Mind Fields: Coltrane’s Dead
Posted: September 2, 2022 Filed under: Biographies, Books, Excerpt, Fiction, Mind Fields | Tags: Arthur Rosch, Confessions of an Honest Man, Mind Fields, Writing to be Read 2 Comments
This is an excerpt from my novel, Confessions Of An Honest Man:
The men get into the car and Zoot steers it carefully across the bridge. “Still need a Pissngas?” Zoot inquires mockingly.
“I forgot I had to pee,” says Aaron. “Now I got to pee really really bad.”
“Well shit, get out and pee, we about fifteen minutes from the Steelville turnoff.”
Aaron goes out behind a bush and relieves himself. He hears the sound of his own stream against a world that has gone supernally silent. There is no wind, no bird song. The sky is a weird shade of pink. As soon as he is finished the rain begins to fall again. The drops are huge, heavy, laden with silt. Covering his head, Aaron races back to the car.
After driving for ten minutes in silence, a black and white road sign appears. The trapezoidal shape of the state of Missouri encloses a number four. Fifteen yards past this sign there is a green board with white letters and an arrow pointing to the right. Steelville, eight miles, it indicates. At this one-sided intersection is a little gas station and a tiny grocery store skirted by a wooden plank walkway. Zoot pulls into the station. He gestures to Aaron to stay in the car. This part of Missouri isn’t explicitly segregated, but it has the taint of old rebellion. Zoot asks a black attendant to fill the tank, and Tyrone jumps through the rain towards the store, looking for another pack of cigarettes. Aaron watches the Schlitz Beer sign flicker, rolls the window down to smell the storm-soaked earth. He knows this country, too. He has come here for vacations with his family. They have gone to Bagnell Dam, Lake of the Ozarks, Wildwood Resort. In a childhood with a paucity of happy memories, this country means peace, relief, respite, jumping from a pier into the lake, riding horses, mom on her best behavior, dad relaxed and having fun.
Zoot chats with the station attendant about the twister, informs him that the Willens Creek Bridge is no longer covered.
“Be damned,” the man says, “twister blew the top the bridge away? No shit?”
“No shit, almost blew us away too, turned this here Lincoln Continental hundred eighty degrees backward but left a cigarette in the ashtray, still lit and ready to smoke.” Zoot’s dialects always reflect his circumstances. He pronounces “this here” as “thissheer”.
Hurriedly finishing the transaction to get out of the rain, the attendant takes Zoot’s money and rushes back into the shelter of the store.
A moment later, Tyrone comes walking out, holding a newspaper limply in his hand. His mouth is hanging open, his eyes have a staring and shocked quality, as if he has just survived a terrible battle. He opens the passenger’s door , throws the newspaper towards Aaron in the back seat and slumps abruptly on the plush leather, one leg hanging out the side.
“You look like you just got terrible news,” Zoot observes with concern.
Tyrone nods and points towards the newspaper.
“Coltrane’s dead,” he says mournfully. “It’s in the paper. He died yesterday.”
There is a stunned silence. Aaron feels as if he has just taken the first plunge on a roller coaster ride, his stomach goes up through his chest.
“No,” Zoot says. “No.”
Tyrone has the paper folded out to the entertainment section. It is the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. There is a big article about Barbara Streisand, a review of the new James Bond movie, a review of the Led Zeppelin Concert at Kiel Auditorium. Down in the far right corner of the page is a two-paragraph squib. ‘Jazz Musician John Coltrane Dies,” it says. There is sketchy information about the jazz giant succumbing suddenly to liver cancer.
Aaron puts his face in the paper and squeezes himself with it, crumbling it around his cheeks. “He is forty years old!” He wails. “Forty years old! What is happening? Why are jazz musicians dying? Why Coltrane, of all people, Trane? “
Desperately, he claws at Zoot’s shoulder. “We’re all professional jazz musicians, Zoot. Is this my future? Is this Tyrone’s? Are you going to die on us, too? Why can’t we survive? What are we doing to ourselves?”
Zoot stares straight ahead, seeing nothing. He reaches across his shoulder and pats Aaron’s hand, squeezing it.
“You’re just beginning to see what it’s like,” the old musician says. “It’s dangerous to be a genius. That’s why I stay in this chitlin circuit groove, play the college campuses, keep my mid-stream profile. And this is hard enough. You think Coltrane can be inspired every night? You think he can get up there and reach down into his guts and deliver a brilliant set five nights a week, be a genius?”
A core of bitter reflection stains Zoot’s voice. These are things he generally keeps to himself. As he speaks, his anger grows and his voice scrapes with frustration and old pain.
“You have to use something, like Bird, like Lester, you have to use something to get to that place where you even feel like playing at all, let alone be great. Then you raise the standard, people turn out and expect to be transformed, to hear an oracular performance, night after night. I smoke my weed, that’s how I do it. And I don’t ask too much of myself. That’s why I’m sixty-three and still playing. I know how much I can give. Men like Coltrane, they don’t know moderation, they can’t know moderation, they have to keep pushing the limits or the critics jump on their ass, the fickle fans get restless, the talk on the street starts goin’ ‘round, ‘Trane’s lost it, Bird’s lost it, Jackie’s lost it, Prez’s lost it, Bud’s lost it! You have a couple bad nights and all these assholes who can’t play a note go talking, he’s lost it, lost it, getting’ tired, man, runnin’ out of steam, his great days are behind him, what a shame, used to be a great musician.”
Zoot pauses for a moment, looking at his sidemen, at his disciples in the mystic art of music. Then he spits a long gobbet out the window and says, with a lengthy and contemptuous drawl, “Sheee-it! Son of a fucking bitch!”
He turns backward to look at Aaron. Cobra-like, he shifts his body, glancing at Tyrone beside him. He is seething, indignant. “That’s why genius musicians die. They have to die! Ain’t no choice! Once they get a reputation as a genius, they have to be a genius every night. They use it up! Then they’re gone!”
He turns on the engine and drives about a hundred yards down the road. He pulls onto the shoulder and scrunches the emergency brake with his foot. He puts his large hands in front of his face, then leans into them and begins to weep.
It is contagious. These three friends, of different ages, races, different backgrounds, are not afraid to show their feelings to one another. The three jazz musicians, on their way to a gig, taking a short cut through the back roads of Missouri, pull onto the side of the country lane and weap for John Coltrane.
Purchase Link: https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Honest-Man-Arthur-Rosch-ebook/dp/B01C3J0NK2
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Arthur Rosch is a novelist, musician, photographer and poet. His works are funny, memorable and often compelling. One reviewer said “He’s wicked and feisty, but when he gets you by the guts, he never lets go.” Listeners to his music have compared him to Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, Randy Newman or Mose Allison. These comparisons are flattering but deceptive. Rosch is a stylist, a complete original. His material ranges from sly wit to gripping political commentary.
Arthur was born in the heart of Illinois and grew up in the western suburbs of St. Louis. In his teens he discovered his creative potential while hoping to please a girl. Though she left the scene, Arthur’s creativity stayed behind. In his early twenties he moved to San Francisco and took part in the thriving arts scene. His first literary sale was to Playboy Magazine. The piece went on to receive Playboy’s “Best Story of the Year” award. Arthur also has writing credits in Exquisite Corpse, Shutterbug, eDigital, and Cat Fancy Magazine. He has written five novels, a memoir and a large collection of poetry. His autobiographical novel, Confessions Of An Honest Man won the Honorable Mention award from Writer’s Digest in 2016.
More of his work can be found at www.artrosch.com Photos at https://500px.com/p/artsdigiphoto?view=photos
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Mind Fields: When We Are The Sociopaths
Posted: August 5, 2022 Filed under: Commentary, Opinion, The Human Condition | Tags: Arthur Rosch, Mind Fields, Social Commentary, The Human Condition, Writing to be Read Leave a commentThe Sociopaths
If you vote for a sociopath to serve in public office, you may be acting from your own sociopathic tendencies. Americans have succumbed to a sociopathic culture that is sad and shocking. It isn’t wealth or poverty that counts in the USA. It’s numbness to the suffering of others. It is disturbing that numbness has spread itself wide, that apathy has replaced interest in public discourse. The awful fact is that people are dead inside. How do I know this? I know it from personal experience. I was also dead inside. Now, I have a bit of life within myself. I continue to fight this social and spiritual desolation. I am less dead than in the past. I use every tool I can grasp: therapy, meetings with a group, reading about psychology, learning about Consciousness itself.
Growing up in a typically dysfunctional family has left me reeling with emotional pain and often engaged in struggles with addiction and other debilitating conditions. I didn’t want this! I wanted to live free and happy but that is neither possible nor even desirable. I have learned patience and the ability to frame my narratives of pain in terms that show their creative importance.
As far as I know, I was not “sent here” by anyone other than another faculty of my very core SELF. We need to understand that possession of a Self is a very high privilege, a vital connection between what is human and what is not of this world but of some inner possibility. Selfness is a condition of consciousness, a unique and important faculty of identity. It isn’t random, it doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from within the mind and the fact that there IS a mind at all is crucial. Why? Why have a mind? Of what evolutionary use is a mind? All creatures have minds and some of them may be highly organized and developed. We have no idea what goes on in the mind of an animal like a whale or an elephant. It seems clear from observation that they are not automatons. Nor are they entirely conditioned by nature. There is something else, something beyond our grasp, about the minds of other species. We are desperately uninformed. At best, we are guessing, by way of zoologists, veterinarians, communicators and empaths.
What if a blue whale knows about the cosmos from an entirely different perspective? What if its brain produces some profound psychedelic that eludes human beings? In its own way it may be swimming among the stars. Is there not an inner life within the life we see? Should not a bear possess an inner life? Does not its memory belong to the universe?
It is essential to respect ALL life forms as conscious and sentient. The concept that MAN is above all other life forms is specious and dangerous. We need to get over ourselves.
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Arthur Rosch is a novelist, musician, photographer and poet. His works are funny, memorable and often compelling. One reviewer said “He’s wicked and feisty, but when he gets you by the guts, he never lets go.” Listeners to his music have compared him to Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, Randy Newman or Mose Allison. These comparisons are flattering but deceptive. Rosch is a stylist, a complete original. His material ranges from sly wit to gripping political commentary.
Arthur was born in the heart of Illinois and grew up in the western suburbs of St. Louis. In his teens he discovered his creative potential while hoping to please a girl. Though she left the scene, Arthur’s creativity stayed behind. In his early twenties he moved to San Francisco and took part in the thriving arts scene. His first literary sale was to Playboy Magazine. The piece went on to receive Playboy’s “Best Story of the Year” award. Arthur also has writing credits in Exquisite Corpse, Shutterbug, eDigital, and Cat Fancy Magazine. He has written five novels, a memoir and a large collection of poetry. His autobiographical novel, Confessions Of An Honest Man won the Honorable Mention award from Writer’s Digest in 2016.
More of his work can be found at www.artrosch.com
Photos at https://500px.com/p/artsdigiphoto?view=photos
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Mind Fields: Two Of My Thoughts
Posted: July 15, 2022 Filed under: Commentary, essays, Mind Fields, Opinion | Tags: Arthur Rosch, Mind Fields, Social Commentary, Writing to be Read 1 CommentTwo Of My Thoughts
#1
Discernment is the ability to obtain sharp perceptions or to judge well. That’s from Webster’s dictionary. I bring it to your attention because if this nation is suffering from a widespread psychological disorder it is this: a lack of discernment. It is the inability to judge well from the information that’s available. There are millions of casualties to this disease which is more sinister than Covid 19. It is something that has no name. I call it The Plebny or Recalcitrant Flux. Any force, power or person who spreads this disease is committing crimes against our planet. In this turbulent time we NEED discernment to pick our way through the fields of ignorance and bad information. Listen to me: bad information. There’s no such thing as bad information. I refer to the mis and disinformation filled with distorted content, warped propaganda, mendacity in the service of ego and power. We’re afflicted by people in power who lie automatically, without internal scanning or external censorship. Damage is being done! Without discernment we are easily manipulated, like cattle being led by nose rings. Further, these people without discernment are unaware of their lack. It is impossible to engage in dialogue with people who can’t perceive with precision and conscience. I am willing to consider other points of view. I’m not stuck. It takes a little effort to discern things. It takes honesty, most of all. With whom are we honest? We must be honest with ourselves most of all because human beings have a tendency towards various mental impediments to honesty like Denial, Shame, Depression, Grandiosity, Narcissism, Sociopathy, Psychopathy, Crushed Affect, Sleepwalkers Syndrome, Intentional Psychomyopathy and Heartbane. There are so many wacked out people in the world that the earth is saturated with their craziness.
A few wild names in there? Blame Mad Magazine and my high school pal and class comedian, Jay Grodsky, for that. We made up goofy names together. He had a ducktail in the back of his head and a giant spit curl falling across his forehead and he was the coolest guy in the world. This was WAY before Travolta but about contemporary with Edward “Cookie” Burns. Jay’s divorced mom didn’t care what he did and he had this big house to fool around in. I idolized Jay but I fear that he barely knew I existed. I wasn’t very cool. In those days I absorbed the coolness of others rather than, as I do now, generate coolness from my nature. I am a cool guy. I waft coolness from my pores.
#2
I think poets write for themselves. I never expect anyone to read my poems. And if they did, what would they make of them? I read a few poets. it’s never been the most fascinating literary form for reading. It’s great fun to write it. When a poem occurs for me, I’m in love with the language. I’ve made it do something it’s never done before. Language exudes emotion. Can I possibly convey how I feel in love?
I’m in love with my therapist. That’s both corny and compelling. A great therapy is one where you and your therapist fall in love, but have enough sense to stay therapeutic rather than personal. I don’t know my therapist. I don’t have to; not to love her. Believe me, I love her with a deeply lusty feeling. I love her with my body. Other than a few hugs we’ve never touched. But I love her in many ways. I told her that I love her for what she knows about me. I’m already inside of her. By knowing me, she loves me, and that’s the whole story. She gives me definition, the outlines of my bones and organs become visible.
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Arthur Rosch is a novelist, musician, photographer and poet. His works are funny, memorable and often compelling. One reviewer said “He’s wicked and feisty, but when he gets you by the guts, he never lets go.” Listeners to his music have compared him to Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, Randy Newman or Mose Allison. These comparisons are flattering but deceptive. Rosch is a stylist, a complete original. His material ranges from sly wit to gripping political commentary.
Arthur was born in the heart of Illinois and grew up in the western suburbs of St. Louis. In his teens he discovered his creative potential while hoping to please a girl. Though she left the scene, Arthur’s creativity stayed behind. In his early twenties he moved to San Francisco and took part in the thriving arts scene. His first literary sale was to Playboy Magazine. The piece went on to receive Playboy’s “Best Story of the Year” award. Arthur also has writing credits in Exquisite Corpse, Shutterbug, eDigital, and Cat Fancy Magazine. He has written five novels, a memoir and a large collection of poetry. His autobiographical novel, Confessions Of An Honest Man won the Honorable Mention award from Writer’s Digest in 2016.
More of his work can be found at www.artrosch.com
Photos at https://500px.com/p/artsdigiphoto?view=photos
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Want to be sure not to miss any of Arthur’s “Mind Fields” segments? Subscribe to Writing to be Read for e-mail notifications whenever new content is posted or follow WtbR on WordPress. If you find it interesting or just entertaining, please share.
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Mind Fields: Why Are Commercials?
Posted: June 17, 2022 Filed under: Advertising, Commentary, marketing, Mind Fields, Opinion | Tags: Advertising, Arthur Rosch, Commercials, Media, Mind Fields, Social Commentary, Writing to be Read 1 CommentWhy Are Commercials?
May 2022
I’ve been watching these f..ing things since the beginning of television in the early fifties.
We call them “commercials”, thus making the word a noun. On offer in our affluent culture is a system built upon the marketing of various products. Without marketing there is no Capitalism. In the early days of TV we took for granted that every ten minutes or so the program would pause for a “word from our sponsor”. In most cases that sponsor was one of three things: food, pharmaceuticals or automobiles.
It hasn’t changed. We still see these interruptions every X number of minutes. Nowadays we mute the volume or we fast-forward but we are forced to waste time on them, one way or another.
When I watch these things I feel a mixture of amused contempt and chagrin. The contempt is for myself and my brethren who have absorbed so many of these messages that the wasted time must amount to… what? Months? Years? I have to wonder. How much of my time has been spent either watching or avoiding these marketing techniques? As much time as I’ve spent sleeping, certainly.
The first commercial that I was aware of was the brand of Twenty Mule Team Borax. It was laundry detergent. It completes the picture of the happy housewife in our capitalist society. She washed clothes in her brand new washer-dryer combo. She fed her children the repulsive junk that was flogged on the Saturday morning cartoon shows. Breakfast cereal. Wonder Bread. Jif peanut butter. Canned peas. I shudder. My insides are permanently made of glue.
The happy housewife model of consumer heaven ruled our lives from the airwaves. Our moms were supposed to be efficient smiling providers of nurture in the form of supermarket comestibles. We had Twinkies. We had cupcakes. So, how come my mom was a raging manic depressive with sadistic tendencies?
I was more likely to get strangled in her apron strings as I was to be poisoned by sugared manna from the delicatessen.
Guess what, people? We have a past. We have history. Our culture has evolved at a rocket pace to keep up with the rate of change. But a lot of us folks came of age in a different world. We don’t understand the stuff our kids and grand kids are consuming. What is this shit? Uh…uh. No Way.
It’s the same old story updated for modern times. It’s still fast food, pharmaceuticals and Ford pickup trucks.
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Arthur Rosch is a novelist, musician, photographer and poet. His works are funny, memorable and often compelling. One reviewer said “He’s wicked and feisty, but when he gets you by the guts, he never lets go.” Listeners to his music have compared him to Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, Randy Newman or Mose Allison. These comparisons are flattering but deceptive. Rosch is a stylist, a complete original. His material ranges from sly wit to gripping political commentary.
Arthur was born in the heart of Illinois and grew up in the western suburbs of St. Louis. In his teens he discovered his creative potential while hoping to please a girl. Though she left the scene, Arthur’s creativity stayed behind. In his early twenties he moved to San Francisco and took part in the thriving arts scene. His first literary sale was to Playboy Magazine. The piece went on to receive Playboy’s “Best Story of the Year” award. Arthur also has writing credits in Exquisite Corpse, Shutterbug, eDigital, and Cat Fancy Magazine. He has written five novels, a memoir and a large collection of poetry. His autobiographical novel, Confessions Of An Honest Man won the Honorable Mention award from Writer’s Digest in 2016.
More of his work can be found at www.artrosch.com
Photos at https://500px.com/p/artsdigiphoto?view=photos
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Want to be sure not to miss any of Arthur’s “Mind Fields” segments? Subscribe to Writing to be Read for e-mail notifications whenever new content is posted or follow WtbR on WordPress. If you find it interesting or just entertaining, please share.
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Mind Fields: Food Disorders And Other Fun Things to Do To F**k Yourself Up
Posted: June 3, 2022 Filed under: Commentary, Mind Fields, Opinion | Tags: Addiction, Arthur Rosch, Eating Disorders, Mind Fields, Social Commentary, Writing to be Read 4 Comments2022, The Year Of The Great Fungus
I have a conceit, i.e. that I should hold the title as “The World’s Most F**ked Up Person”. The only problem is that all of you would also like to hold this same title. Don’t try to con me. I know what you think. The only reason I know what you think is that it’s the same thing that I think.
Or. I used to think. When I recognized that each of us claims this title as the most neurotic person on Earth, I began to have more confidence in myself. Surely, I reasoned, if I am exactly the same amount of f**ked up as everyone else, then I must belong to this Family of Man. I’m human. And we all know that there is great dignity to being human. We are builders of pyramids, makers of satellites and space ships.
I have a very weird relationship with food. The first time I grasped that I was deeply crazy was when I began to eat huge amounts of food. I indulged especially in sweets. If I were to make a pie chart of my life (and refrain from eating it), I’m sure it would show huge chunks of time in the bulimia/anorexia’ zone. The worst of my food disorders followed me through adolescence; years seventeen through twenty two. I was out in the world, trying to maneuver by being on or near college campuses.
I had a sneaky way of being anorexic. I deluded myself into thinking that this was a spiritual discipline. Macrobiotics. It would get me high, exalt me spiritually. By eating small portions of brown rice and onions, chickpeas in barley, I was the paragon of yogic discipline. This was who I wanted myself to be. I got skinny. I weighed 125. On top of this I was taking LSD and smoking DMT. I was deep into my purpose, my destiny of becoming a musician of salvation and a figure of reverence. I was grandiose as all hell.
Then I came to a breaking point. After a year of Macrobiotics, I had such a craving for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that I bought the ingredients and took them back to my hidey hole. “What are you doing?” I asked myself. “This is a self betrayal, this is the opposite of Macrobiotic food. You asshole, what a failure you are!” So I ate it. Then I ate something else sweet and gooey. Then I couldn’t stop eating every kind of junk food on the planet. I had been like a spring ready to snap. Boing!
I was so ashamed of myself. This was 1967, before eating disorders had been invented. I was a pioneer. My bulimia wasn’t the pukey kind. It was the Exercise Freakishly type of bulimia, the one where on alternate days I would purge with sweat and effort, then follow with a day of relentless eating: an entire apple pie, backed up by a half gallon of ice cream. That kind of eating: epic, disgusting eating. After that came the cookies, and so forth. One day exercising. One day binge eating. Back and forth, one followed the other, for more than a year. I looked for help. I went to the college shrink. He said, “I don’t know what’s happening to you and I can’t help you. Besides, you’re not even enrolled as a student at this college.”
I lost weight during this time. It was paradoxical! How could I be losing weight? My metabolism must have been very confused. My waist was a twenty nine or thirty. I was living in a vacant student’s quarter, avoiding the security guys and bedding down with a pad and sleeping bag. I got money from my dad. I worked as a stable boy at a local horse ranch. A stable boy. I had my drums stashed at the university’s music building in a practice room. I practiced there for hours every day, getting high by all means and experimenting with the limits of my technique. That was the point of not going to college. I let my dad pay for semesters at Western Reserve or Wayne State, and then I would slip down to Yellow Springs from Cleveland and hang out with people who talked to trees. I would practice all the time, working through the famous “Stick Control” books and listening to Coltrane records.
This was a pleasant period that lasted about a year. I may be conflating two different periods of time. It doesn’t matter. That’s the way memory works when it sort of fails to work. I think there’s a memory bank in the brain and it gets filled up and needs to be purged once in a while. It’s all just story anyway. Life truly is fiction, it has to be. I just want a subject to write about and my life has been so bizarre that it qualifies as the stuff of novels. That poor guy (that is, myself) didn’t know what lay ahead. He thought that if he took enough acid, did yoga, ate rice and played the drums then he would launch himself into nirvana. It’s not a bad plan, really. The problem was that I was fractured psychologically, harboring behaviors that would shame me again and again. I was very (he says solemnly) very f**ked up.
These were adolescent ordeals, but they were precursors to my future. In the sixties my eighteen year old self dreamed of cosmic unity while the biggest thing that lay ahead of me was coke and heroin addiction. I interrogated my psyche by reading about psychology. After that came years of therapy. I was determined to save myself ,in spite of my terrible behavior.
It took a long time but none of it can be repudiated. It’s lucky I’m still alive and well.
After my food disorders came cocaine, and then, heroin.
I’m still slightly food disordered. I control, compensate, manage. Mostly I exercise.
The cocaine and heroin almost killed me.
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Arthur Rosch is a novelist, musician, photographer and poet. His works are funny, memorable and often compelling. One reviewer said “He’s wicked and feisty, but when he gets you by the guts, he never lets go.” Listeners to his music have compared him to Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, Randy Newman or Mose Allison. These comparisons are flattering but deceptive. Rosch is a stylist, a complete original. His material ranges from sly wit to gripping political commentary.
Arthur was born in the heart of Illinois and grew up in the western suburbs of St. Louis. In his teens he discovered his creative potential while hoping to please a girl. Though she left the scene, Arthur’s creativity stayed behind. In his early twenties he moved to San Francisco and took part in the thriving arts scene. His first literary sale was to Playboy Magazine. The piece went on to receive Playboy’s “Best Story of the Year” award. Arthur also has writing credits in Exquisite Corpse, Shutterbug, eDigital, and Cat Fancy Magazine. He has written five novels, a memoir and a large collection of poetry. His autobiographical novel, Confessions Of An Honest Man won the Honorable Mention award from Writer’s Digest in 2016.
More of his work can be found at www.artrosch.com
Photos at https://500px.com/p/artsdigiphoto?view=photos
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
Want to be sure not to miss any of Arthur’s “Mind Fields” segments? Subscribe to Writing to be Read for e-mail notifications whenever new content is posted or follow WtbR on WordPress. If you find it interesting or just entertaining, please share.
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Mind Fields: Crime Thrillers And Mystery Media
Posted: May 20, 2022 Filed under: Books, Commentary, Crime, Fiction, Mind Fields, Mystery, Thriller | Tags: Arthur Rosch, Crime Fiction, Henning Mankell, James Lee Burke, Mind Fields, mystery, Suspense/Thriller, Writing to be Read 3 CommentsI read everything. I read fiction, non fiction, biography, history, psychology. If libraries were edible there would be few surviving libraries. I would have been a Godzilla-like creature with an insatiable appetite for books, “The Monster That Devoured Libraries”. I’ve been reading voraciously since I was eight years old. I started my reading career with historical fiction, then turned to sci-fi and Fantasy. I detoured into crime fiction and mysteries but I put them down in my twenties and never returned until I saw the film “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”. That rekindled my lust for good thrillers and I checked out the late Stieg Larsen’s epic trilogy. Then I turned to the somber depths of Henning Mankell, author of the Wallander mystery series.
Mankell is sixty four years old. I find this fact very much in his favor. I like reading authors who’ve got some worldly experience, who are old enough to recognize the body’s fragility and are beginning to be on speaking terms with death.
Henning Mankell spends half of his year living in Maputo, Mozambique. He is director of a drama troupe called Teatro Del Avenida. What, I wonder, could be better food for a writer’s mind than to open himself to a world so utterly alien to his native experience?
Stockholm/Maputo, Stockholm/Maputo… here is a successful writer who is seriously engaged with the world. He’s not hiding in some comfy Swedish estate, churning out formulaic mystery books. His writing is many layers deep.
Mankell’s best-selling character, Chief Inspector Wallander, is a frustrating man. He’s frustrating to his daughter, he’s frustrating to his colleagues; he’s especially frustrating to himself. Somehow he never seems to get to that vulnerable place that allows his feelings to surface. He looks like a man tormented by an itch that he can never scratch. He walks around with three days’ growth of beard on his face, his shirt tails are hanging out, his eyes are bleary.
Somehow he always catches the killer, by thrashing his way through obscure connections, chasing ancient traumas, exposing religious zealotry and the classic motive to many a murder, old fashioned desire for revenge. Wallander’s like a gloomy Colombo. He always has one more question.
Mankell’s prose is austere and controlled. It evokes the Swedish countryside, from its thousands of Baltic islands to its birch forests and vast yellow fields of mustard and flax. Mankell also takes non-Swedish readers into the Swedish mind-set via references to Swedish history and attitudes.
There is a nostalgia for an “old” Sweden. Just as we in the U.S. have pre and post Nine Eleven mind-sets, the Swedes divide their recent history into periods before and after the assassination of their prime minister Olaf Palme in 1986. The crime was never solved and remains a collective national trauma.
Any sensitive reading of Mankell requires this awareness of the Swedish world-view. Americans are not great in being aware of other cultures and other histories. This is an opportunity to absorb Swedish culture from one of its iconic writers.
James Lee Burke
A quote from the novel Swan Peak:
“There are occasions in this world when you’re allowed to step inside a sonnet, when clocks stop and you don’t worry about time’s winged chariot and hands that beckon you from the shadows.”
I flat out love James Lee Burke’s writing. He’s another writer with some miles on his old frame. His best selling series characters, Detective Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcell are two of the most colorful non-heroes in crime fiction. Most of Burke’s novels move in and around New Orleans and the bayou country. The area’s history is like a character in itself. The ghosts of civil war personalities haunt the landscape. Burke’s stories draw on the family feuds and crimes from the past. His plots involves the great great great grandchildren of plantation owners and slaves. James Lee Burke’s writing is an invocation of living memory.
Certain structures appear in Burke’s narratives. There’s always an aristocratic family whose roots go back to ante-bellum times. This family has entanglements within the black community. The family is also “mobbed up”, albeit quietly, with the Giacano people in New Orleans.
People whose grandparents were slaves still work for this family. Some old blues man who plays the local dives witnessed a killing forty years ago. He won’t talk about it; he never talks about the “doings of white folk”. Dave can pry bits of information from the reluctant guitar man when he promises not to reveal his source. All the same, there’s a possibility that the old blues man’s body will float out of the bayou some time down the road.
Dave is a recovering alcoholic. The longing, the nostalgia for a shot of Johnny Walker in a glass of beer, is so authentic that Burke’s nascent alcoholism is clear as an empty decanter.
Burke knows the landscape of longing, of grief for an addiction that provided so much comfort yet brought so much destruction. This is why James Lee Burke is so good as a writer: he’s honest about who he is and his “real” personality bleeds across into his characters with perfect fidelity.
Here they are, the inhabitants of James Lee Burke’s fictional world. Dave Robicheaux, Vietnam vet and PTSD sufferer. Alcoholic. A cop who resents authority. Habitue of AA meetings when the pressure builds. Lover of his wife and his daughter Alafair and his tame three legged raccoon Tripod and his un-neutered warrior cat, Snuggles. Best friend of Clete Purcell, a de-frocked homicide cop who now does skip tracing for bondsmen Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine.
Clete is enormous, powerful, aggressive, self indulgent and frequently teeters on the brink of losing his self control. He is described as “an elephant falling down a stairs”. He still drinks and pushes Dave’s patient loyalty to the boundary. A fellow Vietnam vet, fellow PTSD patient, Clete was Dave’s partner in the homicide division of New Orleans Police Department.
In the old days they were called “The Bobbsey Twins.”
Burke mixes up all these characters to create stories with perfect pacing and addictive tension. He describes the color of light in Bayou Teche, the sound of the rain as it blows in from the Gulf. Someone out there creeping around the roots of the drowned trees is leveling a telescopic site onto Dave’s forehead. That someone may be a psychopathic ex-prison guard from Angola Penitentiary, a “gun bull”, a racist of the old stripe who once prodded prison laborers from the saddle of his horse, carrying a shotgun and ready to use it.
Burke’s villains have a whiff of sulfur about them, they aren’t quite human, they have a Satanic indifference to human suffering and a quick toughness that seems invincible.
These are some of the scariest villains in fiction. These are just a few reasons why you should read James Lee Burke.
His heroes are flawed, his villains terrifying, his victims pathetic and mute, his settings historic and laced with the colors of Spanish moss and the distant growl of alligators.
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Arthur Rosch is a novelist, musician, photographer and poet. His works are funny, memorable and often compelling. One reviewer said “He’s wicked and feisty, but when he gets you by the guts, he never lets go.” Listeners to his music have compared him to Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, Randy Newman or Mose Allison. These comparisons are flattering but deceptive. Rosch is a stylist, a complete original. His material ranges from sly wit to gripping political commentary.
Arthur was born in the heart of Illinois and grew up in the western suburbs of St. Louis. In his teens he discovered his creative potential while hoping to please a girl. Though she left the scene, Arthur’s creativity stayed behind. In his early twenties he moved to San Francisco and took part in the thriving arts scene. His first literary sale was to Playboy Magazine. The piece went on to receive Playboy’s “Best Story of the Year” award. Arthur also has writing credits in Exquisite Corpse, Shutterbug, eDigital, and Cat Fancy Magazine. He has written five novels, a memoir and a large collection of poetry. His autobiographical novel, Confessions Of An Honest Man won the Honorable Mention award from Writer’s Digest in 2016.
More of his work can be found at www.artrosch.com
Photos at https://500px.com/p/artsdigiphoto?view=photos
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Mind Fields: When A Man Ages
Posted: May 6, 2022 Filed under: Commentary, Mind Fields, Opinion | Tags: Aging, Arthur Rosch, Mind Fields, Seniors, Writing to be Read 3 CommentsDating And Aging: A dilemma
If you’re fifty years or older and you’re looking for a romance you will find that things have changed. In the past it was “the bad boy” who got all the ladies. Now, to these ladies, a bad boy is just an early version of a bad man.
I used to be a bad boy. I was a jazz musician, which is a permanent “bad boy” pass. Now I’m an elder musician. I’ve given up on looking for romance. It can find me; that’s okay.
It has been difficult for me to re-calibrate my visual expectations. Men are sexually stimulated by their eyeballs. When I was a kid I looked at my dad’s magazines with complete and ardent attention. Without this masculine visual appetite. there would be no porn, no Playboy or Hustler. But there IS, and men like to look almost as much as they like to touch. Men LOOOVE to look.
When I go out into the world, to shop or keep appointments, I see women of my own age in all their seasoned glory. It is an adjustment for the testosterone-fueled man to make… to keep the fires lit on these ladies of fifty and sixty something years. They’re not likely to have fresh pert boobs. Nor a smooth silky skin. As for the shapely ass, eh, maybe… maybe not.
It’s natural for men to seek young women but that doesn’t make it wise. When a man discovers that young women are children with boobs, he finds a clear warning: this is not going to work. If he fails to sense this warning he’s letting himself in for a universe of grief.
When I set out twenty years ago to look for a partner I was already…uh…old. I knew I was looking for women near to my age, that is, I knew it with my mind but my body and unconscious adolescent still sought out twenty three year olds. I understood that women of my age are mothers and grandmothers. I was stuck inside my twenty three year old male lust for women of reproductive age.
It is nature’s way of ensuring that we continue to reproduce our species. Men were designed to want young women. I’ve been in a battle between twenty something ME and seventy something ME. Men want to follow their instincts and spew their seed far and wide. That doesn’t change but the DRIVE in the older version of myself has changed, it isn’t so insistent, so relentless. Maybe it’s time to change the entire aspect of love, eros and friendship.
Changing these core drives gives me a little breathing room.
It gives me a chance to take a step backward and look at myself. I don’t have abs any more. I have… uh… call them abdominal folds. I’m ridiculously fit, BUT. Fitness is not a definitive draw for women. The females of the human species are attracted to emotional intelligence and vulnerability. They want to know and feel your emotions. After failing repeatedly with women, I got into therapy. I found that a few years of therapy is the most erotic asset one can have. It’s also good for acquiring self knowledge. And this, self knowledge, is the most valuable asset of all. The more you know yourself, the more you know what you’re doing. It’s time to put on your big boy pants. Or your big girl pant-suit; as the case may be.
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Arthur Rosch is a novelist, musician, photographer and poet. His works are funny, memorable and often compelling. One reviewer said “He’s wicked and feisty, but when he gets you by the guts, he never lets go.” Listeners to his music have compared him to Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, Randy Newman or Mose Allison. These comparisons are flattering but deceptive. Rosch is a stylist, a complete original. His material ranges from sly wit to gripping political commentary.
Arthur was born in the heart of Illinois and grew up in the western suburbs of St. Louis. In his teens he discovered his creative potential while hoping to please a girl. Though she left the scene, Arthur’s creativity stayed behind. In his early twenties he moved to San Francisco and took part in the thriving arts scene. His first literary sale was to Playboy Magazine. The piece went on to receive Playboy’s “Best Story of the Year” award. Arthur also has writing credits in Exquisite Corpse, Shutterbug, eDigital, and Cat Fancy Magazine. He has written five novels, a memoir and a large collection of poetry. His autobiographical novel, Confessions Of An Honest Man won the Honorable Mention award from Writer’s Digest in 2016.
More of his work can be found at www.artrosch.com
Photos at https://500px.com/p/artsdigiphoto?view=photos
________________________________________________________________
Want to be sure not to miss any of Arthur’s “Mind Fields” segments? Subscribe to Writing to be Read for e-mail notifications whenever new content is posted or follow WtbR on WordPress. If you find it interesting or just entertaining, please share.
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Mind Fields: It Began With Television
Posted: April 15, 2022 Filed under: Commentary, Mind Fields, Opinion | Tags: Arthur Rosch, Entertainment, Mind Fields, Social Commentary, Television, Television & Media, Writing to be Read 2 CommentsIt Began With Television
April 2, 2022
It began with television. I was born in 1947, which makes me the first generation of TV people. I watched Howdy Doody, Sky King and Death Valley Days. How imprinted in my soul is Twenty Mule Train Borax? It’s permanent. As is….The Twilight Zone, Gunsmoke and Rawhide.
Television took the ancient art of storytelling and whisked it away from our personal imaginations. It brought down a shutter on our fantasy and took the lead in guiding our young personalities in ways we could not anticipate. Regard the PURPOSE of television: to make money. We were beyond infatuation. We were addicted to the TV. We stayed up late until the test pattern came on. When we turned the set off we watched the picture die into a small white dot that after a second turned black. It was time for bed. Our parents didn’t care what we watched. We watched most of it together, except on weekend mornings. There was nothing subversive or dangerous on TV in those days. There were only the illusions of the capitalist marketing system. It sold a lot of laundry detergent. It was very tribal and sad. Yet… hypnotic and cute.
TV affected us. We don’t yet know how the effect scales up. We don’t know what has been done. We base our existence upon what presents on the screen. We are Creatures Of The Screen and it continues, until we have whole walls as screens. And they keep getting bigger! The emitted light enters our bodies and charges our cells. Television is both success and catastrophe. Television morphs into cell phones and monitors. It’s in the gas station restrooms. It’s in our pockets. If it JUST STOPPED right now: what would we do? For a while we would be lost. Many of us would just give up. It’s too hard being a human in this culture without that continual entertainment. We might… some of us… turn to reading or writing. Or solving math problems. Or speaking to our friends and family.
We are unbearably lonely. That’s what TV has done. It has infected us with our culture’s unprecedented loneliness. Americans are the loneliest people in the world. It doesn’t stop there. Go to the worst barrio in Manila. You will see satellite dishes on the most humble shack. You will see TV sets playing within tiny shops that sell pencils and sponges. Their owners don’t even watch them. They play Exotic Soaps and Indian made porn tapes. In the souks of Damascus. In the bazaars. Television.
Only the automobile has had such stupendous repercussions. Now, the T.V. has entered the vehicle and drives us to our destinations. We are embraced into the womb of the new culture. Soon, we may not need destinations. We will just be. In our cars. With our media. With our T.V.s.
It is, after all, just story telling.
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Arthur Rosch is a novelist, musician, photographer and poet. His works are funny, memorable and often compelling. One reviewer said “He’s wicked and feisty, but when he gets you by the guts, he never lets go.”
Listeners to his music have compared him to Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, Randy Newman or Mose Allison. These comparisons are flattering but deceptive. Rosch is a stylist, a complete original. His material ranges from sly wit to gripping political commentary.
Arthur was born in the heart of Illinois and grew up in the western suburbs of St. Louis. In his teens he discovered his creative potential while hoping to please a girl. Though she left the scene, Arthur’s creativity stayed behind. In his early twenties he moved to San Francisco and took part in the thriving arts scene. His first literary sale was to Playboy Magazine. The piece went on to receive Playboy’s “Best Story of the Year” award. Arthur also has writing credits in Exquisite Corpse, Shutterbug, eDigital, and Cat Fancy Magazine. He has written five novels, a memoir and a large collection of poetry. His autobiographical novel, Confessions Of An Honest Man won the Honorable Mention award from Writer’s Digest in 2016.
More of his work can be found at www.artrosch.com
Photos at https://500px.com/p/artsdigiphoto?view=photos
______________________________________________________________
Want to be sure not to miss any of Arthur’s “Mind Fields” segments? Subscribe to Writing to be Read for e-mail notifications whenever new content is posted or follow WtbR on WordPress. If you find it interesting or just entertaining, please share.
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Mind Fields – Why Do We Pick On Ourselves?
Posted: April 1, 2022 Filed under: Commentary, Mind Fields, Opinion | Tags: Arthur Rosch, marketing, Mind Fields, Social Commentary, The Human Condition, Writing to be Read 3 CommentsWhy Do We Always Pick On Ourselves
from Mind Fields at writingtoberead.com
Americans pick on themselves. We do it constantly, relentlessly, awake, asleep, we pick on ourselves about everything. It’s as if a perfectionist mother–in-law sits inside our heads on a platform at the very center of our thoughts and points here and there, hectoring us with criticisms.
“You know you could lose a few pounds,” she will say. She points with a drooping finger. “You’re getting heavy.” Her eyes narrow and she leans forward. “What’s wrong with your face? Is that a zit? How could you have a zit at your age? Your pores are kind of large, too. Speaking of age, wow, It really shows you’re getting over the hill.! I see wrinkles at the sides of your mouth and eyes. And that big one in the middle of your forehead, wow.”
Her elbow rests in her left hand while she taps her cheek with the right index finger. “Who could love a mess like you? Who buys your clothes, a retarded pygmy? My god, where did you get those awful shoes?”
Her inspection continues with a glare all up and down the length of me. “Who does your hair”, she rasps, “a baboon? Get another stylist before it’s too late. The damage that’s being done, what a shame, a real shonda. Your hair is thinning out too, a little bit day by day. You’re getting a pot belly! Ever think of wearing something, a brace, maybe?” She sits in a rocker and lights a cigarette. “I have a skin cream that I can recommend. You’re at that age where it loses its elasticity.”
I’m quivering with shock now but determined to let her have her say. “Your teeth are a little funny. Has anyone ever suggested cosmetic dentistry?”
Pick pick pick, pick pick pick. Am I wrong? Have I overstated the case?
She never stops, this critical demon of the shadows. She is a product of decades of indoctrination. I only say “She” because I had a terrible mother. I’m still pissed off about that.
“I should remind you” she says inside my head, “to get your cholesterol checked. It can happen; any second it can happen, bam! and you keep over.You’re dead! Then what happens to your family? Do you have a good lawyer? My brother in law knows one. And his cousin’s a doctor! Have you checked your prostate lately? I hear there’s a new medication for that. There’s a pill for everything these days, just watch sixty minutes. I mean the commercials, not the show. There’s a pill that’ll help you stop smoking if you survive the side effects. I love the medications where one of the side effects is ‘diminished semen’. What does that mean? What kind of pill can have ‘diminished semen’ as a side effect? Isn’t that the scariest thing a man can hear, short of ‘penis may wither and fall off?’ Loss of semen really means having crappy sex, doesn’t it? So why don’t they say, ‘may have brief weak orgasms’?”
This yapping harridan, this carping abusive inner voice, how did it get inside our heads? Let’s make it simple. First there’s television. There are a lot of good things about television, it’s not the monolithic purveyor of propaganda it might be in some other countries. Still, it hauls a freight train of psychological toxins every second of every day, no matter if the sound is on, whether or not you’ve blocked the commercials. It doesn’t matter. The marketers behind television are so sophisticated that we don’t have to turn on the device to be contaminated. In our society, television has become a self-referential culture, the subject of billions of conversations. It has moved into our thoughts and taken residence, permanently.
After TV there’s movies, the internet, magazines, newspapers, radio, you can’t escape marketing anywhere, not even in an airport restroom.
We barely live real lives any more. We talk about fictional characters whose lives are infinitely more exciting than ours and whose dangers are far beyond anything we would ever permit ourselves to face.
It would be interesting to snatch someone from the past and have this person witness our marketing techniques. Show a Viagra or Cialis commercial. What if we brought someone from the Victorian era, from around 1895, and showed commercials for keeping your thing hard? Every ten minutes another commercial showing a man of about fifty with a woman of about thirty eight, snuggling together, holding hands, watching the sun set. We would have to explain the nature of this product to the viewer. Without the warning “see a doctor if erection lasts more then four hours” there is nothing to indicate what this product does, what’s it’s for. When we explain it to our time traveler, what will this person think about our culture? How embarrassed would he or she be, how shocked at the impropriety?
Well, sure, they were prudes. Their repression caused them vast inner conflicts, but I would speculate it added an extra thrilling dimension to sex. It seems that when we started discussing our president’s blow jobs on the public airwaves, some line was crossed, some basic decency and sense of proportion was jettisoned off the side of our big ocean liner of a culture. Sex also got a little bit more ordinary, a bit more like costume jewelry.
I digress, I was talking about how we pick on ourselves. It’s stupidly obvious. It’s about getting us to spend money. The entire purpose of marketing is to manipulate our desires. The basic technique is to infect us with feelings of inadequacy. Then we are bombarded with glittering images of things we’re led to believe will make us feel better. If we feel bad enough we’ll go out and buy some ridiculous cream, or pill, or car, or hair weave, or something that makes no sense at all, we’ll just go buy anything, walk into Walmart with our credit cards and shop, as an anesthetic. We’ll be perfect consumers, depressed, dazed automatons piling up debt. Glassy eyed, we walk the aisles of the stores, pace the infinite mallways without destination until we find ourselves back home with bags full of junk. How did all this crap appear in our houses? I don’t remember buying an eighty eight inch Super High Definition TV set with a quadruple-woofer ten speaker sound system with Dolby nine point two noise reduction software.
We’ve been had. We’re nuts. We pick on ourselves because all our role models are distortions that are dissonant with real life. We don’t see authentic people in the movies or on TV. We see heroes who can kill a dozen trained hyenas by throwing wooden chopsticks from fifty feet. We are not encouraged to admire people who aren’t particularly beautiful, rich or talented. We aren’t given strength of character as a yardstick of true heroism. It isn’t enough to be an ordinary person anymore, we have to be some carefully crafted mannequin, with no missing teeth, no bad habits. We’re going to live to a hundred and fifty in perfect health, glowing and radiant, with a beautiful partner by our side. There won’t be any old age, slow decay, debility, nothing like that because the inner witch-voice won’t allow us to relax and be human, be ordinary and obey the laws of nature even when they take our youth and beauty.
Isn’t that the primary mechanism of marketing? To raise dissatisfaction to a level where we’ll do anything to “better” ourselves in the form of consuming whatever’s consumable to get a buzz for a few minutes or hours?
Pick pick pick, we’ve learned to pick on ourselves without mercy. Go ahead, take a look at yourself in the mirror! Do you like what you see? Have you been taught to accept yourself with all your flawed genes and pathological behaviors?
Can you accept and love yourself as the unique creation that you are?
Of course not. There’s no money in love.
Not yet.
Arthur Rosch is a novelist, musician, photographer and poet. His works are funny, memorable and often compelling. One reviewer said “He’s wicked and feisty, but when he gets you by the guts, he never lets go.” Listeners to his music have compared him to Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, Randy Newman or Mose Allison. These comparisons are flattering but deceptive. Rosch is a stylist, a complete original. His material ranges from sly wit to gripping political commentary.
Arthur was born in the heart of Illinois and grew up in the western suburbs of St. Louis. In his teens he discovered his creative potential while hoping to please a girl. Though she left the scene, Arthur’s creativity stayed behind. In his early twenties he moved to San Francisco and took part in the thriving arts scene. His first literary sale was to Playboy Magazine. The piece went on to receive Playboy’s “Best Story of the Year” award. Arthur also has writing credits in Exquisite Corpse, Shutterbug, eDigital, and Cat Fancy Magazine. He has written five novels, a memoir and a large collection of poetry. His autobiographical novel, Confessions Of An Honest Man won the Honorable Mention award from Writer’s Digest in 2016.
More of his work can be found at www.artrosch.com
Photos at https://500px.com/p/artsdigiphoto?view=photos
______________________________________________________
Want to be sure not to miss any of Arthur’s “Mind Fields” segments? Subscribe to Writing to be Read for e-mail notifications whenever new content is posted or follow WtbR on WordPress. If you find it interesting or just entertaining, please share.
Writing to be Read 
Mind Fields: Don’t Fall Apart
Posted: August 19, 2022 | Author: artrosch | Filed under: Commentary, Fiction, Mind Fields, Opinion, Writing | Tags: Arthur Rosch, Mind Fields, Social Commentary, The Human Condition, Writing to be Read | 1 CommentYou can’t fall apart when things go wrong. And when I say “go wrong” I mean badly wrong, way wrong. The loss of a job, the death of a loved one, a diagnosed illness: that kind of wrong. You can’t fall apart.
It’s difficult, NOT to fall apart. We don’t have rational control of emotions. Grief, despair, depression, are creatures with wills of their own and they seem to take over the daily habits that normally sustain us. How do I NOT fall apart? How do I fight back and regain my dignity after seemingly chucking it into the trash? Where do I find the “fight” in me, after I’ve curled into a fetal position and gone”waaaah!”
The answer is “ANY WAY YOU CAN!” I thought to do some writing, and I ended up writing this. Which will take about five minutes. I wanted to work on my novel in progress and I sat staring at the page feeling waves of terror streaking through my innards. It’s difficult to write through waves of terror. I’ll make it.
I’ll get there.
Last year a man died suddenly. He was the man who provided me with three quarters of my contracting work. Then I had a major health scare. Things began going to pieces, one little piece at a time. Isn’t that always the way it works? No, it isn’t. It’s never just one big thing; more like a lot of little things until it seems that nothing will ever go right again.
That isn’t true! That’s the voice of depression. As a grizzled veteran of the fight against depression I understand the feeling that a low emotional state is permanent. It isn’t. But you can’t fall apart. You have to fight back. Depression is a force of nature with which we contend. It’s here that we find our own heroism. Here, in the battle against the cognitive darkness that threatens to overwhelm us at any time. This is where we ultimately shine.
If you’ve got any energy, go clean something. That often works well to lighten the mood. Or, better, go help someone else who is in trouble. In the process you will forget your own troubles.
Arthur Rosch is a novelist, musician, photographer and poet. His works are funny, memorable and often compelling. One reviewer said “He’s wicked and feisty, but when he gets you by the guts, he never lets go.” Listeners to his music have compared him to Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, Randy Newman or Mose Allison. These comparisons are flattering but deceptive. Rosch is a stylist, a complete original. His material ranges from sly wit to gripping political commentary
Arthur was born in the heart of Illinois and grew up in the western suburbs of St. Louis. In his teens he discovered his creative potential while hoping to please a girl. Though she left the scene, Arthur’s creativity stayed behind. In his early twenties he moved to San Francisco and took part in the thriving arts scene. His first literary sale was to Playboy Magazine. The piece went on to receive Playboy’s “Best Story of the Year” award. Arthur also has writing credits in Exquisite Corpse, Shutterbug, eDigital, and Cat Fancy Magazine. He has written five novels, a memoir and a large collection of poetry. His autobiographical novel, Confessions Of An Honest Man won the Honorable Mention award from Writer’s Digest in 2016.
More of his work can be found at www.artrosch.com
Photos at https://500px.com/p/artsdigiphoto?view=photos
________________________________________________________________________
Want to be sure not to miss any of Arthur’s “Mind Fields” segments? Subscribe to Writing to be Read for e-mail notifications whenever new content is posted or follow WtbR on WordPress. If you find it interesting or just entertaining, please share.
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