Talk Right (posts)

Cindercloth

Posted on by Dr. Bacon, PhD in Freedom & Responsibility, Journified

Finding Sackcloth in “Speak Bird, Speak Again” was somewhat of an adventure. Discovering a tale of the same tale-type as many of the old Indo-European Folk tales, Cinderella from Germany, Katie Woodencloak from Norway, The Broken Pitcher from England, Ashley Pelt from Ireland, The Sharp Grey Sheep from Scotland, The Hearth-Cat from Portugal, Little Saddleslut (love the name), The Baba Yaga from Russia, and many more. A version appearing from the folk history of Palestinian Arabs was somewhat of a surprise, as were many of the tales presented here. Sackcloth is the one which sparks my own interest most keenly. In my world, anything coming from Palestinian Arab origin, is somewhat like originating in Hell. Prejudicial?Indeed, but there ya go.

There are many tales of the same type, for reference here, I am using the brothers Grimm version of Cinderella as translated by Margaret Taylor in 1884. That the two tales spring from the same root is quite apparent. The stories share more than just a tale-type. Various motif similarities fall one after another throughout both versions of the tale, beginning with the title itself “Cinderella,” pointing to the girl in cinders, as it were, and “Sackcloth” her very name referring to coarsely woven fabric. Both, daughters of successful men, have lost their mother. Living lives of trouble, both end up at parties of royalty with their true beauty, previously covered by sack cloth and cinders, now exposed. Both end up charming a prince with their inherent beauty and to the prince, end up married. The two, in many ways, the same story.

The interest I have is spawned in the differences which can be traced to the cultural roots of either version of the tale. The antagonist in Cinderella is the wicked stepmother which is relatively typical of this type of tale from the Indo-European perspective, however in Sackcloth’s case the antagonist is her step-father who rather than servitude from the stepdaughter, is seeking something dangerously close to incest, marriage to the stepdaughter. A conflict of a type much more typical of the cultural environment in the palestinian Arab environment. An environment in which there is apparent conflict between religious allowance and societal beliefs. The folk tales reveal the peoples truer and more personal feelings towards technically acceptable behaviors. The sexual/incestual aspect is absent in the Indo-European version where the type of domineering environment is more likely to be found at the hands of a “wicked stepmother” than a sexually interested stepfather treading dangerously close to incest.

Absent from the Indo-European version is the disguise of dressing as another sex. Dressing as a male to avoid the sexual advances of a stepfather. The prince dressing as a woman to gain access to the hidden identity of the maiden who held his interest. This aspect of the tale would not fit in so nicely in an Indo-European community, particularly the cross-dressing aspect, but in the Palestinian Arabic realm it fits quite nicely and the lesson of the tale is enhanced. The incestuous aspect of the Sackcloth version carries an important cultural vibe which would be absent in the Indo-European surrounding of Cinderella. The domineering behavior of the stepMOTHER and stepSISTERS are not necessary in the Palestinian version. Such is not a typical moral situation found, at the time, in Palestine.

We find motif similarities such as L131, Hearth abode of unpromising heroin, N711.6 prince sees maiden at ball and is enamored, R213 escape from home, and others.

The overall lesson of the abstractly abandoned child, missing the mother, finding and putting to use her own innate beauty and coming out on top in the end, is driven home in both tales and is done so in a fashion relative to the cultural environments in which the differing tales were told.

These two tales are a nice example of the type of tales which spawned the modern usage of the terms “folk psychology,” “Cinderella philosophy,” “Cinderella complex” and the value of folklore is amplified… again.

The Call of the Wild Is Jack London?

Posted on by Dr. Bacon, PhD in Freedom & Responsibility, Literary and Musical Review

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Message to my American Authors Professor:

Am I What I Am or What?

Good gravy..  If you get two of these, ignore the first one. Yes, the one you already read.. unless you didn’t already read it, in which case all is well…  well.

Since time can’t exist, neither can it be frittered away.. I suppose… Still, the bus ride home seems an eternity.
Some things need to be said most when one knows not to whom to say them. I am the guy who fights cocks, hunts.. well.. everything, runs hounds, climbs impossible mountains, skis the chutes, builds and rides choppers, drinks lots of Irish whiskey and Scotch, and so on, then gets his leg tore off, his brain scrambled, and says, “fuck you!” to the rescuing EMTs. Not that much of a touchie-feelie kind of guy… and proud of it! However, I find myself sitting in a classroom full of children, thinking about Buck, and straining every fibre of my being to keep from weeping like a damn baby.
Call of the Wild is the finest work of art to ever go on paper. What London had was “soul.” There are magnificent musicians by the bundles, but when you listen to the radio, certain pieces reach out of that little electric box and grab you right by the heart horns. As a listener, and even more so, as a musician, one can literally feel the soul (when it’s there, which it usually isn’t.. even for a magnificent musician like me). It has nothing to do with talent or ability. Demons or angels perhaps, but whatever it is, it is spiritual and magic. When you read “The Call of the Wild” you do recognize artful phrases, heroic romanticism, descriptive distinction beyond compare, the talent is indeed there, but the magic of “The Call of the Wild,” is Jack London grabbing your soul. Gone neigh one-hundred years? Nope. He’s still here. There is life on that paper. “The Call of the Wild” is a book with a pulse.

The Muslim Heritage In America

Posted on by Dr. Bacon, PhD in Freedom & Responsibility

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Quit trashing President Obama’s accomplishments. He has done more than any other President before him. He has an impressive list of accomplishments, see list below:

        First President to apply for college aid as a foreign student, then deny he was a foreigner.

        First President to have a social security number from a state he has never lived in.

        First President to preside over a cut to the credit rating of the United States.

        First President to violate the War Powers Act.

        First President to be held in contempt of court for illegally obstructing oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

        First President to require all Americans to purchase a product from a third party

        First President to spend a trillion dollars on ‘shovel-ready’ jobs when there was no such thing as ‘shovel-ready’ jobs.

        First President to abrogate bankruptcy law to turn over control of companies to his union supporters.

        First President to by-pass Congress and implement the Dream Act through executive fiat.

        First President to order a secret amnesty program that stopped the deportation of illegal immigrants across the U.S., including those with criminal convictions.

        First President to demand a company hand-over $20 billion to one of his political appointees.

        First President to tell a CEO of a major corporation (Chrysler) to resign.

        First President to terminate America ‘s ability to put a man in space.

        First President to cancel the National Day of Prayer and to say that America is no longer a Christian nation.

        First President to have a law signed by an auto-pen without being present.

        First President to arbitrarily declare an existing law unconstitutional and refuse to enforce it.

        First President to threaten insurance companies if they publicly spoke out on the reasons for their rate increases.

        First President to tell a major manufacturing company in which state it is allowed to locate a factory.

        First President to file lawsuits against the states he swore an oath to protect (AZ, WI, OH, IN).

        First President to withdraw an existing coal permit that had been properly issued years ago.

        First President to actively try to bankrupt an American industry (coal).

        First President to fire an inspector general of Ameri-Corps for catching one of his friends in a corruption case.

        First President to appoint 45 czars to replace elected officials in his office.

        First President to surround himself with radical left wing anarchists.

        First President to golf 73 separate times in his first two and a half years in office, 102 to date.

        First President to hide his medical, educational and travel records.

        First President to win a Nobel Peace Prize for doing NOTHING to earn it.

        First President to go on multiple global “apology tours” and concurrent “insult our friends” tours.

        First President to go on 17 lavish vacations, including date nights and Wednesday evening White House parties for his friends paid for by the taxpayer.

        First President to have 22 personal servants (taxpayer funded) for his wife.

        First President to keep a dog trainer on retainer for $102,000 a year at taxpayer expense.

        First President to repeat the Holy Quran & tell us the early morning call of the Azan (Islamic call to worship) is the most beautiful sound on earth.

        First President to tell the military men and women that they should pay for their own private insurance because they “volunteered to go to war and knew the consequences.”

        Then he was the First President to tell the members of the military that THEY were UNPATRIOTIC for balking at the last suggestion.

        First President to side with a foreign nation over one of the American 50 states (Mexico vs. Arizona).

        How is this hope and change working out for you?

 

~I don’t know who put this together but I felt compelled to pass it on..  Bacon

Atavism

Posted on by Dr. Bacon, PhD in Freedom & Responsibility, Poet, Ya, I Am

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Old longings nomadic leap,

Chafing at custom’s chain;

Again from its brumal sleep

Wakens the ferine strain.

Helots of houses no more,

Let us be out, be free;

Fragrance through window and door

Wafts from the woods, the sea.

After the torpor of will,

Morbid with inner strife.

Welcome the animal thrill,

Lending a rest to life

Banish the volumes revered,

Sever from centuries dead;

Ceilings the lamp flicker cheered

Barter for stars instead.

Temple thy dreams with the trees,

Nature thy god alone;

Worship the sun and the breeze,

Altars where none atone.

Voices of solitude call,

Whisper of sedge and stream;

Loosen the fetters that gall,

Back to the primal scheme.

Feel the great throbbing terrene

Pulse in they body beat.

Conscious again of the green

Verdure beneath the feet.

Callous to pain as the rose,

Breathe with instinct’s delight;

Live the existence that goes

Soulless into the night.

~John Myers O’Hara

I recently got …

Posted on by Dr. Bacon, PhD in Freedom & Responsibility

ImageI recently got a message on Facebook which linked to the Forbes site (yep the rich we’re supposed to be hating so much), the headline being, “Who Is the Smallest Government Spender Since Eisenhower? Would You Believe It’s Barack Obama?” The article was spawned (surprise surprise) by Marketwatch, a “Wall Street Journal” entity (another surprise surprise). Wall Street loves the oBuma! Who can believe that the Administration who increased the national debt by a larger amount than all the administrations from Washington through Reagan isn’t the “smallest government spender since Eisenhower”? And to whom would the comparison between the oBuma and Eisenhower not spring to mind?

To people with the ability to think and reason these statements are worse than absurd, but to the members of the Church of the Black Jesus, the trillion dollar a year increase from Bush to the oBuma is explained by inflation. One helllll of an inflation but there ya go!

Admittedly the Bush administration was absurd in many ways, including spending, but the oBuma administration has done NOTHING to cut the Bush spending which makes that spending now theirs as well as the increase of that spending. Over 200 billion increase (annual). So according to the Wall Street boys, INCREASING the absurdly high Bush spending by 200 billion per annum ties the oBuma administration as the cheapest administration yet. Of course much of that spending has gone to Wall Street, Occupy indeed!

There is no mystery in seeing the Demonrats working their asses off to pull the rug out from under the greatest economical giant in history. The mystery for me is the media. The main-stream American media is indeed a propagandia. There is no longer even an attempt to appear honest. Why? What is the benefit in helping to flush America down the toilet?

The media is a huge comedy show! It literally brings me to fits of laughter almost every day! The only comedy more tragic is the American people.

As Mercilessly As a Man

Posted on by Dr. Bacon, PhD in Literary and Musical Review

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Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” paints a very ingenious picture of the independence of human nature which resides in us all. The impact of her image is amplified by its setting; a black, single mother and her two daughters. Characters of three very independent personalities in spite of the apparent similarities in terms of culture and background. It is not an extraordinary tale. In fact it is somewhat common. The grace and wonder in “Everyday Use” is not the ordinary story of conflicting values and differing senses of identity. This is the very sort of story one sees over and over again. The magic in “Everyday Use” is Alice Walker’s artful telling of the tale. Walker injects a solid dose of realism which is effective even in a casual perusal, but shines quite brightly upon further study.

Her canvas is painted with brilliant colors from a broad brush. It can actually be difficult for one to become fully engaged in a creation such as this; seeing the big picture, focusing the lens, adjusting the tone. These can be such a bother, and the diamonds won’t retract their claws. Mama describes herself along with a daydream image, “I can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man.” along with a daydream self-image, “I am the way my daughter would want me to be: a hundred pounds lighter, my skin like an uncooked barley pancake…  Johnny Carson has much to do to keep up with my quick and witty tongue.” (Walker 424/5) Indeed, Mama, the reader has much to do in seeing your story through the blazing image of your you. Her words portray her rural, self-supporting life graphically and with a comedic irony which makes them a rare pleasure to read.

Mama’s description also primes the reader’s imagination of Dee, who she describes as a “cute shaped” young lady who wears “a dress so loud it hurts my eyes… I feel my whole face warming form the heat waves it throws out.” (425/20) A daughter who possesses, “scalding humor that erupted like bubbles in lye.” (425/15) Thanks to a boy-friend of Dee’s, Mama tells us, “she didn’t have much time to pay to us, but turned all her faultfinding power on him.” (425/16) Need the reader wonder about the innate character of Dee?

What of Dee’s younger sister Maggie, the damaged and much more reserved daughter who lives at home with Mama? “Have you ever seen a lame animal, perhaps a dog run over by some careless person rich enough to own a car, sidle up to someone who is ignorant enough to be kind to him? That is the way my Maggie walks” (424/9)

Rich and robust! The contrast between the two sisters is painted with vivid luminosity, as is Mama’s perception of it. The magnificent independence of Mama, the good looks, intelligent, radiant, yet greedy and arrogant nature of Dee, the injured, unlucky, possibly even abused young Maggie, all sing from the pages in dulcet tones.

There is also stunning symbolism woven into the tale. The quilt, a symbol of family heritage which also reflects the sewn together aspects of this particular family, the differing desires in terms of what is to become of it, and the disparate values in which it is held. Reviewer Judith Hatchett noted this and commented, “the two views of quilts represents mutually exclusive lifestyles” (Hatchett 550) The quilt, the symbolic center of the tale, was woven from patches of clothing worn by ancestors of both girls, treasured by Maggie for sentimental and useful reasons, seen as a cultural treasure to own by Dee.

The image presented here is palpable. “Everyday Use” is a good story made great by the artistic wordbrush of Alice Walker, “as mercilessly as a man.”

~Bacon

Works Cited

Hatchett, Judith et al. American Icons: An Encyclopedia of the People, Places, and Things that Have    Shaped Our Culture. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006. Print

Walker, Alice et al. Compact Literature, Reading, Reacting, Writing. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2010. Print

Hillary? Gun Control? People Control? Indeed!

Posted on by Dr. Bacon, PhD in Freedom & Responsibility

I feel driven to restate a prediction I made over a year ago. Funny it is, how my predictions keep coming true. The birth certificate, Romney, Jim’s suicide, and so on. I’m seeing this next coming to fruition precisely as I predicted it would and I need to renew my prediction in order to increase the value of the coming “I told you so”s.

Shortly before the election Barragh Hussein Obuma will pull out. He’s in the conscious process of driving his own popularity down at this very moment. Making absurd moves which are offending even his most ardent supporters. The propagandia is even stepping in and slinging a few arrows. Hillary has made some interesting moves herself, and the Media?

Weekly World News Hillary to Challenge Obama for President

The Daily Beast  Hillary Told You So

Hillary Unleashed

Huffinton Puffington Post Nancy Pelosi: Hillary Clinton Should Run for President 2016

Petition to Congress Draft Hillary Clinton for President 2012

And there are many more! Precisely as I predicted!

She’ll not make the actual announcement right away. It’ll be closer to election time. She’ll have the entire commielib, lefist, traditional Democrat (including those pissed at Obuma beyond voting). She will be in like Flynn and Bill will be the first..  whatever he is.. You can bet yer ass he’ll be supporting Hillary. Good gravy! It’ll be historical! And there’ll not be the slightest glitch in the overall plan. The bigotry of the left against the successful will roll on ahead full steam. The excuse will be “It’s that Dang Obuma’s fault”. Look at the debt! We HAVE to do something radical! And Bacon’ll say, “see, I told you so!”

And one more..  The first attempted move will be income ceilings. Everything above the ceiling must go to the government. This one may not pass right off the bat, but it’ll be thrown in the oven right away.  Those damn eeeeeevil rich sons of bitches MUST PAY! (their fair share (thanks Alinsky.)) We’ll be feelin’ good as we watch freedom/responsibility swirling down the drain.

I’m feeling prophetic, maybe I should start a religion! The Church of Total Equality of Latter Day Retards… ‘er somethin’

~Bacon

July 4, 2012 Update

OK.. modification time. Embarrassing it is but I missed some important points. I misread Obuma for one. He will not pull out. He’s not simply a servant to his masters as I presumed. He is actually completely insane. He believes in Marxism right to his core. He believes he is doing the “right thing” as did Karl Marx who was a genius, and who’s “Manifesto” seems to be more closely followed by American leadership than is our own Constitution. Read the “Communist Manifesto,” particularly the demands in Section II which could easier be seen as the “constitution” America is currently following. In any case, Obuma must go down and I don’t think Biden is seen as a magnificent option by the Demonrat party. Hillary is the next in line. Were something to happen to Obuma and Biden (Satan forbid!) Hillary is the next in line…  My goodness, how simple.

In any case, my prediction of Hillary Clinton as next POTUS still stands, the point of interest is going to be how she gets there.  The crumbling of Obuma is happening, what I missed was the actual intentions of Obuma. Praise Allah!  Ok then…