The Battle of the Sexes

[RonPrice]

THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES
In 1959, the year I became a Baha'i, James' Thurber's book The Battle of the Sexes, was released as a film. In the plot the characters are not seen in battle, so to speak. The fact that protagonist and antagonist are of differing gender seems to matter little until Mr. Martin's clumsy attempts at murder are mistaken for seduction by his intended victim. Mr. Martin seems, too, to have won the battle, but lost the war, as Mrs. Barrows' tears stir something within him. The American accent of the voice-over artist, Sam Wanamaker, suggests the film, extolling as it does traditional values over modern ways, perhaps wouldn't play well in the progress-obsessed 1950's America, and was hastily re-branded as a quirky sex comedy. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, May 2nd 2004.
HIGHLY EROTICIZED

Some time in late October of 1974 the students in my class in the sociology of art presented to me their Projects. I was a Senior Tutor in Human Relations and part of my lecture load was to teach the sociology of art to art students at the then technical college in Launceston Tasmania. There were about a dozen students in the class ranging in age from late teens to late forties. What characterised most of the Projects was a very strong sexual aspect or dimension to the presentation. This sexual dimension in 1974 was partly, or significantly, due to the sexual revolution of the 1960s which may not have got as far as Tasmania until the early 1970s.

One student presented a frontal view of the female genitalia on an enormous canvas; another student presented a set of containers in the shape of breasts. After the passage of thirty years I do not remember the content of any of the other Projects. At the time, in 1974, I was having my own problems with the erotic in life and, looking back, I don't think it really settled until the 1990s. Eventually, in 1975, I married one of my students, another divorced person like myself. And I am still married to her. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, June 12th, 2004.

This was the year of the great release,
quite voluntary, no effort,
some instinctual need,
some passion overwhelmed me.

Release came again,
quite native, involuntary,
a poetic labour and virtuosity
to master an instrument of words,
to clarify construction
and attain technical control.

And by the age of fifty
re-creation of word and image
happened incessantly
arising from the sea
like Anadyomene,1
boiling up, scattering
the pearls of knowledge
on the shore of life.2

1 Clive Sansom, editor, The World of Poetry, Phoenix House, London, pp.112-113.
2 'Abdu'l-Baha, Secret of Divine Civilization, pp.109-110.

Ron Price
June 12th 2004

[Steve2004]

-stares-.....

[Kiechi]

-Zzzzz...-

[RonPrice]

[QUOTE=Kiechi]-Zzzzz...-[/QUOTE_______
___________________________
I wish you many years of good sleeps; they will take care of a third of your life and mine.-Ron

[Fishy]

Truly fascinating. I disagree?

[RonPrice]

Sex in the City

The chronic cleavage between love and sexual desire is a disease of western man. Here in Australia I have been a Canadian who got lots of practice at learning to love women whom I desired sexually but couldn’t and wouldn’t touch. Here I was a Canadian with a face like the back side of a spoon, etched with a smile, with a cautious reserve and the flavour of irony every time he tasted his world and his words. -With thanks to Robertson Davies and his comments on writing on The ABC program Writers and Writing, 25 June 1995, 8:00-8:20 pm.

I’d learned to smile and say cheese
as good as anyone else in that country
of bland faces like the back of a spoon;
and when I finally learned that skill,
after getting rid of my depressions,
well, not quite, they lingered long,
I left for Australia where in that dry land
people’s faces and mouths tell stories,
some of which you wished you didn’t know.

Scratch that smiling exterior
of a Canadian face and underneath
you get a gem of fascinating complexity.
Like those three girls in Sex and the City
I’ve been discovering this complexity
all my life with the help of Australians
who are a frank, funny and facially
expressive lot: bodies are alive here.

And so they are on Sex and the City
They've been jumping out at me
every time I turn them on as they
have in the classrooms where
I taught, on the street when I walk
or drive around and in my own house
where my wife’s been jumping out
at me for over thirty years.

The whole place is alive
with body language.
The women have been
turning me on so much
I’m like a spinning top.
But I always have my
Canadian face to smile
at the world: the cheerful
Canadian, the good-guy,
the nice guy: very controlled!

It’s too much work for most people
to get to know what’s behind my smile,
but I don’t mind. I’m busy enough
getting to know me. That’ll keep me busy
the rest of my life. And I have hardly
scratched the surface of this poetic story.

Ron Price
23/12/05
(original: 1996)

[Junket]

What are you babblin' about dude?

[Zyx]

I second Frasbee

[RonPrice]

Before I leave this site for a few months with the pressing activities of late adulthood(60 to 80 years of age) before me, I'll post this piece on poetry and sex. What I write here may not appeal to some at this site looking for more overt forms of sex, love and the erotic. To all of you, though, I wish you well in your love lives down life's long track.-Ron
_________________________________

UNIQUENESS AND LONELINESS CLARIFIED AS ONENESS

Poetry is like trying to remember a tune you've forgotten... A poem is written because the poet gets a sudden vision.....he juggles with sounds and associations which will best express the original vision. It is done quite intuitively and esoterically. That is why the poet never thinks of the reader. The vision has something to do with sex. I don't know what and I don't particularly want to know. It's not surprising, obviously two creative forces in alliance, closely connected.

The result is a poetry of self-indulgence, the patter of an entertainer, fodder for future social historians from a poet who needs emotional isolation, from a poet who touches our hearts by showing his own, who reveals the paradoxes and enigmas of our lives by putting his own on the table, who provides, for me, persepctives on unity that emerge out of aloneness and solitude. -Ron Price with thanks to Andrew Swarbrick, Out of Reach: The Poetry of Philip Larkin, St. Martin 's Press, NY, 1995, p. 21.

He pursues self-definition,
the nature of identity,
through separateness,
exclusion and difference,
negative self-definition,
a voice of Englishness
back in that ninth and
early tenth stage of history1,
after the loss of imperial power,
diminished influence, a new value
to English experience.

A remorseful tone, secular
but communal and telling,
not untrue, not unkind, on the margins,
exposed to the beyond,
imprisoned in a personality,
something hidden,
something he has been given,
reticence and the English ethic of privacy:
where difference merges
into absolute unity;
where uniqueness and loneliness
are clarified as oneness
and endless continuities.

Ron Price
29 June 1998

1 1953-1963-ninth stage of history; 1963-1973-first ten years of the tenth stage of history. Larkin did not write "many poems after 1973."(ibid., p.164)