Allan G. Hunter's Blog, page 74

Piracy: A strange thing….

"Buy Zithromycn" says the tag. Whatever that is. That's what some clever soul has managed to attach to my Google. website search. Tap in "allanhunter.net" and you'll get the site reference, but with all sorts of pleas to buy various pharmaceuticals. I do not endorse these items. Never have. Doubt I ever will.

I wonder how I fix this kind of thing?

Republican Hate Speech

Several Republican candidates have recently been speaking in ways that come very close to hate speech. Santorum's anti-gay statements, especially about gay families, have only shown him as ignorant and as a hopelessly un-informed outsider. He might want to check the US Census Bureau's definition of 'family' before he makes his comments.

The trouble is that even if we dismiss him as a sensible person his ugly words still hang in the air, as name-calling always does. His bizarre statements, broadcast with glee by so many networks, do nothing to help raise the discussion level. In fact they tend to inflame those who are already bigoted. This creates less peace.

We don't need that.

Think positive. Be positive. For every thought you think and every word you say has an impact in the larger world. Republicans candidates, of all people, should know that.

Upcoming Workshops 2012

I'll be giving several workshops in the New Year. At Curry College I'll be offering two fourteen week classes of The Therapeutic Uses of Writing - my ever popular workshops designed to uncover the unconscious stories we live by. (The course numbers are  ENG 3440 and 3550).

I'll also be hosting a one day Memoir writing workshop at the Forbes House in Milton. This should be a real delight as there's nothing quite like a truly beautiful, elegant, historic home to get those memories flowing….   This will be on April 28th, a Saturday, and there are limited openings. Interested?  Here's the link:

www.forbeshousemuseum.org

Just drop them a line and they'll wing you back details, which are not on the website yet.

Interview with Wendy Garrett

Today I had the real delight of talking about "The Path of Synchronicity" with Wendy Garrett, host of Empower Radio: www.empoweradio.com . It's always a pleasure to be interviewed for radio, and Wendy is certainly one of the very best people to talk with when it comes down to understanding the ways of the universe.

Check it out next time you have a moment.

The New Book: A Diet Book for the Soul

"Spiritual Hunger" will be ready for purchase in about February 2012.  It's about that emptiness inside that we tend to fill with various activities of a compulsive nature.  Shopping, for example, might come under that heading…. Over-indulgences of all kind fit the category.

So how do we feed that spiritual emptiness, and what with? Think of this book as a diet book for the soul, because it'll show you what's spiritually nutritious, and what's junk food, how to tell the difference, and how to integrate ritual and myth into a meaningful life.

Since February is usually a month of gloomy weather when such questions have an added resonance, it's all perfect.

You can advance order it now from Amazon at a reduced price (about $10), if you're so inclined.

Phillip Roth

I just read "Everyman", and since Roth is one of our national icons it seemed like a good idea to find out why.

I confess to being disappointed. The short novel is centered on the medical procedures attendant on aging and death, but the world the unnamed everyman figure inhabits is purely physical. There was no sense of spirit, no transcendent idea, nothing much except regret, memory, pain and the physical body's dissolution. I don't know when I have ever read anything so nihilistic.

I could go into greater details about it (The fact the the strongest memories seem to be about sexual encounters with women the hero doesn't even like very much - that's a topic one could write on endlessly) but if this is a portrait of modern man then it's fairly grim. It reminds me, in fact, of why I now read contemporary fiction so seldom.  So often there's nothing in it to help us to live.

The business of art is, surely, to help us to live well, to be alive while we are alive. Mr Roth does not supply that.

A Victorian Christmas? We Need a Change.

The present form of Christmas, which includes family gatherings and trees and presents, was invented and puffed into being in England in the early Nineteenth century, Queen Victoria's reign, by the wealthy middle classes.

Until then Easter had been the holiest time of the year; which made sense as it was possible to travel at Easter without freezing to death, and since there was nothing to do in the fields for a while, pilgrimages were in order for some.

The present insistence on gathering family and giving gifts and so on simply didn't exist before about 1750. Scrooge's was simply one attitude to Christmas, one going out of fashion, in the mid 1800s. Remember, though, that Dickens venerated family at a time when people had large families, very large, sometimes, and included half the neighbors as "family". It was a lot different from our present day, tense and tortured nuclear family structure (and face it, many families are these days).

Could it be time, now, to redesign Christmas so it fits what we need, rather than what we're told we need? How would you do it?

I'd like to see less of the frantic commercial behavior I witness, which cannot actually make people happy, surely? I'd like to see us giving things like food and drink as gifts (so the landfills won't overflow and things will be enjoyed in the moment), And I'd like to see some of our gifts go to the less privileged, too, as a matter of custom. But perhaps I'm just a Scrooge?

I'd like to see people give more love and less glitzy trash.

Easy Options - don't give in to them

The alarmist nature of our media encourages, mostly, despair and gloom in us, the citizens bombarded by it. The only problem with this is that it is ultimately easy despair, mutely prodding us to give up and become cynical.

We can't afford this kind of easy I-can-do-nothing-about-it despondency. In fact, it's not really an option because it's predicated on a false choice. It leads us to think, "Oh, I don't know what to do so I'll do nothing". Well, that's simply not true, because we can all do something about making our world a little better, even if it's just being decent to our fellow citizens.

Think of a way, any small way, you can make a difference today. Me, I just went on a walk with a plastic bag and picked up garbage as I went along.  Several people said encouraging things ("Good idea" and "Well done") as I wandered by. I think I even made a couple of friends.

It's not that hard to change the energy.

La Coste

I've just had a series of inquiries from a french agency that wants to put La Coste banners on my website.  They offer to pay, too. This seems odd since I don't use la Coste, and I doubt if anyone comes to my site to look for clothing. Perhaps it's just the enormous number of hits that come to my site that attracts them?

Does anyone have any experience of this kind of thing? I'd dearly love to know what's going on….

Black Friday, Shopping, Christmas

Thanksgiving managed to hold its place until about 3pm on Thursday, so presumably many people bolted their turkey and pie and left the table scraps to congeal in order to get to the shops on time.

I have a theory about this.

It's not about the bargains. It's not really about Christmas or Hanukkah for most people. It's about our restless desire to run around and do things, because if we aren't in a state of anxiety or movement we tend to feel we don't really exist.  We can't relax. We have to be doing.

What use is the utopia of the ten hour work week if we're all so jazzed up on rushing about that we'll simply yearn for our old addictive behaviors once we're there?