Ron Price:
CLASS OF 1958
East Burlington Public SchoolClass of 1958
Burlington, ON
Queen Elizabeth Public SchoolClass of 1971
Picton, ON
Cherry Valley SchoolClass of 1970
Picton, ON
Sir Martin Frobisher Federal Day SchoolClass of 1968
Iqaluit, NU
District High SchoolClass of 1963
Dundas, ON
Ron's Story
Life-Narrative: Timeline
1. EMPLOYMENT & SOCIAL ROLES: 1943-2015
2009-2015-Retired and on an old-age pension
1999-2009-Writer & author, poet & publisher, editor & researcher, online blogger & journalist, reader & scholar; retired teacher & tutor, lecturer & adult educator, taxi-driver & ice-cream salesman: now living in George Town Tasmania
2002-2005-Program Presenter, City Park Radio, Launceston
1999-2004-Tutor and/or President: George Town School for Seniors Inc
-----------ABOVE THIS LINE ARE MY YEARS IN: early retirement beginning at the age of 55--------------------------
1988-1999 -Lecturer in General Studies and Human Services West Australian Department of Training
1986-1987 -Acting Lecturer in Management Studies and 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: Bi-Polar Disability
1979 -Editor, External Studies Unit, Tasmanian CAE(College of Advanced Education); Youth Worker, Resource Centre Association, Launceston; Lecturer in Organizational Behaviour, Tasmanian CAE; Radio Journalist ABC, Launceston
1976-1978 -Lecturer in Social Sciences & Humanities, Ballarat CAE, Ballarat
1975 - Lecturer in Behavioural Studies, Whitehorse Technical College, Box Hill, Victoria
1974 -Senior Tutor in Education Studies, Tasmanian CAE, Launceston
1972-1973 -High School Teacher, South Australian Education Department
1971 Primary School Teacher, Whyalla SA, Australia
------ABOVE THIS LINE ARE MY YEARS IN AUSTRALIA-------BELOW MY YEARS 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 and Northern Development, Frobisher Bay(Iqaluit), NWT, Canada
1959-67 -Summer jobs from grade 9 to end of university
1949-1967 - Attended 2 primary schools, 2 high schools and 2 universities in Canada: McMaster Uni:1963-1966, Windsor TÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂs College: 1966/7.
1944-1963 -Childhood(1944-57) and adolescence(1957-63) in and around Hamilton Ontario.
1943-1944-the time from conception in October 1943 to birth in July `1944
2. SOME SOCIO-BIO-DATA(as of: 2014)
I have been married for 47 years(8 and 39 years, two marriages). My wife is a Tasmanian, aged 68. Weve had 3 children: ages in 2009-48, 43 and 37. I am 70, a Canadian who moved to Australia in 1971 and have written 3 books--all available on the internet. I retired from full-time teaching in 1999, part-time teaching in 2004 and volunteer/casual teaching/work in 2005 after 32 years in classrooms as a teacher and 18 as a student. In addition, I have been a member of the Bahai Faith for 55 years. Bio-data: 6ft, 225 lbs, eyes/hair-brown, Caucasian.
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Much more about my autobiography can be found at my website. Here is a brief description of my website:
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The 4th edition of my website is now in its 5th year. The 3rd edition is described in the following words: This tapestry of 42 hyperlinks endows Baha'i themes and a wide range of social science and humanities subjects with many layers of meaning and evokes a complex range of responses. The author has evolved a style which is highly individual yet, by fusing together so much from many fields of study, from his own life and his philosophy and religion, appeals to both the novitiate, the veteran believer and others on a multitude of paths. There are some 5000 pages of autobiographical narrative, poetry, essays and interviews which can be seen as one long intellectual stimulus.
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The writing industry I am engaged in now during my retirement is to create across the world-wide-web a tapestry of poetry and prose. Readers will find my blogs, my posts at message boards, one of the many parts of this tapestry at any particular site. This literary creation, this industry created by a membership of one, this self-employed individual, this retired teacher and lecturer who is now 70(in 2014) attempts to endow various themes and a wide range of social science and humanities subjects with many layers of meaning across the internet. I try to evoke a complex range of responses in readers who come upon my work.
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As initiator of this prose-poetry project it is my hope that over the many decades of my life I have developed a writing style which, while trying to fuse together material from many academic disciplines, from my own life and my religion, the Baha'i Faith, achieves a degree of both the provocative and the interesting on the one hand; and the entertaining and intellectually stimulating on the other. There are now many thousands of readers engaged in this tapestry, this industry, that I have created.
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It is my conviction that the Baha'i Faith has a significant role to play in the growing unification of the planet, but I do not engage in any sort of aggressive proselytising at the more than 8000 websites that are part of this personal and industrious exercise. I do possess an obvious enthusiasm for my religion or I would not have been associated with it for over 60 years and I would not be promoting it in a multitude of forms as I do and have done since retiring from FT work in 1999, PT and casual work in 2003 and most volunteer work in 2005. It is my hope that what I write as a result of this self-employment resonates with both the novitiate, the veteran Baha'i and others on a multitude of paths.
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I'm going to add a little something about my relationship with the print and electronic media in the following paragraphs.
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Although my experience with the print and electronic media: TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, journals, hi-fis, cassette tapes, CDs--what has become a cornucopia of stimulating media--began insensibly and sensibly in the mid-1940s, the formal study of these media did not begin until my early 30s when I taught media studies at the Ballarat College of Advanced Education(CAE) from 1976 to 1978. Again in the 1980s and 1990s at (Technical and Further Education(Tafe) colleges in northern Australia and then at the Thornlie Tafe College in Perth media studies became a curriculum subject on my agenda.
When I retired from teaching in 1999 I kept three arch-lever files of notes on media studies and in the eight years since, 1999 to 2009, these three files have become six arch-lever files and two 3-ring binders. At the school for seniors here in George Town media studies became part on my teaching activity yet again until 2005.
It has been more than 70 years since the media became a part of my life, first the radio, newspapers and magazines that were part of my parents' experience as early as 1943/4 when I was in the womb and the cradle. The story of the relationship between the print and electronic media and my life over these years is a long and complex one. Now, at the age of 70 I have a base (a) in these files and (b) on the internet, for the study of this important part of my life and the life of my society.
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MY TAPESTRY OF INTERNET WRITING
There are now several hundred thousand(perhaps millions) readers engaged in parts of my internet tapestry, my literary product, my creation, my immense pile of words across the internet & hundreds of people with whom I correspond on occasion as a result. This amazing technical facility, the world wide web, has made this literary success possible. If my writing had been left in the hands of the traditional hard and soft cover publishers, where it had been without success when I was employed full time as a teacher, lecturer, adult educator and casual/volunteer teacher from 1981 to 2001, these results would never have been achieved. When one writes one likes to have readers; its a little like talking and having listeners to make the exercise meaningful.
I have been asked how I have come to have so many readers at my website and on my tapestry of writing which was created across the internet in the years 2001 to 2009. Let me briefly describe the process of developing this tapestry of writing, a tapestry which for millions of internet users is just another form of published writing in addition to the traditional forms. Perhaps the metaphor for the product, the result, of all my internet writing would be jig-saw puzzle rather than tapestry. If a publisher were to attempt to put all of my internet writing into a book, it would take him months and the product would be an irregular bundle of pieces that would require great skill in order to put the puzzle together.
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The literally hundreds of thousands of readers I have at locations on my tapestry, my jig-saw puzzle of prose and poetry are found at over 8000 websites where I have registered: forums, message boards, discussion sites, blogs, locations for debate and the exchange of views. They are sites where I place essays, articles, books, ebooks, poems and other genres of writing. I have registered at this multitude of sites, placed my literary products there and engaged in discussions with literally thousands of people, little by little and day by day. I enjoy these results without ever having to deal with publishers as I did for two decades without any success. This tape...Expand for more
stry, I have sewn in a loose-fitting warp and weft across the internet; indeed, it is so loose the garment would probably be so big that only the great hulk would find the piece of clothing useful and even then.
The last eight years of internet posting, after my full retirement, have been immensely rewarding. As I say above, when one talks one likes to be listened to and when one writes one likes to have readers. It is almost impossible, though, to carry literary torches as I do through internet crowds or in the traditional hard and soft-cover forms, without running into some difficulties. My postings singe the beards of some readers and my own occasionally. Such are the perils of dialogue, of apologetics, of writing, of posting, indeed, I might add, of living. Much of writing and dialogue in any field of thought derives from the experience each of us has of: (a) an intimate or not-so-intimate sharing of views in some serendipitous fashion or (b) what seems like a fundamental harmony or dissonance between what each of us thinks and what some other person thinks. In some ways, the bridge of dialogue is immensely satisfying; in other ways the gulfs over the valleys of life are unbridgeable. When the latter is the case and when a site is troubled by my posts, I usually bow out for I have not come to a site to engage in conflict, to espouse an aggressive proselytism but, rather, to stimulate thought and, as I say, share views. And so, for now, I remain yours sincerely and I look forward to hearing from you should you desire to write.-Ron Price, George Town, Tasmania, Australia.
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Old friends as Classmates, those from the 1950s and early 1960s up to 1963--or 1967 if I include university--over 50 years ago--I hope they remember me as: a thoughtful, considerate person who had a range of endearing virtues. I moved in many circles in those 17 years, of course, and I am sure I am remembered by many in many different ways---too many to write about here.-Ron in Tasmania Australia
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The following prose-poem also expands on my view of adulthood in some ways.-Ron
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LINGERING JUVENILITY
Reading about the death of the father of poet Les Murray and how that death freed Murray from juvenility made me ponder my own freeing and not-so-freeing in relation to my father and my mother. It made me ponder the very nature of adulthood and my success and lack of it thusfar. -Ron Price with thanks to Les Murray: A Life in Progress, Oxford UP, 2000, p.265.
I think his death(1) freed me
from any lingering juvenility,
although I think I went on
hankering after it for years.(2)
I always seemed to need
a mother or was that just
my wife's perception?
I hope I never find out---
for sure.
Adulthood rushed at me
or was it just my hormones,
or civilization's tornados?
Perhaps the rush was from
that evening when I first
felt firm warm breasts
under a star-studded sky
and bra beside a lake
in northern Ontario
just after I turned 18.
Whatever------
I've been the serious one
just about as far back as I remember,
even when the Kingdom of God
on earth began in 1953. I was nine
and I played third base that summer
in the Burlington softball league
for pre-peewees and my dad's
voice boomed through the house
in the evening, filling me with fear.
And now I fill my son with fear
down in the Antipodes
after fifty years of trying
to catch the ball---but
not as much as my Dad and
with much more love and
affection and less extremes
of negative emtion--but then
I have psychiatry and my dad
did not---I have pharmacology
and my dad did not have any.
1 My father's: 1895 to 1965
2 Even went to dances by myself as age as the age of forty in Katherine, after I had been married for fifteen years.
Ron Prce
16 March 2002
(updated for Classmates on 13/10/'09
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More of "My Story," as requested on 13/10/'09, can be read on the internet by googling the phrase "Pioneering Over Four Epochs." -Ron in Tasmania Australia in mid-spring here.
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You can also google RonPrice bipolar disorder, RonPrice poetry, Ron Price Baha'i and one of dozens of other words to add to my name for "my story."
I always wanted to be a baseball player when I grew up. My family and friends thought that was a good idea. As it turns out, they were wrong
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IRVING LAYTON AND ME
In 1944, the year I was born, Irving Layton(1912-2006) wrote his first major poem, The Swimmer. He wrote it in a restaurant known as Childs near the Princess Theatre in Montreal. Running into the restaurant and grabbing the waitress's pen, Layton scribbled the poem at a frenzied pace. Layton considers this to be a pivotal moment in his life-narrative.1 He was 32. It was the moment that he considers, in retrospect, to be the one when he finally joined the ranks of poets and saw his destiny materializing.
In 1944 my mother was 40. She was also a poet, but never the famous writer that Layton became. Layton became his most prolific in the early 1950s. My mother was a woman of 50 in the early 1950s. She joined the Bahai Faith and I was in my last years of childhood. Many believe that his verse was at its best during this time. I was at the height of my baseball career and my public speaking. I lived near Toronto at the time just down the road as the crow-flies, so to speak, from Laytons home in Montreal.
Layton published a book almost every year: the pace not slowing until the mid-1980s by which time I was living in very hot places in Australias north.2 It was in 1959 that McClelland & Stewart published Layton's A Red Carpet for the Sun, which won the Governor General's Award. It was also in 1959 that Layton won the prestigious Senior Arts Fellowship. The fellowship enabled Irving to travel abroad and write. I joined the Bahai Faith that year. I was 15. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Irving Layton Biography, Canadian Poetry Online, University of Toronto Libraries, and 2 Katherine in Australias Northern Territory and South Hedland in the north of Western Australia.
1959 was a busy-very important
year for you Irving. You were at
the height of your career and you
married a younger woman: Aviva
Cantor, a spirited lady with flair &
a love of books. While you were
in the limelight getting the awards
I joined the Bahai Faith, & played
more midget baseball, hockey, and
went through grade 10 on the shore
of Lake Ontarios Golden Horseshoe.
I knew nothing about you back then
Irving, nor did Leonard Cohen who
came to consider you a life-mentor.1
Ive long had an interest in letters of
poets. ÃÂI will have to check out yours
with Robert Creeley published when
my life with the world of poetry was
just starting to take-off in about 1990.2
1 Leonard Cohen once said of Layton, "I taught him how to dress, but he taught me how to live forever.
2 Irving Layton and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence, 1953-1978. Toronto: McGill-Queens University Press, 1990. Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners, and Ed Dorn.
Ron Price
6 August 2012
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MANUFACTURING
On 1 June 1962, as I finished my high school grade 12 exams in Canada at BCHS, and about 12 weeks before my BahaâÂÂi pioneering life began near the end of August, Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi boss responsible for transporting 100s of thousands of Jews to death camps, was executed. Research Professor of history and specialist in Jewish history, David Cesarani, argues that Eichmann had a corporate mentality and that he made a conscious career decision to do what he did within the immense bureaucratic wheel of the German totalitarian state.
He was not an embodiment of evil, not a brutal, depraved, an ideologically-driven psychopath. These popular views are a myth, Cesarani argues. He learned to be an anti-semite; he learned to hate and chose to be part of the genocide process. He was part of a âÂÂpaperwork-based collapse of morality.â He was in many ways a detached, passionless administrator, as Max Weber describes such men so well; he was an ordinary, common, far from atypical man, a graduate in mechanical engineering. He could have been, so argues Cesarani, you or I.-Ron Price with thanks to David Cesarani, Eichmann: His Life and Times, Vintage, 2004.
You can get a manâÂÂs life so
wrong, even if you study him
for years; and you can get your
own life quite wrong even though
you live it decade in and decade out,
for man, it is said, is GodâÂÂs mystery.
You certainly found as the decades
rolled insensibly and sensibly by
some bad, false wretched fame,
notoriety, a failed celebrity,
mortifying failure, a career move
in the wrong direction, a socio-historical,
ideological apparatus and a psycho-social
profile that manufactured you
as they manufacture us
with enough autonomy thrown-in
so that we can call ourselves free
even if we are everywhere in chains
in the Most Great Prison that is our life,
in which we can not walk away but
in which there is always a degree of
voluntarism, there are always half-truths
and we must manage our lives within
a new structure of freedom for our age.
Ron Price
December 23rd 2005
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