Book Review: Family Is Forever: High School 1950-1954

The third volume of Shirley Skufca Hickman’s autobiography

By William Silveira

On July 25, my wife, Marylin, and I drove to Porterville to join Joe and Shirley Hickman for lunch. I had taken a speech class from Shirley in my junior year at Tulare Union High School (1958-1959). Shirley had just graduated from Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado, and this teaching assignment in Tulare, California was her first.

As the World Turns: A fool and his wall

By Ed Rogers

A wall is built to keep something or someone out. It is supposed to make the builder of the wall feel safe. In most cases, it does just that – until the wall is breached for the first time. The fear of being unprotected is overwhelming at that point. It is more intense even than before the wall was built, because there is no backup plan. Once your wall is breached, your faith in it will never be the same. Your only choice or hope is to find a bigger and better wall – right?

Growing Up in America: American movies in the 1950s

Prolog

By Rolf Dumke

Movies in the 1950s were an intoxicating and disturbing experience for an immigrant boy. They exposed the psychic underbelly of an America disturbed by Freud, sex, women, and crime; troubled by the Cold War struggle between patriotic Americans and communist traitors; haunted by Ray Bradbury’s and Orson Welles’s impending attacks by aliens from outer space; and unbalanced by the drama in American high schools that created or cemented social barriers, allocating dramatically different life chances among its students.

Poetry & Portraits: Sondheim

By Eric Meub
 







 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
Has no one seen? Has no one yet been told
      a star is being born in me at last?
Who grouses I’m too old, that I’m a mold
      from which one character alone is cast?

Correspondence: From scientific research

Edited by Moristotle

Interesting combination of technology and art : “Finding Degas’s Lost Portrait with a Particle Accelerator” [Steph Yin, NY Times, August 4]. Excerpt:

Succulent succulent

With gratitude for my gardening wife

By Moristotle

Don't ask me what the succulent’s Latin name is – I haven’t asked my wife yet.

Movie Review: Gladiator

Finding Elysium

By Kyle Garza

Since its introduction to the big screen in the year 2000, Gladiator has met heavy-handed criticism from Christian film critics, largely because of its “gratuitous” violence. I argue, however, that the violence in Gladiator is always purposeful, serving the greater purpose of characterizing the virtues in its combatant protagonist, Maximus Decimus Meridius. Upon a first viewing, Maximus’s story seems to be yet another tale of vengeance and gore that encourages our desire to see wicked villains slain. With a little more reflection, though, we can discover that Gladiator has much more to say about love and service, and in fact uses Maximus to discourage bloodlust and carnage as mere means of entertainment.

Preliminary response to the reader survey

How to follow us by email

By Moristotle

Thank everyone who has already taken the survey [“SURVEY: Tell us how you read & comment on Moristotle & Co.”], which will continue for a few more days.

In Your Dreams: Attend your own funeral

And who was that prostitute?

By Moristotle

The first dream (night of August 3-4). Because my funeral was scheduled to commence in a couple of hours (around 1 p.m.), and I was on the program to perform a classical piano selection for it, we (that is, my over-the-shoulder assistant – or perhaps my manager – and I) had to decide whether I knew the music well enough to do it. We judged that I didn’t, so we decided that we would play a recording of the music and I would sit at the piano and play along with it – sort of finger-syncing.
    We had to get to the venue in time for me to retrieve the sheet music. We arrived – it didn’t seem to be a church (“thank God!”) – but I dilly-dallied the time away and, seconds away from when I was scheduled to start, I had not yet assembled the sheet music I was to “play” from.
    I woke up.

Considerations. Well, the first point has to be that I was supposedly attending my own funeral. If it was someone else’s funeral, I failed to comprehend that, and I did have the sense as the dream went along that it was my funeral, and this didn’t seem strange to me or my assistant manager.
    The second point is that I can’t play anything on a piano, let alone classical music. And not only could I not play such music, neither could I convincingly “finger-sync” doing so.
    A perhaps obvious “meaning” of the dream might be that I have been ill-prepared to live my life, I have not known its “music” but have only gone through the motions of living, so that being alive at my own funeral isn’t strange – I have been dead the whole time anyway. And my being in no hurry to find the sheet music suggests that I have not applied myself to finding the music of living my life.
    All of which seems absurd somehow, and singularly off the mark. Perhaps nothing more is “meant” than that I have some second-thoughts about the actual music that has been my life’s soundtrack?
    Was the only constructive thing I did in the entire dream…to wake up? And is my task now simply to consider what other kinds of music I might pursue?
    One thing strikes me about my life: I work hard, and I am future-oriented in planning projects I need to get done, whether to get through a day or a week of home life or to publish whichever of Moristotle & Co.’s recurring columns have recently accrued. All of these activities are enjoyable, but....Could they be more enjoyable if I could “be present” more in the moment of doing them, and less “in the future” planning my next move?

---

The second dream (night of August 5-6). I was sitting in an upholstered chair in a sort of student center (a busy, crowded, large, public sort of room, anyway), with a fair amount of my “stuff” lying in the seat on other side of me. A woman I recognized from about 40 years earlier at IBM rushed up, desperately in need of using the toilet, which my upholstered chair in the crowded public space had suddenly become (or been revealed to be, although it still looked like an ordinary upholstered chair with a fairly wide and deep seat). There was no question that, of course, I would get up and let her “use the toilet.”
    Nothing else passed between us; we didn’t say hello or anything else. I simply stood up and gathered my stuff, which mainly included several lemons and several limes. I stuffed as many as I could into my pockets and carried the rest away in my hands.
    I didn’t watch her “go to the toilet.”
    In the next scene I was reconnoitering with my team of detectives in another area of the “center” - it seems we were there investigating something, although I can’t remember whether I had a sense of this as I was sitting in the upholstered chair. One of my colleagues asked, “Who was that prostitute?”
    Without hesitation I said the name of the woman who had asked to “use the toilet” and told them what years she had worked at IBM. My colleagues were amazed that I knew her and even knew “all about her.”
    I didn’t question the term “prostitute,” although the woman had never been a prostitute to my knowledge.
    And then I woke up.

Considerations. I don’t think I’d dreamed about the woman in many years, and I can’t remember when I ever did, although I suppose I must have. The most striking thing about this dream (even more striking than the strange “toilet chair”) is that this person showed up in it. And I suppose that the dream’s “meaning” must somehow involve her identity and be centered on the fact that the chair I was sitting in was the one that she wanted to use, not someone else’s – couldn’t all of the chairs in the large room have had the same property? (This question didn’t come up in the dream.)
    And what about those lemons & limes? Why citrus fruits? Vitamin C? The colors – bright green & yellow? Beats me.
    Or could “prostitute” be my psyche’s assessment of my dealings with the woman, and the dream’s message be that I have now evacuated all its remains?

Copyright © 2016 by Moristotle

West Coast Observer: Great divides

In California & beyond

By William Silveira

I have agreed to become a commentator for Moristotle & Co. I hope that what I have to say does not prove to be too soporific to the blog’s readers. And I hope that I will have the inspiration to say something of interest at least once a month.

Boldt Words & Images: On the 71st anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

A meditation in five acts

By Bob Boldt

“My God, what have we done?”
–Bob Lewis, the Enola Gay co-pilot

Act One: Video selections from Alain Resnais’ 1959 film, Hiroshima Mon Amour (French), with music by Giovanni Fusco and George Delerue 

Correspondence: Nightmares

“The Nightmare,” by Henry Fuseli

Edited by Moristotle

I had an election nightmare last night . It was November 8, 2016, and recent polls showed that American voters preferred Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump, 67% to 29%, with 4% undecided.

Sketches from Salt Lake: The Farmers Market

By Geoffrey Dean

Two weekends ago, we made our first visit of 2016 to the SLC Farmers Market. Now in its 25th year, the market brings local farmers, craftspeople, and their customers each Saturday to Pioneer Park in downtown SLC. This time we parked on 200 W, passing the hundred-year-old Broadway Hotel on 300 S (also known as, you guessed it, Broadway) on our way to the northeast corner of the park.

Correspondence: America’s new Manchurian candidate

Edited by Moristotle

Too bad you didn’t have this photo of “Trumpet Mouth” on Sunday (“Tricker Tweeter”), from “A cesspool with teeth…AKA Donald Trump’s mouth…” [Pouring My Mouth Out, July 31]

Movie Review: Genius

Who is the genius?

By Jonathan Price

Genius is a movie you’re likely to miss, but shouldn’t. In our little burg it got two stars out of four, an invitation to skip it, and ran for perhaps one week at the local art theatre downtown. It was previewed in advance a number of times, but apparently never made it out of its dim downtown venue, and may have been seen by 300 people – perhaps – in a metropolitan area of one million.