The Adventures of Bloggard

Been Around the Block. Got Some Stories. These are Them.

Writing and Marketing

by // 4 Comments

Medford Oregon, January 23, 2016:  Two writer friends and I had coffee yesterday, because they wanted to talk about marketing their books. One of them has published a couple of books but his last one has not sold much yet. The other fellow is still working on his book. Both books are novels.

I confessed that although I’ve written several books and have published them in one way or another, I’m no big expert on this subject.

However, as the get-together unfolded, between my marketing experiences and their ideas we actually did put together a couple of plans that seem very likely to be effective.

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

Today, I got an email from one of them, and in his email he said:

“All very interesting, and I want to know more, but my purist streak pulls me back to the Dark Side, to wit: Why don’t I just learn how to write a Story that makes a reader want to burn through it before lunch because I have made this huge promise and they are hungry for their payoff?”

As I began to respond to his question, it reawakened something I learned many years ago from my client Jerry Richardson, the author of “Powers of Persuasion,” which became a national best-seller, about how we humans leave out parts of sentences. I have found it very useful over the years. Perhaps you will find interesting this response to my writer friend —

Hi,

To answer your question —

You asked: “Why don’t I just learn how to write a Story that makes a reader want to burn through it before lunch because I have made this huge promise and they are hungry for their payoff?”

Errors of Omission

Your answer is inside your question. All English-speakers engage in a practice that linguists would call “omission” or “deletion.” We delete parts of the sentence because they are “understood.” An example: [Read more…]

The Dreamland

by // Leave a Comment

Medford, Oregon, November 8, 2015 — Last night something happened that I’ve wanted for nearly forty years.

Because back in that time, in my studio apartment just off Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, as I studied magic and meditation for a year while living frugally on unemployment money from the gubbamint …

Grateful, with my bicycle and a monthly bus pass, I wandered the city, scouting out the cheapest Chinese restaurants, mastering chopsticks, and learning meditation, magical ceremonies, and something called astral projection.

With a book from Robert Monroe and another from a fellow named Ophiel, who had weird sentences and clear how-to instructions, along with Patricia Garfield’s “Lucid Dreaming,” because astral projection seems very similar to lucid dreaming, to me. That is, engaging in a dream-like state which seems real and solid as dreams do, and yet while still conscious.

Once there, having left your stuporous body behind, you might wander around your neighborhood, or visit Detroit, or Antarctica. Or you might wander through magical realms of Faery, or where there be dragons and magic and fabulous beasts, cannibals, captains of pirate ships, or horrifying school boards.

Sometimes It Worked

Back in those days, I attempted it a number of times. Occasionally it worked briefly. You can enter it by holding onto tenuous conscious as you relax down toward sleep, or you can pre-program yourself to do something in the dream, like, look at your hand, and somehow become conscious in that moment, inside the dream-like state. I attained momentary success, finding myself conscious but somewhere else: walking a sidewalk where the leaves of a large bush were outlined in glowing gold, or suddenly peering out from the window of a bus to see the shops and people of Chinatown outside. And once visiting a house across the street. But for me it always lasted only a minute, maybe less.

Some think this process magical. I’m not certain where our own unconscious mind ends and external magic begins. If indeed any boundary does exist.

So back to last night …

As I’ve grown older, I don’t sleep solid through the night. Often in the dead of dark, the need to pee awakens me, so I rise and trundle off to the bathroom. And though this is not an exciting activity, for mysterious reasons — perhaps truculent hormone shifts from growing older — I sometimes return to my warm bedclothes, but now find myself sleepless.

What works, most of the time, is to go to the front room, sit semi-upright in a reclinable chair, and go through some meditation exercises. These clear away any skittish worries that have started bouncing around my skull, and calm my system, so I drift into a mild and focused state with no thought, and somehow sleep comes creeping on little cat feet like a comfortable fog.

Last night, as I then stumbled back to climb into bed, I shifted and jiggled the covers to find just the right spot.

And last night as I drifted down further into a dream, I was conscious.

I was Conscious inside the Dream

I saw and heard and felt the things in my dream, and I knew I was in a dream. I could see the dream unfolding around me as I watched in amazement. At the same time I knew I lay in my bed, and yet could clearly see the fluctuating images, which mutated even as I watched, even as I chose to walk down the landscape, even as I spoke with others I found wandering there along the solid pathways, among the solid trees, beneath the sky so high above.

A fellow passed me on a path, travelling the other way, wearing a short-sleeved plaid shirt, and his head vanished as he walked by, though the shirt remained crisp and bright as he kept on walking. Some scenes were grand — an endless meadow where the plants were growing even as I watched. Then I entered a grubby and cluttered garage, and met a large man snapping open a switchblade knife.

But somehow he did not attack me. Another fellow with a crewcut watched me pass, though he was only a head resting on the ground.

I flew through the trees. I walked a mile-long abandoned city street between tall and empty, flat-faced buildings, and even as I glanced toward the buildings on the left these became a greening stony cliff whose top vanished in the clouds.

On and on and on I wandered there, quietly marveling in calm acceptance that I walked the dream.

From about 3:30 until 6:30 I traveled this dreamscape, as if walking from dimension to dimension to dimension, as they swirled and reshaped themselves around me.

And then I had to scratch my nose

Sated from my wondrous vacation, I let the magical lands tumble away like smoke in the evening, and I was awake.

I’ll try it again tonight. Maybe it will work again. Maybe not.

I don’t know where these images, these places, these people, come from. I know they’re not from memory, at least not MY memory.

But I do know one new thing. One valuable thing.

I now know the distance between the two worlds.

The truth is: they are only an itch apart.

Another Lucid Dream – The Amazing Flexible Pants

by // Leave a Comment

Medford, Oregon, November 15, 2015 — A week ago, I had a lucid dream that went on for hours. I wondered if I could do it again. And the answer is yes and no.

No, I was not able to recreate the state — being conscious in the middle of a dream, knowing that I was dreaming, able to do whatever I wanted as the dream unfurled — at least, not the next night, nor the next.

And then last night, again I awoke around 3:30 and went to sit in the front room and there my meditation activities calmed the body and lower me down toward sleep, and soon enough I grew sleepy and trundled back to get comfy in my bed, and then …

… as I drifted down, down, down I felt a very-specific shift as I had felt a week ago. It’s hard to explain. The closest I can come is that it felt like a window was in front of me, and then the window opening moved toward me and went around me, and as the window opening enclosed my body, there was a warm feeling-shift of relaxation. As quick as the click of a lock, I’d changed from one being-state into another, as immediate as walking through a door. A door of wonder. And there I was, inside the dream, and knew it.

It Was Fun!

It mutated around like dreams do, with irrational changes of scene, and things mutating as you look away and look back. But it’s so much more fun when you KNOW it’s a dream! OK, so here’s what happened — [Read more…]

Twenty Second Tune-Up Makes You Feel Good

by // 4 Comments

Weed, California, Easter Sunday 2009: Here is an Easter gift for you … a super-quick little thing you can do in about twenty seconds, and it makes you feel really good. Most likely this is very good for your body and mind as well, though I can’t prove it!

I call it ‘Arthur’s Twenty Second Tune-Up,’ and it’s both startlingly effective and super-easy.

How to Feel Good in 20 Seconds

First, get an index card, or something similar, about 3″ x 5″. And then … [Read more…]

Yearning Has Faded

by // Leave a Comment

Such feelings come and go,
as tides from an unseen sea
touch, spread, then withdraw.

San Francisco, Spring 1982: In the house on Tenth Avenue that I shared with Quinlan the photographer, I had a dream one night, that I saw Carolyn my high-school sweetheart. I’d like to say she came to me and that she cared for me, but she just passed nearby with a glance. And I was filled to overflowing with yearning. I awoke, and the dream left me with the yearning, as if it had been yesterday.

Last night, I had another dream …

As I crossed the street in front of the English building, I saw the Beatles in a large open Cadillac convertible parked across the street, along with three other musicians in tuxedos whom they had added for the concert. The new musicians had orchestra instruments, but they were singing along with the Beatles, a complex, multipart harmony. It was quite lovely

By the time I’d crossed the street, the car had become a bus. Good thing, as there were so many of them in the vehicle. The bus door was open, so I climbed in and sat in the first seat. Paul waved. And then I realized that the driver, in uniform, was actually Arnold Schwartznegger, the governor of California. Apparently he was showing the Beatles around. Politics.

“Hello, Arnold,” I said, as I struggled to take off my hat, but the hat’s chin cord was caught and I had to fight with it, and then realized Arnold was scowling at me. Maybe I’d been too familiar. “I mean, hello, Mr. Schwartzenegger,” I said, “Is that better?”

His expression told me it was better. Apparently, despite his behavior when he was Conan the Barbarian, Arnold is a guy who really appreciates proper manners.

And then as I mused on this, I found myself sitting at a table in a dim cafe, almost deserted. A cup of coffee sat cooling, I had the funny papers from the newspaper, and the late-afternoon light slanted in through the window across the room. I glanced up to see that at the next table, the Beatles, and everybody who had been sitting there, were all gone.

The light from the window had faded, it was hard to see clearly, and the comics were not very interesting.

Cowardice Won’t Work

by // Leave a Comment

New York Times, August 22, 2004: Writer Stephen Johnson reports on an almond-shaped part of the brain called the amygdala (pronounced “uh MIG’ dulluh”), which is part of the primitive limbic system, which relates to emotions.

Do liberals ‘think’ with their emotions?

“Studies of stroke victims and scans of normal brains,” he reports, “have shown that the amygdala plays a key role in the creation of emotions like fear or empathy.”

If amygdala activity is a reliable indication of emotional response, it raises the interesting question: Do liberals ‘think’ with their limbic system (emotions) more than conservatives do?

And the answer appears to be: Yes, they do.

Not long ago, U.C.L.A. researchers analyzed neural activity of Republicans and Democrats viewing images from campaign ads. It turns out that ‘violent’ images — such as pictures of the 9/11 attack on New York’s World Trade Center towers — produce different effects in Republicans and Democrats.

In fact, you could predict which are the Democrats just by observing the brain scans, because the Democrats had much stronger activity in the amygdala region. Note that this is a reading on a ‘gut response’, operating below the person’s conscious control.

So we learn that liberal brains have generally more active amygdalas than conservative ones. So what?

It’s a plausible explanation that matches some of our stereotypes about liberal values:

* an aversion to human suffering
* an unwillingness to accept capital punishment
* an unwillingness to accept military force
* a fondness for candidates who like to feel our pain.

Which suggests how we may become Republicans or Democrats in the first place.

“Say you’re inclined to form strong emotional responses to images of violence or human suffering,” said the Times article, “and over the course of your formative years, most of the people you meet who respond to these images with comparable affect turn out to be Democrats. That’s a commonality of experience that exists beneath conscious political affiliation — it’s closer to a gut instinct than a rational choice — but if you meet enough Democrats who share that experience, sooner or later you start carrying the card yourself.”

Some of the pundits elsewhere were generalizing from these experiments to suggest that liberals would be more emotional and less rational, using “emotional thinking” more heavily, and that they would be generally more fearful. And that conservatives would tend to be more analytical and more courageous.

Last night, watching Vice-President Dick Cheney debating John Edwards, it seems to me that’s exactly what I saw. Cheney seemed to be more analytical and cited a “braver” course of finding and stomping terrorists around the world till it’s done. Attorney John Edwards seemed more like a car salesman, hitting on the emotional buttons, and glossing over inconsistencies of the past anti-war voting records of himself and Mr. Kerry.

I’m not a political expert, but with a fair amount of past experience in language de-construction and training in counseling and reading body language, I personally would trust Dick Cheney over John Edwards. I caught John Edwards in too many sophistic devices (trickery in using the language) to believe him very much.

I’ve also noticed two things in life.

One is that if you experience a friend or employee or anyone who’s attempting to ‘blackmail’ you, it never pays off to pay them off.

For example, your pal is using emotional blackmail like “If you don’t loan me this money, I’ll feel awful and it will be all your fault!” Or for example, your employee says “I need to have a raise immediately or I’ll quit.” In that case, no matter how awkward it is to let them quit, you’d better just let them quit. Because if you give a raise for this reason (instead of giving a raise because their work has earned one), they’ll just wait till another awkward time to spring the same ruse again. (I had this experience with a bookkeeper named Kathy. The first time I paid up. The second time I paid up. The third time I bid my fond adieus.)

As regards terrorists, if we follow Spain or the Philippines in a pattern of appeasement, we’ll just get more of the same. I’m no political analyst, but it seems like the USA did that very thing under Clinton, with no consequences for the bombing of the USS Cole, no consequences for the Oklahoma government building bombing, no consequences toward Saddam Hussein’s defiance of the United Nations. And we got more of the same. Just like Kathy, they’ll be back.

Till we kill them.

That takes courage. That takes guts.

I don’t like war. But even less do I like our kindergartens in Oklahoma being bombed by fertilizer-filled trucks, discos blown apart during bar mitzvas, dirty bombs in our cities, and seeing people leap from flaming skyscrapers to fall, and fall, and fall.

Some “humans” are not quite human. Some are still barbarians. Some will knife you in a ghetto for your sneakers. Some will bomb your children’s kindergarten and call it religion. They aren’t like me and you.

Being nice won’t work.

Pulling out of the war, on a certain date, won’t work.

This is a new face of war, and there are no Marquis of Queensbury Rules in a knifefight. The bad guys aren’t just the soldiers inside a certain country. You can’t just go there and they’ll come out and fight. Yet, to avoid barbarians murdering those we love, we must fight. And we have to go about fighting differently.

The second thing I’ve learned in life is that, if you must fight, what wins is the use of excessive force.

For example if you just block the incoming blows, sooner or later, you’ll miss and you’ll lose. This reminds me of President Bush debating Senator Kerry last week. Kerry continually attacked, and Bush continued defending against the attacks, and that’s not an effective way to win such a debate.

Similarly, once we have the fact that these subhumans called terrorists do intend to kill us and our children, it will not be enough to just block them. They won’t go away. In fact, our refusal to viciously fight will be interpreted by them as weakness, and will encourage them to escalate. In their eyes, we the enemy are running away and so it’s time to mow us down ha ha ha! Look at the funny bleeding infidels! Ha ha ha.

Empathy, a “more sensitive” war, holding “summits”, issuing “directives”, or “withdrawing in six months” — none of these are courageous. None of these will work.

Cowardice won’t work.

We may not like it, but we’re in it. Relentless effort on our part, unreasonable effort on our part, deadly effort on our part, toward terrorists and their allies like Mr. Hussein … that’s the only thing which will work.

Liberals, with gut-instinct aversion to war, too bad.

Fight or die.

The Day of the Murders

by // 2 Comments

San Francisco, November 27, 1978: I was living in the studio apartment at 495 Third Avenue; and I had a devastating flu that knocked me woozy, half-unconscious.

Over the radio, the murders seemed lurid, wacko, surreal.

George Moscone was San Francisco’s very popular new mayor, after many years of Joe Alioto. Diane Feinstein was on the board of Supervisors, as was ex-police-chief Richard Hongisto, along with Harvey Milk and Dan White.

Harvey Milk ran a camera store on Castro street. He was the first openly gay candidate elected to public office when he was voted a Supervisor.

Dan White ran a tourist shop on Pier 39, and after being voted a Supervisor, supported the Briggs initiative, which would ban gays from teaching. Dan clashed with Harvey, and with mayor Moscone, on a number of issues, and Dan was also having business problems with his shop. White at one point resigned his post, and then later, wanted it back, but mayor Moscone declined.

According to White, his colleague Harvey Milk “smirked” at him, and therefore Dan White decided to kill both supervisor Milk and mayor Moscone with a small-caliber pistol.

Harvey Milk, the Gay Supervisor

He smuggled the pistol past City Hall security by the simple expedient of leaving a window open, through which he then re-entered with the pistol. He murdered both men in their offices with the hit-man’s trick: he shot them in the belly, which is so painful it incapacitates the man, and then close-up he shot them in the head.

Later, when White’s attorney invented the “Twinkie” defence, claiming White was unstable due to stress and eating Twinkies, there were riots, but at sentencing time, White escaped the death penalty, though after parole he committed suicide, as is proper for Twinkie murderers.

On the day of the murders, dimly following the reports on the radio through my flu-muddled mind, it seemed surreal, shocking and unbelievable. But perhaps I am to be forgiven that what I remember most about the day was something else entirely.

My girlfriend Joanne had made for me a long nightshirt, of orange and brown stripes; it resembled those long African robes that some black men affected at that time. Sounds awful, but it was comfortable.

I was wearing only this long shirt when I tore myself from my sickbed, because I had to take out the trash. It had heaped up too much, becoming smelly, and it was bugging me. I only had to go a few steps down the hall, and behind the frosted glass door was the trash chute. Nobody would see me, barefoot in my night shirt. No problem.

Afterward, discovering that I’d locked myself out of my apartment was very disappointing.

Dim-witted, I thought over my options. I didn’t much like them. And I didn’t like the obvious answer, which was to climb the stairs to the roof and come down the fire escape to my apartment on the third floor.

On the roof in the early November afternoon, the sky was bright overcast, and the sea breeze brisk. In my thin night shirt, no undies, no socks, I was freezing. No help for it.

At the edge of the roof, I paused, woozy. No help for it, so I firmly grabbed the hand rail, turned facing the roof, and stepped over the edge of the building, feeling with my bare foot for the metal step below. Found it. So, step by step, I climbed down the two stories to my own window.

The chill wind turned gusty, blowing my night dress in bursts up around my waist. Being naked beneath, I hoped no neighbors were at their windows.

Up the block, two black women pushing perambulators appeared around the corner and were briskly walking toward me.

“Oh, great,” I muttered, hoping that they wouldn’t look up.

I had to focus, but the biting cold of the metal steps on my hands and bare feet helped. I was shivering uncontrollably, but forced myself to move slowly and carefully. My night shirt blew lewdly this way and that. I was chilled through when I reached the metal ledge outside my window.

The window was open an inch. I pulled it open wide. Clumsily I climbed in.

I could hear the women as they passed below, for one spoke to the other.

“Now that burgler,” she said, “. . . he bold!”

Ram Das

by // Leave a Comment

Midwestern University, Wichita Falls Texas, 1965: Actually, not Ram Das, yet. Rather, it was then still Richard Alpert.

“Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out!”

I’d ransacked the North Texas State library stacks, reading up about this LSD that was making news. Harvard researchers Leary and Alpert were urging “Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out!,” and what in the world did that mean?

The psych abstracts were puzzling, describing synaesthesia, n., which means (1) “A condition where one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a color.” Or (2) “A song by Cannonball Adderly.”

Hearing a color? The smell of a picture? The feeling of a sound? Huh?

So when Richard Alpert was speaking, over at Midwestern University, I was ready to go hear it. And so was Kit Thorne.

Little did I know that the somewhat similar Anhalonium Lewinii (peyote) had been known back to the turn of the Century (that earlier one, in 1899) to worthies such as Aleister Crowley. If only I’d studied my Magick, I could have known so much more! But then, we didn’t know that Magick was abounding about us, no, not at that time.

At that time, I didn’t know that Richard Alpert would become Ram Das, that he would live up the street from me in San Anselmo 30 years later, and that even being neighbors I’d never see him again. We didn’t know that Leary would be jailed, and would then escape by levitation. Actually, there was a whole world of what we didn’t know, back in the time of my corduroy coat.

Kit was a pretty brunette, of vivacious enthusiasm, girlfriend of my sour pal, John Mahoney, the photographer who contributed the picture for my story Ralph the Cat in the Avesta magazine. But John couldn’t go, don’t recall why, though sitting in the booth at the Hob Nob, Kit begged to go, and so go she did.

When my stepfather, Dr. Strickland, heard of the venture, to my vast surprise, he decided to go as well. Either he was secretly hipper than I knew, or just palling along with me, or … well, I just don’t know what, but he and my mother and Kit and I showed up at Midwestern Auditorium on the appointed day.

The speaker was late.

On the drive up, Kit had told me of haunted adventures, overruled with sudden tears from nowhere, voices heard, ghosts seen. It fit. And it was beyond me. It seemed very dark. And years later, as the ghosts decreed, she became lost into a darkness, gone. But back then, we knew nothing, and I was half in love with Kit, just because of who she seemed and how she looked. I watched her secretly, while we waited for Alpert.

Finally, he was announced, and walked up to the podium.

Standing there, he paused for a moment.

Actually, kind of a long moment. Well, truly for more than just a moment. He stood, looking into space above the head of the audience, for a long time. A very long time. A really, really long time. It was a long time. A very really long time. Long time. Then he smiled.

“Hello,” he said. And went on to speak about LSD and the fact is I remember not one thing from that talk, but only what came after. When the talk was done, and others filing out, Kit said, “Let’s go meet him!”

Well, OK!

Up we trooped onto the stage, Dr. Strickland bringing up the rear, and Richard Alpert turned his open, Indian eyes upon us. Kit smiled up at him.

“I just wanted to show you this,” she said, holding out her hand. On the middle finger of her beautiful soft hand was a delicate ring with a tiny silver globe of fine filagree, in which tiny silver moving parts made a fine, crystaline tinkling sound.

Alpert watched the ring for a long moment, his grin growing wider as he watched. Then he reached into his pocket, drew out his closed fist.

“And I’d like to show you … this,” he said, opening his hand. And there, sitting upright upon his palm, a tiny jade buddha gazed into the vast beyond in rapt contemplation.

As I recall, my stepfather asked some questions, but I don’t know how much communication there was. As it turned out, I discovered later that my friend Lefevre, then studying art at Midwestern, had become involved in Richard Alpert’s arrival, and had whisked Alpert away to Jerry’s house, where they spent the afternoon wandering the background, watching the bark on trees for a very long time, and considering this new LSD that was in the news. Lefevre had not attended the talk; he’d stayed home to examine the tree bark in greater detail, as he explained later.

I suppose Kit and I made our way back to our homes in Denton. This must be the case. Otherwise we’d still be standing there, on the stage, in the Midwestern Auditorium.

That’s just logic, right?

 
 

reviews

[wprevpro_usetemplate tid=”1″]