John (Thurb) McVey

To be so gifted as to have written such poems as "The Last Duchess" and the one about the Spanish cloister, and other great poems, and to have inspired love akin to worship from his fellow poet and wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning, I think he was far luckier than so many creative people with failed relationships.

All I can say, further, is that Browning's poetry fills me with awe, but has never put tears in my eyes. His wife's love poems, poems dedicated to the man she was devoted to, often do that very thing. Can you name a poet who was more talented and also luckier than he in love?

Or-- if I have failed to learn the whole story, and he was NOT lucky in love-- I will welcome your answer in the interests of truth while being very disappointed to have a cherished illusion shattered.

(There are, of course, many mediocre, amateur poets like me who have been just as lucky in love as Robert Browning or anybody, because I was married for 25 years to a woman who, in her over-all attributes, surely put any other woman who ever lived in the shade! But ant-sized talents like mine, and unknown and, happily, less-celebrated lives like ours, don't count in this question. I cherish the blessing of appreciation of great love poetry, and the blessing that THAT blessing stems not merely longing for, but also from experiencing, so many years of true love from a wonderful woman. I loved her until h er death and afterward, and, when I want to pretend to hear her speaking from her beautiful soul to my soul which has always treasured beauty and love as much as life itself: in those lonely times, I read Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and count myself as satisfied.)

That is: in Christian belief, does Heaven, the place where streets are paved with gold, have a physical location? When I was child, I looked up in the sky and thought I was looking at the bottom part of Heaven, which existed above earth like the roof of a house. Later I thought of Heaven as being a bigger globe, kind of like a big hollow planet with the earth in the center, and, if we could map its features, it could be cast in the form of a big globe, like the world globe on my teacher's desk. And God and His angels and the saved, of course, wandered around that vast world the way people wander all over this terrestrial world.

Then it came as a kind of shock to me to hear a rumor, at a very young age, that if you look through a telescope you will see that the stars, far from being on a flat surface, extend out at great distances, and then I learned further that there are billions of galaxies at unimaginable distances, and the earth is just a little place and not necessarily in the center of things at all!.

And a few years ago I read a theory that the universe is a seemingly endless froth of galaxies and stars on the surfaces of large bubbles with, presumably, nothing but blackness and emptiness between!

How complex all that is compared to what Mama told me when I was four years old and asked her about things like that. My mother used smile at me and point up to the sky and say, "Heaven's up there. That's where God lives. That's where we came from, and that's where we hope to go when we die." And when I asked her if the ants I stepped on, or the old one-eyed Collie dog that a neighbor shot to death for chasing his cattle, went to Heaven, she smiled and said, "I don't know. Maybe." When I asked her if the ants I killed would go to Hell for stinging me, she laughed and said, "No."

My mother didn't know much science, and never claimed to be a theologian either, but she was just as honest in that "I don't know" as any posturing agnostic I ever have met-- including myself at an earlier age.

It was comforting to believe my mother's words, and to be uncertain only of things that my mother and father were uncertain of, before all those stars and galaxies, all those scientific concepts, got in the way. But remaining a child is not an option (though I see evidence every day of adults who have done that very thing).

The time comes when it is we who must decide what we think and believe, and we live in a world where we don't think the way people used to think. But I think that when we dream of or write stories about getting in rockets and going away to wondrous planets with wise, superior beings in outer space, in our hearts we are searching for a Paradise lost as we emerged (or descended) from the simple faith of childhood. And when we read stories of wise, kind, beneficent aliens coming to earth in flying saucers to teach us how to live and get along, it is because we are longing for angels to come and save us, and it is because we just don't have sense enough to listen to a fairly recent message from Heaven: "Love one another." Until we learn how to apply that very simple, basic rule, how can we learn anything else about how to get to Heaven, and how to live on earth, whose philosophy or religion is right? We fight over politics and religion like great "ant armies", but if God was going to step in and squash us and send us all to Hell, he has already had ample provocation.

Still, our very behavior shows that we are still quite far from Heaven, wherever it is. "Love one another": If we can do that, can learn to do it, perhaps, as a messenger from Heaven once told us, we may find that Heaven is within each of us, and each of us as we walk abroad on the earth, will be too busy spreading the bliss and delight of the Heaven within to ponder where, within the physical Heavens of the skies the true Heaven of the spirit lies. For, if the spirit within is immortal, surely it is the direction and attitude we assume on earth that will determine our ultimate destination.

But what do you think?

Tennessee Williams, born Thomas Lanier Williams on March 26, 1911, has been categorized as a "southern gothic" playwright, but "A Streetcar Named Desire", in particular, strikes me as being a lament of the decline of a romantic/aristocratic Southern tradition, and its replacement by a less gracious and often meaner modern culture as personified in Stanley Kowalski, a role that Marlon Brando seems to have permanently put his own stamp on whatever actor may perform it and made me see Brando as "Stanley Kowalski" every time I saw his picture. Surely his historical and social perspective-- a perspective stemming from his life in the "New South" (the South that emerged after the Civil War), a modern South that slowly strangled the Old South's lingering folkways, mores and ideals to death after the quick execution of the Plantation economy in the Civil War-- transcends any mere literary categorization such as "romantic", "Gothic", etc. As even the so-called "New South", the segregated, industrializing South in which Williams grew up, has become a discredited and embarrassing concept to people growing up after the Civil Rights era. Sadly, Williams is so old-hat now that his appeal seems to be nostalgic, a condition that he surely would have deplored. I remember him saying on TV before his death that he expected to write more plays that would lead to a resurgence of interest in his work, but I think his day has passed permanently. What do you think?

Many well-informed people say that Americans are unlikely to drastically cut their energy use, therefore dependency on oil imports from the Mideast and perhaps other sources is, from a practical standpoint, unlikely ever to stop. But-- practical obstacles aside-- COULD we survive by cutting our energy use back, and opening up more reserves, developing alternate energy technologies? An old question, but I think we and our leaders need to grapple with it more, and try to cut our oil imports from the Mideast and other distant nations drastically. Canada, the U.S., Mexico, and Native American tribes might discover great mutual benefits through hanging together on this.

I have had both problems. There is an old proverb: A dog that chases a car, or a man that chases a woman, that is faster and more dangerous than he is, is road-kill waiting to be mashed flat. You can advise them to stop, but they won't listen, and you can pray for them, but even God can't always change a damfool's ways.

Excuse me: that wasn't much of a proverb after all. Here is one now: My dog just now chased it up out of the road and into the yard: "A dog that makes a pig of itself, and a pig that thinks it's a dog, have both truly earned the title 'dumb animal'."

Them old proverbs (to lapse into my granddaddy's vernacular) is only about one minute old, but I have a feeling that they will age quite a bit more before you respond to this ridiculous nonsense.

Some may think that instead of debating and defining these words, we should assume that we already know, and spend our time working and fighting for the ideals that the words represent.

But it seems strange to me that armies die and civilian populations so often sacrifice for theese ideals, yet most people can't even give plain, simple definitions.

I open the discussion by roughly defining "liberty", as "freedom to do some good without doing disproportional harm in the process," defining "freedom" as simply "lack of restraint". Let somebody else tackle the job of defining "good" before or after supplying your own definitions of "liberty" and "freedom", which, of course, is the whole point of this proposed exercise.)

I think that in thinking on these things people would develop enhanced appreciation of Lincoln's comment, "The world has never arrived at a satisfactory definition of liberty."

I know that the Earth and the Moon would be swallowed up in the Red Giant, as would, of course, Marcury and Venus, but could Hubble or a Channel 9 news helicopter orbiting Pluto photograph it safely? Or other news cameras even closer in?

I was once a news photogapher. Scooping the competition while seeing them swallowed up in the red doom of a world-ending event would be the ultimate cool.

(Let's hope that everybody but folks in the rival news organizations is rescued and living in igloos or something in the Oort region where there are thousands of comet-like snowballs, or aboard multi-generational starships headed for another galaxy!)

Don't worry: the sun won't blow up for another ten billion years unless astronomical calculators and estimators are terribly wrong. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Did Van Gogh take his own life because of unbearable intensity of feeling, or out of the loneliness stemming from a possible feeling that it was hopeless to try to convey his feelings to others, by art, by words, or any other means? Of course, no one knows, I just want to know what you think about that, and about what has led to other artistic suicides (possibly excluding some drug overdose deaths, which could be accidental). Psychologists say that true despair seems to be at the root of most suicides, artistic or not. Discussion, please.

Just happened on some performances by this great Swedish operatic tenor while visiting "you tube", and was impressed by his voice. Somebody give me a phonetic rendering of his name so I can say with authority (even though I don't know what I'm talking about) "Jussi Bjorling was the greatest operatic tenor since Caruso." Love to make ringing, authoratative statements even if I really don't know what I'm talking about, though I am sure in my own mind that I like him better than Pavarotti (and Pavarotti, of course, is fantastic!). Only heard Caruso on a scratched Victrola record one time, (got the record, the Victrola and a first-release Victrola Bing Crosby hit for $15!) I have only heard these few songs by Jussi B., but (not being any connoisseur of opera), I liked hearing him more than I like hearing Pavarotti. What a powerful, clear voice, even in the re-mastered version and in the old movie clips! What personality distilled into a voice! Are my untrained instincts reliable?

The story was in a recent "New Yorker" somebody left at the gym. In it two empty people with old money lived in a rich empty space fenced in by a very intricate filagree of literary irony.

They disliked themselves, life, one another and their lazy kids (who wouldn't?), so this pair of sad sacks suffered deliciously from their ink-and-paper alienation and lived crappily ever after. Great!

Well, Daddy extracted crops out of a REAL wasteland during the droughts and greenbug infestations, but if the cotton and wheat didn't pay we extracted vegetables from our garden, drew love and laughter from life as it is. And when I was an underpaid telemarketer and convenience store worker, we of the underclass as the literati still call us.pulled pranks, laughed to gain energy!

Having no talent for world-weariness, I write, but not for sophisticates. Being alive, I write about life. Being spiritual blanks, they specialize in literary portrayals of their own emptiness. Comments?

Some scholars think language, gateway to complex communications and abstract thought, resulted from simple words and sentences being passed down culturally much as different bands of chimpanzees culturally transmit grooming behaviors. Others think evolution of the brain came directly from environmental pressures. A few crackpots (or are they?) , even scholars of the calibre of Julian Jaynes, think intelligence developed in a bicameral brain prior to true consciousness, and the right brain-- repository of collective "wisdom"-- directed behavior through hallucinatory "revelations", accounting for Homeric Greeks having "visits" by Athena and other gods. Jaynes believed massive disasters led to a diverse refugee population for which the tribal gods' traditional wisdom stored in the right parietal lobe had few answers, so consciousness unfolded in response to new dangers. Comments from fans of Jaynes, Gregg D. Jacobs, others? Any thought-out scholarly or amateur comments welcome.

A clip of "The Diamonds" singing it, sounding just like they did in their 1957 recording and the 1958 movie, was on TV, and there are youtube clips of them as young men and old men singing it, in the latter Maurice Williams taking over the bass in an encore, but Williams and "The Gladiolas" put it on the charts before "The Diamonds" made it the first rock and roll song to be released on a 45 rpm, No. 2 on the charts only because of Elvis's popularity in 1957! The unpublicized down-side of the era was white singers stealing black singers' thunder.

The aesthetes of the 1890s didn't think so, but, comparing the "Ballad of Reading Gaol" with the "better works" of Oscar Wilde, I find it more moving and powerful than his brittle comedies, because he speaks as an ex-inmate not as an artsy aesthete.

In speaking so truly, with manifest hopes that readers will understand an inmate's despair a little better, I think Wilde contradicts his earlier "art for art's sake" theory. I guess he'd rake me over the coals for saying that if he were alive!

Another ex-inmate of any jail might say: "Dude, the time you spent reading 'The Ballad Of Reading Gaol' ain't real jail time, and if you think it is, try doing a couple of years yourself. You'll sniff out the difference as soon as you smell the latrines."

Whatever Wilde said, he'd say it more cleverly, of course.

But I still say that if art did not convey something real about human experience it would not even work as art-- as useless as art in itself might be.

Love, humor, and sympathy for ordinary decent people and the downtrodden were conspicuous in Mark Twain's probing and insightful, if entertaining books, "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckeberry Finn", but he reveals cynicism in "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg", contempt for sentimental religiosity in "Letters From The Earth", and perhaps even a cynical commercialism (or else pressing financial need) in some terribly-written lesser works. I see a bitter, disappointed old man who once hoped for more from "the damned human race" . Am I right?

Many poets are fuzzy thinkers, but John Donne, John Milton, William Shakespeare, an numerous others of the better writers, clearly knew what they wanted to say and said it clearly, even when writing on hard-to-define metaphysical concepts. In my opinion, strictly in terms of metaphysical poetry, Donne was a better thinker than either Milton or Shakespeare, but you might have an entirely different view. Tell what you think and why you think it.

To foreigners, a Yankee is any American, but Americans use the term all kinds of ways, and it's usually somebody from another region of the country. I think New Englanders will willingly own up to the title, but I am not sure. Any good definitions?

An engineering student said he bet a friend ten dollars that he could build a robot that could jump a whole mile, and he built it, but if it made many mile jumps it busted. While seeking ways to make it sturdier, he programmed it so that when it went anywhere, it could take an infinite number of jumps but only the first jump could be a whole mile. The second jump would be half a mile, the third jump a quarter of a mile, the fourth jump an eighth of a mile, the fifth jump a sixteenth of a mile, and so on. The guy he placed the bet with lived three miles away. He e-mailed the guy that the robot was built, and the guy said, "Good! Just have it to jump to my house, I'll put the ten dollars in its pocket, and then I'll send it back." But, when he sent the robot to collect the ten dollars he had won, he never got it! No matter how many jumps the robot made, the total distance it traveled never added up to even two miles. How come?

I'm a teacher, but not in science. I purposely am not using the term "black hole" because it is too restrictive for the purpose of this question. As I have not taken astronomy or physics, and have no experts to talk with, I have qualms abour revealing my stupidity and ignorance on the subject, but I really want to learn, and answering some of these questions, or explaining why they might be ludricous, would satisfy a raging curiosity in my mind. (I am studying basic physics on my own, but have not yet made much progress.) Please don't dismiss me or patronize me.

1. Is there a difference in the force of gravity in the polar regions and the equatorial regions of any rotating body in space that bulges at the equator as a result of rapid rotation?

2. Is this difference, if it exists, more extreme as the object evolves to being more like a torus than a sphere?

3. Could these factors lead to a degree of chaos or "weather" between the core and the event horizon?

4. Help?

He said he did it himself, but that means that Gleason was in the same league with the other fat guy. I don't know whether he was or not, and would like to know if anybody else does.

I took Golf as a Physical Education elective in college, and never was able to make the ball soar in the air. I turned the University of Oklahoma golf course into the biggest putting green in history, just put-put-putted the ball, and my score was so far over par that it had to be written in scientific notation. That was 40 years ago, and I'm always afraid my brother in law will invite me to play golf with him and his buddies and I'll be the laughingstock of the course. How to learn?