the first book my dad ever read me was Battlefield Earth.

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Read the directions and directly you will be
directed in the right direction XOXO, Ren

At the start of my travelling-pioneering life, in 1962, the first collection, a monumental edition, of The Letters of Oscar Wilde were published.  I was far too busy at the time dealing with 9 subjects in Ontario's grade 13 curriculum, with my burgeoning erotic inclinations, my incipient bipolar disorder, the nature and direction of the new religio-political commitment I had recently been socialized into over the years 1953 to 19621 and, in October of that same year, a socio-historical event that took our global society as close as it has yet been to a nuclear war.2 -Ron Price: refer to 1the Baha'i Faith and 2 the Cuban Missile Crisis.

That edition of his letters went out of print
but, when I was working in the Northern
Territory of Australia, a new edition became
available.  I was still too busy and there was
so much else going on in my life at that time:
work, family, a new Baha'i community, just
getting through the day....and so it was that it
was not until I retired from full-time, part-time
and casual work that I had any idea of your
brilliance, Oscar.  Your life was inseparable
from your work; indeed, until that retirement
in my own life, my writing was by far the less
important part of my life, too, by far.  I became
like you, Oscar, my own public relations expert,
inventing and reinventing myself, perfecting ads
all over the place.  I've got to hand it to you, dear
Oscar,  you were a clever dude with those words.

You said: I was a problem for which there was
no solution; I can resist everything except, of
course, temptation; if you want to tell people the
truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you;
and, man is least himself when he talks in his own
person.   Give him a mask and he will tell you the
truth1-------and on and on you went evolving, as a
conscious process of your self-expression and your
self-dramatization, discovering the artistic context
which best matched your temperament and character,
devoting your career to investigating the most elusive
subject matter: the self, creating an expressive medium
for your findings, for your many voices, many personae
and your wide range of tones and masks....Me, too,
Oscar, me too on the long, stony and tortuous road.

1 Oscar Wilde Quotes, "The Quotations Page," www.quotationspage.com.

Ron Price
12 June 2009

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2010-2000-Writer: three books on www.
1949-1999: student, teacher,Baha'i for 51 years.

Editor, poet, critic, travel writer, historian, philosopher, essayist, biographer, autobiographer, political activist, university lecturer, librettist, humanitarian, gardener--George Woodcock(1912-1995) seems entitled to wear almost as many hats as there are works to his credit--which stand at somewhere between 120 and 150, not including his radio and TV plays, documentaries and speeches.  He no longer wears any hats, though, having gone some fifteen years ago to that mysterious and undiscovered country, that hole where we all go and speak and write, eat and drink, no more.

In the wider world Woodcock was and is most well-known for his books on the philosophy of anarchism and its history as well as for his well-received biography, The Crystal Spirit, on his friend George Orwell.  From a Canadian perspective he was a literary champion and the founder of the journal Canadian Literature in 1959, finally passing on its editorship eighteen years later.  The journal was the first of its kind and it provided a much-needed place for the exploration and celebration of the works of Canadian literary authors.  In 1959 I was in grade ten, in love with Susan Gregory and baseball and I had just joined the Bahá'í Faith. Fifteen years later I was living in Tasmania as a senior tutor in education studies at the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education. -Ron Price with thanks to Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review, Spring 2009.

You were not known to me, then,
George; my life was filled with so
much else even until just the other
day, when into the early evening of
my life when I chanced upon a short
bio-piece which introduced you to me,
to your life and work.  You were born
just four months before the Master went
through southern Ontario while you were
out in Winnipeg that summer before going
to England and spending the next 35 years
and then returning to Canada to lay your
bones at the age of 82.  I shall say no more
about your life, George, only to thank you
for all that you did in your years of living.
I hope to get to know you better in these
lengthening years of the evening of my life.

Ron Price
1 September 2009


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2010-2000-Writer: three books on www.
1949-1999: student, teacher,Baha'i for 51 years.