Checking In – 10/24/15

Saw “Truth” last night. Blanchett turned in another bravura performance. Well done, important movie. Not sure why audiences didn’t give it a higher rating. I was glad Blanchett finally summed up her case for why the controversy about the authenticity of certain documents was a diversion from the key question: did Bush basically go AWOL while in the National Guard? I may google that question and also Mapes, the 60 Minutes producer who was fired during the turmoil. I wonder what she’s been doing.

Otherwise, I woke up today well-rested, with a positive attitude, still inspired after having recently re-read “The Fire Next Time” for the first time in 52 years and having started Baldwin’s mid-1970s memoir, “No Name in the Street,” which I have not read. This morning, prompted by Amazon’s “Readers Also Bought” feature, I just bought “Notes of a Native Son,” which I also read in 1963. I’m hoping that Baldwin will inspire and guide me when I boil down my full autobiography, “The Search for Deep Community,” into a slice-of-life memoir, which I just started. The working title is “Faith, Love, and Action.” The first paragraph, which I just wrote, reads: “I escaped Dallas by the skin of my teeth in 1962. Mother wanted me to stay in Texas to go to college, but I was dead set on the University of California at Berkeley. To get her support, I had to give her an offer she could not refuse. The maneuver worked. Enormously excited, on a Greyhound bus, I left Texas for the first time in my life. Little did I know I was headed into a hurricane later known as “the Sixties” that would profoundly shape the rest of my life.”

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