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Timothy M. Leonard's books on Goodreads
A Century Is Nothing A Century Is Nothing
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Subject to Change Subject to Change
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Ice girl in Banlung Ice girl in Banlung
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Finch's Cage Finch's Cage
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Saturday
Jun112022

Creative People

I'm one of those people who has learned through living that there is nothing and nobody in this life to cling to.

I am a metaphor looking for a meaning.

I feel free to move away from safe familiar places and keep moving forward to new unexplored areas of life. Floating. If I had a penny for every time someone asked me when I’d settle down I could afford a world hypothesis!

Yes. I could bid on blessings. I’d sacrifice pre-linguistic symbols and create silent metaphorical abstractions. My linguistic skills would evolve into love, into discursive logic. 26,000 year-old Paleolithic iron and copper paintings create a secret symphony of ancient stories in a Spanish cave. Shamans experienced visions for the tribe. Oral transmission said a Griot.

No lengthy drawn out off-the-wall abstract explains my small empty self to anyone by virtue of who I was, am, and will be.

Life is a palimpsest. Trade security for adventures.

“There are two stories in the world,” I said to the Moroccan as we carried boarding cards through the Casablanca terminal. “A stranger arrives in a village or a stranger leaves a village.”

“Yes,” said Omar, a blind writer overhearing their conversation, “we might add there are also stories about love between two people, stories about love between three people and stories about the struggle for power. Stories are about characters revealing emotion through dialogue and action.”

He handed me a pile of yellow papers wrapped in rushes.

“A gift for you. It contains a farrago of evidence. Keep it simple.”

“Thank you.” Where do I find you?”

“In the caves south of Ronda. It’s a long walk.” He disappeared into Baraka.

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation, A Memoir

Human beings and creatures flowering and dying in the void.

Tuesday
Jun072022

Diary, November 13, 2020

"Whatever is done this moment in time has the qualities of this moment in time." - Charles Olsen

Charles Olsen was a link between Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and the New American Poets - the New York School, Black Mountain School, Beat poets and the San Francisco Renaissance. He described himself as "an archeologist of the morning."

 

Walt Whitman :

  • poet, lover of life
  • carefree optomism
  • transcendent self-discovery, new landscapes of beauty & possibility
  • transcendent connecting with something larger than oneself : nature, time & space and love
  • mystic and indirect chant of aspiration toward a noble life
  • reach the highest point a human soul is capable of attaining
  • wisdom / past, future, majesty, love

 

Hanoi

Wednesday
Jun012022

Chapter 15

Earth peoples, oceans wave,  celebrate life energy sex and harmonic forces, said Rita, What happened in the love hotel? Use your imagination.

They paid a woman 3,000,000 Yen through a slot in the door. She gave them a key. It unlocked Akiko’s chamber of secrets. The room featured an American wild-west motif with an Indian chief on a white horse. Very cute, said Akiko. They stripped each other down. They took a long hot herbal bath exploring geography with tender lust. They jumped each other’s bones. It was in-out dialogue, pure passion. Show doesn’t tell, said Z.

He toweled me down, said Akiko. I felt thick cotton noun fibers edge my thin shoulders, along my verb spine, weaving his fingers across my flat stomach, erasing, tracing water fingering my direct object jungle. Slow and easy baby, I sighed being his Shinto shrine as he gave me his offering. Their relationship ignored verbal language, said a blind Japanese masseuse in a love hotel.

What conflicts exist?

-Human vs. Human

-Human vs. Nature already mentioned.

-Human vs. ______><_______

-Human vs. self. Do I or don’t I? Is it safe?

-Nature vs. Nurture

Will someone playfully deconstruct the truth with literal facts to move the narrative along and get to the mind-at-large awareness of his or her experience, said Tran. I hope so, said Omar, A literary agent at a writer’s conference in Oregon said my writing was a word photograph jazz beat. She suggested throwing the narrative out.

She said and I quote, Pick one time or geographical place and flush out the narrative with more exposition. I would like to see character development and social and political realities in 60,000 words, Yeah, said Rita, What did you say? I told her some novelists do exactly the opposite of what they’re told because disobedience is freedom, Beware of book doctors and blood thirsty greedy dictatorial aliens with an agenda, said Rita.

Ok, said Tran, How’s this sound? Write everything in the first five pages. Grab the reader with a hook in every sentence, at the end of paragraphs and at the end of chapters, Yeah, said Grave Digger, WE need a hook, a big iron hook covered with dried blood hanging in the center of an empty Asian market reminding genocide survivors what happens to them if they fuck up. They get a big fat rejection hook in the neck or through their trembling beating pulsating heart.

Fear sells. Fear is a universal language.

Good idea, said Zeynep, Work fear, sex and growth into this. Readers need to keep turning pages. This work doesn’t flow from A 2 Z. It presents a form with a minimum of punctuation  ... punctuation is a nail. Is it an error or a mistake (part of a statement that is not correct) that’s a question for a linguist.

I love Linguini, said Devina, but he doesn’t love me. What else? Split the infinitive hairs. Infinity. Infinite. Finite. Dynamite. Kids know eternity adults are scared of it, said Death. It’s long, cold and black. Nothing ever happens again.

Well, it’s ok to be horrible, said Z. Some writers give up because they want it to be perfect. You need to be passionate and persistent about your art without become obsessive-compulsive about it. A sincere writer has grit and stamina. Do it because you love it. Make a mess. Clean it up and make another mess.

A work of art is never finished. It is abandoned, said Duchamp Ulysses Take Nothing For Granted. Kill your father. Marry your mother or versa visa. Push a stone up a hill. It rolls down. Push it up again.

We are all orphans sooner or later, said Rita, Speaking from my hard-lived sojourn, Experience is my teacher. The rest is just information, Editing is a form of censorship, said Leo Told Story, waving a pile of rejection letters from lame stream mainstream upstream.

Book of Amnesia V1

A flower has profound responsibility.

Saturday
May282022

Diary 2021

Well being - flow and harmony

Sensation leads to perception leads to making meaning leads to conclusions, action, consequences.

Ladder of Inference:

Consequences

Action

Conclusions

Meaning

Perception

Sensation

*

Celebrate the quest.

*

Middle Way:

science / spirituality

memory / mythology

structure / spontaneity

ephemeral / eternal

humorous / profound

connectivity / non-attachment

*

holy trees. strong

learn to listen to trees

then the brevity of our childlike way achieves joy

*

inner life of nature

the wilderness of our own nature

into universe of myth & magic

*

the future is coming for us

*

the absurdity of fear and the fear of absurdity

Sunday
May222022

Fat talk

Big fat American sits down to interview a young Khmer man for a one-hour teaching job with blind / deaf students ... he talks, talks, talks about his degrees and extensive teaching experience in states and China ... his attitude about China is condescending.

Shit government school, big money, I don't need the money.

His sister is a doctor in the states. She told him, "Don't come back here. You will die."

He tells the potential teacher, "If I give you all my money I will be poor and you will still be poor."

Fat man is a sad broken record. He needs more compassion.

 

Life is a dance. Mindfulness is witnessing that dance.

*

Badkhenim: poet jesters. we cheer up the sad. the world to come, state of joy

*

I am that.

*

Everything we see hides another thing

we always want to see what is hidden by what we see

the interest can take the form of an intense feeling

sort of conflict

between the invisible that is hidden

and the visible that is present. - Magrittte