On The Road With Al and Ivy: Blog

On The Road With Al & Ivy - July 6 Topic: Book 1: Becoming A Face is now live on Kindle Unlimited and free promotion  Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FGWKK19K Free Promotion Monday 7/7 to Tuesday 7/8 On The Road With Al & Ivy: Book One: Becoming A Face is now live on KU and will be free this coming Monday and Tuesday. The price will be .99 for three weeks until the regular price is set. Kindle Unlimited readers can download the eBook or read it online for free. Book Overview On The Road With Al & Ivy is a planned trilogy of novels that are loosely based on the author's life in the San Francisco Bay homeless scene in 2016. His travels took him and Ivy to Northern California, Marin County, San Francisco, East Bay, Silicon Valley, Gilroy, Monterrey Peninsula, and Fresno. The On The Road With Al & Ivy novels are about a group of people in 2016, with all of their virtues and flaws, dealing with a catastrophic situation with resilience and making both good and bad choic...

Update on Podcast: Changing back to the original blog format There's one more change to the podcast format, which is in many of the descriptions of the show, the old title of the blog is going to be used again. It will read "On The Road With Al & Ivy: A Literary Homeless Chronicle." The reason is that it will allow me to incorporate material from my ebook and past blog entries that relate to homelessness. In other words, the podcast is simply going back to the old blog format that started in 2016 which covered literary and cultural issues occasionally from a homeless point of view. I may sound naive or clueless when I say that the main reason I had moved to a more literary format was that I actually thought the homeless issue was going to either go away or be reduced by the influx of help and money that was occurring even back in 2016.  There have been huge sums of money spent and the creation of many local and government services, yet the problem has been getting wor...

“All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books. They are the chosen possession of men.” - Thomas Carlyle (Heroes, Hero-Worship And The Heroic In History - 1841) THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC I recently watched the 1928 film, The Passion Of Joan Of Arc. I first saw it in 1994 on DVD that featured a new oratorio composed by Richard Einhorn called "Voices Of Light" and performed by Anonymous 4 (a group) and various soloists.  The film is making the rounds on sites like Freevee (free with commercials), and after viewing the beginning, I was drawn in by Maria Falconetti's shattering portrayal of The Maid. By coincidence, I was rereading W.P. Barrett's 1932 translation of the French and Latin transcripts of Jeanne D'Arc'd trial for heresy and apostasy. The movie simplifies the trial for dramatic reasons. However, what is remarkable is that she was tried by a group of sixty French politicians, lawyers, an...

"Who has not known a journey to be over and dead before the traveler returns? The reverse is also true: many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased." - John Steinbeck (Travels With Charley 1962) THREE BOOKS: Steinbeck's Travels With Charley, Robert Graves' Wife To Mr. Milton, and Boswell's Life Of Samuel Johnson. I kept reading books in 2016; thanks to my eReaders, it was possible to be a homeless guy with a big library. Three books influenced my own work, "On The Road With Al & Ivy: The Novel (Book 1)," in different ways.  I talked about John Steinbeck's Travels With Charley in an earlier blog entry that discussed classics relating to homelessness and my opinion, as it still is now, that it was a travelogue that would relate to those who've chosen the Van or RV life. Travelogues have been around for a long time. The great ones are more than just a description of places and people; they tend to be meditations abou...

"Please understand that a Homeric song is sung to the lyre, and therefore intended for entertainment, no more and no less." - Robert Graves (Homer's Daughter ) Finding good music used to be a simple matter; you liked who or what the media told you to like (and buy).  The power to make or break an artist or record was jealously guarded by gatekeepers because with payola, the promotion business could be as profitable as a casino. The internet gave a voice to millions of people whose opinions and tastes had been muted by gateways such as letters to the editor sections or radio request lines (which waited till somebody asked for a number on the playlist. The social networks (and Google) have created a situation that's turned many media outlets into clickbait farms or Amazon partners working on commission. To be fair, the media still has some power. These new networks aren't to blame. The labels and movie studios want to reach actual customers, and while getting the o...

“She is herself like an angel in revolt. On the judgment of these men, whose eyes are constantly on their superiors or staring at the floor, Jeanne expiates the crime of plain-speaking and of looking straight into the eyes of her adversaries.” - The Trial Of Jeanne D’Arc (W.P. Barrett translation from the original Latin and French documents) The origins of legends about witches and black cats were shrouded in mystery until 123,456 A.D. when the late Professor Ivy Of 'Shitzu U' began groundbreaking studies which unearthed heretofore suppressed Gospels from the early days of Christianity, known today by historians as "The Bro Club Age Of Enlightenment."  "It was difficult to ascertain from historical accounts exactly when witches and black cats became besties, much less if women even existed," the Fluffy White Martyr For The Sacred Feminine stated in her 1986 book, Black Cats Are A-Holes, "Ancient historical accounts rarely mention females unless a famou...