Posted the ninth story today. It's called “Twin Killings” and like “Soar Legs” there's a pun in the title as well as both stories being variations on classic science fiction themes. In the Hollywood parlance “Twin Killings” would be dubbed something like “The Twilight Zone meets film noir.” I wrote it in the eighties, and looking back I can see that I was influenced by the science fiction of my youth and by Rod Serling's TV show.
“Twin Killings” is about an average Joe who just misses winning a $12-million lottery by one number and stumbles into something otherworldly. It features an O. Henry sort of surprise ending—although for experienced sci fi readers the ending may not be all that surprising. I used to read it once a year to my high school students. They loved it.
I probably have perhaps three more stories to post to make it an even dozen. I've written about thirty, but after the first twelve the quality falls off more than a bit. I have a couple of others I'm working on and maybe there are a couple of the not so good stories that I might revise.
--Dennis Littrell
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Monday, November 9, 2009
Skankin'
“Skankin' at the Whiskey” is a story in the form of a “journalism” or a memoir. I wrote it in 1995 and 1996 as part of some work I was doing based on my experiences as a teacher. You can find it in my "The Stories of Dennis Littrell" Google blog. It won a “personal experience essay” prize in a literary contest conducted by the Missouri Review some years ago. To appreciate why I call this a story rather than a memoir requires a bit of explanation.
Story and memoir, novel and autobiography can be closely related genres. But as I used to tell my students “all autobiographers lie,” most by a direct misrepresentation or a “misremembering” of the facts, and all by omission of certain facts. A memoir is often an autobiographical piece.
Fiction is a deliberate and open misrepresentation (or "imagining") of the facts; indeed in much fiction the truths are “only” psychological. But sometimes psychological truths are as important or more important than factual ones, which is why I would ask my students, “What could be truer than fiction?”
In “Skankin'...” most of the facts are true, and hopefully most of the psychology.
Incidentally, memoir is now considered a form of essay, or perhaps I should say an essay can be a report of a “personal experience.”
--Dennis Littrell
Story and memoir, novel and autobiography can be closely related genres. But as I used to tell my students “all autobiographers lie,” most by a direct misrepresentation or a “misremembering” of the facts, and all by omission of certain facts. A memoir is often an autobiographical piece.
Fiction is a deliberate and open misrepresentation (or "imagining") of the facts; indeed in much fiction the truths are “only” psychological. But sometimes psychological truths are as important or more important than factual ones, which is why I would ask my students, “What could be truer than fiction?”
In “Skankin'...” most of the facts are true, and hopefully most of the psychology.
Incidentally, memoir is now considered a form of essay, or perhaps I should say an essay can be a report of a “personal experience.”
--Dennis Littrell
Updating the Blogs
My Google blog, “Rants, Prejudices, and Earthly Delights” now has 13 entries. Here are the titles, which may give the reader a feel for what the book is like:
1.Too Cynical Is Never Cynical Enough
2.Three Eternal Truths
3.Expect Nothing
4.Sex and Subsistence
5.The World Is Not as We Think It Is
6.Our Reality Is Inside Our Heads
7.Pleasure, Pain and Drugs
8.The War System
9.Consciousness
10.Free Will
11.Infinities
12.Doubt and the 10,000 Things
13.Nothing Is Real
The idea (so far) is a book entitled “Look Out Kid, They Keep It All Hid” (Bob Dylan) with the theme “The World Is Not as We Think It Is.” It is a cynical look at the human predicament with evidence from science, history and religion.
Meanwhile, my yoga blog Yoga: Sacred and Profane is thirteen chapters and an introduction long. The last two chapters, still concerned with the physical health aspects of yoga, are on asana (finally!). One of the purposes of Yoga: Sacred and Profane is to introduce practitioners of hatha yoga to the spiritual, psychological and historic aspects of yoga. I am still less than halfway through the book.
--Dennis Littrell
1.Too Cynical Is Never Cynical Enough
2.Three Eternal Truths
3.Expect Nothing
4.Sex and Subsistence
5.The World Is Not as We Think It Is
6.Our Reality Is Inside Our Heads
7.Pleasure, Pain and Drugs
8.The War System
9.Consciousness
10.Free Will
11.Infinities
12.Doubt and the 10,000 Things
13.Nothing Is Real
The idea (so far) is a book entitled “Look Out Kid, They Keep It All Hid” (Bob Dylan) with the theme “The World Is Not as We Think It Is.” It is a cynical look at the human predicament with evidence from science, history and religion.
Meanwhile, my yoga blog Yoga: Sacred and Profane is thirteen chapters and an introduction long. The last two chapters, still concerned with the physical health aspects of yoga, are on asana (finally!). One of the purposes of Yoga: Sacred and Profane is to introduce practitioners of hatha yoga to the spiritual, psychological and historic aspects of yoga. I am still less than halfway through the book.
--Dennis Littrell
Sunday, November 8, 2009
More Stories
I posted a few more stories on my Google story blog. Here's the line up so far as of this date (Nov 8 '09):
Soar Legs
Jug Chablis
Old Seinfeld
Let's Play Overkill
A 'D' in French
California Dreaming
Breathless Prose and the Boogie-Woogie Beat
“California Dreaming” is perhaps the best “commercial” story of the bunch. (In the previous blog I wrote that “California Dreaming” was the best story I ever wrote, but let's face it, I got too sentimental.) I wrote it as a frame for a novelized version of the Dana Point stories. That trick didn't work because no matter what I did the stories themselves (the meat of the “novel”) still made the enterprise obviously episodic. Curiously though the artificial frame turned out to be a good short story itself with sharp dialogue somewhat in the manner of Neil Simon.
“Breathless Prose and the Boogie-Woogie Beat” is an example of a very good story with no commercial value. It has artistic value, satirical value, maybe even historical value, but there is no chance that, e.g., The New Yorker is going to pick it up. A little literary magazine might, but by the time I had really polished it, I no longer needed to see my name in print.
“Breathless Prose...” was originally titled “The Failed Writer,” which is a more descriptive title. The strength of the story is in (1) the pitiful yet somehow triumphant character of Raymond, the failed writer himself, and (2) the satirical critique of the publishing industry as seen from a writer's point of view.
--Dennis Littrell
Soar Legs
Jug Chablis
Old Seinfeld
Let's Play Overkill
A 'D' in French
California Dreaming
Breathless Prose and the Boogie-Woogie Beat
“California Dreaming” is perhaps the best “commercial” story of the bunch. (In the previous blog I wrote that “California Dreaming” was the best story I ever wrote, but let's face it, I got too sentimental.) I wrote it as a frame for a novelized version of the Dana Point stories. That trick didn't work because no matter what I did the stories themselves (the meat of the “novel”) still made the enterprise obviously episodic. Curiously though the artificial frame turned out to be a good short story itself with sharp dialogue somewhat in the manner of Neil Simon.
“Breathless Prose and the Boogie-Woogie Beat” is an example of a very good story with no commercial value. It has artistic value, satirical value, maybe even historical value, but there is no chance that, e.g., The New Yorker is going to pick it up. A little literary magazine might, but by the time I had really polished it, I no longer needed to see my name in print.
“Breathless Prose...” was originally titled “The Failed Writer,” which is a more descriptive title. The strength of the story is in (1) the pitiful yet somehow triumphant character of Raymond, the failed writer himself, and (2) the satirical critique of the publishing industry as seen from a writer's point of view.
--Dennis Littrell
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Lindsay
So I'm going through my old stories on disc, deciding which one to post next when I open a file called “Lindsay.” It is the story “California Dreaming” which I wrote as kind of a frame for the novel California Dreaming which I wrote probably in the 1980s or maybe the 1990s. It a rather long short story, nearly seven thousand words which is probably the reason I never tried to market it.
Well, I just read it for the first time in perhaps twenty years and I was amazed at how good it is. It is the best story I ever wrote. It is amazing that I can say that, and maybe it isn't true. Sometimes when I come upon something I wrote and forgot about it, it seems especially good. Anyway I broke out in real tears reading the story. It is so real and so filled with love and so sharply done.
And of course this realization excites the greed and lust in my soul. Why put this story which may be worth some serious bucks on a blog for all the world to read for free?
I'm all alone in my old age with the realization that I really did write a great story among some very good ones (and a lot of bad ones). It kinda gives me a sense of accomplishment similar to way I felt when the novel I wrote in my twenties, A Perfectly Nature Act, won royalty publication from Putnam's in the seventies. God, I felt so on top of the world! I was a serious literary artist back in the day when that meant something, back in the day when such an acceptance event by a major New York publisher might signal the discovery of the next Hemingway or Salinger or Steinbeck.
But I digress, and no doubt flatter myself. I am going to put this in my blog, because I really don't care about the money, and the fame would be a pain in the ass. (I mean, of course, if I am not totally deluded. Which is...well I'll say possible.) It will be the sixth story and it will have the virtue in addition to being what I think is in many respects the best story I ever wrote that of illuminating the Dana Point stories to come.
--Dennis Littrell
Well, I just read it for the first time in perhaps twenty years and I was amazed at how good it is. It is the best story I ever wrote. It is amazing that I can say that, and maybe it isn't true. Sometimes when I come upon something I wrote and forgot about it, it seems especially good. Anyway I broke out in real tears reading the story. It is so real and so filled with love and so sharply done.
And of course this realization excites the greed and lust in my soul. Why put this story which may be worth some serious bucks on a blog for all the world to read for free?
I'm all alone in my old age with the realization that I really did write a great story among some very good ones (and a lot of bad ones). It kinda gives me a sense of accomplishment similar to way I felt when the novel I wrote in my twenties, A Perfectly Nature Act, won royalty publication from Putnam's in the seventies. God, I felt so on top of the world! I was a serious literary artist back in the day when that meant something, back in the day when such an acceptance event by a major New York publisher might signal the discovery of the next Hemingway or Salinger or Steinbeck.
But I digress, and no doubt flatter myself. I am going to put this in my blog, because I really don't care about the money, and the fame would be a pain in the ass. (I mean, of course, if I am not totally deluded. Which is...well I'll say possible.) It will be the sixth story and it will have the virtue in addition to being what I think is in many respects the best story I ever wrote that of illuminating the Dana Point stories to come.
--Dennis Littrell
Three More Stories
I put up three more stories in the story blog. The first one, “Old Seinfeld,” written in the form of a TV script, is a parody of the Seinfeld TV sitcom, one of the best sitcoms of all time
What the heck, for what it's worth here are my all time favorite sitcoms. Disclaimer: I haven't watched any of the new shows, which explains their absence. Further disclaimer, I reserve the right to add or subtract a show as memory suggests.
1. Seinfeld
2. M*A*S*H
3. The Mary Tyler Moore Show
4. Friends
5. I Love Lucy
6. Cheers
7. Taxi
8. The Honeymooners
9. Amos and Andy
10. All in the Family
11. Laverne and Shirley
12. Married...with Children (mostly the earlier shows)
13. Sanford and Son
14. Three's Company
The second story is one of my darker stories entitled “Let's Play Overkill” which harks back to the Cold War. It is written in a dream sequence sort of way and is dark not only with nuclear winter and global warming, but with subconscious fears and aversions.
The third story is “A 'D' in French” which is the most autobiographical story I ever wrote. I even had to name the anti-heroic protagonist “Dennis” for reasons that become apparent when you read the story. Set at UCLA during the Vietnam War it is in fact almost entirely true allowing for some artistic license including some convenient minor invention. The strength of the story is in the ironies and in my attempt to see my youthful self with objectivity. I wonder how well I succeeded.
--Dennis Littrell
What the heck, for what it's worth here are my all time favorite sitcoms. Disclaimer: I haven't watched any of the new shows, which explains their absence. Further disclaimer, I reserve the right to add or subtract a show as memory suggests.
1. Seinfeld
2. M*A*S*H
3. The Mary Tyler Moore Show
4. Friends
5. I Love Lucy
6. Cheers
7. Taxi
8. The Honeymooners
9. Amos and Andy
10. All in the Family
11. Laverne and Shirley
12. Married...with Children (mostly the earlier shows)
13. Sanford and Son
14. Three's Company
The second story is one of my darker stories entitled “Let's Play Overkill” which harks back to the Cold War. It is written in a dream sequence sort of way and is dark not only with nuclear winter and global warming, but with subconscious fears and aversions.
The third story is “A 'D' in French” which is the most autobiographical story I ever wrote. I even had to name the anti-heroic protagonist “Dennis” for reasons that become apparent when you read the story. Set at UCLA during the Vietnam War it is in fact almost entirely true allowing for some artistic license including some convenient minor invention. The strength of the story is in the ironies and in my attempt to see my youthful self with objectivity. I wonder how well I succeeded.
--Dennis Littrell
Monday, November 2, 2009
The Dana Point Stories
“Jug Chablis” is the second story in my story blog.
http://storiesofdennislittrell.blogspot.com/
This story actually won a third place prize some years ago in a literary magazine competition. I don't recall what magazine it was. However the story has never been published. It is one of the “Dana Point” stories that I wrote in the late seventies and early eighties. The are perhaps a dozen of them, some of them pretty good. This one is, by all accounts that I have heard, the best of them all.
The idea was what I called “participatory journalism” after the manner of Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe and others except that it would be fiction. I did some on the street research but I imagined all the action. Nonetheless all fiction has a factual basis in some respects and the Dana Point stories are no exception.
In “Jug Chablis” Dana has placed an ad in the "SoCal Singles Tabloid" looking for “ordinary extraordinary people.” I won't spoil the story by saying any more. As I said, it's a very good story.
I tried for years to market the stories as a book, first as a collection of short stories and then as a kind of episodic novel. I called the novel, after the song by the Mamas and the Papas, California Dreaming. The plot centered on Dana Point who felt overshadowed by his very successful wife who worked for a New York fashion magazine. They were living in New Jersey and he was trying to “write.” He decided that he needed some experience in the world and they tried a trial separation. In one sense it was a test of their marriage; in another it was a chance to sow some wild oats. I won't anticipate the ending, but the central part of the tale involved his adventures in participatory journalism in California.
I'll be posting more of the Dana Point stories in the story blog along with other stories.
--Dennis Littrell
http://storiesofdennislittrell.blogspot.com/
This story actually won a third place prize some years ago in a literary magazine competition. I don't recall what magazine it was. However the story has never been published. It is one of the “Dana Point” stories that I wrote in the late seventies and early eighties. The are perhaps a dozen of them, some of them pretty good. This one is, by all accounts that I have heard, the best of them all.
The idea was what I called “participatory journalism” after the manner of Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe and others except that it would be fiction. I did some on the street research but I imagined all the action. Nonetheless all fiction has a factual basis in some respects and the Dana Point stories are no exception.
In “Jug Chablis” Dana has placed an ad in the "SoCal Singles Tabloid" looking for “ordinary extraordinary people.” I won't spoil the story by saying any more. As I said, it's a very good story.
I tried for years to market the stories as a book, first as a collection of short stories and then as a kind of episodic novel. I called the novel, after the song by the Mamas and the Papas, California Dreaming. The plot centered on Dana Point who felt overshadowed by his very successful wife who worked for a New York fashion magazine. They were living in New Jersey and he was trying to “write.” He decided that he needed some experience in the world and they tried a trial separation. In one sense it was a test of their marriage; in another it was a chance to sow some wild oats. I won't anticipate the ending, but the central part of the tale involved his adventures in participatory journalism in California.
I'll be posting more of the Dana Point stories in the story blog along with other stories.
--Dennis Littrell
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Why the Blogs?
I started the story blog on Google today. It's my fourth blog and is called “The Stories of Dennis Littrell.”
The first story is “Soar Legs” which is a bittersweet tale of a little guy in the world of pickup basketball in the South Bay of Los Angeles, set in the late seventies or early eighties when I played a lot of pickup basketball. It's a bit of a science fiction story, rather familiar in some respects but very precisely written if I do say so myself. I wrote it perhaps 13 or 14 years ago. If I had been persistent enough I might have gotten it published somewhere. I would rate it as one of my better stories.
The idea of these blogs is (1) to put my unpublished work before the public even if it's a small public; (2) to have a digital copy of work on Google, which presumably will not go out of business anytime soon; and (3) to give me an incentive to do one more edit of my work. It could also be said that that a publisher or an editor or an agent or maybe a movie producer will stumble upon my work and make me an offer I can't refuse.
The yoga blog which is the book, “Yoga: Sacred and Profane” now has eleven entries, an Introduction and ten chapters.
The “Look Out Kid, They Kid It All Hid” blog, entitled incongruously “Rants, Prejudices, and Earthly Delights” has eight entries, eight chapters. Another title for it might be “Too Cynical Is Never Cynical Enough.” It's an attempt to show that the world is not as we think it is.
This blog called “The End of Desire Is Death” will be about the progress of the blogs. Yes, there will be more blogs. I might even do a poetry blog, so watch out. This blog will also be about some miscellaneous thoughts.
For example, I have given a lot of thought to the future of publishing in light of the rise of the Internet. Already we are seeing the death of print newspapers and desperation on the part of some magazines. The book business will come under pressure next. It will last in its present form longer than the newspapers and the magazines will because there is still something agreeable, handy and maybe even comforting in having a book in one's hands. And people like to collect books. But competition from Google, Kindle, and our cell phones portends great changes to come in the book business I believe.
But more than that and deeper is the change in the authority of authorship that the Web is bringing about. There is the information overload which is horrendous with millions of blogs to choose from and millions of other sites with massive streams of information in video and text. In the information business before the Internet, we had agents, editors, and publishers to decide what would see the light of print. In a sense they operated as a kind of screening device that kept out the “not fit to print” stuff whether because it was not well written or because it was false or because it was too controversial or for any number of socially or economically directed reasons. With the Internet we don't have the same screening devices. Anyone can write a blog and say just about whatever they want. With a little more money anyone can start a Netzine or whatever they're called or even just a propaganda site. And they do.
So we are overloaded and without the kind of guidance we once had. In some ways this is good. A lot of really worthwhile points of view never saw the light of day because of the old screening process. But now they do. Because our time is limited, choosing what to read is now the problem. I believe that the next great breakthrough on the Web may come when somebody comes up with a site that identifies quality writing for readers. Right now this is very hard to do. Google typically counts clicks. Other sites rely on reader's reviews or opinions. But what is needed is the sort of authoritative guidance that can only come from experts in the various fields--experts in short story, experts in the novel, experts in political discourse, in economics, in good writing in a hundred fields. And this can only come about by getting experts to read and review what is out there on the Web to read.
But how can this be done? Wikipedia has somehow gotten thousands of expert or semi-expert people to contribute knowledge about a myriad of subjects. Maybe identification of quality writing will come about in a similar way. Amazon.com had something like that going with their customer reviews, but that deteriorated into product promotion because that is what was best for Amazon. They realized after a while that quality reviews were not what was really wanted. What was good for the bottom line were reviews that moved the product off the shelves. Consequently they changed their rating system and the format of their customer review pages to reward and make visible reviews that tended to move product. Instead of several hundred reviews for a major movie, what Amazon wanted was at least three reviews for every product. They figured out how to accomplish something close to that.
But the identification of quality writing, quality information, quality opinion, quality social criticism or merely quality observations on our culture and its many aspects does not seem to have a motivated sponsor as yet. Some entrepreneurial visionary with some serious capital might want to build a site that identifies quality on the Web using—and paying for--expert opinion.
I expect this to happen eventually, maybe sooner rather than later.
–Dennis Littrell
The first story is “Soar Legs” which is a bittersweet tale of a little guy in the world of pickup basketball in the South Bay of Los Angeles, set in the late seventies or early eighties when I played a lot of pickup basketball. It's a bit of a science fiction story, rather familiar in some respects but very precisely written if I do say so myself. I wrote it perhaps 13 or 14 years ago. If I had been persistent enough I might have gotten it published somewhere. I would rate it as one of my better stories.
The idea of these blogs is (1) to put my unpublished work before the public even if it's a small public; (2) to have a digital copy of work on Google, which presumably will not go out of business anytime soon; and (3) to give me an incentive to do one more edit of my work. It could also be said that that a publisher or an editor or an agent or maybe a movie producer will stumble upon my work and make me an offer I can't refuse.
The yoga blog which is the book, “Yoga: Sacred and Profane” now has eleven entries, an Introduction and ten chapters.
The “Look Out Kid, They Kid It All Hid” blog, entitled incongruously “Rants, Prejudices, and Earthly Delights” has eight entries, eight chapters. Another title for it might be “Too Cynical Is Never Cynical Enough.” It's an attempt to show that the world is not as we think it is.
This blog called “The End of Desire Is Death” will be about the progress of the blogs. Yes, there will be more blogs. I might even do a poetry blog, so watch out. This blog will also be about some miscellaneous thoughts.
For example, I have given a lot of thought to the future of publishing in light of the rise of the Internet. Already we are seeing the death of print newspapers and desperation on the part of some magazines. The book business will come under pressure next. It will last in its present form longer than the newspapers and the magazines will because there is still something agreeable, handy and maybe even comforting in having a book in one's hands. And people like to collect books. But competition from Google, Kindle, and our cell phones portends great changes to come in the book business I believe.
But more than that and deeper is the change in the authority of authorship that the Web is bringing about. There is the information overload which is horrendous with millions of blogs to choose from and millions of other sites with massive streams of information in video and text. In the information business before the Internet, we had agents, editors, and publishers to decide what would see the light of print. In a sense they operated as a kind of screening device that kept out the “not fit to print” stuff whether because it was not well written or because it was false or because it was too controversial or for any number of socially or economically directed reasons. With the Internet we don't have the same screening devices. Anyone can write a blog and say just about whatever they want. With a little more money anyone can start a Netzine or whatever they're called or even just a propaganda site. And they do.
So we are overloaded and without the kind of guidance we once had. In some ways this is good. A lot of really worthwhile points of view never saw the light of day because of the old screening process. But now they do. Because our time is limited, choosing what to read is now the problem. I believe that the next great breakthrough on the Web may come when somebody comes up with a site that identifies quality writing for readers. Right now this is very hard to do. Google typically counts clicks. Other sites rely on reader's reviews or opinions. But what is needed is the sort of authoritative guidance that can only come from experts in the various fields--experts in short story, experts in the novel, experts in political discourse, in economics, in good writing in a hundred fields. And this can only come about by getting experts to read and review what is out there on the Web to read.
But how can this be done? Wikipedia has somehow gotten thousands of expert or semi-expert people to contribute knowledge about a myriad of subjects. Maybe identification of quality writing will come about in a similar way. Amazon.com had something like that going with their customer reviews, but that deteriorated into product promotion because that is what was best for Amazon. They realized after a while that quality reviews were not what was really wanted. What was good for the bottom line were reviews that moved the product off the shelves. Consequently they changed their rating system and the format of their customer review pages to reward and make visible reviews that tended to move product. Instead of several hundred reviews for a major movie, what Amazon wanted was at least three reviews for every product. They figured out how to accomplish something close to that.
But the identification of quality writing, quality information, quality opinion, quality social criticism or merely quality observations on our culture and its many aspects does not seem to have a motivated sponsor as yet. Some entrepreneurial visionary with some serious capital might want to build a site that identifies quality on the Web using—and paying for--expert opinion.
I expect this to happen eventually, maybe sooner rather than later.
–Dennis Littrell
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
An email to a friend
[Slightly altered for a more general readership...]
Thanks, ... You are the voice of sanity and wisdom here.
I will "link" to yoga sites or yoga people. Georg Feuerstein, author of a dozen or so books on yoga, who is the foremost American academic authority on yoga owes me a favor. I've reviewed enthusiastically three or four of B.K.S. Iyengar's books. He's the biggest name in hatha yoga, considered the greatest yoga teacher in the world. I doubt he's read my reviews or maybe he has, but he's in India, and bit older than I am and no doubt retired. But maybe I could make contact with somebody on his staff…
And so on. As to your suggestion of a title, "Dennis Littrell's Experience of and Understanding of Yoga" that's not arrogant. It's modest and the truth. But it is entirely non-commercial.
Here's the rub, and here's where Howard Bloom fits in and why his experience is important. Right now he is counting down the days to the publication of The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism: Putting Soul In the Machine. Twenty-nine days left. It is gut-wrenching to read his missives. He spends all day writing and telephoning everybody he knows and everybody they know in the media, and no doubt cold calls and what have you. He nags them: "Bear with me while I try out another angle on you…" He's in the manic stage. It is so desperately important that this book be a success.
What kills me is that it's all about the publicity today, not the writing. Or perhaps it's always been that way. His book is wild with rhetoric and metaphor and analogy and stuffed with information and nouveau terminology. It's brilliant, but for me with all that I have read, it's familiar as he uses biological cycles to inform the reader about economic cycles. It's 167,000 words long, over 800 pages in double-spaced manuscript. There are hundreds of footnotes.
He's probably headed for a psychological fall, and I feel for him. He's 64 or 65 years old. His emotions are out there, and his personality is manic-depressive, like the cycles of business. (His book projects his personality.)
I do NOT want to go through this. I am learning from his experience and that is why I have chosen "to give it away on Seventh Avenue" (so to speak), a reference he would appreciate since he was in the pop music biz. And this is why he inspired me to start the blog. I don't need the fame and fortune. I don't need the anguish of reaching for it. I just want to say, "Here I wrote it. Read it if you like." Send me a note or not. If I were a young man and/or needed the money it would be different. But I'm not and I don't.
This is a ten-year-project like writing reviews turned into a ten-year project. I'll be 78 when the ten years have passed. I'm going to put all my work on the Web in various places, and as you say, I'll learn from the process. My stories, maybe a couple of novels, maybe even some of my poetry. And I'm not going to worry about it.
And it has, as you say, an element of "future shock" to it, this Internet business. The world is changing. Everything's accelerating. The world is zooming by. I was in the supermarket yesterday. There's this old guy, all white hair and pink skin, face moist with the work, checking groceries. It's an assembly line with the constant beep, beep, beep. He's punching in prices and remembering and not remembering produce numbers. I always exchange some chat with him. He has recalled a produce number without having to look it up. I tease him, "You remember the numbers!" I exclaim. He laughs. "Some of them." Then he says, "I can't even remember what I had for breakfast." And of course neither can I.
I am thankful that I do not have to be a cashier in my old age. But I admire him. He likes talking to the people and the job keeps him vital. He's almost too old for the work and pretty soon people might be saying he's too slow…
The last part of life is coming to grips with not only death but with the decline in our abilities and with the realization of who we are, since most of the evidence is already in.
Your friend,
Dennis
Thanks, ... You are the voice of sanity and wisdom here.
I will "link" to yoga sites or yoga people. Georg Feuerstein, author of a dozen or so books on yoga, who is the foremost American academic authority on yoga owes me a favor. I've reviewed enthusiastically three or four of B.K.S. Iyengar's books. He's the biggest name in hatha yoga, considered the greatest yoga teacher in the world. I doubt he's read my reviews or maybe he has, but he's in India, and bit older than I am and no doubt retired. But maybe I could make contact with somebody on his staff…
And so on. As to your suggestion of a title, "Dennis Littrell's Experience of and Understanding of Yoga" that's not arrogant. It's modest and the truth. But it is entirely non-commercial.
Here's the rub, and here's where Howard Bloom fits in and why his experience is important. Right now he is counting down the days to the publication of The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism: Putting Soul In the Machine. Twenty-nine days left. It is gut-wrenching to read his missives. He spends all day writing and telephoning everybody he knows and everybody they know in the media, and no doubt cold calls and what have you. He nags them: "Bear with me while I try out another angle on you…" He's in the manic stage. It is so desperately important that this book be a success.
What kills me is that it's all about the publicity today, not the writing. Or perhaps it's always been that way. His book is wild with rhetoric and metaphor and analogy and stuffed with information and nouveau terminology. It's brilliant, but for me with all that I have read, it's familiar as he uses biological cycles to inform the reader about economic cycles. It's 167,000 words long, over 800 pages in double-spaced manuscript. There are hundreds of footnotes.
He's probably headed for a psychological fall, and I feel for him. He's 64 or 65 years old. His emotions are out there, and his personality is manic-depressive, like the cycles of business. (His book projects his personality.)
I do NOT want to go through this. I am learning from his experience and that is why I have chosen "to give it away on Seventh Avenue" (so to speak), a reference he would appreciate since he was in the pop music biz. And this is why he inspired me to start the blog. I don't need the fame and fortune. I don't need the anguish of reaching for it. I just want to say, "Here I wrote it. Read it if you like." Send me a note or not. If I were a young man and/or needed the money it would be different. But I'm not and I don't.
This is a ten-year-project like writing reviews turned into a ten-year project. I'll be 78 when the ten years have passed. I'm going to put all my work on the Web in various places, and as you say, I'll learn from the process. My stories, maybe a couple of novels, maybe even some of my poetry. And I'm not going to worry about it.
And it has, as you say, an element of "future shock" to it, this Internet business. The world is changing. Everything's accelerating. The world is zooming by. I was in the supermarket yesterday. There's this old guy, all white hair and pink skin, face moist with the work, checking groceries. It's an assembly line with the constant beep, beep, beep. He's punching in prices and remembering and not remembering produce numbers. I always exchange some chat with him. He has recalled a produce number without having to look it up. I tease him, "You remember the numbers!" I exclaim. He laughs. "Some of them." Then he says, "I can't even remember what I had for breakfast." And of course neither can I.
I am thankful that I do not have to be a cashier in my old age. But I admire him. He likes talking to the people and the job keeps him vital. He's almost too old for the work and pretty soon people might be saying he's too slow…
The last part of life is coming to grips with not only death but with the decline in our abilities and with the realization of who we are, since most of the evidence is already in.
Your friend,
Dennis
Friday, October 16, 2009
Yoga: Sacred and Profane
The dilemma we all face is the dilemma that stood in vast array before Arjuna of the Bhagavad Gita. The young warrior of noble birth, strong of arm and wise beyond his years, sat before the great field of battle and doubted.
Doubted.
He doubted whether it was to any good purpose to continue, whether it made any human sense to kill those who came to fight against his army. Many of them were kin. How could he bring himself to kill them? What if he won? What would be gained? What if he lost? But Krishna urged him on by saying that effectively speaking he had no choice.
But Arjuna was a young man with all of his life before him. Not to fight would in effect be suicidal, psychologically speaking, as he would lose face with his fellows, and worse. So he really had no choice.
In a larger sense none of us have any choice. We too must fight. The enemy is delusion and doubt. It is lack of confidence in ourselves and our will to power that holds us back. We slay not, neither do we die, says Krishna.
But let's put aside the Bhagavad Gita for the time being. Instead consider this little ditty:
I went to the animal fair,
The birds and the bees were there;
The big baboon by the light of the moon
Was combing his auburn hair.
Which might well be:
The world's a vanity fair,
With bangles and beads to snare;
Where we sing the tune to break the gloom
While combing our auburn hair.
Howard Bloom wants his book to be a success, a big success. It's a big book with a big subject. He put his heart and soul into the book and he knows that if the book is to be a success he has to put his heart and soul into marketing it. He is counting the days down and sharing with his friends the experience. He is going to appear on radio and TV. It's doubtful that he can interest Oprah, but perhaps NPR will schedule him, maybe he can go on Bill O'Reilly. He will go on tour and give talks and sign copies of his book. He will see the adoring eyes upon him and hear the cheers.
Howard Bloom, as I have said, is a brilliant man. He has great energy and is a formidable scholar who understands the human predicament as a Solomon might.
I haven't read the book yet, but I will as I have read three of his other books, one in digital manuscript.
He is reinventing capitalism, and we all know how desperately capitalism needs reinventing. Naysayers are suggesting darkly that capitalism is a ponzi scheme on the future. They see the pollution and the exploitation. They see the giant international corporations as psychopathic entities who “externalize” costs by dumping their excreta into our oceans and waterways and into the atmosphere. They see how the corporations with their profits buy up the politicians so that their bidding might be done. They see how the corporations buy advertising and pundits in the media to better manipulate the mass mind so that we might continue to blindly acquiesce in their rape of the planet.
Well, no, Howard Bloom won't be saying anything like this. He will present solutions to these problems or show how these problems are illusory. He is reinventing capitalism. And I wish him well.
But I too have written a book. It is called Yoga: Sacred and Profane. Its theme is that the yoga that has come down to us is not the complete yoga, that yoga is more than artful exercise, that yoga is a great psychology, a “religion” if you will that confronts the dilemma of life head on and like Buddhism presents a way to what in Christianity is called “salvation” or “the peace that passeth understanding,” and what in Zen is called “satori.” I have spent thirty-five years writing it and living it. I have read hundreds of books and spent thousands of hours in practice.
Yoga: Sacred and Profane leads to an understanding of yoga that both a rationalist and a spiritualist would appreciate.
I would like Yoga: Sacred and Profane to reach a large audience, but I am a writer not a publicist. I am a yogin not a media maven. I need a publisher, an editor, and a publicist. Perhaps I will get them.
At any rate for now I will “publish” Yoga: Sacred and Profane in another Google blog of that name and elsewhere and hope that my efforts at marketing will be successful. Why? Because Yoga: Sacred and Profane is great work. I say this without any false modesty or false immodesty. I say it because I have studied not just yoga but all the great religions of the world and have lived the life of a jnana yogin for many years. I know a truth deeper than my skin. What I know is the way to samadhi, and I can show it to you.
--Dennis Littrell
Doubted.
He doubted whether it was to any good purpose to continue, whether it made any human sense to kill those who came to fight against his army. Many of them were kin. How could he bring himself to kill them? What if he won? What would be gained? What if he lost? But Krishna urged him on by saying that effectively speaking he had no choice.
But Arjuna was a young man with all of his life before him. Not to fight would in effect be suicidal, psychologically speaking, as he would lose face with his fellows, and worse. So he really had no choice.
In a larger sense none of us have any choice. We too must fight. The enemy is delusion and doubt. It is lack of confidence in ourselves and our will to power that holds us back. We slay not, neither do we die, says Krishna.
But let's put aside the Bhagavad Gita for the time being. Instead consider this little ditty:
I went to the animal fair,
The birds and the bees were there;
The big baboon by the light of the moon
Was combing his auburn hair.
Which might well be:
The world's a vanity fair,
With bangles and beads to snare;
Where we sing the tune to break the gloom
While combing our auburn hair.
Howard Bloom wants his book to be a success, a big success. It's a big book with a big subject. He put his heart and soul into the book and he knows that if the book is to be a success he has to put his heart and soul into marketing it. He is counting the days down and sharing with his friends the experience. He is going to appear on radio and TV. It's doubtful that he can interest Oprah, but perhaps NPR will schedule him, maybe he can go on Bill O'Reilly. He will go on tour and give talks and sign copies of his book. He will see the adoring eyes upon him and hear the cheers.
Howard Bloom, as I have said, is a brilliant man. He has great energy and is a formidable scholar who understands the human predicament as a Solomon might.
I haven't read the book yet, but I will as I have read three of his other books, one in digital manuscript.
He is reinventing capitalism, and we all know how desperately capitalism needs reinventing. Naysayers are suggesting darkly that capitalism is a ponzi scheme on the future. They see the pollution and the exploitation. They see the giant international corporations as psychopathic entities who “externalize” costs by dumping their excreta into our oceans and waterways and into the atmosphere. They see how the corporations with their profits buy up the politicians so that their bidding might be done. They see how the corporations buy advertising and pundits in the media to better manipulate the mass mind so that we might continue to blindly acquiesce in their rape of the planet.
Well, no, Howard Bloom won't be saying anything like this. He will present solutions to these problems or show how these problems are illusory. He is reinventing capitalism. And I wish him well.
But I too have written a book. It is called Yoga: Sacred and Profane. Its theme is that the yoga that has come down to us is not the complete yoga, that yoga is more than artful exercise, that yoga is a great psychology, a “religion” if you will that confronts the dilemma of life head on and like Buddhism presents a way to what in Christianity is called “salvation” or “the peace that passeth understanding,” and what in Zen is called “satori.” I have spent thirty-five years writing it and living it. I have read hundreds of books and spent thousands of hours in practice.
Yoga: Sacred and Profane leads to an understanding of yoga that both a rationalist and a spiritualist would appreciate.
I would like Yoga: Sacred and Profane to reach a large audience, but I am a writer not a publicist. I am a yogin not a media maven. I need a publisher, an editor, and a publicist. Perhaps I will get them.
At any rate for now I will “publish” Yoga: Sacred and Profane in another Google blog of that name and elsewhere and hope that my efforts at marketing will be successful. Why? Because Yoga: Sacred and Profane is great work. I say this without any false modesty or false immodesty. I say it because I have studied not just yoga but all the great religions of the world and have lived the life of a jnana yogin for many years. I know a truth deeper than my skin. What I know is the way to samadhi, and I can show it to you.
--Dennis Littrell
Thursday, October 15, 2009
The Genius of Howard Bloom
I recently had an email conversation with Howard Bloom, author of the forthcoming The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Revision of Capitalism (2009). In part it went like this:
Howard wrote to some of his many friends: "When we contribute to social groups we're part of, we are alert, vigorous, and healthy. When we don't make a contribution, we are grabbed by a process like apoptosis--pre-programmed cell death. We go from active to lethargic and from exhilarated to morose. What pushes the switch from agony to ecstasy? How do we know when we're making a contribution? Attention."
He added: "May the fascinated eyes of other always be upon you."
I wrote: "I learned the truth of this in my life as well. But what I want to do is become non-attached. While 'freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose' (perhaps) I would like to become free of all of society's indoctrinations, all of the evolutionary mechanism's imperatives, and swim in the sea of the fish without desire for more than simple creature comforts."
Howard returned: "Keep in mind, Dennis, that too much detachment is death. And your pains and passions keep you alive...and keep you contributing to the rest of us, including me. Howard."
I wrote: "Well, you got that right. I'm impressed. It took me many years to understand the dilemma: the end of desire is death."
Howard wrote: "This has just gone into my epigram folder: The end of desire is death. Dennis Littrell"
Consequently I was inspired to begin this blog.
Howard Bloom (not to be confused with the literary critic Harold Bloom) is also the author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History (1995) and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000) among other works. He is a brilliant man with incredible reserves of energy. Reading him is an eye-opener. See my reviews at Amazon."
But what is this "dilemma" mentioned above?
The answer in the next post.
--Dennis Littrell
Howard wrote to some of his many friends: "When we contribute to social groups we're part of, we are alert, vigorous, and healthy. When we don't make a contribution, we are grabbed by a process like apoptosis--pre-programmed cell death. We go from active to lethargic and from exhilarated to morose. What pushes the switch from agony to ecstasy? How do we know when we're making a contribution? Attention."
He added: "May the fascinated eyes of other always be upon you."
I wrote: "I learned the truth of this in my life as well. But what I want to do is become non-attached. While 'freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose' (perhaps) I would like to become free of all of society's indoctrinations, all of the evolutionary mechanism's imperatives, and swim in the sea of the fish without desire for more than simple creature comforts."
Howard returned: "Keep in mind, Dennis, that too much detachment is death. And your pains and passions keep you alive...and keep you contributing to the rest of us, including me. Howard."
I wrote: "Well, you got that right. I'm impressed. It took me many years to understand the dilemma: the end of desire is death."
Howard wrote: "This has just gone into my epigram folder: The end of desire is death. Dennis Littrell"
Consequently I was inspired to begin this blog.
Howard Bloom (not to be confused with the literary critic Harold Bloom) is also the author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History (1995) and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000) among other works. He is a brilliant man with incredible reserves of energy. Reading him is an eye-opener. See my reviews at Amazon."
But what is this "dilemma" mentioned above?
The answer in the next post.
--Dennis Littrell
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