About Me Letter
Born 16Jan41, in a cold place--rumbles above making me cry,
I am Brian Salchert, so I have been told. I am 59—well, we
have to live with definitions, sometimes. I am an ad-lib
horizontal comedian with a quirky sense of humor which is
astoundingly dry. I am a
published poet who has also
published letters, reviews, and several rare books, one
which details a mathematical venture I took and one which
is a quick memoir of my stock market ventures and others
which are literary in nature.
Education? Yes. Did you know—
silly, of course you know what you know constantly changes,
that education, i.e., your being led out from, is ongoing,
that while college and university degrees are held in high
esteem, what you learn moment-to-moment outside of any
degree or certificate program is also highly valuable. I
hold a B.A. in English and an Iowa Writers’ Workshop M.F.A..
From September of 1967 into December of 1972 I was a
university Instructor of English.
I also mentored Creative
Writing: Poetry classes toward the end of that period and
was a visiting poet in the Wisconsin Poets-in-the-Schools
Program in early 1973. In
November of 1972 Tom Montag’s
Monday Morning Press published my first book, Rooted Sky.
For many years I was a motel/hotel night auditor and third
shift manager. It was not an
employment I should have had,
much less for more than 25 years; but it was an employment
which afforded me consistent hours of freedom I felt I needed.
Finally, toward the end of summer in 1999 I went from full-
time to part-time, and then not long after to only-as-needed.
On November 1st in 1999, after one of my only-as-needed
nights, I suffered a seizure which put me in the hospital for
two days. I tell you this, not
to get sympathy but to set
before you a lesson which it may well be I have not yet
myself learned: Being a dedicated and valued worker is right
and good, but refusing to heed your body’s warning lights
is not right and is not good.
You have heard it said over
and over that you can be all that you want to be. That,
plainly, is not true. I am now
5’3” and shrinking, although—
thanks again to medical advances—this may soon be curtailed.
No matter what anyone says, the body you have does impose
limits on you. So, I can crawl
into/ smaller places, but I cannot
leap into/ Michael Jordan spaces.
What I do believe, and what
I am now attempting to be an evidence of, is that you can
always be more than you think you can be. Accordingly, and
with constant gratitude to my youngest sister, I am slowly
building a deep Internet presence, am each day learning more
about the ever-changing technologies and philosophies of the
online world, am venturing to acquire valued proficiencies.
If you would like to
contract me to be a speaker or a
visiting teacher, I am available.
If you wish to know more
about me, I am willing to provide that knowledge. Please
direct your inquiries to thinkinglizard@aol.com
or visit first
an I-b-n-a-r Ring (it is 5-4-03 & Ibnar.net's dead) site:
2006-05-19: made INDEX/ index -
21DEC05 special note: INDEX (as used below) is again/ index
One last point: Failure is
only failure when Despair enters
to rule and ruin.
Thank You,
Brian Salchert
at Thinking Lizard at
AOL
Post Note:
It is now early Friday evening 15SEP00.
Late last night and
into this day’s first hour I finished placing six more pages
in Tripod, my long thin 1977 “Birthday Ribbons” poem: a work
which is experimental in form and autobiographical in content.
Read Tape for the Turn of the Year by A. R. Ammons. If you
do, and then also read my much shorter poem, you should see
in what ways I was influenced.
Mine can be found at:
**
2006-05-19: corrected link: it now goes to B R's Secondary Directory
21DEC05 correction of sbove link: birthdayribbons-01-violet.html
Post Note 2:
It is now early Sunday evening 01OCT00.
Today I began new
journeys into the lands of PERL and of XML. I may have to pull
out of the box they are in my old cursorily studied books on
UNIX and C++. These will not be
easy journeys. As I would
much rather spend time with a poem, though I do at times
enjoy solving other puzzles, I will need a special strength to
keep from breaking off from them.
Always end a line of PERL
with a semi-colon; XML means extensible markup language. A
wee start, but a start.
* * *
© 2000-3, 2005 Brian Salchert