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Abstract: The Notebooks I now possess were collected over a thirty year period, 1980 to 2010, from the age of 35 to 65. This collection of some 300 Notebooks is in the form of two-ring binders, arch-lever files & plastic ring-bound booklets. Notes: I began assembling Notebooks as early as the late 1940s and early 1950s in primary school and continued through the 1970s by which time I had become a teacher, a lecturer, a taxi driver and a worker in a tin mine. Very little remains from this first collection of thirty years.
Beginning in the 1980s and continuing to the present time, 2010, I assembled a second and much more extensive collection of Notebooks from the humanities and the social sciences: quotations from my reading, photocopies from books, magazines and journals and, by the late nineties,resources from the Internet. Some of these notes were destroyed or given away when they seemed irrelevant to my future study, research and writing activities. Such a time arose when I retired in 1999 from FT teaching for the major cull of this thirty year period.
My poetry Notebooks contain the sorts of notes that come from observations and experience as well as from reading. I have also accummulated many notes from these sources and they are found in my journals/diaries. By 2010 my Notebooks were found in 300 two-ring binders, arch-lever files and plastic covered binders. They were filled with notes for more than 6600 poems as well as many subjects and disciplines: ancient history, modern history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, media studies, personal/creative writing, post-graduate studies, literature, poetry, Baha’i files on many topics, essay writing, autobiography and biography, miscellaneous, letters, inter alia. There is some material in these Notebooks going back to the 1950s and 1960s, the beginning of my Bahá'í and pioneering experience but, for the most part, the Notebooks gradually assumed the form they now have from 1980 to 2010 and especially after I retired from FT employment in 1999, PT work in 2003 and most volunteer activity in 2005. |
Pioneering Over Four Epochs: Notebooks-Section IX:
Autobiography: Section IX
by Ron Price
published in Pioneering Over Four Epochs: An Autobiographical Study and a Study in Autobiography, Section IX: Notebooks2005
AN INTRODUCTION TO MY NOTEBOOKS
In his work from day to day Leonard da Vinci concentrated on one thing at a time and, while he concentrated on that one thing, that thing was the most important in the world. Not much got done in the short term because da Vinci seemed interested in everything but, over a lifetime, da Vinci accomplished many great things, albeit unfinished. After his death Leonard da Vinci’s Notebooks were hidden away, scattered or lost, much like the first generation of my own Notebooks from the 1950s through the 1970s. His wonderful ideas were forgotten; his inventions were not tested and built for hundreds of years. It was largely due to his wide interests that the things he started were never finished. These casual, passing, fleeting, but intense, interests can be found described, outlined, in those Notebooks. These Notebooks record his observations, his sketches, his notes. They are all scattered through 28 Notebooks in over 5000 pages from 1490 to 1519.
His Notebooks are a fascinating mixture of philosophy, scientific enquiry and art with, arguably, four major topics: painting, architecture, mechanics and anatomy made when he was 37 to 67. My Notebooks are a fascinating mixture of the social sciences and humanities with arguably, four major topics: literature, history, the Bahá'í Faith and published work. -Ron Price with thanks to ABC TV, “Leonardo da Vinci,” 7:30 to 8:30 p.m.,October 31st,2004.
Some may see it a little presumptuous to compare my Notebooks to those of one of the greatest geniuses of history. But, as Bahiyyih Nakhjavani writes in her article Artist, Seeker and Seer, our greatness “rests not in ourselves as much as in our ability and desire to circle around the great.”(1) ‘Contrast’ is a better word than ‘compare’ because my Notebooks are so very different than da Vinci’s. I won’t ennumerate all the differences; perhaps the main difference is a visual bias in his work and a print bias in mine. Mine were collected some 500 years after da Vinci’s. Perhaps the first Notebook I created was in 1949 in kindergarten and from that year until 1967 I created many a school Notebook. None of these notes now exist except two essays from English class in 1961-2 and now located in my Journal Volume 1.1. I have some other notes going back to the early to mid sixties, to the start of my pioneering life in 1961-2, newspaper columns by Richard Needham of the Toronto Globe and Mail, and the 1970s, mostly (a) photocopies of material given to me by students at Box Hill Tafe, (b) from Baha’i books which I keep in my Notebook: “Notes/Quotes file B,” (c) from a sociology of art course I taught in 1974 and (d) from media studies courses I taught in Ballarat in 1976-7. But the vast bulk of my present collection of Notebooks comes from the period 1980 to 2005. Many notes and Notebooks from 1982 to 2002 were given to the Baha’i Council of the Northern Territory as part of the History of the Baha’i Faith in that region.
What exists now in my study are notes and Notebooks for a twenty-five year period 1980 to 2005 from the age of 35 to 60.(2) The collection of 250(ca) Notebooks, in the form of two-ring binders, arch-lever files and plastic binders, consists of written notes and quotes from books on a multitude of subjects, photocopies and typed copies of the works of others and notes taken mostly from my reading and to a far lesser extent my observations and experiences.
New ideas are incubated, to some extent, in these Notebooks. I have squeezed brief writing periods, sketches of varying lengths and tasks of different kinds, into my frenetic life. This squeezing has taken place out of necessity because I was teaching a particular subject, out of interest because it was associated with my involvement in the Baha’i Faith or because I wanted to write about a subject, an idea, an experience, if not at the time I recorded the words, at least later on. I rarely recorded observations of nature in any detail, although occasionally I did in my poetry. The accounts of my experiences can be found in my journals and my poetry.
There are 1000s of pages of notes; I would not even want to begin to count them. Over time I hope to write a more detailed outline of their origins, their evolution and their present contents. I’m not sure they are worth preserving as da Vinci’s were hundreds of years after they were written. I think it unlikely, although I will leave that to a posterity that I can scarcely anticipate at this climacteric of history in which I am living. For now, though, this brief statement is sufficient.(3)
__________________________________FOOTNOTES_______________________
(1) Bahiyyih Nakhjvani, “Artist, Seeker and Seer,” Baha’i Studies, Vol.10, p.19.
(2) My Notebooks from the age of 15 to 35, from 1959 to 1979, are so minuscule as to hardly rate a mention. Those from the age of 5 to 15, although extensive, have disappeared into the dustbin of history. I collected notes from the period 1984 to 2004, beginning on January 19th 1984 for a journal, an autobiography. A more extensive analysis than this cursory one here may reveal a different timetable, a different history of my Notebooks.
(3) Ron Price, “In Commemoration of the 47th Anniversary of the Passing of the Guardian in 1957,” Pioneering Over Four Epochs, November 4, 2004.
A possibly useful embellishment to this autobiography are the some 250 Notebooks: arch-lever files, two-ring binders and plastic binders on such subjects as: ancient history, history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, media studies, personal writing, post-graduate studies, literature, poetry, Baha’i files, writing, autobiography and biography, miscellaneous, letters, et cetera. I can’t imagine anyone keeping this material, although it provides insights into my spiritual pilgrimage and into my reading, an activity which has given many of my days a solidity and value that was invaluable. These Notebooks are a type of diary, a type of academic journal. I will not try to summarize this vast collection of material here but, when and if this autobiography comes to see the light of day, I would like to emphasize that the absence of this body of Notebooks, if absent it becomes, would be a loss in the overall understanding of a life, my life. There is simply too much of this type of material to keep in the event of my demise given that I possess neither name, nor fame nor rank but, perhaps a list of the titles of the files and binders would be useful:
BOOKLETS/FILES THAT WERE NOT USED IN MY PROFESSIONAL TEACHING BUT WERE USED FOR PERSONAL PURPOSES IN RESEARCH, WRITING AND PRIVATE STUDY:
These files assumed the shape they now possess by degrees from 1999 to 2005--for the most part after retiring from FT work at the age of 55 in 1999, from PT work in 2003 and most volunteer and casual work in 2005.
The booklets listed below contain information of value to any comprehensive autobiographical or biographical study. Of the 300+ booklets/files currently on my shelves the ones listed below were not used in my professional teaching up to 1999. Other files, now long thrown or given away, were essentially notes I used and lecture resources for in-class work in teaching until I retired by degrees as indicated above. These 'other' files are listed under 'subjects taught' in my resume in section 24(v) of my website.
Another category of 'other' files were academic courses I taught before 1999 and which continued to be part of my studies after retiring in 1999. History, sociology, literature, media studies, philosophy, psychology, anthropology and religion, inter alia, occupied about 50 of my 'other' files.
1. Notes/Quotes: Vol.A and Vol. B(2 Vols)
2. Notebook: 1-4: Autobiography/Journal(6 Vols)
And Letter Writing(5 Vols)
3. Published(3 Vols) and Unpublished(2 Vols)Writing
4. Conferences Booklet(1 Vol)
5. Roger White: Essays/Book:(6 Vols)
6. Sing Alongs(2 Vols)
7. Novels/Sci Fi:(1983-2001)(2 Vols)
8. Journal: 19 Volumes(12 Vols of which are photos)
9. Dreams(1 Vol)
10. Baha’i Model(1 Vol)
11. Publishers(Internet):Vol.1-24
12. Pioneering Over Four Epochs(2nd edition) 1 copies;(1st edition)-1 copy.
13. Pioneering Over Three Epochs: original set of notes(3 Vols)
14. Individuals:Biography(1Vol)
15. Epic(1 Vol)
16. Letters(21 Vols)
17. Necrology(1 Vol)
18. 10 brown A3 size-files on 10 topics
19. Mother(1 Vol)
20. Baha’i History(2 Vols)
21. A.J. Cornfield's Story(1 Vol)
22. Email Addresses and Info(2Vols)
23. Bahá'í Resources, Talks(2 Vols)
24. Published Articles: Newspapers(2 Vols)
25. Essays: For Loan(2Vols)
26. Website/Internet/Computer Files(3 Vols)
27. Universal House of Justice Letters(5 Vols)
28. ABS Newsletters(3 Vols)
29. Book Ordering(1 Vol)
30. Recipies(1 Vol)
31. Post-Graduate Studies(1Vol)
32. Outback/NT Bahá'í History: Returned to the Regional Council of the NT(8 Vols)
33. George Town Bahai Group(3 Vols)
34. Beacon/The Australian Bahá'í and Other Australian Periodicals(1Vol) 35. Interivews/Book Reviews(2 Vols)
36. Joseph Epstein: On Writing(2 Vols)
37. Creative Writing(1 Vol)
I have never liked to suggest that writing is a grind, that it is brave work, that it is filled with sturm und drung. H. L. Mencken used to say that any scribbler who found writing too arduous ought to take a week off to work on an assembly line, where he would discover what work is really like. The old boy, as they say, got that right. I have had my time on assembly lines of all sorts and they are, for me, mind-numbing. To be able to sit home or wherever and put words together in what one hopes are charming or otherwise striking sentences is, no matter how much tussle may be involved, lucky work, a privileged job. The only true grit connected with it ought to arrive when, thinking to complain about how hard it is to write, one is smart enough to shut up and silently grit one’s teeth. And I do. I often do.
The private record of notes taken, materials gathered and written in personal and scholarly mills which often grind exceedingly small, with their apparent concern with intellectual minutiae, over six decades and for my own immediate purposes--reveal many things. They show the workings of my mind, for what that may be worth and for me, it is worth much. They show me in my private workshop. For those who are interested they show someone who became over the epochs a compulsive note-taker, note-maker and preserver. I will leave it to posterity to analyse further the voluminous contents of these notes, should posterity ever desire to do so.
Compartmentalizing or dissociating one's various online identities can be an efficient, focused way to manage the multiplicities of selfhood. William James, one of the greatest or at least major founding fathers, of/in American psychology, talked about how the normal mind operates in a "field" of consciousness in which one's awareness shifts among different hot spots of ideas, memories, and feelings. Role theory in social psychology speaks about how a successful life is an efficient juggling of the various tasks and positions we accumulate and develop from childhood through adulthood. Cyberspace living is yet another manifestation of this shifting, juggling manoeuvre. It gives people the opportunity to focus on and develop a particular aspect of who they are. It may even give people the chance to express and explore facets of their identity that they do not express in their face-to-face world. Most people in my interpersonal world, now in my late adulthood, never see the much more intellectual, serious, spiritually inclined person that I exhibit on the Internet at my website. In some ways the Internet work is like a diary revealing a private area for the most part not discussed with others. It is a rich world with its excitements, its pleasures, its enhancements and its dangers to a spiritual life as well.
INTRODUCTION
After completing the first edition of my autobiography in 1993, I began collecting resources on the subjects of autobiography, journals/diaries and letters. By April 2009 I had collected three arch-lever files and three two-ring binders on these subjects. I felt that first edition(1986-1993) of my autobiography was entirely unsatisfactory and thought that there must be more to the process of writing such a work, indeed, more to the final product than what I had then achieved.
The resources in these six volumes represent, then, the efforts of the first sixteen years(1993-2009) after the completion of the first edition of my autobiography to draw together a useful body of resources to enrich, to deepen and extend that original edition of my autobiography. These resources, as well as a host of other resources, have proved invaluable in my efforts to write the second to the sixth editions of Pioneering Over Four Epochs.
Ron Price
14 April 2009
JOURNAL/DIARY WRITING:
INTRODUCTION
It has been 18 months since I first came across ‘journal writing/diaries on the Internet.’ In the period June 2003 to December 2004 I made the following list of journal/diary sites and placed a significant number of postings at several of these sites. This work fits in very nicely with my autobiographical work Pioneering Over Four Epochs. There are many journal sites at which I could add material. There are simply too many for one person to post on any regular basis given the fact that I now have at least a 1000 other sites at which to make postings. But this is a start. (See “Notebook 3: Autobiography, Journal and Letter Writing: under ‘diaries’ in my directory).
Ron Price
December 21st 2004
THE CONCEPT OF NOTEBOOKS
Anselm Hollo in his book The Poet's Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26 American Poets(WW Norton and Co., NY, editor, Stephen Kuudisto, et al., 1995)writes "I love reading poets' Notebooks. Poets are curious critters, and it is a pleasure to relax with the jottings and musings of other practitioners." Many writers and poets, though not all, keep Notebooks. This section of Pioneering Over Four Epochs, section IX, contains information relevant to my Notebooks. What readers find here provides a general framework for the many Notebooks I have kept over the years.
There are generally two types of Notebooks which I use. One is the type where I keep notes on a particular subject. The subjects on which I kept notes--and booklet, the Notebook names--are listed in this section. Another Notebook is the type where I keep quotations on the subject of writing, the literary process: poetry, reading, autobiography, diary/journal keeping and letter writing, inter alia. In this latter category I have three major files and in the former category I have some 160 files. There is material in these Notebooks going back to the 1960s, the beginning of my pioneering experience but, for the most part, the Notebooks assumed the form they did in and after 1992 and especially after I retired from full-time employment in 1999.
Ron Price
July 9, 2004
NOTEBOOK 3
AUTOBIOGRAPHY, JOURNAL & LETTERS
section 3: Journals and Diaries:
B. Diary/Journal Sites:
1. The Book Clique Cafe
2. Hamiko Forums
2.1 Dear diary.net
3. My Dear diary
4. Healthy Place.com 4.1 Informed Health Online
5. About.com 5.1 Men’s OnLine Diaries 5.2 personal On-Line Diaries
6. Yahoo directory on-line Journals 6.1 Blurty.com
and Diaries
7. Diaries and Journals: Yahoo Group(My Group)
7.1 We Read Diaries
7.3
7.4 Google: Reading Groups
8. Bebits
10. Readerville(needs new computer item)
11. Diarist.com 11.1 HotScripts 11.2 ebay.Diaries 11.3 Blog directory 11.4 Diarist.Net 11.5 Diarist.com-Lit Scene
11.5.1 Elite Skills 11.5.2 Poetryclub.com
12. Diarist.Net.Active
13. Diarist.Net.Registry
14. Open Diary
15. TSM-Soft-org:Open Forum
-Education
16. Freeware Home: Diaries
and Journals
17. Diaryland 17.1 Diaryland.Gimpsy(100’s of diaries)
18.1 Wikipedia 18.2 Live Journal(Baha’i Group(11)
18.3 Xanga 18.3.1 Weblogs
19. Diaries and Journals On the Internet
20. Google Site: Diaries and Journals 20.5 Google-More Sites
21. Yahoo Groups: Paper Journal
22. Diary-X.com
23. Scholastic.Kids.Fun.Online
24. Support@mydiary.org
25. Gimpsy
26. User Diary Index-Nothing
27. Writing Your Spiritual Autobiography:Self-Help Mag
28. Lit.Scene.com
29. Lukol Directory
29.1 Lukol-Dream Journals
30. Online Diary History Project.
the above were some of the internet sites where I placed some of my autobiography.
TABLE OF CONTENTS ON DIARIES AND JOURNALS--NOT NOTEBOOKS
Preamble:
In 1994 I began to collect information relevant to keeping diaries or journals. Initially it was a tentative and unorganized process but, gradually by 1995, it became more organized and systematic. In September of 1995 I made this table of contents for convenience of locating my source material. Notebooks, in contrast, had their origins many years before this, arguably as far back as 1953, 1963, 1973 or 1983 depending on how one defines Notebook.
The following were some of the resources I drew on for autobiographical study and writing.
PAGE___________________ITEM_________________________________________
1. Freud: comments on biography and autobiography
2. General Notes on Autobiography(GNA)
7. Women’s Autobiography
9. William Carlos Williams’ Autobiography(pp.9-14)
10. GNA
15. Henry James’ Letters
16. Thomas Hardy’s Notebooks
18. GNA
19. Women’s Autobiography(pp.19-22)
23. Menchen’s Diary(pp.23-24)
25. Thomas Mann: Diaries
28. Virginia Woolf Essays: Montaign(pp.28-32)
29. GNA
37. F. Scott Fitzgerald: Notebooks
39. Thomas Woolf: Notebooks
44. Nathaniel Hawthorne: works
46. Peter Howson: biography(Political)
50. Henry James: Notebooks
54. Virginia Woolf
GEORGE, I HARDLY KNEW YOU
I have a faculty...for burying an emotion in my heart or brain for forty years, and exhuming it at the end of that time as fresh as when interred.
-Thomas Hardy, Notebooks.
I see their names in the Baha’i News,
in the ‘In Memoriam’ section, by now
plunged into a sea of light in a world
of mysteries, perhaps. I do not know,
not here; I feel an absense even though
I have not seen them in twenty-five years.
A lump comes to my throat: I wonder why.
I hardly knew the man. He is a distant memory:
cold Canadian evenings with hot coffee brewing
in his kitchen; he was such an ordinary man.
No spectacle, no hero: the ordinarily ordinary,
the humanly human. Why do I feel sad
over such distant simplicity?
“George, I hardly knew you!”
I search my memory for more detail,
for just a little something to hang onto
while I cry.
Ron Price
21 December 1995
MY TRIBUTARY
Each artist thus keeps in his heart of hearts a single stream which, so long as he is alive, feeds what he is and what he says. When that streams runs dry, you see his work gradually shrivel up and start to crack. -Albert Camus, Selected Essays and Notebooks, editor, Philip Thody, Penguin, London, 1970, p.18.
There’s been a stream, scented,
I’ve been drinking from since
before I came of age. The waters
have been sweet and deep, with
periodic wastelands when the bed ran dry
and the blackest soil filled my soul
with fear, disorder and dessication.
My own tributary of this stream
only began to run in my middle years.
Inspiration has run with a force
that I barely understand, nor can withstand
its roving eye and hand like an interwoven
carpet or some meteor travelling through the dark.
Will this tributary shrivel after I have expressed
my life and all it means at a deeper, more intense,
more clear-sighted level than anything I can achieve
in the daily round? I think not; for it is a tributary
of a great and thundering river whose waters will
flow on forever into the sweet streams of eternity:
as long as I have the will that will’s this eternal flow;
I know many who have not
the will that will not will belief.
The mood will not strike them here below:
I know not why?
Ron Price
12 January 1996
MY SENSE OF NOTHINGNESS
...the highest station which they who aspire to know Thee can reach is the acknowledgement of their impotence to attain the retreats of Thy sublime knowledge I...beseech Thee, by this very powerlessness which is beloved of Thee..-Baha’u’llah, Prayers and Meditations, USA, 1938, p.89.
To read Price’s poetry, his notebooks, his autobiographical narrative, his essays and his letters is to shift constantly from his imaginative and intellectual life to the here and the now, a specific time and place in the microcosm or the macrocosm. He has a wonderful capacity, gift if you like, to not see dust, as Virginia Woolf puts it, to be quite removed from the day-to-day trivia of life, as his wife might have put it-and often did. The rare joys of reality are juxtaposed with the endless elements of that trivia, the endlessly prosaic. Perhaps the reason he was a poet, at least in the 1990s, was that he could not stop. For him, writing poetry was a form of self-knowing, a form of risk-taking where he exposed himself. This process, though, helped him to define himself as a writer. -Ron Price with thanks to Marlene Kadar, editor, Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1992.
It was not all risk, though;
some of it was simply pure
surprise and wonder: like
the two exploding stars colliding
17 million light years from Earth
and taking, according to one astrophysicist,
1200 years to do their colliding;
shooting out gas in all directions
at 36 million kilometres per hour,
creating a supernova,
a brilliant light show, in a place,
a galaxy, where six supernovas
have been produced
since ‘Abdu’l-Baha wrote His
Tablets of the Divine Plan.
And me, defining myself,
my sense of nothingness,
in the face of that immensity.
Ron Price
14 June 1997
NOT QUITE ME
It is absolutely essential to the writing of anything worthwhile that the mind be fluid and release itself to the task. -William Carlos Williams
Every poem should be the last poem, written as if it contained the last thing the poet would ever say-like a will.-Lisel Mueller in The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 20 American Poets, W.W. Norton & Co., NY, 1995, p.218.
Every once in a while I go
to some plush joint on the
sixteenth floor and get a view
of the big smoke, or eat a lunch
in the finest restaurant in town
and discuss the state of the world,
or travel in the fast lane for an afternoon
with dinner at the Ritz, or rent a flash car
for the day; it’s a dip into another world for
an instant in time, a world that belongs to
someone else, that’s not quite me, or me for
a minute, fixed on a landscape, a soil, with new
desires, significations, to savour, like a dream,
vain and empty, just a semblance of reality.
MORE INTROVERTED WITH THE YEARS
We all must live in this outer world of physical reality. This world of people, places and things, in which we suffer, mate and, in time, die is something we all experience, albeit in different ways. The poet, the true artist in us, lives in another world, an inner world, a world which is both separate and not separate from this outer world; it draws on this outer world, exists in a symbiotic relationship with this world, attempts to reconcile, blend and embody this outer world. There is an interchange, an interplay, a playing between this inner and outer world. -Ron Price with thanks to Dylan Thomas in Poet in the Making: The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas, editor, Ralph Maud, J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd., London, 1968(1965), p. 26.
I feel as if I have become
more introverted with the years.
I bring the world’s wonders
into myself.
I put words around
every atom in existence
and the essence of all created things,
as much as I can,
within my limitations,
except what the garment of words
can not clothe
and what those mystic tongues
and their mysterious melodies
find no ear with which to hear.
Ron Price
9 October 1999
NOTEBOOKS: Fitzgerald’s and Mine
F. Scott Fitzgerald "began assembling his Notebooks"1 some time after May 1932. He was thirty-six and had eight years to live before his death in 1940. He used his Notebooks to record ideas and observations. Bruccoli, in his review of these Notebooks, says they are not that interesting as literary documents but, since they were from Fitzgerald, they are important.2 Two novels and a collection of short stories appeared from the eight years that Fitzgerald utilized Notebooks.
R. Frederick Price "began assembling his Notebooks" in the 1960s and 1970s, but little remains from these collections. In the 1980s and 1990s Price began to assemble an extensive collection of notes from the humanities and the social sciences, not so much observations as quotations from his reading, photocopies from books, magazines and journals and, by the late nineties, material from the Internet. A vast amount of this, too, has been lost, given away or left behind where he lectured and taught. His poetry, of course, contained the sorts of notes that came from observations and ideas. By 2003, as this statement was being recorded, over one hundred two-ring binders and arch-lever files as well as over fifty booklets of poetry filled with notes represented Price's collection of Notebooks. -Ron Price with thanks to 1&2Matthew J. Bruccoli, editor, The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, NY, 1945, p.viii & p.ix.
It had become a massive embrace,
filled the spaces all around him
like a sprawling glove
that noone could wear,
like a collection of old shirts
nicely hung and arranged
to wear on cold or warm days.
He'd been warming to them for,
what, forty years now?1
It had been a lifetime
since that early start
with lots of practice
even in those earlier years,
perhaps as far back as '53--
surely not that soon,
not in grade four2
when the Kingdom
was just arriving
and that Crusade
to conquer the world?
1 1962-2002
2 I have vague recollections of 'notebooks' from school from about 1953 through 1958, grades four to eight in Ontario Canada. Nothing, of course, remains from this period except a few old photographs. The oldest item from a 'notebook' that I possess comes from 1962.
THE VISION’S COMING FAST NOW
I try to make a place, a landscape, in my poems.
-Octavio Paz in The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26 American Poets, W.W. Norton and Co, NY, 1995.
A poem is to keep a now for then.
-Felix Pollak, ibid.
What we see here towers
far too high for us to grasp.
These terraces and marbles
elude our mental clasp.
The anguish and the loss
that make our furrows
of sweet toil, now spur-on
striding spirits every morning,
on the boil.
The world sees a lovely hanging
garden on the way to work,
a place for flowers and for laws,
a crystal concentrate of beauty,
a blissful vision and a cause.
No one knows what lurks
beneath the ground
of this vast expanse.
The vision’s coming faster now:
the dancer and the dance.1
Ron Price
6 January 1999
1 This is a vahid, or poem of 19 lines,
WITH THANKS TO DYLAN THOMAS
Price consciously attempts to eschew massive or even any partial obscurity and strangeness in his poetry. There is a buoyancy in his poetry, at least he likes to think so, which does not assert its dominion over death, as it does in the work of poets like Dylan Thomas but, rather, asserts the continuity of processes begun in life in an eternal journey.
What Price expresses in his work is not that some things in life are interesting and some things uninteresting but, rather, that certain aspects of phenomenal reality startle or arouse the imagination, force themselves on one’s attention or simply form a complex interaction of mind, emotions and the physical world creating a desire to write.
What some might call magic or chance couplings, Price likes to call the fascinating interplay of wonder, awe and delight to be found in this “burning and bewildering universe”, “in the miracle of myself and others”, and in the closeness of divinity, as close as one’s life’s vein. This is the basis for the intimacy achieveable in Price’s poetry.-Ron Price with thanks to Poet in the Making: The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas, editor, R. Maud, J.M. Dent and Sons, London, 1968(1965), p.37.
Thomas would like to be able
to forget all that he has written
and start again with a newness,
a freshness and a vitality.
Price would like to empty himself
of old dreariness and,
see things with fresh eyes,
with a new heart,
and a new mind,
free of the dust
of acquired knowledge,
free of love and hate
and
all shadowy and ephemeral attachments.1
1 Baha’u’llah, “Tablet of the True Seeker”, Gleanings.
Ron Price 9 October 1999
WRITING FOR THE PLANET
Two years before the outset of the Baha’i teaching Plan in 1937, Thomas Wolfe delivered a lecture at the Colorado Writers’ Conference. What Wolfe said then, about American writers, could well apply to the Baha’is who are writing now at the turn of the century and the millennium from a planetary perspective. I have summarized Wolfe’s words below and turned the message toward myself and my fellow Baha’is who are trying to be writers.
The Baha’i who is also an aspiring writer has a task that very well may be the hardest that any writer has known. The physical proportions are vaster and more difficult than those that the writer in any individual nation on the earth must contend with. There is no antecedent, no structural plan, no body of tradition that the writer can draw on. Such writers must make a new tradition for themselves derived from their own life, from the immense space and energy of the planet. They must labour in the direction of a complete and whole articulation; they must attempt to discover the entire universe; they must try and form a new and complete language. This is the struggle toward which their lives must be devoted. From the billions of living and non-living forms, from the swarming complexity of life everywhere, from the world’s violence and savagery, from the uniqueness that surrounds us everywhere, we aspirants to the vocation of writer must draw on that power and energy in our own life, a power and energy furnished by those who have been “faithful to the Cause of God.”1 We must find that special voice that is in our own speech and that becomes over time the substance of our art.
-Ron Price with thanks to R.S. Kennedy, editor, The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1970, Introduction; and 1 Baha’u’llah, Gleanings, p.161.
I have tired to capture and subdue
the enormous multiplicity
and what is so often the grey wash
of existence, of what comes
into my sensory emporium
and mind from outside, external.
There is a staggering muchness,
pictures, events, happenings
pouring in from all compass points,
sifted through my active brain,
leaning to the side of solitude now,
the deep-sea diving of memory
and the world’s invisible, infinite
sources that swim and float.
Ron Price
24 August 2000
VISIONS: 1937-2000
“The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe show us the difficulties that the autobiographical method created for him due to an ever-expanding, ever-detailed proliferation of material,” writes R.S. Kennedy in The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe(U. of N. Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1970). Rather than small pocket notebooks, the informal records of a literary career, a mixture of day-to-day jottings of a most miscellaneous kind, a jumble of literary ideas, readers of my autobiographical pot-pourri get a mixture of poetry, essays, letters, narrative, journal, history, biography, criticism, notes from reading, newspaper and magazine articles and incompleted novels, mostly from the fourth epoch but some from the third, of the Formative Age. This mixture of genres provides readers with an unusual, a rare, acquaintance with the inner life of a Baha’i who is an aspiring writer, a fascinating glimpse of a poet at work and a close look at the creative process which transformed his experience into writing. -Ron Price with thanks to R.S. Kennedy, The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1970, p. xvii.
I, too, Thomas, have a hope,
a conviction, of a high,
a glorious fulfillment.
No abortion here, Thomas,
no corruption,
no infection of disease
will dull the vision,
the golden dome,
the silver thread,
the amethyst, the diamond:
they will shine
however bleak the scene,
however much the revulsion
that is felt from time to time.1
Yes, there will be shame, anguish,
loathing, follies, stupidities,
crises that threaten to arrest
its unfoldment and
blast all the hopes
which its progress has engendered.2
And there will be a taste
of bitterness with the years,
made sweet by death’s final call
and that Wondrous Vision
that is the brightest emanation
of His Mind.3
1 When the Seven Year Plan began in 1937, Thomas Wolfe was in the last year of his life and the vision, the dream, he had had of America seemed mortally wounded.
2 Shoghi Effendi, God Passes by, p.111.
3 Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Baha’u’llah, p.48. Ron Price 25 Aug 2000
A DIFFERENT PILGRIM'S PROGRESS
It is difficult not to regard, indeed it is quite fitting to regard, James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in autobiographical light. It would seem that Joyce intuited this autobiographical reality early on and most certainly was consciously aware of this personal nature of his writing by the time he undertook the novel. This book is, I think, a sort of 'Pilgrim's Progress' from the world of objectivity to the world of Einstein's relativity which had entered the world more than ten years before Portrait. I could illustrate this by dealing with several facets of the novel, beginning with the overarching guide through the novel: the narrator. The first chapter of Portrait, too, begins with a montage of memories of very young childhood. If Joyce first approached his autobiography through this novel, I first approached it through a narrative of my life and this led, by 1992, to a poetic narrative of literally thousands of poems. -Ron Price with thanks to "The Dedalus Factor: Einstein's Science and Joyce's Portrait of the Artist," Timothy D. Clark, in Joyce's Papers on the Internet, 20 December 2002.
Here you will find my life and times,
but my account is flawed and fails,
as life itself fails and is flawed
and, for the most part, apparently
makes nothing happen of consequence.
But the potential is there
for much good, much effect,
if only, if only the reader
can be part of it, and then
the most self-centred poet
becomes the most universal1
and a life, of little apparent
ultimate significance, keeps
a now for then, a music
that all can use and words
that are, strangely, the poet's
last will and testament.
1From The Poet's Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26 American Poets, WW Norton & Co., 1995, p. 219.
Ron Price
20 December 2002
THE PLUNGE IS OVER
In his introduction to The Notebooks of Henry James, F. O. Matthiesson says that "the note-taking habit did not come easily" to James.1 In my own case, it seems to me that the note-taking habit took root in three interlocked phases: my student and post-graduate student years to 1988, my years as a teacher and lecturer to 1999 and my years as a published and usually unpublished writer, after 1982 until, it would appear in what is now the early evening of my life, some incapacitating senescence that has not yet arrived.
James' notebooks served him well as did mine; indeed for me they were indispensable in my work as a student, as a teacher and as a writer. They were, for James, part of "that saturation in his material which he always held to be the first requisite for viable art."2 They were also due to "his too frequent vagueness of mind." This is true for me in the case of the former; in the case of the latter it was not so much vagueness of mind as the indispensability of the notebooks. They were, for me, one of those sine qua nons of my writing. -Ron Price with thanks to F. O. Matthiesson, editor, The Notebooks of Henry James, Oxford UP, NY, 1947, 1p.ix and 2p.xii.
Part of that solidity of subject,
importance, emotional capacity,
fineness, largeness, naturalness,
humanity, fundamental passion.
Part of those thousand
vanished and present things,
those germs, small seeds,
floating particles in the stream,
an inveterate minuteness,
a stray suggestion,
a wandering word,
a vague echo,
a wince, a prick,
the merest grain,
a tiny nugget,
scarcely visible
in life's great confusion,
lost in a sea of books.
Part of the great plunge
into the ocean of life
of should I say, now,
standing on the shore,
the plunge, I trust, over.1
1 "He should have plunged into the sea of life not just stood on the edge." Graham Clarke, editor, Henry James, Critical Assessments, Helm Info Ltd., The Banks, UK, 1991, pp. 286-7.
Ron Price 21 January 2003
THE AGE WE LIVE IN
It is not so much authorial ego or that I am a compulsive self-historiographer which compels me to document my life more fully than most. All this poetry is my workshop where my awareness of life expresses itself quintessentially. I also see myself as part of a global pattern, a representative figure, part of a mytho-historical process which may be of use to future generations. I was born into a new age with the Kingdom of God just beginning when I was nine years old. In my lifetime the Bahá'í administrative process, the nucleus and pattern for a new Order, went through a radical growth period. I have been committed to the promises and possibilities of this new way of Life.1 As F. Scott Fitzgerald was committed to and had a belief in American life in the 1920s, as American was going through new beginnings so, too, do I feel strongly, passionately, a new commitment, a new belief and new beginnings.
George Bull points out in his introduction to his massive biography of the life of Michelangelo that people are often best understood "in the crowded context of the significant changes and continuities of the age."2 The age I have lived in and through has also faced "significant changes and continuities." My life, I have little doubt, can be understood, too, as Michelangelo's and so many others have been understood, in this same general context of their age. -Ron Price with thanks to 1 Matthew Bruccoli, editor, The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, NY, 1945, p.vii; and 2George Bull, Michelangelo: A Biography, Viking Press, 1995, p.xviii.
I, too, saw myself as coming
at the end of a complex
historical process
that had its beginnings
in the district of Ahsa,
those birds flying over Akka
and those Men with beards
and I identified with it.
I was born near the start
of yet another Formative Age:
would it last as long as the Greeks?1
I understood profoundly well
the claims of this new belief
as you did the claims of your craft.2
I was, like you, fortune's darling
in this new age and I was, too,
the shell-shocked casualty
of a war that was more complex
than any of us could understand.
1 their Formative Age lasted from 1100 to 500 BC; this one began 23 years before I was born.
2 F. Scott Fitzgerald, arguably the major American writer between the wars: 1919-1939.
FINDING MY LIMITS
It has been nearly four years since I retired from my professional career as a teacher. I had already become quite tired of the verbal world in all its forms, teaching and community activity, in my last several years as a teacher. Now after four years of relative quiet, with only my wife and son to talk to, a small Bahá'í community of half a dozen and a few others: family, friends and people I had come to know in the wider community providing a small base of human interaction, I seem to find anything beyond about four hours of continuous human interaction and dialogue at one stretch a cause of some anxiety and fatigue. Only a slight anxiety exists in anticipation of a long verbal exchange, but my spirit clearly finds a type of emotional exhaustion setting in after I have engaged in conversation with others for more than about four hours. I am now only 18 months short of sixty. After forty years of extensive and intensive talking and listening, 1962-2002, a new set of limits, what you might call interaction limits, has slowly defined itself in these early years of retirement from employment. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 3 January 2003.
There's a frontier, too,
of ineffability, like
an invisible wall
that surrounds every
movement of the lips
in love, in anything.
I try to catch some
of its mystery,
embrace and penetrate
some of its universe,
identify it
in my own effort
to unleash the infinite
and express
the emotion of an idea,
the desire to create,
and only this work, this labour,
can satisfy it.1
1 Albert Camus in Notebooks: 1942-1951, trans. Justice O'Brien, AA Knopf, 1965, NY, p.210.
Ron Price
3 January 2003
ENOUGH AND NOT ENOUGH
Poems are not . . . simply emotions . . . they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and things . . . and know the gestures which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighbourhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you have long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained . . .; to childhood illnesses . . . to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel . . . and it is still not enough.-The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge quoted in Washington Post.com, “Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke,” Ralph Freedman, 1996.
Well, Rainer, I’ve seen many-a-city,
many people, places and things,
am not so good on gestures of flowers
at any time of day or season.
Well, Rainer, I go back often
to unknown neighbourhoods,
to unexpected encounters,
partings seen and unseen,
in the paintings of my mind.
Well, Rainer, I also go back
to my days of childhood,
to mornings by the sea, the bay,
the river, the town, the city,
the island and the meadow
where mention of God
hath been made
and His praise glorified.
And Rainer, you are right;
it’s never enough,
but it’s all I have
when I travel at night
to those childhood sicknesses
and to so many things
unexplained in this world
of the mystic, of mystery
that will never be explained.
Ron Price
December 3 2004
A NOTE TO FUTURE EDITORS
When collections of letters, notebooks, poems and diaries of many writers both during and before the twentieth century are published sometimes everything found in the original is reproduced: words crossed out, misspellings, wrong words, incorrect punctuation, etc. Others try to correct, to normalize, the original work prefering normalization to the raw, the pure, the absolutely faithful reproduction, the unadulterated text. Do the texts come closer to us ‘cleaned up and in modern dress’ or in their original form? In their original dress perhaps they force us to penetrate to their essential kinship with our world; perhaps thrust back into history they can speak to us more directly. Does a healthy attempt at correction and revision end up by destroying the essential character of the first drafts, replacing some initial fever with something tame and bland. Wordsworth himself recognized that “his revisions generally made things worse, but he could not prevent himself from trying.”1 One day I may have the kind of experience Wordsworth had and feel compelled to revise my poetry.
My own thoughts and feelings on this matter reveal a preference to ‘clean up’ my work. Get rid of spelling mistakes, I say. Use a form of punctuation that is as conventional as possible, remove all words crossed out and clear away errors of text and context. If the word is clearly incorrect correct it, even change it where it will improve the flow, the accuracy, the message. Bend things as far as possible for the reader without losing the integrity, the accuracy, the aim, the gist, of the original message. I know the poet W.H. Auden did not think this way. He saw everything he wrote as his private property which only he could change. No one should ‘normalize’ his work. With several million words down on paper I do not see how, if some future editor follows Emily Dickinson’s approach, spelled out below, too much can go wrong.
I do not feel as possessive, as fussy, as purist, as Auden. Like the essayist, Montaigne, I create a unity in my writings, and especially my poetry, which “is not the result of a simple plan, and does not come from the orderly exposition of ideas; it lies in the movement of (my) thought, the way (I) glance off one subject to another...”2 If I want to revise a poem I am inclined to follow the advise of Robert Duncan insofar as revision is concerned: “I never revise a poem; I simply write a new one;”3 or as W.B. Yeats once said on the subject: “know what issue is at stake/It is myself that I remake.” I think, though, I come closest to Emily Dickinson’s approach to altering my work. “She made many alterations to her poems, but not one has reference to improvement in rhyme or rhythm. Every change, every suggestion for a different word or phrase was in the evident hope that the thought might be made clearer not to smooth the form.4
Beautiful creations like the unfolding magnificence of the Terraces make you glad you are alive. Now that this creation is here and completed one gets a feeling that it is needed, although one did not have that feeling before it was built. Millions will be affected by the gardens and buildings. It also makes one ask the question: what can I do that is marvellous and inspiring? Maybe I can do something that will last, that is beautiful, that will leave traces for a future age.
This poetry and the general collection of my writing under the title Pioneering Over Three Epochs I like to think displays the kind of sympathy and intouchness with my readers for whom I write, whether they be my correspondents with whom I share an intimacy or those not yet born. That is what I hope to achieve, although I’m sure I often am far off the mark. Any editorial work that will leave the soul of my writing in one piece while making my work easier and more digestible I am happy to give such an editor the full freedom required. Let the trusting trust. If such an editor keeps in mind what is written above, especially Emily Dickinson’s prescription, that is all I can ask. By the time such an event occurs, of course, I am likely to have passed from this mortal coil and shall not, in all likelihood, take too much of a serious interest in the exercise.
1 Charles Rosen, Romantic Poets, Critics and Other Madmen, Harvard UP, London, 1998, p.19.
2 Charles Rosen, Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen, Harvard UP, London, 1998, p.12.
3 Robert Duncan in Talking Poetry: Conversation in the Workshop with Contemporary Poets, Lee Bartlett, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1987, p.54.
4 Mark van Doren, editor, Letters of Emily Dickinson, Grosset and Dunlop, NY, 1962, p.225.
Ron Price
31 December 2000
Ron Price
8 October 2000
Karl Marx hand-copied whole passages of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus into his Notebooks. But the significance of the thought of Spinoza is much less clear than the fact of the copying of the passages.1 The massive quantities of copied material in my Notebooks, two-ring binders and arch-lever files now numbering some one-hundred and fifty, are much easier to trace for the significances of the thought of various authors if the reader sifts the entire oeuvre and any specific writer through the collirium of the Baha’i teachings. For this is Price’s sifting mechanism. That is a given.-1 Eugene Holland, “ Spinoza and Marx,” Cultural Logic, 2002; and Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, January 11th, 2004.
I love reading the Notebooks of poets. Poets are curious critters and it is a pleasure to relax with the jottings and musings of other practitioners.-Anselm Hollo in The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26 American Poets, W.W. orton and Co., NY, editor, Stephen Kuusisto, et al., 1995.
1817: A BIG YEAR
FOR NOTEBOOKS
I have come to see my own notebooks as a genre of my writing which began in 1953 when I was in grade four. The selection of this date is partly due to its significance in the Baha’i timeline of significances and partly due to grade four being the half-way point in my primary education. I had had four years of schooling by then and I’m sure I had notebooks in those first years 1949 to 1952. The first notes that I kept and which I still possess came from 1961/2, but the vast array of notebooks I have now collected comes from the period 1974/5 to 2004/5. The conscious collection of notes into notebooks was an even more recent phenomenon. Looking back I see the years 1980 to 1995 as a time for their early development, an insensible process that is difficult to define in any clear way. But by the late eighties the process of gathering notebooks was a quite conscious one with an increasing articulation of their role in my writing in the years 1995 to 2005.
Reading about the origins and development of the notebooks of the great Russian writer Alexander Pushkin’s(1799-1837)--which he collected in the last two decades of his life, in the years 1817 to 1837, made me reflect on my own. Pushkin carried his notebooks around with him while he was in exile in the 1820s. Mine have simply been relocated by moving companies from Katherine in the NT to South Hedland and then to Perth in Western Australia and finally to George Town Tasmania. Mine now occupy space in an orderly fashion in my study to draw on in my writings and be updated from time to time from (a) my writing, (b) photocopied material and (c) internet information on a host of topics.
Pushkin’s notebooks came to occupy 8 volumes and were first published in 1994, 157 years after his passing. I have no idea whether mine will ever see some published form; I leave that to those mysterious dispensations of a watchful Providence. At this stage, after only 10 years of conscious, formal, organized notebook collecting, I have trouble seeing their long range significance.
Each page of Pushkin’s notebooks is reproduced in colour and are now seen as an important part of Russia’s heritage. Many pages of the originals are deteriorating. Who knows what significance will be seen in the pages of my manuscripts. It is possible than nothing will come of them but, circling around some of the great writers of modern history as I do—and as I think can be helpful to any aspiring writer--it gives me pleasure to make comparisons and contrasts.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, August 11th, 2005.
Your first notebook began
As that century of peace
Began and mine began
In the midst of the greatest
carnage in all of history.
What does it all mean,
Alexander? What does
it all mean? Did you ever
figure it out?
Ron Price
August 11th 2005
INCIDENTS OF A VOLATILE/EVANESCENT KIND
My attitude to books and notebooks is not unlike that of Samuel Johnson(1709-1784) an important literary figure who produced an English dictionary in 1755, the most significant and useful one until the Oxford English Dictionary came out in 1911. Books, to Johnson, were for use not for adornment, not for sacred and reverential treatment. His sanctum sanctorum, his library, his biographer Boswell wrote, “was strewn with manuscript leaves, with books in great confusion” when he chanced by for a visit. And so is this the case with my books and notebooks should a casual observer catch me in the middle of my research and writing. My notebooks and books are full of handwriting, underlining, notes in the margins, indeed, notes in many places in the books. My files and notebooks often lay all over the floor and the furniture. This is not true all of the time and of all my books, but it would take too long to provide a detailed description of this heterogeneous, this varied and complex process. Needless to say, I share some of the features of Johnson’s attitude and policy with respect to books and notebooks.
This disorderliness, this apparent clutter and chaos, which Boswell observed in Johnson’s library, is sometimes observable in mine when I am caught in the midst of my work, my writing and research. At most times, indeed all the time when I am not writing, I keep everything in its place in this small study here at Port Dalrymple on the south side of George Town the oldest town in Australia and located as it is in northeast Tasmania. My notebooks, my books, my manuscripts and papers, my files, my stationary and various items of writing and reading equipment all have their place: labelled, ordered, tidy, dusted and ready for use. –Ron Price with thanks to Alvin Kernan, Samuel Johnson, Princeton UP, 1987.
Such a grand composition,
mingled as it was with
all the shades, peculiarities
and blemishes that flesh
is ere to, all the fertility
and readiness, dexterity,
wit, vigour and vivacity,
the extraordinary endowments
and particulars of his own mind--
such was the person who laid out
all those notes on the lives of others1
sometimes on the floor and disarray.
1 Ron Price with thanks to Boswell's Life of Johnson, Front Matter, Editor, Jack Lynch, Oxford, 1904.
"The business of the biographer is often to pass slightly over those performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness, to lead the thoughts into domestic privacies and display the minute details of daily life. Here exterior appendages are cast aside and men excel each other only by prudence and by virtue.……These narratives are often written by those who are not likely to give much instruction or delight. Most biographical accounts of particular persons are barren and useless……The incidents which give excellence to biography are of a volatile and evanescent kind, such as soon escape the memory, and are rarely transmitted by tradition.”1
"Nor is it always in the most distinguished achievements that men's virtues or vices may be best discerned; but very often an action of small note, a short saying, or a jest, shall distinguish a person's real character more than the greatest sieges or the most important battles." Plutarch, Life of Alexander, Langhornes's Translation.
-Ron Price August 24th 2005
THE THRILLING MOTION
At the beginning of the Seven Year Plan in 1937 the term symbolic interactionism was coined by Herbert Blumer. Symbolic Interactionism is based on the premises that (i) human beings act on the basis of meaning; (ii) meaning arises out of interaction with others and (iii) an interpretive process, an imaginative reheasal, is used by individuals to deal with their environment. Some call this process the social construction of reality, the social definition of situations. The world we live in has an obdurate quality and the truth we derive is essentially subjective. The roots of this sociological perspective go back to sociologists like Max Weber and George Herbert Mead and pragmatist philosophers like Pierce and Dewey in the nineteenth century. -Ron Price, “Notes on Symbolic Interactionism,” Ron Price’s Notebooks, 2005.
While the Kingdom of God on Earth
was getting its kick-start in Chicago
with a wonderful and thrilling motion
from a point of light and a spirit slowly
or quickly permeating to the entire world,
you1 were pointing your finger at meaning,
interpretation, the power of understanding,
the advent of entirely new prophets: only
these would bring the promised hope of escape
from icy darkness, hardness, self-extinction,
inner-deadness at the core of the life of culture.2
For the motion was thrilling, the faintest trace,
hardly observed, then, even now, but the clamour,
He knew, was coming, the cry, the groaning,
would be heard far and near in intimately
where we sat quietly with our steak and pie.
Then, then, the knights would come, knights
assisted, strengthened, reinforced in the midst
of confusion, noise, tumult, stupendous struggle.3
1 Max Weber and Herbert Blumer, major 20th century sociologists of symbolic interactionism. 2 Max Weber, “Weber and The Search for ‘Interpretation’ and ‘Understanding,’” Ron Price’s Sociology Notes, 1998; and Max Weber, Methodology of the Social Sciences, Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois, 1949, pp.72-176. 3‘Abdu’l-Baha in The World Order of Baha’u’llah, Shoghi Effendi, 1974(1938), p. 17.
-Ron Price March 22nd, 2005
ENOUGH AND NOT ENOUGH
Poems are not . . . simply emotions . . . they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and things . . . and know the gestures which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighbourhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you have long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained . . .; to childhood illnesses . . . to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel . . . and it is still not enough.
-The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge quoted in Washington Post.com, “Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke,” Ralph Freedman, 1996.
Well, Rainer, I’ve seen many-a-city,
many people, places and things,
am not so good on gestures of flowers
at any time of day or season.
Well, Rainer, I go back often
to unknown neighbourhoods,
to unexpected encounters,
partings seen and unseen,
in the paintings of my mind.
Well, Rainer, I also go back
to my days of childhood,
to mornings by the sea, the bay,
the river, the town, the city,
the island and the meadow
where mention of God
hath been made
and His praise glorified.
And Rainer, you are right;
it’s never enough,
but it’s all I have
when I travel at night
to those childhood sicknesses
and to so many things
unexplained in this world
of the mystic, of mystery
that will never be explained.
Ron Price
December 3 2004
THE AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSEOF THE PAGE
Four hundred years after the death of Leonardo da Vinci in 1519 and Tablets of the Divine Plan were first promulgated in 1919. Five hundred years after the birth of Leonardo da Vinci in 1453 the Kingdom on Earth had its official beginning in 1953.
For Leonardo much, if not all, of existence, was subject to the rigid, unchanging laws of Nature. He repeatedly underlines the analogy between building and the mechanical structure of the body. This analogy rests on the conception of structures as organisms composed of fully integrated parts.
For Price, poetry was not subjected to any rigid unchanging pattern of laws. Indeed, for him, writing poetry occupied a place between nature and Divinity. Yes, the power was an organism of fully ingreated parts, a structure; but principles and laws of expression eluded him except of course for the broad spelling and grammatical conventions of English. The more he wrote and studied poetry, the less he saw the elegance and organism that was poetry in terms of regularly occuring forms.-Ron Price with thanks to the Science Museum in London and their special exhibit on Leonardo da Vinci, 3 June 2000.
His Notebooks were:
rarely tidy, seldom homogeneous,
or coherent in their discussion
over a long series of pages;
each leaf of paper an autonomous universe,
unrelated to the last one and the next,
a chaotic stratification of odds and ends,
filling dozens of notebooks
with half a century
of reflections, projects and experiments
in the realms of art and science.1
1 a description of da Vinci’s Notebooks found in the Science Museum. One description of my own work could very well be expressed along these lines, at least in part; and that is why I wrote this poem. Of course, it is in some ways presumptuous to compare oneself to a man of such preeminence. But, in another sense, as Bahiyyih Nakhjavani writes, “we should try to circle around the great”(Baha’i Studies, Vol.10) as far as possible.
Ron Price
3 June 2000
FILE TO BIN
A part of the written record of this autobiography, a part that with the passing of time is likely to get lost when my days are gone and someone has the responsibility of keeping all my writings safe and sound, is what I have numbered Section VII: Notebooks and Section II: Parts B & C: Journal. The Journal is currently in three volumes and the Notebooks in some eighty volumes. When I retired from teaching in 1999 I left another fifty(approx.) volumes of notes with my coworkers in the Human Services sector at the Thornlie Campus of the South-East Metropolitan College of Tafe.
My Journal contains the more spontaneous, personal, intimate connections with my real world. The Notebooks, spread as they are over such a wide range of subject matter, and organized in more systematic and orderly arrangements of material, could easily be dispensed with, in most cases, and there would be little loss, unless, of course, all of this wealth of academic resources and this life becomes more important than can be envisaged at this early stage of its existence. Then, in that future age, these notes might prove useful in some minute investigation, in some embellishment of this autobiography. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 2000.
So much writing and note taking
over thirty years of teaching and
Baha’i community consolidation
and most of it gone now into that
part of history which is oblivion.
Only some fifteen volumes left of
any personal, intimate, relevance;
the rest just resources for the work,
and these resources listed elsewhere1
should anyone really be interested.
Can I really contain all those 1000s
of hours of my life in one sonnet?
What does all of that paper mean?
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, file to bin.
1 See Section VIII, kept in “Latest Poetry for Latest Booklet” File
listing all the subject files I have kept and all the ones I left in the last school where I taught.
Ron Price
6 March 2000
There is a vast assemblage of personal, autobiogrpahical, Bahá'í and other 'notebook' type information which is simply too extensive and, perhaps, too irrelevant to include here. The following are two samples from this rservoire.
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INTRODUCTION #5:
A LIST OF FAVORITE PIECES OF MUSIC
PREAMBLE:
The music list below, compiled in the three year period June 2002 to May 2005, will be updated periodically after that date. It is an attempt to define, to give expression to, list what has become for me a vast sea of pleasureable sounds produced in a number of genres of music. My first memories of listening to music were in about 1948, although I was exposed to music right from the word go in 1944 by two parents who played the piano. You will find below a short list of over 60 years of musical experience, musical pieces I have enjoyed from a longer list of music that gave me pleasure, but is obviously too long to include here.
What appears here is just a start to making a comprehensive list, a brief survey, a dip in the sea, so to speak. There were about 100 items in the initial list that I put together in the winter of 2002. I have added to that list from time to time in the last three years and it is now well over 100 items. If I continued to add to this list systematically and regularly a list too long to be manageable would be produced. But the names of many of my favorites are here and, since it seems impossible for me to remember their names, this list will assist me in bringing to memory these names when and if required. The exercise is interesting to me in its own right without any particular practical value.
Most of the items listed here are in my personal music collection(LPs, 45s, CDs and cassettes) or they are items that I have had access to temporarily on the radio, internet or as part of the collection of the local spiritual assembly of the Baha’is of Launceston. As I began adding items to this list from what I heard on ABC FM Radio in and after 2002, it was obvious that, in the end, the list would become too long if I took the exercise seriously with any sense of making a comprehensive collection. What is found here serves as (a) a list of musical pieces I own/have access to in my collection and (b) a list of additional material I would like to have access to in my study, but do not. As I say, this is a list of musical favorites that I will never bring to an end. The sea is just too full. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, May 8th 2005(22 September 2002).
CATEGORIES OF MUSIC:
A.1 CLASSICAL
1. Joaquin Rodrigo: Ecos de Sefarad-guitar.
2. Joaquin Rodrigo: need to familiarize myself with his repertoire to list items here.
3. Beethoven: Sonata #8 opus 13 and Violin Concerto in D, Opus 61
4. Beethoven: Symphonies: set 1-9. Esp: #5
5. Beethoven: Piano Sonatas 23/4
6. Beethoven: Piano Concerto #5
7. Beethoven: Fluer Elise
8. Beethoven: many other pieces-too long a list.
9. Rachmaninov: Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini.
10.1 Rachmaninov: Preludes, 10.2 Piano Concerto No.2 D Minor
10.3 Rachmaninov: several pieces to be defined
10.4 Rachmaninov: many other pieces-too long a list.
11.1 Chopin: Scherzo 1,2,3 and 4 ; 11.2 Ballads 1 to 4.
11.3 Chopin: Fantasie Impromptu
11.4 Chopin, 24 Preludes(C#minor,A-Flat-Major)
11.5 Many other pieces of Chopin—too many to list.
10.1 Schubert: Fantasie in F. Minor, D 940.
10.2 Schubert: Ave Maria. Symphony #8 in B-minor
11.Puccini:One Fine Day, Madame Butterfly
12.Bach:Symphony No.2 E-minor
12.1Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No.1 in F; 12.2 No.6 in Bflat Major; No3, 4 and 5
12.3Bach: see my 20 record collection of Bach--too many to list all the pieces here, but some include: 12.3.1 Orchestral Suite No.3
13. Debussy: Claire de Lune.
13.1 Debussy: Preludes, esp.”Girl With the Flaxen Hair.”
14.Mozart: Sonatas for Piano; 14.2 Divertimenti for strings, Adagio & Fugue in C Minor; 14.3 Piano concertos K488/459; 14.4 Symphony #40 in C minor; 14.5 Nachtmusik
15. Vivaldi: Violin Concerti #3; trumpet concerti for 4 violins
16. Berlioz: Symphony Fantastique
17.Liszt: Concerto No.1 in E Flat Major
18. Hayden: Concerto in D. Major
19. Dvorak: New World Symphony; symphony #3; cello concerto in b minor, op.104; symphonic variations.
20. Tchaikovsky: Symphony No.6
21. Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto D Major
22. Handel: Water Music
35. Massinet: Meditations
36. Brahms, Symphony No.1 in C-Minor
A.2 CONTEMPORARY CLASSICAL
1. Elgar: Cello Concerto, 1st Movement, J. du Pre
2. Eric Satie, Gymnopedies
B. FOLK/POPULAR:
B.1 Bahai CDs(50 in April 2005;40 in August 2002)
1. Parrish and Toppano, The Shores of This Great Ocean(Call Out to Zion)
2. Parrish and Toppano, Royal Falcon(Royal Falcon& The Girl That I Never Knew)
3. Hummingbird, Dash Crofts
5. Advance Guards, Dash Crofts
6. One Planet One People, Dash Crofts
7. Windflower, Dan Seals and Dash Crofts
8. We May Never Pass This Way Again, Crofts
9. Hollow Reed, Crofts
10. One Planet One People, Crofts
11. East of Ginger Trees, Seals and Crofts
12. Angela Wood, Gentle Warrior
13. Year of Sunday, Seals and Crofts
14. Grant Hinden Miller, all his CDs
15. Radio Nur 2002
16. The Voices of Baha: Live At Carnegie Hall
17. Many new CDs are produced annually--too many to list here
--I have listed elsewhere 50 CDs used for Launceston LSA programs on City Park Radio. These 50 CDS have many individual songs--too many to list here.
B.2 Non-Bahá'í CDs/LPs/Cassette Tapes(C):
1. Working Class Man, Bruce Springstein
2. Born In The USA(C), Bruce Springstein
3. Angel Clare(LP) Art Garfunkle
3. Astral Weeks(LP)Van Morrison
4. Songs for Beginners, (LP)Graham Nash
5. Leave Love Enough Alone, (LP) Doug Ashdown
6. Moody Blues, (LP) On the Threshold of a Dream
7. Moody Blues, (LP)Seventh Sojourn
8. Joni Mitchell, (LP)The World Of Joni Mitchell
9. James Taylor,(LP) Sweet Baby James
10. Bob Dylan, (songs) Lay Lady Lay, All Along the Watchtower, A Hard Rain's..,
If Not for You and more-too many to list here.
11. Tom Rush, (LP) Merrimack County
12. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, (LPs)
-4 Way Street, Celebration Copy, Déjà vu
13.. Michael Murphy, (LP)Blue Sky Night Thunder
14. Cat Stevens, (LPs)Tea for the Tillerman, Teaser and the Firecat.
15. Yesterday When I Was Young, Lena Horne
16. To Follow That Star, artist??
17. Non-Baha’i-non-classical CDS--too many to list here.
18. That Was Then This Is Now, Michael Stocks(CD)
19. Bob Seeger, Greatest Hits(CD)
20. Gordon Lightfoot(C): Two In One:
(a) If you could read my mind and (b) Summer Side of Life
21. Andrew Wells, Journeys(CD)
22. Angela Armstrong(C):personal compilation
23. Leonard Cohen, Suzanne, among others
B.3 FROM MY SONG BOOKS(NOT-IN-RECORD COLLECTION):
1. We are the World
2. Cats in the Cradle
3. Fire and Rain, James Taylor
4. Paul Simon, Kathy's Song--too many others to list here.
5. Gordon Lightfoot, Go My Way
-Mother of a Miner's Child--too many others to list here.
6. Mull of Kintyre
7. The Streets of London
8. As Different As We Are, John Denver
9. Rocky Mountain High, John Denver
10. Many more could be added from my songbook
-from the years when I played the guitar on a regular basis: 1968-1998
C. BACKGROUND MUSIC FOR READING/WRITING:(CDs/LPs)
1. Frans Brugger, Blockflotin, Vol.2
2. Sammartini, Symphony in A. Major.
3. Some of the above in sections A and B is good background music.
4. Lucky Oceans plays hundreds of pieces over the months/years on his ABC Radio National Programs. I could include many here.
5.
D. 1 LITURGICAL/CHOIR D.2 OPERA:
D.1:
1. Faure, Blockflotin, Vol.2
2. Mahler, Symphonies No. 4/5
3. Some of the above in sections A and B
D.2:
1. Puccini, Turandot.
E. JAZZ:
1. Phil Morrison Trio, Sea Island Blues, 12 Tracks(T)
2. Jeff Jones, Live in Concert, 14T
3. Tenor/Saxaphone songs(2??) from Porgy and Bess
4. Lucky Oceans plays many ‘jazz’ pieces which I could include here.
F. OTHER:
F.1
1. Lucky Oceans plays a great deal of material on ABC Radio National in his afternoon program and some of the material he plays could be added here. At this stage there seems to be just too much to add to this list.
2. Other musical programs on ABC Radio also bring in “other” music I have begun to add here but can not do so in any comprehensive sense.
3. Friends also introduce me to CDs from time to time and some of this material may be added here in future. Again, the collections of others is just too extensive to list here.
F.2_______________________________________________
1. The Lord's Prayer, Mahelia Jackson
2.
F.3:
1. Talks on Cassette-Ten collections of Baha’i material
2. Talks: (a) on internet-written and (b) on internet-spoken
Ron Price: Updated
On: May 24th 2005
MEDICAL INFORMATION SHEET: No.4
PREAMBLE:
This information is kept for self, doctors and relevant others. This record was begun at age 55 on moving to Tasmania. Sheet no.4 is for 2004-5: age 58-61. See my personal Medical Files in my study for Sheets 1&2 for 1999 to 2002 & Sheet No. 3 is for the years 2003 and 2004. Not all history details are kept on file for this period 1999 to 2005, just a working base for practical use.
The information below, the record of my blood and non-blood test results is for my use in calculating: (i) when to do the next tests, (ii) what to discuss with Dr. Jane Zimmerman in George Town at my next visit (63824333: 4/5 times/year) or Dr. Richard Ayling in Launceston at the Summerdale Medical Centre(63447177: 1 time/2 years); (iii) what to discuss with my psychiatrist in Launceston, Dr. E. Ratcliffe, 155 George Street(63312122) at my annual visit(Caroline:his assistant); and (iv) what action to take in my daily life, if any, as a result of these visits. Annual visits with Dr. Ratcliffe began in Sept 2001. The next visit is Nov. 2005(ca). Two/three monthly visits began with Dr. Zimmerman in November 1999. The data here is essential as a device for helping me in the consultations.
_____________________________________________________________________RECORD OF DATES OF TESTING, ITEMS TO-BE-TESTED INFORMATION:
A. ITEMS TESTED IN THE BLOOD: (**=discuss with Dr on 1/12/05-11:20am)
(a) Fats: 1. Tryglycerides(every 6 months starting 6/01; annually starting 10/04)(fasting required).......appointments 10:30-11:30
(b) Results: 3/04--2.4; 9/04--2.7; 9/05—2.2.
(need to be 2.0 and below...) Next visit: 12/05.
2. Cholesterol*(fasting required)
20 min aerobic type walking every day(begun May 2003)
COPD-30 min non-aerobic walking every day(begun 1998ish)
(plus diabetes test: 4.7 on 10/04; Next test: 12/05)
6.1 at 9/04; “X” 9/7/05. Next visit: 12/05.
1. If the level stays over 6 into 2006, I should consider $40-$100/Month medication. 2. Foods discussed with Dr. Ayling to lower cholesterol(27/5/05)
3. Aerobics exercise required to lower LDHs(6/6/05)
** LDL=3.8(10/02)..(9/03).....5/10/04(3.5)(needs to be 2.5 & less)
3.8 at 9/6/05. Next visit: 12/05.
** HDL=0.9.................(9/03)....5/10/04(1.1) 1.0 at 9/6/05; “X” 12/05.
*Dr. Stefan Delitzsch,G'Town, (8/02) said not to worry about my cholesterol levels given my cholesterol readings; Ratcliffe said(11/04) I should aim for a 4.4 reading. To achieve this I should (i) walk 1/2-1 hour per day and (ii) watch diet(more avocados & oatmeal). I saw Dr. Croft 7/05 for lithium levels.
(b) Lithium-Related Blood Tests:
Every 2 months starting Sept 2001 due to what was then a new creatinine level test: 5 hrs after taking 1 of my three 250 mg tablets of lithium, that is: 9 am for a 2 pm visit. (electrolytes & lithium levels are tested with creatinine levels). This time period changed to: every 6 months starting 6/05, 12/05, 6/06, etc.
*3. Lithium 5/10/04.....10/11/04.....5/10/04..8/2…25/6…12/05(see stats sheet).
x
(.5 to 1.2 is the right range)(do I need another prescription?)
*4. Creatinine
Results began on 6/9/01:(see sheets 1 and 2 for first records)
18/2/04...22/4//04...28/6/04......5/10/04.....8/2/05..4/05..7/05..10/05
160 141
A sequence of 3 no’s(3 two month periods) on ‘an upward trajectory’ in the 130 to 180 range denotes a problem.
7. Urea 18/2/04....22/4/04......28/6/04....5/10/04.....8/2/05….7/05…12/05
should be 8.3 and below...every 3 to 6 months
8. Liver Function Test Results: 27/3/03: ok; 27/3/04: ok; 27/10/04-okay. 10/05-x.
No need to discuss unless there is a problem. Do magnetic resonance imaging if there is a problem.
(c) Non-Lithium-Related Blood Tests:
9. The PSA test is a blood-test. This is a complex issue and many notes are necessary. At 10/03 my PSA reading was 0.89. A ‘finger-up-bum’(FUB) test: 28/10/02; 23/10/03; 1/12/04 revealed only a slightly enlarged prostate. Texture of prostate okay & normal for my age; (2) PSA level test (Prostate Specific Antigen)(early detection of prostate cancer) on 23/10/02, 23/10/03, 10/04. Result: Normal: 0.89('03& ’04)(0 to 4 normal). *Next one: 10/05: 1.2 Symptoms of a 'problem prostate': a. hesitancy in urinating, b. trouble initiating urination; c. blood in urine; and/or d. frequent urination and terminal dribbling.(I exhibit d. symptoms.) **Bring in urine sample 12/05. Do we need to do a cat-scan?? Or what??
Information: (1) A 'PSA level test' may suggest a biopsy is required.(a sample of tumor tissue). If a significant enlargement of prostate exists, an ultrasound, a biopsy and/or other possible tests may be required. Saw Palmetto pills were of no value, 18/8/03, after 3/4 months taking them. Perhaps I should have taken zinc twice a day; I only took it once a day, June to October 2003; and (2) One way to check/to define if there is a problem is to measure the amount of urination. There should be 350-400 mls/urination; anything below this suggests a prostate problem, namely, a super-sensitive bladder wall. At night 600mls plus; in the day 150-250 mls. I tried holding pee to expand the bladder walls, as advised in October 2003, with no success. So 'small urinations in the day could indicate there is a problem). Mine are not small enough(at: 1/12/04) (all okay-27/5/05: Dr. Ayling)
10. Haemoglobin (Red Blood Cells): 27/3/03, 2/04, 4/05: all okay. Discuss at 4/’06.
**11. Diabetes: blood glucose levels: sugar….6/01, 3/03, 9/03(5.4)....9/04(4.7)...12/05
do with cholesterold test (every 6/mo)(fasting required) (needs to be below 5.5)
12. Fluvoxamine: do I need another prescription?
B. ITEMS TESTED NOT-IN-THE-BLOOD:
GENERAL INFORMATION/ISSUES/PROBLEMS ;
1. Testosterone: March 2000 ‘low, but within the normal range’(i.e. 9 in ‘6 to 28')
2. Tetanus 4/2000(ok) …not necessary until 2010………at age 65…..
3. Wax Build-Up In Ears: Use ear drops: cerumol: keep putting in drops once/month. Syringe dates:10/01, 10/02, 15/03 and 17/03.
4. Bowel cancer: Discuss in 2002 & 2005: all okay. Watch out for the texture/ colour and blood in feces.
5. Chest X-Ray: Result of test in June 2001: diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulminory disease; elasticity of lungs is less than it should be; need to breath more deeply, more vigorous exercise. Such exercise was begun in May 2003. Stopped in August due to sore foot. Another chest X-Ray when Dr Zimmerman and I decide in consultation. October 04-okay: no significant change from 6/01; discuss again at visit in 10/06.
6. Check my moles/warts/sores on scalp/small growths for cancer and to get rid of them if annoying. 2001:Sore on neck was not carcinogenic; small growth on arm not cancer. 3/2002-3/2004-no problems. Wart on forehead: cut off:-3/12/04. pay: $10; stich out on 8/12/04.
** 7. Complete 'Medical:' (1) August 2001, (2) October 28, 2003: result: satisfactory, no 'areas to work on,'(3) 12/04: all okay and (4) Next one: 12/05.
8. Check for bone density.Walking, aerobic and non-aerobic, is enough. March 2003: okay. 2/05: chat with Chris-no problem. Osteoporosis-don’t do any tests unless problem arises.
9. Sore foot began about August 1, 2002. Need to wear pad under foot/inner sole and not stress foot until better. Okay by 6/04.Treadmill: start again in 04/05?(no desire)
11. Eucalyptus/tea-tree oil: good for fungus on toe nails: began 9/03 to 12/03. Ceased by January 2004. Discuss with podiatrist at first visit. Nothing significant by 12/04.
12. Keep track of other illnesses/diseases/problems that arise from time to time due to (a) personal experience or (b) things I hear about from people or in the media. Insert items here for discussion at next visit with Dr. Zimmerman in 7/2/05.
12.1 Sore knee at night after knocking in 8/03. Went away by 2/04.
12.2 take bi-polar outline in 4/04 and 11/04: done
12.3 Frozen shoulder-do 2 new exercises-1/12/04: much better 2/05:No more problem
_____________________________________________________________________
C. OTHER:
Print-outs: Results of Blood Tests: See Attached Sheets & page numbers
3-Lithium-Related Tests 4-Cholesterol Related Tests
WITH DR. RATCLIFFE(PTO)
1. First four visits: 6/9/01, 12/9/01, 12/9/02 and 17/9/03. Notes kept from first three visits, but discarded after 4th visit in 9/03. Summmary of 4th visit 17/9/03 below:
1. Cost: $70.15; medicare gives me: $59.65. Gap: $10.50(send to Medicare, they will send me the cheque and I will top 'the gap' up. 2. DSS does a Disability Services Pension review every 5 years: 2001, 2006. GP fills in forms; Ratcliffe not usually required. Gave Dr. Ratcliffe a general statement of bi-polar exerience in 2003 and again in 2004. Gave him my medication/medical info sheets(MIS) in 2003 & 2004.
2. Visit 2004:
1. sleeping: try to go to bed earlier, say midnight, and get into this new routine--thus stopping the going-to-bed after 2 am routine. 2. Next apppointment on a needs basis. Decided in Sept 05 that there was no need to visit Dr. Ratcliffe in 2005. Discuss this subject again with Chris in late 2006.
E. EXPERTS AND WIFE’S ADVICE FOR MY HEALTH
E.1 WIFE: The following are good/useful recipies for particular problems: 1. Solperin(2 tablets) -for aches, pains, sore throat, fever/ 2. Ginger(1st) or stemitil(2nd) -for upset stomach, nausea; and 3. Zinc -colds, sore throats.
E.2 OTHER EXPERTS: read internet as required.
E.3 DR. R. AYLING:
Discussed(May 05) foods: tomatoes(lycopene) once a week; use the following sparingly or not at all: no white rice(once a week), no potatoes(difficult’ now 4 times a week), no white bread, no pasta(once a ftnt), no sweets, no red meat(difficult 4 times a week), no butter-if I want to lower cholesterol. Multivitamin is good, nuts very good, whole grain bread good. See info sheets in file. (Pot&meat-bad, all other okay)
-Ron Price
Updated: October 21st 2005.
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INTRODUCTION #1
The first booklets of music in my life, at least those I remember, go back to the early 1950s. But the first booklet of music that I put together myself in order to run sing-alongs was in the late 1960s. From about 1953 to 2005, a period of more than 50 years, I was involved in sing-alongs in one form or another. In the last ten years, 1995 to 2005, though, singalongs using booklets of songs I created became rarer and eventually non-existent occasions. In some ways it was fitting that the last three years of singalongs, 2002-2005, I was engaged in were with senior citizens using songbooks whose content was mainly for a generation born in the first quarter of the twentieth century—the earliest years of Baha’i administration, the 1910s and 1920s.
There is material in my one remaining sing-along booklet for all age groups, although there is no material that originated from about 1975 to 2005, the group born in the the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. I did not listen to the music of that generation enough to be familiar with it and certainly not well enough to sing it in groups informally in the Baha’i community and in any other communities of which I was a part.
These resources are here in my booklet, though, for a future time when and if singalongs return to my life and to the groups I am involved with.
Ron Price
May 24th 2005
INTERNET SITES: LIST #1
2001-2004
After two decades of keeping a rather small collection of publishers and relevant files, I began in the winter (June to August) of 2001 to keep what has become an extensive collection/series of arch-lever files and two-ring binders recording publishers and websites that were useful in my work to promote my writing, my poetry and the Cause. By July 2003, two years later, I was able to list a massive number of sites and publishers, several hundred locations, more than I could service regularly. I also acquired or listed many other sites in connection with various subjects, topics and disciplines much, if not most, of which I have listed here. The total came to more than 1000 sites.(1) To locate this particular list below readers must go to my directory at: Internet Sites and then to "List No1." There are 19 pages for anyone wanting to copy this list.
In July 2003 I divided this large list into several subsidiary lists, created to give some specificity, some individual subject location, to this burgeoning list. But the list was still unwieldly. These subsidiary lists are now located in various files: religion, the Baha’i Writings, Canadian poetry, Australian poetry and Baha’i history, inter alia. This list below serves as the core, the outline, of my site acquisitions or site activity two years after I had made a start with an original list of internet sites in the winter of 2001. In May 2001 my website(2nd edition) went online and the Baha’i World Centre officially opened its Arc Project. I use this date as a measuring time/rod/demarkation point for my work on the internet in these early years of my retirement: 1999-2005.
By 2004 I had added many more sites and developed a Volume 12. This second list, a list I refer to as “List #2,” is not included here. It was this Volume 12 to which I devoted most of my internet site attention as the early months of 2004 advanced. By April 2004 I was devoting virtually all my time to Volume 12. By October 15th 2004 Volume 12 had more than 500 additional sites and by June 30th 2005 it had more than 1000.
(1) This list of 1000 sites is, for the most part, complete. But it has proved difficult to keep an exact figure due to the number of sites both in List #1 and List #2.
Ron Price
June 30th 2005
40. Phoenix Magazine
Volume 3.5
41. adherents.com
42. Joe Ant.com
43.
44.
45.
46.1 Some Bahai Links
46.2 Bahai Text and Information
48. Bahai Graphics Gems
49. 9lines.com
50. Mary Washburn@earthlink
51. Divine Digest
52. Bahai Net/Baha’is of USA
53. tom@bounty.bcca.org
54. Ordering Books
55.Varqa International Children’s Magazine
56. The Reality Journal
57. Fire Your Creativity
58.1 Alternative Religions(About Newsletters);
58.2 20th century history; 58.3 Education; 58.4 Books & Lit.
59. Beliefnet.com
60. Scottish Bahai Newsletter
61. Spiritual Knowledge Links
62. United Communities of Spirit(UCS)
63. Info@INKryptions.com
64. Friends of the Academy of Self-Knowledge
65. Internet Public Library
66. Religion: General Links
3. Links@primefind.net
4. Autoresponder
5. Kunani
6. Exactseek: 2 pages of search engines
7. Egypt.web
8. AddPro.com
9. Inktomi
10. URL Submitter: 2 pages of search engines
11. TrafficZap: 2 pages
12. Scrub the Web and MetagAnalyzer-to engines
13. The Searcher: 6 pages of search engines
14. Metasearch: 7 search engines
15. Search.com
16. Search Engine Guide: 3 pages
17. Gimpsy
18. info@questfinder.net
19. Search Engine in Table Form
20. Alexa Web Search.
21. info@inkryptions.com
22. Tech Support EconPlanet
23. Consumer Club
24. Newsletter@quikregister.net
25. Internet Index for the Spiritual Seeker
25.1 Peaceful Pages
25.2 International Links
25.3 Australiana Links(A to Z>POFE)
25.4 Literary Data Base
25.5 E-Zine/E-Text Links
25.6 Genre Links
26. Adwords.Support
27. Multi-Faith Net-Resources
28. Spiritual Planet
29. Compassion In Business
30. BookZone
31. True Seeker(Mark Towfiq)
32. Fearless Books
33. Para Publishing
34. FrugalMarketing
35. JL Books.com
36. Autographed By Author
37. Ezine Articles
38. Pluralism Project
39. All You Need To Know
51. Directory of Human Rights Resources on Internet
52. Reliigous Resources.org
53. Tradition: Wisdom
54. Ron Price: Personal page
55. Yahoo: Geocities
56. Plaxo Downloads
57. Baha’i Youth
58. Brilliant Books
59. High Beam Research
60. The Poem Place
61. Council for a Parliament of Religion
62. Alternative and Holistic Links
63. Pluralism Project
64. Jena Productions
65. Brint Network Global
66.Self-Help Australia.summer job
67. UK Authors.com
68. Google Address Changes
RECORD OF MY EFFORTS: (1) AMONG NON-BAHA’I PUBLISHERS
TO PUBLISH THE EMERGENCE OF A BAHA’I CONSCIOUSNESS IN WORLD LITERATURE: THE POETRY OF ROGER WHITE;
(2) TO PUBLISH MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY
AND (3) TO PUBLISH MY POETRY AND ESSAYS.
Volume 3.9 POETRY SITES/EMAILS/INFORMATION
1.
2. Canadian Baha’i Secretariat
3. Duane Herrmann
5. Circle Magazine
6. Elephas
7. Baha’i Faith Index//bahaindex.com/
8. Yahoo Discusison Groups
8.1 Discussion 19
8.2 Participoet
8.3 Soc.religion.Baha’i
8.4 United Poets
8.5 giganews
8.6 dialogue.poetry
9. Suite.101.com
10. Baha’i Poetry
11. PoetLink.com
12. Umbrella Zine
13. Aha Poetry
14. pmpoetry
15. www.net.poets
16. A Little Poetry
17. Hardy Poetry
18. Tim Love’s Poetry
19. Yahoo Accounts
20. Dialogue Poetry
21. L.G. Jaffe
22. Dialogue Among Civilizations
23. Patrick Martin
24. Links Poetry
25. Yahoo Groups(see section 4.1.2 p.27 Internet Website File)
26.1 Poetry International/Poets International 26.2
27. The Poetry Cafe
28. Verse Links
29. Planet Baha’i Mysticism
30. Poetry Super Highway
31. Poets org.
32. daypoems.net
33. Uplifting Words
34. Inner Circle
35. Arctos Press(send in 4/5 of 04)
36.
Volume 3.10
POETRY WEBSITES INFORMATION EMAIL ADDRESSES
1. Contests and Prizes
2. Michael Fitzgerald
3. Gail Radley
4. Gary Geddes
5. Poem Publishers
6. International Newspapers for
Marketing Articles/Poems
7. Academic Institutions
Volume 3.11
PUBLISHERS: SECTION 1.1 AND 1.2 OF VOLUME 1
1.1. Baha’i Publishers: Internet List: 6 Pages
1.2 Specific Publishers: Sites on the Internet/Emails
1.Juxta Publishing Ltd.
2.Elias Zohoori in Jamaica: Baha’i Publications
3. Global Perspective
4. Images International Inc
5. Baha’i Publishing Trust: India(New Books)
6. Baha’i Publishers: list
7. White Cloud Press
8. One World
9. Baha’i Bookstore International
10. Badi Publishing
3.12 Publishing: 9 volumes, 11 parts(see separate list)
3.13 Magazines: On-Line and Hard Cover(see separate list)
3.14 Canadian Poetry
1. Internet Sites: SECTION A:
1. Lists of sites on the internet
2.1 Poetry Magazines
2.2 Canadian Poetry: U of T library
2.3 Canadian Literary Publishers
2.4 Other Canadian Poetry pages/Ind. Canadian Poets on the Web
2.5 International Poetry Sites
2.5.1 Hall of Fame: World of Poetry
3. The Danforth Review
4. Northwest Passages
5. Regina Weese: Submissions(participoet)
6. Canadian Poetry Association: Literary Links
7. Canadian Poetry-Essays See 3.1(16)
7.1 Canadian Poetry Resources
8. The League of Canadian Poets(cost to join: $175)
9. A Celebration of Women Writers
10. New Canadian Review
11. UT Press: Journals Catelogue
12. The Canadian Web In Review
13. Canadian Literature: A Quarterly Journal of
Criticism and Review-essays See 3.1(16.1)
14. Literary Web Sites: New Canadian Books
15. BublLink: Canadian Literature
16. Journal of Canadian Poetry
17. The Writers Union of Canada
18. Writing On-line Forums
19. YoungPoets.ca
20. BookClub Forum: Canadian
21. Poetry Connection.Net Discussion
22. The Poet’s Peak
23. Wild City Markets
24. The Pedestal Magazine
25. pathetic.org
26. Hangtide.com
27. Poets Online.org
28. Poetrypower.org
29. National Poetry Month
30. The Poetry Kit
31. The Scroll.org
32. Poetry.com
33. Track O Boards
34. Online Guide to Writing in Canada
35. Ploughshares
36. Canadian Writes Journal
37. Canlinks
38. Guides and Directories
38.1 Webcity.ca
38.2 MyTown
1. SECTION B(More Internet Sites)
1. The Canadian Poet Registry
2. Hidden Brook Press: Publisher
3. CanLinks Directory
4. Open Directory: Arts: Literature/World Lit/Can Poetry
5. National Library of Canada
5.1 NLC Information by Subject
6. Ontario Arts Council
6.1 Canada Council for the Arts
6.1.1 Newsletters for the Arts
7. www.writers/com: no link possible yet
8. Purely Canadian Poetry pages
9. Lulu-Marketplace.
10. Span: Small Publishers Assoc for N.A.
11. Canadian Federation of Poets
2. Poets
A SERIES: LIST OF 49 POETS
B SERIES: TWO LISTS EACH OF 26 POETS
3.15 Australian Poetry
A. Internet Items/Listings:(A)
1. Australian Poetry: Internet Sites
1.1. Google 1.2 Yahoo 1.3
2. Arts Tasmania
2.1 Application for Funds
2.2 Projects
2.3 Artist Database
2.4 Australian Bush Poetry, Verse & Music
3. The Write Stuff
4. Tasmanian Writers’ Centere($22)
5. Locus On-line: SF and Fantasy
6.1 Culture and Recreation.gov.au: Ron Price
6.2 Culture and Recreaton: Journals
7. National Library of Australia
8. Write Sites
9. OzLit@VicNet
10. Welcome to Australian Poetry
11. Thylazine
12. Australian Poetry Magazines
12.1 Poetry Kit
12.2 Jacket Magazine
12.4 Recommended Links
12.5 Bush Poetry.com
13. OzPoet/OzLit
14. Literary and Historical Texts
14.1 Journals: List 6 Pages
15. Australian Poetry Magazines On-Line
16. Tasmanian Poetry: Internet Sites
16.1 Tasmanian Poetry Festival
17. Australian Publishers and Booksellers
18. Quarterly Magazines, Publishers & Visual/Performing Arts
19. Australian Identity: Internet Sites
20. New Hope International Links to Magazines
21. Electronic Poetry Centre: Alphabetical Links
22. Numbat Poetry Journals-Links
23. Predators and Editors
24. The Poetry Australian foundation(Wollongong Uni)
25. the Red Room Company
26. Poet’s Union Inc.
27. tasmanianartist.com
B. Individual Poets:(B)
2.3 Webb
3. Brissenden
4. Slessor and Murray
5. Dransfield
6. Harwood and Wright
7. Paterson and Lawson
9.1 Dorothy Hewitt
9.2 Rosemary Dobson
9.3 General 9.3.1 John Trantor
9.3.2 Bruce Beaver
9.3.3 David Malouf
9.3.4 Chris Wallace-Crabbe
9.3.5 John Forbes
9.3.6 Richard Flanagan
10. Australian Poets and Poetry
11.1
11.2
12. Forgotten Poets See 7.1 & 7.2
13. War Poets See 7.1 & 7.2
C.1 Journals
C.2 Essays/Articles
C.3 Interviews
Volume 1.2 A.D. Hope
Volume 2 Bruce Dawe
3.16 POETRY GENERAL
A.1 Internet Poetry Sites: General
A.2
1. Directories/Indexes
1.1 Poetry Society of America
1.2 Magazines, Journals & Periodicals: Online
1.3 Electronic Poetry Centre
2. Boston Review: Political & Literary Forum
3. Cortland Review
4. Electronic Poetry Review
5. Eclectica
3.17 THE BAHA'I FAITH AND THE ARTS VOLUME 2.2
Section A: Jolly Roger.com
1. The Nantucket Literary Community: 7 pages
2. Great Books: Classicals and Jolly Roger(Renaissance), 4 pages
3. Starbuck Classical Poetry
4. Great Books Live Literary Cafe
5. Great Books Directory
6. Great Books Renaissance: Austen to Blake, etc.
7. The Western Canon: Great Books Uni/Frigate
8. The Western Canon: Writers
> 12. Hatteraslight.com: Creative Writing in the Context of the Classics
13. The Jolly Roger: Great Books and the Classics
14. Classicals: From the bible to Shakespeare
15. Kill Devil Hill: Great Literature
15.1 Science and Religion
15.2
3.18 Diary/Journal Sites:
1. The Book Clique Cafe
2. Hamiko Forums
2.1 Dear diary.net
3. My Dear diary
4. Healthy Place.com 4.1 Informed Health Online
5. About.com 5.1 Men’s OnLine Diaries 5.2 personal On-Line Diaries
6. Yahoo directory on-line Journals 6.1 Blurty.com
7.4 Google: Reading Groups
8. Bebits
9.
10. Readerville(needs new computer item)
11. Diarist.com 11.1 HotScripts 11.2 ebay.Diaries 11.3 Blog directory 11.4 Diarist.Net 11.5 Diarist.com-Lit Scene
11.5.1 Elite Skills 11.5.2 Poetryclub.com
12. Diarist.Net.Active
13. Diarist.Net.Registry
14. Open Diary
15. TSM-Soft-org:Open Forum
18.1 Wikipedia 18.2 Live Journal(Baha’i Group(11)
18.3 Xanga 18.3.1 Weblogs
19. Diaries and Journals On the Internet
20. Google Site: Diaries and Journals 20.5 Google-More Sites
21. Yahoo Groups: Paper Journal
22. Diary-X.com
23. Scholastic.Kids.Fun.Online
24. Support@mydiary.org
25. Gimpsy
26. User Diary Index-Nothing
27. Writing Your Spiritual Autobiography:Self-Help Mag
28. Lit.Scene.com
29. Lukol Directory
29.1 Lukol-Dream Journals
30. Online Diary History Project.
3.19 Movie Review Sites:
9. yourthecritic 9.1 NY Times 9.2 Webmaster
10. Internet Movie Database
10.1 Rotten Tomatoes 10.2 The Zreview.co.uk
11.1 The Lazy Movie Critic
12. All Watchers.com
12.1 Barnard Cinema Club
12.2 Cinema Review 12.2 Internet Sites
12.3 Cinemarati 12.4 Google Directory-Movies 12.5 Topica
12.6 Wikipedia
12.7.1 Cinephiles
12.7.2 80s Music
12.7.3 The Coming Soon
12.7.4 Foreign Films
12.7.5 Counting Down: Info Only(no postings)
12.7.6 Movie Forums
12.7.7 MJ Forums
12.7.8Movie Message Boards
12.7.9 Ask the Expert
12.7.10 General Movie Discussions
12.7.11 Movie Web
12.7.12 Movielocity:a.b.c
12.7.13 JoBlo’s Movie Club
12.7.14 Movie Compound forum
12.7.15 Movie Board(Fun) 12.7.15.1 Movie Music.Dot.com
12.7.16 In the Machine
12.7.17 Cavola Movie forum
12.7.18 TX-Zombie
12.7.19 Movie Thing(register?)
12.7.20 2 film Critic.com
12.7.21 Arts and Faith
12.7.22 Slant
12.7.23 Admin Zone forums
12.7.24 White Rider Forums
12.7.25 You Talk
12.7.26 Hong Kong Film Critics Society
12.7.27 Goldderby Forums
12.7. 28 The Last Free City
12.7.29 Cinema Blend
12.7.30 Empire Online
12.7.31 Film.talk.uk
12.7.32 Movies Forum
12.7.33 Cinescape
12.7.34 Gospelcom.forums
12.7.35 J.C. Superchat
12.7.36 The Australian Passion Network
12.7.37 starpulse.com
12.7.38 Cult Movies
12.7.39 Yahoo Movies
12.7.40 movie-reviews
12.7.41 More Yahoo Movie Sites
12.7.42 moviecritics_anonymous
12.7.43 drudashoe913’s Movies
12.7.44 Secret Window
12.7.45
12.8 The Passion of the Christ(12 sites)
13. Uplifting Words 13.1 Association for BF Studies-links
14. Baha’i Media(MS)
15. Fire Your Creativity(MS-non-Bahá'í)
16. Baha’i Institute for the Performing Arts
17. International Baha’i Audio-Visual Centre
18. Arts Dialogue 18.1 Art ‘n Soul
19. All Things Spiritual
20. Karen St. Rain: Fitzgerald’s Poetry-Not Available/Relevant
21. Council Campfire USA-sent-done
22. Baha’i Arts Academy
23. Planet Baha’i: Arts&Music>Poetry and Lit.
23.1 Bahá'í Links: Poetry and Literature
23.2 Delphi Forums
24. Planet Baha’i News
28. The Ezine Directory 28.1 List of Sites
29. Baha’i Net
30. Baha’i Arts and Artists
31. ansme.com>S>R&S>B
32. Indolink Forum>Religion>Arts and Culture
33. Strange Directory: Baha’i
34. The Insight.com
35. Google New Age Directory
35.1 Webspirit 35.2 One Spirit Project
35.3 Mystic Planet
36. i-une.com
37. Search Pixie
38. Poetry Homepage-Forum
39. Tim Casey
40. John Walker's Site
41. Fiction Press
42. Free2Code
43. Creative Inspirations
44. fan.Story.com
45. The Baha’i Faith and the Arts
(UHJ Compilation from Research Dept)
46.
3.20 Jolly Roger.com
1. The Nantucket Literary Community: 7 pages
2. Great Books: Classicals and Jolly Roger(Renaissance), 4 pages
2.1 Classical Art and Architecture/Society and Philosophy
2.2 Jolly Roger.com Ultimate B. Board(www.Renaissance)
Hatteraslight.comLiterary Disc.
3. Starbuck Classical Poetry
3.3.1 Federalist.com spirit
4. Great Books Live Literary Cafe
5. Great Books Directory 5.1 Great Books Forum and Live Chat
6. Great Books Renaissance: Austen to Blake, etc.
7. The Western Canon: Great Books Uni
7.1 The Western Canon Frigate
7.2.1 & 7.2.2(same: revised) Western Canon Great Books
8.3 Martin Luther: Western Canon Frigate
9. The Jolly Roger Great Books: Brewery and Eternity
10. Book Talk and Jolly Roger.com First Fleet
11.1 Science and Religion Campfire(Books)(www.killdevilhill.com)
11.2 Writersword.com: the Open Source
11.3 Creative Writing & the Art of Writing Ren R.Ranch
11.4 Renaissance Writers & Creative Writing Forum Frigate
11.5.1 Creative Writing Fleet:Carolina Navy
11.5.2 Creative Writing Fleet. Jolly Roger.com
11.6 Creative Writing Forum Frigate
11.7 Jolly roger.com Ren Navy
11.8 The Jolly Roger Great Books and Classics
11.9 Three Books of the Renaissance
11.10 The World’s Largest Literary Frigate(The Great Works)
11.11 Sociology.Forum Frigate
11.12 Politics Forum Frigate
12. Hatteraslight.com: Creative Writing in the Context of the Classics
12.1 Hatteras Campfire-A Lover's Complaint
12.2 Journal of Conservative Thought:Hatteras
12.2.1 Beckett,Drake & Elliot
12.3 Beacon Ray’s Great Books
12.4 Hatteras Light.com “the World’s Greatest conserv.”
12.5 Beacon Way Press 12.5.1 Canon: 4 Year Course/
12.7 Hatteras.com Campfire Forums Great Books Forum
12.8 William Shakespeare HatterasLight@Hatteras.com
13. The Jolly Roger: Great Books and the Classics
14. Classicals: From the Bible to Shakespeare
(The Founding of Classical and Jolly Roger .com)
14.1 Classicals.com Campfires
14.2 Classicals Renaissance man Every Auction
15. Kill Devil Hill: Great Literature(Cons. Conversation)
15.1 Science and Religion
15.2 Kill Devil Hill Great Books Literary Cafe’s and Chatrooms
16. Search Bug
17. Google Directory: Authors, etc.
18. Personals 18.2 Photos
19. Beacon Ray’s Books
20. The Conservative Scholar-Resources
21. Literature: chats and forums 21.1 BookChat Central
22. Reviews of the Jolly Roger Site
23. Penpals
24. SearchBug: Chats and Forums
25. Website At Navy
26. exboard/ezSupporter File
27. Arts and Literature: Chats and Forums(Babieca)
28. Tutors and Tutoring
29. Pysics and Astronomy discussion Forum
30. Recommended Reading
31. Business Philosophy.com
32. cymbeline Discussion Deck
33. KewlStuff-Meta-cancel
34. The nantucketlighthouses@Nantuckets.com
35. NantucketCampfires@Nantuckets.com
35.1 Nantucket Memories Live Cavin Chat
36. Treaure Island:Abby’s
37. Skakespeare
38. Renaissances.com Classical Ren Portal
38.1 The Bible.Ren.com Ranch
38.2 Classical Poet’s Poetry Ranch:Gt. Books
38.3 Law
38.4 Western Canon. Common Ranch: Gt. Books
38.5 The Classics Ren.com Ranches
38.6 Best Sellers
39. Great Books:Classical
39.1 Carolinanavy.com Sophocles to Shakespeare
39.2 Great Books Fleet
39.3 Classical Gallery Great Books Tyreasure Chest
40. Literary Agents Forum Frigate
3.21 Mark Foster’s Site
12.1 Site Description
12.2 ID, password & homepage
12.3 Rocker Mouse Web Directory
12.4 Forum Items
12.5 MarkFoster>NETwork: Sociology
12.6 ReligionsNet.com
12.7 SPA(Soc Practice Ass'n)
12.8 Sociology Links
12.9 Clinical Sociology
12.10 MarkFoster.NETwork: mirror sites
12.10.1 Bridges Resource Index
12.11 The Bahai Studies NETwork
12.12 Bahai Site.com
12. 13 Flagship Site
12.14 MarkFoster.ORGanon
12.15 MarkFoster Network Rings
12.16 Sociology Ring
12.17 Philosoraptor
Note:
The notes on computer sites has become too extensive and, perhaps, too irrelevant, to include here.
NOTEBOOKS: GENERAL OVERVIEW OF A LIFETIME OF COLLECTING
In the more than fifty years that I have gathered my writing into notebooks the writing has fallen into three general categories: school, job and personal/Baha’i. The first category was created in the years 1949 to 1988 in primary, secondary and tertiary education and then external studies programs(1973-1988). From the hundreds of notebooks created in these years only two remain. From the hundreds created in the dozens of jobs I have had the only ones remaining are the approximately 30 files/notebooks from my last job at Thornlie College, notebooks from several of the social sciences and humanities.
The final category of notebooks now in my possession are what I would term personal/Bahá'í. They were created not for use in a place of employment, not for a teacher or a school system. They were created for my own use in my work as a Baha’i or in my personal use as a writer and poet. I have been gathering resources now for forty years, 1965-2005, but only seriously for the last twenty, 1985-2005. I have been fine-tuning my collection of notebooks in the last ten years, 1995-2005. I now have some 250-300 notebooks covering millions of words and many subjects and topics. These notebooks now serve and will serve as an important part of the base for my many writing projects in these early years of late adulthood(60-80) and old age(80++).
Little did I know when I created my first notebook at the mid-point in the twentieth century that fifty-five years later notebooks would come to occupy such an important place in my daily life. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, August 12th, 2005.
COURSES, UNITS, MODULES, SYLLABI, SUBJECTS OR PROGRAMS
I TAUGHT IN POST-SECONDARY EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS
IN AUSTRALIA: 1974-2004
Preamble:
I began work at the Tasmanian CAE in January 1974 and finished at the George Town School for Seniors in April 2004, a period of thirty years and four months. The list of subjects below is fairly comprehensive. The notebooks remaining from all these subjects is relatively few and they are marked with an asterisk.(*)
_____________________________________________________________________
A. Hedland College: Acting Lecturer in Management Studies: 1986-1987
Katherine Open College of Tafe: 1982-1986
Interpersonal Skills A
Interpersonal Skills B
Performance Appraisal
Negotiating Skills A
Negotiating Skills B
Conflict Resolution A
Conflict Resolation B
Introduction to Management
Club Management
Time Management
Counselling
Interview Techniques
Public Speaking
Interview Techniques
Consultation Skills
Letter Writing and Report Writing A
Letter Writing and Report Writing B
Supervision Skills
Aboriginal Administrator Training Officer Skills
Creative Writing(Adult Education)
Sociology(Adult Education)
B. Thornlie Campus of the SEMC and Perth Campus of CMC:
Communication Core(Certificate 3)
Communication 1(Diploma)
Business Communication 1A(Diploma)
Business Communication 1B(Diploma)
Ancient Greek History TEE**(notes kept)
Ancient Roman History TEE**
Modern History TEE**
Politics TEE
English Literature TEE**
English TEE
Traditional Culture and Modern Society**
Framework of Australian Society
History of Ideas**
Australian Government and Legal Systems
Philosophy 1 A**
Philosophy 1B**
General Psychology**
Commercial and Civic Principles
Interpersonal Study and Work Skills 001
Interpersonal Study and Work Skills 002
Society and Culture
Life Skills 1B(guitar)
Recreation 2(Certificate 2)
Social Science Introduciton
Welfare Practice 1A
Welfare Practice 1B
Welfare Practive 2A
Welfare Practice 2B
C. Human Services Certificate 3
...................Thornlie Campus 1994-1999.
Welfare Communication (4)
Introduction to Human Services(3)
Dealing With Conflict(3)
Family and Community(3)
Workteam Communication(3)
Service Provision and Practice(3)
Study Skills(3)
Recognition of Prior Learning(3)
Human Development 001(3)
Human Development 002(3)
Field Placement(3)
Field Placement(4)
Field Placement(5)
Field Tutorial(3)
Field Tutorial(5)
Managing People: Training and Development(5)
Managing Group Problem Solving and Decision Making(5)
Sociology for Human Service Workers(5)**
D. Engineering, Applied Science and Social Science Students at the Ballarat College of Advanced Education 1976-1978:
Social Science(Applied Science: Engineering)(BSc)
Social Science(Applied Science: Geology)(BSc)
Social Science(Social Science)(BA)
Australian Media(Social Science)(BA)
Sociological Theory(Teacher Trainees: Secondary)*
E. Whitehorse Technical College: 1975-1976
Behavioural Studies(Library Technician Trainees)(Cert.3)
F. Tasmanian CAE: 1974:
Language in Use
Introductory Pscyology
Human Relations
Sociology of Art
Individualized learning
Sociology*
G. Thornlie Campus of the SEMC: 1989-1998:
Writing Plain English
Writing Workplace Documents
Presenting Information
Presenting Reports
Workplace Communication
Quality Team Management
Job Seeking Skills
Communication and Industrial Relations
Managing Effective Working Relationships
Managing and Developing Teams
Field Experience in Community Services
Work Experience in Job Train Programs
H. George Town School for Seniors:
Autobiography*
Creative Writing*
Social Science
Philosophy*
Ron Price
July 2004
_____________________________________________________________________
FILES REMAINING FROM POST-SECONDARY TEACHING
10 WEEKS AFTER FINISHING MY TEACHING
IN GEORGE TOWN: 1999-2004
Sociology-8
Poetry-6
Poetry-give aways-1
Drama-2
Fiction-4
Literature-2
History-14
Philosophy-3
Psychology-4
Media Studies-5
Anthropology-2
Religion-2 M.A.(Qual)-2
Music/Education/Art/Etc: 5
Total: 60(approx)
Ron Price
July 9 2004
-------------------
In his work from day to day Leonard da Vinci concentrated on one thing at a time and, while he concentrated on that one thing, that thing was the most important in the world. Not much got done in the short term because da Vinci seemed interested in everything but, over a lifetime, da Vinci accomplished many great things, albeit unfinished. After his death Leonard da Vinci’s Notebooks were hidden away, scattered or lost, much like the first generation of my own Notebooks from the 1950s through the 1970s. His wonderful ideas were forgotten; his inventions were not tested and built for hundreds of years. It was largely due to his wide interests that the things he started were never finished. These casual, passing, fleeting, but intense, interests can be found described, outlined, in those Notebooks. These Notebooks record his observations, his sketches, his notes. They are all scattered through 28 Notebooks in over 5000 pages from 1490 to 1519.
His Notebooks are a fascinating mixture of philosophy, scientific enquiry and art with, arguably, four major topics: painting, architecture, mechanics and anatomy made when he was 37 to 67. My Notebooks are a fascinating mixture of the social sciences and humanities with arguably, four major topics: literature, history, the Bahá'í Faith and published work. -Ron Price with thanks to ABC TV, “Leonardo da Vinci,” 7:30 to 8:30 p.m.,October 31st,2004.
Some may see it a little presumptuous to compare my Notebooks to those of one of the greatest geniuses of history. But, as Bahiyyih Nakhjavani writes in her article Artist, Seeker and Seer, our greatness “rests not in ourselves as much as in our ability and desire to circle around the great.”(1) ‘Contrast’ is a better word than ‘compare’ because my Notebooks are so very different than da Vinci’s. I won’t ennumerate all the differences; perhaps the main difference is a visual bias in his work and a print bias in mine. Mine were collected some 500 years after da Vinci’s. Perhaps the first Notebook I created was in 1949 in kindergarten and from that year until 1967 I created many a school Notebook. None of these notes now exist except two essays from English class in 1961-2 and now located in my Journal Volume 1.1. I have some other notes going back to the early to mid sixties, to the start of my pioneering life in 1961-2, newspaper columns by Richard Needham of the Toronto Globe and Mail, and the 1970s, mostly (a) photocopies of material given to me by students at Box Hill Tafe, (b) from Baha’i books which I keep in my Notebook: “Notes/Quotes file B,” (c) from a sociology of art course I taught in 1974 and (d) from media studies courses I taught in Ballarat in 1976-7. But the vast bulk of my present collection of Notebooks comes from the period 1980 to 2005. Many notes and Notebooks from 1982 to 2002 were given to the Baha’i Council of the Northern Territory as part of the History of the Baha’i Faith in that region.
What exists now in my study are notes and Notebooks for a twenty-five year period 1980 to 2005 from the age of 35 to 60.(2) The collection of 250(ca) Notebooks, in the form of two-ring binders, arch-lever files and plastic binders, consists of written notes and quotes from books on a multitude of subjects, photocopies and typed copies of the works of others and notes taken mostly from my reading and to a far lesser extent my observations and experiences.
New ideas are incubated, to some extent, in these Notebooks. I have squeezed brief writing periods, sketches of varying lengths and tasks of different kinds, into my frenetic life. This squeezing has taken place out of necessity because I was teaching a particular subject, out of interest because it was associated with my involvement in the Baha’i Faith or because I wanted to write about a subject, an idea, an experience, if not at the time I recorded the words, at least later on. I rarely recorded observations of nature in any detail, although occasionally I did in my poetry. The accounts of my experiences can be found in my journals and my poetry.
There are 1000s of pages of notes; I would not even want to begin to count them. Over time I hope to write a more detailed outline of their origins, their evolution and their present contents. I’m not sure they are worth preserving as da Vinci’s were hundreds of years after they were written. I think it unlikely, although I will leave that to a posterity that I can scarcely anticipate at this climacteric of history in which I am living. For now, though, this brief statement is sufficient.(3)
__________________________________FOOTNOTES_______________________
(1) Bahiyyih Nakhjvani, “Artist, Seeker and Seer,” Baha’i Studies, Vol.10, p.19.
(2) My Notebooks from the age of 15 to 35, from 1959 to 1979, are so minuscule as to hardly rate a mention. Those from the age of 5 to 15, although extensive, have disappeared into the dustbin of history. I collected notes from the period 1984 to 2004, beginning on January 19th 1984 for a journal, an autobiography. A more extensive analysis than this cursory one here may reveal a different timetable, a different history of my Notebooks.
(3) Ron Price, “In Commemoration of the 47th Anniversary of the Passing of the Guardian in 1957,” Pioneering Over Four Epochs, November 4, 2004.
A possibly useful embellishment to this autobiography are the some 250 Notebooks: arch-lever files, two-ring binders and plastic binders on such subjects as: ancient history, history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, media studies, personal writing, post-graduate studies, literature, poetry, Baha’i files, writing, autobiography and biography, miscellaneous, letters, et cetera. I can’t imagine anyone keeping this material, although it provides insights into my spiritual pilgrimage and into my reading, an activity which has given many of my days a solidity and value that was invaluable. These Notebooks are a type of diary, a type of academic journal. I will not try to summarize this vast collection of material here but, when and if this autobiography comes to see the light of day, I would like to emphasize that the absence of this body of Notebooks, if absent it becomes, would be a loss in the overall understanding of a life, my life. There is simply too much of this type of material to keep in the event of my demise given that I possess neither name, nor fame nor rank but, perhaps a list of the titles of the files and binders would be useful:
BOOKLETS/FILES THAT WERE NOT USED IN MY PROFESSIONAL TEACHING BUT WERE USED FOR PERSONAL PURPOSES IN RESEARCH, WRITING AND PRIVATE STUDY:
These files assumed the shape they now possess by degrees from 1999 to 2005--for the most part after retiring from FT work at the age of 55 in 1999, from PT work in 2003 and most volunteer and casual work in 2005.
The booklets listed below contain information of value to any comprehensive autobiographical or biographical study. Of the 300+ booklets/files currently on my shelves the ones listed below were not used in my professional teaching up to 1999. Other files, now long thrown or given away, were essentially notes I used and lecture resources for in-class work in teaching until I retired by degrees as indicated above. These 'other' files are listed under 'subjects taught' in my resume in section 24(v) of my website.
Another category of 'other' files were academic courses I taught before 1999 and which continued to be part of my studies after retiring in 1999. History, sociology, literature, media studies, philosophy, psychology, anthropology and religion, inter alia, occupied about 50 of my 'other' files.
1. Notes/Quotes: Vol.A and Vol. B(2 Vols)
2. Notebook: 1-4: Autobiography/Journal(6 Vols)
And Letter Writing(5 Vols)
3. Published(3 Vols) and Unpublished(2 Vols)Writing
4. Conferences Booklet(1 Vol)
5. Roger White: Essays/Book:(6 Vols)
6. Sing Alongs(2 Vols)
7. Novels/Sci Fi:(1983-2001)(2 Vols)
8. Journal: 19 Volumes(12 Vols of which are photos)
9. Dreams(1 Vol)
10. Baha’i Model(1 Vol)
11. Publishers(Internet):Vol.1-24
12. Pioneering Over Four Epochs(2nd edition) 1 copies;(1st edition)-1 copy.
13. Pioneering Over Three Epochs: original set of notes(3 Vols)
14. Individuals:Biography(1Vol)
15. Epic(1 Vol)
16. Letters(21 Vols)
17. Necrology(1 Vol)
18. 10 brown A3 size-files on 10 topics
19. Mother(1 Vol)
20. Baha’i History(2 Vols)
21. A.J. Cornfield's Story(1 Vol)
22. Email Addresses and Info(2Vols)
23. Bahá'í Resources, Talks(2 Vols)
24. Published Articles: Newspapers(2 Vols)
25. Essays: For Loan(2Vols)
26. Website/Internet/Computer Files(3 Vols)
27. Universal House of Justice Letters(5 Vols)
28. ABS Newsletters(3 Vols)
29. Book Ordering(1 Vol)
30. Recipies(1 Vol)
31. Post-Graduate Studies(1Vol)
32. Outback/NT Bahá'í History: Returned to the Regional Council of the NT(8 Vols)
33. George Town Bahai Group(3 Vols)
34. Beacon/The Australian Bahá'í and Other Australian Periodicals(1Vol) 35. Interivews/Book Reviews(2 Vols)
36. Joseph Epstein: On Writing(2 Vols)
37. Creative Writing(1 Vol)
I have never liked to suggest that writing is a grind, that it is brave work, that it is filled with sturm und drung. H. L. Mencken used to say that any scribbler who found writing too arduous ought to take a week off to work on an assembly line, where he would discover what work is really like. The old boy, as they say, got that right. I have had my time on assembly lines of all sorts and they are, for me, mind-numbing. To be able to sit home or wherever and put words together in what one hopes are charming or otherwise striking sentences is, no matter how much tussle may be involved, lucky work, a privileged job. The only true grit connected with it ought to arrive when, thinking to complain about how hard it is to write, one is smart enough to shut up and silently grit one’s teeth. And I do. I often do.
The private record of notes taken, materials gathered and written in personal and scholarly mills which often grind exceedingly small, with their apparent concern with intellectual minutiae, over six decades and for my own immediate purposes--reveal many things. They show the workings of my mind, for what that may be worth and for me, it is worth much. They show me in my private workshop. For those who are interested they show someone who became over the epochs a compulsive note-taker, note-maker and preserver. I will leave it to posterity to analyse further the voluminous contents of these notes, should posterity ever desire to do so.
Compartmentalizing or dissociating one's various online identities can be an efficient, focused way to manage the multiplicities of selfhood. William James, one of the greatest or at least major founding fathers, of/in American psychology, talked about how the normal mind operates in a "field" of consciousness in which one's awareness shifts among different hot spots of ideas, memories, and feelings. Role theory in social psychology speaks about how a successful life is an efficient juggling of the various tasks and positions we accumulate and develop from childhood through adulthood. Cyberspace living is yet another manifestation of this shifting, juggling manoeuvre. It gives people the opportunity to focus on and develop a particular aspect of who they are. It may even give people the chance to express and explore facets of their identity that they do not express in their face-to-face world. Most people in my interpersonal world, now in my late adulthood, never see the much more intellectual, serious, spiritually inclined person that I exhibit on the Internet at my website. In some ways the Internet work is like a diary revealing a private area for the most part not discussed with others. It is a rich world with its excitements, its pleasures, its enhancements and its dangers to a spiritual life as well.
INTRODUCTION
After completing the first edition of my autobiography in 1993, I began collecting resources on the subjects of autobiography, journals/diaries and letters. By April 2009 I had collected three arch-lever files and three two-ring binders on these subjects. I felt that first edition(1986-1993) of my autobiography was entirely unsatisfactory and thought that there must be more to the process of writing such a work, indeed, more to the final product than what I had then achieved.
The resources in these six volumes represent, then, the efforts of the first sixteen years(1993-2009) after the completion of the first edition of my autobiography to draw together a useful body of resources to enrich, to deepen and extend that original edition of my autobiography. These resources, as well as a host of other resources, have proved invaluable in my efforts to write the second to the sixth editions of Pioneering Over Four Epochs.
Ron Price
14 April 2009
JOURNAL/DIARY WRITING:
INTRODUCTION
It has been 18 months since I first came across ‘journal writing/diaries on the Internet.’ In the period June 2003 to December 2004 I made the following list of journal/diary sites and placed a significant number of postings at several of these sites. This work fits in very nicely with my autobiographical work Pioneering Over Four Epochs. There are many journal sites at which I could add material. There are simply too many for one person to post on any regular basis given the fact that I now have at least a 1000 other sites at which to make postings. But this is a start. (See “Notebook 3: Autobiography, Journal and Letter Writing: under ‘diaries’ in my directory).
Ron Price
December 21st 2004
THE CONCEPT OF NOTEBOOKS
Anselm Hollo in his book The Poet's Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26 American Poets(WW Norton and Co., NY, editor, Stephen Kuudisto, et al., 1995)writes "I love reading poets' Notebooks. Poets are curious critters, and it is a pleasure to relax with the jottings and musings of other practitioners." Many writers and poets, though not all, keep Notebooks. This section of Pioneering Over Four Epochs, section IX, contains information relevant to my Notebooks. What readers find here provides a general framework for the many Notebooks I have kept over the years.
There are generally two types of Notebooks which I use. One is the type where I keep notes on a particular subject. The subjects on which I kept notes--and booklet, the Notebook names--are listed in this section. Another Notebook is the type where I keep quotations on the subject of writing, the literary process: poetry, reading, autobiography, diary/journal keeping and letter writing, inter alia. In this latter category I have three major files and in the former category I have some 160 files. There is material in these Notebooks going back to the 1960s, the beginning of my pioneering experience but, for the most part, the Notebooks assumed the form they did in and after 1992 and especially after I retired from full-time employment in 1999.
Ron Price
July 9, 2004
NOTEBOOK 3
AUTOBIOGRAPHY, JOURNAL & LETTERS
section 3: Journals and Diaries:
B. Diary/Journal Sites:
1. The Book Clique Cafe
2. Hamiko Forums
2.1 Dear diary.net
3. My Dear diary
4. Healthy Place.com 4.1 Informed Health Online
5. About.com 5.1 Men’s OnLine Diaries 5.2 personal On-Line Diaries
6. Yahoo directory on-line Journals 6.1 Blurty.com
and Diaries
7. Diaries and Journals: Yahoo Group(My Group)
7.1 We Read Diaries
7.3
7.4 Google: Reading Groups
8. Bebits
10. Readerville(needs new computer item)
11. Diarist.com 11.1 HotScripts 11.2 ebay.Diaries 11.3 Blog directory 11.4 Diarist.Net 11.5 Diarist.com-Lit Scene
11.5.1 Elite Skills 11.5.2 Poetryclub.com
12. Diarist.Net.Active
13. Diarist.Net.Registry
14. Open Diary
15. TSM-Soft-org:Open Forum
-Education
16. Freeware Home: Diaries
and Journals
17. Diaryland 17.1 Diaryland.Gimpsy(100’s of diaries)
18.1 Wikipedia 18.2 Live Journal(Baha’i Group(11)
18.3 Xanga 18.3.1 Weblogs
19. Diaries and Journals On the Internet
20. Google Site: Diaries and Journals 20.5 Google-More Sites
21. Yahoo Groups: Paper Journal
22. Diary-X.com
23. Scholastic.Kids.Fun.Online
24. Support@mydiary.org
25. Gimpsy
26. User Diary Index-Nothing
27. Writing Your Spiritual Autobiography:Self-Help Mag
28. Lit.Scene.com
29. Lukol Directory
29.1 Lukol-Dream Journals
30. Online Diary History Project.
the above were some of the internet sites where I placed some of my autobiography.
TABLE OF CONTENTS ON DIARIES AND JOURNALS--NOT NOTEBOOKS
Preamble:
In 1994 I began to collect information relevant to keeping diaries or journals. Initially it was a tentative and unorganized process but, gradually by 1995, it became more organized and systematic. In September of 1995 I made this table of contents for convenience of locating my source material. Notebooks, in contrast, had their origins many years before this, arguably as far back as 1953, 1963, 1973 or 1983 depending on how one defines Notebook.
The following were some of the resources I drew on for autobiographical study and writing.
PAGE___________________ITEM_________________________________________
1. Freud: comments on biography and autobiography
2. General Notes on Autobiography(GNA)
7. Women’s Autobiography
9. William Carlos Williams’ Autobiography(pp.9-14)
10. GNA
15. Henry James’ Letters
16. Thomas Hardy’s Notebooks
18. GNA
19. Women’s Autobiography(pp.19-22)
23. Menchen’s Diary(pp.23-24)
25. Thomas Mann: Diaries
28. Virginia Woolf Essays: Montaign(pp.28-32)
29. GNA
37. F. Scott Fitzgerald: Notebooks
39. Thomas Woolf: Notebooks
44. Nathaniel Hawthorne: works
46. Peter Howson: biography(Political)
50. Henry James: Notebooks
54. Virginia Woolf
GEORGE, I HARDLY KNEW YOU
I have a faculty...for burying an emotion in my heart or brain for forty years, and exhuming it at the end of that time as fresh as when interred.
-Thomas Hardy, Notebooks.
I see their names in the Baha’i News,
in the ‘In Memoriam’ section, by now
plunged into a sea of light in a world
of mysteries, perhaps. I do not know,
not here; I feel an absense even though
I have not seen them in twenty-five years.
A lump comes to my throat: I wonder why.
I hardly knew the man. He is a distant memory:
cold Canadian evenings with hot coffee brewing
in his kitchen; he was such an ordinary man.
No spectacle, no hero: the ordinarily ordinary,
the humanly human. Why do I feel sad
over such distant simplicity?
“George, I hardly knew you!”
I search my memory for more detail,
for just a little something to hang onto
while I cry.
Ron Price
21 December 1995
MY TRIBUTARY
Each artist thus keeps in his heart of hearts a single stream which, so long as he is alive, feeds what he is and what he says. When that streams runs dry, you see his work gradually shrivel up and start to crack. -Albert Camus, Selected Essays and Notebooks, editor, Philip Thody, Penguin, London, 1970, p.18.
There’s been a stream, scented,
I’ve been drinking from since
before I came of age. The waters
have been sweet and deep, with
periodic wastelands when the bed ran dry
and the blackest soil filled my soul
with fear, disorder and dessication.
My own tributary of this stream
only began to run in my middle years.
Inspiration has run with a force
that I barely understand, nor can withstand
its roving eye and hand like an interwoven
carpet or some meteor travelling through the dark.
Will this tributary shrivel after I have expressed
my life and all it means at a deeper, more intense,
more clear-sighted level than anything I can achieve
in the daily round? I think not; for it is a tributary
of a great and thundering river whose waters will
flow on forever into the sweet streams of eternity:
as long as I have the will that will’s this eternal flow;
I know many who have not
the will that will not will belief.
The mood will not strike them here below:
I know not why?
Ron Price
12 January 1996
MY SENSE OF NOTHINGNESS
...the highest station which they who aspire to know Thee can reach is the acknowledgement of their impotence to attain the retreats of Thy sublime knowledge I...beseech Thee, by this very powerlessness which is beloved of Thee..-Baha’u’llah, Prayers and Meditations, USA, 1938, p.89.
To read Price’s poetry, his notebooks, his autobiographical narrative, his essays and his letters is to shift constantly from his imaginative and intellectual life to the here and the now, a specific time and place in the microcosm or the macrocosm. He has a wonderful capacity, gift if you like, to not see dust, as Virginia Woolf puts it, to be quite removed from the day-to-day trivia of life, as his wife might have put it-and often did. The rare joys of reality are juxtaposed with the endless elements of that trivia, the endlessly prosaic. Perhaps the reason he was a poet, at least in the 1990s, was that he could not stop. For him, writing poetry was a form of self-knowing, a form of risk-taking where he exposed himself. This process, though, helped him to define himself as a writer. -Ron Price with thanks to Marlene Kadar, editor, Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1992.
It was not all risk, though;
some of it was simply pure
surprise and wonder: like
the two exploding stars colliding
17 million light years from Earth
and taking, according to one astrophysicist,
1200 years to do their colliding;
shooting out gas in all directions
at 36 million kilometres per hour,
creating a supernova,
a brilliant light show, in a place,
a galaxy, where six supernovas
have been produced
since ‘Abdu’l-Baha wrote His
Tablets of the Divine Plan.
And me, defining myself,
my sense of nothingness,
in the face of that immensity.
Ron Price
14 June 1997
NOT QUITE ME
It is absolutely essential to the writing of anything worthwhile that the mind be fluid and release itself to the task. -William Carlos Williams
Every poem should be the last poem, written as if it contained the last thing the poet would ever say-like a will.-Lisel Mueller in The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 20 American Poets, W.W. Norton & Co., NY, 1995, p.218.
Every once in a while I go
to some plush joint on the
sixteenth floor and get a view
of the big smoke, or eat a lunch
in the finest restaurant in town
and discuss the state of the world,
or travel in the fast lane for an afternoon
with dinner at the Ritz, or rent a flash car
for the day; it’s a dip into another world for
an instant in time, a world that belongs to
someone else, that’s not quite me, or me for
a minute, fixed on a landscape, a soil, with new
desires, significations, to savour, like a dream,
vain and empty, just a semblance of reality.
MORE INTROVERTED WITH THE YEARS
We all must live in this outer world of physical reality. This world of people, places and things, in which we suffer, mate and, in time, die is something we all experience, albeit in different ways. The poet, the true artist in us, lives in another world, an inner world, a world which is both separate and not separate from this outer world; it draws on this outer world, exists in a symbiotic relationship with this world, attempts to reconcile, blend and embody this outer world. There is an interchange, an interplay, a playing between this inner and outer world. -Ron Price with thanks to Dylan Thomas in Poet in the Making: The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas, editor, Ralph Maud, J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd., London, 1968(1965), p. 26.
I feel as if I have become
more introverted with the years.
I bring the world’s wonders
into myself.
I put words around
every atom in existence
and the essence of all created things,
as much as I can,
within my limitations,
except what the garment of words
can not clothe
and what those mystic tongues
and their mysterious melodies
find no ear with which to hear.
Ron Price
9 October 1999
NOTEBOOKS: Fitzgerald’s and Mine
F. Scott Fitzgerald "began assembling his Notebooks"1 some time after May 1932. He was thirty-six and had eight years to live before his death in 1940. He used his Notebooks to record ideas and observations. Bruccoli, in his review of these Notebooks, says they are not that interesting as literary documents but, since they were from Fitzgerald, they are important.2 Two novels and a collection of short stories appeared from the eight years that Fitzgerald utilized Notebooks.
R. Frederick Price "began assembling his Notebooks" in the 1960s and 1970s, but little remains from these collections. In the 1980s and 1990s Price began to assemble an extensive collection of notes from the humanities and the social sciences, not so much observations as quotations from his reading, photocopies from books, magazines and journals and, by the late nineties, material from the Internet. A vast amount of this, too, has been lost, given away or left behind where he lectured and taught. His poetry, of course, contained the sorts of notes that came from observations and ideas. By 2003, as this statement was being recorded, over one hundred two-ring binders and arch-lever files as well as over fifty booklets of poetry filled with notes represented Price's collection of Notebooks. -Ron Price with thanks to 1&2Matthew J. Bruccoli, editor, The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, NY, 1945, p.viii & p.ix.
It had become a massive embrace,
filled the spaces all around him
like a sprawling glove
that noone could wear,
like a collection of old shirts
nicely hung and arranged
to wear on cold or warm days.
He'd been warming to them for,
what, forty years now?1
It had been a lifetime
since that early start
with lots of practice
even in those earlier years,
perhaps as far back as '53--
surely not that soon,
not in grade four2
when the Kingdom
was just arriving
and that Crusade
to conquer the world?
1 1962-2002
2 I have vague recollections of 'notebooks' from school from about 1953 through 1958, grades four to eight in Ontario Canada. Nothing, of course, remains from this period except a few old photographs. The oldest item from a 'notebook' that I possess comes from 1962.
THE VISION’S COMING FAST NOW
I try to make a place, a landscape, in my poems.
-Octavio Paz in The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26 American Poets, W.W. Norton and Co, NY, 1995.
A poem is to keep a now for then.
-Felix Pollak, ibid.
What we see here towers
far too high for us to grasp.
These terraces and marbles
elude our mental clasp.
The anguish and the loss
that make our furrows
of sweet toil, now spur-on
striding spirits every morning,
on the boil.
The world sees a lovely hanging
garden on the way to work,
a place for flowers and for laws,
a crystal concentrate of beauty,
a blissful vision and a cause.
No one knows what lurks
beneath the ground
of this vast expanse.
The vision’s coming faster now:
the dancer and the dance.1
Ron Price
6 January 1999
1 This is a vahid, or poem of 19 lines,
WITH THANKS TO DYLAN THOMAS
Price consciously attempts to eschew massive or even any partial obscurity and strangeness in his poetry. There is a buoyancy in his poetry, at least he likes to think so, which does not assert its dominion over death, as it does in the work of poets like Dylan Thomas but, rather, asserts the continuity of processes begun in life in an eternal journey.
What Price expresses in his work is not that some things in life are interesting and some things uninteresting but, rather, that certain aspects of phenomenal reality startle or arouse the imagination, force themselves on one’s attention or simply form a complex interaction of mind, emotions and the physical world creating a desire to write.
What some might call magic or chance couplings, Price likes to call the fascinating interplay of wonder, awe and delight to be found in this “burning and bewildering universe”, “in the miracle of myself and others”, and in the closeness of divinity, as close as one’s life’s vein. This is the basis for the intimacy achieveable in Price’s poetry.-Ron Price with thanks to Poet in the Making: The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas, editor, R. Maud, J.M. Dent and Sons, London, 1968(1965), p.37.
Thomas would like to be able
to forget all that he has written
and start again with a newness,
a freshness and a vitality.
Price would like to empty himself
of old dreariness and,
see things with fresh eyes,
with a new heart,
and a new mind,
free of the dust
of acquired knowledge,
free of love and hate
and
all shadowy and ephemeral attachments.1
1 Baha’u’llah, “Tablet of the True Seeker”, Gleanings.
Ron Price 9 October 1999
WRITING FOR THE PLANET
Two years before the outset of the Baha’i teaching Plan in 1937, Thomas Wolfe delivered a lecture at the Colorado Writers’ Conference. What Wolfe said then, about American writers, could well apply to the Baha’is who are writing now at the turn of the century and the millennium from a planetary perspective. I have summarized Wolfe’s words below and turned the message toward myself and my fellow Baha’is who are trying to be writers.
The Baha’i who is also an aspiring writer has a task that very well may be the hardest that any writer has known. The physical proportions are vaster and more difficult than those that the writer in any individual nation on the earth must contend with. There is no antecedent, no structural plan, no body of tradition that the writer can draw on. Such writers must make a new tradition for themselves derived from their own life, from the immense space and energy of the planet. They must labour in the direction of a complete and whole articulation; they must attempt to discover the entire universe; they must try and form a new and complete language. This is the struggle toward which their lives must be devoted. From the billions of living and non-living forms, from the swarming complexity of life everywhere, from the world’s violence and savagery, from the uniqueness that surrounds us everywhere, we aspirants to the vocation of writer must draw on that power and energy in our own life, a power and energy furnished by those who have been “faithful to the Cause of God.”1 We must find that special voice that is in our own speech and that becomes over time the substance of our art.
-Ron Price with thanks to R.S. Kennedy, editor, The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1970, Introduction; and 1 Baha’u’llah, Gleanings, p.161.
I have tired to capture and subdue
the enormous multiplicity
and what is so often the grey wash
of existence, of what comes
into my sensory emporium
and mind from outside, external.
There is a staggering muchness,
pictures, events, happenings
pouring in from all compass points,
sifted through my active brain,
leaning to the side of solitude now,
the deep-sea diving of memory
and the world’s invisible, infinite
sources that swim and float.
Ron Price
24 August 2000
VISIONS: 1937-2000
“The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe show us the difficulties that the autobiographical method created for him due to an ever-expanding, ever-detailed proliferation of material,” writes R.S. Kennedy in The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe(U. of N. Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1970). Rather than small pocket notebooks, the informal records of a literary career, a mixture of day-to-day jottings of a most miscellaneous kind, a jumble of literary ideas, readers of my autobiographical pot-pourri get a mixture of poetry, essays, letters, narrative, journal, history, biography, criticism, notes from reading, newspaper and magazine articles and incompleted novels, mostly from the fourth epoch but some from the third, of the Formative Age. This mixture of genres provides readers with an unusual, a rare, acquaintance with the inner life of a Baha’i who is an aspiring writer, a fascinating glimpse of a poet at work and a close look at the creative process which transformed his experience into writing. -Ron Price with thanks to R.S. Kennedy, The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1970, p. xvii.
I, too, Thomas, have a hope,
a conviction, of a high,
a glorious fulfillment.
No abortion here, Thomas,
no corruption,
no infection of disease
will dull the vision,
the golden dome,
the silver thread,
the amethyst, the diamond:
they will shine
however bleak the scene,
however much the revulsion
that is felt from time to time.1
Yes, there will be shame, anguish,
loathing, follies, stupidities,
crises that threaten to arrest
its unfoldment and
blast all the hopes
which its progress has engendered.2
And there will be a taste
of bitterness with the years,
made sweet by death’s final call
and that Wondrous Vision
that is the brightest emanation
of His Mind.3
1 When the Seven Year Plan began in 1937, Thomas Wolfe was in the last year of his life and the vision, the dream, he had had of America seemed mortally wounded.
2 Shoghi Effendi, God Passes by, p.111.
3 Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Baha’u’llah, p.48. Ron Price 25 Aug 2000
A DIFFERENT PILGRIM'S PROGRESS
It is difficult not to regard, indeed it is quite fitting to regard, James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in autobiographical light. It would seem that Joyce intuited this autobiographical reality early on and most certainly was consciously aware of this personal nature of his writing by the time he undertook the novel. This book is, I think, a sort of 'Pilgrim's Progress' from the world of objectivity to the world of Einstein's relativity which had entered the world more than ten years before Portrait. I could illustrate this by dealing with several facets of the novel, beginning with the overarching guide through the novel: the narrator. The first chapter of Portrait, too, begins with a montage of memories of very young childhood. If Joyce first approached his autobiography through this novel, I first approached it through a narrative of my life and this led, by 1992, to a poetic narrative of literally thousands of poems. -Ron Price with thanks to "The Dedalus Factor: Einstein's Science and Joyce's Portrait of the Artist," Timothy D. Clark, in Joyce's Papers on the Internet, 20 December 2002.
Here you will find my life and times,
but my account is flawed and fails,
as life itself fails and is flawed
and, for the most part, apparently
makes nothing happen of consequence.
But the potential is there
for much good, much effect,
if only, if only the reader
can be part of it, and then
the most self-centred poet
becomes the most universal1
and a life, of little apparent
ultimate significance, keeps
a now for then, a music
that all can use and words
that are, strangely, the poet's
last will and testament.
1From The Poet's Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26 American Poets, WW Norton & Co., 1995, p. 219.
Ron Price
20 December 2002
THE PLUNGE IS OVER
In his introduction to The Notebooks of Henry James, F. O. Matthiesson says that "the note-taking habit did not come easily" to James.1 In my own case, it seems to me that the note-taking habit took root in three interlocked phases: my student and post-graduate student years to 1988, my years as a teacher and lecturer to 1999 and my years as a published and usually unpublished writer, after 1982 until, it would appear in what is now the early evening of my life, some incapacitating senescence that has not yet arrived.
James' notebooks served him well as did mine; indeed for me they were indispensable in my work as a student, as a teacher and as a writer. They were, for James, part of "that saturation in his material which he always held to be the first requisite for viable art."2 They were also due to "his too frequent vagueness of mind." This is true for me in the case of the former; in the case of the latter it was not so much vagueness of mind as the indispensability of the notebooks. They were, for me, one of those sine qua nons of my writing. -Ron Price with thanks to F. O. Matthiesson, editor, The Notebooks of Henry James, Oxford UP, NY, 1947, 1p.ix and 2p.xii.
Part of that solidity of subject,
importance, emotional capacity,
fineness, largeness, naturalness,
humanity, fundamental passion.
Part of those thousand
vanished and present things,
those germs, small seeds,
floating particles in the stream,
an inveterate minuteness,
a stray suggestion,
a wandering word,
a vague echo,
a wince, a prick,
the merest grain,
a tiny nugget,
scarcely visible
in life's great confusion,
lost in a sea of books.
Part of the great plunge
into the ocean of life
of should I say, now,
standing on the shore,
the plunge, I trust, over.1
1 "He should have plunged into the sea of life not just stood on the edge." Graham Clarke, editor, Henry James, Critical Assessments, Helm Info Ltd., The Banks, UK, 1991, pp. 286-7.
Ron Price 21 January 2003
THE AGE WE LIVE IN
It is not so much authorial ego or that I am a compulsive self-historiographer which compels me to document my life more fully than most. All this poetry is my workshop where my awareness of life expresses itself quintessentially. I also see myself as part of a global pattern, a representative figure, part of a mytho-historical process which may be of use to future generations. I was born into a new age with the Kingdom of God just beginning when I was nine years old. In my lifetime the Bahá'í administrative process, the nucleus and pattern for a new Order, went through a radical growth period. I have been committed to the promises and possibilities of this new way of Life.1 As F. Scott Fitzgerald was committed to and had a belief in American life in the 1920s, as American was going through new beginnings so, too, do I feel strongly, passionately, a new commitment, a new belief and new beginnings.
George Bull points out in his introduction to his massive biography of the life of Michelangelo that people are often best understood "in the crowded context of the significant changes and continuities of the age."2 The age I have lived in and through has also faced "significant changes and continuities." My life, I have little doubt, can be understood, too, as Michelangelo's and so many others have been understood, in this same general context of their age. -Ron Price with thanks to 1 Matthew Bruccoli, editor, The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, NY, 1945, p.vii; and 2George Bull, Michelangelo: A Biography, Viking Press, 1995, p.xviii.
I, too, saw myself as coming
at the end of a complex
historical process
that had its beginnings
in the district of Ahsa,
those birds flying over Akka
and those Men with beards
and I identified with it.
I was born near the start
of yet another Formative Age:
would it last as long as the Greeks?1
I understood profoundly well
the claims of this new belief
as you did the claims of your craft.2
I was, like you, fortune's darling
in this new age and I was, too,
the shell-shocked casualty
of a war that was more complex
than any of us could understand.
1 their Formative Age lasted from 1100 to 500 BC; this one began 23 years before I was born.
2 F. Scott Fitzgerald, arguably the major American writer between the wars: 1919-1939.
FINDING MY LIMITS
It has been nearly four years since I retired from my professional career as a teacher. I had already become quite tired of the verbal world in all its forms, teaching and community activity, in my last several years as a teacher. Now after four years of relative quiet, with only my wife and son to talk to, a small Bahá'í community of half a dozen and a few others: family, friends and people I had come to know in the wider community providing a small base of human interaction, I seem to find anything beyond about four hours of continuous human interaction and dialogue at one stretch a cause of some anxiety and fatigue. Only a slight anxiety exists in anticipation of a long verbal exchange, but my spirit clearly finds a type of emotional exhaustion setting in after I have engaged in conversation with others for more than about four hours. I am now only 18 months short of sixty. After forty years of extensive and intensive talking and listening, 1962-2002, a new set of limits, what you might call interaction limits, has slowly defined itself in these early years of retirement from employment. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 3 January 2003.
There's a frontier, too,
of ineffability, like
an invisible wall
that surrounds every
movement of the lips
in love, in anything.
I try to catch some
of its mystery,
embrace and penetrate
some of its universe,
identify it
in my own effort
to unleash the infinite
and express
the emotion of an idea,
the desire to create,
and only this work, this labour,
can satisfy it.1
1 Albert Camus in Notebooks: 1942-1951, trans. Justice O'Brien, AA Knopf, 1965, NY, p.210.
Ron Price
3 January 2003
ENOUGH AND NOT ENOUGH
Poems are not . . . simply emotions . . . they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and things . . . and know the gestures which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighbourhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you have long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained . . .; to childhood illnesses . . . to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel . . . and it is still not enough.-The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge quoted in Washington Post.com, “Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke,” Ralph Freedman, 1996.
Well, Rainer, I’ve seen many-a-city,
many people, places and things,
am not so good on gestures of flowers
at any time of day or season.
Well, Rainer, I go back often
to unknown neighbourhoods,
to unexpected encounters,
partings seen and unseen,
in the paintings of my mind.
Well, Rainer, I also go back
to my days of childhood,
to mornings by the sea, the bay,
the river, the town, the city,
the island and the meadow
where mention of God
hath been made
and His praise glorified.
And Rainer, you are right;
it’s never enough,
but it’s all I have
when I travel at night
to those childhood sicknesses
and to so many things
unexplained in this world
of the mystic, of mystery
that will never be explained.
Ron Price
December 3 2004
A NOTE TO FUTURE EDITORS
When collections of letters, notebooks, poems and diaries of many writers both during and before the twentieth century are published sometimes everything found in the original is reproduced: words crossed out, misspellings, wrong words, incorrect punctuation, etc. Others try to correct, to normalize, the original work prefering normalization to the raw, the pure, the absolutely faithful reproduction, the unadulterated text. Do the texts come closer to us ‘cleaned up and in modern dress’ or in their original form? In their original dress perhaps they force us to penetrate to their essential kinship with our world; perhaps thrust back into history they can speak to us more directly. Does a healthy attempt at correction and revision end up by destroying the essential character of the first drafts, replacing some initial fever with something tame and bland. Wordsworth himself recognized that “his revisions generally made things worse, but he could not prevent himself from trying.”1 One day I may have the kind of experience Wordsworth had and feel compelled to revise my poetry.
My own thoughts and feelings on this matter reveal a preference to ‘clean up’ my work. Get rid of spelling mistakes, I say. Use a form of punctuation that is as conventional as possible, remove all words crossed out and clear away errors of text and context. If the word is clearly incorrect correct it, even change it where it will improve the flow, the accuracy, the message. Bend things as far as possible for the reader without losing the integrity, the accuracy, the aim, the gist, of the original message. I know the poet W.H. Auden did not think this way. He saw everything he wrote as his private property which only he could change. No one should ‘normalize’ his work. With several million words down on paper I do not see how, if some future editor follows Emily Dickinson’s approach, spelled out below, too much can go wrong.
I do not feel as possessive, as fussy, as purist, as Auden. Like the essayist, Montaigne, I create a unity in my writings, and especially my poetry, which “is not the result of a simple plan, and does not come from the orderly exposition of ideas; it lies in the movement of (my) thought, the way (I) glance off one subject to another...”2 If I want to revise a poem I am inclined to follow the advise of Robert Duncan insofar as revision is concerned: “I never revise a poem; I simply write a new one;”3 or as W.B. Yeats once said on the subject: “know what issue is at stake/It is myself that I remake.” I think, though, I come closest to Emily Dickinson’s approach to altering my work. “She made many alterations to her poems, but not one has reference to improvement in rhyme or rhythm. Every change, every suggestion for a different word or phrase was in the evident hope that the thought might be made clearer not to smooth the form.4
Beautiful creations like the unfolding magnificence of the Terraces make you glad you are alive. Now that this creation is here and completed one gets a feeling that it is needed, although one did not have that feeling before it was built. Millions will be affected by the gardens and buildings. It also makes one ask the question: what can I do that is marvellous and inspiring? Maybe I can do something that will last, that is beautiful, that will leave traces for a future age.
This poetry and the general collection of my writing under the title Pioneering Over Three Epochs I like to think displays the kind of sympathy and intouchness with my readers for whom I write, whether they be my correspondents with whom I share an intimacy or those not yet born. That is what I hope to achieve, although I’m sure I often am far off the mark. Any editorial work that will leave the soul of my writing in one piece while making my work easier and more digestible I am happy to give such an editor the full freedom required. Let the trusting trust. If such an editor keeps in mind what is written above, especially Emily Dickinson’s prescription, that is all I can ask. By the time such an event occurs, of course, I am likely to have passed from this mortal coil and shall not, in all likelihood, take too much of a serious interest in the exercise.
1 Charles Rosen, Romantic Poets, Critics and Other Madmen, Harvard UP, London, 1998, p.19.
2 Charles Rosen, Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen, Harvard UP, London, 1998, p.12.
3 Robert Duncan in Talking Poetry: Conversation in the Workshop with Contemporary Poets, Lee Bartlett, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1987, p.54.
4 Mark van Doren, editor, Letters of Emily Dickinson, Grosset and Dunlop, NY, 1962, p.225.
Ron Price
31 December 2000
Ron Price
8 October 2000
Karl Marx hand-copied whole passages of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus into his Notebooks. But the significance of the thought of Spinoza is much less clear than the fact of the copying of the passages.1 The massive quantities of copied material in my Notebooks, two-ring binders and arch-lever files now numbering some one-hundred and fifty, are much easier to trace for the significances of the thought of various authors if the reader sifts the entire oeuvre and any specific writer through the collirium of the Baha’i teachings. For this is Price’s sifting mechanism. That is a given.-1 Eugene Holland, “ Spinoza and Marx,” Cultural Logic, 2002; and Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, January 11th, 2004.
I love reading the Notebooks of poets. Poets are curious critters and it is a pleasure to relax with the jottings and musings of other practitioners.-Anselm Hollo in The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26 American Poets, W.W. orton and Co., NY, editor, Stephen Kuusisto, et al., 1995.
1817: A BIG YEAR
FOR NOTEBOOKS
I have come to see my own notebooks as a genre of my writing which began in 1953 when I was in grade four. The selection of this date is partly due to its significance in the Baha’i timeline of significances and partly due to grade four being the half-way point in my primary education. I had had four years of schooling by then and I’m sure I had notebooks in those first years 1949 to 1952. The first notes that I kept and which I still possess came from 1961/2, but the vast array of notebooks I have now collected comes from the period 1974/5 to 2004/5. The conscious collection of notes into notebooks was an even more recent phenomenon. Looking back I see the years 1980 to 1995 as a time for their early development, an insensible process that is difficult to define in any clear way. But by the late eighties the process of gathering notebooks was a quite conscious one with an increasing articulation of their role in my writing in the years 1995 to 2005.
Reading about the origins and development of the notebooks of the great Russian writer Alexander Pushkin’s(1799-1837)--which he collected in the last two decades of his life, in the years 1817 to 1837, made me reflect on my own. Pushkin carried his notebooks around with him while he was in exile in the 1820s. Mine have simply been relocated by moving companies from Katherine in the NT to South Hedland and then to Perth in Western Australia and finally to George Town Tasmania. Mine now occupy space in an orderly fashion in my study to draw on in my writings and be updated from time to time from (a) my writing, (b) photocopied material and (c) internet information on a host of topics.
Pushkin’s notebooks came to occupy 8 volumes and were first published in 1994, 157 years after his passing. I have no idea whether mine will ever see some published form; I leave that to those mysterious dispensations of a watchful Providence. At this stage, after only 10 years of conscious, formal, organized notebook collecting, I have trouble seeing their long range significance.
Each page of Pushkin’s notebooks is reproduced in colour and are now seen as an important part of Russia’s heritage. Many pages of the originals are deteriorating. Who knows what significance will be seen in the pages of my manuscripts. It is possible than nothing will come of them but, circling around some of the great writers of modern history as I do—and as I think can be helpful to any aspiring writer--it gives me pleasure to make comparisons and contrasts.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, August 11th, 2005.
Your first notebook began
As that century of peace
Began and mine began
In the midst of the greatest
carnage in all of history.
What does it all mean,
Alexander? What does
it all mean? Did you ever
figure it out?
Ron Price
August 11th 2005
INCIDENTS OF A VOLATILE/EVANESCENT KIND
My attitude to books and notebooks is not unlike that of Samuel Johnson(1709-1784) an important literary figure who produced an English dictionary in 1755, the most significant and useful one until the Oxford English Dictionary came out in 1911. Books, to Johnson, were for use not for adornment, not for sacred and reverential treatment. His sanctum sanctorum, his library, his biographer Boswell wrote, “was strewn with manuscript leaves, with books in great confusion” when he chanced by for a visit. And so is this the case with my books and notebooks should a casual observer catch me in the middle of my research and writing. My notebooks and books are full of handwriting, underlining, notes in the margins, indeed, notes in many places in the books. My files and notebooks often lay all over the floor and the furniture. This is not true all of the time and of all my books, but it would take too long to provide a detailed description of this heterogeneous, this varied and complex process. Needless to say, I share some of the features of Johnson’s attitude and policy with respect to books and notebooks.
This disorderliness, this apparent clutter and chaos, which Boswell observed in Johnson’s library, is sometimes observable in mine when I am caught in the midst of my work, my writing and research. At most times, indeed all the time when I am not writing, I keep everything in its place in this small study here at Port Dalrymple on the south side of George Town the oldest town in Australia and located as it is in northeast Tasmania. My notebooks, my books, my manuscripts and papers, my files, my stationary and various items of writing and reading equipment all have their place: labelled, ordered, tidy, dusted and ready for use. –Ron Price with thanks to Alvin Kernan, Samuel Johnson, Princeton UP, 1987.
Such a grand composition,
mingled as it was with
all the shades, peculiarities
and blemishes that flesh
is ere to, all the fertility
and readiness, dexterity,
wit, vigour and vivacity,
the extraordinary endowments
and particulars of his own mind--
such was the person who laid out
all those notes on the lives of others1
sometimes on the floor and disarray.
1 Ron Price with thanks to Boswell's Life of Johnson, Front Matter, Editor, Jack Lynch, Oxford, 1904.
"The business of the biographer is often to pass slightly over those performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness, to lead the thoughts into domestic privacies and display the minute details of daily life. Here exterior appendages are cast aside and men excel each other only by prudence and by virtue.……These narratives are often written by those who are not likely to give much instruction or delight. Most biographical accounts of particular persons are barren and useless……The incidents which give excellence to biography are of a volatile and evanescent kind, such as soon escape the memory, and are rarely transmitted by tradition.”1
"Nor is it always in the most distinguished achievements that men's virtues or vices may be best discerned; but very often an action of small note, a short saying, or a jest, shall distinguish a person's real character more than the greatest sieges or the most important battles." Plutarch, Life of Alexander, Langhornes's Translation.
-Ron Price August 24th 2005
THE THRILLING MOTION
At the beginning of the Seven Year Plan in 1937 the term symbolic interactionism was coined by Herbert Blumer. Symbolic Interactionism is based on the premises that (i) human beings act on the basis of meaning; (ii) meaning arises out of interaction with others and (iii) an interpretive process, an imaginative reheasal, is used by individuals to deal with their environment. Some call this process the social construction of reality, the social definition of situations. The world we live in has an obdurate quality and the truth we derive is essentially subjective. The roots of this sociological perspective go back to sociologists like Max Weber and George Herbert Mead and pragmatist philosophers like Pierce and Dewey in the nineteenth century. -Ron Price, “Notes on Symbolic Interactionism,” Ron Price’s Notebooks, 2005.
While the Kingdom of God on Earth
was getting its kick-start in Chicago
with a wonderful and thrilling motion
from a point of light and a spirit slowly
or quickly permeating to the entire world,
you1 were pointing your finger at meaning,
interpretation, the power of understanding,
the advent of entirely new prophets: only
these would bring the promised hope of escape
from icy darkness, hardness, self-extinction,
inner-deadness at the core of the life of culture.2
For the motion was thrilling, the faintest trace,
hardly observed, then, even now, but the clamour,
He knew, was coming, the cry, the groaning,
would be heard far and near in intimately
where we sat quietly with our steak and pie.
Then, then, the knights would come, knights
assisted, strengthened, reinforced in the midst
of confusion, noise, tumult, stupendous struggle.3
1 Max Weber and Herbert Blumer, major 20th century sociologists of symbolic interactionism. 2 Max Weber, “Weber and The Search for ‘Interpretation’ and ‘Understanding,’” Ron Price’s Sociology Notes, 1998; and Max Weber, Methodology of the Social Sciences, Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois, 1949, pp.72-176. 3‘Abdu’l-Baha in The World Order of Baha’u’llah, Shoghi Effendi, 1974(1938), p. 17.
-Ron Price March 22nd, 2005
ENOUGH AND NOT ENOUGH
Poems are not . . . simply emotions . . . they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and things . . . and know the gestures which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighbourhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you have long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained . . .; to childhood illnesses . . . to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel . . . and it is still not enough.
-The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge quoted in Washington Post.com, “Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke,” Ralph Freedman, 1996.
Well, Rainer, I’ve seen many-a-city,
many people, places and things,
am not so good on gestures of flowers
at any time of day or season.
Well, Rainer, I go back often
to unknown neighbourhoods,
to unexpected encounters,
partings seen and unseen,
in the paintings of my mind.
Well, Rainer, I also go back
to my days of childhood,
to mornings by the sea, the bay,
the river, the town, the city,
the island and the meadow
where mention of God
hath been made
and His praise glorified.
And Rainer, you are right;
it’s never enough,
but it’s all I have
when I travel at night
to those childhood sicknesses
and to so many things
unexplained in this world
of the mystic, of mystery
that will never be explained.
Ron Price
December 3 2004
THE AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSEOF THE PAGE
Four hundred years after the death of Leonardo da Vinci in 1519 and Tablets of the Divine Plan were first promulgated in 1919. Five hundred years after the birth of Leonardo da Vinci in 1453 the Kingdom on Earth had its official beginning in 1953.
For Leonardo much, if not all, of existence, was subject to the rigid, unchanging laws of Nature. He repeatedly underlines the analogy between building and the mechanical structure of the body. This analogy rests on the conception of structures as organisms composed of fully integrated parts.
For Price, poetry was not subjected to any rigid unchanging pattern of laws. Indeed, for him, writing poetry occupied a place between nature and Divinity. Yes, the power was an organism of fully ingreated parts, a structure; but principles and laws of expression eluded him except of course for the broad spelling and grammatical conventions of English. The more he wrote and studied poetry, the less he saw the elegance and organism that was poetry in terms of regularly occuring forms.-Ron Price with thanks to the Science Museum in London and their special exhibit on Leonardo da Vinci, 3 June 2000.
His Notebooks were:
rarely tidy, seldom homogeneous,
or coherent in their discussion
over a long series of pages;
each leaf of paper an autonomous universe,
unrelated to the last one and the next,
a chaotic stratification of odds and ends,
filling dozens of notebooks
with half a century
of reflections, projects and experiments
in the realms of art and science.1
1 a description of da Vinci’s Notebooks found in the Science Museum. One description of my own work could very well be expressed along these lines, at least in part; and that is why I wrote this poem. Of course, it is in some ways presumptuous to compare oneself to a man of such preeminence. But, in another sense, as Bahiyyih Nakhjavani writes, “we should try to circle around the great”(Baha’i Studies, Vol.10) as far as possible.
Ron Price
3 June 2000
FILE TO BIN
A part of the written record of this autobiography, a part that with the passing of time is likely to get lost when my days are gone and someone has the responsibility of keeping all my writings safe and sound, is what I have numbered Section VII: Notebooks and Section II: Parts B & C: Journal. The Journal is currently in three volumes and the Notebooks in some eighty volumes. When I retired from teaching in 1999 I left another fifty(approx.) volumes of notes with my coworkers in the Human Services sector at the Thornlie Campus of the South-East Metropolitan College of Tafe.
My Journal contains the more spontaneous, personal, intimate connections with my real world. The Notebooks, spread as they are over such a wide range of subject matter, and organized in more systematic and orderly arrangements of material, could easily be dispensed with, in most cases, and there would be little loss, unless, of course, all of this wealth of academic resources and this life becomes more important than can be envisaged at this early stage of its existence. Then, in that future age, these notes might prove useful in some minute investigation, in some embellishment of this autobiography. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 2000.
So much writing and note taking
over thirty years of teaching and
Baha’i community consolidation
and most of it gone now into that
part of history which is oblivion.
Only some fifteen volumes left of
any personal, intimate, relevance;
the rest just resources for the work,
and these resources listed elsewhere1
should anyone really be interested.
Can I really contain all those 1000s
of hours of my life in one sonnet?
What does all of that paper mean?
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, file to bin.
1 See Section VIII, kept in “Latest Poetry for Latest Booklet” File
listing all the subject files I have kept and all the ones I left in the last school where I taught.
Ron Price
6 March 2000
There is a vast assemblage of personal, autobiogrpahical, Bahá'í and other 'notebook' type information which is simply too extensive and, perhaps, too irrelevant to include here. The following are two samples from this rservoire.
_______________
INTRODUCTION #5:
A LIST OF FAVORITE PIECES OF MUSIC
PREAMBLE:
The music list below, compiled in the three year period June 2002 to May 2005, will be updated periodically after that date. It is an attempt to define, to give expression to, list what has become for me a vast sea of pleasureable sounds produced in a number of genres of music. My first memories of listening to music were in about 1948, although I was exposed to music right from the word go in 1944 by two parents who played the piano. You will find below a short list of over 60 years of musical experience, musical pieces I have enjoyed from a longer list of music that gave me pleasure, but is obviously too long to include here.
What appears here is just a start to making a comprehensive list, a brief survey, a dip in the sea, so to speak. There were about 100 items in the initial list that I put together in the winter of 2002. I have added to that list from time to time in the last three years and it is now well over 100 items. If I continued to add to this list systematically and regularly a list too long to be manageable would be produced. But the names of many of my favorites are here and, since it seems impossible for me to remember their names, this list will assist me in bringing to memory these names when and if required. The exercise is interesting to me in its own right without any particular practical value.
Most of the items listed here are in my personal music collection(LPs, 45s, CDs and cassettes) or they are items that I have had access to temporarily on the radio, internet or as part of the collection of the local spiritual assembly of the Baha’is of Launceston. As I began adding items to this list from what I heard on ABC FM Radio in and after 2002, it was obvious that, in the end, the list would become too long if I took the exercise seriously with any sense of making a comprehensive collection. What is found here serves as (a) a list of musical pieces I own/have access to in my collection and (b) a list of additional material I would like to have access to in my study, but do not. As I say, this is a list of musical favorites that I will never bring to an end. The sea is just too full. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, May 8th 2005(22 September 2002).
CATEGORIES OF MUSIC:
A.1 CLASSICAL
1. Joaquin Rodrigo: Ecos de Sefarad-guitar.
2. Joaquin Rodrigo: need to familiarize myself with his repertoire to list items here.
3. Beethoven: Sonata #8 opus 13 and Violin Concerto in D, Opus 61
4. Beethoven: Symphonies: set 1-9. Esp: #5
5. Beethoven: Piano Sonatas 23/4
6. Beethoven: Piano Concerto #5
7. Beethoven: Fluer Elise
8. Beethoven: many other pieces-too long a list.
9. Rachmaninov: Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini.
10.1 Rachmaninov: Preludes, 10.2 Piano Concerto No.2 D Minor
10.3 Rachmaninov: several pieces to be defined
10.4 Rachmaninov: many other pieces-too long a list.
11.1 Chopin: Scherzo 1,2,3 and 4 ; 11.2 Ballads 1 to 4.
11.3 Chopin: Fantasie Impromptu
11.4 Chopin, 24 Preludes(C#minor,A-Flat-Major)
11.5 Many other pieces of Chopin—too many to list.
10.1 Schubert: Fantasie in F. Minor, D 940.
10.2 Schubert: Ave Maria. Symphony #8 in B-minor
11.Puccini:One Fine Day, Madame Butterfly
12.Bach:Symphony No.2 E-minor
12.1Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No.1 in F; 12.2 No.6 in Bflat Major; No3, 4 and 5
12.3Bach: see my 20 record collection of Bach--too many to list all the pieces here, but some include: 12.3.1 Orchestral Suite No.3
13. Debussy: Claire de Lune.
13.1 Debussy: Preludes, esp.”Girl With the Flaxen Hair.”
14.Mozart: Sonatas for Piano; 14.2 Divertimenti for strings, Adagio & Fugue in C Minor; 14.3 Piano concertos K488/459; 14.4 Symphony #40 in C minor; 14.5 Nachtmusik
15. Vivaldi: Violin Concerti #3; trumpet concerti for 4 violins
16. Berlioz: Symphony Fantastique
17.Liszt: Concerto No.1 in E Flat Major
18. Hayden: Concerto in D. Major
19. Dvorak: New World Symphony; symphony #3; cello concerto in b minor, op.104; symphonic variations.
20. Tchaikovsky: Symphony No.6
21. Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto D Major
22. Handel: Water Music
35. Massinet: Meditations
36. Brahms, Symphony No.1 in C-Minor
A.2 CONTEMPORARY CLASSICAL
1. Elgar: Cello Concerto, 1st Movement, J. du Pre
2. Eric Satie, Gymnopedies
B. FOLK/POPULAR:
B.1 Bahai CDs(50 in April 2005;40 in August 2002)
1. Parrish and Toppano, The Shores of This Great Ocean(Call Out to Zion)
2. Parrish and Toppano, Royal Falcon(Royal Falcon& The Girl That I Never Knew)
3. Hummingbird, Dash Crofts
5. Advance Guards, Dash Crofts
6. One Planet One People, Dash Crofts
7. Windflower, Dan Seals and Dash Crofts
8. We May Never Pass This Way Again, Crofts
9. Hollow Reed, Crofts
10. One Planet One People, Crofts
11. East of Ginger Trees, Seals and Crofts
12. Angela Wood, Gentle Warrior
13. Year of Sunday, Seals and Crofts
14. Grant Hinden Miller, all his CDs
15. Radio Nur 2002
16. The Voices of Baha: Live At Carnegie Hall
17. Many new CDs are produced annually--too many to list here
--I have listed elsewhere 50 CDs used for Launceston LSA programs on City Park Radio. These 50 CDS have many individual songs--too many to list here.
B.2 Non-Bahá'í CDs/LPs/Cassette Tapes(C):
1. Working Class Man, Bruce Springstein
2. Born In The USA(C), Bruce Springstein
3. Angel Clare(LP) Art Garfunkle
3. Astral Weeks(LP)Van Morrison
4. Songs for Beginners, (LP)Graham Nash
5. Leave Love Enough Alone, (LP) Doug Ashdown
6. Moody Blues, (LP) On the Threshold of a Dream
7. Moody Blues, (LP)Seventh Sojourn
8. Joni Mitchell, (LP)The World Of Joni Mitchell
9. James Taylor,(LP) Sweet Baby James
10. Bob Dylan, (songs) Lay Lady Lay, All Along the Watchtower, A Hard Rain's..,
If Not for You and more-too many to list here.
11. Tom Rush, (LP) Merrimack County
12. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, (LPs)
-4 Way Street, Celebration Copy, Déjà vu
13.. Michael Murphy, (LP)Blue Sky Night Thunder
14. Cat Stevens, (LPs)Tea for the Tillerman, Teaser and the Firecat.
15. Yesterday When I Was Young, Lena Horne
16. To Follow That Star, artist??
17. Non-Baha’i-non-classical CDS--too many to list here.
18. That Was Then This Is Now, Michael Stocks(CD)
19. Bob Seeger, Greatest Hits(CD)
20. Gordon Lightfoot(C): Two In One:
(a) If you could read my mind and (b) Summer Side of Life
21. Andrew Wells, Journeys(CD)
22. Angela Armstrong(C):personal compilation
23. Leonard Cohen, Suzanne, among others
B.3 FROM MY SONG BOOKS(NOT-IN-RECORD COLLECTION):
1. We are the World
2. Cats in the Cradle
3. Fire and Rain, James Taylor
4. Paul Simon, Kathy's Song--too many others to list here.
5. Gordon Lightfoot, Go My Way
-Mother of a Miner's Child--too many others to list here.
6. Mull of Kintyre
7. The Streets of London
8. As Different As We Are, John Denver
9. Rocky Mountain High, John Denver
10. Many more could be added from my songbook
-from the years when I played the guitar on a regular basis: 1968-1998
C. BACKGROUND MUSIC FOR READING/WRITING:(CDs/LPs)
1. Frans Brugger, Blockflotin, Vol.2
2. Sammartini, Symphony in A. Major.
3. Some of the above in sections A and B is good background music.
4. Lucky Oceans plays hundreds of pieces over the months/years on his ABC Radio National Programs. I could include many here.
5.
D. 1 LITURGICAL/CHOIR D.2 OPERA:
D.1:
1. Faure, Blockflotin, Vol.2
2. Mahler, Symphonies No. 4/5
3. Some of the above in sections A and B
D.2:
1. Puccini, Turandot.
E. JAZZ:
1. Phil Morrison Trio, Sea Island Blues, 12 Tracks(T)
2. Jeff Jones, Live in Concert, 14T
3. Tenor/Saxaphone songs(2??) from Porgy and Bess
4. Lucky Oceans plays many ‘jazz’ pieces which I could include here.
F. OTHER:
F.1
1. Lucky Oceans plays a great deal of material on ABC Radio National in his afternoon program and some of the material he plays could be added here. At this stage there seems to be just too much to add to this list.
2. Other musical programs on ABC Radio also bring in “other” music I have begun to add here but can not do so in any comprehensive sense.
3. Friends also introduce me to CDs from time to time and some of this material may be added here in future. Again, the collections of others is just too extensive to list here.
F.2_______________________________________________
1. The Lord's Prayer, Mahelia Jackson
2.
F.3:
1. Talks on Cassette-Ten collections of Baha’i material
2. Talks: (a) on internet-written and (b) on internet-spoken
Ron Price: Updated
On: May 24th 2005
MEDICAL INFORMATION SHEET: No.4
PREAMBLE:
This information is kept for self, doctors and relevant others. This record was begun at age 55 on moving to Tasmania. Sheet no.4 is for 2004-5: age 58-61. See my personal Medical Files in my study for Sheets 1&2 for 1999 to 2002 & Sheet No. 3 is for the years 2003 and 2004. Not all history details are kept on file for this period 1999 to 2005, just a working base for practical use.
The information below, the record of my blood and non-blood test results is for my use in calculating: (i) when to do the next tests, (ii) what to discuss with Dr. Jane Zimmerman in George Town at my next visit (63824333: 4/5 times/year) or Dr. Richard Ayling in Launceston at the Summerdale Medical Centre(63447177: 1 time/2 years); (iii) what to discuss with my psychiatrist in Launceston, Dr. E. Ratcliffe, 155 George Street(63312122) at my annual visit(Caroline:his assistant); and (iv) what action to take in my daily life, if any, as a result of these visits. Annual visits with Dr. Ratcliffe began in Sept 2001. The next visit is Nov. 2005(ca). Two/three monthly visits began with Dr. Zimmerman in November 1999. The data here is essential as a device for helping me in the consultations.
_____________________________________________________________________RECORD OF DATES OF TESTING, ITEMS TO-BE-TESTED INFORMATION:
A. ITEMS TESTED IN THE BLOOD: (**=discuss with Dr on 1/12/05-11:20am)
(a) Fats: 1. Tryglycerides(every 6 months starting 6/01; annually starting 10/04)(fasting required).......appointments 10:30-11:30
(b) Results: 3/04--2.4; 9/04--2.7; 9/05—2.2.
(need to be 2.0 and below...) Next visit: 12/05.
2. Cholesterol*(fasting required)
20 min aerobic type walking every day(begun May 2003)
COPD-30 min non-aerobic walking every day(begun 1998ish)
(plus diabetes test: 4.7 on 10/04; Next test: 12/05)
6.1 at 9/04; “X” 9/7/05. Next visit: 12/05.
1. If the level stays over 6 into 2006, I should consider $40-$100/Month medication. 2. Foods discussed with Dr. Ayling to lower cholesterol(27/5/05)
3. Aerobics exercise required to lower LDHs(6/6/05)
** LDL=3.8(10/02)..(9/03).....5/10/04(3.5)(needs to be 2.5 & less)
3.8 at 9/6/05. Next visit: 12/05.
** HDL=0.9.................(9/03)....5/10/04(1.1) 1.0 at 9/6/05; “X” 12/05.
*Dr. Stefan Delitzsch,G'Town, (8/02) said not to worry about my cholesterol levels given my cholesterol readings; Ratcliffe said(11/04) I should aim for a 4.4 reading. To achieve this I should (i) walk 1/2-1 hour per day and (ii) watch diet(more avocados & oatmeal). I saw Dr. Croft 7/05 for lithium levels.
(b) Lithium-Related Blood Tests:
Every 2 months starting Sept 2001 due to what was then a new creatinine level test: 5 hrs after taking 1 of my three 250 mg tablets of lithium, that is: 9 am for a 2 pm visit. (electrolytes & lithium levels are tested with creatinine levels). This time period changed to: every 6 months starting 6/05, 12/05, 6/06, etc.
*3. Lithium 5/10/04.....10/11/04.....5/10/04..8/2…25/6…12/05(see stats sheet).
x
(.5 to 1.2 is the right range)(do I need another prescription?)
*4. Creatinine
Results began on 6/9/01:(see sheets 1 and 2 for first records)
18/2/04...22/4//04...28/6/04......5/10/04.....8/2/05..4/05..7/05..10/05
160 141
A sequence of 3 no’s(3 two month periods) on ‘an upward trajectory’ in the 130 to 180 range denotes a problem.
7. Urea 18/2/04....22/4/04......28/6/04....5/10/04.....8/2/05….7/05…12/05
should be 8.3 and below...every 3 to 6 months
8. Liver Function Test Results: 27/3/03: ok; 27/3/04: ok; 27/10/04-okay. 10/05-x.
No need to discuss unless there is a problem. Do magnetic resonance imaging if there is a problem.
(c) Non-Lithium-Related Blood Tests:
9. The PSA test is a blood-test. This is a complex issue and many notes are necessary. At 10/03 my PSA reading was 0.89. A ‘finger-up-bum’(FUB) test: 28/10/02; 23/10/03; 1/12/04 revealed only a slightly enlarged prostate. Texture of prostate okay & normal for my age; (2) PSA level test (Prostate Specific Antigen)(early detection of prostate cancer) on 23/10/02, 23/10/03, 10/04. Result: Normal: 0.89('03& ’04)(0 to 4 normal). *Next one: 10/05: 1.2 Symptoms of a 'problem prostate': a. hesitancy in urinating, b. trouble initiating urination; c. blood in urine; and/or d. frequent urination and terminal dribbling.(I exhibit d. symptoms.) **Bring in urine sample 12/05. Do we need to do a cat-scan?? Or what??
Information: (1) A 'PSA level test' may suggest a biopsy is required.(a sample of tumor tissue). If a significant enlargement of prostate exists, an ultrasound, a biopsy and/or other possible tests may be required. Saw Palmetto pills were of no value, 18/8/03, after 3/4 months taking them. Perhaps I should have taken zinc twice a day; I only took it once a day, June to October 2003; and (2) One way to check/to define if there is a problem is to measure the amount of urination. There should be 350-400 mls/urination; anything below this suggests a prostate problem, namely, a super-sensitive bladder wall. At night 600mls plus; in the day 150-250 mls. I tried holding pee to expand the bladder walls, as advised in October 2003, with no success. So 'small urinations in the day could indicate there is a problem). Mine are not small enough(at: 1/12/04) (all okay-27/5/05: Dr. Ayling)
10. Haemoglobin (Red Blood Cells): 27/3/03, 2/04, 4/05: all okay. Discuss at 4/’06.
**11. Diabetes: blood glucose levels: sugar….6/01, 3/03, 9/03(5.4)....9/04(4.7)...12/05
do with cholesterold test (every 6/mo)(fasting required) (needs to be below 5.5)
12. Fluvoxamine: do I need another prescription?
B. ITEMS TESTED NOT-IN-THE-BLOOD:
GENERAL INFORMATION/ISSUES/PROBLEMS ;
1. Testosterone: March 2000 ‘low, but within the normal range’(i.e. 9 in ‘6 to 28')
2. Tetanus 4/2000(ok) …not necessary until 2010………at age 65…..
3. Wax Build-Up In Ears: Use ear drops: cerumol: keep putting in drops once/month. Syringe dates:10/01, 10/02, 15/03 and 17/03.
4. Bowel cancer: Discuss in 2002 & 2005: all okay. Watch out for the texture/ colour and blood in feces.
5. Chest X-Ray: Result of test in June 2001: diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulminory disease; elasticity of lungs is less than it should be; need to breath more deeply, more vigorous exercise. Such exercise was begun in May 2003. Stopped in August due to sore foot. Another chest X-Ray when Dr Zimmerman and I decide in consultation. October 04-okay: no significant change from 6/01; discuss again at visit in 10/06.
6. Check my moles/warts/sores on scalp/small growths for cancer and to get rid of them if annoying. 2001:Sore on neck was not carcinogenic; small growth on arm not cancer. 3/2002-3/2004-no problems. Wart on forehead: cut off:-3/12/04. pay: $10; stich out on 8/12/04.
** 7. Complete 'Medical:' (1) August 2001, (2) October 28, 2003: result: satisfactory, no 'areas to work on,'(3) 12/04: all okay and (4) Next one: 12/05.
8. Check for bone density.Walking, aerobic and non-aerobic, is enough. March 2003: okay. 2/05: chat with Chris-no problem. Osteoporosis-don’t do any tests unless problem arises.
9. Sore foot began about August 1, 2002. Need to wear pad under foot/inner sole and not stress foot until better. Okay by 6/04.Treadmill: start again in 04/05?(no desire)
11. Eucalyptus/tea-tree oil: good for fungus on toe nails: began 9/03 to 12/03. Ceased by January 2004. Discuss with podiatrist at first visit. Nothing significant by 12/04.
12. Keep track of other illnesses/diseases/problems that arise from time to time due to (a) personal experience or (b) things I hear about from people or in the media. Insert items here for discussion at next visit with Dr. Zimmerman in 7/2/05.
12.1 Sore knee at night after knocking in 8/03. Went away by 2/04.
12.2 take bi-polar outline in 4/04 and 11/04: done
12.3 Frozen shoulder-do 2 new exercises-1/12/04: much better 2/05:No more problem
_____________________________________________________________________
C. OTHER:
Print-outs: Results of Blood Tests: See Attached Sheets & page numbers
3-Lithium-Related Tests 4-Cholesterol Related Tests
WITH DR. RATCLIFFE(PTO)
1. First four visits: 6/9/01, 12/9/01, 12/9/02 and 17/9/03. Notes kept from first three visits, but discarded after 4th visit in 9/03. Summmary of 4th visit 17/9/03 below:
1. Cost: $70.15; medicare gives me: $59.65. Gap: $10.50(send to Medicare, they will send me the cheque and I will top 'the gap' up. 2. DSS does a Disability Services Pension review every 5 years: 2001, 2006. GP fills in forms; Ratcliffe not usually required. Gave Dr. Ratcliffe a general statement of bi-polar exerience in 2003 and again in 2004. Gave him my medication/medical info sheets(MIS) in 2003 & 2004.
2. Visit 2004:
1. sleeping: try to go to bed earlier, say midnight, and get into this new routine--thus stopping the going-to-bed after 2 am routine. 2. Next apppointment on a needs basis. Decided in Sept 05 that there was no need to visit Dr. Ratcliffe in 2005. Discuss this subject again with Chris in late 2006.
E. EXPERTS AND WIFE’S ADVICE FOR MY HEALTH
E.1 WIFE: The following are good/useful recipies for particular problems: 1. Solperin(2 tablets) -for aches, pains, sore throat, fever/ 2. Ginger(1st) or stemitil(2nd) -for upset stomach, nausea; and 3. Zinc -colds, sore throats.
E.2 OTHER EXPERTS: read internet as required.
E.3 DR. R. AYLING:
Discussed(May 05) foods: tomatoes(lycopene) once a week; use the following sparingly or not at all: no white rice(once a week), no potatoes(difficult’ now 4 times a week), no white bread, no pasta(once a ftnt), no sweets, no red meat(difficult 4 times a week), no butter-if I want to lower cholesterol. Multivitamin is good, nuts very good, whole grain bread good. See info sheets in file. (Pot&meat-bad, all other okay)
-Ron Price
Updated: October 21st 2005.
______________________________
INTRODUCTION #1
The first booklets of music in my life, at least those I remember, go back to the early 1950s. But the first booklet of music that I put together myself in order to run sing-alongs was in the late 1960s. From about 1953 to 2005, a period of more than 50 years, I was involved in sing-alongs in one form or another. In the last ten years, 1995 to 2005, though, singalongs using booklets of songs I created became rarer and eventually non-existent occasions. In some ways it was fitting that the last three years of singalongs, 2002-2005, I was engaged in were with senior citizens using songbooks whose content was mainly for a generation born in the first quarter of the twentieth century—the earliest years of Baha’i administration, the 1910s and 1920s.
There is material in my one remaining sing-along booklet for all age groups, although there is no material that originated from about 1975 to 2005, the group born in the the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. I did not listen to the music of that generation enough to be familiar with it and certainly not well enough to sing it in groups informally in the Baha’i community and in any other communities of which I was a part.
These resources are here in my booklet, though, for a future time when and if singalongs return to my life and to the groups I am involved with.
Ron Price
May 24th 2005
INTERNET SITES: LIST #1
2001-2004
After two decades of keeping a rather small collection of publishers and relevant files, I began in the winter (June to August) of 2001 to keep what has become an extensive collection/series of arch-lever files and two-ring binders recording publishers and websites that were useful in my work to promote my writing, my poetry and the Cause. By July 2003, two years later, I was able to list a massive number of sites and publishers, several hundred locations, more than I could service regularly. I also acquired or listed many other sites in connection with various subjects, topics and disciplines much, if not most, of which I have listed here. The total came to more than 1000 sites.(1) To locate this particular list below readers must go to my directory at: Internet Sites and then to "List No1." There are 19 pages for anyone wanting to copy this list.
In July 2003 I divided this large list into several subsidiary lists, created to give some specificity, some individual subject location, to this burgeoning list. But the list was still unwieldly. These subsidiary lists are now located in various files: religion, the Baha’i Writings, Canadian poetry, Australian poetry and Baha’i history, inter alia. This list below serves as the core, the outline, of my site acquisitions or site activity two years after I had made a start with an original list of internet sites in the winter of 2001. In May 2001 my website(2nd edition) went online and the Baha’i World Centre officially opened its Arc Project. I use this date as a measuring time/rod/demarkation point for my work on the internet in these early years of my retirement: 1999-2005.
By 2004 I had added many more sites and developed a Volume 12. This second list, a list I refer to as “List #2,” is not included here. It was this Volume 12 to which I devoted most of my internet site attention as the early months of 2004 advanced. By April 2004 I was devoting virtually all my time to Volume 12. By October 15th 2004 Volume 12 had more than 500 additional sites and by June 30th 2005 it had more than 1000.
(1) This list of 1000 sites is, for the most part, complete. But it has proved difficult to keep an exact figure due to the number of sites both in List #1 and List #2.
Ron Price
June 30th 2005
40. Phoenix Magazine
Volume 3.5
41. adherents.com
42. Joe Ant.com
43.
44.
45.
46.1 Some Bahai Links
46.2 Bahai Text and Information
48. Bahai Graphics Gems
49. 9lines.com
50. Mary Washburn@earthlink
51. Divine Digest
52. Bahai Net/Baha’is of USA
53. tom@bounty.bcca.org
54. Ordering Books
55.Varqa International Children’s Magazine
56. The Reality Journal
57. Fire Your Creativity
58.1 Alternative Religions(About Newsletters);
58.2 20th century history; 58.3 Education; 58.4 Books & Lit.
59. Beliefnet.com
60. Scottish Bahai Newsletter
61. Spiritual Knowledge Links
62. United Communities of Spirit(UCS)
63. Info@INKryptions.com
64. Friends of the Academy of Self-Knowledge
65. Internet Public Library
66. Religion: General Links
3. Links@primefind.net
4. Autoresponder
5. Kunani
6. Exactseek: 2 pages of search engines
7. Egypt.web
8. AddPro.com
9. Inktomi
10. URL Submitter: 2 pages of search engines
11. TrafficZap: 2 pages
12. Scrub the Web and MetagAnalyzer-to engines
13. The Searcher: 6 pages of search engines
14. Metasearch: 7 search engines
15. Search.com
16. Search Engine Guide: 3 pages
17. Gimpsy
18. info@questfinder.net
19. Search Engine in Table Form
20. Alexa Web Search.
21. info@inkryptions.com
22. Tech Support EconPlanet
23. Consumer Club
24. Newsletter@quikregister.net
25. Internet Index for the Spiritual Seeker
25.1 Peaceful Pages
25.2 International Links
25.3 Australiana Links(A to Z>POFE)
25.4 Literary Data Base
25.5 E-Zine/E-Text Links
25.6 Genre Links
26. Adwords.Support
27. Multi-Faith Net-Resources
28. Spiritual Planet
29. Compassion In Business
30. BookZone
31. True Seeker(Mark Towfiq)
32. Fearless Books
33. Para Publishing
34. FrugalMarketing
35. JL Books.com
36. Autographed By Author
37. Ezine Articles
38. Pluralism Project
39. All You Need To Know
51. Directory of Human Rights Resources on Internet
52. Reliigous Resources.org
53. Tradition: Wisdom
54. Ron Price: Personal page
55. Yahoo: Geocities
56. Plaxo Downloads
57. Baha’i Youth
58. Brilliant Books
59. High Beam Research
60. The Poem Place
61. Council for a Parliament of Religion
62. Alternative and Holistic Links
63. Pluralism Project
64. Jena Productions
65. Brint Network Global
66.Self-Help Australia.summer job
67. UK Authors.com
68. Google Address Changes
RECORD OF MY EFFORTS: (1) AMONG NON-BAHA’I PUBLISHERS
TO PUBLISH THE EMERGENCE OF A BAHA’I CONSCIOUSNESS IN WORLD LITERATURE: THE POETRY OF ROGER WHITE;
(2) TO PUBLISH MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY
AND (3) TO PUBLISH MY POETRY AND ESSAYS.
Volume 3.9 POETRY SITES/EMAILS/INFORMATION
1.
2. Canadian Baha’i Secretariat
3. Duane Herrmann
5. Circle Magazine
6. Elephas
7. Baha’i Faith Index//bahaindex.com/
8. Yahoo Discusison Groups
8.1 Discussion 19
8.2 Participoet
8.3 Soc.religion.Baha’i
8.4 United Poets
8.5 giganews
8.6 dialogue.poetry
9. Suite.101.com
10. Baha’i Poetry
11. PoetLink.com
12. Umbrella Zine
13. Aha Poetry
14. pmpoetry
15. www.net.poets
16. A Little Poetry
17. Hardy Poetry
18. Tim Love’s Poetry
19. Yahoo Accounts
20. Dialogue Poetry
21. L.G. Jaffe
22. Dialogue Among Civilizations
23. Patrick Martin
24. Links Poetry
25. Yahoo Groups(see section 4.1.2 p.27 Internet Website File)
26.1 Poetry International/Poets International 26.2
27. The Poetry Cafe
28. Verse Links
29. Planet Baha’i Mysticism
30. Poetry Super Highway
31. Poets org.
32. daypoems.net
33. Uplifting Words
34. Inner Circle
35. Arctos Press(send in 4/5 of 04)
36.
Volume 3.10
POETRY WEBSITES INFORMATION EMAIL ADDRESSES
1. Contests and Prizes
2. Michael Fitzgerald
3. Gail Radley
4. Gary Geddes
5. Poem Publishers
6. International Newspapers for
Marketing Articles/Poems
7. Academic Institutions
Volume 3.11
PUBLISHERS: SECTION 1.1 AND 1.2 OF VOLUME 1
1.1. Baha’i Publishers: Internet List: 6 Pages
1.2 Specific Publishers: Sites on the Internet/Emails
1.Juxta Publishing Ltd.
2.Elias Zohoori in Jamaica: Baha’i Publications
3. Global Perspective
4. Images International Inc
5. Baha’i Publishing Trust: India(New Books)
6. Baha’i Publishers: list
7. White Cloud Press
8. One World
9. Baha’i Bookstore International
10. Badi Publishing
3.12 Publishing: 9 volumes, 11 parts(see separate list)
3.13 Magazines: On-Line and Hard Cover(see separate list)
3.14 Canadian Poetry
1. Internet Sites: SECTION A:
1. Lists of sites on the internet
2.1 Poetry Magazines
2.2 Canadian Poetry: U of T library
2.3 Canadian Literary Publishers
2.4 Other Canadian Poetry pages/Ind. Canadian Poets on the Web
2.5 International Poetry Sites
2.5.1 Hall of Fame: World of Poetry
3. The Danforth Review
4. Northwest Passages
5. Regina Weese: Submissions(participoet)
6. Canadian Poetry Association: Literary Links
7. Canadian Poetry-Essays See 3.1(16)
7.1 Canadian Poetry Resources
8. The League of Canadian Poets(cost to join: $175)
9. A Celebration of Women Writers
10. New Canadian Review
11. UT Press: Journals Catelogue
12. The Canadian Web In Review
13. Canadian Literature: A Quarterly Journal of
Criticism and Review-essays See 3.1(16.1)
14. Literary Web Sites: New Canadian Books
15. BublLink: Canadian Literature
16. Journal of Canadian Poetry
17. The Writers Union of Canada
18. Writing On-line Forums
19. YoungPoets.ca
20. BookClub Forum: Canadian
21. Poetry Connection.Net Discussion
22. The Poet’s Peak
23. Wild City Markets
24. The Pedestal Magazine
25. pathetic.org
26. Hangtide.com
27. Poets Online.org
28. Poetrypower.org
29. National Poetry Month
30. The Poetry Kit
31. The Scroll.org
32. Poetry.com
33. Track O Boards
34. Online Guide to Writing in Canada
35. Ploughshares
36. Canadian Writes Journal
37. Canlinks
38. Guides and Directories
38.1 Webcity.ca
38.2 MyTown
1. SECTION B(More Internet Sites)
1. The Canadian Poet Registry
2. Hidden Brook Press: Publisher
3. CanLinks Directory
4. Open Directory: Arts: Literature/World Lit/Can Poetry
5. National Library of Canada
5.1 NLC Information by Subject
6. Ontario Arts Council
6.1 Canada Council for the Arts
6.1.1 Newsletters for the Arts
7. www.writers/com: no link possible yet
8. Purely Canadian Poetry pages
9. Lulu-Marketplace.
10. Span: Small Publishers Assoc for N.A.
11. Canadian Federation of Poets
2. Poets
A SERIES: LIST OF 49 POETS
B SERIES: TWO LISTS EACH OF 26 POETS
3.15 Australian Poetry
A. Internet Items/Listings:(A)
1. Australian Poetry: Internet Sites
1.1. Google 1.2 Yahoo 1.3
2. Arts Tasmania
2.1 Application for Funds
2.2 Projects
2.3 Artist Database
2.4 Australian Bush Poetry, Verse & Music
3. The Write Stuff
4. Tasmanian Writers’ Centere($22)
5. Locus On-line: SF and Fantasy
6.1 Culture and Recreation.gov.au: Ron Price
6.2 Culture and Recreaton: Journals
7. National Library of Australia
8. Write Sites
9. OzLit@VicNet
10. Welcome to Australian Poetry
11. Thylazine
12. Australian Poetry Magazines
12.1 Poetry Kit
12.2 Jacket Magazine
12.4 Recommended Links
12.5 Bush Poetry.com
13. OzPoet/OzLit
14. Literary and Historical Texts
14.1 Journals: List 6 Pages
15. Australian Poetry Magazines On-Line
16. Tasmanian Poetry: Internet Sites
16.1 Tasmanian Poetry Festival
17. Australian Publishers and Booksellers
18. Quarterly Magazines, Publishers & Visual/Performing Arts
19. Australian Identity: Internet Sites
20. New Hope International Links to Magazines
21. Electronic Poetry Centre: Alphabetical Links
22. Numbat Poetry Journals-Links
23. Predators and Editors
24. The Poetry Australian foundation(Wollongong Uni)
25. the Red Room Company
26. Poet’s Union Inc.
27. tasmanianartist.com
B. Individual Poets:(B)
2.3 Webb
3. Brissenden
4. Slessor and Murray
5. Dransfield
6. Harwood and Wright
7. Paterson and Lawson
9.1 Dorothy Hewitt
9.2 Rosemary Dobson
9.3 General 9.3.1 John Trantor
9.3.2 Bruce Beaver
9.3.3 David Malouf
9.3.4 Chris Wallace-Crabbe
9.3.5 John Forbes
9.3.6 Richard Flanagan
10. Australian Poets and Poetry
11.1
11.2
12. Forgotten Poets See 7.1 & 7.2
13. War Poets See 7.1 & 7.2
C.1 Journals
C.2 Essays/Articles
C.3 Interviews
Volume 1.2 A.D. Hope
Volume 2 Bruce Dawe
3.16 POETRY GENERAL
A.1 Internet Poetry Sites: General
A.2
1. Directories/Indexes
1.1 Poetry Society of America
1.2 Magazines, Journals & Periodicals: Online
1.3 Electronic Poetry Centre
2. Boston Review: Political & Literary Forum
3. Cortland Review
4. Electronic Poetry Review
5. Eclectica
3.17 THE BAHA'I FAITH AND THE ARTS VOLUME 2.2
Section A: Jolly Roger.com
1. The Nantucket Literary Community: 7 pages
2. Great Books: Classicals and Jolly Roger(Renaissance), 4 pages
3. Starbuck Classical Poetry
4. Great Books Live Literary Cafe
5. Great Books Directory
6. Great Books Renaissance: Austen to Blake, etc.
7. The Western Canon: Great Books Uni/Frigate
8. The Western Canon: Writers
> 12. Hatteraslight.com: Creative Writing in the Context of the Classics
13. The Jolly Roger: Great Books and the Classics
14. Classicals: From the bible to Shakespeare
15. Kill Devil Hill: Great Literature
15.1 Science and Religion
15.2
3.18 Diary/Journal Sites:
1. The Book Clique Cafe
2. Hamiko Forums
2.1 Dear diary.net
3. My Dear diary
4. Healthy Place.com 4.1 Informed Health Online
5. About.com 5.1 Men’s OnLine Diaries 5.2 personal On-Line Diaries
6. Yahoo directory on-line Journals 6.1 Blurty.com
7.4 Google: Reading Groups
8. Bebits
9.
10. Readerville(needs new computer item)
11. Diarist.com 11.1 HotScripts 11.2 ebay.Diaries 11.3 Blog directory 11.4 Diarist.Net 11.5 Diarist.com-Lit Scene
11.5.1 Elite Skills 11.5.2 Poetryclub.com
12. Diarist.Net.Active
13. Diarist.Net.Registry
14. Open Diary
15. TSM-Soft-org:Open Forum
18.1 Wikipedia 18.2 Live Journal(Baha’i Group(11)
18.3 Xanga 18.3.1 Weblogs
19. Diaries and Journals On the Internet
20. Google Site: Diaries and Journals 20.5 Google-More Sites
21. Yahoo Groups: Paper Journal
22. Diary-X.com
23. Scholastic.Kids.Fun.Online
24. Support@mydiary.org
25. Gimpsy
26. User Diary Index-Nothing
27. Writing Your Spiritual Autobiography:Self-Help Mag
28. Lit.Scene.com
29. Lukol Directory
29.1 Lukol-Dream Journals
30. Online Diary History Project.
3.19 Movie Review Sites:
9. yourthecritic 9.1 NY Times 9.2 Webmaster
10. Internet Movie Database
10.1 Rotten Tomatoes 10.2 The Zreview.co.uk
11.1 The Lazy Movie Critic
12. All Watchers.com
12.1 Barnard Cinema Club
12.2 Cinema Review 12.2 Internet Sites
12.3 Cinemarati 12.4 Google Directory-Movies 12.5 Topica
12.6 Wikipedia
12.7.1 Cinephiles
12.7.2 80s Music
12.7.3 The Coming Soon
12.7.4 Foreign Films
12.7.5 Counting Down: Info Only(no postings)
12.7.6 Movie Forums
12.7.7 MJ Forums
12.7.8Movie Message Boards
12.7.9 Ask the Expert
12.7.10 General Movie Discussions
12.7.11 Movie Web
12.7.12 Movielocity:a.b.c
12.7.13 JoBlo’s Movie Club
12.7.14 Movie Compound forum
12.7.15 Movie Board(Fun) 12.7.15.1 Movie Music.Dot.com
12.7.16 In the Machine
12.7.17 Cavola Movie forum
12.7.18 TX-Zombie
12.7.19 Movie Thing(register?)
12.7.20 2 film Critic.com
12.7.21 Arts and Faith
12.7.22 Slant
12.7.23 Admin Zone forums
12.7.24 White Rider Forums
12.7.25 You Talk
12.7.26 Hong Kong Film Critics Society
12.7.27 Goldderby Forums
12.7. 28 The Last Free City
12.7.29 Cinema Blend
12.7.30 Empire Online
12.7.31 Film.talk.uk
12.7.32 Movies Forum
12.7.33 Cinescape
12.7.34 Gospelcom.forums
12.7.35 J.C. Superchat
12.7.36 The Australian Passion Network
12.7.37 starpulse.com
12.7.38 Cult Movies
12.7.39 Yahoo Movies
12.7.40 movie-reviews
12.7.41 More Yahoo Movie Sites
12.7.42 moviecritics_anonymous
12.7.43 drudashoe913’s Movies
12.7.44 Secret Window
12.7.45
12.8 The Passion of the Christ(12 sites)
13. Uplifting Words 13.1 Association for BF Studies-links
14. Baha’i Media(MS)
15. Fire Your Creativity(MS-non-Bahá'í)
16. Baha’i Institute for the Performing Arts
17. International Baha’i Audio-Visual Centre
18. Arts Dialogue 18.1 Art ‘n Soul
19. All Things Spiritual
20. Karen St. Rain: Fitzgerald’s Poetry-Not Available/Relevant
21. Council Campfire USA-sent-done
22. Baha’i Arts Academy
23. Planet Baha’i: Arts&Music>Poetry and Lit.
23.1 Bahá'í Links: Poetry and Literature
23.2 Delphi Forums
24. Planet Baha’i News
28. The Ezine Directory 28.1 List of Sites
29. Baha’i Net
30. Baha’i Arts and Artists
31. ansme.com>S>R&S>B
32. Indolink Forum>Religion>Arts and Culture
33. Strange Directory: Baha’i
34. The Insight.com
35. Google New Age Directory
35.1 Webspirit 35.2 One Spirit Project
35.3 Mystic Planet
36. i-une.com
37. Search Pixie
38. Poetry Homepage-Forum
39. Tim Casey
40. John Walker's Site
41. Fiction Press
42. Free2Code
43. Creative Inspirations
44. fan.Story.com
45. The Baha’i Faith and the Arts
(UHJ Compilation from Research Dept)
46.
3.20 Jolly Roger.com
1. The Nantucket Literary Community: 7 pages
2. Great Books: Classicals and Jolly Roger(Renaissance), 4 pages
2.1 Classical Art and Architecture/Society and Philosophy
2.2 Jolly Roger.com Ultimate B. Board(www.Renaissance)
Hatteraslight.comLiterary Disc.
3. Starbuck Classical Poetry
3.3.1 Federalist.com spirit
4. Great Books Live Literary Cafe
5. Great Books Directory 5.1 Great Books Forum and Live Chat
6. Great Books Renaissance: Austen to Blake, etc.
7. The Western Canon: Great Books Uni
7.1 The Western Canon Frigate
7.2.1 & 7.2.2(same: revised) Western Canon Great Books
8.3 Martin Luther: Western Canon Frigate
9. The Jolly Roger Great Books: Brewery and Eternity
10. Book Talk and Jolly Roger.com First Fleet
11.1 Science and Religion Campfire(Books)(www.killdevilhill.com)
11.2 Writersword.com: the Open Source
11.3 Creative Writing & the Art of Writing Ren R.Ranch
11.4 Renaissance Writers & Creative Writing Forum Frigate
11.5.1 Creative Writing Fleet:Carolina Navy
11.5.2 Creative Writing Fleet. Jolly Roger.com
11.6 Creative Writing Forum Frigate
11.7 Jolly roger.com Ren Navy
11.8 The Jolly Roger Great Books and Classics
11.9 Three Books of the Renaissance
11.10 The World’s Largest Literary Frigate(The Great Works)
11.11 Sociology.Forum Frigate
11.12 Politics Forum Frigate
12. Hatteraslight.com: Creative Writing in the Context of the Classics
12.1 Hatteras Campfire-A Lover's Complaint
12.2 Journal of Conservative Thought:Hatteras
12.2.1 Beckett,Drake & Elliot
12.3 Beacon Ray’s Great Books
12.4 Hatteras Light.com “the World’s Greatest conserv.”
12.5 Beacon Way Press 12.5.1 Canon: 4 Year Course/
12.7 Hatteras.com Campfire Forums Great Books Forum
12.8 William Shakespeare HatterasLight@Hatteras.com
13. The Jolly Roger: Great Books and the Classics
14. Classicals: From the Bible to Shakespeare
(The Founding of Classical and Jolly Roger .com)
14.1 Classicals.com Campfires
14.2 Classicals Renaissance man Every Auction
15. Kill Devil Hill: Great Literature(Cons. Conversation)
15.1 Science and Religion
15.2 Kill Devil Hill Great Books Literary Cafe’s and Chatrooms
16. Search Bug
17. Google Directory: Authors, etc.
18. Personals 18.2 Photos
19. Beacon Ray’s Books
20. The Conservative Scholar-Resources
21. Literature: chats and forums 21.1 BookChat Central
22. Reviews of the Jolly Roger Site
23. Penpals
24. SearchBug: Chats and Forums
25. Website At Navy
26. exboard/ezSupporter File
27. Arts and Literature: Chats and Forums(Babieca)
28. Tutors and Tutoring
29. Pysics and Astronomy discussion Forum
30. Recommended Reading
31. Business Philosophy.com
32. cymbeline Discussion Deck
33. KewlStuff-Meta-cancel
34. The nantucketlighthouses@Nantuckets.com
35. NantucketCampfires@Nantuckets.com
35.1 Nantucket Memories Live Cavin Chat
36. Treaure Island:Abby’s
37. Skakespeare
38. Renaissances.com Classical Ren Portal
38.1 The Bible.Ren.com Ranch
38.2 Classical Poet’s Poetry Ranch:Gt. Books
38.3 Law
38.4 Western Canon. Common Ranch: Gt. Books
38.5 The Classics Ren.com Ranches
38.6 Best Sellers
39. Great Books:Classical
39.1 Carolinanavy.com Sophocles to Shakespeare
39.2 Great Books Fleet
39.3 Classical Gallery Great Books Tyreasure Chest
40. Literary Agents Forum Frigate
3.21 Mark Foster’s Site
12.1 Site Description
12.2 ID, password & homepage
12.3 Rocker Mouse Web Directory
12.4 Forum Items
12.5 MarkFoster>NETwork: Sociology
12.6 ReligionsNet.com
12.7 SPA(Soc Practice Ass'n)
12.8 Sociology Links
12.9 Clinical Sociology
12.10 MarkFoster.NETwork: mirror sites
12.10.1 Bridges Resource Index
12.11 The Bahai Studies NETwork
12.12 Bahai Site.com
12. 13 Flagship Site
12.14 MarkFoster.ORGanon
12.15 MarkFoster Network Rings
12.16 Sociology Ring
12.17 Philosoraptor
Note:
The notes on computer sites has become too extensive and, perhaps, too irrelevant, to include here.
NOTEBOOKS: GENERAL OVERVIEW OF A LIFETIME OF COLLECTING
In the more than fifty years that I have gathered my writing into notebooks the writing has fallen into three general categories: school, job and personal/Baha’i. The first category was created in the years 1949 to 1988 in primary, secondary and tertiary education and then external studies programs(1973-1988). From the hundreds of notebooks created in these years only two remain. From the hundreds created in the dozens of jobs I have had the only ones remaining are the approximately 30 files/notebooks from my last job at Thornlie College, notebooks from several of the social sciences and humanities.
The final category of notebooks now in my possession are what I would term personal/Bahá'í. They were created not for use in a place of employment, not for a teacher or a school system. They were created for my own use in my work as a Baha’i or in my personal use as a writer and poet. I have been gathering resources now for forty years, 1965-2005, but only seriously for the last twenty, 1985-2005. I have been fine-tuning my collection of notebooks in the last ten years, 1995-2005. I now have some 250-300 notebooks covering millions of words and many subjects and topics. These notebooks now serve and will serve as an important part of the base for my many writing projects in these early years of late adulthood(60-80) and old age(80++).
Little did I know when I created my first notebook at the mid-point in the twentieth century that fifty-five years later notebooks would come to occupy such an important place in my daily life. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, August 12th, 2005.
COURSES, UNITS, MODULES, SYLLABI, SUBJECTS OR PROGRAMS
I TAUGHT IN POST-SECONDARY EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS
IN AUSTRALIA: 1974-2004
Preamble:
I began work at the Tasmanian CAE in January 1974 and finished at the George Town School for Seniors in April 2004, a period of thirty years and four months. The list of subjects below is fairly comprehensive. The notebooks remaining from all these subjects is relatively few and they are marked with an asterisk.(*)
_____________________________________________________________________
A. Hedland College: Acting Lecturer in Management Studies: 1986-1987
Katherine Open College of Tafe: 1982-1986
Interpersonal Skills A
Interpersonal Skills B
Performance Appraisal
Negotiating Skills A
Negotiating Skills B
Conflict Resolution A
Conflict Resolation B
Introduction to Management
Club Management
Time Management
Counselling
Interview Techniques
Public Speaking
Interview Techniques
Consultation Skills
Letter Writing and Report Writing A
Letter Writing and Report Writing B
Supervision Skills
Aboriginal Administrator Training Officer Skills
Creative Writing(Adult Education)
Sociology(Adult Education)
B. Thornlie Campus of the SEMC and Perth Campus of CMC:
Communication Core(Certificate 3)
Communication 1(Diploma)
Business Communication 1A(Diploma)
Business Communication 1B(Diploma)
Ancient Greek History TEE**(notes kept)
Ancient Roman History TEE**
Modern History TEE**
Politics TEE
English Literature TEE**
English TEE
Traditional Culture and Modern Society**
Framework of Australian Society
History of Ideas**
Australian Government and Legal Systems
Philosophy 1 A**
Philosophy 1B**
General Psychology**
Commercial and Civic Principles
Interpersonal Study and Work Skills 001
Interpersonal Study and Work Skills 002
Society and Culture
Life Skills 1B(guitar)
Recreation 2(Certificate 2)
Social Science Introduciton
Welfare Practice 1A
Welfare Practice 1B
Welfare Practive 2A
Welfare Practice 2B
C. Human Services Certificate 3
...................Thornlie Campus 1994-1999.
Welfare Communication (4)
Introduction to Human Services(3)
Dealing With Conflict(3)
Family and Community(3)
Workteam Communication(3)
Service Provision and Practice(3)
Study Skills(3)
Recognition of Prior Learning(3)
Human Development 001(3)
Human Development 002(3)
Field Placement(3)
Field Placement(4)
Field Placement(5)
Field Tutorial(3)
Field Tutorial(5)
Managing People: Training and Development(5)
Managing Group Problem Solving and Decision Making(5)
Sociology for Human Service Workers(5)**
D. Engineering, Applied Science and Social Science Students at the Ballarat College of Advanced Education 1976-1978:
Social Science(Applied Science: Engineering)(BSc)
Social Science(Applied Science: Geology)(BSc)
Social Science(Social Science)(BA)
Australian Media(Social Science)(BA)
Sociological Theory(Teacher Trainees: Secondary)*
E. Whitehorse Technical College: 1975-1976
Behavioural Studies(Library Technician Trainees)(Cert.3)
F. Tasmanian CAE: 1974:
Language in Use
Introductory Pscyology
Human Relations
Sociology of Art
Individualized learning
Sociology*
G. Thornlie Campus of the SEMC: 1989-1998:
Writing Plain English
Writing Workplace Documents
Presenting Information
Presenting Reports
Workplace Communication
Quality Team Management
Job Seeking Skills
Communication and Industrial Relations
Managing Effective Working Relationships
Managing and Developing Teams
Field Experience in Community Services
Work Experience in Job Train Programs
H. George Town School for Seniors:
Autobiography*
Creative Writing*
Social Science
Philosophy*
Ron Price
July 2004
_____________________________________________________________________
FILES REMAINING FROM POST-SECONDARY TEACHING
10 WEEKS AFTER FINISHING MY TEACHING
IN GEORGE TOWN: 1999-2004
Sociology-8
Poetry-6
Poetry-give aways-1
Drama-2
Fiction-4
Literature-2
History-14
Philosophy-3
Psychology-4
Media Studies-5
Anthropology-2
Religion-2 M.A.(Qual)-2
Music/Education/Art/Etc: 5
Total: 60(approx)
Ron Price
July 9 2004
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