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Art Exhibit..., Aphorisms..., Poland..., Nursing ... , Vagabond..., Star Trek..., Voting..., Other...
London Calling's Pixel and Paper Gallery will feature WM's artwork (woodcuts) starting February 1st.
http://www.demon.co.uk/london-calling/artgal.html
Dear Mr. Markiewicz:
I found your name on a listing of authors on the internet and saw on you list of interests aphorisms and journalism. My name is Nick Haskett, and I am the faculty adviser for the Collinsville High School newspaper in Illinois.
I have a couple of questions. First, as a class assignment (I also teach Lit.) I sometimes make my students write original aphorisms. Some of them are pretty good. Would you be interested in seeing them? If so, I could send them to you.
Second, I have been trying to contact celebrities (actors, athletes, authors, etc.) via e-mail to arrange interviews (via exchange of e-mail or by phone) with my journalism students. So far the only one that has worked out has been with Edd Hall (Jay Leno's announcer). I perused the member directory of AOL and found some (like Uma Thurman and Al Pacino) who pretended to be the real thing but turned out to be fakes. My question is, do you have any idea how I could find some genuine e-mail addresses for such people. I know they don't want to be bothered by millions of fans, but it seems like they are SO insulated from any outside contact.
Anyway, thank you for your time and consideration.
Nick
KAHOKI1@aol.com
A person who uses drugs for a high is like someone who sets his house afire because he's cold.
People who talk about everything talk about nothing.
Fighting for peace is like having sex for chastity.
Dreams are like ice cubes - if you don't take action, they will disappear.
Thinking of aphorisms is like digging for treasure without a map.
Parents are like broken records -- they keep repeating themselves.
Three people may be close friends till one leaves the room.
To love is to bare your neck to the guillotine's blade.
Life is like an egg - one wrong move and you're scrambled.
Men are like infants, you have to guess at what they want.
Listen to many, but trust only a few.
Only one side of a story is like a lifesaver - there is always a hole in it.
Freshman are like trees - they just stand there.
Boys come and go, but credit cards are forever.
Remember that winners do what losers don't want to do.
What you put off today will be here tomorrow.
If guns cause crime, then matches cause arson.
He who aims at nothing will hit it.
Cars are like women -- if you spend a lot of money on them, they'll look good.
Pan Markiewicz,
I just returned from a four-year stay in Poland from June 1991-July 1995, and appreciated the paradoxes mentioned in your piece on the Polish Home Page. In spent time as an English teacher in Szczecin and as an art student at A.S.P. Krakow, and, as bizarre as it seems for an American kid from Tennessee without an ounce of Polish heritage, I spent a year as a (very) minor celebrity on RMF-FM one of the two nation-wide radio stations.
A fellow vagabond named English Elvis, who also found himself wandering in Poland, called Krakow "The Nexus: Some Sort of Time/Space Continuum." For me, this is the most accurate description. Stary Rynek is a labyrinth where every political and social innovation gets lost and finds itself tangled up in some piwnica or jumbled together with King Kazimierz's crows and Kantor's walking canes, with Tartars approaching the river's edge and Russian tanks hiding over the hills.
I love Krakow and Poland, and since I've returned to Chicago have been bored silly. It seems I need the ridiculously tragic paradoxes of Poland's history (mixed with a hearty sense of humor).
Take care. Trzymaj sie.
Brian Durand
bdurand@artic.edu
Greetings,
Just a little feedback on your article. No offense, but it's a little tedious by now with all the references to freedom of speech. Enjoyed most of it though.
regards
Peter
102146.165@compuserv.com
I stumbled on this page today and it's been a pleasure. Today I was going do something on the Internet besides browse and play. I thought I might read instead of just looking at the pictures, and wham! I read The Pity and the Horror. I have been a nurse or working in hospitals since I graduated from high school.
I have recently been thinking about getting out of nursing because of the day to day depression and pain I see. You want to make it all better but you can't. When you have to give people bad news and they look at you with those "do something eyes" It is sometimes too much to take.
I am hurt that you had to go through that situation. I work every day to make sure that it doesn't happen when I am on my unit. The article made me feel ashamed for the times that I did not intervene.
I have love being a nurse. It is just recently that it has been becoming harder to remember that. Though never because of the patients that I care for. It's just the crap you have to wade through to get to your patient sometimes. Most all of my experiences in nursing people have been good, and growing experiences but it only takes one to slam the fight out of you for awhile. And sometimes they seem to come at you all at once in threes, one hour before it is time for you to leave. I get a lot of end of shift overtime.
Today your words helped inspire me. I especially liked the Western peoples and Culture.
I will post the article The Pity and the Horror at work.
Thank you.
Gerald Stassines RN
Stass1@sojourn.com
Hi--
I came across your page the other day and just wanted to say that I enjoyed your site. Being a big ST fan I couldn't resist your piece on the show.
I too consider ST to be "a pearl" amongst the too often shallow and Hollywoodish shows on TV. In fact, I consider it my favourite show, as it explores themes and ideas that most TV leaves untouched. Nevertheless, your article comes as no surprise.
I read a few days ago in a book I picked up about all the problems TNG has experienced over the years. To keep it short, the show is produced as if our government was in control...
After reading this, I suddenly discovered that may favourite show -- my pearl -- was just another victim of our entertainment-first media. Gene may have had a vision, but it was severely distorted. You are dead on when you talk about shallow aliens, and our ethno-centrism.
I guess that the majority of people out there don't really care about *real* exploration. I sometimes wish, however, that someone could just say the hell with them, and give us something really good... (only to be cancelled;) )
Anyways, keep up the good work.
Brett
bretts@idirect.com
William,
... You've got some really interesting insights here -- I liked the Canada piece a lot and the revisit to Paris. Everything *does* seem to be blanding out around the world, but I guess as the companies destroy the people who work for them and reinvent feudal society, the old helter-skelter will come back, though maybe not in so nice a way. Interesting to see the French burn tires and block runways when the government tries to screw them over, whereas the Americans these days just look blank and vote Republican.
Derek Davis
derek@tomte.com
Silly Little Tomte Publications
http://pobox.com/slt/
Just dropped by to visit your site. The work was as excellent as always. I especially enjoyed the communications section. There were some excellent letters, some really moving words...
Take care, --
Craig A. Vitter
vitter@postoffice.ptd.net
@EZine
http://home.ptd.net/~vitter/@ezine.htm
William:
On your major thesis about the unpredictable alchemy, the luck and serendipity of our search for a safe path through the swamps of reality, I completely agree. However in most other ways we diverge and I think I know why.
Whereas you were born and educated in Europe, I was born and educated in England and in the United States. Thus I have learned to think in sharp Anglo Saxon boxes, whereas you think in European categories, which appear to me headlong and scattered. I don't mean to offend you, for your modes of thought are common to most Europeans, whereas to my sensibility, European thinkers, and especially French intellectuals, comport themselves in an antic and zany manner. This is a clash of cultures, not of persons.
The chasm between England and Europe has lasted since Roman times and will, I deeply hope, ultimately shipwreck European political unity. We English, for I think of myself as an Englishman self-exiled to Canada, have displayed our indifference to Europe ever since the monk Pelagius uttered his heresies, and we continue with confidence to do so.
British minds have always run in empirical and commonsense tracks, and that's how they trained me to think. I am well satisfied with it. It has nonetheless led me into a large and subtle metaphysics, which is not what my educators intended. Europeans in my view are educated to become theoreticians so that they tend to weave intricate basketworks of suppositions which rarely feel impelled to take account of actual events. Karl Marx was a typical European theoretician and the English empiricists like Bertrand Russell didn't take to him kindly. They turned out to be right. So I find it hard to map your ideas into mine.
I'm not saying you are a Marxist, for I know you abhor that ideology even more than I do, for you have personal experience of it and I have not. In almost every way you and I share our humanistic concerns. Even so the coordinates of our personal maps just won't line up. Our thoughts are mutually incommensurable, but not, I hope, mutually incomprehensible.
You make such breathtaking assumptions in each sidelong phrase that I grope to place a surveyor's point where we can begin to bring the threads of our ideas together. Let me just take your proposition, "It seems that the first goal of the voting process is to give the voters a chance to show their political maturity by selecting the best politicians and the best program."
My education and subsequent lifelong experience of the Anglo-Saxon political process tells me the first goal of the voting process resembles nothing like your suggestion. The right to vote is not a chance to display maturity. It is and always has been, since the days of antiquity, a procedure for making public decisions out of private preferences.
I have to make my history brief, so permit me to surf over the tips of a thousand subtle waves. The ancient aim is to reconcile, so far as possible, public necessities and personal values. Now, if I may jump-cut to the instantiation of that aim in the British tradition, British voting ever since the barons imposed their will on King John has always moved to exclude people who have no stake in the public wellbeing, or else who lack the ability to choose well, even privately. The rules evolved instinctively so as to exclude unqualified, unstable, unmotivated, evil and capricious voters.
Women and children, though not necessarily evil, are probably capricious, like lunatics and imbeciles -- we are thinking here in actuarial terms -- though criminals are certainly evil, and none of them should vote in the public interest.
The rules, then, unconsciously and correctly assumed the inequality of man, and starting with Simon de Montford, restricted the vote to property owners and preferably noblemen. The Englishman's home is his castle, and if he doesn't own a castle then he can raise no voice in public affairs. Quite right too.
The rise to power of commercial men in Tudor and Stuart times led to the enfranchisement of commoners. Since all merchants and customers are equal in the coin-shaped eyes of the marketplace the insidious abstract doctrine of human equality began to poison the stream of public discourse. By 1776 the damage was done and the equality of man took its treacherous place at the head of the political table.
Now it is from this nonsense that the illegitimate generalization has proceeded: Namely, that if tradesmen can vote then so can women and if women then so can teenagers and if teenagers then so can imbeciles, criminals and lunatics.
Well, I don't intend to refute you point by point but you can see how our paths of thought diverge.
The Daedalus of British empirical philosophy, the Austrian Sir Karl Popper, has given us the only thread that will guide us safely through the lethal labyrinths of circumstance. That thread is Popper's empirical search algorithm of conjectures and refutations, the alchemical method by which I have arrived at my own philosophy.
(We must also be grateful to Popper for his poetic genius in naming and thereby bringing into existence, the Open Society).
As you know, I am expatiating on that and other matters in my own Web pages at URL:
http://www.well.com/user/rcl/index.html
Richard Lubbock
this internet is really far out - like a global community - sounds hokey but look at what we just shared... when tv goes to sleep at night it dreams that it's the world wide web...
Charles
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