@cletrusrichard,
I'll post the following and hope it answers the question.-Ron Price, Tasmania
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QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Preamble-Part 1:
I began to put the following sequence of questions and answers together as I was about to retire from full-time employment as a teacher after some 30 years in the profession, 1967 to 1999. In the first 15 years of the reinvention of myself as a writer and author, editor and researcher, a poet and publisher, an online journalist and blogger, an independent scholar and reader, the years from 1999 to 2014, I added more material to what you could call this simulated interview. This is the 26th simulated interview in 19 years, 1996 to 2014. There is no attempt in this particular series of Qs & As to be sequential, to follow themes or simulate a normal interview.
I have attempted a more logical-sequential pattern in my other 25 interviews over those 19 years. I have posted literally millions of words on the internet at 100s, indeed 1000s now, of sites. Readers who come across this particular interview of about 10,300 words and 26 A-4 font-14 pages will gain some idea of the person who writes the stuff they read at these sites on the world-wide-web. Readers wanting access to these sites and my work, my posts at these sites, need to simply google my name RonPrice followed by any one of dozens of other words like: forums, poetry, literature, philosophy, history, religion, cinema, inter alia.
There are some 4000 to 5000 other Ron Prices in cyberspace. Readers must ensure they are accessing my posts and my writing and not those of some other chap with the same name as mine. I have posted this interview for the interest of what has become an extensive readership, my constituency of readers, and others who come across my work for the first time, or for whatever number of times for whatever particular person.
Preamble-Part 2:
2.1 The questionnaire concept which I utilize below was originated, so I am informed, by French television personality Bernard Pivot after what was called the Proust Questionnaire. The Proust Questionnaire is about one's personality. Its name and modern popularity as a form of interview is owed to the responses given by Marcel Proust(1871-1922), the French novelist, critic, and essayist. At the end of the nineteenth century, when Proust was still in his teens, he answered a questionnaire in an English-language confession album belonging to his friend Antoinette, daughter of future French President Félix Faure. The album was entitled "An Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, etc." At that time, it was popular among English families to answer such a list of questions that revealed the tastes and aspirations of the talker.
2.2 James Lipton (b.1926) an American writer, poet, composer, actor and dean emeritus of the Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University in New York City utilized this questionnaire in his series of interviews entitled Inside the Actors Studio. The series premiered in 1994 and has been broadcast in 125 countries around the world reaching 89,000,000 homes.
2.2.1 Lipton asked the following ten questions:
1. What is your favorite word?
2. What is your least favorite word?
3. What turns you on?
4. What turns you off?
5. What sound or noise do you love?
6. What sound or noise do you hate?
7. What is your favorite curse word?
8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
9. What profession would you not like to do?
10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
2.2.2 My answers are:
1. God
2. ****
3. My instinctual and human needs for: food and drink, silence and sounds, sensory and especially sexual stimulation, oxygen and physical comfort, shelter and work, love and kindness, as well as the pleasures that come from the satisfaction of these instinctual and human needs.
4. Noise, loud and aggressive people, conversation after one to two hours; most of the TV currently available to me, a great deal of printed matter. When the needs referred to in #3 above are not satisfied.
5. Some classical, jazz and popular music, some human voices and silence.
6. Any loud sounds, some human voices.
7. ****
8. I was a student and scholar, teacher and tutor, lecturer and adult educator from 1949 to 1999. Now I am enjoying new roles: poet and publisher, writer and author, editor and research, online journalist and blogger.
9. Law and medicine, work in the biological and physical sciences as well as the trades.
10. Well done and now tell me about your troubles in life while trying to serve Me.
Preamble-Part 3:
Below readers will find my own 34 questions, questions I began to ask and answer back in 1998 and 1999, as I was about to retire from FT teaching, and a teaching-student life going back to 1949, half a century. These questions were last updated on 1 January 2014.
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1.Do you have a favourite place to visit? I’ve lived in 25 cities and towns and visited over 100. I have lived in 37 houses and would enjoy visiting both the houses and the towns again for their memory, their nostalgia, their mnemonic, value. When writing about these places as I do from time to time, I would benefit from such visits, but it is not likely that I will visit any of them now in the evening of my life for many reasons not the least of which is my lack of funds and my disinclination to travel any more.
There are dozens of other places I’d enjoy going as a tourist or travel-teacher, circumstances permitting, circumstances like: plenty of money, good health, lots of energy and if I could be of some use to the people in those places. My health, my new medications for bipolar disorder, medications I’ve now had for over five years, prevents me from travelling.
1.1 Tell us a little more about your health both before your writing began in earnest in the 1990s and before. Rather than go into detail here I will simply refer you to my 90,000 word and 200 page(font-14) account of my experience of bipolar 1 disorder as well as the section of my website on the same subject. You can google “Ron Price BPD”.
2. Who are your favourite writers? The historians Edward Gibbon and Arnold Toynbee, Manning Clark and Peter Gay, among a long list of historians I keep in my notebooks; the philosophers Ortega y Gasset and Nietzsche, Buber and Spinoza, among another long list I keep in my notebooks; the Central Figures of the Baha’i Faith and Their successors Shoghi Effendi and the Universal House of Justice; the poets Rainer Maria Rilke and Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth and Roger White; the psychologists Rollo May and Alfred Adler, and a host of others notes about whom I keep in my notebooks, as well as writers from many other disciplines.
3. Who are your favorite artists? There are several dozen art movements and hundreds if not thousands or artists that can be accessed in both libraries and now, with a click or two, on the internet. I will name two famous artists whose work I like and two whom I have known personally: Cezanne and Van Gogh, Chelinay and Drew Gates. I find it just about impossible to answer a question like this given my eclectic tastes. I have tried in question #2, but found there were too many names and so I do not intend to make such a long list here. As my years of retirement from the world of jobs, community work, and nose to the grindstone stuff, so to speak, lengthen as they have since 1999, I find there are more and more artists in the history of art whose work I am just finding out about and learning to appreciate.
4. Who are your favorite composers, musicians, vocalists and singer/songwriters? How can one choose from the thousands in these categories? It is the same problem as in the previous two questions. Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninov, Hayden come to mind as composers but, goodness, there are simply too many to list. I placed a list of my favourites at several sites in cyberspace. The list had more than 100 people and 100s of their works. Over the years, I’ve had at least a dozen different favorite composers including: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Brahms, Debussy, Stravinsky, Dvorak and Rachmaninoff. My favorite composer seems to be the one whose musical world I’ve been immersed in most deeply at any given time.
Sergei Rachmaninoff was a master of translating melancholy and nostalgia into a musical language. He was cured of a profound writer’s block through hypnosis, and he dedicated his beloved Second Piano Concerto to his psychiatrist, Dr Nikolai Dahl. I dedicate my love for music to my mother and father both of whom played the piano in our home as I was growing-up.
5. Who are your heroes? The Central Figures of the Baha’i Faith, Beethoven, Emily Dickinson, a large number of men described in ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s Memorials of the Faithful(1970, 1927) and many more that I come across in reading history and other social sciences, the humanities as well as the physical and biological sciences. Again, the list is too long and its getting longer with the years as I head with what seems the speed of light to the age of 70 in 2014.
6. Who has been your greatest inspirations? Roger White and John Hatcher in my middle age, Jameson Bond and Douglas Martin when I was a young man in my teens and twenties as well as a host of others, too many to list, in these years of my late adulthood, 60 to 70. Now in my late adulthood, the years after 60 in the lifespan according to some human development psychologists some new inspirations include: the essayist Joseph Epstein, the writers Bahiyyih Nakhjavani and Udo Schaefer, a number of poets and writers whose works I had never had time to read or did not know even existed---again the list is getting longer since reading and research, writing and editing have become much more central to my life, to my daily activities than during my years of employment: 1961 to 2001.
7. If you could invite several people for dinner from any period in history, who would you choose and why? I would not invite anyone because I don’t like to talk while I’m eating. After dinner these days I like to watch TV for a few minutes and then go to bed. I’d chose the following people to have a chat with at some other time during the day, but I would not have them all come at once. I would take them as follows:
7.1 Pericles: I’d like to know what went on in Athens in the Golden Age, as he saw it. I’ve come to know a great deal about Athens in the 5th century BC since I taught ancient history and I have many questions which, of course, I could answer by reading. But there are so many views of the man and the times.
7.2 Roger White: I’d like to simply enjoy his gentle humor and observe that real kindness which I could see in his letters and in his rare interviews.
7.3 My mother and father and my maternal grandparents: The pleasure of seeing them again(except for my grandmother whom I never saw since she died five years before I was born) after all these years would, I think, be just overwhelming.
7.4.1 Douglas and Elizabeth Martin, 7.4.2 Jameson and Gale Bond and 7.4.3 Michael and Elizabeth Rochester. These people were all university academics or the wives of academics who had a seminal influence on my developing values in the formative period of my late teens and early twenties.
7.5 There are many others in another list too long to include here.
8. What are you reading? In 1998, my last year of full-time employment, when I began to list these questions and provide the answers, I had fourteen books on the go: eight biographies, four literary criticisms, one book of philosophy and one of psychology. Now in these early years on two old age pensions, 2009 to 2012, I am reading mostly material on the internet and that reading list is too extensive to list here. I never go to libraries any more and, due to a lack of money, I never buy any books, although my wife does occasionally and I browse through what she buys. The internet is overflowing with enough print to keep me happily occupied until I die. My son bought me David Womersley’s 3-volume edition(1994) of Gibbon’s famous work in 2010 and after 3 years I’m up to page 140 underlining as I go the passages that I may use one day in my own writing.
9. What do you enjoy listening to in the world of music? I listened mainly to classical music on the classical FM station while living in Perth in the last dozen years of my FT employment(1988-1999) as well as some from the folk, pop and rock worlds. Now that I live in George Town northern Tasmania in these years of the early evening of my life(1999 to 2012) this is also true only hardly any pop, rock and folk and much more jazz and classical. I have written about my tastes and interests in music since my adolescence in other places and I refer readers here to the section of my website on music for the kind of detail that would lead to prolixity if I included it here.
10. What food could you not live without? I would miss my wife’s cooking and Persian and Mexican food if I was cut off from them. It must be said, though,(answering this question 14 years after beginning to answer it) now that I live in northern Tasmania I rarely eat Persian and Mexican food. Now that I am retired I hardly miss these foods. I enjoy the food I get, that my wife and I prepare and only eat a Persian meal or a Mexican meal perhaps once a year now. Do I miss it? Yes and no. I enjoy eating when I am hungry; hunger is the driving force and I enjoy many, many foods when I am hungry. If I could not have some of these foods I’d be happy with many others.
11. What do you do when you feel a poem coming on? I get a piece of paper and pen or go to my computer/word processor and start writing. Most of my poems take less than half an hour. My latest booklet of poetry comes from my poetry factory, as I have occasionally come to call this location for my production of poetry in George Town Tasmania, Australia where I write these pieces. I have also calculated the number of poems I have written per day over the last 32 years after a hiatus of 18 years(1962-1980) in my pioneering life in which no record was kept even though I was writing poetry very occasionally, very rarely, at the time.
In the first years of my life, 1943 to 1962, the influences on my writing of poetry included: my mother and grandfather, the primary and secondary school system in Ontario and the university I attended. The Baha’i Faith after 1953 was also a poetic force. All these poetic influences were completely unrecognized as poetic influences at the time since my interests were mainly sport, getting high marks at school, having fun, and dealing with life’s quotidian and sometimes anxious events.
A. From 1 August 1980 to 22 September 2012 there have been 11,734 days(circa).
B. The number of poems written per day is calculated using the following data: 7075(circa) poems in 11,734 (circa) days to 22 September 2012. That works out to: 1 poem in 1.65 days or 4.3 poems/week.
C. The maths: 11,734(days) divided by 7075(poems)
11. How important is life-style and freedom from the demands of employment and other people to your creative life? These things became absolutely crucial by my mid fifties. The Canadian poet, anarchist, literary critic and historian George Woodcock (1912-1995), once said in an interview that it was very important for his literary work that he could live as he wished to live. If a job was oppressing him, he said, he had to leave it. Both Woodcock and I have done this on several occasions, but I did not leave the jobs I did in order to write—except for the last job in 1999 when I was 55.
Woodcock broke with a university and I broke with three Tafe colleges. It's a derogatory thing to say it's a form of evasion, of avoidance or cowardice, said Woodcock, but you have to evade those situations in life in which you become insubordinate to others or situations in which others offend your dignity.
Woodcock went on to say in that same interview that when one acts dramatically or precipitately—like resigning from a job or losing one’s temper--it often has consequences that are very negative. He gave examples from his own life and I could give examples here; I could expand on this important theme but this is enough for now. Readers who are keen to follow-up on this aspect of my life can read my memoirs. Everything in my memoirs is true, but it has been "filtered and worked on". Readers tend to think a memoir is a chronicle or record of a life but, as the memoirist Kate Holden says, “it's a much more subtle form. You're compressing, eliding, using your craft.” She uses her craft to present a good story and I use it to present what I hope is a good analysis, some accurate and honest, useful and helpful reflections on life to those who read them.
12. Were you popular at school, in your primary, secondary and university days? I certainly was in primary and secondary school, but not at matriculation or university. I did not have the experience many writers and intellectuals have who received early wounds from the English school system among other influences in life. It wasn't merely the discipline at these schools; it was the ways in which boys got what was called the school spirit. In most English schools it is a brutal kind of pro-sporty spirit that militates against the intellectual who is looked on as a weakling. I was popular at school because I was good at sport and I got on with everyone.
I certainly was not seen as, and I was not, an intellectual. I was good at memorizing and that is why I did so well, but at university I could not simply memorize; I had to think and write my own thoughts and my grades went from ‘A’s’ to ‘C’s. This was also due to the beginnings of episodes of bipolar I disorder which has afflicted me off and on all my life.
14. You did not flower early as a writer. Tell us something about the origins of your prose and poetic writing. Many writers flower early. Many of them become largely forgotten whereas I have a different type of creativity which seems to be growing in meaning and personal significance, in power and vitality, literally decade by decade, again, like the Canadian George Woodcock. This kind of creativity over the lifespan is actually quite abnormal, atypical. I seem to have been the tortoise or the bull if you're going to use the Taurean symbol. I have been marching forward slowly. I think what I am writing now is better than anything I’ve ever written in my life. Who knows what lies ahead.
Some years ago a reporter from Musician magazine asked jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim a question about when his interest in music began. Ibrahim said he understood the logic of the question but that he couldn't answer it because music had always been part of his day to day living. I feel in a similar way about my relationship to writing. I can't remember a time when I didn't have a deep investment in writing. From 1949 to 1967, the age of 5 to 23, writing was the very source of my success and survival in school. If I had not developed the capacity to write well I would never have got good grades and gone up the academic ladder—but I had to work at the process back then. Any significant literary success, any published work, did not come, really, until I was nearly forty.
15. What sort of personal relationships do you have these days? I was reading about the Canadian writer George Woodcock whom I have already mentioned in this series of questions and answers. He said that he did not have all that many friends who were writers. He knew their problems, but he did not know the problems of painters. He said that he liked to move among painters, mathematicians, psychologists and people who could tell him something. By my mid-fifties I had had enough of people telling me about things, any things. I had been both a listening post, a reader, and a talker for so many years I was a bit of a burnt-out case and wanted to shut my ears to the endless chatter of life by the age of 55 in 1999.
If I wanted to know about stuff, about any particular person, I could read, watch TV, listen to the radio or google. If I wanted some social life I could visit a small circle of people in the little town I live in, that I took a sea-change to near the mouth of a river by the sea. After an hour or so of conversation and various forms of social interaction I usually had enough and looked forward to my return to solitude.
Due to my medications by the age of 65 and perhaps due to being in my middle years(65-75) of late adulthood(60-80) I found more than two hours with people in any form took me to the edge of my psychological stamina, patience, my coping capacity. It was better for me to seek out solitude after two hours to preserve the quality of my relationships and not to “blot-my-copybook,” as my wife often put it when I indulged in some emotional excess, some verbal criticism of others or gave vent to some kind of spleen which often resulted after that two hours---due to my mental illness, my bipolar disorder. In the 13 years since I retired I have been on a series of medication shifts which have altered my psycho-emotional life. Now I spend 12 hours a day in bed for an 8 to 9 hour sleep and work at literary activity for 6 to 8 hours a day.
16. How would you describe the social outreach in your poetry? I rarely point a finger directly at some guilty party, organization, person or movement; sometimes there is a subtle psychological base to a poem that hints at or implies some evil in someone’s court. My poetry is quite explicitly non-partisan. I have dealt with this issue several times in my series of 26 interviews. It is an important question because the wider world often judges a person by the extent to which they engage with, or in, the quixotic tournament of social and political issues in our global community. I don’t shout at any multinational or rave for some environmental group.
When I do shout and rave it is about other things and there's nothing subtle about my shouting and raving and, in the process, probably little depth in those prose-poems of mine either. With millions of readers now in cyberspace I’d say I now have a social outreach wider, more extensive, than any I’ve had in my life.
33. How would you describe poetry in general terms?
Part 1:
As I see it, to speak of poetry is to speak of poetries. For much of what follows in this section I thank: "Introduction: poetries" by Mike Chasar, Heidi R. Bean & Adalaide Morris in The Website of The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, 2006.
Although millions have not and will not read any poetry, the idea that poetry is dead is absurd; the belief that it belongs to the academy or in some coterie of society is also false; it takes many forms, some contradictory. Poetry possesses a cluster of sticky critical terms: “masterpiece,” for example, “canon,” “lyric,” and “close reading,” “ageless,” “artful,” “arresting,” and—yes—“alliterative.” In the plural, however, poetries move around, switch sides, and multiply; they do things, have politics, say more than they know, and are free, like all forms of discourse, to be abysmal, ephemeral, territorial, or tentative. How poetries do this is the subject of many essays.
Part 1.1:
I invoke the term poesis in its radical meaning, “a making, a made thing,” whose materials—in speech, miked or taped, in print, typed or typeset, or in flickering or flashing pixels—are language and rhythm. Poetries are thinned or thickened language, language on broadsides, billboards, or newspapers, language scrapbooked, staged, or screened. Wordslinging, words lingering, words slinking, linking, inking, even Inc.-ing, poetries include, but are not limited to, found poetry and sound poetry; riddles, charms, spells, and oaths; canonized poetry, magazine poetry, fakes, and doggerel; concrete poetry and ad copy, cheers, couplets, and cantos. Poetry is found in strange places: the cant of the criminal classes, verses on wartime postcards, the juvenilia of failed poets,, the puncepts of Sylvia Plath, the gangsta rap of Def Poetry Jam, and, most capaciously, the “‘weird English,’ graffiti ... gnomic thought-bytes and ... auratic verbal detritus” of localized “micropoetries”.
Part 2:
The term “poetries” has an additional resonance. It serves as a sort of portmanteau that packs together the name of a genre—poetry—with the name for a set of critical approaches to social phenomena—cultural studies. As Michael Davidson points out in the preface to his book Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word, early Marxist critics such as Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, and Theodor Adorno granted poetry a role in the production and reproduction of social life that all but a few left-oriented cultural studies scholars of the last two decades have ignored.
One reason for this is a long-standing agreement to disagree that locks Cultural Studies into a differential relationship with Poetry. In marking their identities by excluding each other, more recent Cultural Studies scholars caricature the genre of Poetry as the repository of mystified concepts—creativity, genius, eternal value, mystery, etc.—ripe for appropriation by right-wing ideologues; Poetry scholars, in their turn, cartoon Cultural Studies as one of a slew of fads from which Poetry’s creativity, genius, eternal value, mystery, etc., provide a refuge. “Poetries” of all sorts have long been not just active but essential in the production and reproduction of everyday life.
Part 2.1:
Outside “official verse culture”—the domain of old new critics, and new new formalists, poetries have been and continue to be wherever the action is. Like the purloined letter, they have been, all the time, under our noses and/or at our ears. If, as Cary Nelson argues in his landmark book Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945, “we no longer know the history of the poetry of the first half of this century; most of us, moreover, do not know that the knowledge is gone”. Poetries, at least for me, participate in a widening that looks back to the taverns of Elizabethan England and forward to cable TV and the URLs of the World Wide Web. I aim to make poetries’ hidden lives more than an “open secret." For more on this subject go to: "Introduction: poetries", by Mike Chasar, Heidi R. Bean & Adalaide Morris in The Website of The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, 2006.
34. Do you have any interest in micropoetries?
34.1 For the sake of those reading this interview, let me define the term micropoetries drawing on the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies and Maria Damon's essay "Poetries, Micropoetries, Micropoetics", spring/fall 2006. Damon writes as follows: "Many have found the term “micropoetries” to be too inexact to be tremendously useful: is it “found poetry” tout court? Well, no, though that might be a subset thereof. Is it synonymous with doggerel? No. The term micropoetries is deliberately loose and capacious, intended to encompass a range of para-literary instances of expressive culture that somehow function as a shard which can become the basis for a theory of culture, or a theory of cultural transmission; or posit an anonymous urban ballad as a springboard for a theory of reception and production of African American “high” literature."
Damon continues: "Micropoetries are intensely context-specific and may require great elaborations from their analysts in order to convey their full significance; in this, the attempt to overcome the “you had to be there” quality inherent in micropoetic power, the critic becomes a “thick description” ethnographer, or an over-amped exponent of litcrit, crazily trying to summon the ambience in which the micropoetic moment achieved the epiphantic. One might imagine the poetry of teenaged women in a South Boston housing project, as an amateur foray into ethnographic writing.
The concept of “Poetries” is a direct descendant of “micropoetries,” might include: graffiti as language, poetry therapies, prison poetry, a relative’s topical verse, the history of fortune cookies, the use of modernist conventions to market corporate slogans lasered in gothic script onto wooden plaques ... they could also be pre-slam colloquial, vernacular poetry sound that contributes to a texture of living in forgotten places and by emphasizing that the question would be: “What cultural work does this artifact or this poetic event accomplish?” It would be impossible to isolate the event from its context; artefact and event would be inseparably implicated in each other."--For a comprehensive overview of micropoetries go to the Website of the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, and Maria Damon's essay "Poetries, Micropoetries, Micropoetics", spring/fall 2006.
34.2 I think some of my poetry has a micropoetic aspect, but not as a conscious production. The object, the poem, for me is somewhat like a laurel wreath. It accrues meaning of its own beyond that of memento; it becomes a vehicle for creativity, and that has a joyful and energizing function. I am one of those people who has trouble identifying as a “professional” poet. Poetry functions as an emotional as well as linguistic technology that is particularly apposite for moments when affect exceeds linguistic expression; poetry is a valuable resource for me because it is both overdetermined and compressed on the one hand and, in the prose-poetic form that I utilize, it allows for an expository and comprehensiveness in relation to the subject I have chosen to write about.
In literally 1000s of my poems, written by someone with no training, formal or informal, readers will find a grasp of the significance of the smallest elements of standard poetic language: language play that embodies a philosophical stance toward its subject matter; internal rhyme; thematic invocation of a series of overlapping/juxtaposed cenotaphic surfaces on which a life is written and unwritten.
34.3 Walter Benjamin(1892-1940 was a German literary critic, philosopher, social critic, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist. He made the plea to writers that “nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history.” This speaks to the importance of the “micro” in all its senses but, particularly, everything beyond the literal. The sense of scale, the sense of ignominy, abjection, forgetability, eccentricity, undesirability, wrongness are all part of this poetic thrust.
The last thing Benjamin wrote before he killed himself believing he would not be able to escape the Nazis, was his exhortation to his intellectual heirs to attend to every bit of detritus and debris, every life and every social and human phenomenon. The urgency his message, a kind of S.O.S. in a bottle flung in a last act of faith in rigorous, engaged creative thinking whose primary aim was human emancipation, translates well into a concern with the heightened charge of micropoetries and poetries.
This may well go unattended unless one learns a new way of listening, and a new way of writing. It is always Benjamin’s conviction that language and material objects share strange, hidden and multiple resonances that make his work particularly relevant to poetry scholars whose focus is the morpheme, the phoneme, the letter, the stutter, the many glottal villages we move through unconsciously: the smallest bits of linguistic stuff that constitute the social environment on which our lives depend. In the radical freedom of Benjamin’s associative and dialectical imagination, he permits himself to create new word-worlds wherein the relations between things, thoughts and language are illuminated, complicated, enriched, deepened, invented and discovered.
35. Now that you have completely retired from FT, PT and most volunteer work, how would you describe your life-style?
I revel in my solitude after 50 years in classrooms as a student and/or teacher with wall-to-wall people in my life, to say nothing of my involvement in family and community, say, the years from 1949 to 1999. Being free of somewhere between 50 and 80 hours every week with the necessities of the normal nose-to-the-grindstone sort of stuff, the human responsibilities of holding down a job, taking-care of one’s family, and attending to my community demands, especially in the Baha’i groups I belonged to for decades, has been the basis of the recreation of another me, if one defines one’s me by one’s lifestyle, by one's activities.
I revel in going out of the house for little visits, little cameos. My life is, to most people, quite obscure. Having rather reclusive impulses, and spending 6 to 8 hours a day in literary engagements, keeps my social profile very low. I do go out and live a normal life visiting, perhaps two dozen people in their homes over a 12 month period, and having my family visit me and me them, at least some of them.
You remember Flaubert’s dictum, “Live like a bourgeois so that you can write like a God.” Although I have a somewhat hermetic life these days, I still have enough contact with everyday people to keep my feet on the ground of ordinariness and the content of what you might call popular, populist culture. I think Flaubert means, in part, that you hoard, you build-up, life’s experiences, and use them for your writing. That’s not all that he means, though, in that remark.
