"Singles Day" by Scott Keene

This piece comes out of a writing session done at the Library Coffeehouse Writers Group in Long Beach, Ca., which Calvin Harris H.W., M. conducts. It is written by, writer and friend Scott Keene of Long Beach, Ca.

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There it was a date February 15, and there were even cards for it. They were right there next to the Valentine's Day cards and the Get-Well-Soon. He had never even heard of Single's Day and now here was a whole section.

    He was one of those people who believed that most of the holidays - at least all the lovey-dovey "National So-and-So Day" were just fodder for the greeting card industry. But still, he found himself needing one today. A "get-well-soon" this time which he wanted for a co-worker and casual acquaintance. Someone with whom he was terribly close wouldn't need a card - they would know in person how he felt.

    So, he stood and stared at the Single's Day section and wondered: was he still a single or was he now a couple?

 Participation in the writing group could lead you to find out something that you hadn’t revealed to yourself before.  If nothing else, you will have creative fun time in a relax supportive atmosphere.

Looking forward to your call or email letting me know your thoughts.

NOTE: Additional day and/or evening sessions are being considered for 2017 Calendar, please inquire and/or signup. Groups sizes are limited. 

For More Information or to RSVP
Send Calvin an email message to: things2cal@gmail.com, or call 949-331-7200

Valentine's Day

By Marni Spencer-Devlin

Below is an all too familiar tale for many.  It comes out of a writing session done at the Library Coffeehouse Writers Group in Long Beach, Ca., by writer, author, and Friend  Marni Spencer-Devlin.

She hated the day; hated it with a passion. It was the day that every TV commercial and newspaper ad, every flower shop, heck, even the grocery stores and the car dealerships banded together to thump their collective noses at her: “ You’re alone! You’re weird! You’re not good enough. You’re not pretty enough! You’re single -  because nobody wants you!”

All the other days of the year she could brush over the facts. She actually had a lot of friends; a lot of guy friends, even. In many ways she was very popular. Well-liked, in that she-has-great-personality kind of way. Her guy friends always included her in everything but that was because nobody considered her, in even the remotest sense, girlfriend material

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Usually she was fine with it but today was that one truly dreaded day. None of her friends were available to hang out because they were all off on romantic dates. She had no such obligation and today it just got to her. The walls of her apartment were closing in on her. She could not bear to spend one more moment behind those lonely barriers. But she could not go out anywhere either. Every restaurant was running Valentine’s specials; every café chockfull of lovers. So she just went outside and sat on her stop and cried. Which made her feel even more lonely and pathetic. Which made her cry even harder.

She felt someone standing in front of her. Oh no! She didn’t want to lift her head. She didn’t want to move her hands from her face. She knew she was a pathetic, snotty mess. She didn’t even have a handkerchief.

“Melanie?”

Oh no! The Someone knew her name!!? Now she would have to respond!

“Melanie, are you crying?”

Well duh! Clearly A Rhoades Scholar!

She didn’t recognize the voice. And she didn’t want to look up.

“Melanie, it’s Frank from the Bodega across the street? Melanie, I’m here to give you these…”

She eyed through her fingers and spied the most beautiful, huge bouquet of pink Peonies she had ever seen!

“Melanie, I have admired you from afar for so many years. I was always too shy to say something. But today I thought….well…here goes….

“Melanie…will you be my Valentine?”

Does Time Exist

Why our gut feelings are no match for physics
Discourse by James Gleick, author and science historian.

Article reported on by MIKE ZONTA for the BathtubBulletin.com

Physics often makes a fool of our gut feelings. James Gleick, author of Time Travel: A History makes this point using the most elemental example. You, sitting or standing to read this now, your gut feeling and experience tells you that you’re sitting or standing on a flat plane, on an immobile surface. Science has some news for you though, in Gleick’s words: “You’re actually on the surface of a giant sphere that’s spinning at high speed and hurtling through space, and by the way there’s no difference between up and down except an illusion that’s created by the force of gravity.”

Radical readjustments of accepted perception is central to the nature of physics – even if something isn’t proven, our mind has to stay open to the possibility that maybe, things aren’t as we see, feel or intuit them to be. This is particularly relevant to the debate surrounding time. Does time exist, or doesn’t it? Is time only inside our minds, or is it a force acting upon us? It might seem ridiculous to question the existence of something that radically shapes our lives – our days, hours, minutes, our life span, our grandparents, our grandchildren.

Einstein’s teacher and contemporary Hermann Minkowski offered his vision of space-time as a single thing, a four-dimensional block in which the past and the future are just like spatial dimensions, with a north and a south. Some physicists say there is no distinction between the past and the future, and that time is a dimension just like space.

This seems at odds with what we feel, which is that the past has happened and the future is not yet determined. The future and the past are different to us, but in physics they’re the same. Gleick’s realization in the face of the multiple hypotheses on time is that just as our feeling about the stability of the surface we walk on is not so simple, our perception of time may also be radically more complex than we think. At this point, every expert’s ideas in this debate are provisional, but we have an obligation to take these ideas seriously.

Meditating on a spirituality of wholeness

by William Fennie

A Gnostic Book of Hours
June Singer
HarperCollins, 1992

At the turn of the 1990s Jungian analyst June Singer had completed what she thought would be her final work, Seeing through the Visible World: Jung, Gnosis, and Chaos. Fortunately for us, a muse came and "sat on her shoulder," telling her that she had yet one more work to complete. Because of that fortuitous event we have A Gnostic Book of Hours, Keys to Inner Wisdom.

The work is just what you would expect from a person of such accomplishment toward the end of her professional career. Her masterful blending of the Rule of Saint Benedict, which reaches into the roots of the European monastic tradition, and "heretical" texts which the Roman Catholic Church and others have for centuries tried to suppress by every possible means, shows a deft and subtle hand as well as profound spiritual intuition.

The Benedictine Offices (periods of prayer) are: Matins (night); Lauds (daybreak); Prime (early morning); Terce (midmorning); Sext (midday); None (mid afternoon); Vespers (sunset); and Compline (bedtime).

For each of these periods Dr. Singer has selected one portion of the Gnostic writings that were uncovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945. She very thoughtfully matches the subject matter of the scriptural extract to the time of day when the meditation will take place. Then, over the period of seven days, there are seven sections of the reading, each with its own annotation and commentary.

The combined impact is formidable. I use this book three or four times every the year, and each time I use it I see very significant results. Just making sure that I stop at the various times during the day to do the meditation completely changes the nature of how I live in the world. As Dr.  Singer writes, the primary purpose of a Book of Hours was "to enable the reader to maintain an awareness of the presence of the divine mystery within the everyday world."

The nature of the texts corresponds very well with a spirituality that seeks to engage with both the inner and outer aspect of life, both the male and female aspects of the divine. In addition to seeing a recognition of the the feminine divine we run across many references familiar to those of us who were brought up in the Christian tradition. Here, for example, is an extract from the Apocryphon of John:

The Womb of Every Thing

"The invisible Spirit looks at himself
  in the light that surrounds him, the water of life.
"He gives to every realm in every way,
  putting his desire into the spring of the pure-light water.
"His thought performed a deed, and she came forth:
  she appeared before him in the radiance of his light.
"Her light shines like his light,
  the perfect power of the virginal Spirit.
"She is the First Power to come forth from his mind.
"She is the Forethought of the All."

In tandem with Dr. Singer's cogent reflections, these become genuine meditations, not formulas: they encourage reflection, even life-review. By the time the week is over you have traversed a long road into your unique inner universe.

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The book is beautifully ornamented with images from Ethiopian Coptic Magic Scrolls - all in all, a beautiful book. A paperback edition was re-issued after the original printing sold out. It's very nice, but these days you can get an even finer first-edition hardback through one of the associated vendors at Barnes and Noble or other book sellers.

If you want to learn more about the gnostic tradition and its history, look for Elaine Pagels' works, "The Gnostic Gospels" and "Beyond Belief."

Waiting for the Writing Muse

By Scott Keene

Hey,

It's been a tough week.

So Here's the story -

He just wasn't feeling it. He knew inspiration would come. It always did. Or usually did, he found himself correcting himself. So he had no doubt that inspiration would strike at just the right moment.

It's hot. Too hot for coffee. Two things he thought he'd never say: it's too hot for coffee and it's too cold for ice cream. and he'd just said one of them. Come December, if he found he was no longer craving ice cream, well, something was seriously wrong.

He looked around the coffee shop for a spark of inspiration. Lots of students, it seemed, the obligatory laptops and textbooks. A zombie or two on a couch in the corner - asleep or possibly passed out from the heat? He couldn't tell. No air conditioner in this place. Had it always been this way? Only ceiling fans making lazy circles overhead. He wasn't sure if they were helping or just pushing the warm air around and making him frustrated.

The walls were lined with bookcases and lots of interesting photographs. His eyes searched for something to hold onto, but... no, nothing yet.

Then he landed on the window. The sun was streaming through and he had moved from the table in front of it because it had just been too damn hot. But now he focused on what was hanging in the window: a pane of stained glass, most likely taken from an actual church. He had seen it many times before, but today he saw something he didn't remember ever seeing before.

Across the bottom, an engraved dedication. "Rev. and Mrs. Samuel Corwin."

That was it. He had it. His inspiration.

Scott Keene is a local Long Beach, California, short story writer and is a member of the Library Coffee House writers group.

My Experience of Discovery with Jean-Paul Basquiat's Notebooks

By Michael Kelly

"In my opinion, an individual without any love of the arts cannot be considered completely civilized. At the same time, it is extremely difficult, and sometimes impossible, to interest people in works of art unless they can see them and know something about them."

—J. Paul Getty, 1965

In a continuing discourse on Art and where to begin finding yours. I would like to present a post by my friend Michael Kelly who, among other things, is a technical business & educational systems creator. -Calvin

On my first visit to the High Museum’s exhibit of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Unknown Notebooks” here in Atlanta, I was disappointed. Close to a hundred pages from the notebooks were displayed in the usual waist-high display cases in two large galleries; it was a very mixed bag: some were interesting, but most seemed to be the product of someone playing with one or two words, or a few lines. Here’s an example:

colors with numbers on the back
brooming into mezzo /aspuria-

You have to picture a page with just these two lines on the top the rest blank. Insight, anyone? It’s true that this is the kind of private noodling that art-history scholars love to sift through, but why was it trumpeted as providing insight into Jean-Michel’s art for the rest of us?

Before saying more about my visits, you should know that this is a traveling exhibit that may come to a Museum near you. It came to the High from the Brooklyn Museum, where it was first organized, and where an important Basquiat show was mounted in 2005. I wanted to see Basquiat’s notebooks because of seeing and enjoying other artists’ notebooks, and because his art is baffling to me. While some of his pieces have a very strong visceral impact, I draw a blank when I try to understand why; many of his pieces hardly register as art, which of course is hardly unique to Basquiat. Although I’ve spent a good number of years in New York’s many museums and galleries enjoying and learning about all kinds of art, especially modern art, I find it difficult to sort out what is going on in any given Basquiat painting—and if you are familiar with his work, you know that there’s typically a lot going on. He put an enormous amount of energy into his work, which attracted me and affected me, but it was also clear that I had very little resonance with what was actually being depicted in the paintings.

Although I left the exhibit disappointed, I was actually still processing a lecture by Franklin Sirmans on Basquiat and his notebooks which I’d attended earlier in the evening. Basquiat was born in New York City on December 22, 1960 and died there in 1988. He emerged as an artist in the 80s, and some of the key points of reference in Mr. Sirmans’ talk were the cultural transformations that Jean-Michel was immersed in during this period: rap music and other kinds of street art, most notably for Jean-Michel graffiti. Where he emerged was in Manhattan’s famous downtown gallery scene, which was scruffy, energetic and Punk.

Discovering that the Notebooks show was closing in a matter of days, I decided to give it one more try. The second time I could feel the pieces start to come together. I realized that I was reading the words on the page in a literal way, as if they were orphans from a story or that he started describing something and kept getting interrupted. In other words, I was reading like I would read my notebook, not like the words of a graffiti artist! And not words from a street-art, rap-inflected view of the world. These neatly printed words were like bits of poems: creating visual imagery in the mind’s eye; testing out how they looked on the page; and experimenting with how they sounded. Once I made that shift, the notebooks came alive for me. I still don’t know what “colors with numbers on the back” means, but as poetry it comes alive: maybe a colored ticket or artist’s paints? And “brooming into Mezzo”—I get that he’s playing with word-sounds: booming into…, brrrroooming into…. I began to peer down at each page, trying to free-associate with each one. It was an intense kind of fun, and had the side-effect of creating a backed up line of museum visitors.

My discovery was to see the notebook pages more like a street-smart graffiti artist with an attitude and a lyrical gift with words as images. It takes time to see something in a new way because we don’t have any indication that we are seeing in a way at all and don’t have a conscious way to change it even if we want to. But despite our habitual ways of seeing, that ones we don’t know are ways, with lots of inputs and a willing attitude our brains are able to process things differently. So be on the lookout for possible visual shifts, and then pay attention when what you obviously see is raw fish—try to get your brain to show you sushi!

Michael Kelly can be contacted thorough his blog Explorations.

Two shorts by Scott Keene

Introducing short story writer Scott Keene of the Long Beach, California, Writing Group

Tattoos & Footsteps

by Scott Keene 27 July 2012

He woke with a start. He looked around the room with sleepy eyes. Where was he? He looked at the nightstand next to the bed. The hotel clock said 3:15. Of course, he sighed. The Marriott near the airport in St. Louis. The connection to Cleveland had been cancelled because of the storm. Southwest had tried to put him up in some crappy hotel that looked like some sort of medieval castle. He wasn't having that. He took his hotel voucher and his Marriott rewards points and gave himself an upgrade.

He lay his head back down on the pillow and let his eyes adjust to the darkness. Then he heard it again. The same sound that had awoken him. Footsteps. Except… no, it couldn't be. They sounded like they were coming from inside the room. He flipped the switch on the lamp next to his side of the bed and listened again. He could hear the faint sound of music coming from somewhere, but he couldn't make out the tune.

He got up, pulled on a t-shirt and jeans and slipped his feet into his loafers. Grabbed the key card and the ice bucket and walked down the hall.

There was a vending machine room at the end of the hall, where the ice machine was. He put the bucket in place and pressed the button. He heard the gentle whir of gears turning, but no ice. He pressed again and still nothing. He turned and walked back towards his room. As he passed room 217, he paused. The music was coming from behind this door. Still, he had trouble recognizing the tune. He leaned forward and gently pressed his ear to the door. Music, yes, but other noises too. Was that…? Yes, just beneath the sound of the music was the soft slapping and moaning of copulation.

He blushed and stepped away from the door. As he turned once again to make his way back to his room, he heard the door to room 217 open. "Hey," the woman said. He faced her, looked her up and down. She was naked he realized but covered nearly head to toe in tattoos. The music was louder now with the door open and he could still hear the sounds of love-making from inside.

Interesting. "Hey," he said, smiling.

Breasts

by Scott Keene 14 April 2016

He had a lot of thoughts about breasts. He was certainly not a breast man, but when prompted to write about breasts, there were several thoughts that came to mind.

He didn’t like the way the female breast was sexualized in American culture. Women were not allowed to be topless. Unless, of course the nipples were covered up. Why was this? Why was it okay to leave the breast exposed as long as the nipple was not revealed. He just didn't get it.

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The Bather, 1858, Gustav Courbet

He remembered watching a special on Discovery Health channel about breast reduction surgery. This is medical. Clinical. There is nothing sexy about breast reduction surgery. Yet when the exam begins, the doctor pulls back the paper gown to reveal the breasts and the nipples are pixelated. Ridiculous.

By contrast, he remembered another special on weight loss. Same type of scenario, only this time the subject was male. The man weighed close to 300 pounds and was about to undergo reduction surgery, including breast reduction. But this time, full male breasts, no nipple pixilation. And this man's breasts were way bigger than the woman's in the other special. He realized, of course, size had nothing to do with it. It was clearly a gender issue.

But he still didn't get it.

Are Beards a Man's Makeup ?

Many thanks to my long-time friend Jimmy Garner for the following post.

This week I spoke, from Hamburg, Germany, with my dear friend Calvin. He mentioned his thoughts about an article/blog for his March website edition concerning Men’s Beards.

November 2015 was National Beard Month and the evidence of this was apparent. From the man on the street, to celebrities, to News anchors, every man seemed to be sporting some sort of facial hair. Having spent some years in the “hair” business, I do have some thoughts about this subject.

I am a 63-year-old man with a sort-of-kind-of salt and pepper hair color on my face and head. Well … I should say of what hair I have left on my head. It seems that being a man of a certain age, I have hair in places I didn’t know I had. However, I have for years worn what I thought was a goatee. After being corrected more than once, and asking the Gods of Google, I found that “the two styles are often confused because of their similarities, but a goatee only covers the chin, while a Van Dyke also includes a mustache”. So, I have a Van Dyke. Who knew?

After many years in the business, I developed the opinion that the older a person becomes, the less hair they have, the younger they look. I am reminded of my first years in my salon, when I entered to see a woman speaking on our client phone, standing with her back to me, wearing a short smock. She had beautiful long blonde hair, arranged off her shoulders down to her mid-back; not to mention gorgeous long legs. However, when she turned around and I saw her face and neck, well … I was shocked. While her face had great character and she carried herself with grace and elegance, she looked just awful, accentuated by the long hair. She appeared more a caricature of her former self. I noticed the same issue with older men and long hair and/or facial hair. It seemed to be a universal generality, the less hair one had, the younger they looked. Of course there can always be the exception. If not for my partner’s preference for facial hair, I would not have any hair on my head, with the exception of eye brows.

My opinion in this was reinforced by watching the development of last years National Beard Month. There were articles aplenty in the newspapers, magazines, TV news programs, and the Internet about the pros and cons, the why and why nots of men’s facial hair over the years. Many articles and comments were quite surprising and even some a bit disgusting. However, what struck me were the visual difference in the younger men vs we older fellows.

Having an aesthetic eye for appearance, I found the older fellows, sporting their 5 o’clock shadows or full beards, usually with greater degrees of gray, looking older for their effort. The younger men looked stylish and many of them quite sexy. Of course, youth has its advantages. Even though it might be an eclectic combination of hair style and clothing, many young people can wear just about anything and get away with it. But for us older gentlemen, it is more like trying to squeeze our middle aged belly into a spandex sport outfit! It just ain’t gonna work! (I’ve always thought Spandex should come with warning labels).

The title of this missive I attribute to my partner; it is his borrowed statement. So should a man’s makeup be just that, facial hair? I think not, especially when it all starts to go gray and those character forming crow’s feet become cracking claws; anymore than I think mascara, rouge and eye liner work for men.

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Jimmy D. Garner

Do we, as men, hide behind our beards or use them as a misconstrued attempt at looking hip or younger? There are many reasons for wearing a beard. When I was planning my February trip to Hamburg, Germany, I thought I should grow my beard to ward off the cold weather experienced here; besides just about everyone has one, so why not. Just before I left So. Cal, I looked in the morning mirror and was shocked. “My God, what am I thinking”. I only saw an old man with a gray beard that looked awful. Vanity prevailed! I shaved off the beard and some years, keeping the Van Dyke.

For what it’s worth . . . .