RonPrice

Yes, indeed, we are all God's children, as starlight7's old prof used to say: the weird and the wonderful, the wise and the witty, the wicked and the worthless----and all those who post on the world-wide-web. I bid you all farewell and, before the court of 'Poms in Oz', I rest my case.-Ron Price, Tasmania

Writers & authors, poets & publishers, online bloggers & journalists, editors & researchers, readers & scholars like myself get a lot of motivation out of knowing that other people will respond to what they are publishing online. Knowing, as I do, that hundreds of thousands and, since about 2009 when I went on 2 old-age pensions at the age of 65, that literally millions can see what I'm writing over my dozen years or so of writing-and-publishing online is a very powerful motivator.The popularity of my writing exists because of social media and the vast number of sites on the Internet. But my popularity, like anyone's, needs to be placed in a context; When one exists, when one's writing exists, in a place like the internet with its 3 billion users, 1 billion sites, some 100 billion webpages, and 200 billion posts, emails, & messages sent everyday----popularity is a relative term. Some 99.9% of those who use the world-wide-web do not know me and will never read my writing. But .1% is 1/1000th of 3 billion and that makes 3 million readers, & .01% is 1/10,000th of 3 billion, or 300,000 readers. That, of course, is a very rough guesstimation and, when one is dealing with these sorts of numbers in cyberspace, it all becomes somewhat mind-numbing, and irrelevant beyond a certain point. My guesstimation of readership is, at a minimum, several million.

Internet publishing is a whole new ball-game for those who take it seriously. My style is only one of the many ways that writers get readers. I am prepared to see my results as a certain form of self-delusion. All those who read my work read, of course, various portions of my work. It's not like readers of books and totalling-up book sales. Believe me I am engaged in a publishing industry with short posts, medium sized posts, long posts and everything in-between. PS I now have some 10 million words in cyberspace; this, of course, is a guesstimation since, after a certain amount of interchange and posting, adding it all up becomes somewhat irrelevant.

Yes, Quinkla, you may be right in the end when my roll is called-up-yonder. I used to think that once stuff got into cyberspace it was there forever but I don't believe that any more. Meanwhile, if I add-up all those who click on my posts at the over 8000 sites it adds-up to several million. I can hardly believe it myself.-Ron

Not being a believer in reincarnation, I trust my life does, in fact, begin at conception, mungbean.-Ron

I'm pleased, NickyNook, to be able to outline my modus operandi, my MO as they say in the who-dun-its. Of course, when one posts in cyberspace, or for that matter talks in real space, one can only interest some of the people some of the time. "Such is life," as the outlaw Ned Kelly is reported to have said on his way to the gallows in NSW in 1880.-Ron

I'll give you quite a detailed answer, CaptainR, to your question.-Ron ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ PIONEERING OVER FIVE EPOCHS A. MY TYPE OF SOCIAL NETWORKING 1. Everything I do with other people online is part of my particular type of social networking across the vast landscape that is cyberspace. My social networking is associated with three basic activities: (a) the creation of a personal website that serves as a home base, a central hub, for my writing, for teaching and consolidation, that is, community building, for service and social activism, as well as for feedback from others---should they wish; (b) the creation of a detailed personal profile(see Appendix 1 below) which I post at over 8000 internet sites which readers at these sites can access, again, if they wish; and finally © posting my writing at these 8000+ sites, and interacting with others about my posts and theirs. In the process I promote my website, and my writing, at these 8000+ internet sites. 2. In the last dozen years, 2004 to 2015, I have created an extensive audience or readership. I address myself to a circle, a crowd or single individuals. I try to make of my interactions more than the typical ones found at sites like Facebook and twitter. The interactions or connections at such popular social networking sites often reduce friendship to a feeling or an image, a sense of connection to faraway or nearby friends about everyday things based, for the most part, on very short, pithy posts. Such connections involve posts that usually contain little about one’s true difficulties and feelings in life and, when they do, it is in the form of sort and pithy posts increasingly with lots of images and aphorisms from popular culture and elsewhere. 3. A world of privacy and an image is created. There is nothing wrong with that, with this type of site and networking style, but it is not my style, not my approach, not my MO, modus operandi, to use a who-dun-it term. I post a great deal about what I think in the form of prose and poetry, generally more extended pieces of writing than the posts found in the Facebook and twitter world. My posts are far beyond the one-liners, the jokes, what I did today, what I ate for dinner, I poke you, I like this and I don’t like that, the ‘here are some photos of this’ and ‘here are some pictures of that’, ‘here is a video of this’ and ‘here is a piece of music,’ etc 4. Social networking exposes readers to this or that book, this or that video or piece of music, this or that restaurant, food dish or pleasurable activity, this or that idea or cause. To each their own as we all navigate this parallel universe in our own ways. B. MY WEBSITE 1. My website has been on the internet for the last 19 years: 1997-2015. It is part of a tapestry, or perhaps a jig-saw puzzle is a more accurate word, for all my poetry and prose both at my website and elsewhere in cyberspace at those 8000+ sites mentioned above. I have dozens of links at my site, some linked to my writing at other internet sites, and some linked to resources created by others. I have created a large thread of words, indeed, over 100 blog-type webpages across the internet since leaving the world of FT paid employment in the late 1990s and taking a sea-change at the age of 55. 2. My cyberspace creation is made by a now self-employed individual: a retired teacher and lecturer, tutor and adult educator, taxi-driver and ice-cream salesman. I am now a poet and publisher, writer and author, editor and researcher, online blogger and journalist, scribbler and sampler within the immense commentariat and bloggosphere that is the world-wide-web. 3. I am now 70 and I attempt to endow various themes and a wide range of subjects in the arts and sciences with many layers of meaning. In these last 19 years on the world-wide-web I have evoked a complex range of responses in readers who come upon my work, responses which range from lavish enthusiasm to utter indifference and quite intense criticism. The solitary work of literary creation requires a type of talent, some earned ability or unearned gift of grace which is almost never collaborative except in the broad sense that we all draw on the ideas of others. 3.1 The solitude I require to create an essay, a poem or a book requires my ability to draw on the globally interrelated, interdependent and interlocked system of the WWW to market my wares. Until my work is ready to be placed in cyberspace the activity is intensely private, although I often draw on the work of other writers in composing my own literary creations. The marketing of my work is also private, and then the feedback comes in or it does not as the case may be. Not everything I write in cyberspace is commented on by others. B.1 MY WEBSITE AND OTHER INTERNET SITES I will continue to use my website as the central hub for my literary work, for my internet teaching and learning activity, for my now several million words and many books on the internet in this 2nd decade of the 21st century. My writing is found in the form of: essays and blogs, poems and articles, ebooks and message boards, threads and special topic sites, indeed a myriad types of discussions. I do not engage, though, in any sort of aggressive proselytising or heated exchange at those 8000 websites that are part of this personal and industrious exercise. When what I write produces vehemence and invective, heated criticism at some site, I simply leave if I am unable to cool the emotional climate at the site. Sometimes I am banned before this occurs for a variety of reasons: Christians only, Muslims only or some other form of exclusivist site-policy. Sometimes what I write is considered spam and, even after I defend my case, I am sometimes excluded from some site. In cyberspace as in any real space, one cannot win all the time. C. MY WRITING STYLE AND MY VALUES 1. I have tried over the last several decades of my life, looking back as far as my own junior youth in the 1950s, to develop a writing style which, while fusing together material from many academic disciplines, from my own life as well as from my value, belief and attitude base, aims to be both provocative and intellectually stimulating on the one hand, and light and entertaining on the other. In writing, as in daily life though, one wins sometimes and one loses at other times; one’s writing appeals to some and not to others. One’s value, belief and attitude base is a set of assumptions around which one places one’s emotions and then proceeds to act and argue one’s case before the court of life. 2. I possess an obvious enthusiasm for my evolving values, beliefs and attitudes as well as the several causes I promote or I would not have been associated with them in their overt form---for nearly 60 years; nor would I be promoting my ideas in a multitude of forms, subtle and not-so-subtle, on the internet as I do and have done since retiring from FT work in 1999, PT in 2003 and most casual-volunteer work in 2005. D. MY READERSHIP 1. I now have several million readers on the internet. It is difficult to guesstimate readership precisely in cyberspace when there are now nearly 300 million sites and over 2 billion users, and when one writes and posts, interacts and reads at as many sites as I do. Many of the sites at which I post my writing and interact with others keep me informed about how many people click-on to what I have written, and many don't. Each site is again, another one of those infinite number of parallel universes to which I refer above. 2. I am engaged in varying degrees of frequency and intensity, in parts of this tapestry, this jig-saw puzzle, this literary product, this creation, this immense pile of words with hundreds of people with whom I correspond on occasion as a result. I keep most of this correspondence as infrequent as possible or I would drown in this new form of letter writing: the email and the internet post. E. THE WWW AND PUBLISHING 1.This amazing technical facility, the world wide web, has made this literary success, this form of publishing, possible. This teaching and learning exercise, this form of service and often social activism, among the many other functions of my writing in the now wide and extensive dialogue I now have with diverse publics is an enriching one. If my writing had been left in the hands of the traditional hard and soft-cover publishers, where it had been without success for the most part from 1981 to 2001, these publishing results with my now extensive readership would never have been achieved. Back in those twenty years I was still employed FT and raising a family. Much of my current internet profile is due to the fact that I am now retired and can reinvent myself as a writer and author, poet and publisher, online blogger and journalist. 2. It is my hope that what I write as a result of this self-employment, this literary vocation and avocation, this pleasurable occupation of my leisure time, resonates with both the novitiate and the veteran on the one hand, and the great diversity of people who are on a multitude of paths in their journey through life. F. NOTE When accessing what I write in cyberspace you can Google: Ron Price, but be aware that there are 4000 to 5000 other Ron Prices now on the web. Some of them are men of fame and others of notoriety. You can also google: Pioneering Over Five Epochs or Ron Price forums or Ron Price followed by…..many other words and phrases literally several 1000 possibilities to access what I have written. APPENDIX 1: EMPLOYMENT-SOCIAL-ROLE POSITIONS: 1943-2015 2010-2015-Retired and on an old-age pension in George Town, Tasmania 1999-2009-Writer & Author, Poet & Publisher, Editor & Researcher. Retired Teacher & Lecturer, Tutor & Adult Educator, Taxi-Driver & Ice-Cream Salesman, George Town Tasmania Australia 2002-2005-Program Presenter City Park Radio Launceston 1999-2004-Tutor &/or President George Town School for Seniors Inc --------ABOVE THIS LINE ARE MY YEARS OF RETIREMENT---------------------- 1988-1999 -Lecturer in General Studies & Human Services West Australian Department of Training 1986-1987 -Acting Lecturer in Management Studies & Co-ordinator of Further Education Unit at Hedland College in South Hedland WA 1982-1985 -Adult Educator Open College of Tafe Katherine NT 1981 -Maintenance Scheduler Renison Bell Zeehan Tasmania 1980-Unemployed due to illness and recovery 1979-Editor External Studies Unit Tasmanian CAE; Youth Worker Resource Centre Association; Lecturer in Organizational Behaviour Tasmanian CAE; Radio Journalist ABC---all in Launceston Tasmania 1976-1978 -Lecturer in Social Sciences & Humanities Ballarat CAE Ballarat, Victoria 1975 - Lecturer in Behavioural Studies Whitehorse Technical College, Box Hill Victoria 1974 -Senior Tutor in Education Studies Tasmanian CAE Launceston, Tasmania 1972-1973 -High School Teacher South Australian Education Department 1971-Primary School Teacher Whyalla South Australia ---ABOVE THIS LINE ARE MY YEARS LIVING IN AUSTRALIA AND BELOW THIS LINE ARE MY YEARS LIVING IN CANADA------------------------------- 1969-1971 Primary School Teacher Prince Edward County Board of Education Picton Ontario Canada 1969-Systems Analyst Bad Boy Co Ltd Toronto Ontario 1967-68 -Community Teacher Department of Indian Affairs & Northern Development Frobisher Bay NWT Canada 1959-67 -Summer jobs-1 to 4 months each- from grade 10 to end of university 1949-1967 - Attended 2 primary schools, 2 high schools and 2 universities in Canada: McMaster Uni-1963-1966, Windsor Teachers’ College-1966/7 1944-1963 -Childhood(1944-57) and adolescence(1957-63) in and around Hamilton Ontario 1943 to 1944-Conception in October 1943 to birth in July 1944 in Hamilton Ontario 2. SOME SOCIO-BIO-DATA TO 2015 I have been married twice for a total of 48 years. My second wife is a Tasmanian, aged 68. We’ve had one child: age 38. I have two step-children: ages: 49 and 44, three step-grandchildren, ages 21, 19 and 4, as well as one grandchild aged 3 years. All of the above applies in February 2015. I am 70, am a Canadian who moved to Australia in 1971 and have written several books--all available on the internet. I retired from full-time teaching in 1999, part-time teaching in 2003 and volunteer teaching/work in 2005 after 32 years in classrooms as a teacher and another 18 as a student. In addition, I have been a member of the Baha’i Faith for 56 years. Bio-data: 6ft, 230 lbs, eyes-brown/hair-grey, Caucasian. You can also go to any search engine and type: Ron Price followed by any one of a number of words in addition to: poetry, forums, blogs, literature, history, bipolar disorder, psychology, sociology, media studies, inter alia, to access my writing________________________ End of document

Yes, starlight7, some half a million now, and located at the bottom end of the world, the last stop on the way to Antarctica if you take the western-Pacific-rim-route.-Ron Price, an Australian-Canadian hybrid.

I'm just musing, dmjg. I'm a writer and author, poet and publisher in these years of the evening of my life. I post at many sites in cyberspace and in the process collect a few readers. After a 50 year student and paid-employment life, 1949 to 1999, I reinvented myself and now do online blogging and online journalism, editing and research, FYI.-Ron

While Bobj mows the lawn, and Quinkla learns something from my post I learn, yet again, the great variety of response to all things literary.-Ron Price, Australia

From the age of 55 to 65 I gradually took an early retirement, by stages, first from FT, then PT, and finally casual-volunteer work. Little by little and day by day, I headed for the world of a writer and author, and the roles I have listed above. By the age of 65 in 2009, I was able to go on two old-age pensions, one from Canada where I had worked at FT & PT jobs from 1950 to 1971. My 2nd pension is from the Australian governnment. I worked in Australia from 1971 until I was able to gradually free myself from the 60 to 70 hours a week which were involved in my FT employment from the early 1970s to the end of 1990s. Those 2 old-age pensions, as well as income from a small group of stocks and investments, now bring-in some $34,000/annum. This $34,000 that now comes in to our coffers annually is enough for my wife and I to live on since: (a) we have our home completely paid-for; (b) we have little debt, and © we live frugally. In 2012, three years ago now as I write this update, we took-out a $20,000 reverse mortgage, our only debt now, in order: (i) to pay-off all our other debts, & (ii) to be able to handle big-ticket-cost items like: car expenses & household repairs, gifts for needy family members & birthdays for many members of our immediate & extended family, big doctor & dentist bills, as well as the occasional bit of retail therapy. Such a form of therapy, retail therapy, also and arguably western civilization's most popular art-form, has especially been the case for my wife who has taken-care of our domestic & family requirements during our 40 years together, 1975 to 2015. I earned the money, & she organized the spending of it; this was & is an arrangement I have always been happy with, & an important part of what has made our marriage last some of the inevitable tests of time. Of this $20,000, to which I refer above, some $3,000 remains as of this 10th day of July 2015 Downunder. We also own a handful of stocks which have a net-worth of some $3000 to $4000 depending on their currently fluctuating stock market values. In addition, we own a house and property valued at $270,000 to $330,000, again, depending on the market. We also have a guesstimated $25,000 in 'other assets' like: fixtures and furniture, art and antiques, plant and equipment, an assortment of business and electronic equipment, car and clothes, intangible assets like this website and my other online writing. It's a miscellany of memorabilia & domestic necessities. Several studies have shown that households of those people now in their 70s in Australia have enjoyed a significant increase in their wealth; compared to generations X, Y, Z, or alpha, war-babies like myself have had a good run. I don't want to go into the fine details comparing the financial life of the generations in Australia going back to, say, the Silent Generation, and the previous generations. Suffice it to say, my wife and I are comfortable with our pensions and our home paid-for, even though our money-in-the-bank does not allow us to go on expensive trips, or engage in extended retail therapy. For an excellent overview of the advantages of the generation I was born into go to this link:http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2014/2/7/economy/baby-boomers-have-failed-doomed-generation

------------------------------------ We each find our own place in cyberspace; sometimes it is easier to find our place on the internet than in the real world. More than half the world still has no access to the world-wide-web. But for those of us who do, it is a wonderful resource. As I say, "to each their own".-Ron Price, George Town, Tasmania

My intention, dmjg, was to state my experience briefly and, in the process, see if there were any others at this site who have worked as a teacher or lecturer in Australia. Others might like to discuss their experience. I'll say a little more about my experience, in this case about teaching creative writing, and see if there are others who would like to respond.-Ron Price, Tasmania-------------------------------------------------- THE HINTERLANDS Part 1: Creative Writing courses at universities are relatively new: the sixties in the US, 1971 in the U.K. and at various times in other countries in the last three to four decades. Romantic theories of creativity have often been democratised in Creative Writing pedagogy whereby students are encouraged to develop their individual styles by the process of finding a voice. This is a result of the influence of Progressive Education on the Creative Writing movement in American schools in the 1920s, and in English and Australian schools in the 1960s and 1970s. Having been part of this movement, first as a teacher in primary and secondary schools myself in the ‘60s and ‘70s and, then, as a lecturer in post-secondary educational institutions from the ‘70s to the ‘90s in Australia, I came to it by the turn of the millennium as a writer myself in cyberspace. In her handbook on Creative Writing Dorothea Brande, writing in the year of the outbreak of WW2, warned against the danger of a contagious style, of writing after the fashion of admired authors. "The important matter," she asserts, "is to find your own style, your own subjects, your own rhythm, so that every element in your nature can contribute to the work of making a writer of you." Brande's advice for achieving this was to tap into one's own unique and individual unconscious via a series of writing exercises, thus drawing out original material. Brande wrote these words more than two decades before Creative Writing found a place in university curricula and in the other sorts of post-secondary education in which I was involved as a lecturer, as I say above, from the 1970s to the 1990s. Part 2: If we accept that what underpins Creative Writing pedagogy should be a critical reading practice, then reconfiguring this reading practice in an application to Creative Writing may enable those who would be successful creative writers to more productively engage in the several disciplines that underpin Creative Writing and in Creative Writing itself. Yesterday on the ABC’s Radio National program “The Book Show”(20/2/06; 10:05-10:30 a.m.) Patricia Duncker, a professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia where Creative Writing as a university subject began in England, and a writer herself, talked about being well-read as an essential foundation for writing. Duncker’s emphasis, and Brande’s, on finding your own style certainly fit into my own approach, my own understanding, of how to develop good writing.–Ron Price with thanks to Paul Dawson, “Towards a New Poetics in Creative Writing Pedagogy,” TEXT, Vol.7, No.1. I’ve lived, learned and taught through an era of new ways of looking at writing is in its many forms, uses and styles. I’ve lived, learned and taught so many books that I now settle for them in doses so small that cyberspace has become my home, hearth. Now I bring my buried life of reverie, memory, feeling, dreams into the foreground of my consciousness & mix it liberally with the flowing waters of the sweet-scented streams which have seen & been running to the sea of my life from rivers far into hinterlands where I rarely travel any more now in the evening of my life, my 70s, 2014 to 2024, and 80s.....if indeed I last that long: 2024+++ Ron Price 21/2/'06 to 24/9/'14.

The role of teacher is often formal and ongoing, carried out at a school or other place of formal education. In many countries, a person who wishes to become a teacher must first obtain specified professional qualifications or credentials from a university or college. This was the case for me, and I obtained these qualifications in the 1960s, from 1963 to 1967. These professional qualifications included, for me, the study of pedagogy, the science of teaching, and a range of special subjects which I hope to outline here at a future time. Teachers, like other professionals, may have to continue their education after they qualify, a process known as continuing professional development. This I did from 1970 to 1988 in a variety of ways. Teachers may use a lesson plan to facilitate student learning, and I did this in my first years as a teacher. I also provided a course of study, called the curriculum, which was determined by the educational instutution which employed me. A teacher's role may vary among cultures; my teaching was done in: Ontario, the NWT of Canada, & nearly all of the states of Australia. Teachers may provide instruction in literacy & numeracy, craftsmanship or vocational training, the arts, religion, civics, community roles, or life skills. I taught all these subjects and many more. For more on the subject of teaching go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teacher Lecture is a word which comes from the French word 'lecture', meaning 'reading'. It is an oral presentation intended to present information or teach people about a particular subject, for example by a university or college teacher. Lectures are used to convey critical information, history, theories, background, & equations. A politician's speech, a minister's sermon, a businessman's sales presentation, among other oral presentations, may be similar in form to a lecture. I worked as a lecturer from 1975 to 1999 with several years during this period working at other jobs and tasks, roles and professions. Usually the lecturer will stand at the front of the room and recite information relevant to the lecture's content. For more go to:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lecture

Your concern, starlight7, is one I have often heard while living here for over 20 years. There is a conflict here between the need and desire for tourists and the desire to keep the masses away. I wish you well from Tasmania after three weeks of its autumn season.-Ron

Thanks for your response, MARYROSE02. My wife and I are on old-age pensions which is quite enough to survive on, but no money for big-trips and retail therapy in large doses. After more than 30 years spent as an internal and/or external student, I have no interest in any more formal-institutional learning. But I have reinvented myself as a writer and author and you can read some of my offerings at:***Website link removed per forum rules***..I'll say a little more about that job-application process in what follows.-Ron Price, Australia ------------------------------------------------------ Part 3: Writing is for most of its votaries a solitary, hopefully stimulating, but not always pleasurable leisure-time, part-time or full-time pursuit. In my case, as I say, in these middle years(65-75) of late adulthood(60-80), writing and its companion activities: reading and research, editing and publishing, online blogging and journalism, has become full-time about 40 to 50 hours a week. This activity is for me, and for the most part, an enriching and enjoyable pursuit. I have replaced my former paid employment and extensive activity with people in community with a form of work which is also a form of leisure, namely, as I say: writing and reading—independent scholarship. Not all is easy-sailing on the western-front, though: health issues still abound; money is, at worst, an annoying tick and the inner battle of life, the only real one which we all face, still goes on. Inevitably the style of one's writing and what one reads is a reflection of the person, their experience and, often, their philosophy. On occasion, I set out a summary of my writing, my employment experience, my resume, in an attachment to this brief essay, this introductory statement, this commentary on the job application process which occupied my life for five decades: 1957-2007. If as that famous, although not always highly regarded, psychologist Carl Jung writes: we are what we do, then some of what I was and am can be found in that attachment, that resume and its several appendices. That document may seem over-the-top as they say these days since it now occupies some 30 pages and many more pages if the appendices are also included. Part 4: Half a century of various forms of employment as well as community, leisure and volunteer activity in the professional and not-so-professional world, all this time in many towns, institutions and venues produced a great pile of stuff. It also produced what used to be called, and still is by several different names: one’s curriculum vitae, one’s CV, one’s bio-data sheet, one’s resume, one’s life-narrative, life-story, storyline. This document is now, at least as I see it, more of the latter, more of a lifeline, a life-narrative, a memoir, an autobiography-of-sorts. As I say, I make the list of this stuff available to readers of this account, this essay, when appropriate, when requested and, occasionally, when not appropriate. I update those many pages to include recent writing projects I have completed, or am in the process of completing, during these first years of my retirement from full-time, part-time and most volunteer activity. My resume has always been the piece of writing, the statement, the document, the entry ticket which has opened up the possibilities of another adventure, another bit of gadding about, another slice of a quasi-pioneering-travelling, a peripatetic existence, a moving from town to town, from one state or province to another, from one country to another, from one piece of God's, or gods', Earth to another piece of it. And so it was that I was able to come to work in another organization, gain entry to another portion of my life and enjoy or not enjoy a new world and a new landscape with a whole new set of people and experiences, some familiar and some not so. Part 5: The process, I often thought, was not unlike a modern form of a traditional rite-de-passage. To some extent I came to take on what often seemed like another personality, another me in the long road to discover if, indeed, there was a Real Me underneath all this coming and going. I'm sure this process will continue, will also be the case in all its many forms in these years of my late adulthood(60-80) and old age(80++), if I last that long and should, for some reason, movement to yet another place or, indeed, from place to place be necessary to continue for some reason I can not, as yet, anticipate. This continued movement, though, seems highly unlikely as I go through these years of late adulthood and head into the last stages of my life, from sunset and early evening to night’s first hours and then, finally, the last hours of night, the final syllables of my recorded time. This process, this rite de passage, expressed in the form of yet another job in another place seems, for the moment, to have come to an end. Time, of course, will tell. The last ten years(60-70) are, as I indicated above, the first ones of late adulthood. In this first 15 years of my retirement(2000 to 2015), I have been able to write to a much greater extent than I had ever been able to do in those years of my early(1965-1984) and middle(1984-1999) adulthood when job, family and the demands of various community projects kept my nose to the grindstone, as they say colloquially in many parts of the world. With the final unloading of much of the volunteer work as well which I took on when I first retired, in the years from 1999 to 2005; with the gradual cessation of virtually the entire apparatus and process of job-application by 2007; with my last child having left home in 2005; with a more settled home environment than I’ve ever had--by 2007 and with a new medication for the bipolar disorder that afflicted my life since my teens, also by 2007---the remaining years of my late adulthood beckon bright with promise. Part 6: As I indicated briefly above, though, all is not clear-sailing for rarely in life is everything clear sailing, at least in my own life—and I suspect this is the case in most if not all of our lives, if we are honest about our experience down life’s road. My resume reflects the shift in role, in my lifespan activity-base and lists the many writing projects I’ve been able to complete in this first decade of independent scholarship and full-time writing. This process of extensive change in people’s lives is even more true in the recent decades of our modern age at this climacteric of history in which change is about the only thing one can take as a constant--or so we are often led to believe because it is so often said in the electronic media. For many millions of people during the half century 1957 to 2007, my years of being jobbed and applying for jobs, the world was their oyster, not so much in the manner of a tourist, although there was plenty of that, but rather in terms of working lives which came to be seen increasingly in a global context. This was true for me during those years when I was looking for amusement, education and experience, some stimulating vocation and avocation, some employment security and comfort, my adventurous years in a new form of travelling-pioneering, globe-trotting, pathfinding of sorts, as part of history’s long story, my applying-for-job days, some five decades from the 1950s to the first decade of the new millennium. My resume altered many times, of course, during those fifty years. It is now, for the most part and as I indicated above, not used in these years of my retirement and especially since 2007, except as an information and bio-data vehicle for interested readers, 99.9% of whom are on the internet at its plethora of sites. Part 7: This document, as I say above, a document that used to be called a curriculum vitae or a CV, until the 1970s, at least in the region where I lived and dwelled and had my being, is a useful backdrop for those examining my writing, especially my poetry. Some poets and writers, artists and creative people in many fields, though, regard their CV, resume, bio-data, lifeline, life-story, life-narrative, personal background as irrelevant, simply not necessary for people to know, in order for them to appreciate their artistic work. These people take the philosophical, indeed, somewhat religious position, that they are not what they do or, to put it a little differently and a little more succinctly, "they are not their jobs." I frequently use this resume at various internet locations on the World Wide Web, again as I indicated above, when I want to provide some introductory background on myself. I could list many new uses after decades of a use which had a multifactorial motivational base: to help me get a job, to get a new job, to help me make more money, to enrich my experience and to add something refreshing to my life as it was becoming increasingly stale for so many reasons in the day-to-day grind, to help me get away from supervisors and from situations I could not handle or were a cause of great stress, to help me flee from settings where my health was preventing me from continuing successfully in my job, to help me engage in new forms of adventure, pioneering, amusement, indeed, to help me survive life’s tests in the myriad forms that afflict the embattled spirit, et cetera, et cetera, inter alia, inter alia, inter alter, inter alter. The use of the resume always saved me from having to reinvent the wheel, so to speak. One could photocopy it and mail it out with the covering letter to anyone and everyone. The photocopier became a common feature of the commercial, business and government world in the 1960s just as I began to send out the first of the literally thousands of job applications that I would over the next forty years: 1967-2007. One didn’t have to write the application out each time; one did not have to “say it again Sam” in resume after resume to the point of utter tedium. The photocopier itself evolved as did the gestetner, one of the photocopier’s predecessors. There were many ways one could copy one's basic data. For a time, my mother used to type applications for me back in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I became entrenched in the job market in the 1960s. This entrenchment was so very much like trench-warfare back in that Great War of 1914 to 1918--when millions died, were simply mowed down on the European continent in a process whose meaning we have yet to fully plumb. But, however little or much we have come to understand the meaning and significance of WW1, we--my generation--have come to experience a new warfare. As Henry Miller, one of the first to get away with using the "F" word in his trilogy: Sexus, Nexus and Plexus, expressed back in 1941 the new warfare of my generation: "a war far more terrible than the destruction" of the first two wars, the first two phases, with fires that "will rage until the very foundations of this present world crumble." It is not my intention to document any of these three phases of the destructive calamity that visited humankind in the century I have just left, for this documentation has been done in intimate detail elsewhere, both visually, orally and in print. I do not document, but I frequently refer, to these three phases. I have different purposes here than mere historical documentation. My job application process was clearly, at least as I look back over half a century of the process, part of that third war. Applying for jobs as extensively as I did in the days before the email and the internet came on board in the early 1990s, became an activity, for me, that sometimes resembling a dry-wretch. Four to five thousand job applications from 1957 to 2007 is a lot of applications! At least since the mid-1990s, a few clicks of one’s personal electronic-computer system and some aspect of life’s game could go on or could come to a quick end over a set of wires under the ground, the electronic world of cyberspace. During that half-century of job-hunting years I applied, as I say, for some four to five thousand jobs, an average of two a week for each of all those years! This is a guesstimation, of course, as accurate a guesstimation as I can calculate for this fifty year period. The great bulk, 99.9% of those thousands of letters involved in this vast, detailed and, from time to time, exhausting and frustrating process, I did not keep. I did keep a small handful of them, perhaps half a dozen of all those letters, in a file in my Letters: Section VII, Sub-Section X, a part of my autobiographical work which is now entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs. Part 8: This autobiographical work Pioneering Over Four Epochs goes for 2600 pages in five volumes and, due to its length, will not likely be read while I occupy space on this mortal coil. Much of my autobiography, portions of it, are now found, though, on the internet at a multitude of sites where in nano-micro-seconds anyone can find portions of my writing in addition to my autobiography or my resume. I am known in a multitude of microcosms, microworlds, miniworlds, where neither name nor fame can reach me, and where all the problems that go with any degree of celebrity status in our fame-hungry world will pass me by into cyberspace, into an electronic ether. Given the thousands of hours over so many years devoted to the job-hunting process; given the importance of this key to my venture across two continents, two marriages, with at least two personalities being the bipolar person that I am; given that this new style of pioneering, voyaging-via-employment, venture in our time has been at the core of my life with so much that has radiated around this core; given the amount of paper produced, the amount of energy expended and the amount of money earned and spent in this great exercise of survival; given the amount of writing done in the context of those various jobs, some of this employment-related correspondence seemed to warrant a corner in the written story of my life. It seemed appropriate, at least it was my desire as I recently entered the years when I no longer applied for jobs, to write this short statement(“not short enough,” I can hear them say) fitting all those thousands of unkept resumes and job-applications into a larger context as well as all those letters, emails and internet posts written in connection with trying to make connections with others, into some larger framework of action and meaning. For those who would like to read more on this theme, I invite them to go to the internet site: Baha’i Library Online>Secondary Source Material>Personal Letters>The Letters of RonPrice: 1961-2011. If such readers prefer, they can simply google: Ron Price Letters and more of this story will become available with only a few clicks. Updated on: 29/12/’13. 3750 Words

[h=1]LETTER WRITING: 2 JOB APPLICATIONS A WEEK[/h][h=2]FOR 50 YEARS---JOB HUNTING 1957-2007[/h] Part 1: The 3600 word statement which follows describes my transition from employment and the job-hunting process which took place from 1957 to 2007 to retirement and the pursuit of a leisure life devoted to writing in the years 1999 to 2014(the present). The years 1999 to 2007 marked the years of transition. During those 8 years I also gave up PT work and most casual-volunteer work. The information and details in my resume, a resume I no longer need or use in any direct sense in the job-hunting world after fifty years of use, but which I occasionally post on the internet for a range of purposes, should help anyone wanting to know something about my personal and professional background, my writing and my life. This resume is useful now, in many other contexts, as some residue, some leftover, but not to assess my suitability for some advertised or unadvertised employment position. This resume could be useful for some readers in cyberspace to assess the relevance of some statements I make on the internet, statements on a wide variety of topics at a wide variety of internet sites. If I feel there is a need for readers to have some idea of my background, my credentials and my experience; if I feel that it would be useful for them to have a personal context for my remarks at an internet site, I post that resume. But I do not post that resume here. This post, this essay, for it is a sort of essay or article, is a statement, an overview of my job application life. This overview may be of value to those who have to run-the-gauntlet in the job-hunting world, and it is a gauntlet for millions of people. Let there be no mistake about that. My intention is to be of encouragement; to help those who read this statement become more persistent, more optimistic about their own position, a position which is often a bleak one, in a bleak house given the nature of the employment market in this 21st century. Part 2: I never apply for jobs anymore, although I have registered at several internet sites whose role is, among other things, to help people get jobs. Perhaps this act of registration at such sites on the world-wide-web is an act in which I engage out of some sense of nostalgia, out of habit, out of an inability to stop applying for jobs after five decades of persistent and strenuous efforts in that direction. Those decades of efforts were aimed at obtaining jobs, better jobs, jobs more suited to my talents, jobs that paid better, jobs that freed me from impossible situations which I had become involved with, some work-scene in which I was ensconced--along the road of life. I stopped applying for full-time jobs, as I say, in September 2007 and part-time ones in December 2003. I also disengaged myself from most volunteer or casual work six years ago in 2005 so that I could occupy myself as: an independent reader and scholar, a writer and author, a poet and a publisher, an online blogger and journalist, an editor and researcher, indeed, what some might call a man of leisure in the Greek tradition. At the age of 70, then, and on two old-age pensions, one from Canada where I worked from 1955 to 1971 and an Australian pension, I am in one of the formal conditions, one of the many definitions, of old age. I am now in the middle years(65-75) of late adulthood(60-80), as one model that the human development theorists in the field of psychology use to define this period in the lifespan. I have become self-employed in the many roles I outlined above. None of these roles pay any money, although I did receive royalties for my books at one internet site. The royalties were for six years of the sale of one of my books at that site. I received a cheque for $1.49. Years ago, back in the 1970s if I recall correctly, I could have bought one of those chocolate frogs for, at the time and again if I recall correctly, 25 cents. But at $1.50, their current price, this money, these royalties, will not allow me to buy even one frog. Part 3: As I say, in introducing this post, I have applied for an average of 2 jobs a week for 50 years. That's 5000 applications. I could post more of my story here and I will if others at this site make a request.-Ron Price, Tasmania

I've given much thought to these topics, MARYROSE02, but the thoughts are at my website and I do not want to risk moderator disapproval by providing either the link or any reference to my site. I would encourage you to go to Wikipedia the largest online encyclopedia to deal with the subjects of your interest. Indeed, cyberspace is overflowing now with essays and books on the subjects, FYI.-Ron

I was reminded as I thought about the legacy of Whitlam and Fraser of the words of sociologist C. Wright Mills.1 By linking biography and history, individual and society, self and world, Mills sought to show that underlying people’s experience of difficulty and anxiety, apathy & discouragement, as well as a host of troubles and issues that they confront, are the fundamental problems of reason and liberty. They are not only this imaginative sociologist’s problems but Everyman’s. What is desired, continued Mill, is the strength of mind and heart to be inwardly alive and to persevere in one’s devotion. Such a person is not only the teller of what is, is not only an autobiographical voice, but he is also the seeker after the highest human possibilities. This person must insist that “nothing is worthy of man as man unless he can pursue it with passion.” This passion alone is, of course, not sufficient for the achievement of one’s purpose. Much else is needed, and we are not talking here about that sterile excitement which abounds in our popular culture today, the kind that finds its way into our culture ad nauseam, with a kind of shrill voice at fever-pitch, the musical and artistic cultural inheritance of rock-and-roll and do your own-thing, where the worst are full of passionate intensity, and the ceremony of innocence is drowned.2 Mills saw both liberalism and socialism as having collapsed as adequate explanations of the world and of ourselves, and he saw this in the first decade that Whitlam and Fraser had gone into politics: 1953-1963. As I entered adulthood in the 1960s I found the words of C.W. Mills expressed my feelings and thoughts about partisan politics and even more so today.–Ron Price with thanks to 1C.W. Mills, The Sociological Imagination, Oxford UP, 1959, p.196; 2W.B. Yeats, quoted in Kenneth Clark, Civilization, Penguin, NY, 1969, p.246.

On hearing of the passing of Malcolm Frazer in the morning of 20/3/'15, I revised a prose-poetic piece I had originally written on hearing of the passing of Gough Whitlam on 21/10/'14. It is too long to post here, but I will say that when one writes about politics, the people and the events, the ideas and the issues, one does not have to engage in the partisan variety which divides the nation and individuals from each other and engages millions in hair-splitting discussions on topics about which they usually or, at least, often know very little. Often the opinions are endless, opinions which get dropped-about now in cyberspace's social media and elsewhere, and in real space. I have studied politics and taught it from grade 10 when I was 15 to these years of my retirement more than half a century later. I am now 70. My parents had political meetings in our home back in the early to mid-1950s. It was in those early, those embryonic, years when I was inoculated against partisan-party politics. That in-house political discussion was characterized by endless hair-splitting and personality clashes in what were my pre-puberal years and we are still, as Matthew Arnold once wrote, ".....here as on a darkling plain. Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, /Where ignorant armies clash by night." The political scene has changed little, in many ways in the last several decades, some 60 years of my life-narrative.-Ron Price

Thanks, jac2011....that is good to know.-Ron

Thanks to PaulandDeb. When one retires from decades of 60 to 80 hours a week of: (i) a teacher with additional community responsibilities, as well as (ii) the duties and tasks of being a husband and father of three kids, and then 4 grand-children, filling in the time is the key agenda item from, say, 70 to death. There are more options now in the 21st century and each person has to workout their own package, of course. I wish you all well as you work out your days of frenetic passivity and endless activity, of boredom and stimulation each in their own measure as each of your interests and tastes dictate both before(and if) you retire, and after.-Ron

I thank you folks for your responses. You are all busy and frequent posters at this site; I'll probably drop in here occasionally as I head into old-age. Some people, when introducing themselves, say very little, things like: "it's good to be here" and "take care"....etc. Others, like me, probably say too much......To each their own in cyberspace and real space. Most of the things I want to say, I say on my website, and readers here can read as much or as little of it as they desire

Part 1: I never apply for jobs anymore, although I have registered at several internet sites whose role is, among other things, to help people get jobs. Perhaps this act of registration at such sites on the world-wide-web is an act in which I engage out of some sense of nostalgia, out of habit, out of an inability to stop applying for jobs after five decades of persistent and strenuous efforts in that direction. Those decades of efforts were aimed at obtaining jobs, better jobs, jobs more suited to my talents, jobs that paid better, jobs that freed me from impossible situations which I had become involved with, some work-scene in which I was ensconced--along the road of life. I stopped applying for full-time jobs, as I say, in September 2007 and part-time ones in December 2003. I also disengaged myself from most volunteer or casual work six years ago in 2005 so that I could occupy myself as: an independent reader and scholar, a writer and author, a poet and a publisher, an online blogger and journalist, an editor and researcher, indeed, what some might call a man of leisure in the Greek tradition. At the age of 70, then, and on an old-age pension, an Australian pension, I am in one of the formal conditions, one of the many definitions, of old age. I am now in the middle years(65-75) of late adulthood(60-80), as one model that the human development theorists in the field of psychology use to define this period in the lifespan. I have become self-employed in the many roles I outlined above. None of these roles pay any money, although I did receive royalties for my books at one internet site. The royalties were for six years of the sale of one of my books at that site. I received a cheque for $1.49. Years ago, back in the 1970s if I recall correctly, I could have bought one of those chocolate frogs for, at the time and again if I recall correctly, 25 cents. But at $1.50, their current price, this money, these royalties, will not allow me to buy even one frog. Part 2: I have gradually come to this current, some would say, penurious role in the years after I left full-time employment in 1999, some 16 years ago. Not being occupied with earning a living, and giving myself to 60 hours a week on average in a job, as was the case in the three decades from 1969 to 1999; and not being occupied with giving many other hours to community activity, as I had been for so many years as was the case from at least 1949 to 1999, marked a turning point in my life. I became able to devote my time to a much more extensive involvement in writing and reading material of my own choice. The process of frequent moves and frequent jobs which was my pattern for fifty years, 1949 to 1999, is not everyone's style, modus operandi or modus vivendi--to use two still commonly used Latin phrases. Many millions of people live and die in the same town, city or state and their life's adventure takes place within that physical region, the confines of a relatively small place, a domain, a bailiwick as politicians often call their electorate. Such people and other types as well often have very few jobs in their lifetime. Physical movement is not essential to psychological and spiritual growth, nor is a long list of jobs, although a great degree of inner change, extensive inner shifting, is inevitable from a person’s teens through to their late adulthood even if they sat all their lives on the head of a pin and never moved from the parental nest. That reference to the head of a pin was one of the theologico-philosophical metaphors associated with angels and often used in medieval times. This metaphor has interesting applications to the job-hunting process but I will leave that for another time. I was able to find jobs, in the main, by being willing to go where the jobs were and not feel committed to one town, one state, one home. Ron Price Tasmania

Mental health issues need to get an airing at this site since they are an increasing problem in both the UK and Australia. I won't tell all my story here but, readers with the interest, can access my story ***link removed per forum rules***