EDUCATED - Tara Westover

EDUCATED Tara Westover

An unlikely journey of escape, discovery and intellectual growth 

LE COUSIN DE M MAGRITTE

MAY I HAVE HALF A WORD PLEASE?

There has been a furore about the overuse of the F word on the airwaves....how it has devalued our language and our morals and deadened our senses. This is especially true in the US presidential election of Trumpistan, where feelings run high and almost anything is fair game. 

Words are indeed powerful. They evoke an automatic response from our consciousness. In a sense, they do our thinking for us. They are contextual, however, and if used too much, either lose their meaning entirely or indeed mean exactly the opposite of their intention. Consider the epithet FxxxxxxA. It no doubt used to be an insult; now it is more an expression of surprise.

Why not use a half-word instead? A half-word will not explain anything for us; it will force us to think to understand. Of course it will be a euphemism for its full partner, but it will require active participation for comprehension and will stop us cheapening our language with all-purpose potty words that, in fact, may mean anything or nothing at all.

Take the half-word It, for example. No prizes for guessing its full partner. But use it for a while, and you will quickly find just how confused our language can become when overuse turns into saturation, and where context then becomes everything.

IT has amazing properties to transform itself.

For example, someone who knows his IT is seen as smart; someone who knows IT, dumb.

Both good IT and bad IT can be good, usually when followed by the word man, as in: This is good IT, man, or this is BAAD IT, man.

You can either take a IT, or have a IT, or just plain IT, and it all means the same thing.

Being IT hot is good, being a hot IT is seen as selfish and egotistical.

Being full of IT, or a IT head is also bad, but if you have your IT together that is good.

If you don't give a IT it is also bad, whereas saying he gives a IT means in fact he doesn't.

And so on and so on.

By stripping away the full word you will make people think about what you are saying, and make you think twice before you say it.

And if someone should ask you what you are doing, just say you are using half-words, and if they ask you what the other half of IT is, just look at them and respond quietly: "What you should tell yourself the next time you mindlessly say IT:........Sh....

ANGRY SKY

ROSE

WHEEL

THE GREATEST

A MEMORY OF MUHAMMED ALI

I was fortunate to have met Muhammed Ali twice.

The first time was in the Miami airport when I was a student. I noticed a huge hullabaloo in the baggage claim area, and spotted the distinctive Eraserhead grey frizz of Don King’s afro. My mate and I went over to investigate.

Don King was in terry cloth slippers looking like a bum, literally, and there perched on the baggage carousel surround by a mob was Ali, signing autographs. Most people gave him large dollar bills to sign….20s and  100s and the like. He signed and signed, hardly looking up. I waited in the massed queue (not really a queue, more like a rugby scrum) and passed him the only bill I had, which was a one-dollar bill.

He stopped and looked up.

“A Dollar?” he said.

I shrugged my shoulders. “I’m a student. If I use a twenty I’ll have to spend it. Now I’ll keep it forever.”

He shook his head, smiled, and signed.

The second time was in the early 1990s when he was on a book tour in London on Old Broad Street in a bookstore. I bought the book, and tried to approach him,  hoping he would sign my dollar bill, which I always carried in my wallet. By this time he was shaking like a leaf from Parkinson’s. His minders were not letting anyone near him. I said: “Do you think Muhammed would sign this dollar bill? He signed it for me in 1978 when I was a student.” The minder shook his head.

“No autographs.”

All of a sudden Ali, who heard this exchange, mumbled something, and gestured for me to come over. His face was all puffy, and it was impossible to decipher what he said, apart from “Come…come” in a very slurred speech.

I was in my mid thirties at this point, but I felt like a schoolboy. I showed him the dollar, and he scrawled his signature on it. You could make out the M and not much else. It only took a second.

There was something magical about the man. The energy which flowed off of him was like standing next to a heater. I will never forget it.

When I found out he died, I cried. The first time for a public figure that I can remember.

The dollar was subsequently stolen along with my wallet, and no doubt spent by someone for whom it meant nothing.

No matter. I shall always have the memory.

The word great is bandied about way too much. But he was a great man.

The Greatest. 

FAST EDDIE ARBS THE SYSTEM

WRITTEN IN 2010..... POLITICS EH? Originally written on 27 Sep 2010....long before this interloper ran for Prime Minister......


Would you even consider a leader who wasn't even elected by the members of his party? Who gets in power by an alliance with unions but in the next breath disavows them?

Do you really ever want a government in place where behind the scenes a union boss can call on a strike without EVEN A MAJORITY OF HIS OWN MEMBERS?

Well, that's what you have got with the latest Labour party farce.

After an election process which, let's face it, was completely off the radar screen, Fast Eddie won the battle of the brothers, sneaking up at the last moment with the unions in his pocket (or he in theirs). Neither the majority of party members, MPs, or MEPs voted for him.  And some of the union members are not even in the Labour party.

What a system, eh?

AN EASTER TO REMEMBER

Spring in England always carries with it the kind of mixed messages carried by harbingers who are slightly unsure of what they are supposed to be carrying. A lovely sunny day can easily be followed by the grey wet which has preceded it, pulling the springtime rug straight out from under the psyche desperate to jump onto it after a grey dull winter. There are no magic carpet rides in the British spring.

This year especially, I will have an Easter to remember. Bad news comes in threes, and the past month has seen me have an ear operation to remove a basal cell carcinoma (skin cancer), an interior job which is very slow to heal as it is on the inside of the ear. Then food poisoning. Then le comble as the french say, the finger incident. 

Riding home on the Tube, straphanging as one does on the newer carriages, the driver hit the brakes just after leaving Sloane Square. My left finger got caught in the strap as I hurtled to the floor, knocked off balance by the twisting of the strap and the suitcase on the floor next to me. The finger stayed behind. Snap.

I fell down, and one gentleman helped me up and offered me his seat. Are you alright? he said. No, I broke my finger I said, and held up my hand for him (and the rest of the carriage) to see. Gasps and horrified looks. But mostly averted gazes.

A nice gentleman next to me said quietly:the closest hospital is Chelsea and Westminster. I stumbled off the train at South Ken, crossed the street to hail a cab (but not before a young girl scuttled across the road to nab the one I was heading for). I found the next one in the rank, and showed him my finger. Ouch, he said, and carried on a sympathetic conversation. 

My finger was dislocated and fractured in three places (those with a nervous disposition should look away now).

The NHS rocks. After an hour wait, I got a very competent and friendly doctor (Kate MacEwan, like the lager she said although she is a Mac and not a Mc).After diagnosis and  X-rays, the Filipino med assistant cut off my wedding ring. 20 seconds of nitrous oxide, and Kate pulled the finger back into place. The whole process took about four hours. Now I have to go next Tuesday to a specialist to see if they need to put pins in.

The point is not the rich vein of bad luck I seem to have tapped into, but the reminder that the body is a very complex and fragile instrument, and that despite whatever happens, you will figure out a way to cope, and there are a hell of a lot of other people worse off who should be remembered at Easter. But in this faux spring as the water drips down on what should be a nice Easter Saturday, this will be an Easter which I will remember. And do take care riding on those new trains. Those straps can be lethal (think of a hangman's noose which closes around you).

SPHERES OF INFLUENCE

 2015

CRANE BEACH

OUTER SPACE

THOU SHALT NOT PASS

A beautiful afternoon on a day in Boston.

A FLY IN THE OINTMENT

There always is....no?

A FLY IN THE OINTMENT

HAPPY OR NOT?

AT HEATHROW AIRPORT

You get to choose. Or at least press the button....

LAST LOOKS

How does one say goodbye to a house after 46 years, when the mere act of looking out the window puts you in a past you cannot touch any more, but will stay with you always. The pictures are off the wall, ready to be taken away and their absence will leave an empty room. The ghosts and the memories of your life are in the past. But the sun still shines through, and will shine through on someone else's memories. Someone else's life. The last look is always the most vivid. And the most painful.

LAST LOOK NO. 4

 LAST LOOK NO. 1

LAST LOOK NO. 2

 LAST LOOK NO. 3

THE MIGHTY WAD-LITERATURE

BERLIN

AQVARIUM
Berlin
December 2015

RUMINATIONS FROM ROMAN TOBIAS

A wise man heeds the voice of his son. 

The world is composed of order and chaos, of love and conflict. Where do we find ourselves on this axis? Have a look and ask yourself. You might be surprised. 

OLD SCHOOL

OLD SCHOOL

The doors opened. He quickly cast a practised eye down the carriage and spotted an open seat. They were like gold dust, with commuters slumped silently in this moving sepulchre, each person in their own private world. Gratefully he eased himself down, and assumed what he called the position, his rucksack on his knees, his wrists looped through the straps on each side, his arms thus balanced needing no armrest. After thirty years of commuting on the Tube, he had developed the ability to fall asleep in this position almost immediately, head erect, feet flat on the ground, knees evenly spaced. At this time of year, with the shortest day only a week away, the distinction between day and night was horribly out of kilter. Life was lived in a crepuscular funk, the grey of London sleepwalking each day through different shades eventually to black, only to start the same cycle all over again. Christmas was less than a month away, but with his children long since gone, the familiar mixture of angst and creativity (what present should he be getting?) had dulled with time, replaced with a vague sense of dread. Life should be lived forward but remembered backward, he had read somewhere, but at this point in his life the road ahead seemed very short, and the rear view mirror filled with too many images and feelings.

He closed his eyes, but having been ill the previous week, he was not hopeful that sleep would come easily. The antibiotics he had been given heightened his senses, he thought. Each cough or sniffle down the carriage was a coded signal for his body to react in the same way, and he didn't want to give into another coughing jag. All he heard was the rustling of papers, the squeal of the brakes as the train stopped, and the mellifluous tones of the pre-recorded announcements. He gave up on sleep and began glancing around at his fellow passengers, oblivious to his attentions.

Across from him sat a middle-aged woman in black with precision-cut highlighted blonde hair, Anna Wintour-style. She was very thin with wrinkled skin like parchment and her mouth was set in a permanent frown. Her eyes were fluttering, and it was clear she would have no trouble whatsoever falling asleep, he noted jealously. Her lids drooped, opened, drooped again, fluttered, and stayed shut. Her head pitched forward onto her chest (too thin to call it anything but a chest), and he noticed the tiniest chink in her otherwise perfect coiffure, the faintest hint of her dark roots. Sic transit gloria mundi, he thought to himself, and his gaze turned elsewhere. The train stopped, a seat came free diagonally opposite to his right, and a young girl sat down. He looked at her. His wife always admonished him for staring at people in public. His rejoinder was that it was not staring, but observing. 

The girl was twenty-ish, dressed in de rigeur jeans, and somewhat anachronistic Doc Martins. Her ears were pierced in several places, with a delicate hoop through the top of one ear. No tats, as far as he could tell. She would only be called edgy by someone on his side of the age divide. She wasn't beautiful, but striking. Yes, striking, that was it. Her hair was plaited and wound up from the nape of her neck in a lopsided bun. Her face was like a painting, long like a Modigliani painting, with a thin nose and lips which seemed too narrow for her face, as if they had been painted on.  A Madonna with no child possibly. He was intrigued. Because of the angle, he could observe unnoticed. She was unaware of him, or if she noticed, she didn't care. That was for certain, but was par for the course. He had long since reconciled himself with the unpalatable fact that he had become for all intents and purposes, invisible. Especially to anyone under thirty.

The woman in front of him, her head at an unnatural angle, started and woke up. He looked at her but her eyes registered nothing, and her mouth remained fixed downward. He threw in the towel, and put on his earphones and closed his eyes. By and by, a sad song came on called Lost Soul,  one which for him had taken on a special poignancy. It was a duet and the lyrics, like all good lyrics, seemed to have been written for him.

He sat alone with a pencil in his hand

All day long he drew careful on the paper

In the end just a picture of a man

Just a picture of a man. Too right, he thought. Aren't we all just pictures of ourselves?

When the chorus came on and the singers' harmonies meshed perfectly, he felt a lump in his throat.

A lost soul coming down the road somewhere between two worlds.

He opened his eyes, and for some reason his attention was drawn directly to the girl at right.  Her face was turned in his direction, but she was not looking at him. Gazing at her own thoughts, possibly. But slowly her eyes welled up, and a tear fell from her eye onto her left cheek. She wiped it away, but not self-consciously. She was lost in herself.

He looked around the carriage. No one else looked up. He looked back at her and her eyes were still welling.

What makes people do the things they do? Our lives are full of days identical save the scissor cut, like those paper dolls cut from patterns which string out once they are unfolded. What makes one of those paper dolls step out and start dancing on their own? What makes a certain moment special, or even memorable?

He closed his eyes and began to imagine what possibly had made this girl cry. He thought back on his past, a distant past when youthful feelings fresh as snow were now buried in the permafrost of his memory. He was lucky to have married young, the best decision he had ever made, but this had nothing to do with his wife, or indeed his life. People cry when they see autumn trees in a mist, at movies, for the most obscure reasons. Who could ever know the real reason?

Impulsively he opened his rucksack and pulled out his notebook and a pen, turned to a page near the back which he could afford to tear out, and began to write. Urgently, the words poured out.

I don't know who you are

I don't know why a tear

Is falling down your face

I don't know what or who

Has caused this pain

And led you here to this sad and lonely place

He looked up. He closed his eyes and thought a moment, and continued writing. The words came a little harder, as if he were wrestling with a deadline.

Still I know no matter what

Moments like these will never last

You may think heartbreak is the danger

But as sure as tomorrow shall come

Heed the timeworn words of this old stranger:

This too shall pass

He read what he had written. He looked at the girl. Her expression had not changed. She of course had no idea what was going through his mind. Nor should she. He tore out the page, and folded it.

He had made up his mind what he was going to do.

He always acted on impulse. Over the course of his lifetime, sometimes it worked, and sometimes not. But once an idea came into his head, no matter how crazy, he generally acted on it.

The train came to the next station. The young girl got up from her seat and came towards him to exit, as he was sitting right by the door. As she passed by, he reached out and touched her arm. She paused, and looked at him. Excuse me, he said, and handed her the piece of paper. Their eyes met briefly, a quizzical look replaced by an infinitesimal moment of what...recognition? Her brow knitted. She took the note and hurried past. The doors closed.

He sat back in his seat and looked around. No one else had seen this moment. The woman in front of him was fast asleep, her head pitched forward as before. He remembered what he had read about practising random acts of kindness daily. This thought comforted him. He closed his eyes and turned up his music, now on a happy song. Maybe individuals can make a difference.

----------------------------

Chloe was late. She was supposed to meet Justin at Sloane Square, but just before she got to the station he had texted her. Sorry, hun. Can't make it. Something came up. Hun. She hated when he called her that. Something. It was always something. This was just another in a long series of disappointments kept. What an asshole, she thought to herself as she sat down. She would just go home. Another evening ruined. She started to feel sorry for herself, and her eyes stung with anger and regret.  

She stayed on the train to Barons Court. Maybe she would go buy groceries and fix herself a meal.  As she turned to get off the carriage, some man touched her on her arm. She looked at him uncomprehendingly. What the hell? He handed her a folded piece of paper. She rushed off the train. 

What was that about? she thought to herself. 

She unfolded it and started to read it.

I don't know who you are.....

Just what I need, she thought. She read no more, crumpled the piece of paper, and tossed it on the platform before heading up the stairs and out into the night.

--------------------------- 

The old school is no more.

Everyone is yearning

No one is learning

Society is burning

Yet the world just keeps on turning.

Wake up people.

Before it is too late.

LAYING ON YOUR BACK IS NOT A GOOD IDEA...

With post-nasal drip. 

I know. It is not the next line you were looking for. But that is my life this week.

My friend Tom Wells told me he cracked a rib once from a coughing jag. Sure, I thought to myself when he told me. Hard to imagine. Not any more. My ribs are sore. I have gone through four boxes of tissues. I briefly blacked out and hit the closet door after one particular violent upheaval, anything to get that grotesque cloying, tickling, gagging effluence out of my body. Suffocating from within. And all because of some microscopic organism, or even worse, a collection of RNA strands coming from God-knows-where, invisible to all but an electron microscope, which have latched onto my cells like some unwanted interloper and have wreaked havoc. At least it is not Ebola.

But back to this post-nasal drip thing. The body's answer to Chinese water torture, a slow steady almost imperceptible stream that courses down the back of your throat while you lie there trying to fall asleep, timed precisely to hit critical mass (expectorable mass, or hocking velocity for the uninitiated) at the exact moment you have dozed off again, setting off another involuntary reaction of coughing.

What kind of sadistic barbarian invented this body defense mechanism? I have done the lot. Sleeping propped up on two pillows to steepen the angle of attack. Lozenges. Night Nurse. Day Nurse. Robitussin. Olbas steam inhaling (now there's a good one, if you want to try and see your body turn itself inside out once that supercharged eucalyptus steam hits your lungs). A brief respite, but only brief. The more times you wake up, the more tired you get, the more your body fights, the more you wake up, the more tired you get and on and on. It has been four days. At least now I can write about it.

I know what you are thinking. Man up, you big baby. Self-indulgent claptrap. Yeah...well you're probably right. Pretty small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. 

But I have gotten it off my chest, if not out of my chest, if you catch my drift. 

TO STRIVE, TO SEEK, TO FIND, AND NOT TO YIELD

...though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are-

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, yet strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

ULYSSES

Brian sent this, forwarded on by Ned, and it sums up the spirit of the weekend. It shall be engraved on the trophy.

To quote the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton: The old dog for the hard road.

B3. A WEEKEND CELEBRATION

BILLYSBURG BIRTHDAY BIATHLON

Williamsburg Va

31st October-1st November 2014

Two days of intense competition 

The USA vs. Europe in tennis/golf and the substitute sport, bowling.

To celebrate the birthday of Randy Case

Andrew, Rob, Chad, Ned, Eric, Randy, Mike, Tom

with Brian and Robbie

 The awards ceremony

The Captains, Eric (Europe) and Randy (USA)

Brian and Ned

                             Andrew                                               Mike

                               Ned                 Rob and Eric

           Papa Case                                     Tom and Mike

 Shelley feeds the masses

 The CASE clan, including Papa and Mama Case

 The Golden Horshoe

Tom

 Los Tres Amigos

The BB (Big Ben)  Trophy and the Runner UP EPIC FAIL! button

The US won, and put down the first marker (see red square). The next one will be in Spain in May 2016, when Europe will try and put in the next blue brick.  See you there!

It was all about friendship, really.

Thanks to Rob Case for his photos!

LOOK

LOOK
Euston Road
Oct 2014