Memorial Day Rememberance....Carl Felker

This is my good friend, Carl Felker, now deceased. Carl was a combat infantryman in WWII, serving in the 76th. Division, 385th Infantry Regiment.
Carl shared a lot of his combat experiences in Europe with me and not many of them were good. He was drafted at 18 in Savannah, Tn. Carl was 76 when he died and for all his life after the war, he suffered from what is now know as Post Traumatic Disorder. Despite this handicap, he went on to college and became a school teacher and a Methodist minister. He was also married to the same woman all his life and raised three children.
All his life Carl was a knowledge seeker with an open mind. His sharing with me of some of his knowledge changed my life for the better. Carl's life was one of love, service and devotion to his fellow man and his country.
I'm proud to have known him and been his friend.

Two in a series.....

Sartre apparently was a big ingester of mescaline to get him, er, up to speed. He also took downers to let him sleep. These facts create a big question for the history of philosophy, don't they?

Now, many readers have felt that despite his fame as the inventor of existentialism and despite his importance in many fields of literature, thought, and politics, he's completely unreadable.

Being and Nothingness, is supposed to be Sartre's great investigation of the experience of the absurdity and lack of intrinsic meaning in existence. When you discover nothingness, it's like a huge turning point, and there's no turning back.

Sure wish the book was better. This thing is a twisty-turny, pompous, sloppy, contradictory mess, written in a celebratedly bad prose, whether French or English. It may be a brilliant book, but it's not a good one. Maybe, applying the Li Po principle above, Sartre should have taken more drugs.

Bet they had one hell of a wave to ride out...

Today in history...

One in a series....

One of the best of the T'ang dynasty poets in seventh-century China, Li Po wrote many poems about drinking. In his poems and in many poems of the classic era of Chinese poetry, alcohol has two functions. First of all, it brings friends together to sing, to reminisce, to have great little parties at which everyone gets tight and starts having poetry contests. Well, great!

Second, it acts as a muse, a way to relax and release the poet into fantasies and meditations that are good for the creation of poetry. See? Nothing new. Artists have been saying for centuries that if you take drugs, you make better art. They've often felt that the perceptual expansion offered by drugs lets them have better, more suprising insights. Or at least they think they do!

Li Po and his pals obviously felt that wine helped you be a better poet. Of course, being continuously sozzled comes with its own problems. Legend has it that Li died when, in a drunken state, he tried to embrace the reflection of the moon in a lake and fell in.

Ahhhhh .....Family Fun

Michel Houellebecq's mother, who as reported on The First Post has written a memoir rebutting the alleged portrayal of her as an "old slut of a mother" in her son's best-selling novel Atomised, is back on the warpath.

In an interview in today's Guardian, Lucie Ceccaldi (pictured), 83, calls her son an "evil, stupid little bastard", saying that it would be in his best interests to stay out of her way. "If he is unfortunate enough to use my name in something again, I'll cane him round the face, that'll knock his teeth out, that's for sure. And [his publishers] won't stop me."

The Frenchman, who now lives in Ireland, is refusing to respond to her attacks, which he sees as part of a cynical campaign to publicise her book, L'innocente. In the past, he said of his mother: "She is too egocentric to produce a significant account of anything other than herself."

When asked about her abandonment of her son - he claims she left him with grandparents so she could live on a commune and enjoy young male lovers - Ceccaldi says: "I never left anybody. My son is my son. It was more him that left me. I had a relationship with him until he decided he had been abandoned. I saw him every year. Maybe I should have sent him to an English boarding school so he could have gone horse-riding and become a gentleman and everyone would have praised me."

In her memoir's postscript, she says that she will only talk to her estranged son “if he goes to a public square with Atomised in his hand and says: ‘I am a liar, I am an imposter’.” However, she has little hope of this happening. “He's too proud. And also, he's famous because he's a terrible victim. If he apologised to me, his sales would disappear."

(thanks to TheFirstPostUK)