On The Road With Al and Ivy: Blog

"In this land of boundless expanses and unnerving strangeness, this land with which none of their memories were linked, the bunker was a semblance of home." “Seems long to you, does it,” Steiner said tightly. He shook his head slowly. “It was yesterday, I tell you. Yesterday and today and tomorrow and always.” - Willi Heinrich (Cross Of Iron 1955 - translated by Richard and Clara Winston for 1956 English edition) "But there is no honor in this war, memories will be ugly, even if we win, and if we die, we die without God." - From 1957 movie, "The Enemy Below" Director Samuel Peckinpah's work was often pigeonholed into a violent, macho loser niche by critics in the 70s, and any philosophical underpinnings misunderstood or treated as thematic flaws. His visual art was judged by superficial elements like his trademark slow motion deaths (a technique now in common use in films).  Those mainstream opinions, thanks to the Internet, have multiplied by a factor...

"Here we were heading for unknown southern lands and barely three miles out of hometown, poor homely old hometown of childhood, a strange feverish exotic bug rose from secret corruptions and sent fear in our hearts." - Jack Kerouac (On The Road - The Original Scroll) In the pale moonlight, which lent a wanness of its own to the delicate face where thoughtful care already mingled with the winning grace and loveliness of youth, the too bright eye, the spiritual head, the lips that pressed each other with such high resolve and courage of the heart, the slight figure firm in its bearing and yet so very weak, told their silent tale; but told it only to the wind that rustled by, which, taking up its burden, carried, perhaps to some mother's pillow, faint dreams of childhood fading in its bloom, and resting in the sleep that knows no waking. - Charles Dickens (The Old Curiosity Shop) One of the things that young children like to do is form clubs or groupings that can blur the l...

Just as many writers about 1930 had discovered that you cannot really be detached from contemporary events, so many writers about 1939 were discovering that you cannot really sacrifice your intellectual integrity for the sake of a political creed — or at least you cannot do so and remain a writer.  - George Orwell (The Frontiers Of Art and Propaganda) "...the Indian lovers, like the Indian haters, were satisfied with their own image of the red man". - Stephen E. Ambrose (Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives Of Two American Warriors) Childhood is described as a time of innocence, but kids often spend it lying, cheating, stealing and inflicting pain on each other; while parents try their best to contain such impulses, at least until adulthood where there's a time and place for everything.  It's a time for learning your place in the world. Look at any children's toy section and it's obvious that sexual roles are defined early on, and as our perception of t...