User:RonPrice
1. EMPLOYMENT-SOCIAL-ROLE POSITIONS: 1943-2015
2009-2015-Retired at age 65, and on an old-age pension 1999-2009-Writer & author, poet & publisher, online blogger & journalist, reader & scholar, editor & researcher; retired teacher & tutor, lecturer & adult educator, George Town Tasmania Australia 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 OF RETIREMENT FROM FT PAID EMPLOYMENT------ 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 due to Bi-Polar Disability 1979 -Editor External Studies Unit Tasmanian CAE 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 LIVING IN AUSTRALIA; BELOW 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 and 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 October 1943 to July 1944-Conception to Birth in Hamilton Ontario
2. SOME SOCIO-BIO-DATA TO 2009
I have been married for 42 years. My wife is a Tasmanian, aged 63. We’ve had one child: age 32 in 2009. I have two step-children: ages: 42 and 39 in 2009. I am 65, am 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 2003 and voluneeer teaching/work in 2005 after 35 years in classrooms. In addition, I have been a member of the Baha’i Faith for 50 years. Bio-data: 6ft, 230 lbs, eyes-brown/hair-grey, Caucasian. See my website for more details at: http://www.users.on.net/~ronprice/ and go to any search engine and type: Ron Price followed by any one of a number of words: poetry, Bahá'í, literature, history, bipolar disorder, psychology, sociology, inter alia.
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3. A SUMMARY OF RON PRICE’S INTERNET PUBLISHING “HIS CUP OF PUBLISHING TEA”
3.1
I have outlined below(in 1500 words and four A-4 font 14 pages) several categories of my writing and my writing projects of varying sizes, genres and subjects on the internet. Readers can gradually get into whatever categories of my work they desire, if at any time they do in fact desire to read my works over the next few days, weeks, months, years or decades. The following items went onto the internet in the period 2001-2014.
The following outline is a presentation of what might be called my marketing strategy, my literary strategy or my internet strategy, a strategy given the limitations of my technical internet skills. One might refer to my current modus operandi, my MO as the who-dun-it enthusiasts call it, as my business plan, although such a term suggests a more professional and money-oriented approach than it really is. In some ways what I write below is an outline of this small business, how I operate, how I have built it up, its raison d’etre and where it seems to be going if, indeed, it is going anywhere at all—and I know it is, at least from my own perspective.
3.2
Most of my writing is free of any cost, although some of the self-publishing material costs anywhere from $3 to $20 at self-publishing sites like Lulu and eBook Mall. I mention this fact: (a) not to advertise and (b) not to try and sell my work. I have received 20 cents/annum in royalties since I began self-publishing in 2003. Fame and wealth will elude me as it eludes most writers. There are three general categories of printed matter, my own writing, that I have placed on the world wide web. These categories are:
1. Books:
1.1. The Emergence of a Baha’i Consciousness in World Literature: The Poetry of Roger White. This 300 page ebook is available at Baha’i Library Online and parts of it can be accessed at many places on the internet.
1.2. A paperback edition of the above book is available at Lulu.com for $11.48 plus shipping costs from the USA. This self-publishing site also has a five volume, four book, work, a study in autobiography, entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs which is 2500 pages long(four 625 page books).
Much of this is available as an ebook and in paperback for $10 to $20 per volume at Lulu.com in 2009. It has been reviewed/approved by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of the United States for placing on the internet. The cost of these books is set by Lulu.com.
1.3 My internet site entitled Pioneering Over Five Epochs had some 450,000 words and 30,000 pages and was several books unto itself. This was an equivalent of 6 books at 75,000 words per book. This was the 3rd edition of my site. My 4th edition has the equivalent of 60 books at 80,000 words per book(circa).
2. Internet Site Postings:
Essays, poems, parts of my autobiography/memoir and a wide variety of postings/writings in smaller, more manageable, chunks of a paragraph to a few pages are all free and can be accessed by simply: (a) going to any one of approximately 8000 sites and (b) typing some specific words into the Google search engine as indicated in the following:
2.1 Approximately 8000 Sites:
I post at a wide range of poetry, literature, social science and humanities sites across a diverse mix of subjects, topics and intellectual disciplines in both popular and academic culture. The list of over 100 pages of these sites and a developmental outline of the process/the timeframe by/in which these sites were acquired is available to anyone interested by writing to me at: ronprice9@gmail.com. But a simpler method for readers to access many of my postings would be to:
2.2 Type Sets of Words At Google:
There are literally hundreds of sets of words now that will access my writing at various sites. If you type, for example, Ron Price, followed by any one of the following words or word sequences: (i) poetry, (ii) literature, (iii) religion, (iv) Baha’i, (v) history, (vi) Shakespeare, (vii) ancient history, (viii) philosophy, (ix) Islam, (x) Australia Baha’i and (xi) pioneering over four epochs, et cetera, et cetera, you will get anywhere from a few sites to over 150 sites arranged in blocks of ten internet locations. This last site, “pioneering over four epochs”, is a particularly fertile set of words to type into the google search engine, although there are other sets of phrases that will yield a fertile list of my writings in prose and/or poetry.
The main problem with this latter way of accessing what I have written(section 2.2) is that my work is side by side with the items of other writers and posters who have the same name as mine and/or the same topic. I have counted over 4000 other Ron Prices and I'm sure there are more. You may find their work more interesting than mine! There are some wife bashers, a pornographer or two, car salesmen, evangelists, media celebrities, indeed, a fascinating array of chaps and chapesses who have different things to sell and advertise, different life-trajectories and claims-to-fame than my life and my offerings. If you type/google the words Ron Price followed by some topic/word of an academic, literary, poetic or subject of personal interest, you will: (a) eliminate some of the other Ron Price’s and (b) have access many sites with my writing.
3. Specific Sites With Much Material:
Some sites have hundreds of pages of my writing and these sites are a sort of middle ground, a different ground, between the two major categories I have outlined above. The Baha’i Academics Resource Library(BARL) (or Baha’i Library Online), for example, has more of my material than at any other site. My writings are listed there under: (a) books, (b) personal letters, (c) poetry, (d) biographies and (e) essays, among other categories/listings. The Roger White book is at BARL under “Secondary Resource Material>Books>Item #changes.
I find this site useful personally, but some of the poetry is not arranged in as visually pleasing a form as is often found at many other internet sites. Readers should click on “By author” at the top of the access page, then type “Price” into the box and 50+ articles/documents will appear/be accessible.
There are some sites at which my writing is found in a very pleasing form with photos and pictures and general settings to catch the eye. Some site organizers have their location beautifully arranged. I leave it to readers to read what pleases them and leave out what doesn’t. When one posts as much as I do on the internet, one often writes too much, says the wrong things or upsets an applecart or two. It's part of the process. In cyberspace, as in the real world, you can't win them all. The pioneering over four epochs word sequence is, as I’ve said, a useful word package to access some 150 sites with my writing and has no competition from other ‘Ron Prices.’
Concluding Comments:
I had no idea when I retired from full-time employment in 1999, from PT employment in 2001 and from much volunteer work in 2005, to write full-time that the internet would be as useful a system, a resource, a base, for my offerings as it has become. There are literally millions of my words in many a genre now on this international web of words that I have written in the last 13 years(2001-2014). From the early eighties to the early years of this new millennium I tried to get published in a hard or soft cover, but without any success.
My guess is that in the years ahead the world will be awash with books and various genres of printed matter from millions of people like me posting various quantities of their writing. In some ways the world is already awash with print as it is awash with audio-visual products. The print and electronic media have got something for everyone these days, probably more than most people can assimilate.
What I write will not be the cup-of-tea of all readers. This goes without saying. If that is the case readers are simply advised to drink someone else’s tea from someone else’s cup. There is something for everyone these days in both hard and soft cover and on the Internet. If readers don’t like my work or someone else’s go to sources of printed matter they like.
For those who already do or may in the future come to enjoy my writings, I hope the above is a useful outline/overview. For those who don't find what I write attractive to their taste, as I say, the above will give you a simple handle to avoid as you travel the net. I wish you all well in your own endeavours in the path of writing or whatever path your travel down.
Ron Price Updated: 21 March 2014
4. WORDS TO TYPE INTO SEARCH ENGINES LIKE GOOGLE TO GET ITEMS OF MY WRITING BY TOPIC:
1. Type my name Ron Price(with or without a space between the names) followed by any of the following subjects/topics/words—and many others you might like to try somewhat at random. The results are literally 100s of 1000s of selections, sites, documents, items, readings, poems, articles, essays, ebooks, internet posts, inter alia.
journal, diary, Universal House of Justice, Buddhism, The Báb,Hinduism, Literature, Bahá’u’lláh, tradition, poetry, Shoghi Effendi,history, Abdu’l-Baha, astronomy, ancient history, epochs, interviews, society, sociology, education, democracy, psychology, politics, schools, cinema, anthropology, teaching,geography, health, TV, Bahá’i, mental health, radio, religion, bipolar, depression, BPD, philosophy, lithium,George Town, media studies,writing,Christianity, pioneering, creative writing, Australia, popular culture, classical poetry,Canada, Thucydides, essays, Belmont, Herodotus, movies Virgil, letters, Autobiography, westerns, biography, Plutarch, social studies, Islam, war, Jolly Roger, Toynbee, Launceston, Gibbon, Zeehan, Shakespeare, Ballarat, Dickinson,Melbourne, Wordsworth, Katherine, epic, South Headland, narrative,Perth, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, Windsor
There are also: (a) many writers, (b) thinkers, (c) people with other skills in other disciplines, (d) other topic areas as well as (e) many other subjects one could add here, too many to list.
5. FAVORITE BOOKS
Perhaps how much one reads is as important as what one reads, although one would not want to press this point too much. Given the fact that we all have different tastes, perhaps the essential question or comment under ”Favorite Books" is not “which books one has read” but “how much,” “when” and “why.” I offer this as a tangential remark for this part of the site to initiate a discussion on books for those inclined.
It is impossible for me to make an accurate record or even a reasonable guesstimation of what might be called my reading record since 1960, some 50 years, from puberty to these early years of late adulthood, age 15 to 65. I have made a start at such a record, though. For the most part, my reading is in the social sciences and humanities—a vast field to say the least and too extensive to even provide a cursory list of my favorite books here. My reading on dreams is not extensive, just a casual glance at the literature.
6. This film review, film commentary, on Mel Gibson's THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, is my first post at Wikipedia.
Gibson's work is not intended to be a masterful historical documentary as, say, Ken Burns' work on the Civil War. Nor can one say that Mel Gibson's work possesses an intellectual poverty as an historical documentary. Shawn Rosenheim, an associate professor of English, says all TV documentaries possess a strong intellectual poverty and need a fine-tuning with print resources and scholarly commentary. If Rosenheim is right, that the visual media are simply incapable of producing finely landscaped historical documentary(1), the implications are extensive for the billions now who imbibe their history mainly from TV.
Even if Rosenheim is wrong, historical documentary of an event 2000 years ago is impossible, except in a very general sense for non-specialists. We simply do not know enough. We all know that Gibson did not take his camera crew to downtown Jerusalem in some kind of time-warp to produce an anti-Jewish, anti Roman clip for the evening news. Even if he had, and he then produced for all of us an evening two hour spectacle called "the crucifixion," there would still be questions about visual manipulation and the program's service in the name of directing popular thought toward a new religious movement.
No one would claim that Gibson's is a neutral recording of objective events. It is a construct operating from a certain point of view. It is a rhetorical argument achieved through the selection and combination of elements that both reflect and project a world. It is achieved by certain cinematic conventions that try to erase any signs of cinematic artificiality. An ideology is promoted by linking the effect of reality to social values and institutions in such a way that these values seem natural and self-evident. In the case of Mel Gibson's work, a work that I found quite stimulating, the ideology is simply and strongly: fundamentalist Christianity.
I've never been attracted to Christianity in any of its fundamentalist forms. But I liked this film. It was not because of its historical accuracy that I liked it. I liked All the Presidents Men and a host of other films based on and rooted in some historical theme. Rarely are historical films accurate; the main reason they seem so is that the people watching them know so little about the theme, the event, that it seems plausible to them. Sadly, but truly, we know so little about the events of the life of Jesus of Nazereth that a good script writer, a good cinematographer and a big band of men and women can bring something to life that may never have happened at all.
Bertrand Russell wrote in his book Why I'm Not a Christian that, in a court of law, there is little evidence for even the existence of Jesus let alone his manner of death. Historicity simply does not exist when it comes to the events in the life of a man who has had a profound affect, I believe, on history. But what I believe and what I know; what you believe and what you actually know about Jesus are in two different worlds. The distance between the pulpit and the academic chair of religion has been widening for at least two centuries.
Mel, you've given us a thriller. To hell with history! 5 out of 5. As a sort of epilogue to this brief comment on the film: one of the main reasons I am a Baha'i is that historicity is not an issue with the revelation of Baha'u'llah. The originating impulse in each case of the phenomenon of revelation and the origins of religions before modern times, has receded so far into that history as to be accessible to us in only a very limited and, at least for me, unsatisfactory degree. Far otherwise with the work of the Founder of the Baha'i Faith. The details of His life are massively documented. And one day film-makers will make films about this life that draw on historical facticity, historical reality.
But history has a thousand faces, a thousand forms, and Mel Gibson has given us some very stimulating ones in his film The Passion of the Christ. They are faces that will serve for millions to bring them closer to One whom Baha'u'llah, the Founder of the Baha'i Faith, said that when Christ was crucified, the world wept with a great weaping.
FOOTNOTES-------------------------
1 The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, editor, Marcia Pandy, the Athone Press, London, 2001.