L. Peat O'Neil

Armageddon-Fearing Pilgrims Flock To French Village

2011-02-21T18:24:00.000-08:00

Armageddon-Fearing Pilgrims Flock To French Village

Special Interview With Zoltán Géher - XpatLoop.com - Specials

2011-02-21T18:17:00.000-08:00

Special Interview With Zoltán Géher - XpatLoop.com - Specials

Gulangyu :: China

2011-01-22T16:35:00.000-08:00

Gulangyu (Piano Island) is quiet because no cars are allowed on the island. Called Piano Island because of its shape and for the music academy on the island, it lies east of Xiamen -- like a small fish just beyond of the larger island. Students at the music school practice all day and in that vicinity you can hear their scales, harmonies and rare screeches.

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Mansion on Gulangyu

Entry gate to an abandoned estate, Gulangyu

On the beach when the tide was out I found pottery bits and sea glass. Paths on the waterfront promenade are fitted with speakers for recorded music of a better quality than Muzak drifts on the salty air.

Feral Cats Live on Gulangyu

Xiamen in the background. Supply Boats anchored at Gulangyu

Gulangyu's main attraction would be the amazing mansions built by rich merchants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Gulangyu has always attracted smugglers and drug dealers. Former U.S. and British consulates dating back to 19th c. are now hotels. The Spanish consulate next to the Catholic Church was converted to rest home for senior citizens.

Former Spanish Consulate, Gulangyu

Business of Taxpayer Financed Buildings:: Why Buy Ugly?

2011-01-15T17:00:00.000-08:00

Why spend money acquired from taxpaying citizens on a building that is ugly and an eyesore on the earth?

People would become more visually oriented and creative if they could see beautiful structures that open their eyes to intense interrelations of beauty and nature. If systems thinking was applied to design then there would be more opportunity to cultivate and nurture the seeds of creativity.

Especially when the construction project is a taxpayer-funded project, it should be designed and built to the highest standards of architectural and engineering felicity. Let federal and state sponsored building be the very best examples of American architecture.

Think of the massive structures that we travel the globe to see -- the cathedrals of France, Potala palace in Lhasa, castles on the Rhine, Angkor Wat, Borobudur, the Pantheon in Rome, Teotihuacan and countless other ancient cities in Mexico, the temples of Athens, the pyramid tombs of Egypt, the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China. These were public works projects or symbols of private enterprise in their day. If visionary builders and paymasters centuries ago hadn’t constructed pleasing and durable buildings, there would be no residual evidence of their creative effort and social systems.

Architecture -- that which remains after the floods, hurricanes, tornados, wars and fire. It provides specific and concrete evidence of how a society functioned, what it valued, how the humans prospered or failed, what was valuable to them.

Would you describe any of these taxpayer financed buildings as lasting esthetic monuments to freedom and creative enterprise?

Maybe the ugly building penalty tax has a place in our culture?

http://www.wazobiareport.com/reports/Lagos-state-introduces-Ugly-Building-tax

National Park Seminary

2010-09-26T11:25:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time the region was forested, then a posh boarding school was built. The buildings were converted to a military installation, home for soldiers in the post Viet-Nam war era. Now the buildings at National Park Seminary are offered for sale as spiffy condominium apartments.

Resources on the history of National Park Seminary

Print and photo:

History of The Seminary at Forest Glen

Save our Seminary

National Park Seminary Condominiums

Roadside America

Wikipedia - National Park Seminary

Video: Fire at the Odeon, Forest Glen Seminary

Video: Black and White images of the Seminary

Cross Creek, Florida

2010-03-21T18:40:00.000-07:00

I ate Miz' Rawlings grapefruit this morning. Sweet and juicy, a far cry from the thick skin commercial varieties sold in Northern grocery stores. The best tasting Florida citrus are thin skinned and crack open when they hit the sandy turf. The fruit from Cross Creek was chock full of seeds too, obviously not bred for travel.

"Nutmeg grapefruit is the breed," says Lee, a tour guide at Cross Creek, author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' farm in north central Florida. He wandered barefoot through the writer's house and citrus grove, leading a dozen tourists through the historic property. "Sand sticks in running shoe crevices, not to bare feet," he says, dusting his soles against his tattered pants legs. Lee's aw-shucks, gee-willikers style brings to life Rawlings' backwoods characters in popular books like The Yearling and Cross Creek.

Rawlings won the Pulitzer Prize in 1939 for The Yearling. Beloved by many young readers, the novel tells of local boy Jody Baxter's coming of age in Florida's hard scrapple northern pine country near Ocala Forest. Her novel displayed contemporary realities in realistic voice and bridged subject and stylistic antipodes. The 1938 Pulitzer book, John P. Marquand's The Late George Apley, hewed closer to 19th century novel forms and subject matter, while John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, the Pulitzer winner in 1940, was a thoroughly modern novel rooted in vernacular voice and character.

When she came here in 1928 with first husband Charles Rawlins, both journalism graduates from the University of Wisconsin, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was a neophyte Floridian who thought she could live off the orange grove. The farm was planted with pecan trees, which she ordered cut down to plant citrus.

Geothermal Electricity Launch on Nevis

2009-05-03T12:27:00.000-07:00

Geothermal Launch on Nevis

Caribbean Island Transforming Hot Water

According to St. Kitts and Nevis Democrat newspaper on “Tuesday 28th April, in Nevis, West Indies Power (Nevis) Ltd. was issued a Geothermal Resource Concession by the Nevis Island Administration (NIA) and signed a 25 year Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with the Nevis Electricity Company Ltd. (NEVLEC). The Geothermal Resource Concession is for a renewable 25 year term and grants West Indies Power (Nevis) Ltd. (WIPN) the right to develop and produce electricity from the geothermal resources on Nevis.”

Kerry McDonald, CEO of West Indies Power (Nevis) Ltd, said, “West Indies Power will now be able to start building the geothermal power plants that will supply Nevis and the other islands in the northern Caribbean with low cost, reliable, renewable, clean energy for the foreseeable future.”

Hot Water :: Cool Air

People have been tapping into geothermal energy for cooking and heating forever. Settlements near geyser fields made good sense to our stone age ancestors. Think of geothermal as a steam power source coming from Earth's interior. The thermal energy is drawn from beneath Earth's crust, at various distances below the surface. Jules Verne’s novel “Journey to the Center of the Earth” spins a story about traveling on the hot rivers of the surface deep into the earth’s molten rivers called magma.

Volcanic areas produce reservoirs of steam and hot water. In Iceland, steam is tapped for residential heat and hot water. Steam geysers are left for visitors to enjoy in remote areas of Iceland, as at Yellowstone National Park in the USA and the Valley of the Geysers north of Zhupanovo on the east coast of the Kamchatka peninsula in Siberia.

Nevis plans to use its geothermal resources to generate electricity which ultimately may be used to power air conditioners. Hot water makes cool air.

Conversations and Connections

2009-04-22T12:00:00.000-07:00

A writers' gathering, Conversations and Connections, Third Annual, on 11 April 09, was hosted by a trio of excellent literary journals -- Barrelhouse, Potomac Review and Baltimore Review, with Johns Hopkins University and Montgomery College. The venue was SAIS near Dupont Circle.

The opening was an unfriendly hour on a soaking wet day: 8:30 a.m. I rolled into the Herter Room, named for one of the least known 20th century Secretaries of State and a co-founder of SAIS, around 10 a.m. just as an experienced and informed panel of novelists -- Susan Coll, Keith Donahue, C. M. Mayo, Leslie Pietrzyk -- began a conversation about managing point of view in fiction.

Ducked rain shielded by a too small umbrella made in China for Marimekko, to scoot across Mass. Ave to another office building now part of the SAIS complex. A few years ago, the Italian Cultural Institute occupied the first floor, where films and lectures in Italian were followed by Prosecco and amusing canapes. The Italians have moved on, now hosting cultural programs in their swank new Embassy just across Whitehaven Parkway from the current Secretary of State's Washington residence.

Possibly, the panel exploring the Digital Literary Landscape offered the most international perspectives. Editors M. Flinn and G. Donovan from Blackbird, a stunning journal nested at Virginia Commonwealth University, told a SRO audience that among their global 750K page views is surprisingly deep market penetration in Turkey where women read online and join book discussion groups, which is an acceptable social activity outside their cloistered homes.

Blackbird receives submissions from the global anglophone writing community. Other contemporary literary journals whose editors were also on the panel -- Failbetter.com, JMWW, LOCUSPOINT -- publish a diverse pool of writers. There's no need to distinguish any longer between serious online lit journals and printed journals. The editors pointed out that online literary publications offer added value with audio and video files that enhance understanding of poems, stories or essays read aloud and published in the journal.

How to tell which online journals are worthy? Read the masthead and take note of a stable publication schedule.

The future: More of everything digital. Kindle books; print-on-demand books and articles; novel serializations chapter pre-releases, partnering with universities, publishing on cellphones. Just possibly literary gatherings facilitated by VOIP or video conference.

Japanese Version of Travel Writing: See the World-Sell the Story

2009-04-12T14:04:00.000-07:00

Do you police your byline? Need a reason? Here's what happened to me yesterday.

I was looking up various topics at the Library of Congress where you can rove through the electronic resources. As usual, I also searched my byline in WorldCat. Up popped a 2008 edition of my 2005 non-fiction book Travel Writing, published by F+W Publications.

Who knew!? A Japanese version! An earlier edition of the book was published in Italian recently, and in Chinese a decade ago. But Japanese -- this was news to me.

Naturally, I sent a flash-mail to the contract and royalties manager at the publisher -- F+W. Is this an oversight, I asked? A case of stiff-the-writer? Copyright infringement? We shall see.

So, don't forget to check your byline regularly in many databases.

Japanese version

旅行ライター入門講座 : わが国初の本格的トラベルライティングの教科書旅行ライターとして旅立ちたいあなたへ /
Ryokō raitā nyūmon kōza :
wagakuni hatsu no honkakuteki toraberu raitingu no kyōkasho ryokō raitā to shite tabidachitai anata e /

ピート・オニール. 池田豊信. 福本直美.

L Peat O'Neil; Toyonobu Ikeda; Naomi Fukumoto

2008 Japanese Book Internet Resource 360p.; 21 cm.

Tokyo:Baperupuresu,; ISBN: 9784894490819 4894490811

English version of Travel Writing, See the World-Sell the Story by L. Peat O'Neil

Wild Child @ Little Caliente Hot Springs

2009-03-27T18:44:00.000-07:00

Ninashka Hanz talks about being a good little witch. How Wicca is the only religion a woman like her could embrace; how her Solvak grandmother taught her the old ways and what was the point of life but to be one with nature and your own true self. How her Czech grandmother was a witch too, but deep and dark.

Twenty and wonderous, she moves from one campsite to the next, changing conversations, flipping the radio dial. She’s approached our site after a short exchange in laid back FM station style with Don the post office warehouse worker whose tent is nearest the forest. Then we watched her sashay up to AM Top 40 tuned Joe six-pack who camps with a family not his own, having exchanged his kids for someone else’s when a new Momma came into his life. I thought I’d seen her before.

Nina says the big Rec-V next to ours belongs to an ex-Navy guy who was at Ft. Meyers back in the late sixties and now drives around the lower 48 from state park to federal forest, camping out year round. “I tried to sell him on driving up to Alaska,” Nina said, “but he didn’t want to drive outside the borders of the USA. Go figure.”

We’d seen her hitching on Rt. 101, out fetching groceries, we found out later. I spotted her first, warned Hank to slow down. “It’s a girl, Hank. We have to pick her up.” He shrugged, drove past. “We’re headed to Mono, have to get there by dark.” By now he realized I was bored with his silences and needed to talk to people once in a while. I don’t mind mostly silent company but I have to let loose my thoughts and I was long overdue. We’d been driving the better part of a month without saying much. Get up in the morning, drive, stop, gas up and go on. Pull into some state rec area, sleep and do it all over again. Only the pots of coffee on the little burner in the munchkin kitchen in the back marked the passing days.

I tell Hank that he and I used to be on the opposite sides of some line. If I hadn’t crossed over and made a move, nothing would have happened. Now I cross the line, which in this case is the sandy gritty campground path that connects the tent sites to the restroom bathhouse. I’m headed for a young couple and soon enough I realize she is the same person we’d seen on 101. I offer Nina and Joe Sixpack a bag of marshmallows. I can tell Nina is reluctant to waste her time with him, because that’s what she calls him, Joe Sixpack. I hang around, toasting the marshmallows and keeping the conversation around firelight drifting upward instead of down into a silent gully of thought. Nina is sucking her beer bottle and complaining her life is not worth much, the other face of the girl who wants to make money packing Alaska salmon. Nina, I say, what you’re doing is an opportunity, not a mistake.

Nina holds court at Mono Campground, so named after the last great mononucleosis epidemic of 1969. Not really, but we entertained ourselves with such stories. We’d been here ten days now and Nina has installed herself as unofficial hostess.

As the days passed, Nina would come round, telling us how she lives in state parks and national lands. “It’s my land,” she’d say. “Your’s too. Take advantage of it. Stay as long as you like. Remember, these forests belong to we the American people.” I’d nod and smile and repeat what she said to Hank sulking under the plastic pull out awning, pretending to work the crossword puzzle. “It is her land, you see, Hank? And ours too. America, land of the free. This is a government forest, owned by the people, so she's living on her own property.” My voice might have climbed louder than necessary. I was trying to wake Hank up from his depression. On good days, he’d nod my way and pull his lips back in the mad-dog smile. Bad days, he’d ignore me. I just wanted some kind of reaction.

If anyone interesting pulls into the neighborhood, as we came to think of the campground, Nina invites them over for wine, dope and sounds. Before she became a witch, she said she was a singer in a rock band, back when she was in her teens. “I was the drummer’s old lady,” she said. “They had to let me sing or he wouldn’t play and the group had to have a drummer. Couldn’t play for nothing.” She's her own old lady now and at just twenty years, writes ballads about the meaning of life, too young to have a place to hold them down.

She bathes in the sulphur hot springs and talks to her dog Sugarfoot. “All bark, no bite, but they don't know that,” she confides, pulling shreds of Buglar tobacco out of the economy size can and piling it into rolling papers. “Hey Sugar, hey Foot: go kill, maim and scare,” she jokes at the dog, a mangy white cur that licked its hindquarters. She commands the dog to come without raising her head from cigarette rolling. I ask her where she got the tobacco. “Downtown, you know, in Carthage, east of Santa Barbara.” The joke was that there’s nothing east of Santa Barbara but mountains.

One time I asked her, “You ever get scared out on the road alone, sleeping in campgrounds? Not knowing where your next meal or ride was coming from?” Nina laughed, “Fear? Of what? Magic protects me,” she said. “I really am a witch; no one would mess with me.” Fooled me. Like Sugarfoot, she’s all bark, no muscle. I think Sugarfoot does his part; looks like a mean junkyard dog.

Later I hear her giggles while her orgasmic center rises to her mind's delight. She’s moved on from Joe Six to the ex-Navy guy in the big motor home. When I walk by, they’re sitting on folding chairs looking at the stars. “Have some wine and weed,” she urges. “Andy has some of the good stuff, Maui magic. Come on, let’s talk about things tragic and all that looks like magic.”

That sounds like a line from a song, I say. You should write that one up. Nina grimaces and pulls her guitar from behind the chair. “Sure, I’ll come by later when I’ve punched it out.”

Toting her guitar and Bugler can, lugging a stack of tattered songbooks, including her own lyrics recopied on three-hole lined school notebook paper, Nina enters our camp. She bangs out her twenty year old lament, her defensive answer to a world that has not dealt her well. She wants to go to Scotland and she wants to go to Budapest and see what her grandmother talked about.

“The name was Hanzlik in the old country. I’m Czech and White Russian.” She quotes bits and parts of a language that only a million people know. “There’s none of us left, she says, starting to slur her words. “The gypsies and witches, they killed us off. ‘Cept for some who went into hiding. ‘Zey killed us all off.”

Nina drinks cheap wine, slugging it back from the bottleneck. Now she’s sitting on a picnic table. The ex-Navy man is sloshed and amazed. He’s wandered over to see why she’s been gone so long. She says fuck a lot, but has no lasting interest in him, knows the difference between knaves. She’s telling about different men she’s known, maybe to shuck off Andy-the-Navy-guy’s interest, or maybe to stir him. On the one hand I want to give her my time and my ear, but she only wants to talk cheap. It's not new to me, this story.

She sings. “Jest mello down some backroad, bein’ native and naive, eatin’ weeds and grazing dope, sniffing each other's breeze. Me and this spring's lover, me and love me later. Sometimes my mind I play, sometimes each in a day. Beat the clock in the corridors of plenty, listen to the voices of unpublished rhyme, hum magic airwaves on the sundial.” The song is truly awful.

“It might be time for me to leave the Mono campground. Change my life,” she says, dragging on the Bugler. A scrap of tobacco from the end of the rolled cigarette sticks to her lip.

Sure enough, she hopped in our van the next morning, headed out with us to the highway west of Santa Barbara. The coast road, 101. Sugarfoot lay on the throw rug in the back and Nina hunched over her gear. I swiveled around in my shotgun seat so I could talk to her and still keep an eye on the road. Hank drove, nodded once in a while towards the side view window. Kept his peace when she lit up in the back. We didn’t allow smoking, usually, but I guess Hank allowed this exception.

We dropped her off in Christmas, California within sight of the big yellow house that she said was her sometime mother's. “I’ll stop off and see her for a while, then head up to Alaska. Time to get some money.” But in the rear-view mirror, I saw her stall around, put her knapsack and guitar on the ground, then stick out her thumb.

नतुरे व्रितिंग

2009-01-16T14:32:00.000-08:00

http://writingwildnature।blogspot.com/

एक्स्सर्प्ट्स फ्रॉम माय बुक व्रितिंग थे स्पिरिट: हन्द्बूक फॉर नतुरे व्रितेर्स

Falcon Dam::Rio Grande

2008-12-29T08:27:00.001-08:00

The 1953 dedication of Falcon Dam created a massive water reservoir on the Rio Bravo del Norte, aka Rio Grande. Farmers were displaced on both sides of the river. A city on the Mexican side was flooded, the inhabitants relocated to new homes built for them by the Mexican government. Towns and farms on the U.S. side were also flooded, the inhabitants had to sue for relocation and compensation.
Read more about the history of this border area.

Stay-cation

2008-07-14T12:29:00.001-07:00

Staying home to conserve resources? This summer take the time to explore the backyard, local park, county historical society museum instead of booking a carbon hog expedition.

March Ink

2007-03-05T10:23:00.000-08:00

Lunar eclipse behind us, ides and spring equinox ahead. On these shifting sands is your house in order? Look to the east, keep the wind at your back and don't forget to scan the skies for refreshing omens. Where do your travel plans take you next?