by Richard Subber | Dec 22, 2020 | Human Nature, Reflections, Theater and play reviews, Tidbits
Guess who wasn’t coming to dinner at your house in 1967…
Well, if you grew up in a white family, it’s a pretty good bet that a handsome black guy—a doctor!—wasn’t planning on sitting down to dinner and telling you he planned to marry your daughter.
That’s the reality that was.
So, about 50 years ago, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton and Beah Richards and Roy Glenn got crazy in Hollywood and filmed Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. It was a blockbuster. Houghton (daughter) and Poitier (doctor) played lovely young people who were in love, and everybody got with the program by the end of the movie, and they lived happily ever after. (There were Oscars, click here).
It’s a poignant and dramatically dynamic movie. Every character throws firecrackers at least a couple times, and everybody catches the firecrackers with high art and deftly normalized social criticism and passionate declarations about the right thing.
I’ve watched it several times. For me, it doesn’t get old. I like to live in the world with people who say “If you love somebody, you gotta love somebody, so go ahead and do it.”
The movie turned a lot of heads, but I’m guessing it didn’t change a whole lot of minds.
….and don’t forget that the last recorded lynching of a black man (Michael Donald) in America was near Mobile, Alabama, in 1981.
* * * * * *
Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2020 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Blithedale Romance
by Nathaniel Hawthorne, not his best…
–
Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Nov 4, 2020 | Democracy, Human Nature, My poetry, Poetry, Politics, Power and inequality
Too many gulfs…
Hand me that hammer
This lightening sky pulls my eye
upward from newly darkening earth.
Our troubled plain
has no points of light just now.
We face fears, terrors, hates, imprecations,
repudiations, exclusions…
Too many gulfs appearing,
too few bridges imagined
in the grim thoughts of too many.
I will build one bridge today,
I welcome this lightening sky
to ease my work.
November 9, 2016
I work on building a bridge every day. I try to do a good thing every day. That’s good for me and for America. It helps to keep me sane.
* * * * * *
My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2020 All rights reserved.
Book review: Shantung Compound
They didn’t care much
about each other…
by Langdon Gilkey
–
My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 53 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
by Richard Subber | Aug 16, 2020 | Human Nature, Tidbits
resist the temptation…
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) offers much to like to so many people. I think his poetry is under-appreciated…and try reading “The Tell-Tale Heart” when you’re home alone some evening, and it’s nasty outside, and you would really prefer to feel pleasant inside, except you’re reading the masterpiece…
I confess, I only like the first half of Poe’s snippet about folly, melancholy ain’t my thing…”dipped in folly” suggests the exotic and self-indulgent excess of youth, mostly not fatal because it’s usually hauled along by optimism and rescued once in a while by love, for which we may be endlessly thankful…
If you’re not personally in the youth category any more, be prepared to supply the love.
Let’s keep pushing melancholy into the next county somewhere…
* * * * * *
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2020 All rights reserved.
Movie review: Same Time, Next Year
all-American adultery, oh yeah…
–
Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Apr 1, 2020 | Human Nature, Reflections, Tidbits
The “Hobo Ethical Code”
Maybe you were thinking there’s no such thing as a “Hobo Ethical Code.”
(I’m not talking about “Politician’s Ethical Code,” don’t get me started….)
In 1889, at the Hobo National Convention in Chicago, the folks who proudly called themselves “hobos” adopted an ethical code that stands the test of time. You can read it below.
You’re right, we don’t have to spend a lot of time these days on the “boil up” part, but just about everything else in the 15-point code has some application to life today.
In fact, living like a noble hobo doesn’t sound like a bad idea at all.
For the record, a hobo is a migratory or homeless worker who looks for work, standing apart from the “tramp” who works when there isn’t much of an alternative and the “bum” who avoids work altogether.
Decide your own life; don’t let another person run or rule you.
When in town, always respect the local law and officials, and try to be a gentleman at all times.
Don’t take advantage of someone who is in a vulnerable situation, locals or other hobos.
Always try to find work, even if temporary, and always seek out jobs nobody wants. By doing so you not only help a business along, but ensure employment should you return to that town again.
When no employment is available, make your own work by using your added talents at crafts.
Do not allow yourself to become a stupid drunk and set a bad example for locals’ treatment of other hobos.
When jungling in town, respect handouts, do not wear them out, another hobo will be coming along who will need them as badly, if not worse than you.
Always respect nature, do not leave garbage where you are jungling.
If in a community jungle, always pitch in and help.
Try to stay clean, and boil up wherever possible.
When traveling, ride your train respectfully, take no personal chances, cause no problems with the operating crew or host railroad, act like an extra crew member.
Do not cause problems in a train yard, another hobo will be coming along who will need passage through that yard.
Do not allow other hobos to molest children; expose all molesters to authorities…they are the worst garbage to infest any society.
Help all runaway children, and try to induce them to return home.
Help your fellow hobos whenever and wherever needed, you may need their help someday.
p.s. It seems that no one knows how the word “hobo” originated.
* * * * * *
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2020 All rights reserved.
Book review:
Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale
Full of her passion, not mine…
click here
–
My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 53 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Jan 9, 2020 | Global climate change, Human Nature, Politics, Reflections, Tidbits
actually, not an unthinkable thought…
“Owing in large measure to humankind’s
long, steadily accelerating career of habitat shattering,
the rate of extinction is currently
about a thousand times what is normal.
That’s how fast the planet’s biotic community
is losing member species these days…
I can’t get that extinction crisis out of my mind.
Extinction is not abstract in the least.
It’s the thousands of instances of the desolation
of being the last of one’s kind.”
Stephanie Mills, excerpt from “The One Who Steals the Fat,” The Sun magazine, January 2001
We’re not accustomed to thinking in truly absolute terms—think about it, extinction is the end.
Think again about your grandchildren.
Think again.
* * * * * *
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2020 All rights reserved.
Book review: Shakespeare’s Wife
Germaine Greer went overboard a bit…
–
As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Dec 6, 2019 | Human Nature, Tidbits
Too many ways for lies to travel…
“A lie can travel halfway around the world
while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
Samuel Langhorne Clemens “Mark Twain” (1835-1910)
I tried it—I can tell the truth twice while I’m tying my shoes.
Try telling someone the truth today.
* * * * * *
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2019 All rights reserved.
A quote from General Custer
Hint: it’s something to do with Indians…
–
My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 53 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
* * * * * *
