Out of the sunset’s red Into the blushing sea, The winds of day drop dead And dreams come home to me. — The sea is still,— and apart Is a stillness in my heart.
The night comes up the beach, The dark steals over all, Though silence has no speech I hear the sea-dreams call To my heart; — and in reply It answers with a sigh.
Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago in 1930, the daughter of civil rights activists and intellectuals. Her play, “A Raisin in the Sun” (1959), the first drama by a black woman to be produced on Broadway and winner of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, was loosely based on her own experiences. When she was 8, her parents bought a house in a white neighborhood, where Lorraine witnessed a racist mob and her parents’ resulting civil rights case.
She studied at the University of Wisconsin for two years, then moved to New York to become a writer, working as an associate editor of Paul Robeson’s “Freedom.” She married Robert Nemiroff in 1953, whom she met on the picket line while protesting discrimination at New York University. Hansberry divorced her husband in 1964.
Hansberry selected the title of her play from a line in a poem by Langston Hughes: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun, Or does it explode?” Sidney Poitier starred in both the play and film versions. The play’s central protagonist is Beneatha, an eager young woman determined to fight social convention and go to medical school. Beneatha is a “self-avowed” atheist (who gets slapped by her mother for admitting it).
Hansberry wrote “The Drinking Gourd,” commissioned by the National Broadcasting Co., in 1959. About the American slave trade, it was considered too hot for television and was never produced. Her play, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” (1964), was about a Jewish intellectual. It played on Broadway while Hansberry was hospitalized for cancer that cut her life short at age 34. “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black” was posthumously adapted from her writings and was produced off-Broadway in 1969, also appearing in book form (1970). D.1965.
SMiLes I Remember in the Neo-Natal Unit And the 51 Days Of Our Only Child Ryan Born on June 4th, 1997, A Couple of Days Before
My 37th Birthday Then
His Life Only Pain Never A Smile An Only Family Portrait That Way At All on Father’s Day That Year Anyway the
Folks, the Precious Doctor’s Who Worked At Shands Hospital in Florida
Often Said if they Had Worked in that Neo-Natal Unit And Could See All of What Can And Will Go Wrong with the Human Condition
At Birth, They Would Have Been Terrified to Even Try
to Sire A Child And Of Course That’s Just at Birth
Never The Less The Way They Made it Through the Day Was Often Dark Humor Sarcastic Yes like the Dude Who Was Insisting His Son Be Circumcised
As the Young Doctor Said Oh my God ‘it’ is the Size of A Japanese Soup Noodle As If
That Was the Worst of All that Parent’s Worries A Child
Who Might
Live or Die With Part of Nature Attached or Not Then
SMiLes The Human Condition Where What is Cherished Most is Often True Insanity Only
Lending Recognition Dear Doc That
This Condition is A Far Cry And Yes Laugh From Anything Really Rational True Once one Delves Deeper into Stories of Humans…
And that Reminds me too Yes Stumbling into a National Geographic Documentary on YouTube About Lion’s Mating And The Crowd Started Jeering About the Size of the ‘Lion’s Package’
Not Even Thinking About the Size of Jaws and Claws And Family
Jewels
Left Dangling With An Entire Environment of Fighting Sharp as Razors Oh All the Illusory Fears Folks Drive to
I am a blogger because I love writing, photographing, communicating with other people who are like-minded, exchanging ideas, teaching others what I know, and learning from others’ mental and soul wonders so we can all share, connect, inspire and grow.
Educating myself and advancing in my blogging is what I have decided today, that is why I want to set some goals and share them with my followers, contacts, family, and friends:
Today we face many changes, different ways of doing our daily chores, and huge differences in the way we purchase our necessities in life.
It was interesting to see the changes in just our phone habits in the course of a few short years: home phones to flip phones to iphones. Now our phones seem a part of us in ways never thought 20 years ago.
We wait in line to buy food, wear masks, don’t hug or shake hands and cannot see smiles.
Our best choice is to be flexible in this situation in order to survive.
Flexible, independent thinking will help navigate these uncertain times. Listening, learning, and making decisions that are best for ourselves is the way to make it.
Learning science, practicing it, understanding it, loving it! I also cherish many scientists who have given us the pleasure of expanding our way of living and our mental horizons and who have worked tirelessly to better humanity. So here there are some quotes from one of the so many scientists that I deeply admire.
“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” — Isaac Asimov
“I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.” — Isaac Asimov ”
“There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.” — Isaac Asimov
“Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know – and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance.” — Isaac Asimov
English is not my native language, Spanish is. I also speak Italian, Portuguese and I am fluent one hundred percent in all these languages. But I admit that I make typos and several mistakes when I write in my non-native languages, but I always try to learn and speak better, even in Spanish and I am always willing to learn from my mistakes. That is why I am a serious critic of misconduct in expressions in the languages mentioned above.
So here it goes, my pet peeve of today: Troop VS Trooper
I often hear reporters on American TV channels talking about “troops”. The first time when I listened to that word being misused was when the war in Afghanistan was being announced by different TV reporters back in October 2001.
They were mentioning the amount of “troops” that President George Bush was sending. I was astonished! They said ten thousand of them were parting from the USA. So I started to make my own calculations and said well, if a troop has a minimum of 3 to 5 platoons;
One platoon has 2 to 4 squads, and each squad has 10 to 14 troopers or soldiers, then a platoon has about 50 soldiers, then a troop has a minimum of 250 men. If President George Bush was sending 10,000 troops then he was sending about 2, 500,000 (two and a half million) soldiers or troopers!
And next week they said more “troops” were leaving for the Middle East. By then I knew how erroneous and non-well educated in their own language they were: when they were saying “troops” they were referring to a singular, to one man, which is wrong.
For some English speakers, a “trooper” is a mounted soldier. For others, a “trooper” is a policeman who patrols the roads of a U.S. state in a car.
As to “how a plural word becomes singular,” the answer has to be “by being used that way.”
However, just because usage is widespread or has been added to a dictionary doesn’t mean that it is worth adopting.
The worst thing of all is that 17 years have gone by and I still hear it and read it. I can’t stop stupidity!
Delirious as a blowtorch and begotten in the luminosity of love — This is the infamous out-of-orbit literary journal that delivers storytelling fit for a gathering around fire. Home to unpredictable fiction, revealing personal essays, bitter social assessments, subversive hymns, underwater obscenities, uplifting bad news, veiled confessions, hints of the erotic... And maybe even some dicey advice.