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Wednesday, October 5, 2022
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Speech: Refraining from False Speech
Via Daily Dharma: There Is Just Now
Invite the mind to pay attention to the body’s time so that the mind can learn a simple truth: There is just now.
Willa Blythe Baker, “Being in Body Time”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - October 5, 2022 💌
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Via White Crane Institute // LOUISE FITZHUGH
1928 -
LOUISE FITZHUGH was an American writer and illustrator of children's books, born on this date (d: 1974), known best for the novel Harriet the Spy. Her other novels were two Harriet sequels, The Long Secret and Sport, and Nobody's Family is Going to Change.
Fitzhugh was the illustrator of the 1961 children's book Suzuki Beane, a parody of Eloise; while Eloise lived in the Plaza, Suzuki was the daughter of beatnik parents and slept on a mattress on the floor of a Bleeker Street pad in Greenwich Village. Fitzhugh worked closely with author Sandra Scopperttone to produce Suzuki Beane, which incorporated typewriter font and line drawings in an original way. Although a parody of both Eloise and beatnik conceit, the book sprang to life as a genuine work of literature. Today, it is much sought after on used-book websites.
Fitzhugh's best-known book was Harriet the Spy, published in 1964 to some controversy since so many characters were far from admirable. It has since become a classic. According to her New York Times obituary, published November 19, 1974: "The book helped introduce a new realism to children's fiction and has been widely imitated". Like Fitzhugh, Harriet is the daughter of affluent New Yorkers who leave her in the care of her nanny, Ole Golly, in their Manhattan townhouse.
Louise’s father, Millsaps Fitzhugh, was a prominent lawyer who told Louise that her mother, Mary Louise Perkins, a ballet teacher from Clarksdale, Miss., died when Louise was a baby. That was a lie. Mary Louise was alive and well, teaching dance in Clarksdale (about an hour and a half away from Memphis) and trying to see her baby. Mary Louise — who had met Millsaps while vacationing in Europe — had chafed under her husband’s controlling, boorish behavior (he wouldn’t let her teach, gave her a paltry allowance and disparaged her family, calling them “trash”) and demanded a divorce. Despite the emotional abuse he inflicted on his wife, Millsaps won full custody of Louise — he had bragged that he had the courts “all sewn up” due to his family name.
The Fitzhughs refused to let Mary Louise see the child; Josephine particularly thought Mary Louise, who came from a poor family, was a bad influence.
Hardly the feminine girl heroine typical of the early 1960s, Harriet is a writer who notes everything about everybody in her world in a notebook which ultimately falls into the wrong hands. Ole Golly gives Harriet the unlikely but practical advice that: "Sometimes you have to lie. But to yourself you must always tell the truth". By and large, Harriet the Spy was well-received—it was named to the New York Times Outstanding Book Award list in 1964—and it has sold 4 million copies since publication. It was very popular among young girls, particularly unfeminine or non-conforming girls who lacked representation in fiction; Fitzhugh, like many of Harriet's fans, was a lesbian.
Two characters from the book, Beth Ellen and Sport, were featured in two of Fitzhugh's later books, The Long Secret and Sport. The Long Secret deals fairly honestly with female puberty; the main characters are pre-teen girls who discuss how their changing bodies feel. Another young adult manuscript, Amelia, concerned two girls falling in love. This manuscript was not published and was later lost.
Fitzhugh illustrated many of her books and had works exhibited in Banfer Gallery, New York, in 1963, among many other galleries.
According to a recent biography, Sometimes You Have to Lie, written by Leslie Brodie, Fitzhugh led a secret life that would have thrilled her nosy heroine. She was a pint-sized heiress with a wealthy, dysfunctional Southern family. She was a lesbian who dressed in tailored suits and capes and had multiple affairs with women and a few men. She wrote her books before her death in 1974, at the young age of 46, and her last romantic partner took pains to keep as much of Louise’s salacious past — including her sexuality — under wraps.
Those attempts notwithstanding, Fitzhugh was artistic, rebellious, impulsive and captivating. Standing at a pint-sized 4 feet, 11 inches, she looked like a fairy or sprite — with her delicate frame and sly smile. As a teen she wore overalls and cropped hair and dated both boys and girls. The summer before college, she eloped with one of her high school sweethearts, Ed Thompson, one wild evening in Mississippi, though she was sleeping with a woman, artist Amelia Brent, at the time. (The marriage was quickly annulled, but she and Ed remained friendly.)
Later, after transferring to Bard to study writing, she seduced her gay male poetry adviser, James Merrill, who recounted in his memoir that Louise “began undressing me” and “what we found ourselves doing proved to be a thrilling discovery.”
Louise, however, preferred sleeping with women, and in 1951 she moved to Greenwich Village with her old flame Amelia. There, Louise would fall in with an artistic lesbian crowd, including pulp novelist Marijane (MJ) Meaker, playwright Lorraine Hansberry and the photographer Gina Jackson. She frequented gay coffee shops and nightclubs and swore off women’s clothes, preferring button-down shirts, trousers and sometimes a velvet cape.
An inheritance from her grandmother — despite being estranged from her father’s family — allowed Louise to live the life of a starving artist without the starving part, and she studied painting not only at the Art Students League, but also in Paris, where she would meet her second serious girlfriend, France Burke, and Bologna, Italy, where she painted frescoes alongside her friend and lover Fabio Rieti. Rieti and Louise had a tempestuous two-month affair, and she told him that he was the only man she ever loved, though she ultimately decided “I can’t abide a male human being in my bed,” and dumped him.
“Harriet the Spy” was controversial when it was published in 1964. It was shockingly subversive. Harriet’s parents are rich, well-meaning but clueless yuppies who attend cocktail parties and leave their 11-year-old in the care of her nanny, Ole Golly. Her best friend, Sport, has to cook and make cocktails for his degenerate writer father. Her other best friend, Janie, wants to be a scientist so she can “blow up the world.” Harriet sees a child psychologist, drinks egg creams and uses curse words. One reviewer called the book “depressing”; another called Harriet “pathetic.” But the novel flew off the shelves and ushered in a wave of realism in children's literature, from S.E. Hinton’s “The Outsiders” to Judy Blume’s “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.”
After a string of live-in girlfriends, she met a nurse named Lois Morehead and the two moved to Connecticut with Lois’ 13-year-old daughter in 1969. Lois helped keep Louise in line — and away from her wild New York friends, to their annoyance. But Louise was productive. In 1974, she finished another book, “Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change,” about a middle-class black family. But a few weeks before it was published, Louise suffered a brain aneurysm and was rushed to the hospital. She died at just 46.
Lois, as executor of Louise’s estate, would — as Brody writes in the biography — “preserve the mystique surrounding the author of Harriet the Spy." While a few picture books and one other novel have been published since Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change, many of Louise’s manuscripts have remained under lock and key.
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Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute
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Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org
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Tuesday, October 4, 2022
Via Washing to Post
Why Bolsonaro and the global right-wing love to hate on election polls
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| Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who is running for reelection, speaks at the Alvorada Palace in Brasilia on Sunday. (Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters) |
Brazil’s right-wing incumbent president, Jair Bolsonaro, failed to win the first round of the country’s general election on Sunday. But he did do something important for many on the global right: He beat the polls.
For weeks, many of Brazil’s major polling companies showed Bolsonaro trailing far behind his left-wing challenger, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. One widely reported poll gave Lula a 14-point lead and even suggested he could win in the first round of voting — something that has not happened in more than three decades of Brazilian democracy.
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Lula did win a plurality of votes, 48.4 percent, but he did not win a majority needed to secure a first-round victory. Bolsonaro, who in some polls was predicted to win a dismal 34 percent of the vote, ended up with 43.2 percent.
To many inside and outside Brazil, Bolsonaro’s surprise showing is about more than just one election: It’s evidence that the far right is undervalued by polls globally, echoing claims in other parts of the world.
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“Polls are broken. They are undercounting right-wing support. And it’s vital this be fixed to maintain credibility,” the Brazil-based journalist Glenn Greenwald, a firm critic of Bolsonaro, tweeted on Monday.
“THE SILENT MAJORITY IS BACK!!!” former president Donald Trump wrote on the right-wing social network Truth Social on Sunday evening. He later wrote that Bolsonaro had beaten “inaccurate early Fake News Media polls.”
Besting the work of professional pollsters has long been a badge of honor for the former U.S. president. In 2016, before he was elected, Trump dubbed himself “Mr. Brexit” — an apparent reference to not only the incendiary politics surrounding the British referendum to leave the European Union but also the widespread idea that polls had missed the outcome of that vote.
Trump did indeed beat the pollsters in 2016 — and again in 2020. He lost the latter election but it still prompted something of a reckoning in the polling industry. One industry panel later said the surveys ahead of the 2020 presidential election were the most inaccurate in 40 years.
But with his post on Sunday about a “silent majority,” Trump was referring to a common theory among U.S. conservatives that right-wing ideas are actually more popular than they appear to be in polls.
In Britain, pollsters have also spoken of the “shy Tory” factor that suggests right-wing voters are less likely to admit their preferences to pollsters. Other theories have suggested that right-wing voters may be harder to pick up in mainstream polls, as they are more likely to be rural and less likely to use the internet, among other factors.
The full picture, however, is more complicated. Brexit may have been a political earthquake, but for some, it was a widely expected one. For weeks ahead of the vote, polls showed that support for leaving the E.U. was gaining among British voters.
More recently, electoral wins for the far right in Sweden and Italy have largely tracked with pre-election polls. And in France, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen underperformed her polls.
Even in Brazil, Lula, the left-wing candidate, actually overperformed his polling average by 2 percent. (Although Bolsanaro outperformed his by 8 percent).
For practical reasons, polls are conducted with small sample sizes that represent only a slice of the entire population — with complicated equations on how to use this survey data to represent the national mood accurately. If those equations are off, so are the final results.
In 2018, a study published by the social and natural sciences journal, Nature Human Behaviour, looked at more than 30,000 national polls from 351 elections in 45 countries between 1942 and 2017. The study found that there did not appear to be any systematic decline in accuracy over that time period — and that there was “no evidence to support the claims of a crisis in the accuracy of polling.”
But Christopher Wlezien, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the study, said in an interview that he had not analyzed more recent data to see if the conclusion still stood up.
In 2015, Israeli polling firms failed to see that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was on a path to reelection (notably, the polling errors were so significant that even exit polls, conducted after the vote, were off).
Brian Winter, editor in chief of Americas Quarterly, noted on Twitter on Monday that there had been a noteworthy number of polling missteps recently, with major polls off in the United States, Argentina and Chile.
For Brazilians, polling has now become a political issue in itself. CNN Brasil reported Monday that Bolsonaro’s allies were now seeking a “broad investigation” into the work of polling companies ahead of the election to see if there is criminal liability.
If so, it would be just the latest round of attacks by Bolsonaro on Brazil’s election process. He has already claimed without evidence that the country’s electronic voting system is compromised. In the event of an electoral loss, Bolsonaro is widely expected to refuse to accept the results. It would be similar to what Trump did after his own 2020 electoral defeat — but this time it might work.
But concern about the polls won’t be limited to Bolsonaro and his supporters.
Winter tweeted that he no longer planned to share or discuss Brazilian polls ahead of the next election. “It’s clear the models are broken, respondents not being truthful, or some other problem,” Winter wrote. Other political analysts say that the polling companies need to take action before the controversy consumes them.
“It is very serious because the institutes are under attack and they are unfounded attacks. Because there are a lot of serious people in the institutes trying to do their best, but they were wrong,” Pablo Ortellado, a professor of public policy at the University of São Paulo, said in an interview with BBC News Brasil.
Brazilian polling firms will soon have another chance to prove themselves. Ahead of the second and final round of the election in four weeks, there will be more polls and more scrutiny. But companies will try to learn from their mistakes and tweak their methods to ensure higher accuracy.
It could be something easy to fix. But some polling inaccuracies have stumped top experts. Many, including Wlezien, heavily scrutinized the polling misses during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In response, firms updated their methodologies and weighting — only for the polls to be off again in 2020.
“I don’t understand how it could hurt them,” Wlezien said of the idea that far-right parties overperformed their polls. “And the sense is that the people running these polls don’t have a strong interest in getting it wrong — in any direction.”
By Adam Taylor
Via Daily Dharma: Hold It First in Your Heart
We will never be able to build what we have not first cherished in our hearts.
Joanna Macy and Sam Mowe, “The Work That Reconnects”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Intention: Cultivating Lovingkindness
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Via White Crane Institute // GRAHAM CHAPMAN
1989 -
GRAHAM CHAPMAN, the English comedian, actor, writer, physician and one of the six members of the Monty Python comedy troupe, died on this date (b. 1941) He was also the lead actor in their two narrative films, playing King Arthur in Month Python and the Holy Grail and the title character in Monty Python's Life of Brian. Chapman kept his sexuality secret until the mid 1970s when he famously came out on a chat show hosted by British jazz musician George Melly, thus becoming one of the first celebrities to do so. Several days later, he came out to a group of friends at a party held at his home in Belsize Park where he officially introduced them to his partner, David Sherlock, whom he had met in Ibiza in 1966, and subsequently raised their son, John Tomiczek, together.
After Chapman made his sexuality public, a member of the television audience wrote to the Pythons to complain that she had heard a member of the team was Gay, and included in the letter a Biblical passage calling for all homosexuals to be stoned to death. With fellow Pythons already aware of his sexual orientation, Eric Idle replied, "We've found out who he was and we've taken him out and stoned him."
Chapman was a vocal spokesman for Gay rights, and in 1972 he lent his support to the fledgling newspaper Gay News, which publicly acknowledged his financial and editorial support by listing him as one of its `special friends.' Among Chapman's closest friends were Keith Moon of The Who, singer Harry Nillson, and Beatle Ringo Starr. Asteroid 9617 Grahamchapman, named in Chapman's honor, is the first in a series of six asteroids carrying the names of members of the Monty Python comedy troupe.
A memorial service was held for Chapman in December 1989 in the Great Hall at St. Bartholomew's. John Cleese delivered the eulogy (see below); after his initial remarks, he said of his former colleague "…good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard, I hope he fries!", and then pointed out that Chapman would have been disappointed if Cleese passed on the opportunity to scandalize the audience. He explained that Chapman would have been offended had Cleese, the first person to say "shit" on British television, not used Chapman's own funeral as an opportunity to also become the first person at a British memorial service to use the word "fuck". Afterward, Cleese joined Gilliam, Jones, and Palin along with Chapman's other friends as Idle led them in a rendition of "Always look on the Bright Side of Life" from the film Monty Python's Life of Brian.
On December 31, 1999 Chapman's ashes were rumored to have been "blasted into the skies in a rocket.", though in actual fact, Sherlock scattered Chapman's ashes on Snowdon, North Wales on June 18, 2005.
Today's Gay Wisdom
2017 -
John Cleese's Eulogy for Graham Chapman
Widely considered one of the most notable eulogies of the last century, here is Cleese's eulogy for Graham Chapman:
Graham Chapman, co-author of the 'Parrot Sketch,' is no more.
He has ceased to be, bereft of life, he rests in peace, he has kicked the bucket, hopped the twig, bit the dust, snuffed it, breathed his last, and gone to meet the Great Head of Light Entertainment in the sky, and I guess that we're all thinking how sad it is that a man of such talent, such capability and kindness, of such intelligence should now be so suddenly spirited away at the age of only forty-eight, before he'd achieved many of the things of which he was capable, and before he'd had enough fun.
Well, I feel that I should say, "Nonsense. Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard! I hope he fries. "
And the reason I think I should say this is, he would never forgive me if I didn't, if I threw away this opportunity to shock you all on his behalf. Anything for him but mindless good taste. I could hear him whispering in my ear last night as I was writing this:
"Alright, Cleese, you're very proud of being the first person to ever say 'shit' on television. If this service is really for me, just for starters, I want you to be the first person ever at a British memorial service to say 'fuck'!"
You see, the trouble is, I can't. If he were here with me now I would probably have the courage, because he always emboldened me. But the truth is, I lack his balls, his splendid defiance. And so I'll have to content myself instead with saying 'Betty Mardsen...'
But bolder and less inhibited spirits than me follow today. Jones and Idle, Gilliam and Palin. Heaven knows what the next hour will bring in Graham's name. Trousers dropping, blasphemers on pogo sticks, spectacular displays of high-speed farting, synchronized incest. One of the four is planning to stuff a dead ocelot and a 1922 Remington typewriter up his own arse to the sound of the second movement of Elgar's cello concerto. And that's in the first half.
Because you see, Gray would have wanted it this way. Really. Anything for him but mindless good taste. And that's what I'll always remember about him---apart, of course, from his Olympian extravagance. He was the prince of bad taste. He loved to shock. In fact, Gray, more than anyone I knew, embodied and symbolized all that was most offensive and juvenile in Monty Python. And his delight in shocking people led him on to greater and greater feats. I like to think of him as the pioneering beacon that beat the path along which fainter spirits could follow.
Some memories. I remember writing the undertaker speech with him, and him suggesting the punch line, 'All right, we'll eat her, but if you feel bad about it afterwards, we'll dig a grave and you can throw up into it.' I remember discovering in 1969, when we wrote every day at the flat where Connie Booth and I lived, that he'd recently discovered the game of printing four-letter words on neat little squares of paper, and then quietly placing them at strategic points around our flat, forcing Connie and me into frantic last minute paper chases whenever we were expecting important guests.
I remember him at BBC parties crawling around on all fours, rubbing himself affectionately against the legs of gray-suited executives, and delicately nibbling the more appetizing female calves. Mrs. Eric Morecambe remembers that too.
I remember his being invited to speak at the Oxford union, and entering the chamber dressed as a carrot—a full length orange tapering costume with a large, bright green sprig as a hat—and then, when his turn came to speak, refusing to do so. He just stood there, literally speechless, for twenty minutes, smiling beatifically. The only time in world history that a totally silent man has succeeded in inciting a riot.
I remember Graham receiving a Sun newspaper TV award from Reggie Maudling. Who else! And taking the trophy falling to the ground and crawling all the way back to his table, screaming loudly, as loudly as he could. And if you remember Gray, that was very loud indeed.
It is magnificent, isn't it? You see, the thing about shock... is not that it upsets some people, I think; I think that it gives others a momentary joy of liberation, as we realized in that instant that the social rules that constrict our lives so terribly are not actually very important.
Well, Gray can't do that for us anymore. He's gone. He is an ex-Chapman. All we have of him now is our memories. But it will be some time before they fade.
The video of Cleese delivering the eulogy can be seen online here: http://www.youtube.com/
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Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute
"With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson
Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org
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Monday, October 3, 2022
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