Preamble

Part 1:

What follows is a series of 6 posts on one thread here at this International Forum where I've been posting for several years. I have posted between 100 and 200 thousand words at this site, at least two good-sized books. Perhaps after my demise, an event soon to take place as the clock-flies, as tempus fugit, as my mother used to say, perhaps books will be made of all my posts. I am somewhat inclined to the view that, for millions of people, books are somewhat passe, even declasse, to chose a word that rarely appears these days. Still, given the yin and yang of life and the complexityof so many issues, I'm sure there are also more books being read now in 2013 than at any other time in history, especially given the world's population of 7.3 billion compared to 2.3 in 1944 when I was born.

I get an invitation every two or three weeks from the administrators and moderators to add another post at this international forum. Although there are only 6 posts in this series, on this thread, readers will quickly tire if they attempt to read all my 5 posts and the summary statement at the end in one reading, in one go.

There are some 40,000 words and 120 pages(font-14) in the statement below, so skim or scan this lengthy document---is my advice, read until you get tired or lose interest or, it goes without saying, just don't read it. In this latter case, go somewhere else:

(i) to read and/or enjoy whatever images(moving or still) catch your fancy and interests, (ii) to make whatever clever or funny, or both, remarks you can make at some social networking site(SNS), and/or (iii) to enjoy your enthusiasms and passions---because there are plenty of things in cyberspace you might enjoy more than reading what is found below.

There is now plenty to do in real space and getting entangled in my extensive words of appreciation to and for: (a) a myriad of people, places and things, and (b) aspects of my life over the last 70 years since my conception some time in mid-October 1943--may not be the best use of your time. But I leave you to work out how to use your time and, if reading this statement attracts your interest, go for it aned may it be of some personal value.

I began posting the following piece at this International Forum on 24/10/'12, and this latest addition, this last piece of editing, was placed here three months later on 25/1/'13. -Ron Price, Tasmania, Australia ------------------------------------------------------------------------Preamble

Part 2:

In some of my childhood years and adolescence, the ages 9 to 19, and the first decade of my young adulthood, 20 to 30, the seeds of what I believed, and still believe to be, a divine knowledge were sown in the soil of my heart.(1) These were the years, in total, from 1953 to 1975 in my lifespan. It was a heart which had its pure parts and, certainly by the age of 30, its share of impure elements, loves of various kinds that inclined me to ere in my ways, inclinations that would have been better if they were not part of my life, and immaturities that took decades to learn to deal with, and some of which I am still dealing with.

Life is a long path of learning, and the two decades from the first years of my late childhood to the beginning of the last decade of my young adulthood, age 9 to age 30, were formative ones. For many reasons I kept that divine knowledge to which I refer, part of my first organized and articulate belief system, hidden---at least mostly---due to the disinterest of those around me in the content of that knowledge. We all have to chose which parts of

life's knowledge-base we want to make permanent, or at least a long term part of our lives, and which parts to share with others. Most of those I knew in my childhood, adolescence and young adulthood, the 1950s through the 1970s, carried on the beliefs of their parents or opted for atheism, agnosticism, or one of the many variants of secular humanism centering their lives in the process on: family, job, a range of personal interests from TV to gardening, from cooking to sport.

"To each their own", seems to be the adage. Not everyone wants to investigate what we investigate, or engage in whatever is our romance or religion, our personal recipes. Not everyone is going to share our particular interests: whoever we are and whatever our interests. Much sadness results from hoping others will be enthusiastic about what we have enthusiasms. Much loneliness comes from the simple inability to be able to people out solitude with the joys of aloneness and the various activities associated with contemplation, the intellectual side of life and enjoying one's own company. By my mid-50s I had had enough of the social world and yearned for aloneness, but not everyone experiences this fatigue with people that I did after 50 years of a highly social and gregarious life-style.

It took me some years to learn not to expect others to be enthusiastic about what I was enthusiastic about; unrealistic expectations dot the lives of most of us and lead, in one way or another, to a certain sadness.

Perhaps that knowledge, that divine knowledge, to which I refer above was also kept hidden from others, as well as myself, by those mysterious dispensations of Providence and my own incapacities. I was unaware in those early years of my life of the marvellous truths and wisdoms of this earthly and etherial wisdom that had come into my life as early as '53. These truths and wisdoms only gradually became part of my understanding, only gradually became part of my everyday use in practice. And, again, whatever I regard as truths and wisdoms is not and has not been shared with everyone else in my life, especially family and friends who were close to me. My belief that the Baha'i Faith was the latest, the newest, of the Abrahamic religions was not shared with most of those I came to know in life.

Gradually, though, more and more pennies dropped as I went through the last decade of young adulthood(30-40), middle age(40-60), and the first decade of late adulthood(60-70). I will be 70 in 18 months from now, on 23/7/'14, and, if good health stays with me, I hope to become a centenarian in 2044 and get my letter from the Queen or King, as members of Commonwealth countries have done since 1917. The Anniversaries Office at Buckingham Palace is responsible for sending-out such letters. Most of the pennies dropped in the form of my writing prose and poetry, although excellent treatments for my bipolar disorder were like gifts from the gods, so to speak. These treatments came in stages from the 1960s to the last 9 months of 2012 and 2013.

In the first 9 years of my late adulthood(60 to 69), on retirement and on two old-age pensions, and especially the years after the age of 65 in 2009, hyacinths of a divine wisdom finally began to spring from my heart, at least that was my view, if not the view of all my readers and friends. Those hyacinths had begun to spring-forth before the age of 65 in sensible and not so sensible ways. As I look back over the decades of my life, I can see that they have been in evidence perhaps as far back as the 1950s, but that evidence was not as abundant as it became, as it bloomed in my 60s. This, of course, is what you might call a personal retrospective, a personal reflection on the 7 decades that have been my life thusfar.

There were also wisdoms that sprang from mire and clay, from my shadowy and ephemeral attachments(2). So it was that I felt I always had to analyse my views to refine them and so come to understand them more deeply than I once had. For, as I say above, life is one long path of learning and discovery, making mistakes, falling down, and getting up to try again. In some ways it is not the falling down that is crucial, but the getting back up and continuing the journey, the battle, the road of life. There have been some people in my life who possess a persistence in dealing with their tests and difficulties and they have been like mentors, even though they often did not know it.

One person who has been my mentor in this regard has been my second wife who has had to deal with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome or just the problems assoicated with

hypothyriodism in recent years, to say nothing of her two mastectomies and a hystorectomy. Indeed, she has had a list of psychological and physical problems that were enough to sink a ship, so to speak. I am one of those fair-weather creatures who feel good when life is good, and when I am in physical discomfort I do not deal with it with stamina and persistence, patience and a long-suffering attitude. I express my appreciation to her in more detail further-on in this statement.

In our complex world it is somewhat presumptuous to claim to possess any wisdom. Virtually all of whatever wisdom is mine was obtained from others: from reading, from observing and, as I say, from learning by my mistakes. I leave it to readers to assess the evidence of any wisdom or lack of it in the lengthy statement below and in my general writings---which readers can now access in cyberspace if they are interested. In some ways, I feel I have only made a start along this lengthy path of wisdom acquisition. Go to this link, if you are interested, for the latest of my annual emails/letters for access to the current state of play in my life:http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?241588-Ron-Price-s-Annual-Email-for-2012-1st-Edition&p=3452639#post3452639

If this link proves too difficult to access, just go to my website by googling these words: Pioneering Over Five Epochs. Then go to the sub-section on Autobiography. This will lead you to the link to my annual letters for 2011/12, 2012/13, and 2013/14.

Preamble:

Part 3:

The life and ideas, writings and analysis of the Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius(121 to 180 A.D.) and the British historian Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) taught me at various times from my university days(1963-1967) to the years of my retirement from all FT, PT and casual-volunteer work(2006-2012) by their example. I still worked for several causes, mostly in cyberspace and to some extent in real space. These were causes to which I have been committed for various lengths of time from the 1950s to this second decade of the 21st century.

These two historians, philosophers and poets taught me, or at least I learned by reading their works, how good and how pleasant it is for a writer and author, a poet and publisher, an editor and researcher, an online journalist and blogger---like myself to declare his gratitude to those in his life whose words and sentences, lives and actions, found their way inexplicably into his life and, he likes to think, into his soul.

Wishing to delight myself, in part because I am a writer and author, I now give my expression of thanks for the virtues and actions of those who have lived with me in the privacy of my inner chamber and in my social life, to those many sources of meaning and pleasure which have enriched my life. I now want to thank those who have helped me rise, at least partly, from the prison of self to some of the glorious meads above and, at least to some extent, from this mortal cage unto parts of the paradise of the Placeless.(3) -Ron Price with the deepest appreciation for (1)Baha’u’llah’s Hidden Words, Persian, # 36, and (3) #39; and (2) Baha’u’llah, Tablet of the True Seeker, Gleanings, Baha’i Pub. Trust, Wilmette, 1956(1939), p. 264.

I first came across the statements of appreciation & acknowledgement that the above two wonderful writers, to whom I have been indebted for their writings, had expressed to those to whom they were indebted nearly 50 years ago. It is high time for me to express my own thanks and acknowledgements in relation to my indebtedness to: others, to people, places and things, in my life. This statement is now some 40,000 words and 120 pages, using font-14, in length--hence the need for readers to glance lightly at this document, skim or scan, read every word, if they are so inclined or, as I say above, just not read the following.-Ron Price, Statement of Thanks and Acknowledgements, last updated on 25/1/'13.

Preamble:

Part 4:

This statement follows many paths and includes many approaches to the overall view, the comprehensive presentation and picture of my thanks and acknowledgements. Some readers will find this recitation, this account, far too circuitous, far too

lengthy and detailed for their liking. I write this piece mainly for my own interest and, if readers find it also of interest, so much the better.

One could go on endlessly, on such a topic, thanking the universe for staying in its place and not wandering out of balance, thanking all the asteroids for not running into our planet, and on and on might go some litany by a writer who writes compulsively as I have come to do to some extent in this the evening of my life---having retired from FT, PT and as much volunteer work as possible and having also limited my social engagements to a minimum.

One must draw the line somewhere, and I have done so below. Like all such statements, it is a quite personal and idiosyncratic one.-Ron Price, Australia, written over the period 24 October 2012 to 25 January 2013 in the second-half of my 69th year.------------------------------------------------------------------------Part 1: PEOPLE

To my Mother for helping to awaken in me a love for music and words, poetry and prose as well as a sensitivity to the religious and philosophical aspects of life. She was there, of course, from my inception, and my earliest memories in 1947/8 consist of her kindness and gentleness, her long-suffering persistence, and her many ways and means of exposing me to the input of a religious and poetic sensibility, an intellectual and social responsibility.

If my Mother had not been there giving to my mind and heart that early bent, a bent and direction that became more and more evident as my teens turned into my twenties and my twenties into my thirties, I have little doubt that I would not now be writing these words. She is responsible, in part at least, for the general orientation of my life. In many ways my orientation is very different from hers. We each must seek our own path.

As the Lebanese-American artist, poet, and writer Kahlil Gibran wrote about "a woman who held a babe against her bosom and who said: "Speak to us of Children." And he said: "Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. You may

give them your love but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams."

and he went on:

"You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness; For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable." ----------------------To my Father for the example of his quietness and hard-working life, for giving his all to my mother and I, and for being an example to me of another type of persistence and patience, for his sin-covering eye and for his always exerting an effort in the years I remember him, in his 60s and early 70s, when his fatherly advice and his having embraced a new Faith in the evening of his life helped to give a direction to mine in my life's early morning especially the years 1953 to 1965.-----------------------------To my first and my second wife, two women who also taught me by their example. My first marriage was over the 6 year period: 8/1967 to 12/1973, and that first wife(Judy Gower, now Judy Noack, age 65) taught me, or gave me the daily example of, a spontaneity and a delight in life, among other things. She was also a fine primary school teacher and went on to teach for more than 40 years retiring in June 2012.

In the case of my second wife whom I have now known from 2/'74 to 1/'13, 39 years. I experienced a woman who had the ability to give and to endure in the face of difficulties. I do not possess that ability, that capacity to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to anything like the same extent as is her endurance. But she has pointed the way for me to at least try within the context of my incapacity. I have spent more time with my second wife than any other person on earth, and I thank her for the myriad things she has done to and for me, for helping me

raise three children and for accompanying me into the evening of my life as helpmate and companion, friend and colleague.

She and I will, I hope, go the distance together into the evening and, indeed, the nighttime hours of our earthly life. It is my belief that we shall also go into the land of lights, that "undiscovered country", as Shakespeare says in his famous soliloquy in Hamlet, "from whose bourn No traveller returns/ puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have/Than fly to others that we know not of?" -----------------------------To my 1 child, 2 step-children, one grand-child, & 3 step-grandchildren for helping to give me a sense of a normal, or should I say, somewhat traditional life-narrative in the lifespan. In the last several decades with the breakdown of the traditional family in the West there has arisen a multitude of family types: (i) single parent with kids, (ii) single parent with no kids, (iii)partners who are, as they say, in de facto relationships, (iv) people having affairs within the context of one of the variety of marital relationships, (v) homosexual and lesbian family arrangements, (vi) married with no kids, (vii) group marriage, (viii) common-law marriage, and (ix) marriage with partners who died early leaving the other partner alone, inter alia.

A common-law marriage can also be known as a sui juris marriage, that is, an informal marriage, or marriage by habit and repute; this is an irregular form of marriage that can be legally contracted in an extremely limited number of jurisdictions. Common law marriage should not be confused with non-marital relationship contracts, which involve two people living together without holding themselves out to the world as spouses and/or without legal recognition as spouses in the jurisdiction where the contract was formed.

Non-marital relationship contracts are not necessarily recognized from one jurisdiction to another whereas common law marriages are, by definition, legally valid marriages worldwide provided the parties comply with the requirements to form a valid marriage while living in a jurisdiction that still allows this irregular form of marriage to be contractedinter alia. I have now enjoyed, at least for the most part, some 46 years of marriage(1967-2013) in two affinal families.

A marital relationship is, for most people, a demanding one and a context for a great deal of significant learning in the path of life. It is also a context for the raising of children, an exercise in which I have now been involved for nearly 40 years as I have seen them grow from childhood to the stages of early adulthood(20-40), and middle adulthood(40 to 60). My oldest step-daughter is now 47, and I came into her life when she was 8 in 1974.

I should also add here that I had the pleasure of growing-up in what sociologists call a consanguineal family of three in which I was the only child of older parents. My mother was 40 when I was born and my father 55. I was able to start life on a solid base of values and beliefs from these two souls to whom I was the fruit of their life. I also had the benefit of my grandfather's presence to the age of 3 in Hamilton Ontario where I was born.

As I have grown into my late adulthood, the years from 60 to 80, according to one of the many models of human development in the lifespan used by psychologists, I have become much more conservative, much more appreciative of tradition, of familiarity, of the loyalty of a partner, of the importance to me of someone with whom I have shared most of my life, and will share my future years until one of us passes from this mortal coil. My relationship is not, nor has it always been, easy, but that is true of nearly all of the really important relationships in my life and, I might add, most other peoples' lives.-------------------------------My family, both my consanguineal and two affinal families, required of me more patience and kindness than I thought I had, as well as more self-discipline, self-forgetfulness, and the need to persist and keep going to maintain the links that can be and should be, but not always are, part of the family bond. In the process I was able to provide both financial support, a home and hearth, and protection from life’s elements. I was also able to be as good an example as possible of how to live to my several children and grand-children. sometimes even the power of negative example, it a powerful one for one's children.

Being at first a child, in my case, a son of two legally married parents over 23 years until the death of my father, and then a

step-parent, a step-grandparent over 19 years(to 2013), as well as a parent and a grandparent over 35 and 2 years respectively---has given me a set of roles in life which have taught me many things, too many things to list here, things I am still learning in these several roles, and things I may not have learned had I not been at first a child, then a step-parent, a parent, a step-grand-parent, and a grandparent.

Each of these family units: consanguineal, and affinal, has demanded of me all that I had in terms of patience and endurance, compassion and a wide range of human virtues. I sometimes thought I was being tested beyond my capacity but, in retrospect, I do not think this has been the case. I have Baha'u'llah's words to confirm this view. ndeed, I have His words to confirm many of my ideas in life, words which have given me a sense of certitude that has been an asset all my adult life. Everyone in life has their own story insofar as the acquisition of good human qualities is concerned. A significant part of my story has been in the roles of a quite traditional life-narrative of the lifespan. And I am thankful for that.---------------------------------------------------------------To my grandfather, and my mother’s brother and sister for yet other examples to me of how to live, what to do with my time, and what to strive-after in life's journey. Their generosity and kindness in my formative years, my childhood and adolescence, I will never forget and those qualities have helped to give me, even now, a sense of a solid foundation for the living of my life, as well as its meaning and purpose. By the time I was 40 they had all left this earthly life, and I could begin my years of spiritual maturity as Baha'u'lah calls the age of 40.--------------------------Part 2: TWO SPECIAL HISTORIANS

To Arnold Toynbee, Edward Gibbon and a Host of Historians for their sheer intellectual prowess and occupation, their persistence in achieving their literary goals and purposiveness, their self-discipline and concentration, their eager appetite for knowledge and their ambition to carry out the duties imposed on them by their native curiosity and their creative intellectual work.-------------------------------Part 3:

To People and Institutions, Landscapes and Buildings, Photographs and Moving Pictures, Radio and Books

Part 3.1: MORE PEOPLE

My curiosity was stirred, and meaning and pleasure in my life was enhanced by, all of the above. This Part 1, though, deals with the multitude of people up to the age of 30, the end of the first decade of my young adulthood. There were several people who came into my life, from the age of 9 to 30, as a result of my association with the Baha’i Faith beginning at the age of 9 in 1953. Some of these people were academics: Jameson Bond, an anthropologist, and Douglas Martin, a historian; Michael Rochester a physicist and his wife, Elizabeth, a psychologist-social worker; Nancy Campbell, a dancing instructor and prominent Baha'i in southern Ontario, and several others whose names I have now forgotten.

In addition there were others who were working men and women from many walks in life: John and Hattie Dixon, Fred Graham, Lulu Barr, Loretta Francis and so many others to whom I owe so many different things, too many to list here.

Jameson Bond helped the penny to drop in my academic and professional career at a critical turning point from October 1965 to May 1967 while I was in my last two years of university. I decided at that time to travel-and-pioneer among the Inuit and to do so I had to qualify as a primary school teacher. So it was that, on finishing my B.A. in 1966, I entered teachers’ college in the small Baha’i community of Windsor Ontario, Canada's most southerly city, where Jameson Bond was a professor of anthropology at the University of Windsor.

I spent most of the next four decades(1967-2007) as a teacher and lecturer, among several other jobs in the international pioneer field, jobs and roles which readers here can survey at LindedIn, Facebook, and in the CV, the resume which follows in this lengthy thread.----------------------Douglas Martin was a high school history teacher, and a member of the national spiritual assembly of the Baha’is of

Canada when he came into my life in my third year of high school. He often took me to discussions, or firesides as Baha'is call them, in Toronto and to Baha’i summer schools in Michigan and in northern Ontario. At the time he was arguably the Canadian Baha’i community’s best public speaker. I heard him give innumerable public talks and his style and manner, his ideas and intellect stimulated the early development of my own ideas in relation to the Baha’i Faith among other subjects. I have kept my interest in history from the 1950s to this second decade of the 21st century, and his influence is difficult to quantify.--------------------------------I will not site chapter and verse of the influence of many other Baha’is in my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood---in whose homes I spent some time, occasionally with my parents, sometimes with my first wife, and often on my own. These Baha’is were ordinary men and women whom I got to know in my childhood, my teens and my twenties due to a degree of social intimacy, domestic familiarity, and personal dialogue, that I cannot put into words. The full measure of what they have given to me and my feelings for them, even after the passing of more than 40 to 60 years, is impossible for me to express in a few words. Indeed, it requires an autobiography which is now some 2600 pages.-------------------------------------There were, of course, many others from many walks in life: dozens of teachers and professors, lecturers and tutors, and 100s of fellow workers, colleagues, and students over an 18 year period, as well as the literally 1000s of students I taught over 32 years. In the many jobs I had over the years 1955 to 2005 there were too many to even attempt a cursory summary. It would require too many words to give them, each and all, their just place in this already lengthy statement. Perhaps, at a future time, I will try to focus on a small handful of the 1000s of people I have summarized in the above paragraph.----------------------------Scholars from many fields. I will write about only one, although there have been so many that to discuss them below would require many pages. I will deal with but one as an example from the many possible ones. My prose and my poetry mentions many of these influences and readers who would like an extension of this section are encouraged to read some of my several million words, and more than 7000 prose-poems.

Erich Fromm(1900-1980):

Part 3.2:

Fromm was German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher and theorist who brought other theories together. He also emphasized how a person's personality is embedded in class, status, education, vocation, your religious and philosophical background and so forth. Since this autobiography and my personality is embedded to a great extent in these factors that Fromm describes, it seems timely to start this first expression of thanks to scholars with these words on Fromm.

I read Fromm's books off and on for thirty years. -Ron Price with thanks to Michael Maccoby, "The Two Voices of Erich Fromm: The Prophetic and the Analytic," Society, July/August 1994. The year I began my pioneering experience, 1962, Erich Fromm, American psychoanalyst and prolific writer in the field of existential psychology, stated his 'credo' in his book Beyond the Chains of Illusions. I have written some of his Credo below since it was consistent with my views back in 1962 and still is. I have commented on some of his Credo expressing views that have remained part of my beliefs during this pioneering venture spanning, as it does now, more than fifty years.

Part 3.2.1:

"The most important factor for the development of the individual is the structure and the values of the society into which he has been born." Given this fact, my role as a Baha'i has been to spend my life trying to build the kind of society fit for human beings to be born into. For, as Fromm says in his Credo, "society has both a furthering and an inhibiting function. Only in cooperation with others, and in the process of work, does man develop his powers, only in the historical process do humans create themselves. Only when society's aim will have become identical with the aims of humanity will society cease to cripple man and to further evil."

In attempting to transform society, Fromm underestimated the

need for individuals to adapt to their society. For the Baha'i to be an effective teacher, propagator, of the New Society he has become associated with, he needs to adapt to the larger society in which he has been born and in which he lives his life. The difficulties I had in the first decade of my pioneering experience came, it seems to me in retrospect, from a slow adapting to my society. Later, in the following decades, my effectiveness was due significantly to my more effective adapting to my society.

This adaptive process is slow and arduous work and, for Baha'is, it takes place in the context of action toward goals using a map provided by the Founders of their religion and the legitimate Successors. "I believe that every man represents humanity. We are different as to intelligence, health and talents. Yet we are all one. We are all saints and sinners, adults and children, and no one is anybody's superior or judge. We have all been awakened with the Buddha, we have all been crucified with Christ, and we have all killed and robbed with Genghis Khan, Stalin, and Hitler. Man's task in life is precisely the paradoxical one of realizing his individuality and at the same time transcending it and arriving at the experience of universality. Only the fully developed individual self can drop the ego."

Perhaps this is one way of defining the nature of 'Abdu'l-Baha and the reason for his effectiveness and efficiency. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 9 October 2002.

Part 4: INSTITUTIONS

The Guardianship and the Universal House of Justice are twin-institutions of the Baha’i Faith that have guided my steps over my entire Baha’i life and have influenced my beliefs and actions in more ways than I can count. They have also maintained the unity of this newest of the world’s Abrahamic religions, a unity which is perhaps this Faith's greatest achievement in a world in which all the major religions are fractured into a multitude of sects and cults, denominations and branches, divisions, isms and wasms.

The Central Figures of the Baha’i Faith, and their successors, Shoghi Effendi and the Universal House of Justice have provided me with a core of ethical and moral directions, with spiritual and

intellectual examples and models, aims and purposes, goals and meanings, ways and means on how to live my life, and contribute to the building of a new society, global and unified---a process that will take several centuries.

Part 4.1Baha'i Administration:

Serving in various aspects of the elected and appointed side of Baha’i administration has been a learning experience from the word go. I have served on local spiritual assemblies, off and on, since 1966. It has provided a wonderful opportunity to get to know people in demanding personal circumstances. The Baha'i Faith is not one based on a passive congregationalism; it is not one with a comforting and regular ritual that induces what is often a sort of aesthetic religiosity, a bit like a spectator-sport. Much religion in the west, what remains from the acids of secularism, is something inherited from the wider society, but not something that one invests a great deal of thought. The Baha'i Faith requires a much more active commitment.

I cannot think of any other experience I have had with people that affords this particularly useful, invaluable lesson in understanding human character, than my community experience in the Baha'i Faith. At the same time, I must warn the student of human nature, as the essayist William Hazlitt(1778-1830) also warns, that “the more I learn, the less I understand it.” This is a complex and subtle question which requires a separate essay to deal with its implications.

One would hope that, with the insights of over one hundred years of social science behind us, we would have come to understand humankind more. In some ways, perhaps. There is nothing that helps a man more in his travel through life than a just understanding of his own characteristic weaknesses. In consulting, for that is the term Baha'is use for attempting a dispassionate and cordial discussion of issues at local assembly meetings, an individual is made more than a little aware of his inadequacies, his inabilities, his utter ineptitudes, in addition to his strengths. In my early years of assembly work, until I came to Australia, my main problem was focussing sufficiently on the topic at hand in order to make a useful contribution. I got lost in the multitude of views.

Once I had mastered the problem of dealing with complexity in the consultative process, at least enough to deal with some of the subjects--I went on to other skills. It had taken several hundred hours to get this far. I was a slow learner. Keeping my ego out of the way was always a challenge. Not dominating; not reacting to punitive rebuttals with my own heat were new problems for me by the 1970s. I’m still working on them. Just as soon as I think I’m winning I get plastered again. It is a long road travelled and it keeps the old ego quite manageable, or should I say nicely tested, on a weekly or fortnightly basis. I am now retired and participate in the consultative process of Baha'i administration far less than I once did.

Part 4.2:

Perhaps it is just a sign of age, or that familiarity breeds fatigue, or that after three decades of serving with the aim of increasing the number of believers and getting a discouragingly meagre response year after year, but ennui creeps in, sometimes an engulfing weariness with it all. Except for a short period of statistical success in the late 1960s and early 1970s---it has been slow slogging. A certain persistence, dedication, devotion to duty all come into play or one would simply wither on the vine. Call it spiritual muscle if you like.

The patience of Job and the wisdom of Solomon are useful but in short supply. The Baha'i Faith is like a large family and most people know how difficult families can often be. It is also one reason why so many in our world stay clear of participation in organizations, except those they have to like: work and school, or interest groups like tennis clubs, sport associations and film societies.

When one reads about(Priceless Pearl, p.451) about a special Baha'i known as the Guardian and comes to know that he was “called by sorrow and a strange desolation of hopes into quietness” the heart responds with a “yes!” The Guardian comes closer. This is a revolution, the Baha'i Faith, with all the attributes of ordinariness and quietness. I am thankful to have been part of this quiet revolution.

I think that is one reason why those buildings on Mount Carmel lift my heart so. It has partly to do with hundreds of meetings in lounge rooms being spiritually dried out. Faith asks many things of the believer: one of these things is the need to endure these endless meetings. For some martyrdom in the West is associated more with meetings than with jails, bullets, and physical persecution. Some may find I’m overstating it. For them I probably am. In Shoghi Effendi’s first letter to Australia and New Zealand he refers to “severe mental tests”. Such tests take many forms and I’m sure they are not over yet for us in this fourth epoch, seventy years after his letter.

Then, of course, there were the multitude of meetings over 4 decades of paid employment and that is another story which I will save readers from a detailed expatiation. In those four decades there were many I have to thank, and I do so later in this statement.

Part 5:

Part 5.1

Australian Government--Department of Human Services

There are many government departments in Australia which I must acknowledge and give thanks to. Perhaps the DHS is one which has been of direct benefit to me at times when I have been unemployed. Through the agency of Centrelink I was able to receive financial benefit: (i) for some 8 months in 1979-80, again (ii) from 8/'99 to 7/'09 on, first, unemployment benefit and, second, disability benefit, and finally: (iii) from 7/'09 to the present on an old-age pension.

Part 5.2

Other Federal, State and Local Government Departments and Agencies

I will not list all of these sectors and sections of the three levels of government in which my life has been enmeshed in the 41 years I have lived in Australia, 1971 to 2012. Nor will I list the similar agencies in Canada in another form of federal

parliamentary government where I lived my life from 1943 to 1971.

Part 6: LANDSCAPES

The bleak and lonely landscape of Ontario in winter and Baffin Island all year round, southern Ontario’s richly coloured but, paradoxically, obdurate autumnal canvas, the hushed and howling drama of winter’s death, with Canada’s images of northness and seasonality, and the clean-red spaciousness on all the old maps.

Australia’s searing heat, glaring sunlight and vast empty landscapes filled with spinifex and sand precipitate me into a nostalgia which helps to support my reality by filling my memories with spaces that I once thought were ordinary but, now in retrospect, I find to be neither ordinary nor moderate. I have been intimidated by the relentless Australian sun that so often oppressed my spirit as I walked through its vast territories, and dusty gardens. The freezing 30 to 50 below temperatures on the icy Arctic tundra and the sun’s often unalleviated glare are now memories as if they were part of the experience of someone else.

There were, and there are, other landscapes: (i) many of which have been brought into my life by cinema and TV which I write about below, and (ii) others in both Canada and Australia which were far from bleak, far from excessively hot or cold, and far from remote. I will leave it to readers to google those places, those two dozen towns where I have lived in life, and the more than 100 to which I have travelled, to read about the landscape and general geography.

Part 7: BUILDINGS

There have been many buildings both sacred and secular that have strongly influenced my life, and they stand now as memories and icons, spaces and places with meaning and a certain sensory pleasure. The buildings and gardens at the Baha’i world centre in Haifa Israel, several Baha’i temples around the world, many of the homes I have lived in beginning with my childhood and early adult life. There are, too, a myriad places of architectural delight, too many to recount here, which with their

historical settings and significances influenced my life by providing individual mise en scenes, settings, of beauty and a certain wonder.

In the years of my retirement, from the age of 55 to the present, I have had the time and the leisure, to enjoy the immense variety of buildings that were presented on art and architecture programs on television: temples and churches, mosques and religious buildings from history, as well as the architecture of many civilizations and religions, nations and cultures. After nearly 15 years of being able to take in such beauty in an organized form by scholars and commentators, I have had my life enriched and these years of my retirement may have a long way to go to continue this process of my aesthetic and intellectual education.

Part 8: PHOTOGRAPHS, MOVIES, VIDEOS AND DVDs

Preamble:

I must express my appreciation for the innumerable photos and movies, videos and DVDs. Although my experience with the print and electronic media: TV and cinema, newspapers and magazines, journals and the internet, cassette tapes and CDs, DVDs and videos--what gradually became a cornucopia of stimulating media--began to come into my life insensibly and sensibly by 1950, the last 60+ years (1952-2012) have been immensely enhanced and refined by the content of these media. I must acknowledge my thanks to the sources of this vast field of experience that resulted from their presence in my life.

The formal study of these media did not begin until my early 30s when I taught media studies at the Ballarat College of Advanced Education, now the university of Ballarat, from 1976 to 1978. Again in the 1980s and 1990s at colleges of technical and further education in northern Australia, and then at the Thornlie Tafe College in Perth, media studies became a curriculum subject on my agenda. When I retired from teaching in 1999 I kept three arch-lever files of notes on media studies and in the dozen or so years since, 1999 to 2012, I have added several more files of notes and photocopied material.

The visual content of media in newspapers and magazines were

part of my parents' experience and they became part of mine, perhaps unconsciously, as early as 1944 when I was in the cradle. The story of the relationship between the print and electronic media and my life over these seven decades is a long and complex one. Now, at the age of 68 I have a base (a) in my files and on TV, as well as (b) on the internet, for the study of this important part of my life and the life of my society.

The only years I had much to do with the formal study of film, what is now called by several names: film studies, cinema studies, the history of film, et cetera--was when this formal study was part of a media studies course that I taught at the Thornlie College of Tafe on two or three occasions in the early 1990s. I drew on films, video and TV programs in my teaching all the way back to the 1960s. It was not until I retired from teaching, both FT and PT, as the new millennium turned its corner that these volumes and a serious study of these mediums slowly emerged. They had begun, they had their etiology as the medical world calls beginnings, with some notes, notes I had taken for that course I taught in Tafe more than two decades ago in those early 1990s.

By November 2012, more than 13 years into my retirement, these film studies and other media studies notes were expanded. They had begun to occupy all of volumes four and five of my media studies files with three additional special 2-ring binders for Volume 5.1, Volume 5.2.1 directors, Volume 5.2.2 Actors and Volume 5.3 Actors. The material on the Internet was absolutely burgeoning in the field of film studies and impossible to cover in any systematic way because of (a) the wide ranging nature of my academic interests and (b) the limitations of time and circumstance.

By November 2012, too, more than 13 years after retiring from full-time work, and taking a sea-change to Tasmania, I had notes on over 50 specific films and access to 1000s, as well as notes on many specific actors and directors. My study of the field of film studies had really only just begun—the many aspects of film and its history was clearly an interdisciplinary field. Some 60 years of ‘the movies’ provided a pleasure for which I express my thanks and acknowledgements.

Part 8.1: PHOTOGRAPHS

While growing up in Canada and before leaving home and the region of southern Ontario, first in 1966/7 and then in 1971, my mother and then my first wife took a serious interest in taking photos. In Australia before my divorce in 1974 my first wife, Judy, continued her interest in photography and had her own dark room.

After 1974 until now, 2012, nearly 40 years, a series of people have contributed their part in providing the photographic base for this album: (a) the Baha’is for whom taking photos may just be their only ritual; (b) my consanguineal family in Canada and the two affinal families in my life, one in Canada and the other in Australia; and (c) friends, associations, work colleagues, et cetera in the many other communities I was involved with in varying degrees during my life.

More recently, of course, since taking an early retirement and returning to Tasmania in 1999 as well as the opening of the new millennium in 2001, I have begun to receive more photos from: (a) my 2nd affinal family, the one here in Australia; (b) my wife’s consanguineal family and the affinal family from her first marriage; (c) my first wife’s, 2nd affinal family, the one from her second marriage after she and I divorced in 1975; (d) my consanguineal family in Canada; (e) people I met along the road of life, Baha’is and non-Baha’is, who have sent me photos since this album had its embryonic existence in 1992 and, finally, (f) a new set of people I have only begun to meet since moving to George Town.

I have always thought that taking photos as a hobby, a serious leisure activity, would be a good idea. By the 1990s, with cameras becoming more versatile and cheaper, many were snapping more photos than ever, not so much in the way my first wife did with her dark room and the study of photography as a serious leisure activity, but simply as a hobby so that more photos could be enjoyed by family and friends.

Circumstances, other interests, problems with the mechanical and technical aspects of life and having others around who did the job with enthusiasm always seemed to militate against my

using the camera and snapping photos. Like many things in life, the idea of taking photos more frequently than once a year, if that, remained just that: a good idea and it was never acted upon. It would seem, in retrospect, that print, talking and listening and other activities, leisure and non-leisure, would occupy me-not taking photographs, not in the past and not in the future and the remaining years of my life. Such is life. Others should therefore be given credit for the contents of this album. I only arranged the deck-chairs, as they say these days.

In the last years of my teaching career: FT, PT and volunteer teaching (1992-2005) this album had its first shaping and in the following two years, 2006-2007, this album assumed its present form. One can organize and reorganize photos, like so many other things in life forever, ad nauseam. After more than a dozen years of putting this folio of photos with their several embellishments into a useful shape for the future, I leave it now for other activities that demand my attention and hold my interest to a greater extent. I am happy with the general arrangement here. If it is to have any long term value I feel these photos are now in a form that might be useful to posterity, at least some element of a future age. Time will tell what will be their long term use, their longevity.

Part 8.2: BOOKS, NEWSPAPERS, MAGAZINES, JOURNALS, INTERNET

In the more than 60 years during which reading has been a critical part of my life, 1949 to 2013, books and newspapers, magazines and journals, the internet and a world of print from too many sources to list here----meaning and pleasure were brought to me through these mediums. It is a meaning and pleasure to which I here give thanks and voice my acknowledgements to more resources and materials, more writers and authors, poets and essayists, novelists and scholars than I would want to list for fear of prolixity and boredom for readers of this now lengthy ‘thanks and acknowledgements’ statement.

It is impossible for me to make an accurate record, or even a reasonable guesstimation, of what might be called my reading record since 1949, that mid-century marker that was my first

year of kindergarten and the beginning of grade one. I have made a start at such a record, such a rough guesstimation, though. And here it is:

A. Books Read(i.e. skimmed or scanned): 5,000B. Books Read: entire…………………..........: 5,000C. Books Partly Read : 20,000______________________________Total : 30,000

D. Poems Read(i.e. skimmed or scanned) : 4,000E. Poems Read: entire…………………............…: 3,000F. Poems Partly Read : 6,000___________________________Total : 13,000

G. Articles Read(i.e. skimmed or scanned) :50,000H. Articles Read: entire…………………............:20,000I. Articles Partly Read(1/4 or more) :100,000___________________________Total : 170,000

J. Total number of items above…........………: 200,000(circa)----FOR MORE SECTIONS BEYOND THIS LAST SECTION PART 8.2 GO TO THE NEXT POST---------------------------------------------------THE NEXT POST IS THE 2ND ITEM IN THIS THREAD---------------

_________________married for 44 years, a teacher for 35, a writer & editor for 12, and a Baha'i for 52(in 2011)

Last edited by RonPrice on Fri Jan 25, 2013 4:17 pm, edited 38 times in total.

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RonPrice  Post subject: Re: THANKS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS(Part 2)

Posted: Thu Oct 25, 2012 1:58 pm Part 8.3: SOUND AND MUSIC

Joined: Mon Jan 24, 2011 10:56 pmPosts: 128Location: George Town Tasmania Australia Nationality: Canadian

The radio and many other sources of sound like: hi-fis and cassette tapes, television and film, especially their musical content.

A.

All of the above have played an important part in my life unlike dance and plays, the martial arts and sport---and of which have been, at best, peripheral and short-lived experiences. In primary school from 1950 to 1957 music was a regular part of the curriculum. My mother and father both played the piano, sang in choirs, had sing-alongs in our home, with our family, with friends and with the Baha’i community as I entered my late childhood in about 1953/4. We listened to classical music around the house from my conception in October 1943 until my father died in 1965.

My mother and I then moved into different flats. I then moved to another town in 1966 and then another, and then another country; in the process this family musical experience ended and I began my life in a series of two affinal families each with their musical experiences.

In the mid-to-late fifties I became interested in rock and roll, listened to it on the radio in my bedroom among other places; in 1965 I bought my first LP: Barry McGuire’s The Eve of Destruction. My mother gave me the family copy of The Messiah that same year and these two LPs launched my collection. I purchased LPs and 45s, as they were known, until 1975 by which time I had accumulated some 60 LPs and 45s. In 1975 my first marriage ended and with it, it seems in retrospect, my purchase of records and extensive listening to music in my home.

B:

Judy, my first wife, and I never had a TV and listening to records was an important part of our shared experience: 1967-1973. In the following years I had to scale-back my purchases of records due to having to raise three children and the increased cost of records. My second wife and her two daughters were more interested in watching TV, engaging in sport and, for various

reasons like the fracturing and diversity of our musical tastes and the birth of my only child, listening to records in my home seriously diminished by the mid-1970s.

I started to learn to play the guitar in 1968 after an unsuccessful attempt at classical guitar in 1962/3. I taught music in my role as a primary teacher from 1967 to 1971. In 1989 I taught guitar to a class of Aboriginal students at Thornlie Tafe. I led sing-alongs from 1968 to 1999 when I retired from the teaching profession. In 2000 I joined a small group of singers in George Town to entertain residents in an aged care facility called Ainslie House in that same town, the oldest town in Australia(1804) and I continued singing with that group until May of 2005. In 2008 I began to play the guitar and to lead those same residents in singalongs using my “sixties singalong music booklet” that I revised from earlier collections I had made as far back as the 1960s.

In 2000 I also had access to some 50 CDs as part of my role of Baha’i radio program presenter on City Park Radio. By April 2005 I had presented about 150 half hour programs and this activity also came to an end that year. Such, in summary, is a brief history of my musical experience and I thank and acknowledge the many sources of meaning and pleasure which have delighted my life.

I have made a list of the pieces of music I have enjoyed most, and it can be found in my computer directory, my two-ring binder sing-along file and on the internet. I also have a list of all the records I own in that same file. This particular music file has four sub-sections divided into 4 sub-sections as follows: two popular music sections and two classical sections. They contain separate lists of articles about music, articles I began to save in 1984, but did not begin to save seriously until the year 2000. I opened this file for these articles and resources in 2004 after twenty years of slowly accumulating the material. It became a serious collection in the four years(2004-2008) in my effort to write poetry with musical themes. In 2005 I divided the resources into: (a) classical and (b) popular and placed them in separate files. In 2006 I opened a jazz section(1.1.B), a sub-section of the popular music file.

C:

I should mention, in closing this introduction, that radio and television have played an important part in my musical experience beginning as far back as 1944. This is not the place to summarize more than 60 years of radio and more than 35 years of television and their respective musical influences in detail. I should say, though, that in these first dozen years of my retirement, 1999 to 2012, my musical experience comes in the main from the Australian Radio National, the FM classical radio station. TV, at an average now of 1 hour/day and some pop-music from the local radio station are also part of my musical fare.

Occasionally I used to get an LP bug and listen to classical music from my collection of LPs, but in 2007 this ceased due to hi-fi technical problems. One of my aims in these early years of my retirement is to integrate music, life's activities and my religious beliefs in different ways in my poetry and in postings on the internet. The resources in these files represent a base of information for this poetic-writing exercise which I have found to be immensely stimulating.

The exercise of listing one’s favorite music is no easy task after the passing of some seven decades. If a person is young, say in their childhood or adolescence the task is not as great. It may be better for such young people to wait for some years before making such a list, waiting until they survive the perils of: (a) their sporting interests, (b) their love life, (c) their job life, (d) their other leisure pursuits, (e) their desires and passions, wants and wishes as well as (e) the many slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that inevitably come into life. In my lifetime there has come to be a world of sound in which I can drown, happily or not-so-happily as the case may be. The lists I made of my favorite music contain some of the happier sources, pieces, items, songs, inter alia that give me pleasure now and they did so at various times in my 69 years of life, 1943-2012.

D:

In the three year period June 2002 to May 2005, I compiled periodically a list of my favourite music. It was an attempt to define, to give expression to, to list what had become by then a

vast sea of pleasurable sounds produced in a number of genres of music. My first memories of listening to music were in about 1948, although I was exposed to music right from the word go in 1943 by two parents who played the piano. I would post the full list here, but it is too long. I would post here "a short list" of nearly 70 years of musical experience, musical pieces I have enjoyed from a longer list of music that gave me pleasure, but it is also too long to include.

This list is just a start to making a comprehensive outline, a brief survey, a dip in the sea, so to speak. There are now over 1000 items in this full and comprehensive list that I put together in the years 2005 to 2011. If I continue to add to this list systematically and regularly the list will become completely unmanageable and necessitate far too much of a focus on music in my otherwise highly interdisciplinary life. But the names of many of my favourites are found below for my interest and occasionally to post at a website when others ask about my musical tastes. Since it seems impossible for me to remember the names of many of the pieces, this list helps assist me in bringing to memory these names when and if required. The exercise is interesting to me in its own right without any particular practical value.

As I began adding every item to this list from what I heard on ABC FM Radio in and after 2002, and on the internet, it became obvious that, in the end, the list would become too long if I took the exercise seriously with any sense, as I say, of making a comprehensive collection. What is found here serves as: (a) a list of musical pieces I own/have access to in my collection and (b) a list of additional material I would like to have access to in my study, but do not. As I say, this is a list of musical favourites that I will never bring to an end. The sea is just too full and I have listed only classical pieces below. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, Last Updated on: 19 June 2011.

E:

1.1 Bach: Symphony No.2 E-minor1.2 Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No.1 in F; 12.2 No.6 in B flat Major; No3, 41.3 Bach: Goldberg Variations1.4 Bach: Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring1.5 Bach: see my 20 record collection of Bach--too many to list

here2.1 Beethoven: Sonata #8 opus 13 and Violin Concerto in D, Opus 612.2 Beethoven: Symphonies: set 1-9, especially no.#52.3 Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor, Opus 57(Appassionata)2.4 Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 24 in F# major, Opus 782.5 Beethoven: Pathetique Sonata, Piano Sonata No.8 in C minor Op.132.6 Beethoven: Moonlight Sonata, Piano Sonata No.14 in C-sharp minor Op.27/2.2.7 Beethoven: Piano Concerto #5(Emperor)2.8 Beethoven: Fur Elise(Bagatelle No.25 in A minor, G.1732.9 Beethoven: Leonora Overture No.3, Opus 72 and 72a2.10 Beethoven: Waldstein Sonata, Piano Sonata No.21 in C major Op.532.11 Beethoven: Piano Trio #7 in B Flat Opus 97(The Archduke)2.12 Beethoven: too many other pieces of Beethoven’s to list due to prolixity3. Berlioz: Symphony Fantastique4.1 Johannes Brahms, Symphony No.1 in C-Minor4.2 Brahms, Piano Concerto # 1 in D Minor, Opus # 155.1 Frederick Chopin: Scherzo 1,2,3 and 4 ; 11.2 Ballads 1 to 45.2 Chopin: Fantasy Impromptu in C sharp minor, Opus 665.3 Chopin, 24 Preludes(C#minor,A-Flat-Major) 5.4 Chopin, Waltz No.7 in C Sharp minor, Opus 64/25.5 Chopin, Study No.3 in E major Opus 10 Tristesse5.6 Chopin: Polonaise in A Flat, Op. 53 "Heroic"5.7 Chopin: Nocturne No. 2 in E flat, Op. 9 No. 25.8 Chopin: Etude Op.10 No. 3 in E5.9 Chopin: to list all of Chopin’s music that I enjoy would lead to prolixity6.1 Claude Debussy: Claire de Lune from the Suite Bergamasque6.2 Debussy: Preludes, “Girl With the Flaxen Hair” among other preludes7.1 Anton Dvorak: New World Symphony 7.2 Dvorak: Symphony #3 7.3 Dvorak: Cello Concerto in B Minor, op.1047.4 Dvorak: Symphonic Variations, Opus 788. Edvard Grieg, Peer Gynt, Suite No.19. Frederick Handel, Water Music Suite10. Gabriel Faure, The Pavane in F-sharp minor, opus 5011. Franz Joseph Hayden: Concerto in D. Major

12. Franz Liszt: Concerto No.1 in E Flat Major12.1 Liszt: Liebestraum No. 3 in A-flat, S 541 / III.12.2 Liszt: Consolation, for piano No. 3 in D-flat Major 12.3 Liszt: La Campanella 12.4 Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsody #2 in C-Sharp Minor13. Henryk Mikołaj Górecki (pronounced Goretsky), Symphony #3.14. Jules Massinet: Meditations15. Felix Mendelssohn, Symphony #4 in A(Italian), Opus 9016.1 Amadeus Mozart: Sonatas for Piano16.2 Mozart: Divertimenti for strings, Adagio & Fugue in C Minor 16.3 Mozart: Piano Concerto #20 in D minor, K466 16.4 Mozart: Piano Concertos: other16.5 Mozart: Symphony #40 in C minor16.6 Mozart: too many other pieces of Mozart to list due to prolixity17. Giacomo Puccini:One Fine Day, Madame Butterfly18. Nicoli Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade19.1 Sergei Rachmaninoff: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini19.2 Rachmaninoff: Prelude in G Minor, Opus 23, No.519.3 Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No.2 D Minor19.4 Rachmaninoff: Prelude in C sharp Minor Op.3 No.219.5 Rachmaninoff: too many other pieces of Rachmaninov to list due to prolixity20.1 Joaquin Rodrigo: Ecos de Sefarad-guitar20.2 Joaquin Rodrigo: need to familiarize myself with his repertoir21. Erik Satie: Gymnopedie No.122.1 Franz Schubert: Fantasie in F. Minor, D 94022.2 Schubert: Ave Maria, Symphony #8 in B-minor22.3 Schubert: Octet Quintet in F major(For 2 violins, viola, cello, double bass, clarinet, horn and bassoon)22.4 Schubert: Impromptu No.3 in G flat major D.899/Op.9022.5 Schubert: Impromptu No.7 in E flat major opus 6 22.6 Schubert: Impromptu No.7 in E-flat major opus 90 no.222.7 Schubert: String Quartet #14: Death of a Maiden, D 81022.8 Schubert: String Quintet in C.22.9 Schubert: Piano Trios in E Flat Major, D 929 and 89722.10 Schubert: Piano Quintet In A major: 'Trout' D667 22.11 Schubert: Impromptu in A Flat Major. Op. 90, No. 423.1 Robert Schumann: Concerto in A-Minor23.2 Schumann: Symphonies 1-4

23.3 Schumann: Etudes23.4 Schumann: Romance Violin23.5 Schumann: Fairy Tales for Viola and Piano 23.6 Schumann: violin concerto op 134 d minor23.7 Schumann: Mondnacht 23.8 Schumann: Traumerie24.1 Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Symphony No.6 in B Minor24.2 Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto D Major24.3 Tchaikovsky: Piano Trio in A Minor, Opus 5025. Antonio Vivaldi: Violin Concerti #3; trumpet concerti for 4 violins

F:

There were over 50 CDs in the Launceston Baha’i community files by 2005. I played them for several years as “presenter of programs” on City Park Radio. I have none of these in my personal collection. I have listed elsewhere these 50 CDs. These 50 CDS had many individual songs that I came to enjoy and could list them as favourites. I give thanks to those who created the music and acknowledge the pleasure they have given me.

After having music in my life for nearly 70 years(1943-2012) and after collecting records for 40 years(1965-2005), the time finally arrived to index the collection I had acquired. By 2005 music in the form of CDs, at least for me, were replacing LPs as a source of new recorded music. A separate collection of some 15 CDs is now found in the chest of drawers near the radio in the dining room. Cassette tapes had begun to be a source of music already by the 1960s and I now have some 30 cassette tapes found in that same place in the dining-room.

This index does not include these CDs and the cassette tapes or, indeed, the 3 mini-discs acquired when I was a presenter of programs at City Park Radio from 2001-2004. At a future time I hope to index the CDs and the cassette tapes. Much of the material on the CDs, the cassette tapes and the mini-discs is not music, but other types of recorded resources: talks, radio programs, et cetera. There are three sections for the records in this collection found in my study: (A) popular, (B) classical and (C) 45s.

Part 8.4:SERVICES

To the organizations, institutions, and providers of services

Since this list is just about endless: car salesmen and car repairmen, dog catchers and dentists, fashion designers and florists, newsagents and nurses, psychologists and psychiatrists, inter alter--I will focus on one which, over my lifetime, has been invaluable: doctors and specialist doctors like psychiatrists. I have written an extensive appreciation of them and readers can google Ron Price bipolar disorder for a 90,000 word statement of the details.

Part 9.1: EDITORS AND COMENTATORS

To the editors of my writing and the many who have commented on my writing.

Preamble:

I have had many teachers and tutors, lecturers and professors, people who have given me advice about, and criticism of, my writing from the 1950s to the 21st century. Betty Conow and Bill Washington both editors; Roger White and Douglas Martin both writers---have offered me advice, a great deal in the case of Bill and just a little in the case of Douglas. An editor, it has been said, is someone who knows more about writing than writers, but they have escaped the terrible desire to write.

Since publishing in cyberspace from, say, 2004 to 2012, I have received a great deal of advice from many of those who have escaped such a desire. I have written the following brief essay to place all this advice and editing, criticism and commentary in a general context. It is a context of thanks and acknowledgements.

The first criticism of my writing, at least the criticism that I remember, was in 1950 when I was in grade one in the then small town of Burlington Ontario. Burlington was nestled at the heel of what was then and is still called southern Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe. The town is and was jammed right at the left-hand end of Lake Ontario. I’m sure I received criticism of my scribbling in the three years before that in my early childhood from my family members and playmates, perhaps as early as 1947 when I was three or four years old and colouring or

printing my first words on paper.

I have no memories of that incoming criticism, no memories until, as I say, 1950. That was more than 60 years ago: 1950 to 2012. I do have memories of criticism of my behaviour as early as the age of four in 1948 when my father applied a wooden hair-brush to my bare bottom as he was asked to do by my mother for some misdemeanour, a behavioural indiscretion the details of which are now long forgotten.

When one is a student, as I was from 1949 to 1970 in Canada, and in Australia from 1974 to 1988, receiving criticism of what one writes is part of the core of the educational process. Sometimes that criticism is fair and helpful; sometimes it is unkind and destructive. It is not my intention here to provide a detailed outline of those several decades of criticism of my writing. In general, though, the comments on my writing covered the complete range: praise of my writing that saw it as the best of the best to criticism indicating I was among the worst of the worst.

Part 9.2 THE TRANSITION TO WRITING ON THE INTERNET

Early in this new, this third, millennium, in 2004 to be precise, I began to receive written criticism of my prose and poetry on the internet. I had received criticism, verbal and written, of my unpublished writing from 1950 to 1974, and of my published writing from 1974 to 2004 during which time I was able to publish some 150 essays in newspapers and magazines, newsletters and in-house publications where I worked in several towns and cities in Australia.

Writing had become, by the 1970s, a more central focus to my life, much more central than it had ever been, although it had always been central in one way or another at least, as I say above, since 1950. Being on the receiving end of criticism in cyberspace has been, in some ways, just a continuation of the first half-century, say grade 4 in 1954 to 2004, of comments by teachers and students, by supervisors and the general public on what I had written. Some readers have been so impressed with my writing that they have asked for more, poured praise and expressed their enthusiasm.

9.3 INTERNET CRITICISM

9.3.1 The Bullies:

The internet, though, is full of lumpen bully-boys who prowl the blogosphere. Some of the bully-boys, and girls--for bullying is not confined to the male gender—do all their work at one site and they have literally thousands of posts at that site. If they see someone’s ego getting out of hand, or if they judge some new site participant as not fitting into the site conventions in some way or other, they make it their job to cut them down to size thus intimidating many a potential site writer and poster. So be warned, writers at internet sites need to be conscious of site conventions and, initially anyway, not post items that challenge what you might call the site’s orthodoxy.

Such internet bullies remind me of some of the teachers I have worked with in my 50 years in classrooms. Such teachers saw their role as pushing and pulling all their students into line by the exercise of their authority. On the site boards, as internet sites are often called, where site activists live and have their being, the authority of site administrators and moderators is exercised like a heavy club, an iron fist. They see their task as one of ensuring the maintenance of site rules and routines, conventions and styles. “Newbies,” as new members are often called, must fall in or ship out. This ‘site-orthodoxy’ which prevails is important for a new poster to become familiar with and become familiar fast if he does not want his emotions trashed, stepped on with little knowledge of what some call awareness of emotional intelligence and etiquette of expression.

9.3.2 The Fundamentalists:

There are a wide range of hysterical secularists, what I have come to call the secular fundamentalists, who proliferate among the immense commentariat that is the internet. They are not unlike many of the so-called Bible-bashers that fill out global society by the millions. There are also the dogmatic Islamists and Christian fundamentalists, among others who want to impose their absolutes on others. They try to inflict, or perhaps promote, their interpretation of the Quran or the Bible on the rest of the Muslim or Christian communities, respectively.

9.3.3 CRITICISM AND PRAISE: WHAT WRITERS NEED

My experience on the internet in the last decade, 2004 to 2012, is, just a continuation of those decades of criticism and, of course, praise that I had already received. “Writers,” as the famous American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald said so succinctly over dinner in the film entitled Last Call, “must get used to criticism.” After decades of extensive writing in many places in the public domain, I must agree with this entre deux guerres writer; criticism is part of the air that writers breath and, especially is this true on the internet for writers like myself who have lots of readers. I do not ask for criticism, except at a few writers’ and poets’ sites whose purposes, among others, is to provide constructive, useful, criticism.

I do not ask for praise. There’s nothing wrong with praise itself and, when it comes, I feel encouraged. But lip-service and flattery are cheap substitutes for praise when no praise is deserved. People who are addicted to praise will take what they can get and lap it up with enthusiasm. The want of praise is a complex psychological, and an entirely different, matter. If one falls into the trap of constantly seeking approval, validation, and recognition from other people as the primary way to determine one’s self-value, one loses the ability to generate one’s own self-value. After years of getting plenty of praise from my parents and teachers and then my students, friends and colleagues, I no longer continue to rely on other people to buoy my self-esteem.

Since I also received my fair share of criticism in the first 50 years of my writing life, I am aware of my limitations as well as my talents and capacities. I am also aware that personal, sustained and intelligent effort is essential to back-up any already acquired or natural abilities, what one writer calls unmerited grace. The process of skill-acquisition, at least in the area of writing, and at least as I have experienced it in more than half a century, is gradual, a daily exercise, not a constant nor linear but exponential process until a saturation point is reached. No one faculty produces results and knowledge, love and will are what you might call the three pre-requisites to produce results.(2) The reliance on external praise can grow to the point that whenever someone praises you, even in the smallest way, you feel a rush of elation, the feeling that “someone out there values

my existence.” As the famous psychiatrist Viktor Frankl once said: “Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue.”3 This applies, a fortiori, to writing. Some writers only want praise but, after living Downunder for more than 40 years, I have come to expect and even enjoy a little criticism. Criticism is part of the air one breaths here in Australia.

9.3.4 LITERARY TYRANTS

Literary tyrants, people who are going to tell you where and when, why and how, you have gone wrong in no uncertain terms, without mincing their words or pulling any punches, without what you might call an etiquette of expression and tact, have always come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. One must learn to deal with them in one way or another as their criticisms come your way in the daily round. There are many MOs, modus operandi, to use a term from the who-dun-its, for dealing with the harsh and not so harsh words of others. Of course, it is not only writers who have to deal with critical tongues and words in many forms. A vast literature now abounds on how to deal with this reality of life. Courses are mounted in educational and other service institutions to help people deal with this pervasive reality of everyday life in the micro and macro worlds which we all inhabit.

9.3.5 THIS 6000 WORD ESSAY: A PAUSE TO REFLECT

I discuss below in this 6000 word essay, the reactions to criticism of two famous writers: one from the 19th and one from the 20th century. Their reactions throw light onto my own way of dealing with this inevitable reality of existence if one is as I am, a writer and author, an editor and publisher, a poet and a journalist, a researcher and independent and sometimes not-so-independent scholar, a man of words, a writer of belles-lettres, a person with belletrist concerns. For many writers the term belles-lettres is used in the sense to identify literary works that do not fall easily into the major literary categories such as: fiction, poetry, drama, short story, inter alia, but have—at least in some ways--a more aesthetic function or purpose. Much of my writing has become in the last thirty years, 1981 to 2011, since the very helpful treatment of lithium for my bi-polar disorder, a hybrid that does not easily and comfortably fit into the major categories of writing.

And so it is that, after more than sixty years, 1949 to 2012, of having to deal with the phenomenon of critical feedback of my written work, I pause here to reflect on the incoming criticism of what I have written over those years, on what I now write, and on what I hope to write. I pause and reflect on the experience of two other writers below, writers who lived in the last two centuries, writers of fame and much success if not in the popular press or populist literary idioms. at least in some quarters---if not in the popular and

9.3.6 The Example of Laura Riding

In 1936, right at the start of the Baha’i teaching Plan, a Plan in which I have been engaged in a host of ways for nearly sixty years, 1953 to 2011, the American poet Laura Riding(1901-1991) wrote to a correspondent: "I believe that misconceptions about oneself which one does not correct, but where it is possible to correct, act as a bad magic.” That bad magic has been at work on the reputation of Laura Riding for many years, for well over 70 years.

One of the criticisms leveled at Riding in her later life, or more accurately, simply a comment about Riding--and repeated recently by the renowned literary critic Dr. Helen Vendler--was that Riding "spent a great deal of time writing tenacious and extensive letters to anyone who, in her view, had misrepresented some aspect, no matter how minute, of her life or writing."4 Vendler, a leading American critic of poetry, found Riding "more than a little monomaniacal,” in relation to criticism of her work.

Despite advanced age and failing health, Riding continued her vigorous and valiant, one might even say, fanatical attempt to halt the spread of misconceptions about herself and her writing to the very end of her life. But the "bad magic" was too powerful to be overcome. Incidentally, this view of criticism that Riding held, the view that it was “bad magic," was held by a woman who was also accused of being a witch and of exercising a literary witchcraft by some of her more zealous critics.

Why was Riding so scrupulous in her attempts to correct misconceptions of her life and writing no matter how minute? It

was, partly at least, because she recognized the importance of details to the understanding of human character. "The details of human nature are never a matter of infinitesimals," she wrote in an essay published in 1974. "Every last component of the human course of things is a true fraction of the personal world, reflecting a little its general character." She, like many other writers and non-writers it should be added, never welcome criticism. Some react to the slightest criticism like a cornered wildcat and others like a barking dog.

Writing, it seems to me, is something like biography which, as Freud notes in some general remarks on the subject found in Volume XXI(1927-1931) of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud(Hogarth Press Ltd., London, 1961, p.211) “does not throw any light on the riddle of the miraculous gift that makes an artist.” Still, it seems to me, that biography and writing, paradoxically do throw some light on the man, and I comment on this reality of life in this short essay.

My approach to incoming criticism is more diverse than Riding’s, not as consistently intense and defensive, not as sensitive to infinitesimals, not like that wildcat or that barking dog. Sometimes I ignore the comment; sometimes I am tenacious and write an extensive response; sometimes I write something brief and to the point. Sometimes I deal with the comment with some attempt at humour, sarcasm and wit, if I can locate these clever sorts of written repartee in my intellectual and sensory emporium.

Part 10: INTERNET LANGUAGE

Punitive rebuttals abound on the internet, often laced with the F, the C, or the S words, invectives from the younger generations who have grown up with these words of abuse. A much larger vocabulary of blasphemy and blame can now be found in the print and electronic media, more than in any previous generation at least in modern history. Sometimes taking umbrage at the use of these forms of vilification and vituperation in cyberspace is appropriate and sometimes it is not. I certainly agree with Riding that one’s writing should not be judged by some infinitesimals, but it is difficult when one writes extensively in the public domain, in or out of cyberspace, not to be judged by all sorts of

things of which infinitesimals are but one of the many. The only way to avoid criticism and to be totally safe is not to stick one’s head above the ground of cyberspace’s highly varied terrain: just don’t write anything or, even better, stay with reading books, watching TV and enjoying other forms of the print and electronic media.

10.1 Marking Papers

Riding, of course, did not have to deal with the world-wide-web. Hers was a more refined and elitist, academic and journalistic, literary and scholarly world. Hers was a world I inhabited for many a year as both a student and teacher, as a lecturer and tutor. I wrote more essays than I care now to count and I marked so many that, by the time I took an early retirement at the age of 55, I can honestly say that I suffered from what I came to call print-glut. When one has to read more than 200 pages of student work every week and do this for years, mark it for spelling and grammar errors, for content and quality, one needs an energy and enthusiasm which tends, for most teachers, to get worn-down at the edges. And this is to put the problem mildly. I found I was just about ill with mental fatigue when I faced a large pile of papers or scripts as they are variously called and which required marking by the time I came to take an early retirement.

By the time I came to pull-the-plug and take a sea-change as it is called Downunder in the Antipodes my role as critic of the writing of students had lost all its oils and juices. I was ready to be farmed-out, ready to go out to pasture, where marking was to be seen no more. My feedback to students and writers on the internet is nowhere near as extensive now as it once was for me as a teacher. I am enjoying my sea-change, my being out-to-pasture, so to speak.

10.2 Feedback From Others On the Internet

After eight years, from 2004 to 2012, of receiving, keeping and filing some of the written and critical feedback sent to me by readers on the internet, I must conclude that, thusfar, the negative feedback I have received has been useful in adjusting the nature of my posts. The criticism I have received at a multitude of sites at which I post helps me to adjust my contributions to suit the administrators and moderators, the participants and interlocutors

who fill the cyberspace places at these world-wide-web locations. Each site is, in some ways, like a game-board, with its rules and routines, its conventions and codes. It took me at least a decade to fully grasp this reality. Even then, site administrators and moderators are not always tactful in dealing with what they see as your insensitivity to their site’s modus vivendi, way of doing things.

Most of the feedback I have received in these seven years that has been viewed in a negative light tends to see my posts as: too long-winded, not relevant or appropriate. They raise the hackles of some readers because they were seen as boring or, indeed, one of many a pejorative adjective. I thought this personal statement here, this brief overview, analysis and comment, would be a useful summary of both the incoming criticism I have received in the last seven years and my views on that criticism. The negative feedback was in the 10% range and 90% of my literary contributions, or posts as they are usually called in cyberspace, have received various forms of appreciation.

Some people on the internet let you know, as I have already indicated above, and in no uncertain terms, what they think of your posts. Frankness, candour, invective, harsh criticism, indeed, criticism in virtually every conceivable form, can be found in the interstices of cyberspace, if one writes as much as I do at more than 8000 locations among the 260 million sites and 4.6 billion subjects, topics or items of information at last count, that are now in existence in that world of cyberspace. In the last seven years I have been on the receiving end of everything imaginable that someone can say negatively about someone’s writing and someone.

This negative feedback has been, as I say, useful and I have tried to respond in ways that improve readers’ opinions of my work and, sometimes, of me. Sometimes I am successful in these efforts of explanation and of self-justification, of defence and argument, of apologetics and apology, and sometimes I am not. Such are the perils of extensive writing and human interaction; indeed, such are the perils of living unless one is a hermit and does one’s own plumbing and electrical work, never goes shopping and relies only on the products of one’s garden for food. Internet interaction, like interaction everywhere else in life, is a learning experience. The faster one learns the better and, if

you don’t learn, you get hit again and again with the same criticism. Regret and remorse, in writing and in living, can be and are useful means of learning from experience and so, of course, can praise and popularity.

10.3 Isaiah Berlin and Ivan Tergenev

To draw now on a second writer and how he dealt with criticism, I introduce Sir Isaiah Berlin(1909-1997). He was a leading political philosopher and historian of ideas before his death as the 2nd millennium was about to turn the corner to the 3rd. In a lecture Berlin gave in 1970 on the Russian poet Ivan Turgenev, Berlin pointed out that this famous Russian writer altered, modified and tried to please everyone in some of his works. As a result of this desire to please his critics, one of the characters in his books “suffered several transformations in successive drafts, up and down the moral scale, as this or that friend or consultant reported their impressions.”

Berlin went on to say, in that same lecture, that Turgenev was inflicted by intellectual wounds as a result of the criticism of his works by others, wounds that festered in varying degrees of intensity, depending of course on the nature of the criticism, for the rest of Turgenev’s life. Turgenev was attacked by writers and critics of many persuasions on the Left and the Right of the political spectrum in those days when these political demarcations had more clear and understandable characterizations.

This Russian novelist(1818-1883) possessed, Berlin noted, a capacity for depicting “the multiplicity of interpenetrating human perspectives that shade imperceptibly into each other, nuances of character and behaviour, motives and attitudes.”5 Turgenev, like Riding, could never bear the wounds he received from incoming criticism of his writing in silence. He shook and shivered under the ceaseless criticisms to which he exposed himself, so Berlin informs us.

Pleasing others, of course, is important for any writer if he or she is to win a place of success among teachers and tutors, supervisors and those in the general public. This is just as true on the world-wide-web. But there is also, and without doubt for millions of internet participants, a new found freedom of

expression that cyberspace provides. Part of this freedom, at least for me, is due to the advantages and pleasures of age. Now in the early evening of my life, these middle years(65 to 75) of late adulthood as some human development theorists refer to the period in the lifespan from 60 to 80, with jobs and employment positions far behind me, no one checks what I write before my offerings go into the bright lights and pixelated pages of cyberspace.

My own editing pen is kept busy, of course, and I can edit as much or as little as I desire. Editing has never been one of my favorite activities and I tend to rush this part of the writing job, at least initially. I then revise or alter, subtract or add, delete and generally edit in a multitude of ways as a result of incoming comments, both the encomium and the opprobrium. Sometimes I make no changes at all to my initial internet post. After a decade of writing in cyberspace and on the several editions of my website, there is little doubt that I do more editing of my work than ever before. This may be for many reasons: age, freedom from employment, more leisure-time—I could add several more reasons.

After my writing gets onto the world-wide-web: it is ignored, criticized, diagnosed, interpreted, subjected to hair-splittings and logic-choppings by readers and posters, moderators and administrators who inhabit the plethora of internet sites. I am on the receiving end of invective and ignominy, negative appraisals and accusations of nefariousness. I am assailed with acrimony, berating and blame, blasphemy and bickering, castigation and censure, condemnation and contumely, denunciation and diatribe, epithet and obloquy, philippic and reproach, revilement and sarcasm, scurrility and tirade, tongue-lashing and vilification. I am given more advice than I have received at home from those I love and who love me as well as my students and friends over a lifetime of seven decades.

The main advantage that all of this incoming and negative feedback is that it helps me to alter what I write at a site which takes me on and criticizes virtually everything I contribute and has no word of praise for what I write. Such a negative reaction helps me to adjust: (a) my future entry processes sites and (b) how I continue the nature of my participation at that site. Writing on the internet is a learning process as writing is in any other

form of the print and electronic media.

The criticism I received as a student and teacher in the last half of the twentieth century goes on in pithy paragraphs and sentences, phrases and single words at the several thousand internet sites where my millions of words are now published---to choose what seems to me to be an apt word for the nature and extent of my internet contributions, the places that my words occupy, in the many coloured and black-and-white pixelated pages, the public spaces in cyberspace.

I am viewed---to continue to summarize the incoming criticism I receive---as tactless and insensitive, awfully boring and told where to get off, where to go, where to go for further writing courses to help me in my literary vocation and avocation. Sometimes I am told why I should discontinue the practice of writing entirely. I am also told what a wonderful inspiration my writing is. Compliments and acclaim, flattery and praise, abound. These words of encomium and opprobrium that I receive, as I say, are really not much different than; indeed, are much the same as, the words many other writers get when their words are found between hard and soft covers.

I am not alone in receiving criticism. Even the writings of Shakespeare, the Bible and other major works in the western literary canon get great buckets of criticism poured on them from the generations which have come on the scene since the post-world-war-2 years, from those now 65 and over, and 65 and under, to select two convenient timeframes covering as it does everyone. Most of those who offer me their criticisms of my literary efforts and my opinions, my responses to what others write and the inevitable and myriad contentious issues that abound in cyberspace, most of them are from the “Y” and the “Z” generations, those born from the mid-1970s onward.

The “Y” generation was born between the mid-1970s to the first years of the 2000s. These generation-Y people are today's teens, 20s and 30s, the millennial generation, the net generation. Some say that generation-X are those born between 1974 and 1980. The fine-tuning of these generational labels gets a bit complex. The first generation who have grown-up with internet access, the years 1990 to 2010, have a wide range of personality constructs. These people are sometimes called the Z-generation and I would

require a separate statement to discuss in sufficient detail their internet, their personality, typologies.

There are, though, some generalities about the generations I deal with which are helpful in an analysis and description. These generalities may help a person deal with the individuals one comes across at internet sites as I do, but my comments on them will not be detailed here. I could benefit, as I go along here, from the assistance of one, Rob Cowley, affectionately known in publishing circles back in the seventies and early eighties as “the Boston slasher.” There is little doubt that I might benefit from him taking a work like my 5 volume memoire which is about twelve times the length of the average novel or twice the length of War and Peace. I have not be blessed or cursed, as some writers are, by total recall.

His editing was regarded in some circles as constructive and deeply sensitive. If he could amputate several dozen pages, several thousand words, of my explorations on the net with minimal agony to my emotional equipment I’m sure readers would be the beneficiaries. The experience of editing some of my work it seems to me is not unlike that of a man attempting to hang on to the fin of a plunging whale. Unlike the writer Thomas Wolfe, though, I would not find the cutting painful. I would not, as Wolfe did, take my book away from such an editor. Neither would I, like Ernest Hemmingway, deal with my editor with any bullying arrogance or pathetic insecurity. I would not be shattered by whatever criticism or aggressive editing came my way, nor would I be touchier than someone with a fresh burn.

But, alas, I think that fine editor Bob Cowley is dead. I did find two editors, one a copy-proof-reader and friend who does not slash and burn but leaves one's soul quite intact as he wades through my labyrinthine passages, smooths them all out and excises undesirable elements. But this editor is in the late evening of his life and, after editing several hundred pages of my writing, he has tired of the exercise, prefers gardening and his own writing, and so I am left on my own. The other editor I found was a generous soul on the internet who worked free-of-charge for me for over a year. But other life obligations eventually took him away.

Perhaps one day I may assume the role that Cowley exercised so

well in his life in Boston as The Slasher, but I think it unlikely. Several people have already asked me to edit their work and I have declined. I think all the reading, the marking and editing, of those 200 pages of student work per week brought my role as editor of the work of others to an end. In the meantime and without the services of professional editors, I advise readers not to hold their breath waiting for me to do what is a necessary edit. I often edit the writing of others when it is only a page or two, but it is not an exercise I enjoy after having edited student work for more than three decades and my own writing for more than five.

10.4 The Process of Baha’i Review and Review By Others

After more than sixty years(1949-2012), then, of having my writing poured over by others; after nearly fifty years(1964-2012) of having my writing reviewed before its publication by Baha’i reviewing committees and institutions at national and regional as well as local levels of Baha’i administration and even by some individuals and groups at the Bahá'í World Centre in Haifa Israel; after trying to write in a way that would please various groups of people both within the Baha’i community and without by committees and colleagues, professors and tutors, students and teachers at a multitude of educational institutions---before my writing saw the light of day in some in-house publication or public newsletter, some magazine or journal, some newspaper or periodical, I have come to especially enjoy writing on the internet.

The National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Australia Inc., the nationally elected body by the Bahá'í community in Australia does not require writers like myself to have their writing reviewed before it goes onto the internet. The Review Office of the NSA of the Baha’is of the USA has given me permission to post my works on the internet, although they have advised that review is necessary if I want to place any of my writings in book form, in a hard or soft cover, for general and public consumption. My five volume, 2600 page autobiography, has found many a place in whole or in part on the world-wide-web. That same Review Office has reviewed this work, given me permission to place it on the internet but not between the covers of a book. There is much more I could add about the process of Baha’i review, but this short comment on the Baha’i review

process which is still in place is sufficient to include in this discussion of the process of dealing with criticism.

Part 10.5 Dealing With Criticism: An Answering Theology

Critical scholarly comments on my work as well as criticism raised in public or private discussions of less scholarly material, should not necessarily be equated with hostility. Questions and judgments, evaluations and critiques, are perfectly legitimate, indeed, necessary aspects of a person's search for an answer to an intellectual conundrum. Paul Tillich, that great Protestant theologian of the 20th century, once expressed the view that dealing with criticism, a process sometimes called apologetics, was an "answering theology.”6 I have always been attracted to the founder of the Baha'i Faith's exhortations in discussion to "speak with words as mild as milk," with "the utmost leniency and forbearance."7 This form of dialogue, its obvious etiquette of expression and the acute exercise of judgment involved, is difficult for most people when their position is under attack from people who are more articulate, better read and better at arguing both their own position and the position of those with whom they are in dialogue in some critical exchange at some thread at a site on the internet.

I am also aware that, in cases of rude or hostile attack, rebuttal with a harsher tone, that punitive rebuttal, may well be justified, although I prefer humour, irony and even gentle sarcasm rather than hostile written attack in any form. Still, it does not help an apologist to belong to those "watchmen" whom the prophet Isaiah calls "dumb dogs that cannot bark."8 In its essence criticism is often just another form of confrontation, an act of revealing one's true colours, of hoisting the flag, of demonstrating the essential characteristics of one's faith, of one's thought, of one's emotional and intellectual stance in life. “Dialogue should not mean self-denial,” wrote Hans Kung, arguably the greatest of contemporary Catholic apologists.9

The standard of public discussion on controversial topics should be sensitive to what is said and how; it should be sensitive to manner, mode, style, tone and volume. Tact is also essential. Not everything that we know should always be disclosed; not everything that can be disclosed is timely or suited to the ears of the hearer to paraphrase closely one of the Founder of the Baha’i

Faith’s more quoted passages.

To put some of this question of tact, and this topic of personal revelations another way, we don't want all our dirty laundry out on our front lawn for all to see or our secrets blasted over the radio and TV. Perhaps a moderate confessionalism is best here, if confession is required at all. In today’s print and electronic media it seems unavoidable even if only modestly. Much of internet dialogue, though, is far, far, below standards of even a reasonable modesty or literacy as posters “f,” “c” and “s” words abounding and making their way through discussions.

Often the briefest of phraseology, a succinctness that approaches sheer nothingness, and an inarticulateness that has more in common with grunts and sighs as well as whimpers and whims is found at internet sites. So often the language betrays a knowledge of basics deriving from the visual media and little reading. The eye, as one writer put it recently in what I thought was a clever turn of phrase, is so often quicker than the mind. Well, yes and no, I hasten to add on the complex subject of the print and electronic media. Perception and understanding based on the use of the print and electronic media is yet another too complex a subject to deal with here in even the briefest of ways.

Anyway, that's all for now. It's back to the spring winds of Tasmania, about 5 kms from the Bass Straight on the Tamar River. The geography of place is so much simpler than that of the literary, intellectual, philosophical and religious geography that some readers on the internet who engage in complex and not-so-complex discussions are concerned with. Even physical geography, though, has its complexities as those who take a serious interest in the topic of climate change and the worlds of biodiversity and related sciences are fast finding out. Whom the gods would destroy they first make simple and simpler and simpler. I look forward to a dialogue with someone, anyone who is inclined to respond to what I’m sure for some is this overly long post. Here in far-off Tasmania--the last stop before Antarctica, if one wants to get there by some other route than by air or off the end of South America--your response will be gratefully received.-Ron Price, George Town, Tasmania, Australia.----------------------FOOTNOTES--------------------------------------The interwar years: 1919 to 1939

2 For some of the ideas here I am indebted to William S. Hatcher, “The Concept of Spirituality,” Baha’i Studies, Vol. 11, 1982.3 This quotation like many that I and others use can easily be found by the simple process of googling.4 See Elizabeth Friedman’s response to: The White Goddess! from the November 18, 1993 issue of The New York Review of Books and Helen Vendler, “Laura (Riding) Jackson,” February 3, 1994.5 Isaiah Berlin, (1) “Romanes Lecture 1970 on Turgenev: Fathers and Sons.;” and (2) “The Gentle Genius: Turgenev’s Letters selected, translated, and edited by A.V. Knowles, Scribner’s and Sons in The New York Review of Books, 2010. 6 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, U. of Chicago, 1967, Vol.1, p. 6.7 Baha’u’llah, Tablets of Baha'u'llah, Haifa, 1978, pp. 172-173.8 The Bible, Isaiah, 56:10.9 Quoted in Udo Schaefer’s, "Baha'i Apologetics," Baha'i Studies Review, Vol.10, 2001/2.---I HAVE MUCH MORE TO ADD AND, AND WILL IN PART 3 BELOW----

_________________married for 44 years, a teacher for 35, a writer & editor for 12, and a Baha'i for 52(in 2011)

Last edited by RonPrice on Mon Dec 24, 2012 10:29 am, edited 4 times in total.

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RonPrice  Post subject: Re: THANKS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS(Part 3)

Posted: Thu Oct 25, 2012 2:29 pm 

Joined: Mon Jan 24, 2011 10:56 pmPosts: 128

Thanks and acknowledgements to the many places of my employment in the years: 1957-2007

Part 1:

The statement which follows in this section of thanks and

Location: George Town Tasmania Australia Nationality: Canadian

acknowledgements describes: (i) 50 years of job-hunting and job acquisition, (ii) my transition from employment and the job-hunting process to retirement from FT, PT and most casual-volunteer work in the years 1999 to 2009, and (iii) the reinvention of myself as a writer and author, editor and researcher, poet and publisher, online journalist and blogger as the second decade of the 21st century opened.

Hunting for jobs and being jobbed took place from 1957 to 2007, and by the age of 65 I was enjoying two old-age pensions, one from Canada for my work their from 1961 to 1971, and one from Australia. The transition from the job world to retirement and the pursuit of a leisure life devoted to writing took place, for the most part, in the years 1999 to 2005.

During those six years I also gave up PT work and most casual-volunteer work---except for volunteer work associated with the Baha’i community and many online organizations in the areas of: mental health, human relations, the humanities and social sciences, among other disciplines. This statement below will serve as my acknowledgement to those organizations, institutions, and employing authorities that, in so many ways, had an immense impact on my life over half a century. They each and all deserve a place in my statement of thanks and acknowledgements.

The information and details in my resume, a resume I no longer need, or use in any direct sense, in the job-hunting world after fifty years of use, but which I occasionally post on the internet for a range of purposes, should help anyone wanting to know something about my personal and professional background, my writing and my life.

This resume contains information about many organizations and groups, institutions and employing authorities to which I also give thanks as I acknowledge the role they have all played in shaping the direction of my life-narrative. This resume is useful now, in many contexts, but not to assess my suitability for some advertised or unadvertised employment position.

This resume could be useful for some readers in cyberspace to assess the relevance of some statements I make on the internet, statements on a wide variety of topics at a wide variety of

internet sites. If I feel there is a need for readers to have some idea of my background, my credentials and my experience; if I feel that it would be useful for them to have a personal, a historical, a memoiristic, context for my remarks at an internet site, I post this resume. I do so here in this wider statement of thanks and acknowledgements. See Appendix 1 for my CV.

Part 2:

This post, this essay, for it is a sort of essay or article, is a statement, an overview of my job application life. This overview may be of value to those who have to run-the-gauntlet in the job-hunting world, and it is a gauntlet for millions of people. Let there be no mistake about that. My intention is to be of encouragement; to help those who read this statement become more persistent, more optimistic about their own position, a position which is often a bleak one, in a bleak house---especially if those readers are currently unemployed and running that gauntlet.

I never apply for jobs anymore, although I have registered at several internet sites whose role is, among other things, to help people get jobs. Perhaps this act of registration at such sites on the world-wide-web is an act in which I engage out of some sense of nostalgia, out of habit, out of an inability to stop applying for jobs after five decades of persistent and strenuous efforts in that direction. These decades of efforts were aimed at obtaining jobs, better jobs, jobs more suited to my talents, jobs that paid better, jobs that freed me from impossible situations which I had become involved with, some work-scene in which I was ensconced--along the road of life.

I stopped applying for full-time jobs in September 2007 and part-time ones in December 2003. I also disengaged myself from most volunteer or casual work by 2005 so that I could occupy myself as: an independent scholar and researcher, a writer and author, a poet and a publisher, an online journalist and blogger, indeed, what some might call a man of leisure in the Greek tradition and which I describe in more detail elsewhere.

At the age of 68, then, and on two old-age pensions, one from Canada where I worked from 1957 to 1971 at FT and PT jobs, and one from Australia, I am in one of the formal conditions, one

of the many definitions, of old age. I am now in the middle years(65-75) of late adulthood(60-80), as one model that the human development theorists in the field of psychology use to define this period in the lifespan. Other models refer to this period as old-age.

I have become self-employed in the many roles I outlined, I listed, above. None of these roles pay any money, although I did receive royalties for one of my books at an internet site. The royalties were for six years of the sale of that book at that site. I received a cheque for $1.49. Years ago, back in the 1970s if I recall correctly, I could have bought one of those chocolate frogs for, at the time and again if I recall correctly, 25 cents. But at $2.00, their current price, this money, these royalties, only allow me to buy one frog if I add an extra 51 cents from my money supply.

Part 3:

I have gradually come to this current, some would say, penurious role in the years after I left full-time employment in 1999, more than a dozen years ago. The pensions I receive total $1200 a fortnight; my house is paid for and so it is that my wife and I are comfortable, if not affluent enough to engage in much retail therapy. Not being occupied with earning a living and giving myself to 60 to 80 hours a week on average at a job as well as to various community responsibilities, as was the case in the three decades from 1969 to 1999; marked a turning point in my life.

I became able to devote my time to a much more extensive involvement in writing and reading books and articles of my own choice, and not material that was the choice of others and part of the requirement, the responsibilities, of my job. For this reading material and the publishing of my writing I have the internet to thank: Google, Microsoft and other search engines and cyberspace organizations.

To publish one’s writing has long been a sign of culture but, with the internet, I’m not so sure one can still say this since every man and his dog is putting stuff in cyberspace. Not all of it, to say the least, is a service to literature.

The ancient Greeks believed leisure was much more than free

time. It was free time well used, free time with a moral mission. In the Politics, Aristotle(384-322) makes this arresting assertion: “The first principle of all action is leisure…. Leisure is better than occupation and is its end; and therefore the question must be asked, what ought we to do when at leisure? Clearly we ought not to be amusing ourselves, for then amusement would be the end of life.” Aristotelians see human time divided into three major spheres: (1) working for a living, (2) recovering from working for a living, and (3) leisure time.

Leisure is the highest use of time. It is the antithesis of "wasting time" or "killing time" with diversions and amusements. Nor is it rest and relaxation; the downtime we need to recover from work should really be considered an extension of work. After several years of retirement from the different kinds of work which involved me from 1957 to 2007--from FT, PT, casual and volunteer work--a period in which I recovered from the effects of half a century of jobs, I have begun to enter, sensibly and insensibly, by subtle and not-so-subtle degrees, Aristotle’s third major division of time into which life can be divided.

After nearly fifty years of the first two kinds of work I am finally free to pursue leisure in the recreational, in the old, in the Greek, sense of the word, a sense that is indispensable to achieving our human potential. In the last decade or so I have reinvented myself for that leisure-life. Writing is for most of its votaries a solitary, hopefully stimulating, but not always pleasurable leisure-time, part-time or full-time pursuit. In my case, in these middle years(65-75) of late adulthood(60-80), writing and its companion activities: research and reading, editing and poetizing, publishing and scholarship, has become full-time about 40 to 60 hours a week.

Part 4:

These activities are for me, and for the most part, enriching and enjoyable pursuits. I have replaced my former paid employment and extensive activity with people in community with a form of work which is also a form of leisure, namely, as I say: writing and reading, independent scholarship—the activities listed above. Not all is easy-sailing on the western-front, or on any front, though: health issues still abound; money is, at worst, an annoying tick and the inner battle of life, the only real one which

we all face, still goes on.

Inevitably the style of one's writing and what one reads is a reflection of the person, their experience and, often, their philosophy. I have set out a summary of my writing, my employment experience, my resume, in an attachment, or an addition to this brief essay, this introductory statement, this commentary on the job application process which occupied my life for five decades: 1957-2007.

If as that famous, although not always highly regarded, psychologist Carl Jung writes: we are what we do, then some of what I was and am can be found in that attachment, that resume, that statement, and its several appendices. That document may seem over-the-top as they say these days since it now occupies some 30 pages and many more pages if its appendices are also included. See Appendices 1 to 4 below for my CV.

Half a century of various forms of employment as well as community, leisure and volunteer activity in the professional and not-so-professional world, all that time in many towns, working for and in institutions, and a variety of venues and locations across two continents, produced a great pile of stuff, literally millions of words. It also produced what used to be called and still is by several different names: one’s curriculum vitae, one’s CV, one’s bio-data sheet, one’s resume, one’s life-narrative, life-story, storyline.

This document is now, at least as I see it, more of the latter, more of a lifeline, a life-narrative, a memoir, an autobiography-of-sorts. I use it to engage in a form of social activism in cyberspace. It is a form of activism which is an extension of half a century of social activism, 1957 to 2007. Which I describe elsewhere in my writing, my many autobiographical statements.

I have made the list of this stuff available to readers of this account, this essay, this inclusion in a list of my thanks and acknowledgements. I update these many pages to include recent writing projects I have completed, or am in the process of completing, during these first years of my retirement from full-time, part-time and most volunteer activity.

My resume has always been the piece of writing, the statement,

the document, the entry ticket which has opened up the possibilities of another adventure, another bit of gadding about, another slice of a quasi-pioneering-travelling, of a peripatetic existence, a moving from town to town, from one state or province to another, from one country to another, from one piece of God's, or gods', Earth to another piece of it. And so it was that, in the process of job-hunting, I was able to come to work in another organization, gain entry to another portion of my life and enjoy, or not enjoy, a new world and a new landscape with a whole new set of people and experiences, some familiar and some not so. I was able to engage in planting of seeds of a new way of life, a way of life I just began to enter in the 1950s.

The process I describe here, I have often thought, is somewhat like a modern form of a traditional rite-de-passage. To some extent I came to take on, in the process of changing jobs, what often seemed like another personality, another me in the long road to discover if, indeed, there was a Real Me underneath all this coming and going. I'm sure this process will continue, will also be the case in all its many forms in these years of my late adulthood(60-80) and old age(80++), if I last that long and should, for some reason, movement to yet another place or, indeed, from place to place be necessary to continue for some reason I cannot, as yet, anticipate.

Part 5:

This continued movement, though, seems highly unlikely as I go through these years of late adulthood and head into the last stages of my life, from sunset and early evening to night’s first hours and then, finally, the last hours of night, the final syllables of my recorded time. This process, this rite de passage, expressed in the form of yet another job in another place seems, for the moment, to have come to an end. Time, of course, will tell. See Appendix 1 for my CV.

The last eight years(60-68) are, as I indicated above, the first ones of late adulthood, at least by one of the models of the lifespan. In this first dozen years of my retirement(1999 to 2012), I have been able to write to a much greater extent than I had ever been able to do in my adolescence(1957-1964), those years of my early(1965-1984) and middle(1984-1999) adulthood when student life and job, family and the demands of various

community projects kept my nose to the grindstone, as they say colloquially in many parts of the world.

With the final unloading of much of the volunteer work as well which I took on when I first retired, in the years from 1999 to 2005; with the gradual cessation of virtually the entire apparatus and process of job-application by 2007; with my last child having left home in 2005; with a more settled home environment than I’ve ever had--by 2007---and with a new medication for the bipolar disorder that afflicted my life since my teens, also by 2007---the remaining years of my late adulthood beckon bright with promise.

As I indicated briefly above, though, all is not clear-sailing for rarely in life is everything clear sailing, at least in my own life—and I suspect this is the case in most if not all of our lives, if we are honest about our experience down life’s road. My resume reflects my many shifts in role, in my lifespan’s activity-base, and it lists many of the writing projects I’ve been able to complete in this first decade or more of independent scholarship and full-time writing.

The process of frequent moves, living in another town, and learning new jobs which was my pattern for fifty years, 1949 to 1999, is not everyone's style, modus operandi or modus vivendi--to use two still commonly used Latin phrases---at least by some. Many millions of people live and die in the same town, city or state and their life's adventure takes place within that physical region, the confines of a relatively small place, a domain, a bailiwick as politicians often call their electorate. Many people, indeed millions, have very few jobs in their lifetime. Millions of others have no job at all.

Physical movement is not essential to psychological and spiritual growth, nor is a long list of jobs, although a great degree of inner change, extensive inner shifting, is inevitable from a person’s childhood and teens through to their late adulthood and old age---even if they sat all their lives on the head of a pin and never moved from the parental nest. That reference to the head of a pin was one of the theologico-philosophical metaphors associated with angels and often used in medieval times. This metaphor has interesting literary applications to the job-hunting process and movement from place to place, but I will leave that

play on words for another time.

Part 6:

This process of extensive change in people’s lives is even more true in the recent decades of our modern age at this climacteric of history in which change is about the only thing one can take as a constant--or so we are often led to believe because it is so often said in the electronic media. For many millions of people during the half century 1957 to 2007, my years of being jobbed and applying for jobs, the world was their oyster, not so much in the manner of a tourist, although there was plenty of that, but rather in terms of working lives which came to be seen increasingly in a global context.

This was true for me during those years when I was looking for amusement, education and experience, some stimulating vocation and avocation, some employment security and comfort. These were my adventurous years in a new form of travelling-pioneering, globe-trotting, pathfinding of sorts, as part of history’s long story, my applying-for-job days, some five decades from the 1950s to the first decade of the new millennium. My resume altered many times, of course, during those fifty years. It is now, for the most part and as I indicated above, hardly ever used in these years of my retirement and especially since 2007, except as an information and bio-data vehicle for interested readers, 99.9% of whom are on the internet at its plethora of sites.

This document, as I say above, a document that used to be called a curriculum vitae or a CV, until the 1970s, at least in the region where I lived and dwelled and had my being, is a useful backdrop for those examining my writing, especially my poetry, and as an inclusion here with my “thanks and acknowledgements.” Some poets and writers, artists and creative people in many fields, though, regard their CV, resume, bio-data, lifeline, life-story, life-narrative, personal background as irrelevant, simply not necessary for people to know, in order for them to appreciate their artistic work. These people take the philosophical, indeed, somewhat religious position, that they are not what they do or, to put it a little differently and a little more succinctly, "they are not their jobs."

Part 7:

I frequently use this resume at various internet locations on the World Wide Web, again as I indicated above, when I want to provide some introductory background on myself. I could list many new uses after decades of a use which had a multifactorial motivational base: to help me get a job, to get a new job, to help me make more money, to enrich my experience and to add something refreshing to my life as it was becoming increasingly stale for so many reasons in the day-to-day grind, to help me get away from supervisors and from situations I could not handle or were a cause of great stress, to help me flee from settings where my health was preventing me from continuing successfully in my job, to help me engage in new forms of adventure, pioneering, amusement, indeed, to help me survive life’s tests in the myriad forms that afflict the embattled spirit, et cetera, et cetera, inter alia, inter alia, inter alter, inter alter.

The use of the resume always saved me from having to reinvent the wheel, so to speak. One could photocopy it and mail it out with the covering letter to anyone and everyone. The photocopier became a common feature of the commercial, business and government world in the 1960s just as I began to send out the first of the literally thousands of job applications that I would over the next forty years: 1967-2007. One didn’t have to write the application out each time; one did not have to “say it again Sam” in resume after resume to the point of utter tedium. The photocopier itself evolved as did the gestetner, one of the photocopier’s predecessors. See Appendix 1 for my CV.

There were many ways one could copy one's basic data. For a time, my mother used to type applications for me back in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I slowly became entrenched in the job market as the 1960s rolled-on. This entrenchment was so very much like trench-warfare back in that Great War of 1914 to 1918--when millions died, were simply mowed down on the European continent in a process whose meaning we have yet to fully plumb. But, however little or much we have come to understand the meaning and significance of WW1, we--my generation--have come to experience a new warfare. Henry Miller(1891-1980), one of the first to get away with using the "F" word in his trilogy: Sexus, Nexus and Plexus, expressed back in 1941 part of the new warfare of my generation. It is, he

wrote, "a war far more terrible than the destruction" of the first two wars, the first two phases, with fires that "will rage until the very foundations of this present world crumble."

Part 8:

It is not my intention to document any of these three phases of the destructive calamity that visited humankind in the century we have just left, for this documentation has been done in intimate detail elsewhere, both visually, orally and in print. I do not document, but I frequently refer, to these three phases. I have different purposes here than mere historical documentation. My job application process, and other aspects of my community and individual life, was clearly, at least as I look back over half a century of the process, part of that third war. This perspective also places that half century in a wider sociological and historical, psychological and cultural context.

Applying for jobs as extensively as I did in the days before the email and the internet came on board in the early 1990s, became an activity that sometimes resembled a dry-wretch. Four to five thousand job applications from 1957 to 2007 is a lot of applications! At least since the mid-1990s, a few clicks of one’s personal electronic-computer system and some aspect of life’s game could go on, or could come to a quick end, over a set of wires under the ground, the electronic world of cyberspace.

During that half-century of job-hunting years I applied, as I say, for some four to five thousand jobs, an average of two a week for each of all those years! This is a guesstimation, of course, as accurate a guesstimation as I can calculate for this fifty year period. The great bulk, 99.9% of those thousands of letters involved in this vast, detailed, ultimately rewarding but, from time to time, exhausting and frustrating process, I did not keep. I did keep a small handful of them, perhaps half a dozen of all those letters. I kept them in a file: Letters: Section VII, Sub-Section X, a part of my autobiographical work which is now entitled Pioneering Over Five Epochs.

This autobiographical work Pioneering Over Five Epochs goes for 2600 pages in five volumes and, due to its length, will not likely be read by many while I occupy space on this mortal coil. Much of my autobiography, portions of it, are now found on the

internet at a multitude of sites where in nano-micro-seconds anyone can find portions of my writing in addition to my autobiography or my resume. I am known in a multitude of microcosms, microworlds, miniworlds, where neither name nor fame can reach me, and where all the problems that go with any degree of celebrity status in our fame-hungry world will pass me by into cyberspace, into an electronic ether.

Part 9:

Given the thousands of hours over so many years devoted to the job-hunting process; given the importance of this key to my venture across two continents, two marriages, with at least two personalities being the bipolar person that I am; given that this new style of pioneering and voyaging-via-employment, this particular form of venture, adventure, in our time has been at the core of my life with so much that has radiated around this core; given the amount of paper produced, the amount of energy expended and the amount of money earned and spent in this great exercise of survival and revival; given the amount of writing done in the context of those various jobs, some of this employment-related correspondence seemed to warrant a corner in the written story of my life. It deserves a place in this “thanks and acknowledgements” statement. See Appendix 1 for my CV.

It seemed appropriate, at least it was my desire as I recently entered the years when I no longer applied for jobs, to write this short statement(not short enough, I can hear them say) fitting all those thousands of unkept resumes and job-applications into a larger context as well as all those letters, emails and internet posts written in connection with trying to make connections with others, into some larger framework of action and meaning. For those who would like to read more on this theme, I invite them to go to the internet site: Baha’i Library Online>Secondary Source Material>Personal Letters>The Letters of Ron Price: 1961-2011. If such readers prefer, they can simply google: Ron Price Letters and more of this story will become available with only a few clicks.

THANKS TO GOOGLE AND MICROSOFT AND MANY OTHERS IN RELATION TO THE WWW

Part 1:

In 1998 two Stanford graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founded Google.com, a search engine that used a better technology than had previously existed for indexing and retrieving information from the immense miscellany of the World Wide Web and for ranking the Web sites that contained this information according to their relevance to particular queries based on the number of links from the rest of the Internet to a given item. This PageRank system transformed the Web from its original purpose as a scientists’ grapevine. From the random babble the Web had been it soon became a searchable resource providing factual data of variable quality to millions of users. I was one as I retired from FT work in 1999.

It was the exigencies of commerce that transformed Google itself from an ingenious search technology without a business plan to a hugely profitable enterprise offering a variety of services including e-mail, news, video, maps, and its current, expensive, and utterly heroic, if not quixotic, effort to digitize the entire public domain’s contents of the books and other holdings of major libraries. This new program aims to provide users, wherever in the world Internet connections exist, access to millions of titles while enabling libraries themselves to serve millions of users without adding a foot of shelf space or incurring a penny of delivery expense.

In the first year after I retired from FT work, July 1999 to July 2000, Google officially became the world's largest search engine. With its introduction of a billion-page index by June 2000 much of the internet's content became available in a searchable format at one search engine. In the next several years, 2000-2005, as I was retiring from PT work as well as casual and most volunteer activity that had occupied me for decades, Google entered into a series of partnerships and made a series of innovations that brought their vast internet enterprise billions of users in the international marketplace. Again, I was one.

Part 2:

Not only did Google have billions of users, but internet users like myself throughout the world gained access to billions of web documents in Google’s growing library. The information revolution set off in the closing decade of the 20th century by the

invention of the World Wide Web transformed irreversibly much of human activity. Internet communication, which has the ability to transmit in seconds the entire contents of libraries that took centuries of study to amass, vastly enriched the intellectual life of anyone able to use it, as well as providing sophisticated training in a broad range of professional fields. It was a finer and more useful library than any of those in the small towns where I would spend my retirement in the years ahead. It was also a library with a myriad locations in which I could interact with others and engage in learning and teaching in ways I had never dreamt of in the first five decades of my life as a student and teacher: 1949-1999.

This electronic system of communication has built a sense of shared community among its users, a community of individuals who are impatient of either geographic or cultural distances. This description of the sense of shared community created by the internet is an evolving one with increasing efficiency and effectiveness as the years go on. It is interesting to note that Friendster began in 2001, LinkedIn and MySpace in 2003, and Facebook in 2004 four of the more popular communities.

The internet is a cornucopia of accurate, well-argued and knowledgeable information. But it is also a place for specious and spurious, inaccurate and beguiling arguments. People who know little about an issue are often easily taken-in on the internet. Many often believe a u-tube post they can see to one that requires study and reading on their part. The internet, like many forms of technology before it, is both boon and beast, asset and debit, to the lives of its participants. Indeed, a quite separate section of this statement on my cyberspace experience could be devoted to the negative and positive impacts of the internet.

Part 3:

In 1994, at the age of fifty and as I was beginning to eye my retirement from FT work as a teacher and lecturer, Microsoft launched its public internet web domain with a home page. Website traffic climbed steadily and episodically in the years 1995 to 1999. Daily site traffic of 35,000 in mid-1996 grew to 5.1 million visitors by 1999 when I had taken a sea-change and retired to Tasmania at the age of 55. Throughout 1997 and 1998 the site grew up and went from being the web equivalent of a

start-up company to a world-class organization.

I retired from FT work, then, at just the right time in terms of the internet capacity to provide me with: (a) access to information by the truckload on virtually any topic; and (b) learning and teaching opportunities, both direct and indirect, far in excess of any I had had in my previous years as a student and teacher. My first website in 1997 was part of the initial flourish of web sites and search engines in the mid-1990s. The second edition of my site was in 2001. A world, a succession, of brand names have made electronic communication an everyday experience. Web browsers such as Netscape, Internet Explorer, and Safari, as well as search engines such as Yahoo and Google, the latter founded in 1998, all came on board just as I was retiring from 50 years in classrooms as a teacher and student.

This new technology had also developed sufficiently to a stage that gave me the opportunity, the capacity to post, write, indeed, “publish” is quite an appropriate term, on the internet at the same time. From 1999 to 2005, as I say, I released myself from FT, PT, casual and most volunteer work, and Google and Microsoft offered more and more technology for my writing activity for my work in a Cause that I had devoted my life to since my late teens and early twenties.

Part 4:

The Internet has become emblematic in many respects of globalisation. Its planetary system of fibre optic cables and instantaneous transfer of information are considered, by many accounts, one of the essential keys to understanding the transformation of the world into some degree of order and the ability to imagine the world as a single, global space. The Internet has widely been viewed as an essential catalyst of contemporary globalisation and it has been central to debates about what globalisation means and where it will lead.

There are now several hundred thousand readers, as I say above, engaged in parts of my internet tapestry, my jig-saw puzzle, my literary product, my creation, my immense pile of words across the internet--and hundreds of people with whom I correspond on occasion as a result. This amazing technical facility, the world wide web, has made this literary success possible. If my writing

had been left in the hands of the traditional hard and soft cover publishers, where it had been without success when I was employed full time as a teacher, lecturer, adult educator and casual/volunteer teacher from 1981 to 2001, these results would never have been achieved.

I have been asked how I have come to have so many readers at my website and on my internet tapestry of writing that I have created across the world-wide-web. My literary product is just another form of published writing in addition to the traditional forms in the hands of publishers. The literally hundreds of thousands of readers, perhaps even millions since it has become impossible to keep even an accurate account of all those who come across what I write, I have at locations on my tapestry of prose and poetry, a tapestry I have sewn in a loose-fitting warp and weft across the internet, are found at over 8000 websites where I have registered: forums, message boards, discussion sites, blogs, locations for debate and the exchange of views.

The 1000s of internet sites are locations where I place essays, articles, books, ebooks, poems and other genres of writing. I have registered at this multitude of sites, placed the many forms of my literary output there and engaged in discussions with literally thousands of people, little by little and day by day over the last decade. I enjoy these results without ever having to deal with publishers as I did for two decades without any success. I thank my many readers and acknowledge with great appreciation this new tool for communication.

Part 5:

There are a number of groups and individuals to whom I am indebted in connection with my work on the WWW. Graham Nicholson for supporting me in the early stages of the 4th edition of my website which has now been in cyberspace for nearly two years. Define Studio, an internet design company, for designing my present website and, of course, the millions of readers who come to what I write.

The field of science

The field of science has provided the abundant material and technological civilization that I have enjoyed in my lifetime.

During 2001-2002, two years after I had taken an early retirement at the age of 55, I opened a file for the many science subjects. The material was collected, for the most part, after my retirement from FT and PT teaching in the years 1999 to 2002. I have never had files for these subjects, although in the 1980s, while writing articles on various Baha'i buildings, I did open a file on architecture. In 2008 I extended the science file to include many of its sub-disciplines in the physical, applied, and biological sciences.

My life story, life narrative, life experience with these disciplines goes back, as far as I can remember, to grade seven, 1956/7, when I was twelve and on the puberty cusp. “Egg, larva, pupa and adult,” are the first words I remember from that science course, more than half a century ago, although my maternal grandfather and uncle had an interest in science and they were part of my life until 1958.

I continued taking science courses from grade seven to grade thirteen in the academic year 1962-1963 when I studied chemistry. I took one science course in my second year at university, 1964-1965. That course was in the philosophy of science; at teachers’ college, 1966-1967, I also took one course in the field of science---teaching science to primary school children. As a primary school teacher I taught science from 1968 to 1971.

Science, of course, is part of everyone’s life in this age, but the formal collection of information and the study of the many relevant disciplines in the vast field of science did not begin until the early years of the new millennium during my retirement from FT, PT and casual-volunteer work. My second wife, Chris, took an active interest in scientific subjects. She was a qualified maths and science secondary school teacher and over nearly four decades I have benefitted from her interest in the many science subjects and our unnumbered conversations. Her collection of books and articles is extensive while mine, even now after only a dozen years of gathering articles, is not large.

The social and behavioural sciences and the humanities have kept me busy for decades. These are younger and inexact sciences, and they are still the major focus of my study. The sciences are now playing a larger part in my studies in these

years of my retirement from the job world and endless community activities and responsibilities. It did seem timely to write this introduction after 12 years of an ingathering of print resources on some 15 sub-sections of the sciences now in 2 volumes.

I have always liked the Baha’i historian Douglas Martin’s view of science as: “the systematic, the disciplined, use of the rational faculty.” In this sense, I like to think that my life has had a scientific turn in this last half century outside its formal study, my teaching of it as a subject and my general interest in its many disciplines.-------------------------------------------------------------------APPENDIX #1:RESUME AND RELEVANT APPENDICES

Preamble:

In addition to my standard resume found below, my Baha’i resume is also found here(Appendix 4), as is: (a) a list of subjects I taught while lecturing and teaching in post-secondary schools and colleges in Australia, (b) a list of essays and articles I have published and (c) some relevant bio-data. Once used to apply for jobs from the late 50s to the early years of this third millennium, this evolving document is now an archive that I update occasionally for internet use in these middle years(65-75) of my late adulthood, a period developmental psychologists generally define as one’s stage in the lifespan from the age of 60 to 80.

This document is 30 pages in length in a font 14. Readers with little time are advised to skim and/or scan the more than 7000 words contained therein as suits their taste, interests and needs. I have placed it here in this thanks and acknowledgements statement since I must thank the dozens of people who are part and parcel of what is found below: writers and authors, teachers and lecturers, mentors and poets, scholars and more people than I could possibly or desirably list here.

This document was sent to the National Baha’i Archives of Australia(NBAA) to assist in providing a context for the collection of my letters(1960 to 2010) which I sent to them in 2010. This document could also be useful in providing: (i) a base of facts for anyone writing my obituary after my passing in the

years to come, or (ii) a context for a statement of my thanks and acknowledgements._________________________________________________A. My Ascribed Roles in the Lifespan: grandson and son, nephew and cousin, father and step-father, uncle and husband, grandfather and step-grandfather, boy and male, among many others.B. My Achieved Roles in the Lifespan: writer and author, editor and researcher, poet and publisher, essayist and online journalist, blogger and independent scholar, teacher and lecturer, student and tutor, as well as many other roles. These other roles are found in section 4 below, roles I held at different times since beginning my employment life in 1957._________________________________________________1.1 Academic Qualifications* Bachelor of Arts(Sociology)McMaster UniversityHamilton Ontario Canada 1966

*B. Ed.(Primary School Training)Windsor Teachers’ CollegeWindsor Ontario Canada 1967

* MA(Qualifying Thesis)University of QueenslandSt Lucia QueenslandAustralia 19881.2 Professional Qualifications* Post Graduate Diploma in EducationWindsor UniversityWindsor Ontario Canada 1967

* Certificate of Integrated StudiesEducation Department of OntarioToronto Ontario Canada 1970

1.3 Further Studies(Qualifications Partly Completed)* Advanced Diploma in EducationUniversity of Adelaide Adelaide South Australia 1973-comparative education unit

* Master of Educational Administration

University of New England Armadale NSW 1975 to 1978-comparative education, organization theory and practice, educationaladministration, open education and history of education units

* Diploma in Personnel Management and Industrial RelationsTasmanian College of Advanced EducationLaunceston Tasmania 1980-organizational behaviour-3 units

* Graduate Diploma in Multicultural EducationArmadale College of Advanced EducationArmadale NSW 1983-language and society unit; presented paper at residential school.

* Graduate Diploma in Religious EducationSouth Australian College of Advanced EducationAdelaide South Australia 1984 to 1986-Religious symbols and symbolism, sociology of education, the Bibleas literature, moral education, Islam and principles of religious education units.*MA(Qualifying thesis)-The Routinization of Charisma in the Baha’i Faith

1.4 Transcripts and Grades* Transcripts are available on request, originals or copies.* A summary of my academic record would read: Matriculation(B), BA(C), Dip. Ed.(B), Post-Graduate Studies(2 distinctions, 5 credits, 1 pass(B) and 10 pass(C) grades.

1.5 Teaching Qualifications and Registrations* Teaching Certificate(Primary) Windsor Teachers’ College 1967.* Registered with the Primary, Secondary and Technical Teachers Registration Boards of Victoria in 1975.* Granted permanency with DEVET (now Dept of Training and Employment) in Western Australia in June 1992.* Teaching, lecturing and tutoring in universities and colleges of advanced education, as I did from 1974 to 1978, did not require any formal registration. One got one’s job on the basis of qualifications and, of course, an interview.

1.6 Professional Memberships and Eligibility

* Secondary School Teachers Union of Western Australia: 1987 to 1999. Branch secretary for four of those years at Hedland College and the Thornlie Campus of the Southeast Metropolitan College of Tafe now Swan College of Tafe.* Australian Association of Educational Administration: 1975 and 1976* Australian Institute of Welfare Workers, eligible but did not become a member.--------------PART 4 OF THIS THREAD TO COME NEXT--------------

_________________married for 44 years, a teacher for 35, a writer & editor for 12, and a Baha'i for 52(in 2011)

Last edited by RonPrice on Mon Dec 24, 2012 10:39 am, edited 6 times in total.

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RonPrice  Post subject: Re: THANKS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS(Part 4)

Posted: Thu Oct 25, 2012 2:42 pm 

Joined: Mon Jan 24, 2011 10:56 pmPosts: 128Location: George Town Tasmania Australia Nationality: Canadian

2. PUBLICATIONS:

2.1 Articles and Reviews: Journals/Websites

1.*Essays, Interviews and Articles on the Internet at: 1.1 The Baha'i Academic Resource Library also entitled Bahá'í Library Online has several hundred items posted there, 1995 to 2010; and at 1.2 An estimated 8000 other internet sites containing many millions of my words at: posts, essays, articles, ebooks, books, debates and general responses to the writings of others: 2001-2012.2. * "A History of the Baha'i Faith in the Northern Territory:

1947-1997," Northern Lights, 32 Instalments, 2000-2003.3. * Periodic Articles in "Newsletters," Regional Teaching Committees of the NSA of the Baha'is of Australia Inc., 1971-2001.4. * Periodic Articles/Letters, Baha'i Canada and The Australian Baha'i Bulletin now The Australian Baha’i: 1971-2006. 5. * "Memorials of the Faithful," Baha'i Studies Review, September 2001.6. * "Review of Two Chapbooks: The Poetry of Tony Lee," Arts Dialogue, June 2001.7. * "Asia and the Lost Poems: The Poetry of Anthony Lee," Art 'n Soul, a Website for Poets and Poetry, January 2000.8. * "The Passionate Artist," Australian Baha'i Studies, Vol.2, 2000.9. * "Memorials of the Faithful," Australian Baha'i Studies, Vol.1, No.2, 1999, p.102 and uplifting words.org, 2005-6.10. * "Poetry of Ron Price: An Overview," ABS Newsletter, No.38, September 1997.11. * "Thomas a Kempis, Taherzadeh and the Day of Judgement," Forum, Vol.3, No 1, 1994, pp.1-3. 12. * "Forward", An Introduction to Occasions of Grace: Poems and Portrayals, Roger White, George Ronald, Oxford, 1993.13. * "The Inner Life and the Environment", a paper presented at Murdoch University at the Baha’i Studies Conference in April 1990 and published in The Environment: Our Common Heritage, Monograph No.5, 1994, pp.118-131.14. * "The History of a Dream: A Tribute to Persistence", Office of Tafe Publication in Western Australia, 1988, pp.5-6.15. * "Response", Dialogue, Vol.2, No.1, 1986, pp.3-4.16. * "Homeward Bound", Dialogue, Vol.1, No. 1, 1985, pp.37-38.17. * "Happiness", Herald of the South, Vol.11, 1985, pp.26-27.18. * "Perspectives on Multiculturalism", Residential School Papers: May to July 1983, Centre for Multicultural Studies, Armidale CAE, pp.24-28.19. * "Who Plays the Music in Your Dreams?", Dream International, 1983, Vol.1, No.3, p.31.20. * "Consultative Decision Making", Northern News, Darwin, December, 1983.21. "The Baha'i Faith: A Series of 4 Articles," Student Magazine, Ballarat College of Advanced Education, 1977-78.22. “The Baha’i Faith: 4 Articles,” Tasmanian CAE Publication, Launceston, 1974.

23. Many other published works: the list is too long to include here.

2.2. Articles and Reviews: Newspapers

150 articles of about 800 words each have appeared in the following newspapers and magazines in 1983-1986.Katherine Advertiser.....150,000 wordsKatherine Times................2,000 wordsBarkley Regional..................300 wordsLaunceston Examiner...........300 wordsThe Tasmanian.................... 300 words The Northern News .............300 wordsCosmos.................................500 wordsZirius....................................500 wordsBallarat CAE.....................2,500 words(5 articles)Newspapers on Internet...20,000 words

In 2005 I began posting items at online newspapers and now have postings at:

2.3 Online Newspapers and Journals

1. The New York Times2. Nashuatelegraph3. International Viewpoint4. Persian Journal5. The Australian6. Career Journal7. The Canadian Poetry Association8. World Chronicle9. Contemporary Literature10. European History11. Medieval History12. Writers in Touch13. Arkansas Poets Society14. Dream Journal15. Many others, too many to list here.

2.4 Online Message Boards, Blogs and Forums:

Approximately 8000 online sites. List available on request at my email address:

ronprice9@gmail.com2.5 Poetry

Poetry published in the following publications:

1. Artgender2. The Southern Gazette3. Herald of the South4. Katherine Advertiser5. four W No.6: Selected Works-Charles Sturt University 6. The Southern Gazette7. Australian Baha’i Bulletin8. The Liquid Mirror 9. Baha'i Canada10. ABS Newsletter11. Australian Baha'i Studies Journal12. World Order: Anthology2.6 Online Poetry Sites

1. Approximately 400 internet sites have poetry that I have written in one or more of the several sub-sections that occupy each of these sites. An estimated forty poetry magazines on the Internet have published my poetry.2. A comprehensive list of these poetry sites where I have work published is available on request, if required.

2.7 Manuals

1. Twenty-five in-house training manuals in the management studies program for Headland College and the Open College of Tafe in Katherine in the Northern Territory.(70 page average length of each manual: 1982-1986)2. Sixty study guides for the Perth Campus of the Central Metropolitan College of Tafe and the Thornlie Campus of the Southeast Metropolitan College of Tafe in a wide range of General Studies and Human Service subjects.(40 pages average length: 1988-1999) Note: these colleges now have different names.3. Six manuals for classes at The School for Seniors in George Town: 1999-2005.4. See the list of subjects taught in Appendix B below. This list includes the subjects for which these manuals were produced. Note: Total numbers of manuals produced are approximate only.

2.8 Books, Essays and Letters

2.8.1 Books Complete: Published:

1. The Emergence of a Baha'i Consciousness in World Literature: The Poetry of Roger White. This is a collection of essays written from 1988 to 2002: 150,000 words, 300 pages(approx).* Published by Juxta Publications and The Baha'i Academics Resource Library. Can be downloaded free of charge at either of these sites. Also available as an ebook at Lulu.com and eBookMall. A soft cover copy in several volumes is available at Lulu.com2. Pioneering Over Four Epochs: An Autobiographical Study and a Study in Autobiography, 6th edition: 2600 pages in 5 volumes at: (1) Lulu.com (2) has been reviewed by the Review Office of the NSA of the Baha’is of the USA with permission to post on the internet; and (3) eBookMall which has this book in eBook form in an 1800 page abridged version for $2.98; (c) many parts of this work are found at innumerable sites on the internet; and (d) a hard copy of an 800 page 3rd edition of this book has been at the Baha’i World Centre Library since 2004.

2.8.2 Books Incomplete: Unpublished:

1. Twelve attempts at a novel in the years 1983 to 2005. The longest single attempt was 30,000 words. All of these attempts are kept on file and are available on request, if desired.

2. Several of my internet postings at the Baha’i Library Online could be made into books. These postings are found at several sub-sections of this site under:

Essays and internet postings

2.1 Poems and Poetry2.2 Histories, memoirs, interviews2.3 Biographies2.4 Personal Letters2.5 Articles, papers, unpublished2.6 Books, Articles and Other Media

2.8.3 Essays Complete: Unpublished:

1. An autobiographical collection of over 200 essays: 1979 to 20112. See section 2.8.2 above sub-section 2.1

2.8.4 Essays Complete: Published:

1. Essays 1977-2011: A collection of over 300 essays. Too long to include here.

2.8.5 Letters Complete: Unpublished:

1. 1961-2011. A collection of 50 volumes(arch-lever files and 2-ring binders) of letters, emails and posts on the internet, an estimated 5000 items. See Baha’i Library Online, listed above in section 2.8.2(2.5) for a lengthy introduction to this collection.

2.6 Booklets

2.6.1 Complete: Unpublished:

1. 67 booklets of poetry: 100-120 poems per booklet, written from 1980 to 2011, over 6700 poems.

2.7 Websites

1. Several million words in several genres: essays, narrative, interviews, book reviews, poetry, letters, emails and a wide range of various types of postings and responses to the writing of others are located at over 8000 websites on the Internet. 2. See the 4th edition of my website at: http://www.ronpriceepoch.com This is a site which went from some 450,000 words and the equivalent of six books at 75,000 words/book in my 3rd edition to: a 4th edition which went online in March 2011 and contains/gives readers access to a total of 50 books at 80,000 words/book. 3. An outline of the developmental process that led to this slowly acquired publishing outlet and a list of some 8000 sites is available under separate cover by writing to me at my email address: ronprice9@gmail.com

2.8 Collections of My Poetry and Essays in Libraries:

2.8.1 Poetry

1. Baha'i World Centre Library, Baha'i World Centre, PO Box 31 001, Haifa Israel: 5000 poems.2. Canadian National Baha'i Centre Library, 7200 Leslie Street, Thornhill, Ontario, L#T 6L8 Canada, 300 poems.3. Australian National Baha'i Centre Library, Sydney, Australia, 300 poems.4. Regional Baha'i Council of Tasmania, PO Box 1126, GPO Hobart, Tasmania, 7001, Baha'i State Library of Tasmania, Hobart, 300 poems.5. Baha'i Centre of Learning Library, C/-LSA of the Baha'is of Melville, PO Box 628, Applecross, Western Australia, 6153, 200 poems.6. Local Spiritual Assembly Library of the Baha'is of Burlington, Ontario, Canada, 300 poems.7. International Pioneer Committee of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of Canada, 7200 Leslie Street, Thornhill, Ontario, L3T 6L8, Canada, 120 poems.8. Local Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of Brighton, PO Box 553, Brighton, South Australia, 5048, State Baha'i Centre Library, Brighton, S.A., 120 poems.9. Local Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of Canberra, 18 Hichey Court, ACT, 2611, Baha'i Centre Library, 120 poems.10. Baha'i Council of the Northern Territory, PO Box 2055, Humpty Doo, NT, 0836, 100 poems11. Baha'i Council of Victoria, Knoxfield, Victoria, 3182, 100 poems.12. LSAs of Belmont, Launceston, Ballarat, Darwin: hold 'some of my poetry' in their archives, 100 poems.13.LSA of the Baha’is of Toronto Ontario, 288 Bloor Street West, Toronto Ontario, M5S 1V8, Canada, 100 poems.14. The Baha’i Community of Iqaluit, Iqaluit, NWT, Canada, 100 poems.15. The Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Hamilton, PO Box 57009, Jackson Station, Hamilton, Ontario, L8P 4W9, 300 poems.16. The Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Ballarat, PO Box 136, Ballarat, Victoria, 3350.18. Threading Lights........of An Infinite Grace....September 18th 2007 to 15 August 2008. Given to my wife Christine Price on her

60th birthday.19. Booklets of poetry to other communities and institutions are not planned into the future as they have bene in the last two decades, 1990 to 2010.

2.8.2 Essays:

1. The Afnan Library, c/-George Ronald Publishers, 24 Gardiner Close,Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 3YA, England has a CD of some 200,000 words.2. Glowinski’s Library in Poland At: http://glowinski.olesnica.pl/index.php? ... page=lista

2.9 Books in Traditional and Cyberspace Libraries:

1. The Emergence of a Baha'i Consciousness in World Literature: The Poetry of Roger White is held in the Afnan Library, a 'deposit library' administered by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of the United Kingdom, April 2003.2. The same book can be found online in the 'Baha'i Academics Resource Library' and at: http://bahai-library.org/books/white; as well as at: Juxta Publications. See http://juxta.com/3. I have been given approval to publish this book by the National Literature Committee of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of Canada and Juxta Publications has put it on their site at: http://juxta.com/4. Pioneering Over Four Epochs: An Autobiographical Study and a Study in Autobiography can be located at: the BWCL, 2004, at Lulu.com in softcover in 5 volumes(part), eBookMall(part) and many other websites have portions of this work at their sites. I have been given permission to publish these volumes on the internet. If I want to place them in a hard or soft cover they will require further review in the USA by the Review Office.

2.10 Essays in Libraries:

1. The Baha'i World Centre Library: 50 essays-1994.2. Various internet ‘libraries’ on a list that is increasing in the first decade of this 3rd millennium.3. See section 2.8 above. Each of these libraries has one to several of my essays in their collection and they are found in my

poetry booklets.

2.11 Radio Programs and Interviews:

2.11.1 Interviews: I have been interviewed on eight occasions in eight cities and towns in Australia between 1974 to 1995 on the subjects of: (i) education, (ii) the Baha'i Faith and (iii) Iran. Each interview lasted from 15 to 25 minutes.2.11.2 Programs: Presented 150 half-hour programs on City Park Radio in Launceston for the Launceston Baha'i Community: 2000-2005.2.1.3 Simulated Interviews: 90,000 words in 26 interviews were simulated from 1995 to 2011. These interviews discuss my poetry, prose and other topics relevant to my writing. Some of these can be found at Baha’i Library Online in the sub-section entitled interviews.Many interviews can be found at various sites on the internet.

3. COURSES AND LEVELS TAUGHT

3.1 Apprentice and Youth Programs:

1. Pre-Apprentice, Apprentice, Educational Programs for Unemployed Youth(EPUY), Programs for Unemployed Youth(PUY), Preparation for Employment Programs(PEP) and Youth Training Programs(YTP) generally for 15 to 25 year old students:2. I was a teacher in a wide range of these programs from 1982 to 1999 at the following educational institutions:2.1 Open College of Tafe in Katherine 1982-19862.2 Hedland College 1986-19872.3 Perth Campus/Balga Campus 19882.4 Thornlie Campus 1989-1999

3.2 Other Post-Secondary Institutions:

Full-Part-Time-Volunteer-Casual(FT/PT)1. George Town School for Seniors Inc 1999-2005(Volunteer)2. Charles Sturt University 1995(July to October)(FT)3. Tasmanian CAE 1974(FT) and 1979(PT)(now university of Tasmania)4. Ballarat CAE 1976-1978(FT)(now university of Ballarat)5. Deakin University 1977(external studies lecturer)(PT)

6. Whitehorse Technical College 1975(FT)(now part of Swan College of Tafe)7. University of Tasmania 1974(external studies lecturer)(PT)

3.3 Courses Taught

In the thirty-one years from 1974 to 2005, I taught full-time for 22 and part-time as a tutor for 7. During the years 1980-1981 I did not teach. In those two years I: (a) had an episode of bipolar disorder and was unable to work and (b) worked in a tin mine in Tasmania. I taught in the post-secondary institutions listed above; I taught some ninety(approx.) different units of study in the humanities and social sciences. The list is too long to sight here; I have included the list in Appendix C below.

The list includes the following general categories:

* communication studies* social sciences* welfare studies/human services * education studies* matriculation studies* public relations/media studies* creative and business writing* special education programs for: (a) indigenous people and (b) seniors(See Appendix C below for list of subjects taught)

3.4 Primary and Secondary School Teaching Experience:

3.4.1 Primary:

1. Sir Martin Frobisher School, Frobisher Bay(now Iqaluit), NWT, Canada,1967/8.2. Cherry Valley Primary School, Cherry Valley, Ontario, 1969/70.3. Picton Primary School, Picton, Ontario, Canada, 1970/1.4.Whyalla Primary School, Whyalla, South Australia, 1971/2.

3.4.2 Secondary:

1. Queen Elizabeth Public School in Picton Ontario: 1970-71

-I taught grades 7 and 8 in this primary school in Ontario. In Australia this school would have been at the junior secondary level.2. Eyre High School, Whyalla, South Australia, 1972/3.3. Para Hills Secondary School, Para Hills, South Australia, 1973/44. Oakwood Education Trust, Launceston Campus, 2001.

4. INDUSTRIAL, COMMERCIAL AND HUMAN SERVICE EMPLOYMENT EXPERIENCE: 1957-2001(non-teaching jobs/experience)

4.1 Summer/Short Term/Part-Time Jobs: (each 5 months maximum)* Hamilton Spectator, 1957-1960: sold newspapers in Burlington, Ontario.* Self-employed, gardener, 1960-1962 in Burlington, Ontario.* Kitchen-Assistant, A&W Root Beer Co., Aldershot, Ontario, 1960.* Packer, Shell Oil Company, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, 1961.* Driver-Assistant, Dundas Slot-Machine Company, Dundas, Ontario, 1962.* Data Processing/Storeman & Packer, Firestone Tire and Rubber Corporation, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, 1963* Cash-Register Clearance, T. Eaton Company of Canada, 1964* Repairman/Assistant, Bell Telephone Co of Canada Ltd., Hamilton, Ontario, 1964* Abstractor, Canadian Peace Research Institute, Dundas, Ontario, Canada, 1965* Electrician's Assistant, Stelco of Canada, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, 1965* Driver/Salesman, Good Humour Company, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, 1966* Clerk, Motor Vehicle License Branch, Dept of Transport, Brantford, Ontario, 1967* Systems Analyst, Bad Boy Company, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1968* Security Work, International Security, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1968

* Youth Worker, Resource Centre Association Inc., Launceston, Tasmania, 1979* Journalist, ABC Radio, Launceston, Tasmania, 1979* Editor, External Studies Unit, Tasmanian C.A.E., Launceston, Tasmania, 1979

4.2 Full Time Jobs:(each 2 to 4 years)

* Maintenance Scheduler, Renison Goldfields P/L, Zeehan, Tasmania, 1981-1982* Adult Educator, Tafe, Katherine, Northern Territory, 1982-1986(some teaching involved)* Public Relations Officer, Hedland College, South Hedland, WA, 1986-1987(some teaching involved)

4.3 Casual-Volunteer Work:(1996-2010)

To include the list of all my volunteer activities from the start of my middle childhood years in 1949 through my adolescence, to the final year of full-time work(1999), and into my present retirement(2012 to my death) would not be relevant here, and it would be too extensive to list.

I have, therefore, only included volunteer work for the last 16 years of my life, age 52 to 68, 1996 to 2012, late middle age and the early years(60 to 68) of late adulthood, the period which some developmental psychologists call the years from 60 to 80. During these years I was preparing to retire(1996-1999), completing my last years of FT, PT and casual-volunteer work(1996-2005), and enjoying the first years of my retirement(2005-2012).

4.3.1 Several Baha’i community activities in Belmont WA and metropolitan Perth from 1996 to 1999: chairperson, secretary, organized public meetings, gave blood in donation programs, organized advertising and public relations for the Baha’i community of Belmont.

4.3.2 Research Assistant, Recreation Network Inc. (disability services) Subiaco, WA, 1997.4.3.3 Red Cross, Volunteer Fund Raiser/Campaign Co-ordinator:

1996-74.3.4 Presenter of Programs, City Park Radio, Launceston, 2000-2003.4.3.5 Tutor/President, George Town School for Seniors, Inc., George Town, Tasmania, 1999-2005. 4.3.6 Parks and Wild-Life Service Northern Region Tasmania, Volunteer, 2007.4.3.7 Several Baha’i community activities in George Town Tasmania and the wider Tasmanian community: chairman, secretary, publicity officer, organized public meetings, blood donation, advertising and public relations.4.3.8 sold raffle tickets for charity organizations, sang in a small choir and played the guitar to senior citizens.

5. 1 PERSONAL INTERESTS

* Writing: see section 2 above for details: 1962-2012* Reading and music : 1943-2012(statement available if desired)

* The social sciences and humanities: have more than 300 files/notebooks/resource manuals, circa 20 million words, collected over more than 50 years, 1959-2012.

5.2 CLUBS, ASSOCIATIONS AND FORMAL GROUPS:

* gone solo on the guitar: 2008-2012.* Member of a singing group in George Town, 2001-2005.* Public Speaking Assessor, Rostrum, Katherine, NT : 1984/6* Member of the Lions Club, Zeehan Tasmania : 1981/2* Member of fitness/swimming centres in:Melbourne(1975-6), Ballarat(1977-1978), Perth(1989-99), & Launceston(1999-2003)* Member of baseball and hockey teams in Burlington: 1953-1962* Member of the Baha’i Faith : 1959-2012(to whatever is the year of my death)(see Baha’i Resume below for details)

* I have been a member of many groups during the fifty-two year period 1959 to 2012, the age of 15 to 68. I was associated with or worked as a volunteer in: (a) The George Town School for Seniors, (b) City Park Radio in Launceston, (c) several other clubs and associations like: (I) Cubs, (II) formal discussion

groups in educational institutions as a student and (III) unnumbered groups as a teacher; and (d) an aged-care facility in the town I now live in, George Town, Tasmania where I have entertained as a solo guitarist from 2008 to 2012.

5.3 AWARDS, PRIZES AND FORMAL RECOGNITIONS:

5.3.1 Most valuable player in the midget baseball league in 1960 in Burlington Ontario.5.3.2 Most home-runs in the pee-wee league and midget league in 1955 and 1956 in the same town.5.3.3 Public Speaking in grade 8. Represented my school in the Halton County public speaking contest.5.3.4 Nomination for the best teacher at the Thornlie College of Tafe in 1999 in Perth Western Australia.

6. REFERENCES, REFEREES AND PORTFOLIO OF MY WORK:

6.1 I am no longer required to supply transcripts, references and testimonials in relation to positions since I no longer apply for jobs. I keep a file of such documents, though, which I used from the 1960s to the first decade of the 2000s in an archive for various practical and nostalgia purposes. In that file are many of the references and documents in connection with my working life and my community participation as a citizen, a volunteer and an individual in relation to the many interest groups in the community with which I have been associated. I have not required any of these documents in the last fifteen years, 1997 to 2012.

6.2 Samples of my writing are also available, if requested. I have a portfolio of my writing in many forms, genres and layouts as suited to the needs of the groups and individuals making the requests—for the most part now on the internet. Virtually all of these requests, as I say, now come from a wide variety of locations on the world-wide-web. Occasionally I got requests from friends and Baha’i institutions, but they ceased by the 21st century.

6.3 In July 1999 I ceased full-time employment as a lecturer-teacher. In May 2001 I went onto an Australian Disability Pension and I no longer applied for full-time jobs. Seven years

ago, in late 2003, I applied for my last part-time job. In May 2005 my work in nearly all volunteer organizations also ceased with the exception of work done within the Baha’i community. Now at the age of 68(in July 2012) I devote myself full-time to writing and editing, poetry and publishing, online journalism, blogging, and independent scholarship, although my wife ensures that I keep my end up on the domestic front and in some social activities.

7. GENERAL

* a brief bio-data sheet can be found below in Appendix A below.* a covering or introductory letter has not been included to introduce this document.* a list of published essays can be found in Appendix B* a list of subjects I have taught from 1974 to 2005 can be found in Appendix C below.Last Updated: 20 October 2012____________________________________________________________BIO-DATA SHEET

POSITIONS APPLIED FOR: I applied for some four thousand jobs during the 50 year period: 1957-2007. During two of those years I was ill and/or hospitalized and could not work: 4000 job applications over more than 40 years is an average of two every week for 40 years--from the summer holidays in grade 10 to my 63rd year.

HEALTHManic-depression/bi-polar disorder: treated--separate statement available, if desired, at Baha’i Library OnlineAGE 68.2(in October 2012)REFEREES Have not required any referees in the last 7 years: 2005 to 2012.(FT/PT/Volunteer Work) See lists above in sections 3,4, and 5 of resume. VALUE BASE Member of the Baha’i Faith for more than 50 years, 1959-2012(the present).

COMPUTER Extensive use of computer to: (a) write, (b) search and keep documents, (c) keep a large personal archive of writing.DRIVER’S LICENCE Yes(1962 to 2012) PHOTO Over 300 digital photos available on electronic transfer from my computer directory, if desired.PORTFOLIO I have a large portfolio of my writings available under separate cover, if desired.

APPENDIX B:

PUBLISHED ARTICLES/ESSAYS:

Preamble:

The following four volumes of essays have been published in newspapers and on the internet which, since the years of my retirement from full and part-time work in 1999 and 2003 respectively, has been a fertile source for the publication of my writing. The following lists are of a general nature. I do not attempt to specify precisely the location of the published essays and articles. This list, though, will give readers here some general indication of the quantity of my publications in these genres.

Volume 1: 1979-1993

A. Letter to Vargha1 Bulletin 19802 Bulletin 19803 Bulletin 19804 Bulletin 19815 Tasmanian Papers 1981(3)6 Cosmos7 Cosmos8 1982-Source?9 Cosmos 198310 Katherine Advertiser 198411 Bulletin: Review

12 Armidale CAE: Papers13 Dialogue14 Herald of the South: Happiness15 Bulletin: NW Baha’is16 Bulletin: 198617 Poem: Bulletin18 Tassie Newsletter: 198019 Dream International-198120 Renison Newsletter-198221 Katherine HS-198222 Barkley Regional-198523 Perth Technical College24 Armidale CAE: Papers25 Bulletin 198526 Bulletin27 NW Baha’is28 Dialogue29 Dialogue30 Dialogue31 Bulletin32 Perth Tech33 Literacy Article for ITC34 Article on White for World Centre-198935 ABS-1990 Paper36 Overheads for same paper-199037 The Teaching Profession-Article for ITC

Volume2: 1983-1986

Some 150 articles appeared in 3 newspapers in Katherine in the Northern Territory of Australia. I have not listed them here, but they are available on request from this author at: ronprice9@gmail.com/

Volume 3:1993-2003

1. Poem in Herald of the South2. Poem in Australian Baha’i Bulletin3. Article in Forum4.&5. Article on Dizzy Dance Theatre6. Poem in Bulletin7. Bulletin: Fishing8. International Library of Poetry: 1 poem

9. ABS Poetry Collection10. Ref in Bulletin re: poetry contribution11. Memorials of the Faithful12. Baha’i Canada: teaching13. Arts Dialogue: article14. FM Radio article15. Book Review: Beacon16. Chapbooks Review: Arts Dialogue17. Report on Scholarship(1998)18. RTV Conference 200119. Associate Newsletter: Memorials20. Beacon: Teaching Conference21. Beacon: advertisement on website22. Lodestar(L’ton LSA) ad for Radio Program23. Examiner Advert Re: radio program24. Poem in Beacon25. Baha’i Canada: 10 Year Crusade26. Certificate of Recognition: School for Seniors27. Happy Hour Newsletter: 28. NGTC: article on teaching29. Beacon: external affairs30. John Davidson’s Book: Review31. Last Installment for Northern Lights32. Bulletin: MDA33. The Religion Forum: poem34. www. Bahai.fo-35. Planet Baha’i: poems36. Article : Frances Gregory37.erose@temple.edu38.Tahirih Danesh39. Indiana University Press40. Happy Hour41. Theoquest42. Endgame From My Website43. Classics Network: poem44. Happy Hour45. bafa: arts dialogue46. Planet Baha’i: item47. Alumbo Column48. Article for: Civilization Adv Centre49. National Library of Canada50. George Town On Show Art Exhibit51. cvoogt: notice

52. Building Momentum Conference: review for Beacon53. Uplifting Words: article

Volume 4: 2004-2010

Table Of Contents

These published articles are mostly internet postings, and the list of the following articles can be found in my directory at: Novel>Humanities>Cont. Pub Writ V4. This list is not comprehensive, but contains many of the main and significant posts at internet sites.

A. Diary: Introduction: Volume 4.A.1(Vol.4) and 4.A.2 (Vol.5)

B. Published Items Listed Below:

1. TPM-The Philosophers Magazine2. Uplifting Words3. talk religion Bahá’í (groups.google.com)4. giganews.com5. Alumbo*(sent to Tas Council 21/4/06=TC)5.1 Google: bahaipioneering.bahaisite.com/6. talk religion bahai7. Baha’is and Friends8. Philosophy Forums(TC)9. Canadian Poetry Association10. Paper Journal11. Philip Adams-Letters12. Theo quest13. Humbul Humanities Hub14. The Critical Poet(TC)15. Hamilton Writers16. Planet Baha’i(TC)17. federalistnavy.com18. Facets of Religion(TC) World Religion Day19. United Communities of the Spirit(TC--some)20. Creativity Cafe21. 20.six.co22.1 Apologetics.org 22.2 Baptist Watch23. About site. Holistic Healing24. Ainslie House Association Newsletter

25. Pyramids of Peace26. The Metaphysical Community Site(TC)27. Awareness and Meditation Site(TC)28. Pathways of Light29. Religious Debate30. Dreams: 40 Year Overview31. Mysticism Belongs to Everyman(TC)32. Email to Leslie at Yahoo Site33. Baha’i Resume at: Heart of the Baha’i Faith 34. Feedback From 3 Sites35. Psychotherapy and Spirituality: Yahoo Group36. APS Voices37. Apologetics.org: Statement #538. Life Solutions: Yahoo Group39. Foreign Films: A Good Example of How Not to Write40. Debates on Jesus: Yahoo Group41. The Write Review(TC)42. Writers Waters II43. My Journey Through Sociology(TC)Clinical Sociology Forum44. About: Expert Intro45. Migration Heritage Centre(NSW)46. Feedback From Bi-Polar Survivor47. The Mystery Tradition48. About Bi-Polar Forum-Response48.1 Bulletin: Memorials of the Faithful48.2 Bulletin: Computer Internet Teaching48.3 Bulletin: Pioneer to Tasmania (can’t find article)49. Bi-Polar Letter to: various people50. Faith and Fellowship-Exile51. Midlands Contest52. Unheard Words53. Muse Whispers: Vol.154. Tasmanian Summer SchoolProgram: Using the Internet55. Middle East Truth. Website(TC)56. Intro to Job Hunting File57. Kookamonga Square58. Internet Infidels59. Soft news60. weblog@20six.co.uk61. Article on John Davidson’s Book62. Conjunctions: Robert Creeley

63-5. Prayers For Healing: several sites66. Trip Advisor(TC)67. Canadian Poetry: content outline68. IMDb Film Review: Frances69. Spark Notes: Poem and Reply(TC)70. ProSports Daily Forum(TC)71. Christian-Baha’i Dialogue-1st 10 pages(TC)72. Ruth Gledhill Blog(TC)73. Booklet/Report to Tasmanian Council-21/4/0674. Kansas City Star75. Baha’i Canada-3/7/0676. Australia Baha’i-Internet77. bookhitch.com(+royalties)78. Depression Forum79. Leonard Cohen atRonsexsmith.com80. My Faith Site81. Aust Baha’i-LSA82. Mega Search. Autobiography83. Wikipedia. many84. John Gielgud Forum85. Annual Letter: 2006(1st draft)86. Film Sites87.Jackal:MovieLens88. Letter to ABC Radio/TV Religion89. Blog. HEYDAYCOM90. Iran:Baha’is-5/11/0691. Bulletin-11/0692. Notebooks-Outline93. Blog for America94. Another Blog(Yahoo)95. Poem for Seti96. Elizabeth Jolley97. No of Books(RNIB)98. Indy Music99.Chicagoland Site100. Poetry Magazine101. Free Online/eBooks102. Online Books Page

APPENDIX C:

COURSES, UNITS, MODULES, SYLLABI, SUBJECTS OR PROGRAMS TAUGHT IN POST-SECONDARY

EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS IN AUSTRALIA

The list below outlines the ‘subjects’ taught between 1974 and 2005: 29 years. I did not teach in the years: 1980-1981. The subjects I taught in primary and secondary schools from 1967 to 1973 are not included here.

A. Hedland College: Acting Lecturer in Management Studies: 1986-1987, and Katherine Open College of Tafe: 1982-1986

Interpersonal Skills AInterpersonal Skills BPerformance AppraisalNegotiating Skills ANegotiating Skills BConflict Resolution AConflict Resolution BIntroduction to ManagementClub ManagementTime ManagementCounsellingInterview TechniquesPublic SpeakingInterview TechniquesConsultation SkillsLetter Writing and Report Writing ALetter Writing and Report Writing BSupervision SkillsAboriginal Administrator Training Officer SkillsCreative Writing(Adult Education)Sociology(Adult Education)

B. The Thornlie Campus of the South East Metropolitan College of Technical and Further Education, and The Perth Campus of the Central Metropolitan College of Technical and Further Education:(1988-1999)

Communication Core(Certificate 3)Communication 1(Diploma)Business Communication 1A(Diploma)Business Communication 1B(Diploma)Ancient Greek History TEE

Ancient Roman History TEEModern History TEEPolitics TEEEnglish Literature TEEEnglish TEETraditional Culture and Modern Society(Anthropology)Framework of Australian Society(Economics)History of IdeasAustralian Government and Legal SystemsPhilosophy 1 APhilosophy 1BGeneral PsychologyCommercial and Civic PrinciplesInterpersonal Study and Work Skills 001Interpersonal Study and Work Skills 002Society and Culture(Sociology)Life Skills 1B(guitar)Recreation 2(Certificate 2)Social Science IntroductionWelfare Practice 1AWelfare Practice 1BWelfare Practice 2AWelfare Practice 2B

C. Thornlie Campus(as above): 1994-1999

In these three programs: Human Services Certificate 3Welfare Studies Certificate 4Human Services Diploma(5)I taught the following subjects:Welfare Communication (4)Introduction to Human Services(3)Dealing With Conflict(3)Family and Community(3)Work Team Communication(3)Service Provision and Practice(3)Study Skills(3)Recognition of Prior Learning(3)Human Development 001(3)Human Development 002(3)Field Placement(3), (4) and (5)Field Tutorial(3) and (5)Managing People: Training and Development(5)

Managing Group Problem Solving and Decision Making(5)Sociology for Human Service Workers(5)

D. Engineering, Applied Science and Social Science Students at the Ballarat College of Advanced Education 1976-1978:Social Science(Applied Science: Engineering)(BSc)Social Science(Applied Science: Geology)(BSc)Social Science(Social Science)(BA)Australian Media(Social Science)(BA)Sociological Theory(Teacher Trainees: Secondary)E. Whitehorse Technical College: 1975-1976Behavioural Studies(Library Technician Trainees)(Cert.3)F. Tasmanian CAE: 1974:Language in Use(Linguistics)Introductory PsychologyHuman RelationsSociology of ArtIndividualized LearningSociology

G. Thornlie Campus of the SEMC: General Studies: 1989-1998:Writing Plain EnglishWriting Workplace DocumentsPresenting InformationPresenting ReportsWorkplace CommunicationQuality Team ManagementJob Seeking SkillsCommunication and Industrial RelationsManaging Effective Working RelationshipsManaging and Developing TeamsField Experience in Community ServicesWork Experience in Job Train Programs

H. The George Town School of Seniors Inc: 1999-2005AutobiographyCreative WritingPhilosophySocial SciencesMedia Studies-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------APPENDIX 4

RESUME OF BAHA’I ACTIVITY OF RON PRICE

Preamble:

The outline below is a brief sketch only. No attempt is made to list all the activities in the fifty-nine years(1953-2012) of my association with and membership/service in the Baha’i community. I have tended to generalize rather than specify the particular tasks and their respective occasions. Some specificity is required, though, and I think I have provided a good balance between specificity and generality.

I would think, in the vast majority of cases, the information below is correct and accurate, although some guesstimation has been required. This statement has been used occasionally when applying for positions somewhere in what has become a vast network of service situations/institutions around the globe both within and outside the Baha'i community. In the last seven years, 2005 to 2012 I have not applied for positions using this document. But I use it occasionally on the internet to provide readers with some general background of my involvement with the major volunteer organization in my life.

A. 10 Homefront Pioneering Localities: Listed as Follows:

Baha'i Youth in Burlington :1957-1962A.1 Youth Pioneering(age 18-23 inclusive) : 1962-1966A.1.1 -Homefront Pioneering 1-Dundas : 1962(August) to 1963(May)2-St. Thomas : 1963(May-June)3-Hamilton : 1963(June-December)4-Dundas : 1964-1966(May)(note: towns I moved to twice are counted in this list as only one locality 5-Hamilton : 1966(June)-1966(September)6-Windsor : 1966(September)-1967(May)7-Brantford : 1967(May)-1967(August)

A.1.2 LOCAL ASSEMBLY SERVICE: (Youth: Homefront Pioneering)

8-LSA of the Baha’is of Windsor : 1966/7: vice-chairman

9-LSA of the Baha’is of Toronto : 1969(January to June)-----------------------AUSTRALIA BELOW THIS LINE----------------A.1.3 LOCAL ASSEMBLY SERVICE: (Youth: International Pioneering)

10-LSA of the Baha’is of Whyalla : 1972: secretary11-LSA of the Baha’is of Gawler : 1973: chairman

B.ADULT PIONEERING:(AGE 30 AND OVER: International Pioneering)

12-LSA of the Baha’is of Ballarat : 1976-78 : chairman/secretary13-LSA of the Baha’is of Launceston: 1979 : publicity officer14-LSA of the Baha’is of Stirling : 1988 : secretary15-LSA of the Baha’is of Belmont : 1989-1999: chairman/secretaryfor 7 of these years

C. REGISTERED and UNREGISTERED GROUP SERVICE:C.1.1 Homefront Pioneering16-Frobisher Bay/Iqaluit) NWT : 1967(August) to1968(June)17-Whitby :1968(June to December)18-King City Ontario : 1969(June-August)19-Picton Ontario : 1969(August) to 1971(July)-----------------------AUSTRALIA BELOW THIS LINE------------C.1.2 International Pioneering20-Whyalla South Aust : 1971(I arrived in Whyalla on or about 15 July 1971.Whyalla was a Baha'i Group in 1971; LSA in 1972)21-Launceston Tasmania : 197422-Kew Victoria : 197523-Smithton Tasmania : 197924-Zeehan Tasmania : 1980-8225-Katherine NT : 1982-8626-South Hedland WA : 1986-8727-George Town Tas : 1999-2012(plan to live in this town until my passing)

D. PUBLISHED AND UNPUBLISHED WORK:

See my resume above for details in these two categories of my writing.

E. COMMITTEE WORK:

E.1 LSA and Group Committees:

The list of committees during the 19 years of service on LSAs and another 29 years in Registered and Unregistered Groups is partly too long to recount and partly beyond the scope of my memory after all these years. I do not recall serving on any committees in the five year period 1959 to 1964. Since May of 2005 I have been the publicity officer and secretary of the George Town Baha’i Group(Reg).

E.2 Regional and National Teaching Committees:(RTCs and NTCs)

1. RTC of Northern Tasmania : 19742. RTC of the Northern Territory : 1984-863. National Community Development Committee: 1976-77

F. Assistant to the Auxiliary Board : 1986In the Northern Territory in 1986 for a few months before moving interstate.G. Pioneer Service: (Continued)1. Homefront : Canada : 1962-19712. International : Australia: 1971-2012

H. Teaching Work:

It is very difficult to quantify one’s teaching work and the accomplishments of some fifty years of teaching both as a pioneer(1962-2012), as a new Baha’i in my home town for three years(1959-1962) before pioneering and the several years of early contact through my mother and father with this new Faith(1953-1959). But, given the importance of this part of Baha’i life, the following activities could be listed as areas of contribution relevant to the teaching work.

It should also be emphasized, as a preamble to this list of activities that, since the early 1990s, there has been an important shift in the field of Baha’i public information and the focus of Baha’i activity. The former preoccupation with “conversion” and the inevitable sense of “us and them” that intruded for so many

years; what had become a somewhat parochial view of focusing the Baha’i message in religious categories was slowly replaced with a more inclusivistic approach or philosophy and my own teaching work has reflected this shift.

1 Working on LSAs, Groups and Committees

1.2 Writing: (see my resume above)1.2.1 essays and poetry for magazines, journals, newspapers and websites in and out of the Baha’i community1.2.2 essays and poetry given to individuals, groups and LSAs in the Baha’i communitynote: -some of this is kept at the Baha’i World Centre Library(BWCL)-the rest I have on file in hard copy or in my computer directory at home1.2.3 Giving talks/presentations/interviews1.2.4 Working as a teacher in educational institutions1.2.5 Moving to many towns and states where few or no Baha’is have lived1.2.6 Moving to another country at crucial point in a Plan as a pioneer1.2.7 Entering into various forms of activity and interest groups in local communities 1.2.7.1 -festivals and other public events, social programs and musical events -media programs and local organizations in a list too long to mention1.2.8 Promoting the Baha’i Faith through various forms of advertising such as:- putting up posters, an estimated....10,000.-doing letterbox drops, an estimated 7,000 -placing ads in newspapers, radio stations, TV stations and magazines, an estimated 1000, and-being interviewed on radio, eight radio appearances(one on cassette tape; one on mini-disc and sent to the BWCL).1.2.9 Going on unnumbered travel teaching trips from home communities/localities to extension goals, to towns which were not goals and overseas as a pioneer; and Giving poetry readings in both Baha’i and other interest group settings

I. Consolidation Work:

It is also difficult to define one’s contributions to the consolidation work over this same time period of 59 years. Again, some attempt is made below, given the importance of consolidation during these years of the ninth and the tenth stage of Baha’i history: 1953-2012. There has been a major shift in the nature of consolidation in Baha’i communities as there has been in the teaching domain. I would like to list the following as part of my contribution to the consolidation work in its several forms:

Work on the Baha’i institutions listed above taking many forms—too extensive to list here; 1. Writing, as listed above and requiring no more description; 2. Writing booklets of poetry which I think have, and will have, a consolidation potential in the years ahead since they provide a rich base of comment on the several decades of Baha’i experience in these epochs; and3. Several of the activities listed above under ‘teaching’ which also had a consolidation function.

J. Other Forms of Work/Activity in the Baha’i Community:

In a lifetime, over more than five decades, of service in this emerging world religion one does a great deal. This section has been opened to include items not covered in the above and will be elaborated upon in the years ahead as my life continues into late adulthood(60 to 80) and old age(80++).

K. Concluding Statement:

K.1 The above sketch, or Baha’i resume as I call it, has been written to provide an outline of my activity in the Baha’i community since 1953 when my mother joined this new world Faith and when I was still a child. My formal service to this Cause began in 1959 when I joined the Baha'i Faith at the age of 15. The 200 thousand Baha’is in 1953 are now six million and the Baha’i community has gone through several transformations in this time.

K.2 This sketch above of my activity in this Faith is concerned more especially with the years since 1962 when my pioneering life began and since 1966 when my service in Baha'i Administration started in Windsor Ontario. This statement needs

to be read in conjunction with: (a) my professional resume above--which I used for many years when applying for general employment positions; (b) my nearly 7000 poems--which is part of a larger autobiographical work entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs containing: journals, poetry, letters, book reviews, photographs, tapes, notes and narrative written and collected over 50 years: from 1960 to 2012—an estimated five million words.

K.3 Some 5000 of my poems were sent as a gift to the BWCL in celebration of the wondrous efflorescence that is the Baha’i Project on Mount Carmel. An 800 page autobiography by the same title was also sent to the BWCL in 2004. This statement, like my professional resume, was once used when applying for positions in the embryonic global Baha’i Administrative Order. Now it is used, for the most part, on the internet when relevant at various websites in connection with a host of subjects. I trust the above statement is useful to readers who chance upon it.

K.4 Several thousand of my letters were placed in the National Baha’i Archives of Australia as a gift in 2010.

Ron PriceThat’s all folks!Last updated on: 23/10/’12

_________________married for 44 years, a teacher for 35, a writer & editor for 12, and a Baha'i for 52(in 2011)

Last edited by RonPrice on Fri Oct 26, 2012 3:00 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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RonPrice  Post subject: Re: THANKS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS(Part 5)

Posted: Thu Oct 25, 2012 2:53 pm QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS: A Form of Thanks and Acknowledgements

Joined: Mon Jan 24, 2011 10:56 pmPosts: 128Location: George Town Tasmania Australia Nationality: Canadian

Preamble:

Part 1:

I began to put the following sequence of questions and answers together as I was about to retire from full-time employment as a teacher after some 30 years in the profession, 1967 to 1999. In the first dozen years of the reinvention of myself as a writer and author, editor and researcher, a poet and publisher, an online journalist and blogger, an independent scholar and reader, the years from 1999 to 2012, I added more material to what you could call this simulated interview. This is the 26th simulated interview in 16 years, 1996 to 2012. There is no attempt in this particular series of Qs & As to be sequential, to follow themes or simulate a normal interview.

I have attempted a more logical-sequential pattern in my other 25 interviews over those 16 years. I have posted literally millions of words on the internet at 100s of sites. In the process I have acquired literally millions of readers, more than I ever could have imagined during or after that student-working life of half a century: 1949-1999.

Readers who come across this interview of 8000 words, and 20 A-4 font-14 pages, will gain some idea of the person who writes the stuff they read at these sites on the world-wide-web. Readers wanting access to these sites and my work, my posts at these sites, can simply google my name RonPrice followed by any one of dozens of others words like: forums, poetry, literature, philosophy, history, religion, cinema, inter alia.

Part 2:

There are more than 4000 other Ron Prices in cyberspace. Readers must ensure they are accessing my posts and my writing and not those of some other chap with the same name as mine. Some of these other Ron Prices are people of fame and renown; there are many others of notoriety. I have posted this interview for the interest of what has become an extensive readership, my constituency of readers, and others who come across my work for the first time.

The contents of this interview are an indirect way of expressing my thanks to the many sources of my writing and creativity, especially in these years of my retirement when I do not have my time filled with 50 to 80 hours a week engaged in a host of responsibilities that I once had in my younger adult life: job and community, family and friends, student life and just surviving life's slings and arrows as well as dealing with the wins. The victory over one's own self is the big one and only time will tell how successful one has been---and even then I often wonder.....

Part 3:

The questionnaire concept which I utilize below was originated, so I am informed, by French television personality Bernard Pivot after what was called the Proust Questionnaire. The Proust Questionnaire is about one's personality. Its name and modern popularity as a form of interview is owed to the responses given by Marcel Proust (1871-1922), the famous French novelist, critic, and essayist. At the end of the nineteenth century, when Proust was still in his teens, he answered a questionnaire in an English-language confession album belonging to his friend Antoinette, daughter of future French President Félix Faure. The album was entitled "An Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, etc." At that time, it was popular among English families to answer such a list of questions that revealed the tastes and aspirations of the talker.

Part 4:

James Lipton (b.1926) an American writer, poet, composer, actor and dean emeritus of the Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University in New York City utilized this questionnaire in his series of interviews entitled Inside the Actors Studio. The series premiered in 1994 and has been broadcast in 125 countries around the world reaching 89,000,000 homes according to that popular source of information Wikipedia. Lipton asked the following ten questions and I have placed my answer in a bracket following each question:----------------------------------------------1. What is your favorite word?(God)

2. What is your least favorite word?(Fuck)

3. What turns you on?( My instinctual and human needs for: food and drink, silence and sounds, sensory and especially sexual stimulation, oxygen and physical comfort, shelter and work, love and kindness, as well as the pleasures that come from the satisfaction of these instinctual and human needs)

4. What turns you off?(Noise, loud and aggressive people, conversation after one to two hours; most of the TV currently available to me, a great deal of printed matter. When the needs referred to in #3 above are not satisfied)

5. What sound or noise do you love?(Some classical, jazz and popular music, some human voices and silence)

6. What sound or noise do you hate?( Any loud sounds, some human voices)

7. What is your favorite curse word?(Fuck)

8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?

(I was a student and scholar, teacher and tutor, lecturer and adult educator from 1949 to 1999. Now I am enjoying new roles: poet and publisher, writer and author, editor and research, online journalist and blogger)

9. What profession would you not like to do?

(Law and medicine, work in the biological and physical sciences as well as the trades. This is due to (i) my lack of mechanical aptitude and, as far back as my early 20s at university, (ii) my inability to memorize vast quantities of information. In the arts, the humanities and social sciences I could get by with my creative capacities and the memorization of a relatively small core of information, ideas and concepts)

10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

(Well done, and now tell me about your troubles in life while trying to serve Me)----------------------------------------------

Part 5:

Below readers will find my own 28 questions that I began to both ask and answer in 1996. I last updated my answers, after further reflection, on 24 December 2012.______________________________1. Do you have a favourite place to visit?

I’ve lived in some two dozen cities and towns and visited over 100. I have lived in some three dozen houses and would enjoy visiting both the houses and the towns again for their memory, their nostalgia, their mnemonic, value. When writing about these places as I do from time to time, I would benefit from such visits, but it is not likely that I will visit any of them now in the evening of my life for many reasons not the least of which is: (i) my lack of funds, (ii) my disinclination to travel any more, and (iii) the current symptoms of my bipolar 1 disorder and the medication cocktail I am on: seroquel, an anti-psychotic, and effexor, an anti-depressant.

There are dozens of other places I would enjoy going to as a tourist or travel-teacher, circumstances permitting, circumstances like: plenty of money, good health, lots of energy and if I could be of some use to the people in those places. My health, and as I say above, my new medications for bipolar disorder, medications I’ve now had for over five years, prevents me from travelling.

1.1 Tell us a little more about your health both before your writing began in earnest in the 1990s and after.

Rather than go into detail here I will simply refer readers to my 100,000 word and 250 page(font-14) account of my experience of bipolar 1 disorder as well as the section of my website on the same subject.

2. Who are your favourite writers?

2.1 the historians Edward Gibbon and Arnold Toynbee, Manning Clark and Peter Gay, among a long list of historians a summary of whose writings I keep in my notebooks; 2.2 the philosophers Ortega y Gasset and Nietzsche, Buber and Spinoza, among another long list I keep in those same notebooks;

2.3 the Central Figures of the Baha’i Faith and Their successors Shoghi Effendi and the Universal House of Justice; 2.4 the poets Rainer Maria Rilke and Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth and Roger White; 2.5 the psychologists Rollo May and Alfred Adler, and a host of others about whom I keep in my notebooks, as well as writers from many other disciplines.

3. Who are your favorite artists?

There are several dozen art movements and hundreds, if not thousands of artists that can be accessed in libraries and, with a click or two of my mouse, on the internet. I will name two famous artists whose work I like and two whom I have known personally: Cezanne and Van Gogh, Chelinay and Drew Gates. I find it just about impossible to answer a question like this given my eclectic tastes. I have tried in question #2, but found there were too many names and so I do not intend to make such a long list here. As my years of retirement from the world of jobs, community work, and nose to the grindstone stuff, so to speak, lengthen as they have since 1999, I find there are more and more artists in the history of art whose work I am just finding out about and learning to appreciate.

4. Who are your favorite composers, musicians, vocalists and singer/songwriters?

How can one choose from the thousands in these categories? It is the same problem as in the previous two questions. Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninov, Hayden come to mind as composers but, goodness, there are simply too many to list. I placed a list of my favourites at several sites in cyberspace. The list had more than 100 people and 100s of their works. Over the years, I’ve had at least a dozen different favorite composers including: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Brahms, Debussy, Stravinsky, Dvorak and Rachmaninoff. My favorite composer seems to be the one whose musical world I’ve been immersed in most deeply at any given time.

Sergei Rachmaninoff was a master of translating melancholy and nostalgia into a musical language. He was cured of a profound writer’s block through hypnosis, and he dedicated his beloved Second Piano Concerto to his psychiatrist, Dr Nikolai Dahl. I

dedicate my love for music to my mother and father both of whom played the piano in our home as I was growing-up.

5. Who are your heroes?

The Central Figures of the Baha’i Faith, Beethoven, Emily Dickinson, a large number of men described in ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s Memorials of the Faithful(1970, 1927) and many more that I come across in reading history and other social sciences, the humanities as well as the physical and biological sciences. Again, the list is too long and its getting longer with the years as I head with what seems the speed of light to the age of 70 in 2014.

6. Who has been your greatest inspirations?

Roger White and John Hatcher in my middle age, Jameson Bond and Douglas Martin when I was a young man in my teens and twenties as well as a host of others, too many to list, in these years of my late adulthood, 60 to 70. Now in my late adulthood, the years after 60 in the lifespan according to some human development psychologists some new inspirations include: the essayist Joseph Epstein, the writers Bahiyyih Nakhjavani and Udo Schaefer, a number of poets and writers whose works I had never had time to read or did not know even existed---again the list is getting longer since reading and research, writing and editing have become much more central to my life, to my daily activities than during my years of employment: 1961 to 2001.

7. If you could invite several people for dinner from any period in history, who would you choose and why?

I would not invite anyone because I don’t like to talk while I’m eating. After dinner these days I like to watch TV for a few minutes and then go to bed. I’d chose the following people to have a chat with at some other time during the day, but I would not have them all come at once. I would take them as follows:

7.1 Pericles: I’d like to know what went on in Athens in the Golden Age, as he saw it. I’ve come to know a great deal about Athens in the 5th century BC since I taught ancient history and I have many questions which, of course, I could answer by reading. But there are so many views of the man and the times.

7.2 Roger White: I’d like to simply enjoy his gentle humor and observe that real kindness which I could see in his letters and in his rare interviews.

7.3 My mother and father and my maternal grandparents: The pleasure of seeing them again(except for my grandmother whom I never saw since she died five years before I was born) after all these years would, I think, be just overwhelming.

7.4.1 Douglas and Elizabeth Martin, 7.4.2 Jameson and Gale Bond and 7.4.3 Michael and Elizabeth Rochester. These people were all university academics or the wives of academics who had a seminal influence on my developing values in the formative period of my late teens and early twenties.

7.5 There are many others in another list too long to include here.

8. What are you reading?

In 1998, my last year of full-time employment, when I began to list these questions and provide the answers, I had fourteen books on the go: eight biographies, four literary criticisms, one book of philosophy and one of psychology. Now in these early years on two old age pensions, 2009 to 2012, I am reading mostly material on the internet and that reading list is too extensive to list here. I never go to libraries any more and, due to a lack of money, I never buy any books, although my wife does occasionally and I browse through what she buys. The internet is overflowing with enough print to keep me happily occupied until I die. My son bought me David Womersley’s 3-volume edition(1994) of Gibbon’s famous work in 2010 and after 3 years I’m up to page 140 underlining as I go the passages that I may use one day in my own writing.

9. What do you enjoy listening to in the world of music?

I listened mainly to classical music on the classical FM station while living in Perth in the last dozen years of my FT employment (1988-1999) as well as some from the folk, pop and rock worlds. Now that I live in George Town northern Tasmania in these years of the early evening of my life(1999 to 2012) this

is also true only hardly any pop, rock and folk and much more jazz and classical. I have written about my tastes and interests in music since my adolescence in other places and I refer readers here to the section of my website on music for the kind of detail that would lead to prolixity if I included it here.

10. What food could you not live without?

I would miss my wife’s cooking and Persian and Mexican food if I was cut off from them. It must be said, though,(answering this question 14 years after beginning to answer it) now that I live in northern Tasmania I rarely eat Persian and Mexican food. Now that I am retired I hardly miss these foods. I enjoy the food I get, that my wife and I prepare and only eat a Persian meal or a Mexican meal perhaps once a year now. Do I miss it? Yes and no. I enjoy eating when I am hungry; hunger is the driving force and I enjoy many, many foods when I am hungry. If I could not have some of these foods I’d be happy with many others.

11. What do you do when you feel a poem coming on?

I get a piece of paper and pen or go to my computer/word processor and start writing. Most of my poems take less than half an hour. My latest booklet of poetry comes from my poetry factory, as I have occasionally come to call this location for my production of poetry in George Town Tasmania, Australia where I write these pieces. I have also calculated the number of poems I have written per day over the last 32 years after a hiatus of 18 years(1962-1980) in my pioneering life in which no record was kept even though I was writing poetry very occasionally, very rarely, at the time.

In the first years of my life, 1943 to 1962, the influences on my writing of poetry included: my mother and grandfather, the primary and secondary school system in Ontario and the university I attended. The Baha’i Faith after 1953 was also a poetic force. All these poetic influences were completely unrecognized as poetic influences at the time since my interests were mainly sport, getting high marks at school, having fun, and dealing with life’s quotidian and sometimes anxious events.

A. From 1 August 1980 to 22 September 2012 there have been 11,734 days(circa).

B. The number of poems written per day is calculated using the following data: 7075(circa) poems in 11,734 (circa) days to 22 September 2012. That works out to: 1 poem in 1.65 days or 4.3 poems/week.C. The maths: 11,734(days) divided by 7075(poems)

11. How important is life-style and freedom from the demands of employment and other people to your creative life?

These things became absolutely crucial by my mid fifties. The Canadian poet, anarchist, literary critic and historian George Woodcock (1912-1995), once said in an interview that it was very important for his literary work that he could live as he wished to live. If a job was oppressing him, he said, he had to leave it. Both Woodcock and I have done this on several occasions, but I did not leave the jobs I did in order to write—except for the last job in 1999 when I was 55.

Woodcock broke with a university and I broke with three Tafe colleges. It's a derogatory thing to say it's a form of evasion, of avoidance or cowardice, said Woodcock, but you have to evade those situations in life in which you become insubordinate to others or situations in which others offend your dignity.

Woodcock went on to say in that same interview that when one acts dramatically or precipitately—like resigning from a job or losing one’s temper--it often has consequences that are very negative. He gave examples from his own life and I could give examples here; I could expand on this important theme but this is enough for now. Readers who are keen to follow-up on this aspect of my life can read my memoirs. Everything in my memoirs is true, but it has been "filtered and worked on". Readers tend to think a memoir is a chronicle or record of a life but, as the memoirist Kate Holden says, “it's a much more subtle form. You're compressing, eliding, using your craft.” She uses her craft to present a good story and I use it to present what I hope is a good analysis, some accurate and honest, useful and helpful reflections on life to those who read them.

12. Were you popular at school, in your primary, secondary and university days?

I certainly was in primary and secondary school, but not at

matriculation or university. I did not have the experience many writers and intellectuals have who received early wounds from the English school system among other influences in life. It wasn't merely the discipline at these schools; it was the ways in which boys got what was called the school spirit. In most English schools it is a brutal kind of pro-sporty spirit that militates against the intellectual who is looked on as a weakling. I was popular at school because I was good at sport and I got on with everyone.

I certainly was not seen as, and I was not, an intellectual. I was good at memorizing and that is why I did so well, but at university I could not simply memorize; I had to think and write my own thoughts and my grades went from ‘A’s’ to ‘C’s. This was also due to the beginnings of episodes of bipolar I disorder which has afflicted me off and on all my life.

14. You did not flower early as a writer. Tell us something about the origins of your prose and poetic writing.

Many writers flower early. Many of them become largely forgotten whereas I have a different type of creativity which seems to be growing in meaning and personal significance, in power and vitality, literally decade by decade, again, like the Canadian George Woodcock. This kind of creativity over the lifespan is actually quite abnormal, atypical. I seem to have been the tortoise or the bull if you're going to use the Taurean symbol. I have been marching forward slowly. I think what I am writing now is better than anything I’ve ever written in my life. Who knows what lies ahead.

Some years ago a reporter from Musician magazine asked jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim a question about when his interest in music began. Ibrahim said he understood the logic of the question but that he couldn't answer it because music had always been part of his day to day living. I feel in a similar way about my relationship to writing. I can't remember a time when I didn't have a deep investment in writing. From 1949 to 1967, the age of 5 to 23, writing was the very source of my success and survival in school. If I had not developed the capacity to write well I would never have got good grades and gone up the academic ladder—but I had to work at the process back then. Any significant literary success, any published work, did not come,

really, until I was nearly forty.

15. What sort of relationships do you have these days?

I was reading about the Canadian writer George Woodcock whom I have already mentioned in this series of questions and answers. He said that he did not have all that many friends who were writers. He knew their problems, but he did not know the problems of painters. He said that he liked to move among painters, mathematicians, psychologists and people who could tell him something. By my mid-fifties I had had enough of people telling me about things, any things. I had been both a listening post, a reader, and a talker for so many years I was a bit of a burnt-out case and wanted to shut my ears to the endless chatter of life by the age of 55 in 1999.

If I wanted to know about stuff, about any particular person, I could read, watch TV, listen to the radio or google. If I wanted some social life I could visit a small circle of people in the little town I live in, that I took a sea-change to near the mouth of a river by the sea. After an hour or so of conversation and various forms of social interaction I usually had enough and looked forward to my return to solitude.

Due to my medications by the age of 65 and perhaps due to being in my middle years(65-75) of late adulthood(60-80) I found more than two hours with people in any form took me to the edge of my psychological stamina, patience, my coping capacity. It was better for me to seek out solitude after two hours to preserve the quality of my relationships and not to “blot-my-copybook,” as my wife often put it when I indulged in some emotional excess, some verbal criticism of others or gave vent to some kind of spleen which often resulted after that two hours---due to my mental illness, my bipolar disorder. In the 13 years since I retired I have been on a series of medication shifts which have altered my psycho-emotional life. Now I spend 12 hours a day in bed for an 8 to 9 hour sleep and work at literary activity for 6 to 8 hours a day.

16. How would you describe the social outreach in your poetry?

I rarely point a finger directly at some guilty party, organization, person or movement; sometimes there is a subtle psychological

base to a poem that hints at or implies some evil in someone’s court. My poetry is quite explicitly non-partisan. I have dealt with this issue several times in my series of 26 interviews. It is an important question because the wider world often judges a person by the extent to which they engage with, or in, the quixotic tournament of social and political issues in our global community. I don’t shout at any multinational or rave for some environmental group.

When I do shout and rave it is about other things and there's nothing subtle about my shouting and raving and, in the process, probably little depth in those prose-poems of mine either. With millions of readers now in cyberspace I’d say I now have a social outreach wider, more extensive, than any I’ve had in my life.

17. Some poets see their work as a form of social criticism and, like the Canadian poet Irving Layton, for example, they rage against society and some of what they see as society’s illnesses and injustices. Where does your poetry fit into this picture?

Many of Layton's more than forty published volumes of poetry are prefaced by scathing attacks on those who would shackle a poet's imagination; over the years he has used the media and the lecture hall to passionately and publicly decry social injustice. But perhaps his loudest and most sustained protest has been against a restrictive puritanism that inhibits the celebration and expression of human sexuality. My poetry is not an expression of scathing attacks on anything; nor is it a passionate and public poetic vis-à-vis that quixotic tournament of social issues that are paraded in front of me day after day in the print and electronic media.

I see my poetry as an extension of the whole Bahá'í approach to social issues and individual engagement with these issues. There are several Bahá'í books which explore this quite complex subject. One of the best was published 25 years ago. It is entitled Circle of Unity: Bahá'í Approaches to Current Social Issues. I encourage readers to have a look at it if they would like a more complete answer to this question, a question that I cannot answer in a small paragraph.

As far as the imagination is concerned it is not, in my view, the opposite of facts or the enemy of facts. The imagination depends

upon facts; it feeds on them in order to produce beauty or invention, or discovery. The true enemy of the imagination is laziness and habit, as well as an ineffective use of leisure-time. The enemy of imagination is the idleness that provides fancy. I am not concerned, as Layton was, with a restrictive puritanism that inhibits the celebration and expression of human sexuality. I have many concerns in the process of writing poetry and journals, essays and narrative autobiography. I would like to emphasize here that authentic historical documents, mine and those of others, are products of the human mind and language; this is reality itself. Reality could be seen as a white light which each person sees on a spectrum of colour. Insofar as reality is thought, I deal in human reality all the time when I am writing and reading.

18. Do you think travelling has been crucial to your writing?

The Canadian poet Al Purdy(1918-2000) admitted quite clearly that if he hadn't travelled he wouldn't have written very much. He felt that he had to go further out in the world and experience place in order to write. He was one of the most popular and important Canadian poets of the 20th century. Purdy's writing career spanned more than fifty years. His works include over thirty books of poetry, a novel, two volumes of memoirs and four books of correspondence. He has been called Canada’s "unofficial poet laureate" and, "a national poet in a way that you only find occasionally in the life of a culture."

I did not travel the way Purdy did. I just kept moving to new towns, some two dozen. For a great many reasons largely associated with my bipolar disorder as well as some inexplicable fatigue with talking and listening, I became too tired, perhaps too old, too worn-out, too sick, too poor----goodness---what a sad tale, eh? Now I travel in my head and through the print and electronic media. And yes, travel in both these forms has been absolutely crucial to my productivity, but it ways that are difficult to explain since they span several decades.

19. Do you like talking about poetry?

Gary Geddes tells(In It’s Still Winter: A WEB JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY CANADIAN POETRY AND POETICS, Vol. 2 No. 1 Fall 1997) a great story of Douglas Dunn who was

writer in residence at Hull. Dunn wanted to meet the famous British poet Larkin. But Larkin was a curmudgeon. He hated poets! Douglas Dunn was told by friends who knew Larkin that, if he wanted to meet Larkin then he had to make sure he didn't ever talk about poetry. He could talk about jazz and anything else, but not poetry. So these friends arranged this meeting and left the two of them in the pub. Finally, after a few beers, Larkin leaned across the table and said, "there are too many poets in this university. Your job as writer in residence is to get rid of them."

I don’t feel like this at all, although I can appreciate Larkin’s sentiments. If I want some congenial poetic spirits I read their poetry or I read about them, but I have no strong desire to meet and have a chat. But I like to write about poetry and that is why I’ve simulated these 26 interviews. I am fascinated by the development of poetry in my life and seek to understand how and why both my interest and my writing have arisen.

20. Do you like reading poetry?

Gary Geddes says in the same interview I quoted above that when he was translating a book of Chinese poetry with a George Leong, George would often bring him the most depressing and melancholic poems in Chinese to translate. Geddes would say: "George you gotta give me something else, I can't bear all of this stuff.” I feel that same way about a lot of poetry, indeed, most contemporary, classical and poetry from any period of history. I just don’t connect with it. My mind and heart do not engage in its content or style, or both. Often I just don’t understand what the poets are saying. The poets I do engage with hit home quite deeply, but they are relatively few. They are also people I am only now discovering since my retirement, since I have the time to read and not engage in a 60 to 80 hour a week filled with people and responsibilities.

21. Do you use metaphor in your poetry to any extent?

Not anywhere near as much as I’d like, as much as exists in its poetic potential. Aristotle once wrote that the ability to see relationships between things is the mark of poetic genius. I would not want to make the claim to be a poetic genius; how could one ever make such a presumptuous, preposterous, claim. But I see relationships between things all over the place. It’s one

of the great motivators in why I write. I want to develop my use of metaphor in my poetry. I don’t think I’ve really taken off yet in my effective use of metaphor.

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur(1913-2005) sees mood and metaphor as the basis of the unity of a poem, of poetry itself. Writing poetry is certainly a mood thing for me and I’d like to make it much more of a metaphor thing as well. When emotion and intellect converge in imaginative writing, writing for example that draws on metaphor, readers can be transported to another life-world, a type of Gestalt, a Lebenswelt, to use the philosopher Edmund Husserl’s(1859-1938) term. Any transcendence that results for me and the reader of my work is not due to being taken to another realm at least not consciously.

Any sense of transcendence that does take place is due to seeing meaning, hidden meaning, meaning that did not exist before, in my or my reader’s experience, in the things and thoughts themselves. One goes beyond the familiar and finds fleeting moments rich in imaginative detail. There is a world outside language as the Canadian poet Don McKay(1942- ) asserts. It is very difficult to translate that world but some poetry can do this, can make this translation, with conviction and delight. I’d like to come back to this question several years from now when I’m in my 70s or even 80s.

22. What do you see as the function of a poet?

A poet has many functions, but two functions of this poet that interest me, to answer this question off the cuff so to speak, is: (a) to discover and distil the labour and the genius of the Bahá'í experience and (b) to give expression to the delight and the love that are at the heart of writing. The Canadian poet A.J. M. Smith wrote this in 1954. Smith had a preoccupation with death as I have, although not as intense and not in the same way as Smith’s. Out of his preoccupation with death he made poetry. I have made my poetry out of this and other preoccupations. The medications I’ve taken in the last decade or so have softened my interest in the subject of death.

From a Bahá'í perspective, of course, the arts and sciences in general, and poetry in particular, should “result in advantage to man,” “ensure his progress,” and “elevate his rank” ; that music

is a ladder for our souls, “a means whereby they may be lifted up into the realm on high” ; that the art of drama will become “a great educational power” ; that when a painter takes up her paint brush, it is as if she were “at prayer in the Temple” ; that the arts fulfil “their highest purpose when showing forth the praise of God”; and that “music, art and literature...are to represent and inspire the noblest sentiments and highest aspirations.” The leader of the Baha’i cause from 1921-1957 saw such spiritual power in the arts that he predicted they would eventually do much to help it spread the spirit of love and unity. The poet, as I say, has those two functions and many others that I write about in the millions of words readers will find if they get into my oeuvre.

23. When you talk about art and the arts what do you mean?

When I say “art” or “the arts,” I mainly have in mind those that are commonly referred to as “fine arts” such as poetry, painting, sculpture, theatrical drama, film, music, dance and others. But I also have in mind the “design arts,” such as architecture and urban design as well as the crafts, such as pottery and rug-weaving because these arts operate on a spiritual as well as a material plane. Readers can now google the subject at locations in cyberspace like Wikipedia for answers to factual questions like this one.

24. What do you see when you look in the mirror?

I have a photo which I post at many internet sites. The caption, the descriptive comment on this photo, reads: “This full-frontal facial view-photo, taken in 2004 when I was 60 in Hobart Tasmania, has a light side and a dark side. It is an appropriate photo to symbolize my lower and higher natures. These are natures that reach for spiritual, for intellectual and cultural attainment on the one hand and reach for and get caught-up in/with the world of mire and clay and its shadowy and ephemeral attachments.

Of course, when I look in the mirror there is not this clear dichotomy of light and shadow. When I look in the mirror I see an external self, a face which bears a relationship with my real self, a self which is not my body. My real self is an unknown quantity and my face really tells me very little about this real

self. And so, to answer your question, I see what nearly everyone else sees: eyes, ears, nose, mouth, cheeks, etc. I also see that: I need a shave; I need to put some ointment on my skin; I need to comb my hair or cut my moustache.

25. What would you bring to this interview to ‘show-and-tell’ if you could bring only one item? And what would you say about that item.

My mother-in-law, who is now 93(i.e. 2012) and lives in a little town called Beauty Point in northern Tasmania across the Tamar River from where I live, has a little figure in her lounge-room. It is a small figure of three monkeys. It has a label on it: see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. It always reminds me of a quotation from Bahá'u'lláh’s book Hidden Words. The quotation goers like this and it is this of which I wish to tell:

“O COMPANION OF MY THRONE! Hear no evil, and see no evil, abase not thyself, neither sigh and weep. Speak no evil, that thou mayest not hear it spoken unto thee, and magnify not the faults of others that thine own faults may not appear great; and wish not the abasement of anyone, that thine own abasement be not exposed. Live then the days of thy life, that are less than a fleeting moment, with thy mind stainless, thy heart unsullied, thy thoughts pure, and thy nature sanctified, so that, free and content, thou mayest put away this mortal frame, and repair unto the mystic paradise and abide in the eternal kingdom for evermore.” -Bahá'u'lláh, Persian Hidden Words, p. 44.

26. Talk a little bit about the types of poetry written and read today?

The famous American essayist Joseph Epstein wrote over 20 years ago that: “Sometimes it seems as if there isn’t a poem written in this nation that isn’t subsidized or underwritten by a grant either from a foundation or the government or a teaching salary or a fellowship of one kind or another.” Dana Gioia wrote that “the first question one poet now asks another upon being introduced is ‘Where do you teach?’” Dana Gioia, “Can Poetry Matter?,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1991.

Gioia himself acknowledges a heritage of a commentary of concern for the health of poetry extending from Edmund

Wilson’s “Is Verse a Dying Technique?”(1934) through to Joseph Epstein’s “Who Killed Poetry?” (1988). But performance poetry is alive and well and, in contrast, is based in speech. Walter J. Ong so eloquently demonstrated that this poetry is fundamentally other than writing. Sound, he writes, “is not simply perishable but essentially evanescent, and it is sensed as evanescent.” These are performances of poetry, some now call mic-poetry, that practice a poetics of openness and engagement, and in doing so inherently refuse official, institutional surveillance. This mic-poetry and its venues utilize space not constructed for cultural displays, spaces such as bars and coffeehouses.

I will draw on the words of Rollo May, the man who introduced existential psychology to the USA and whose writings influenced me back in the 1970s and still do. “If you do not express your own original ideas,” wrote May, “if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. Also you will have betrayed your community in failing to make your contribution to the whole.”

“A chief characteristic of this courage,” he went on to say, “is that it requires a centeredness within one’s own being. This is why we must always base our commitment in the centre of our own being, or else no commitment will be ultimately authentic.” Unconscious insights or answers to problems that come in reverie do not come hit or miss. They may indeed occur at times of relaxation or in fantasy, or at other times when we alternate play with work. But what is entirely clear to me is that they pertain to those areas in which a person consciously has worked laboriously and with dedication.

The Dionysian principle of ecstasy is often the result: a magnificent summit of creativity which achieves a union of form and passion with order and vitality. I encourage readers to read May’s books. They were and are an intellectual and spiritual delight for me and they answer much more fully these topics for which you wanted a comment.

Count Basie's great drummer Jo Jones once said his job was not so much to play the drums as it was to get himself into the kind of condition where he could play the things he could imagine. I think that's my job too, but imagination is only part of the story

and perspiration, effort and work, is the other 99 per cent.

27. Popular and mass culture on the one hand and intellectual-elitist educated-high culture on the other are both evidenced in the many millions of words in your poems, essays and books. Could you comment on this dichotomy in your life and writings?

Part 1:

In recent years, since my early retirement from FT and PT work in my late fifties---in the late 1990s—and as we entered the 3rd millennium and even more so now that I am 68, on two old age pensions and have immersed myself totally in reading and writing, research, editing and publishing, I have come to understand more clearly how my investments in these two cultures were shaped as far back as my childhood.

My father became an adult in 1911 before the Great War and my mother during that war in 1917. I was a child of a working class immigrant father and a mother who was also the child of a working class immigrant father. They viewed education, ideas, and culture with reverence. This was especially true of my mother. My mother, her brother, her sister and her father read books, lots of books. They listened to classical music and were interested in the arts generally. They became reasonably knowledgeable about the arts, although not academically so. Their formal education was never beyond high school. They were what we call autodidacts.

This background created in them a disposition against popular culture to some extent. Perhaps they had a fear that common tastes might make them appear undiscerning and unworthy. I don’t know. They were part of my daily life until I was 21 in 1965, when my father died and I moved out of the family home. My father had a number of working class jobs, was a passionate gardener and read the newspaper more than books. He was no elitist. They both listened and danced to popular music, loved motion pictures, and played and followed sports, among other interests.

Part 2:

The years after World War II transformed popular culture in

important ways. The enormous expansion of consumer spending, the rise of new communications media especially TV, and the incorporation of distinct European American ethnic cultures and communities into a more generalized white identity left me with a different view of culture than the one that made sense to my parents. The comfortable lower middle class home, community, and culture in which I grew up was a happy one.

Before the age of 18 in 1962, I imagined that professional athletes inhabited a world I wanted to be a part of. In my late childhood and teens I lost myself in a Canadian culture defined by my small hometown: its baseball, hockey and football players; pictures of sporting heros printed on the backs of cards that I collected, and its trinity of religious orthodoxy: Catholic, Protestant and Jew.

I was drawn to rock and roll radio programs, movies, and that world of sport. My little world was defined by the "down home" music and humor of disc jockeys, by the quiet theatricality, festivity, and sensuality of mass mediated working class culture and family, school and a little circle of friends.

Part 3:

I had my first symptoms of bi-polar disorder at the age of 18 and went on to university: 1963-1967 still battling the disorder, although it was not diagnosed until I was 24. While I was studying the social sciences at university in the working class, ‘ lunch-pail’ city of Hamilton, I began to see my culture like a kind of suffocating tedium and type of tyranny. It was during these years that my interests in the Bahá'í Faith developed and these interests helped to give me a balance between the intellectual-high culture and the more populist aspects of culture. And the rest is history as they say.

I have now had half a century since then, 1962-2012, of an interest in both popular and high culture and am very, very far from being an authority on either, indeed, on anything.

Part 4:

The Canadian poet Archibald Lampman, who championed the idea of variety of subjects and styles as a poetic virtue wrote in

his essay on “Poetic Interpretation” (c. 1895), that: “the perfect poet would have no set style. He would have a different one for everything he would write, a manner exactly suited to the subject.” It seems to me, as I now survey the last two decades of an enormous poetic output, that I have come to acquire a certain style, although the content is immensely varied from elitist to popular culture.

28. What do you think readers can learn from your prose that they can’t from your poetry?

28. To answer this question, allow me to begin with the words of a leading American critic of poetry Helen Vendler. She notes in her review of American poet Robert Hass’s 500 page series of essays entitled What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World in The New York Review of Books 27/9/’12---that: “Poets’ prose is in a category all its own. It enlarges for readers the idea of a writer’s mind and also demonstrates aspects of his character. To a reader knowing only the poetry there can be surprises, for example:

Emerson’s aphoristic journals, Whitman’s fact-filled memoranda of the Civil War, or Thoreau’s memories of his dead brother in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Poets’ prose can be formal and reticent, as is the case in T.S. Eliot’s writing; or it can be intimately painful as in Robert Lowell’s account of his time in Payne Whitney (“From the Unbalanced Aquarium”). What Light Can Do collects the poet Robert Hass’s essays of the last twenty years, in which we hear a disarming voice speaking as if to friends. His prose has an unusually wide range: he has written not only on other poets but also on photographers (Robert Adams, Robert Buelteman, Laura McPhee) and fiction writers (Jack London, Chekhov, Cormac McCarthy, Maxine Hong Kingston).”

Vendler continues: “Hass’s first instinct in writing prose is to take on the manner of a born storyteller, transporting us to a well-described setting—biographical, ecological, or personal—and naturalizing us, so to speak, into an imaginative atmosphere. In other hands, an essay called “Wallace Stevens in the World” might not begin: “My nineteenth birthday was also the birthday of one of my college friends.” Nor might a piece on the First Epistle of Saint John open with: “In my grade-school classroom

in Northern California, there were pictures pinned to the bulletin boards representing the Last Supper.” Other essays begin more straightforwardly, but not without a deliberate will to surprise.

The intriguing “Chekhov’s Anger” invites us in with a blunt and unsettling opening: “In his journals Chekhov notes two reasons why he doesn’t like a lawyer of his acquaintance. One is that he is very stupid; the other is that he is a reptile.”

In my case, readers will find my prose exists in my poetry as well as in my essays and autobiography. To make a long story short, I think I could go so far as to say my prose and poetry are virtually indistinguishable. That is why I call it prose-poetry.

Concluding Comment:

I began asking and answering these questions in 1996 as I indicated at the start of this simulated interview. I added more questions and answers, as I also said at the outset of this interview, more than a decade later from 2009 to 2012. The last update to the above 28 questions, as well as the 10 questions that opened this simulation, was made 14 years after beginning this process of question and answer---on 10 November 2012. Total: 7900 words and 20 A-4 pages.-------------------End of document

_________________married for 44 years, a teacher for 35, a writer & editor for 12, and a Baha'i for 52(in 2011)

Last edited by RonPrice on Mon Dec 24, 2012 10:52 am, edited 6 times in total.

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RonPrice  Post subject: Re: THANKS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS(Part 6)

Posted: Sat Nov 10, 2012 6:46 am If I pause and reflect any more on this subject of---THANKS

Joined: Mon Jan 24, 2011 10:56 pmPosts: 128Location: George Town Tasmania Australia Nationality: Canadian

AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS---I could express many more words to many more people and places, organizations and things. Perhaps I will add more as the evening of my life heads for nightfall in the years of my life that remain, the years beyond 70. Some human development psychologists call the years from 70 to 80, the last decade of late adulthood before old age begins at 80. Some of these same psychologists have 3 phases of old-age: early old-age(80-90), middle old-age(90-100) and old-old age(100++). If I last to the age of 100 the year will be 2044.

For now, though, the above five posts on this thread, with their 40,000 to 50,000 words and 120 to 140 pages in font-14, will suffice. Some readers may find the inclusion of my resume a curious addition. In adding my resume I must, in the process, give thanks and acknowledge all those who made the achievements, to say nothing of my many failures and failings, of a lifetime possible. One's failings, of course, are generally not included in one's CV even though they are crucial learning experiences.

Without others all that we achieve would never take place. Adam, that mythological creature, needed Eve for without her all, or at least many, of his moral parameters(or hers) in life would not have existed. Without readers, a writer and author, a poet and publisher, an editor and researcher, an online journalism and blogger, a scholar and reader, like myself, would hardly exist. Writers need readers like talkers need listeners.

I began the above 5 posts on 24 October 2012, and it is my intention to update this statement from time to time. The last update was on 25/1/'13, more than 3 months after beginning this particular kind of overview of my life, and nearly 4 weeks since the opening of 2013. -Ron Price Australia.

_________________married for 44 years, a teacher for 35, a writer & editor for 12, and a Baha'i for 52(in 2011)