On The Road With Al and Ivy: Blog

"If she moves her eyes and opens her mouth just a little, the world she's trying to refuse will rush into her instantly..." - Yukio Mishima (The Temple Of The Golden Pavilion, 1956) The first historical example of free speech was in 200,000,000 B.C. which was documented on a Sumerian cuniform tablet unearthed during a Huntsville, Alabama Easter Egg hunt in 1978 by a child who unfortunately damaged the document by trying to eat the relic thinking it was a peanut butter chocolate egg. [Citation needed, some critics claim that the petrified fragment was actually a boiled Easter egg that was left in the field from the previous egg hunt in 1977] The ancient excerpt, which an internet expert (who declines to identify himself) says is part of the first volume of the Lost Gospel of Murgatroyd, relates that the great King Nubilecanazzer McDougal the Glorious One, had just sentenced a peasant to several days of torture for unauthorized viewing of the Queen's royal buns (everyon...

He traverses familiar,  As one should come to town  And tell you all your dreams were true;  He lived where dreams were sown. - Emily Dickinson  "Do you suppose I give a damn about life now? Why, you bone-head, I haven't got a single damned lying hope or pipe dream left!" "By God, there's no hope! I'll never be a success in the grandstand--or anywhere else! Life is too much for me! I'll be a weak fool looking with pity at the two sides of everything till the day I die!" - Eugene O'Neill (The Iceman Cometh)  I've first saw O'Neill's play, "The Iceman Cometh" in high school. My English & Literature class watched the movie version that starred Lee Marvin and Robert Ryan on PBS. I won't go into all of the deep meaning, as there's cliff notes and Google for that, but what seems relevant today was the importance of dreams, which are part of a reality, even if delusional. The play'...

"Homer died two hundred years ago, or more, and we still speak of him as though he were living...the others he wrote in his epic of the Trojan War. They are mere shadows, given substance by his songs; which alone retain the force of life; the power to soothe or stir or draw tears." - Robert Graves (Homer's Daughter 1955) I celebrated a half million views in the November blog entry, and this month should see another milestone; the completion of the final draft of the book. It'll still need to be line edited (and possibly refined as a result) but I decided last month that it was time to finish. I remember good friend, author and editor, Melody Ramone, once telling me that there'd come a time when it felt "finished" and added half jokingly that I'd also might be sick to death of the manuscript. That was certainly true, though being "sick of it" in my case is more a case of the musical equivalent, which is feeling that the work is as good as i...