthday presents. From the Golden Books of Science and Astronomy I learned about electromagnetism, the names of the planets, and the difference between cumulus, cirrus and stratus clouds; from The Golden History of the World I learned about the Minoans, the Gods of Mount Olympus, Alexander the Great, the Romans, the Vikings, the American Civil War, and the world wars; from The Reader's Digest Junior Omnibus I learned about Annie Oakley, Harry Houdini, Jack Dempsey, Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile barrier, and how a jet engine works, all while enjoying (and secretly benefiting from) the book's wealth of jokes, riddles and brain-teasers. I was also lucky enough to have a friend who, like me, loved books. Where other kids played cowboys and Indians, we played Hector and Achilles.
In this respect, my university experience may not have been quite what you might imagine. One of the best things about studying philosophy is that one doesn't have to apprentice for it. You plunge right in doing exactly what philosophers do: reading, writing, discussing ideas, and absorbing intellectual history. I enjoyed my university years immensely and went far beyond the assigned readings; none of this felt like "school" at all. We earned our grades through the quality of the papers we wrote, and I was always eager to try expressing my thoughts in written form, to see how the results measured up against what I was reading. In graduate school, when I became a teaching assistant, one of my responsibilities was grading undergraduate essays, something that enabled me to see just how much progress I'd made myself.
Canada, of course, is about as multi-ethnic a society as one is ever likely to find. On my father's side we're Irish; on my mother's, Scottish and English. Growing up, my parents' best friends were Jewish. My own best friend, after my parents moved us from Ottawa to Toronto, was Polish. When I finally made it to Germany in the 1970s I fantasized about meeting a nice German girl, and I did; but things never got serious. Instead, I followed up my German adventure by living a year in Paris, where I met a nice French girl from Marseilles. That was in 1977. We got married in 1981 and are still married today.
I feel like I'm always a contrarian on these. This may be mostly true, but some concepts are worth struggling with. I think if you're trying to write something truly new, talking about something in a way people don't usually talk about it, it's hard. I've struggled with things and ended up tabling them, but I save them in a separate file in case I ever figure it out.
That isn't contrary to what was said. To the extent that your struggle to eliminate the conceptual confusion succeeds, the writing problems will become solvable as well. Failing conceptual clarity the writing is a lost cause, evidence of your thought's opacity to itself.
This rule was first proposed by Zsa Zsa Gabor, except instead of writing she applied it to marriage.
LOL certainly doesn't do this justice. LMAO is lame. As is ROFL . My response: a full throated gut laugh for about 3 minutes. Thanks for brightening my day.
You got it in four tries
Thanks. It takes one to know one. Have a blessed day.
Marriages are like cats. Anyone can end up with two. But at 3 or more, and more so with each addition, it's reasonable until proven otherwise to assume a defect in sanity.
Damn, beat me to it. Kudos....
Hahahahahah
Don't you have to pick someone who was married five times, not NINE? The fail here is that she never gave up.
Reminds me of a thing I used to say to colleagues who came to me for writing help, usually pressing a hopelessly confused first draft under my nose.
“Forget what’s on the page,” I would tell them. “Tell me, in your own words, what it is you want to say.”
If they could, I would say, “That’s it! Write down exactly what you just said.”
If they couldn’t, it meant they didn’t have anything to say in the first place.
I need to apply this rule to my comments...
I finally read this. As as one who has written through my long life for the sole purpose of writing rather than publishing or gaining fame, I've come to believe writing is an attempt to capture in 100% precision, the thought in my mind. Sometimes it happens and it's like finding true love for the first time. I guess that makes my writing more like Don Quixote searching for the next windmill.
Same for me... still tilting...
I tried to compose a brilliant comment but after 5 tries I gave up
Was this the first thing you came up with then? 😉
Busted
I have a completely different approach to revision: I never revise, at least not if it's fiction or opinion. Here's how I learned that: long, long ago, I wanted to write something really good for an obscure literary publication. So I wrote the thing, and then I started to rewrite it. Scribble scribble scribble. After some days of this, a "friend" came to visit and looked at my drafts. After contemplating them, he picked up the first draft and said, "This is much better than the others." "That's just what every writer wants to hear," I said, "I already washed up as a writer." "No," he replied, "your first draft is pretentious crap, but it has vitality. Your other drafts are pretentious crap, but now, no vitality." From this I learned not to rewrite. However, for those who can't resist the temptation, I suggestion the following method: 1. Write your first draft, as quickly as possible, but don't sweat it. Just write it. 2. Set the first draft aside. 3. Write the second draft, from memory if possible, but if you must pick and snip, pick and snip. 4. Now take the second draft and throw it out. 5. Recover the first draft, correct the spelling errors and solecisms (or don't), and present it as your finished work. You're done.
I have feeling this is EXACTLY how I should be working - "revisions" just mean flailing about in the weeds. It's why I've always worked best under deadline - but who wants to live that way? I stopped writing because I couldn't sustain the way I was living. Thank you!
Yes, I recently dug out an old short story I wrote long ago and proceeded to edit it into something horrible. It was a complete waste of several hours.
Thank you, Matt!
I have decided that I want to write my first book. I have saved all the letters from my British pen pal since we were randomly put together in a Teen Magazine application. I think it would be great to expose how a random selection created a lifelong close friendship from two people who live halfway round the world from each other.
I can not write until I am clear about who I am writing for. The problem is that most of my desired audience has passed away, making feedback a bitch
Have you considered a Ouija board? 😉
Yes, I frequently talk to ghosts. Could almost as easily write them letters. They give plenty of feedback, if you listen for it.
Here is an analogous rule: If you’re suffering from writer’s block, lower your standards.
That's America's solution to student underachievement; hence, grade inflation. Hence, also, American underachievement in international scholastic competitions. You can call a rock a jet, but it will not fly.
It will if you throw it.
To lift off the ground and move through the air under your own power is to fly. To be launched off the ground and fall back to it is to be thrown. Different concepts, hence different words. Of course, we get lazy and talk about the flight of a ball or an arrow, launched by an arm, bat or bow, but this doesn't eradicate the difference. No one attributes the power of flight to rocks, balls or arrows.
Kaspar Hauser would disagree with you.
Why is the word Hence still in use and Guffauw isn't.
I happen to guffaw quite often!
Jack Winn
Sorry to have miss spelled the word and I will now correct it.
G U F F A U W.... Guffauw.
There used to be a cartoon strip in the major newspapers many years ago, say in the 60s and earlier when the papers had a full page or more dedicated to cartoons. Lille Abner, Blondie, Popeye the Sailor Man, Mr.Jiggs, The Katzenjammer kids, Dick Tracy and so on as well as one that I laughed at a lot, it was called Colonel something and consisted of two characters an old moustached grandpa type always sitting in a large armchair and a kid of about eight years old with only two vertical hairs on his bald head. The kid would stand by the armchair in the first frame and either tell the old man something that the kid was proud of or ask a question. In the second frame the old man would open his gigantic toothless gaping maw of a pie hole and begin a long tirade of talk about something totally irrelevant: when I was in Innnjjaaa hunting the deadly tigerrr.... blah... blah. In the third frame the kid has his hands on his hips looking disgusted and squinting his eyes while the old man just keeps rolling along exercising his flapping lips. In the fourth frame the kid has his back to the frame and is walking away, the old man is still verbiose but his words finally end with Guffauw Guffauw ... The old man has been fibbing again imagining a past that he never had.
WBJ
Please always call this the "Sisyphus 5 Rule"! A funny, snappy little snippet and an excellent rule. I'm sharing it to my editorial networks.
Matt! I’m a writer and 100% love and appreciate that you are sharing your tips! Knowing even YOU struggle sometimes is helpful. 🙏
I remember seeing "Sisyphus 5" before they were popular.
Hahah it takes me at least three hours lately to write a three Pp email. Some of that of course is adding commas
Commas...always the bugaboo of writers, really.
That "natural pause" rule will always get in the way
Huh. So THAT's what that nasty smell is...
The encouraging news, from your point of view, is that the lack of conceptual clarity at the root of an inability to express oneself clearly in print announces itself only to thinkers astute enough to receive this message. They're the ones who sense something is wrong--the necessary preliminary to possibly realizing, sooner or later, just what it is. Those who know intellectual clarity only by hearsay remain blithely unaware of how incoherent and unreadable their writing is (you don't have to look far for examples).
UUHH...
Intellectual stuff doesn't sell these days. The little money that you will get isn't worth the work. Worst is that you will get ring fenced with the rest of the wink wink intelligentsia and then you will discover that boredom and bullshit can make you wish for terrible things.
I will consider myself a writer when a stranger walks up to me and says that I am.
(?) Your 'reply' addresses nothing in my post. However...
a) Even a cursory perusal of the offerings of the world's finest publishers (Knopf, Oxford, etc.) confirms that the market for "intellectual stuff" remains as strong as it ever was. Furthermore, if you check the backlists of these same publishers, as well as the secondary market for used books on sites like ABE, you'll find that heavy-duty intellectual books not only hold their value but increase it. A copy of Israel's Radical Enlightenment or Husserl's Logical Investigations, for example, will now set you back several hundred dollars.
b) Whether what you choose to market qualifies as intellectual or non-intellectual, if you're unclear in your mind just what you're trying to say, your writing is bound to reflect your confusion. Making this point is the sole reason the phrase 'intellectual clarity' made it into my post, which doesn't concern itself even slightly with what sells and contains no recommendation as to what level of intellection writers should aim for. The necessary precondition to becoming a writer, I should have thought, is being able to understand what one reads, words and their meanings being indispensable tools of the writer's trade, yes? This stranger's opinion anyway.
Mark Kennedy
I generalized of course and I did not mean to criticize your post. We could have a conversation sometime regarding the current western culture of materialism the great lubricant of all means of motion and activity including becoming a successful writer and making a living at it. As well as what writing will or will not be acceptable by the current publishing houses who now are political and cultural censors.
I am up in years, retired comfortably and I write when I feel like it about anything which my mind/emotion/intuition feels a need to engage the keyboard as a means to express a personal and lately pissed off opinions. A far greater amount of anger is now part of my comments posts and writings than in the past, especially in the last 2 to 3 years.
I fully agree with you on this quote: The necessary precondition to becoming a writer, I should have thought is being able understand what one reads, words and their meanings being indispensable tools of the writers trade.. ..
WBJ
Thanks, WBJ, for your gracious reply. We're fellow travelers, "retired comfortably." Funny... making money was never my priority (I submit as evidence the fact that I devoted six university years to acquiring a philosophy M.A.). Yet we're part of a generation where, if you followed the rules and your parents' advice and invested in a house, you probably now collect more in dividends from the company that heats that house than you pay them to heat it. Things worked out for us to the extent that we're now able, quite easily, to help our children buy houses too, something that might otherwise be impossible for them. What's gone wrong for them and their era? Here's one of the more entertaining takes on the matter (once you get past the turgid introduction to Blyth himself):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGuaoARJYU0
I fear there's still a slight misunderstanding between us. I have no objection to anybody criticizing any post of mine. What I wanted to alert you to was the irrelevance of your observations to anything in the post to which you were ostensibly replying, a reflex response for which you can blame my philosophy background (I specialized in logic and epistemology and still find instances of logical irrelevance jarring--sorry). As for anger and disappointment at the state of the world, I think the state of the world warrants such response. When I was young, 2023 was a science fictional date, and I had much higher hopes for the future that 2023 would deliver if I ever made it that far, as I suspect you did.
Good luck with the writing, if that's one of your retirement projects. I wrote a novel after I retired, just to see if I could do it, and did manage to finish and get it printed. The process was interesting, almost a collaboration between the person who goes to bed thinking he's done good work, and the one who gets up in the morning realizing what needs to be fixed. ;-)
Dear Mr. Kennedy
You're welcome.
As to us being fellow travellers ( perhaps fellow spirits ) but feet on the ground life experience our paths could not be more different. I haven't spent a day in a University other than to watch our children get their degrees. I did not complete even grade 8 in school here in Canada after my parents decided to emigrate here. The day I got kicked out it was the happiest day of my life up to then. I was doing the Wiley E Coyote high kick for the rest of the day. No more government sponsored Eddikashion for me. I look back sometimes and know that it could have been so much different. WW2 got in the way, a whole generation of children born in the thirties in Germany wound up not getting even a basic education, there were no real teachers just old men too old for fighting, and old women who must have been Nuns. I got so much religion and Jesus that I began hallucinating that Jesus was waving at me sitting on a branch of a bomb burned old tree outside the window. When I told the teacher this I was hauled out and whipped on the buttocks with a nasty cane. Our one and only school room had a large hole in the ceiling and when it snowed or rained all the desks were moved over against the wall. The male teacher, the only one we had had a huge dent in his forehead and would have awful seizures out of the blue and collapse in a heap on the floor. A true believer I suppose in the Prussian style of education he was a disciplinarian who relished violence delivered by caning to drive the message home. He had a cabinet I imagine designed to his own specifications, low on one end high on the other to accommodate all the different gages of bamboo canes in thickness and length. I feared this man a lot as he could explode at any time, and having been caned by him more than once, but I wanted that one cup of fresh milk and either a banana or an orange that was given at school each day. God, we were all skin and bones. I am talking in terms of the time at about 1947/8/9 but actually it was really rough until we left Germany in 1954. We lived in Koln Deutz a suburb of Cologne just across the Rhine river, everything around us was bombed to smithereens including the building we lived in. My job was to pick up scrap Iron and other metals from the bombed out buildings at about the age of eight I had a little hand cart along for the job. I was witness to some strange things going on in those mostly destroyed wrecks. I always think that there is a story here but I can't bring myself to write a work about it because I am the only actor in the play, there are no fellow participants to liven up a depressing story just the thoughts and musings of a young boy... I can say for certain that nobody cared at the time, thats what war does to the vanquished the only important thing is survival no time for questions and answers.
Once we came to Canada and spending less than a year in school I went to work to help support the family. Eventually my wife and I found each other and we raised our family of four boys and one girl. Right now you know more about me than my own children do. I saw no point in telling them. I just revelled in the fact that we were able to keep them well fed needing nothing more than the love we gave them to be happy little beings enjoying the one important thing that they will only experience once in their lives... a happy Childhood.
I have couple of talents given to me by biological tom foolery through ancestry as does everyone. A photographic memory, an inborn sense of right and wrong, and a talent for successful and objective speculation. I taught myself higher mathematical skills and strategies of determining probabilities and their convergence. Stocks and Options have been my key to monetary success in the past. I would be the rabbit in the story of the race which the rabbit although faster eventually looses to the turtle. This Rabbit won. Today life is not that exiting and I draw a decent salary on top of a pension out of a very safe non speculator fund.
What also has been a life long passion for knowledge and thus reading a lot of books on just about anything. According to my mother I could read by the time I was three, because as she was reading a large print news paper I would look at the pictures and then ask her what the letters and words meant. I do recall this event at a hospital of some kind where I found some books and began reading. My mother said to the doc that I was actually reading to which he said in German: Mine Frau ein kind auf drei jare alt kanst nicht lesen. He got a big surprise when he handed me a newspaper and said: Lesen duh, so I went ahead and read out loud. Jaa... Ach du lieber sie haben ein wunderkind.
And know it is time for me to enjoy a nice cup of tea and a biscuit, as well as biting off another chunk of my giant bar of marzipan given for fathers day, while the wife isn't looking.
WBJ
Fascinating, WBJ. Thanks for sharing so much of your story... you should indeed write it down for posterity, and definitely for your children's sake. I'm sorry your experience of school wasn't more positive. Through no virtue of my own I not only passed my childhood in comparatively congenial environments, in an era that offered more rewarding possibilities, but also had the opportunity in my mid-twenties to live and work for a year and a half in much better times in Germany. I remember my days there with fondness. German history had always interested me, and at university German philosophy ended up attracting me even more. For a couple of years before getting the chance to go and become a Gast Arbiter, I had a large map of Germany tacked to a bulletin board in my bedroom in Toronto. What for you was grim experience has been for me, several steps removed, romantic tragedy. I feel for Germans and the hardships they've endured, but I also admire their competence and genius and found the Germans I met and worked with interesting and friendly.
Books, coupled with a thirst for knowledge, are indeed the keys to education. Ich war kein Wunderkind... aber... I had kind and canny relatives. When my grandparents, aunts and uncles realized, when I was in grade four, "Hey! The kid likes to read," they started giving me books for Christmas and birthday presents. From the Golden Books of Science and Astronomy I learned about electromagnetism, the names of the planets, and the difference between cumulus, cirrus and stratus clouds; from The Golden History of the World I learned about the Minoans, the Gods of Mount Olympus, Alexander the Great, the Romans, the Vikings, the American Civil War, and the world wars; from The Reader's Digest Junior Omnibus I learned about Annie Oakley, Harry Houdini, Jack Dempsey, Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile barrier, and how a jet engine works, all while enjoying (and secretly benefiting from) the book's wealth of jokes, riddles and brain-teasers. I was also lucky enough to have a friend who, like me, loved books. Where other kids played cowboys and Indians, we played Hector and Achilles.
In this respect, my university experience may not have been quite what you might imagine. One of the best things about studying philosophy is that one doesn't have to apprentice for it. You plunge right in doing exactly what philosophers do: reading, writing, discussing ideas, and absorbing intellectual history. I enjoyed my university years immensely and went far beyond the assigned readings; none of this felt like "school" at all. We earned our grades through the quality of the papers we wrote, and I was always eager to try expressing my thoughts in written form, to see how the results measured up against what I was reading. In graduate school, when I became a teaching assistant, one of my responsibilities was grading undergraduate essays, something that enabled me to see just how much progress I'd made myself.
Canada, of course, is about as multi-ethnic a society as one is ever likely to find. On my father's side we're Irish; on my mother's, Scottish and English. Growing up, my parents' best friends were Jewish. My own best friend, after my parents moved us from Ottawa to Toronto, was Polish. When I finally made it to Germany in the 1970s I fantasized about meeting a nice German girl, and I did; but things never got serious. Instead, I followed up my German adventure by living a year in Paris, where I met a nice French girl from Marseilles. That was in 1977. We got married in 1981 and are still married today.
I feel like I'm always a contrarian on these. This may be mostly true, but some concepts are worth struggling with. I think if you're trying to write something truly new, talking about something in a way people don't usually talk about it, it's hard. I've struggled with things and ended up tabling them, but I save them in a separate file in case I ever figure it out.
That isn't contrary to what was said. To the extent that your struggle to eliminate the conceptual confusion succeeds, the writing problems will become solvable as well. Failing conceptual clarity the writing is a lost cause, evidence of your thought's opacity to itself.
in way, we all write the same essay over and over again.