Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    <scribbled by silly Sat 7 Jul 12 16:29>
  

    
If you type:  bio dvdgwalley
you get David's email address.
  

    
In #250, the words (Euphrates watershed) should have been inserted after
"Turkey"
  

    
But I make one helluva margarita and my soul is pure. Jeez.
  

    
my e-mail address is:
dgwalley@bcn.net

as for the flamewar verterans, I wear asbestos underwear or is it
sharewear, have to ask my wife.

thanks so much for filling tht hole in my educaiton vis-a-vis the
Kurdish nation. I think you<peter, would make one hell of a
commentator. I mean why the hell do we have to put up with Jeff
Greenfield and crew from CNN when there's more than aeuquate brains
right here on the Well? 
  

    

where?
  

    
For whatever it matters, the recent events in Colorado make it doubly
important that Teenage Nervous Breakdowngets a wider audience. And for
those who want to buy the book, there's an essay called "Play School"
which sums up the whole high school experience.

curiouser and curiouser---
  

    
Geez.  I'm sure you're not the only person who's doing it, but using that
tragedy to springboard publicity for your book seems pretty tasteless.
  

    

This is a surprise to you? Come on. He's got to try to get some extra sales
somehow. He certainly won't by impressing us with the conciseness, brevity
and clarity of his writing.
  

    

And while we're at it, let's pause, reflect... and think about replacing
that unsightly old black trenchcoat with a brand-new London Fog!

Geez...
  

    
very impressive.
  

    
Okay, let's call off the dawgs. I never outed myself before, I think,
but I'm a former psychotherapist who had lots of adolescents among my
clients.

ANY effort, thought, movement, donation, or whatever is a step in the
right direction. Let's not slam our own for a try.

This society needs to realize that the combo of orgasmic adoration of
violence plus ease (if not heavy-breathing encouragement) of gun
ownership spells INJURY AND DEATH. We can all play innocent, but the
facts are what they are. Charlton Heston can come do adolescent therapy
for a few days and then claim he knows what the hell he's talking
about. THAT IS ALL.
  

    
Heston working with teens.  He'd have to be stuck with his committment, not
just there for a photo op.

Pity that could never be.
  

    
As I said, <riffraff>, TNB is trying to make a point. I'm certainly
not using the recent Colorado shoot-out to flog my book, I was merely
pointing out that there is a certain resonance to all of this which TNB
had laid out. I think Gail understands exactly what I was talking
about and I'm sure that <satirefreak> wold gfeel the same way when the
book is perused.

One of the things which strikes me aobut the coerage of this event is
the very geneeric nature of the new stories, rearrange the names, move
the locale, and here's a generic new s story about teenagers, guns and
violence, and how no one knows nuthin' about what goes on in side
theminds of teenagers. I think the reason why there's such a too-do
about all of this is that the reporters always foreget how sshitty the
high school expereince was, so much so that they re-create it when they
get out, and that status games, identiy politics all play a part.

I mean, haven't we all thought what it would have been like to sleep
through adolescen ce and wake up onthe other end. Being a teenager
sucks, being in high school sucks even more, but more to the point of
TNB, being in high school eternally is the American curse. That's what
I am trying to probe in TNB.
  

    
Well, your concern is obvious, but your timing was a bit crass.

I've been privately muttering "why can't kids just write morbid poetry and
take drugs like me and my pals did?"  but it's not amusing or appropriate 
yet.  There's an innate timing around tragedy.  Which I've now fallen
over.   Eeeeew.  
  

    

This is well said:

  "being in high school eternally is the American curse"
  

    
For christ's sake! something like 10,000 times as many people have been
killed in Kossovo over the last three weeks, largely becasue the American
government is terrified of even one of its volunteer soldiers being
killed. As tragedies go, the high school thing just doesn't regiter. It is
just another example of of the extremely weird attitude of respectable
American opinion towards violence and guns.

Yes, it was horrible. But it seems to me perfectly obvious that this is
going to happen every two years or so for as long as America lasts. If you
have liberal gun laws and the glamourisation of violence as the answer in
every form of popular entertainment, teenagers are going to do this and
go on doing it. You should just write it off as something like car
crashes.
  

    

 As I said, <riffraff>, TNB is trying to make a point. I'm certainly
 not using the recent Colorado shoot-out to flog my book,

Just a damn good impression of someone trying to then?

Sorry. Don't buy it for a sec.
  

    
<andrewb>, it's equally true that no one would have been shocked had it been
an inner-city school populated by poor, non-white kids.

I am apparently one of the only two people I know who doesn't understand
what we're doing in Kosovo except making things much worse than they were.

wg
  

    
#264: "The recent events in Colorado make it doubly important that TNB gets
a wider audience.  And for those who want to buy the book..."

If you're not trying to flog it, you might think about how you phrase some
things, then.
  

    
One of the reasons I quit being an adolescent therapist is that I
started to feel like most of my clients were so far gone they couldn't
have spotted the point of no return with binoculars. That, and the fact
that - as cool as I like to think I am - they got one look at my
30something self in professional clothing and phoned it in from the get
go. All these politicians railing about throwing boatloads of
therapists into the high schools oughta try being one sometime. Maybe
the elementary school would be a better idea, as well as empowering
Child Protection agencies to actually DO anything, ever, in cases of
clearcut abuse. There's TREMENDOUS resistance to that, where I live.

I'm with you, Gail - why couldn't these kids have written bad poetry,
drunk Milwaukee's Best in the woods, and trashtalked the "popular" kids
with their group of fellow alleged outcasts, like the rest of us did?
And, you know, MY definition of "outcast" does not include being part
of any "mafia" at all. They had their group, they just also had their
scary sense of entitlement.
  

    
Andrew, your point about Americans and guns is well taken. It is
appalling and obscene that our culture lionizes guns, and the right of
every unbalanced member of society to have a home arsenal. I'm still
waiting to hear how this creepy duo (or more) GOT the semi-automatic
weapons they had. 

That said, I must point out that their explosives were projects they
created themselves, allegedly from eerily accurate Internet sites. And
when people start talking about Internet censorship, I get nervous.
This is a problem.

Finally, I would say that most of my friends and family agree with my
gun stance, and vehemently oppose them. However, I have two friends
with concealed weapon permits who are otherwise politically "good" and
very intelligent (one a Yale-educated lawyer, one a Berkeley PhD). They
both have been victims of violent crimes, and swear they'll be able to
fight back next time. 

Violence perpetuates violence, and most people like me would fight
harder for tougher gun laws if we thought they'd have an ice cube's
chance in Hell of passing. They don't.
  

    
sorry to be so "crass" but originally, maybe a month ago we were
talking about what TNB was about. But no matter, this is far, far more
interesting. One could be craser still and say that everyone knows that
high school sucks, and that if one could be freeze-dried or fresh
frozen at 14 and wake up at 19, things would be different. Sure I wish
that kids could go that old route of drinking black coffee, smoking
luckies, reading beat poetry and disparaging the preps, jocks and
cheerleaders ("I'm losing status in the high school, I used to thik it
was my school," quoth forever Frank Zappa).

The news converage is generic. If I had a journalism course, I'd give
them an incident like this and they'd could write the stories without
even going there. The young men responsible are "good kids" or "lost
kids"---it's all like that song in West Side Story named "Officer
Krupkie"---"The trouble is crazy, the trouble is he drinks, the trouble
is he's crazy, the trouble is he stinks, the trouble is he's growing,
the trouble is he's grown, Krupkie we've got troubles of our own." The
news media is only writing about the mirror they've made and reported.
We are all excised because as much as we'd probably like to do this in
fantasy, we know the different between fantasy and reality. It's more
apparant that some kids are encouraged today NOT to know the
difference, or better, not to care about the difference. It's certainly
obvious to me that these kids are post-literate, because if they read,
they'd have found literature which would speak to them like
Steppenwolf or, god help us, Catcher in the Rye.

But's it's a post-literate and that's what we're stuck with: post-
literate crime, teenagers in game/chat rooms, almost sounds like a
story in the national Enquirer, doesn't it?
  

    
Yeah, but I want to jump back and add my vote to wendyg about Kosovo.
I feel the same way, especially on the Media discussion (#1679: check
it out) which reads like war gaming but is full of illuminating urls. 
Still it's the most interesting discussion going on--at least for me
stuck out here in the Maine woods. 
Whoever said earlier that the Colorado shootout--hideous as it is--is
filling the screens that would in some other world be filled with the
grand mal shootout under US/NATO auspices.
  

    
to finish the thought...whoever said that (andrew b??) I agree there
too.