Thanks, everyone!

Feeling grateful today for everyone who has liked, commented on or decided to follow my blog. It actual fills me with wonder to think that there are people around the globe who read what I’ve written.

Since I’m pretty busy most of the time and more people seem to be reading my blog, I want to apologize in advance if I don’t get to your blog and acknowledge it after you’ve read min. So far I’ve been able to check out the blogs of every person who has shown an interest in mine, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to get to every one in the future. If that happens, it certainly won’t be for lack of interest. I’ve found some really wonderful things and have often wished I had all day just to sit and read them.

But as you know, if you’ve been reading me regularly, I’m finishing up my autobiography, as well as making a major life transition with my work in general. This takes up a lot of my time. So another request I’d like to make is not to be chosen for any awards. I did get picked for one, and was duly flattered, but after a good fifteen minutes of trying to figure out how to reply to it and everything else I was supposed to do after winning it, I finally gave up!

Anyway, to show my appreciation for all of you, here’s a little music from my band, Brass Tacks:

http://soundcloud.com/jazzrascal/01-passarinho-do-mato 

http://soundcloud.com/jazzrascal/02-fadood

The Flame

Everyone has a flame inside them,

Well, sometimes it’s barely a flicker

Or maybe it’s just a teeny spark,

But it’s there, just waiting for a breeze

To fan it into action.

 

Once it’s in action, don’t let it go out,

It’s yours to tend and care for…

Don’t let the rain pour down on it…

Keep it dry and hot and springing up

Higher and higher.

 

Then one day it’ll burn so high and strong

That nothing can put it out, ever.

Not the rain, not a league of firemen,

Not even your own occasional lapses…

It has a life of its own.

Spring! Flowers!

Even though it’s fall here in Brazil, I’m in a springy mood today. A friend of mine bought some peonies and that got me daydreaming about the flowers we used to have in our yard when I was a kid.

There was a long, narrow flower bed in the middle of the yard, dug into the side of a large rock (this was in Connecticut, where there are lots of large rocks). This bed already had flowers in it when we moved there in 1947. On one side there were lovely pink peonies. I loved how their tight little buds, which always had red ants crawling over them, would suddenly burst into gigantic, perfumey blooms. And next to them was a bunch of lily-of-the-valley, one of my very favorite flowers because of their delicacy and strong scent.

Next to our front door were two bushes, one with purple lilacs and the other with fuchsia azaleas. Lilac is my next favorite flower scent, and I used to love to cut bouquets of them and bring them inside just so I could stick my face into them every minute!

My sister Bertie and I used to plant annuals in a little plot next to the front door. We always planted marigolds and zinnias, for some unknown reason, maybe because they were so hardy and colorful.

I haven’t lived anywhere for a long time where I could plant flowers and I have to say I really miss it. But I’m enjoying my nostalgic flower moment right here.

Book coming soon, and poetical distractions…

I’ve just sent my book off to a trusted, intelligent friend (who is also a writer) for a final read-through. I’m certain she’ll have some good suggestions for me to get the thing finally wrapped up.

As soon as I sent it to her I missed it, which is pretty funny because it’s still right here on my computer. But I don’t want to mess with it at all until she’s done with her review.

But I really wanted to work on something else. I HAD to work on something else…besides my blog. So I dug into some files of poetry that I’ve written, and decided to put them into book form and maybe write some new ones.

Then I got the really insane idea of illustrating them. I mean, this is truly insane, because I don’t know how to draw in the sense of actually drawing…you know, with perspective and everything.

I guess the reason I thought of this is because of possible copyright issues with using pictures from the internet and also because I can’t afford to pay an illustrator. Oh well.

I used to fiddle around making little drawings of household things and heads…yes, little heads of all sorts of people that I made up in my mind. I can’t find any of them, but I think I could probably reproduce something like that. Maybe it doesn’t matter that I don’t know how to draw. We’ll see.

Well, I’ve gotten a bit off track here, but what I wanted to say is that I don’t think it’ll be all that much longer until the book is published, unless of course my friend says, “Hmmm, I think it might be good if you rewrote the whole thing.” Ha!

Like, Coment, Follow

Reblogged from Boomie Bol:

Lately, I have come across a bunch of posts and comments about liking and commenting on posts, I read a nice one yesterday by Randall Dean Scott, http://www.randalldeanscott.wordpress.com check it out if you can. I also read a comment last week about liking a post and not getting a like back. And these thoughts came to my mind and I decided to share.

Read more… 609 more words

I'm posting this here because I thought it was really well said and I couldn't have said it any better or even as well! :D

Stroking the underdog

When I was a little kid in school back in the middle 40s, I can remember being rewarded for doing good work. I loved it when the teacher stuck a gold star on my paper or workbook, and it made me want to do even better.

I also remember that we had reading groups, and they were divided according to ability. If you were in a lower group and your reading improved, you’d get moved to a higher one.

But over the years I started to notice a change in this merit-for-excellence system. Teachers started giving poor performers more attention, and even rewards, so they wouldn’t feel bad about themselves. I thought, why should an under-achiever get a reward? It didn’t make sense to me. Encouraging and helping someone do better is one thing, but I came to believe over the years that stroking the underdog doesn’t help anyone.

I remember a situation many years later when I started to attend the workshops of a well-known jazz pianist in New York. He would sit at a grand piano in a big loft and young musicians — mostly pianists — would crowd around him at tables, waiting eagerly for their chance to perform. After each one finished, he would critique them in front of the audience.

After I’d gone a few times I started to notice a pattern. He would be kind and complimentary to the mediocre ones and critical, sometimes verging on harsh and cruel, to the really talented, accomplished ones. I questioned some of the musicians about it, and they said he did this to encourage the not-so-good ones and to make sure the really good ones wouldn’t get a swelled head and would work harder.

I just don’t get that. Not that I think he should have trashed the struggling ones, but there was certainly no reason to be so hard on the ones who obviously had talent and had worked hard to develop it. I stopped going to the workshop. It all just felt too personal. Some people became his “pets” (usually the not-so-good ones) and that really bothered me.

So today when I see, for example, a group of children competing in some kind of game, and when it’s done the teacher or adult in charge gives all the kids a prize so no one’s feelings will be hurt, I really think that’s a mistake. It gives kids the idea that they don’t have to work hard to get a reward, and breeds complacency and mediocrity.

Kids who are having a hard time need a helping hand to get better, maybe to change their habits so they can develop their abilities and talents. I say this because I don’t really believe there’s any such thing as a “dumb” kid, or one that has no special abilities and talents. But the way to discover these abilities is to help the kid learn how to bring them out, not by stroking him or her when they’re not even trying. By doing this, underdogs will always be underdogs, because they’ve learned that it’s rewarding.

What do you think?

The end of my TV days

We were one of the first families among our friends to get a TV back in 1950. It was a dinky little thing with a tiny screen and rabbit ears and knobs you had to get up off the sofa to turn. Programming was all in black and white, of course, and there weren’t enough shows to fill up 24 hours a day, so everything would just stop and we’d get to watch what they called a “test pattern” — after the national anthem, of course.

My sister Bertie and I grew up with shows like “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” a puppet show that was really ahead of its time because it was entirely improvised; the “Steve Allen Show” (noted for its great jazz guests); “Lights Out,” a really scary, creepy mystery program; and “Your Hit Parade” with live singers performing the popular songs of the day in really corny, weird settings, among other shows, which were live in those days. My mother absolutely loved the new TV and there were never any restrictions about how much we could watch it. We didn’t watch much during the day, but we were glued to it every night of the week.

I don’t have a TV any more. I haven’t had one for three years. After television being such a major part of my life, it was strangely easy just to let it go. And it came about it a very natural way. I had left Rio de Janeiro to go back to the USA in 2007, thinking I was going to stay. But that idea didn’t work out, so I came back exactly one year later. During all this upheaval of intercontinental moving, I had to give up virtually everything I owned except for what I could stuff into a big suitcase. So naturally a TV wasn’t part of that plan.

When I got back here I lived for six months in a couple of temporary apartments that had small TVs, but I found that I rarely watched anything. I also checked out what the local cable plans had to offer, and it was only marginally less awful that what I’d seen in the USA and expensive, so I decided to pass on getting a TV when I finally moved into a more permanent, unfurnished place. Meanwhile, I had already discovered the wonders of YouTube and downloading films from iTunes, so I certainly wasn’t without home entertainment. Then I found a site that streamed national soccer games, so I figured I was set. I could even catch up with some of my former guilty TV pleasures on YouTube, like “America’s Next Top Model” and “American Idol,” not to mention great BBC dramas and obscure films that I couldn’t find anywhere else.

So who needs TV? Do you?