Mimi Sammis: An interesting life

Among the tour group that went to Egypt in February and March of 2017 was an lively artist named Mimi. I well remember spending a couple of hours with her in the proximity of the Sphinx, (everyone else on the tour having gone off to see something that she and I decided was of less interest than hanging out with that globally recognized symbol.) I don’t remember what we talked about, but I remember the afternoon.

I said she was an artist. About half our two-week trip centered on a boat, which was towed up the Nile from Luxor to Aswan. Every day, Mimi would spend a certain amount of time dashing out watercolors of whatever was in sight. At the end of the trip, she invited us to each pick one. I picked one of Luxor from the far side of the Nile, and it resides in my workroom, near my desk.

A friend of Mimi’s who reads this blog sent me her obit, which gives a glimpse of what must have been a very interesting life.

https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/greenwichtime/name/anne-sammis-obituary?pid=204817105&utm_source=MarketingCloud&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ObitShare_PPNBlock_061323&utm_content=ViewObituary&sfmc_id=125098664&env=8d8591b2e492da9ca09cc5a4e1a1248fcc9da2f0bcaca1874e37a772a1987d62

My old friend Ed Carter’s family had a tradition, when someone died. They’d raise a toast to the departed, and all would say “Bon Voyage.” I like the idea, and have used it myself. Bon Voyage, Mimi! I can’t help wonder what you’ll be getting into.

The Woke Bell Tolls for Ernest Hemingway

A new low in imbecility. It started with political correctness (read: censorship and self-censorship) and keeps on going downhill. All the sheep flock together and take comfort in the fact that they all think the same thoughts (which of course means they aren’t thinking at all) and follow the same shepherd.

We’ve seen all this before. In the 1980s the feminist movement thought they’d killed off Hemingway’s reputation, and some remarkably stupid accusations were taken as if they made sense.  One is tempted to say, “this too shall pass,” except that the level of cultural literacy continues to decline so precipitously.

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fpjmedia.com%2Fculture%2Frobert-spencer%2F2023%2F06%2F29%2Fthe-woke-bell-tolls-for-ernest-hemingway-n1707204

CULTURE

The Woke Bell Tolls for Ernest Hemingway

The Woke Bell Tolls for Ernest Hemingway
(AP Photo, File)
Readers have now been warned. Anyone in our enlightened age who is crazy and daring enough to read Ernest Hemingway, an author who is not a person of color, not trans, and not a victim of white patriarchal oppression, will now be waved off by Hemingway’s own publisher. New editions of the work of the man who was once considered one of America’s greatest writers, before such things came to be measured solely by the author’s race, gender, and political proclivities, contain a “trigger warning” alerting fragile wokesters to the fact that if they are actually so foolish as to read the book, they will encounter thoughts that today’s elites have most decidedly not approved.

The UK’s Telegraph revealed Saturday that Penguin Random House, which publishes Hemingway’s novels and stories, has slapped them with “a trigger warning” due to “concerns about his ‘language’ and ‘attitudes.’” Hapless new Hemingway readers are also “alerted to the novelist’s ‘cultural representations.’”

I can imagine what Ernest Hemingway himself would say to all this, but I wouldn’t be able to publish it. The arrogant, self-infatuated, blinkered, miseducated woke dopes at Penguin Random House don’t seem to understand that the whole idea of reading Hemingway, or any other great writer, is to encounter “language,” “attitudes” and “cultural representations” that are not one’s own, and are not the same as the language, attitudes, and cultural representations of contemporary culture.

Back in those dark days before schools turned to teaching the really important stuff, like whether you’re of the opposite sex and how evil you are if you’re white, children were taught that there was a pantheon of great writers throughout history, starting with Homer and going through Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantic poets, and the like. Hemingway was often included as one of the few Americans on the list. Someone who picked up Shakespeare or Milton was not expecting them to sound like or reflect the attitudes of Ibram X. Kendi and Dr. Fauci; readers were instead expecting to be carried to a very different world that would help them see their own with new eyes.

All that is gone now. The problem with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and the rest is that they would all today be considered members of the worst group of people on the planet, white males. As we live in what used to be known as Western civilization, this is not all that surprising. It is also not in the least surprising that this pantheon has now been swept away and replaced with writers whose sole claim to relevance is not their insight, wisdom, or the power of their words, but their race and their gender. Hemingway was another white male, and so his star has dimmed from the days when he was considered one of the greats, and now he has been hedged around even more to keep him from leading anyone into wrongthink.

Penguin Random House added a disclaimer to its new edition of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. It “states that publishers decided not to censor the book” — hey, thanks! The note on The Sun Also Rises warns readers that this book could be dangerous to your health as a dutiful woke NPC and might actually lead you to have a thought of your own, one that the guardians of acceptable opinion might find double-plus ungood: “This book was published in 1926 and reflects the attitudes of its time.” Yeah, that’s the idea – in part.

The Penguin Random House wokesters also added a please-don’t-hurt-us insistence that they weren’t the ones thinking forbidden thoughts: “The publisher’s decision to present it as it was originally published is not intended as an endorsement of cultural representations or language contained herein.” Whew! Bullet dodged!

The Telegraph adds that “Hemingway’s collection of short stories, Men Without Women, now carries an almost identical warning, differing only by alerting would-be readers to the fact that the book was originally published in 1927.” We can at least be relieved that the whole thing wasn’t wokeified into Men Who Are Women.

Related: And Then There Were None: Woke Censors Come for Mystery Writer Agatha Christie

Hemingway biographer Richard Bradford remarked acidly: “The publisher’s comments would be hilarious, were they not also alarming.” He added that the warnings “would be understandable had they brought out a new translation of Mein Kampf. They seem to imply that, because it’s a literary classic, they’re willing to take a deep breath and warn readers with delicate sensibilities that something in it might unsettle them.” Yet he warns that if you examine “any novel or poem written at any time, and search for a passage that could create unease for persons who are obsessed with themselves…you’ll find one.”

Indeed. And the woke censors will. The object of the game is to put a fence around any thoughts and ideas that aren’t approved by the elites. The next step will be to ban Hemingway and others altogether. Keep your old books. The time will come when you’ll need to hide them.

Bob Friedman and the endless chain

Yesterday (Thursday July 7) I went poking around one of my journals for 2019, looking for notes from my trip to Egypt, and found, tucked into the pocket, an article I had written for our local metaphysical newspaper about my old friend and former partner in Hampton Roads Publishing Co., Bob Friedman, who had died Jan 7 that year. That was three and a half years ago, to the day. Seems endlessly long ago.  I thought, I should share this with a wider audience, so here it is. As I said at his memorial service, Bob was a great man, who lived his metaphysics.

Echo World, February 2019

Bob Friedman and the endless chain

By Frank DeMarco

Our lives are tied to others by invisible connections. Who we are, what we think and feel, what we do – it all affects those around us. Some of these connections (with family, friends, associates, casual acquaintances) we see. But our influence upon others doesn’t stop there, not by a long chalk. Bob Friedman’s life is a good example of how our lives are part of an endless chain of influence.

Bob Friedman’s life (Feb. 15, 1942 to Jan. 7, 2019) affected uncounted and uncountable others. He co-founded The Donning Company in 1974, co-founded Hampton Roads Publishing Company in 1989, and founded Rainbow Ridge Books by himself in 2009, in all publishing more than a thousand books, some of which have already changed our world.

In the 1980s, Mary Summer Rain was unknown. Her manuscript had met so many rejections that she was almost ready to give up. Bob read it, showed her what needed to be cut, and added her to his list of authors. If her books had never been published, how many lives would have been diminished?

Similarly, Neale Donald Walsch. As soon as Bob saw Conversations with God, he saw the potential that other people (including me, as I had already rejected it) had missed. How many people’s lives have been changed by the Conversations series? And these are only two of those he shepherded into print.

Only an author can know what it means when someone is willing to invest time and money to get his baby out into the world. Bob’s long-time friend John Nelson, author of five books Bob published, wrote (as part of his yet-unpublished book of Zen poetry):

98.

A friend passes on, and one feels sad.

What do you recall from your first meeting?

A promise of success, or the kind eyes offering it?

Bob spent more than 40 years making it possible for authors to get their brain-children into print. In that alone, he changed their lives, regardless of the book’s subsequent fate. (And, remember, many books with limited sales nonetheless are deeply important to some.) More invisible links. And those affected readers lead lives that then affect others in turn, continuing the chain.

As an Aquarian, Bob valued friendship. I don’t know how many publishers number their authors among their friends, but certainly he did. For that matter, some of his friends dated back to high school years. He kept his friends.

And how many people he influenced! I should know. Over more than 30 years, he and I were friends, then business partners at Hampton Roads, then again friends, and publisher to author. If I had never met Bob, my life would have been unimaginably different.

Up to this point, writing this was relatively easy. But it is difficult to write about our various relationships. Bob and I were extremely close, and bitterly incompatible, and instinctively aligned, and living in different worlds, depending on the time of day. We worked together and pulled off some amazing things, and we worked against each other and wound up losing what we had built from nothing, and then, being forced to work together again, without others (and, in fact, against others), we rediscovered what we had valued in each other, so that our final dozen years were again productive and mutually satisfactory. But nobody else could really understand the good and the bad that went on between us.

What stays with me is the feeling I have had since learning that Bob was on his way out. On the one hand, “Bon voyage!” which is how our mutual business partner, friend and author Ed Carter and his wife greeted the news of someone’s graduation to whatever comes next. I don’t regard death as a tragedy, just as another departure in lives filled with departures. I am fully confident that the spirit that clothed itself as Bob is on to other things.

But for me, as for others who are left behind, what a sense of loss! Over the past dozen years, whenever I transcribed and posted new sessions – with the guys upstairs, with Rita, with Nathaniel – I had this strong sense of Bob as supportive background presence. One after another, he published my books, even though they made him little money. Early mornings, transcribing, I would wonder what Bob would make of the latest sessions. I won’t have that background presence now. (Or perhaps I will, in an entirely new way. Time will tell.)

That’s a small example of how Bob changed lives, in the way our lives all contribute to the great chain of consciousness and connections and consequences.

Bon voyage, old friend. And, well done.

—–

Frank DeMarco lives in Charlottesville. He is the author of many books on communication with those in the Non-3D world. His website is www.ofmyownknowledge.com. On Facebook, frank.demarco.10.

 

Reflections in Space

Two-thirds of a lifetime ago – 50 years ago, somehow! – I spent a couple of years as audio-visual librarian for the Tampa, Florida, public library, and among the many films I oversaw was a half-hour documentary that remained with me.

This film, made in the early days of the space age, though toward the end of the Apollo program, looks at the early impact of that venture in various arts, as seen by writers Arthur C. Clarke and William F. Buckley, a dancer (Edward Villella), a poet (Archibald MacLeish), various painters, including a very young Jamie Wyeth. Now, your first reaction may be, “Who cares? What does this have to do with me?” But if there’s anything more to do with us than consciousness, I can’t offhand think what it would be.

Today for some reason it occurred to me that maybe the film could be found on the net, via duckduckgo, and sure enough, courtesy of the Charlotte and Mecklenburg County (N.C.) public library system, here it is. The first couple of minutes are a little the worse for wear, and every so often it skips a word or two, but in general it is in good shape.

I include the link for those who may will find it of interest. A remarkable film, one I am glad to have had the chance to see again after so long a time.

https://archive.org/details/ReflectionsInSpace

 

Reminder

{Been poking through old journals. Found this, written down 25 years ago.

Surely this can’t apply to you, right? You’re nobody special, right?]

 

A hero ventures forth

From the world of common day

Into a region of supernatural wonder;

Fabulous forces are there encountered

And a decisive victory is won:

The hero comes back

From the mysterious adventure

With the power to bestow boons

On his fellow man

(From The Hero’s Journey, by Joseph Campbell.)

 

Circles of influence

Sunday, April 18, 2021

Last night I was thinking that you could measure the flow of individuals in and out of your life by creating a simple graphic and placing each name where it belonged. Theoretically this would show you who you knew at what times of your life. It might remind you of relationships you had long forgotten.

I don’t know that this graphic would actually do that, but I can see that it could give you a sense of the great number of people your life touched.

We swim in a sea of people. We know it intellectually, abstractly. This would show it visually, viscerally.

Draw it much like an outline of the solar system, with yourself as the center of your life. Then, in a series of concentric circles, place those you have interacted with:

  • Within the past week
  • Within the past month
  • Within the past three months
  • Within the past six months
  • Within the past year
  • Within the past five years
  • Within the past 10 years
  • Within the past 25 years
  • Within the past 50 years
  • At any time in your life before that.

Like so:

As I say, I don’t know that this would help us much to cluster particular people who were important in our lives at any given time, but certainly it ought to show how many people we have had as part of our lives, how many people’s lives we ourselves have touched.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Papa’s Trial to be published

Good news! My novel about Hemingway is to be published soon my SNN Publishing, a company that is owned by my friend Chris Nelson.

I very much wanted Papa’s Trial to come out before the Ken Burns special aired, and now it looks like that will happen. The book’s subtitle, Hemingway in the Afterlife, will give you some sense of what it’s about. Papa kills himself, thinking it’s the end, and instead he finds he must defend what he did in his life. Which gave me a chance to say some things about the afterlife. Stay tuned.