Transcendian Reading List

Short version, or unexplained list.

The I Ching/by wonder

The Bible/By spiritual season

War and Peace/ Tolstoy

Absolam Absolam/William Faulkner

Classic Readings in International Relations

The works of James Jones: Some Came Running, The Thin Red Line, From Here to Eternity, The Pistol, Go To the Widow Maker, Whistle.

The Naked and the Dead & Harlots Ghost/Norman Mailer

The USA Trilogy/ 1919, The 42nd Parrallel, and The Big Money by John Dos Passos.

A Death out of Season, Blood on the Snow, and The Face of Terror by Emmanuel Litvinoff

15 Battles that Changed the World/John Creasy

The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich & The Nightmare Years by William Shirer

Inside the Third Reich/Albert Speer

Les Misarbles/Victor Hugo

Flying Cloud/Armstrong Sperry

All of the books by Nevil Shute, but particularly Round the Bend and The Legacy.

The Art of Clear Thinking/author name forgotten

The Civil War Trilogy by Shelby Foote

Grant/McFeely

The Last Picture Show, Texasville & Duane’s Depressed

Lonsome Dove, Streets of Laredo, Commanche Moon & All My Friends are Going to be Strangers/ Larry McMurtry

Dog Soldiers, Outerbridge Reach and Damascus Gate/Robert Stone

Lolita/ Nabakov

Gorky Park & Polar Star/Martin Cruz Smith

The Prince of Berlin/ Dan Sherman

KGB/Ken Barrows

Time and Time Again/Clifford Simak

Pillars of the Earth/Ken Follet

The Human Comedy/William Saroyan

Collected Poems/Weldon Kees

Collected Poems/Gregory Courso

Fantasies and Meditations on the Illusionless Man/Alan Wellis

Catch 22/Joseph Heller

All Quiet on The Western Front/Erich Marie Remarque

The Enormous Room/ee cummings

The Norton Anthology of Modern War/edited by Paul Fussell

The First World War and Modern Memory/Paul Fussell

The Prince/Machievelli

Three Soldiers/John Dos Passos

Chicken Hawk/authors name not now remembered

Dispatches/Michael Herr

Highways to a War/Christopher Koch

In Cold Blood/Truman Capote

Executioners Song/Norman Mailer

Goodbye Mickey Mouse & Spy Story/Len Deighton

Cold Mountain/Charles Fraizer

Home Before Dark/Susan Cheever

Continental Drift/Russell Banks

Fools Die & The Dark Arena/Mario Puzo

Amerika/Franz Kafka

A Clockwork Orange/Anthony Burgess

Hollywood/Charles Bukouski

For Whom the Bell Tolls/Ernest Hemingway

Confederacy of Dunces/

The Flim Flam Man/

Blue Movie/Terry Southern

Young Men and Fire/Norman Mclean

Play it as it Lays/Joan Didion

Final Drafts/

Final Payments/Mary Gordon

The Fountainhead & Atlas Shrugged/Ayn Rand

Sand and Stone/ Frank Lloyd Wright

Einstein History and Other Passions/Kenneth Knowlton

Blood Meridian/Cormac McCarthy

       This is the short version of my reading list that has no comments.

                                                     Russell Scott Day 8/28/05

Working Class Corner/ Platform Remembered

      Because I am a hard head and tend to do as many things as others the first way I learned, though not necessarily the best way I now and again lose hours and hours of writing that may have been better than what I have to condense to what I remembered of it, because I wrote it online, and it just went somewhere that I can’t find.

       Such a thing happened about 4 times last week.

       My condensed rememberances of the main points were about Defense and Education.

       On the case of Defense I tried to think of weapons that everyone ought to be assumed to be carrying in a time of general war.

       I don’t care where you live anymore, you really need to be carrying some sort of defensive weapon, and not really so much for yourself all of the time.

       There will be call for weapons in outerspace for large crews.   Such weapons will be non lethal and will initially be Taser sorts of weapons, (Though you might call them Phasors like they did on Star Trek.)

       In the Earth environment and outerspace environment non lethal weapons work and therefore I would like to see all sensible citizens have weapons such as Pepper Spray or Mace, and even Tasers, though in the schools I would not allow students yet to carry such things in the classrooms.

       My education was extreme and I was large enough and fast enough until I was in my mid thirties to win or draw in the fights I was in, but for the small and the weak children who have no protectors and may find themselves alone, I might arm even school children with something like Pepperspray.

       My education was so extreme that I lived in Rochdale College in Toronto in during the Viet Nam War when everyone knew someone who had either been there, or who had been there and died there.   There I was a newspaper editor poet and Security Guard.

        All the Hallucenigenic Drugs were legal in Rochdale College, and I worked to keep Drunks and Junkies and Speed Freaks out besides thieves or kidnappers or other sorts who are likely to harm others or themselves.

        There are some people that even go out looking for the first fight they can find and I fought with some of them in the Lobby.

        Overall for a City of its size Toronto is pretty civilized, or was then when I was on Rochdale Security.   I didn’t carry a gun or even a useful knife and fist fought in the fights I had to.

        I was 19 then, and now I am 52 and I really ought to be carrying Pepper Spray as a general rule.

        I was in the Bank today depositing my check and for a second felt a little fear that the guy sitting on the bench outside the bank looked a little crazy.   Who knows what he has in his bags, or how crazy and desperate he might be?

       I was getting some bacon and coffee in a store on Market St. and Wilmington and these guys came in with guns and robbed the place.   They made me lie on the floor.   I had nothing in the face of a gun, and if I had had a gun then there might have been a shoot out.

      With the spray I might have had a bit of a chance if I rolled with it and was able to spray it when the robber might have come to shoot me in the back of the head as happened to a mechanic named Manny I knew.

       Manny lived because he had a hard skull and he was shot with a 25 caliber pistol that has low velocity right out of the barrel.

        Now far as I know if you can have a drivers license you can have Pepper Spray, and really I think if you outlaw guns you ought to require all to carry something for the defense of themselves and others, in a time of general war.

       Of course I think that the Drivers License ought to be a Federal License same as a Pilot License, and it would make clear that we were at war if that disconnect was changed as far as US Citizenship was concerned.

       True Southerners do not believe in the Federal Government which is one of the reasons in the past I called myself an Easterner which works as far as my conflicts over work with Californians in the movie business.

        So to end this stuff about defense, I am going to at least go out and buy Pepper Spray for my wife and myself and keep it with me as part of my civic duty and part of my private need, – now that I’m not so tough.

       The Schools are where the issue of non lethal weapons and their carry would be precedent setting and prepare youth for the carrying and proper use of weapons more generally than is currently the case in the United States at least.

       The attacks and killings that have taken place in American Schools in the recent era does seem to call for defensive weapons of the sort sold by the License Plate place to at least be carried by teachers and administrators of schools.

       In a time of general war upon civilians by external actors, and internal actors, where the place of the attacks is too varied to be fully defended by specialist warriors all must be armed with a clear understanding of the common threat and what their weapons are rightly used for.

       Weapons and physical violence of fists and feet are rightly used to defend yourself or your family, friend, or countrymen.

EDUCATION.

        Your parents do not teach you what you need to know, but what they know and that is why there are schools and teachers to make up for that fact.

        I tell my daughter that I want to help her learn to do what she wants to do and do not necessarily want her to do things I have done to make a living, or fullfil my destiny.

        I want to help her learn what she wants to know to live up to the destiny she feels God has given her.

        So I want the schools to teach the things I don’t know very well, that I ought to know better, or more of, like I really ought to know another language besides English.

        I want the local Elementary Schools and all schools really to teach languages other than the mother tongue in Elementary School when it is known that that is the easiest time for the student to learn another language.

         If I had any power over education that would be a big issue with me and something that I would not stop attempting to institute.

         I feel that it criminal that students in the US are not taught languages when it is best to teach it to them, and sometimes suspect that it is done on purpose to keep Americans from actually being able to make a living in anywhere but America.

        Reading and writing are crucial skills and the best way to teach reading of English is apparently through Phonics and for English that is the method I would want to make sure was used for teaching reading.

        Navigation and numbers skills are equal to language skills, but dependent on it.   For math and physics I would emphasize principals that solved word problems in math in my schools.

       This is my platform as concerns Defense and Education.

        As far as the Economy is concerned I will address that issue in the next filing.

                                                                  Russell

Federalism

       Real Southerners are not successfully federalized and really do not believe in the Federal government.

       From early on in my life I was federalized because we lived in a multiplicity of states and I more over identified with being an American.

       The trip to the Moon was the sort of Federal program that made a kid proud to be an American.

       Somehow it is hard to feel pride about being an American even with a semi functioning space program.

       All that money spent on all that wonderful science and pictures of Earth seems run by Science Fiction stories from a time when there was a difference.

      It is time the Space Program, embodied in the Federal institution that is NASA was run on facts, and not fictions.

       The facts are that the Moon and Mars and Venus may well be eventually useful to mankind, but they are not practical evacuation destinations for large numbers of people and are better viewed as useful for defensive purposes, such as places from which to defend the Earth from Asteroids or Aliens.

       In fact neither threat is an impossiblity, though I consider the Asteroid threat more likely.

       The most sensible thing to do now with the Space Program is to give a mission of concrete utility to those of us who are going to be living and working here on Earth.

       That mission really does need to be a Planet Defense System that is similar to the Coast Guard and it may well be best to put the Coast Guard in charge of NASA to make it happen.

       The Coast Guard is a good Federal institution with a clear mission that insulates it from politics generally so well that a hero tv show about the Coast Guard is called for.

       I see them as the US equivalent to the Canadian Mounties.

       Too many of us do live in the past.

       The world has not changed, but what we know about it has, and it is sad for the working people that so many of our leaders do not even live in the present, and are incompetent to lead us into the future.

       Religion is not necessarily in favor of the facts.

       On one hand this is a good thing, for otherwise there seems little reason to try to be something more than an animal, but on the downside religion is a denial of the fact that one has only for certain one life and there is no real evidence that things will be better in another life, if there is even one to be had.

       Some say God is Love, and others say God Knows all, and others say suffering is God’s Will for the sinner.

       I say that once your religion inhibits you more than it inspires you, it is useless.

       This is my main measure of the goodness of any set of religious beliefs.

       In relation to government then I look at religious beliefs as helpful when they inspire both leaders and followers to make more satisfying lives for their citizens.

       A satisfying life is a life of building things, making things, growing things, cleaning things, or in general working and having that work appreciated.

       Really we know that honest work ought to be rewarded honestly and in the United States the reason it is so hard these days to feel pride is that workers are looked down on because they must work, and must take any job that is in-front of them and must take whatever pay offered because otherwise they will have no work at all.

       All the poor working people are encouraged to hate themselves for not being rich employers who can abuse those that work for them, and further hate themselves because they no longer can even get jobs making things, which does satisfy a human need and does produce some pride that infects even salesmen of a nation.

      New Orleans was the present, in that it was the Service Economy that the Right Wing has sold to the American workers on the back of Religion.

       Say we just fix everyone’s house in New Orleans, and send them back to the same jobs they had, and just pay them more to do them?   The Government of the United States, which is Corporations and the Catholic Church has turned the US into a "service economy" and the Chinese are proud that they are making everything.

       Everything they don’t make, or invent, they get to steal.

       As far as the fortunes of the American Working Classes are concerned since the economy is divorced from making things at the same time it needs to have things to sell for a profit and everyone is getting old we can count on the end of US prosperity as it once might have been.

      The only thing to possibly help would be enforcement of international laws concerning intellectual property rights in China and Russia in conjunction with an international minimum wage.

       It is a good time for the creation of a Planet Defense System which is something the US could make, and sell shares of to other nations.

       Transcendia, if it had a budget would build a planet defense system as its "Service Economy".

       The problem with building a Planet Defense Service is that protecting the Earth from Asteroids and Aliens does not allow one to be selective.   In other words it will not work for me to say that if you have not paid your share of the service fee, I will let an asteroid, when it is coming, and not going to hit where others have paid for the protection, hit your nation, since the hit will likely affect those who have paid for the service and those that have not.

        Therefore I am best to make the technology and sell it to the UN.

        It is too bad that the UN is so fucked up, the EU so complacent, the US so out of control, and China and Russia so dependent on peasants, while the Catholic Church and Islam conspire to maintain the Crusades of the Dark Ages.

        Looked at realistically one would be inspired to commit suicide if one lost all faith in themselves as having hope of arguement with rational minds.

       The Space Elevator Concept does offer an economical bridge to outerspace that really must be built.

       It would be a big project that would cost a good deal of money and would turn the tower of Babel into something useful.

                                                                      Love- Russell

Dear Friends,

         I’ve been writing letters to people like Ellie Kinnard, an NC State Senator, Moses Carey, the Orange County Commissioner, and Sally Greene who is on the Chapel Hill Town Council.

       My writings on those issues have been directed at the operations of the local airport IGX, Horace Williams, the plight of the homeless and what to do about it, and advancing wherever possible the prospects for local motion picture production.

      I had a nice talk with Diane Reed because Moses Carey told me to call her about what is done with money collected in the county from motel and hotel room taxes.

       My question to Commissioner Carey was, "How much money does the County get from taxes on hotel and motel rooms, and what is done with it?"

       Apparently according to Ms. Reed there are only 1300 hotel and motel rooms in Orange County and the budget for her office of tourism is only 400 to 500 thousand dollars a year.

      As far as the initiative to elimanate homelessness as much as is possible and practical, I would like to see homeless people exempted from paying taxes when they get the money together to stay in a motel or hotel room as a little thing that would help them.

       I did discover that State Employees get a special rate when they stay in hotels and motels in the state, and think that the homeless ought rightly get that rate as well, as a little help to them.

      Now it does appear that most of the money that the Tourism Board gets from taxes on hotel rooms and motel rooms in Orange County is spent on brochures and the like.

       I have suggested that at the least Bill Arnold of the State Film Commission have such publications in his pocket and packet of "literature" when he goes with his staff to LA to lobby for film productions to come to the State and work.

      Further I think that although brochures and flyers have some utility, they would be more effective in conjunction with an event or events that draw the people who run desirable businesses such as motion picture production, physically to the area, of their own volition.

      Them guys from LA play Golf, and whenever they come to NC to work they bring their Golf Clubs.   I did convince Mr. Arnold and his staff to at least give away passes to great Golf Courses in the State of NC whenever they go out there to LA to Lobby for Business.

       For years now I have been trying to get an ABOVE THE LINE INVITATIONAL GOLF FISBEE GOLF TOURNAMENT instituted in the State of North Carolina, somewhere.

       When I lived in Guilford County I found out that significant amounts of money do end up in the County Coffers that could be used to finance such an event.   This is apparently common to most Counties, that money collected from taxes on hotel and motel rooms goes in some degree to the County Tourism Boards.

       I am trying to get some County to put up the money to institute such an event that builds on inherent strength and desirablity of the existing infrastructure in conjunction to "incentives", or what I call bribes.

       There are some good Golf Courses in Orange County, and as well some of the premier Disc Golf Courses in the Nation along side of them that I feel ought to be advertised and utilized so as to attract the people and players we need for a mature Motion Picture Industry to thrive in the State of North Carolina.

      Really I do not think that brochures are enough.

      People like to go to places they see in the movies and on TV, so I want to see a televised Golf Tournament for Motion Picture Producers, Actors, and Writers somewhere in the State, and since I live in Orange County, I’d like to see it happen where I live, since it might help me continue to live here.

      On the issue of the airport, Horace Williams, it is not run in a way that I approve of for it is run as if it is a private airport owned by the University of North Carolina, and it is not by law a private airport, but really a community airport.

      Landlocked localities need their own airport.

      Really it is odd to me that the County Commissioners and the Town Council of Chapel Hill and Carrboro have so completly abdicated their responsiblities as far as the asset that is the only airport in the County.

      I’ve worked to change their view of this asset so that the airport is acknowledged as important to the infrastructure and benefits the working people of the County in all of the ways it could as an Economic Multiplier.

       In the meantime I’m coming apart from lack of income to finance the healthcare I need.   I’m also coming apart due to the hard physical work I’ve drifted to doing in construction because that is the regular work I have been able to find.

       So it is time that I did focus a bit more on my own work, which is writing, and to that end I have started to refocus on my new novel Force of Nature.

       I rewrote and posted into the Poetry Section of transcendia.org, the first Chapter today, and I hope you will read it along with subsequent chapters as I may post them.

       I am tempted to run for either Mayor of Carrboro, or County Commissioner, and have been working on a platform worthy of support.

       Whatever Platform I codify in coming weeks will be based on what I understand as important for the Working Classes.   In general I am certain that a fully developed infrastructure is vital to the health of the overall anarchistic capitalistic economy, and that that means energy, police, schools, healthcare, roads, and water.

       I will refine the order and methods in subsequent postings as I serialize this novel that is on my mind.   I hope you will keep up with both, and welcome imput on the political subjects I turn to when I am not feeling particularly entertaining.

                                         Love, Russell Scott Day

Founder of Transcendia

War

     Please write to me about what wars you know about that are not in the general news.   I need to make a list of current wars and threats to working class people.

     In my view wars hurt working people regardless of their religious beliefs and I believe that it is not wise to believe in anything too much.

     I believe that believing in something too much results in war.

     I am talking about constructs here, views of morality and theological edits and imperatives.

      I did have a vision and I do believe in my vision as an experience that guides me.

      I believe that my vision was real and crossed from my physical life to my spiritual life and gave me a touchstone in my head that is what my body carries around and is what makes me a soul instead of an anonymous spirit.

       I think and believe that it is my duty to save the prospect of creating a soul for the unnamed spirits by saving the physical world for them to come to and which we go back to with an identity which is what spirits thirst for so much as to really be impatient about.

      The home of humanity is the Earth only so far and it is getting to the point where even if it is not hit by a big rock commonly called an Asteroid, it will be overwhelmed by people who are spirits and the common life will be even with the achievement of identity not much better than being dead.

       Since you need a body to have sex from all I know, I really do not expect to have sex in heavan, and though I really appreciate the life of the mind, it is the rememberance of physical love that I suspect is the reason that spirits desire to have this weird life.

       Some people then when faced with my education that comes from my Aleph vision say then that heavan does not conform to their conception of it.

      Basically they seem to expect that in heaven is an orgy where they get to have everything they wanted here.

      What  they need to face if we are to maintain the home of physical souls, which is a valuable and unique experience, and really not ought to be disturbed by wars which shorten the development of the soul and cause some to want to come back when it would be more fair if once was enough that whatever you do in the interests of war, is wrong.

      I believe that so much that I am willing to fail in making Transcendia into a real nation.

      This is one of the reasons I want the United Nations to take Transcendia over, though I am not pleased with Kofi Annan and the Security Council or the French,China or Russia.

       Certainly the Vatican is a big problem for Transcendia because the Vatican has an agenda that is not supported by practical programs for maintaining a place to grow souls over the long term.

       It is Confuscious and Christ who I typically work with on for the Transcendian agenda.

       Confuscious recommends to me professionalism in actions caused by ideals and vision, and Jesus recommends doing unto others as I would have done to me.

      I don’t really want to be murdered, and therefore I feel it behooves me not to murder others.   War does not seem a good justification for murder.

      Practically if someone is trying to kill me or my children or my countrymen, then they ought to be defended against and possibly killed since the weapons available, have the power to make the Earth impossible for humans to live on.

       So the most practical thing for the international community of souls to do is to get rid of all weapons of mass destruction like nuclear weapons so that the souls that are convinced and believe that there is infinite space for all spirits to invade will not have the capacity to wipe out long term prospects.

                                                           Love, Russell

Infrastructure Platform for Local and Global

       The largest city I have lived in for an extended period of time was New York City.

        At the least that would recommend the infrastructure mix of rail, cough sea, therapy road, and air transportion options.

       The way things are going the infrastructure necessary for civilization which according to the numbers using common technology has become unsustainable.

         Technology does need to be directed towards goals for it to appear.

         The history of inventions shows that the concepts are free.

         Even the first man who ever saw a bird wanted to fly and dreamed of it.

         The need for flying machines increased as the population increased and became both increased and increasing.

          Engines pushed to their limits explode when their lubricants break down.

          Ideas for social lubrication have fallen to architects and urban planners.

          The mix of hunter gatherer and farmer life depends on transportation.

          Transportation is going to or fleeing from.

           Are paths transport?

           My feet and legs are transport.

           The path is infrastructure.

           Every path leads somewhere.

            For deer a path leads to food.

            One of the reasons we run over deer all the time around here is because we have taken from them their job.

            From my honeymoon vist to Disney World and Epcot Center, and the tv images I grew up with, and my experiences in New York City, it would seem to me that the bottleneck needs focus on the megalpolis with full integration of transportation that put food where it needed to be when it needed to be there for all humanity.

           Putting people into outerspace is not putting them where there is food.

           Why go where there is no food?

            This is simply not sensible.

             To get through the bottleneck of human needs at maximum population outerspace needs to provide energy,escape, insurance, and food.

             The space elevators need to be directed towards capturing supplies for the working people.

             Knowledge is a supply, and knowing how to grow and transport food in any environment would be a good thing to know, especially if it produced a surplus.

             I will continue to work on this subject from a completed goal of determining what must be done locally and globally by all communities to enable as long an existance as would be possible for mankind if the interest was in enabling humanity for at least half of infinity.

             As far as making food in outerspace at a profit is concerned I suspect that it will require L5 designs which acknowledged a need for gravity, or something like it.  Then I suspect that it would be profitable only if it was linked to space elevators.

           Plus I suspect that there is no way that spacecraft as we have known them so far like airplanes or ICBMs can do enough to fullfil mankinds needs, and that the only hope for mankind really does seem to rest in space  elevator construction.

           I really would like it if the town I lived in would put some money up towards sisterhood with an equatorial region city where nearby would be a space elevator.

          I will work more on this in a following post.

                                                                                                   Russell   

…

Should I run for Founder?

Politically spiritually physically and intellectually I have been working to come up with a total local and global platform that would work as if I was running for mayor or king or president or commissioner.

I do study and over the long haul I have relied on Scientific American for good as I could get information.

Just like I really would not expect to be certified to fly except by pilots who had flown with me, viagra I really would not expect to be certified to be in a position of leadership unless other leaders had sat in the co-pilot seat and gotten where they wanted to go.

Maybe I am too humble.

I am pleased that according to what I know of Confucious it was his intent to make clear that leaders needed to be worthy of the responsiblity, abortion the pleasure of the fullfilled duty are without measure in my opinion.

I have just read Climax of Humanity by George Musser in the Scientific American and my goal in this and maybe the following on my global and local focus will be to come up with a platform of actions and taxes and ideals that ought to work to the precepts and known knowlege of history and sociology so much that regardless of my imperfections or even perfections, denture the actions, precepts of ideology, would work in inner and outerspace, or at least in the Solar System for a good while.

For Carrboro and Chapel Hill I then first suggest a Convention of Futurists where would be Showcased and sold all highest technologies of personal and public infrastructure, for the world naked has been the infrastructure which mankind is destroying by doing what mankind does too often.

Maintainance and love of the infrastructure really now means that mankind regardless of religion can love what has been given and what they have made.

Hell I would encourage men to make fighting space ships since without them Earthlings will be vulnerable to alien attack, and it is just in our nature to do things like that.

In Chapel Hill and Carrboro I would with the approval of the citizens certify for roads all of the best vehicles available regardless of crash worthiness.

If you can have motorcycles on the roads you can have very small cars, and I am very interested in seeing more of the Swatch Cars that my friend from Holland has told me about.

The nearby NASA property in the County better start using that land to launch Micro Rockets or come up with some use of that land that is fitting to the needs of our children.

A sister City in Ecuador is highly recommended to Chapel Hill and Carrboro and common laws must be aligned so as to make regular travel between the sister cities common and safe.

The goal of good administrators and leaders is always first to protect their people and their turf.

Passive and Active protection mean that first the turf is to be made attractive and functional, and that at the same time that which makes it attractive to all is sustained and further thrives inspite of love and envy.

It is true that I have not made myself more known and vulnerable.

Now that I am older and more broken down and likely to die any minute, I really ought to talk a bit more into the face of Glass.

Energy is the bottom line as far as creating and enabling a civilization worthy of the name.

Solar energy is the most perfect passive source of energy and trumps nuclear power and therefore really ought to be the focus of some nation besides Transcendia.

I am going to give my neighbor Ed a call on this subject and see what sort of plan he has in his pocket to power my rented home.

                                                                                           Love, Russell

Looking Back, a short film I made from Steve Elliots S8 footage shot when he was in Viet Nam, and film I shot of him walking on railroad tracks to Hell Bound Train, by Savoy Brown, and Pigmeat HeartBeat by Pink Floyd is going to be shown in the Flickerfest Film Festival, at least in Chapel Hill, at Cats Cradle.

      Steve was my girlfriend’s boyfriend before he went to Viet Nam.

      We spent time together enough that he gave me his film, and I shot film of him and edited it together.

      I thought the festival would have preferred the documentary I shot of Carter’s Inaugartion.

      It has been a good while since I have had a film in a festival.

      The DVD technology helps since I have lost films I made by trusting people to send them back.

       I no longer give people my originals to show.

       As far as Super 8 is concerned it is not good enough to be duplicated much.

       I never did get permission for the soundtrack from the artists and I am hopeful that they will not sue me when the film is shown and accept that I’ve never yet made a cent from the film.

       In fact I haven’t let people much see it because I never have gotten around to getting rights to the soundtrack, which I think helps it.

        If you know anyone who was in Savoy Brown or Pink Floyd I would appreciate it if you would let them know that I would be grateful if they would not sue me for using their music for this little film.

        It would be nice if this film was shown in Viet Nam for it would show instant regrets.

                                                                                                                                 love, russell

I have not been to church in over a year except for a memorial service and an ash internment of my father-in-law who was a Prespitarian, physician however you spell it, minister, of South Port and Scotland, far as I can tell.

His sonnets are on the site and laid out better than what I filed this weekend.

So I have done a reading and it has come up from the I Ching and the Bible to be about judgement at the hand of God on both counts, in both books.

Well maybe I am wrong.

51   Chen/The Arousing (Shock, Thunder)

The superior man does all he can to make sure he does what God would want.

John 1-19-28

"I am the voice crying in the wilderness."

      Now I want to make clear that I am a pragmatic man with spiritual intent, and that I know that now I have less time to live than I have to learn.

        I know that the great life is the life lived for love and only love in all its forms physical or intellectual, and that if I live and act according to bad ideas I might as well be a very small bug that has no soul.

        Now do ants have souls?

        I have at least told my wife that when I die I do not want to be buried and all of my parts are up for grabs if they are useful and otherwise what is left of me may be studied or possibly eaten.

       I was very happy to see that the trapped submariners were rescued before they ate each other.

       To complete this reading I need to read Acts 3-1-ll and Judges 7-1-8 apparently.

                                                                                                                -Russell

I added to the poetry section two poems:

        I was prompted to post the poems because of an email I got asking if I wanted to contribute to a Drag Queen Queer Show oriented Television Program from a Public Access Channel.

        For the poem Selecto Sexo I imagine pictures of robots and sex toy to a voice over, and it is one of a series of poems I wrote in the television Voice Over style.   Others in the series were advertisments for a Space Ship named the Ace Leader Star Chief, and the Glaxo, a Space Truck.

        Selecto Sexo was written in 1976, and Using the Lumberfile, was probably written sometime in the Eighties.

        Selecto Sexo is about bi-sexuality, and Using the Lumberfile is about Menage` Trois.

       Somewhere in the letters index is The Essence of Love, which is the poem I have been thinging about the most lately.   I will likely write it into the Poetry section soon.

        It’s been a hot summer and I think my brains have baked some as a result.   I feel this sort of do or die and I don’t care what I say sort of compulsion exacerbated by my Father-in -Laws’ death which has brought up in me memories of my Father and events surrounding his life and death.

        I’ve been in a good deal of pain for the past week and though in my past I have lived through and recovered from boughts of chronic pain, I was younger and knew that I would recover if I took certain actions like leaving Manhattan and taking work that wasn’t as hard, but didn’t pay as well when I was working.

         It’s never all one thing.

         Is it my back, or could it be my kidneys?    I’m pretty sure it is my back.

         I read a nice little piece in The Week magazine that pointed out that if God was so intelligent why did he make us with such flawed back design?   What a fine sentence there was in the piece about evolution had left some scars.   "Scars of Evolution", what a fine phrase.

         I’ve been thinking about The Essense of Love because people asked me what Heavan was like and because of my vision called Transcend-O-Ray, I do feel like there are all these spirits that want to be in bodies because they know that regardless of the security of just being with God and all the other lighted things, you get to have sex and eat in a body and if you don’t have a body you can’t do that.

          Some of the shame that is associated with sex may well rise up from the rememberance of spirits that it is unique to the physical life.

         Light has a constant speed unless it is slowed down as it passes through the glass lens.   My favorite book in the Bible is St. John because when I read it I could read it simply as advice on how to take photographs.

         When it is really hot and it is really cold there come these views of the world that those of us still blessed with eyesight know achieve such horror or truth and beauty that we can feel our souls being created from the anonoymous spirits who thirst for individual successes and share the tortures as did Jesus and Budda describe.

         I have not done a service with the I Ching and the Reading for the Day for longer than much of the time, and have been trying to write my Book.    There are some paragraphs I’ve come across in past postings that made me wonder if I remembered who I was and made me remeet myself  actually surprised that I wrote at least one good paragraph.

         Now my Theological arguement with the Vatican Agenda and Bush Policies as concerns Womens Rights and the Rights of Gays is boiled down to my sense that from a purely practical standpoint it is to the advantage of the Spirits that knock at the door, knowing of the rarity of the physical event so much as we have it for a finite time, that those of us having it are in conflict with them and need to teach them that if they are patient and allow us to not destroy the planet we will be more able in the long term to let them have the ride we are on.

        If the Pope is so in touch with God I would expect him to allow prevention of pregnancy with a sense of patience towards all the spirits out there trying to get here.    Really I would expect the Infinite God to accept human wisdom and the recognition by the bodied made into souls that it is the same duty to the spirits that they expect from God.

        What is wrong with me if I recognize God may forget that he is infinite?   Frankly I think God wants me to recognize that he might forget and it may be a little joke he put forth that gives me the opportunity to make him proud of me as if he were my Father and I wanted to make a good arguement to him to get some respect.

                                                                                                                        Love – Russell