Monday, August 05, 2024

The Luke and Tom show: Inside the undoing of PwC

For the first time, the Financial Review tells the story from the perspective of the people inside PwC and the Tax Office, based on interviews with more than 40 insiders. This is part 1: the Luke and Tom show.

Edmund Tadros Professional services editor

Aug 5, 2024 – 5.00am

Tom Seymour appeared relaxed and confident. Sitting on his own in a meeting room in Brisbane, wearing a dark jacket and no tie, the PwC Australia chief executive was about to explain to partners how the firm was dealing with what has become known as the tax leaks scandal.

To the 900 partners tuning in to the webcast, from meeting rooms, client sites and offices around the country, Seymour did not appear panicked about the controversy engulfing the firm.

Two days earlier, a bombshell report in The Australian Financial Review revealed the firm’s former head of international tax, Peter Collins, had shared with fellow partners confidential details about federal tax changes designed to combat multinational tax avoidance.

PwC’s tax advisers had used the information to win new clients and then develop structures that sidestepped the very tax laws that Collins was helping the federal government to design. The government was outraged, clients were asking awkward questions, and partners were demanding answers from the firm’s leaders.

The webcast was their first chance to hear from the CEO. On a split screen to Seymour’s right was then-chairwoman Tracey Kennair; she said little, but cycled through various glum expressions.

It started at 1pm on Friday, May 5, 2023. Seymour began by apologising, admitting it was a mistake to have “missed the issue”. He announced an internal inquiry, saying he expected to be fined by the firm because he helmed the tax practice at the time of the leaks.

He faltered as he delivered his own bombshells: “six to eight” partners who shared the confidential tax information were still at the firm and, worse, Seymour himself had received some of the emails. The disclosures were not well received.

“We thought Tom was going to go,” says one attendee. “We couldn’t believe it, he was quite cocky … when he said he was on the emails, that’s when I knew we were f---ed.”

A second says: “Everyone couldn’t believe he had lied to us. Nobody wanted him as leader. A third says: “Tom was in a really bad state … [he] knew he was toast.“

Despite the growing uproar, Seymour’s tone was defiant. This was really a lot of fuss over a “legal technicality”, the media reports were “wildly exaggerated”, and the PwC staff who received the emails didn’t know the material was secret. And no, he wouldn’t be resigning.

Seymour’s manner suggested he felt he still had the support of the majority of the partnership. At the time, PwC was the pre-eminent professional services firm in the country, partners took home an average $930,000 a year and were on track for another bumper payday thanks to the sharp rebound in business post-COVID.

By the time the webcast was done 30 minutes later, the bewildered partners were aware of the depth of the crisis. But they had no idea just how it would upend the firm over the next 12 months, triggering a media storm and tough new regulation for the whole professional services industry.

That weekend, partners tried to come to grips with events. By Monday, Seymour would be out of the top job. Within two months, PwC would be under the “supervised remediation” of the global firm. Within a year, the Australian firm would be broken up, its government consulting arm sold in a $1 firesale.

Today, PwC has been reduced by a third to 650 partners, its revenue now the smallest of the big four firms, behind long-time laggard KPMG. It remains a target for regulators and the federal police, and a punching bag for politicians.

For the firm and everyone in it, the tax leaks scandal has been a disaster. But PwC’s journey from hero to zero begins long before investigative reporter Neil Chenoweth’s first report in January 2023.

Over the past four months, The Australian Financial Review has pieced together that story from the perspective of the people inside PwC and the Australian Taxation Office. Based on interviews with more than 40 insiders, we reveal the rise of a sales-driven culture that allowed the tax leaks to happen, why the firm bungled its response, and why it is still struggling to break clear of the fallout.

This account, to be published in multiple parts, starting today, digs into PwC’s history of aggressive tax advice; the years-long war with the Tax Office that followed; who was behind the advice that so upset tax officials; and why the firm’s leaders took so long to rein in the small group of advisers.

But fundamentally, this is a story about two people: Luke Sayers and Tom Seymour.

Luke Frederick Sayers was born in country Victoria in 1969. The middle of three children, his father was a school principal and his mother was a teacher. The family moved to Canada, and upon returning to Melbourne he attended Coomoora High (later to become Keysborough Secondary College), a state school in Melbourne’s south-east.

When he graduated, his parents presented him with a round-the-world airline ticket on the condition that he finish a year of a combined commerce-computer science degree at Monash University. He spent a year doing “the backpacker thing” around Europe and north and South America.

After graduation, in 1991 Sayers joined the Melbourne office of the firm that would become PricewaterhouseCoopers and quickly began climbing the ladder. His big break came in August 1996 when he swung a job as consultant for the firm’s Washington DC office at the dawn of the internet age.

He set about helping build out the telecoms consulting business, and within two years, at just 29, became the second-youngest partner in the US firm. When he returned to Australia in August 2001, he was put in charge of the Telstra account, one of PwC’s top 20 clients.

It was obvious to all that Sayers had been marked as a potential leader. “He came out of the US; he was a highly regarded young technology partner. He’s dynamic, he’s affable, he’s energetic. He’s a good relationship guy, he knew his technical stuff,” says Jonathan*, a former senior leader.

(*Current and former PwC staff still refuse to speak publicly against the firm, fearing it will affect their ongoing relationships, legal obligations and, often, their retirement benefits. It is an obsession with, ironically, confidentiality. All interviewees have requested that their names not be used. In place, we have used pseudonyms and, where required, short descriptions of the speaker.)

Thomas “Tom” Richard Seymour, seven months younger than Sayers, had taken a different route. One of three children, he was born in London. His late father, Richard, was a heart surgeon. After attending St Joseph’s Nudgee College in Brisbane, he did a Bachelor of Commerce at Queensland University of Technology and a Bachelor of Laws, with honours, at the newly established Bond University on the Gold Coast.

Seymour was 23 when he started as an accountant at PwC’s Gold Coast office in 1994. The office was considered a satellite compared with the larger Brisbane operation, which was staffed mainly by male private school alumni, often commerce/law graduates from the local sandstone university, the University of Queensland.

By 1998, Seymour was a manager in the firm’s Brisbane office. This was the same year Coopers & Lybrand merged with Price Waterhouse to form what was then the world’s largest accounting and consulting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and later PwC. Seymour proved particularly effective at developing and selling tax structuring advice, and by July 2002 he had been made partner. He was 32 years old.

Around 2006, an unexpected move brought Sayers and Seymour together for the first time. Then-PwC boss Tony Harrington was looking to appoint a new head of tax and legal. He gave the job to Sayers, a partner who was good with clients but, controversially at the time, had no background in tax. It was a decision that would resonate for years.

Putting Sayers in the leadership position was part of a push to “blood” a range of ambitious partners in areas beyond their core expertise. It was part of ensuring PwC had a broad range of potential leaders. Others say, only half-joking, that Harrington – an old-school leader with a dominant personality – was actually trying see which partners could cope with the torture of being put in charge of businesses they didn’t understand.

“The fundamental piece is: Can you manage teams? Can you deal with clients? You’re not in the role to give technical advice,” says Jonathan*, the former senior leader. “There is a whole team of highly capable technical people, and whenever those partners needed to check, the technical team got involved.”

Sayers knew his promotion was a risky move. It was also unprecedented in the organisation to have someone who was not a tax expert running such a deeply technical domain.

He was confident in his ability to win new work, but he needed someone close who understood tax, was organised and was across the detail. Young and keen, Seymour ticked those boxes, and he quickly became Sayers’ closest lieutenant.

The unlikely pair settled into a productive partnership that developed into an abiding loyalty that lasts to this day. Personable Sayers did the people work, while details man Seymour made sure the jobs got done. By mid-2009, Seymour was national corporate tax leader.

*Alexander, another former senior leader at the firm, says Sayers “had a strong market focus, an aversion to boffins. He was looking for performance.”

*Sebastian, a retired Melbourne-based tax adviser who worked with Sayers and Seymour, says tax advisory can be split into two parts: “There’s the recurring work, filing tax returns and filing [business activity statements] – that sort of stuff that you tend to keep once you’ve got it. Then there’s consulting work; you have to fight for it, and once you’ve finished it, you’ve got to go out and get more work.”

The tax consultants were the “guns”. The “top guns” were the international tax advisers who came up with the edgy cross-border structures. *Sebastian describes Sayers as a salesman who came into tax to boost revenue. “What do salespeople want? Growth growth growth.”

And grow it did. Sayers has said running tax taught him that he didn’t have to be a subject-matter expert to do well, as long as everyone was broadly moving towards the same goal.

In retrospect, that wasn’t the best lesson to take from the experience.

Senior tax officials believe the cultural issues that eventually led to the tax leaks scandal can be traced back to the change in business model as Sayers pushed a sales-driven approach to tax advice. It was a shift that, at the time, married nicely with Seymour’s technical and legalistic approach to advice. “The way I’d describe Tom is, he’s a direct guy,” says *Timothy, a Sydney-based former partner and tax adviser at the firm.

“What you see is what you get. He’s a strong personality. If he thinks something is bullshit, he’ll call it out.

“How did Tom see the world? He would say the law’s the law. We’ve got to advise the client of what the law is. Our job is not to moralise. That’s the client’s choice.”

This idea, that it was the tax advisers’ role to present clients with tax schemes that could plausibly work, was commonly held across the wider tax advice industry at the time.

Sayers and Seymour did well. The practice grew rapidly, and by 2008 – and not yet 40 – Sayers was considering a tilt at chief executive. In the end, however, he didn’t run. Recollections vary about why, but the consensus was that he was seen as a bit “loose” by more conservative parts of the firm and needed to “grow up”.

Instead, partners voted in Mark Johnson, the head of audit, as Harrington’s successor. About a year into his term, Johnson – encouraged by the firm’s governance board – appointed Sayers national managing partner.

In 2012, Johnson opted out of a second four-year term. After three years “growing up” in the managing partner role, it was now Sayers’ time. The firm’s partners elected Sayers as CEO, making him, at 42, the youngest ever leader of the Australian firm. Seymour moved smoothly into Sayers’ former role as head of tax and legal.

Sayers had taken the reins of a powerhouse firm that had revenue of more than $1.4 billion, about 450 partners, and about 6000 staff. At the time, auditing generated almost 40 per cent of revenue. Consulting brought in almost 30 per cent, tax and legal about 23 per cent, and the balance came from the firm’s private clients division.

But under Sayers, the balance of power was about to shift decisively to the always sales-driven consultants. Never again would the firm’s highly regulated auditors, who thought of themselves as the heart of the PwC brand, be the dominant division.

In the relentless search for growth and sales, the conservative culture built by audit was about to be swept away.

Having reached the top, Sayers got straight to work. He moved quickly to clear up a long-running class action brought against the firm and its audit client, shopping centre giant Centro. He sat in on talks that led to a then-record $200 million settlement. PwC’s share was about $66 million, or one-third of the total, likely the largest audit-related legal settlement in Australian history.

The PwC leadership team in 2010. Tom Seymour, back row, third from right, was managing partner of finance and operations. Luke Sayers, bottom row, fourth from left, was CEO and senior country partner.

The Centro case demonstrated that errors made within the firm’s heavily regulated services – audit and taxation – had inherent long-term risks. It was also a demonstration that the firm’s instinct was to always aggressively fight threats, legal or otherwise – and that its experts sometimes kept fighting when the wisest move would have been to settle.

Sayers would later tell friends that he had pushed the settlement with Centro through in spite of the firm’s lawyers.

He also cut underperforming business lines and sacked about 200 staff. The purge included “a clean-out of the partners”, with dozens – “the bottom 10 per cent” – shown the door, according to *Sebastian, the retired Melbourne partner.

When senior partners he knew well walked into a room, Sayers would smile and announce, ‘the big dog’s here!’

Sayers has no regrets about this. In his mind, he was getting rid of the time-servers, the partners who weren’t performing, and who had relied on their tenure to avoid accountability. “We were probably the first to drive performance,” he has said of this period.

Many of the partners subjected to this treatment over the years have never forgiven him. For them, being ejected from the partnership was like being kicked out of their family. In his mind, Sayers was changing PwC from being a boring audit and tax firm into an audit, tax and advisory firm. He never used the word “accountant”. They were now “business advisers”.

A big part of the change was Sayers’ blokey personal style. He would use sporting metaphors to compliment partners on “shooting the lights out” when they did well. There were other ways it all became a bit like a footy club. When senior partners he knew well walked into a room, Sayers would smile and announce, “the big dog’s here!”

In his first year as leader, he held an online values “jam” with the firm’s staff and partners. The resulting values – performance matters, have a go, hunger for growth, be open and authentic, embrace differences and care – thrilled younger staff members and provoked eye-rolling in other quarters. The professionalism that was meant to underpin the entire firm – really the entire sector – took a back seat to this hybrid of feel-good pop psychology, progressive politics, and sales motivation.

The firm’s new values and strategy were distilled into a children’s cartoon book featuring coloured block creatures. The idea, according to a former partner involved in its development, was to create a storybook that could explain the firm’s strategy to a five-year-old.

The sales-driven changes upset many, particularly the firm’s old guard. “The nerds didn’t like him,” says *Rosannah, a former consulting partner. It didn’t help that Sayers was OK with challenging the thinking of partners, regardless of their seniority, in front of others. “He’d put people on the spot,” she says.

Sayers was known to walk up to partners and ask, “have you seen a client today?“, or, “what have you sold today?” He has told others that those resistant to his leadership were people who didn’t want to change – and just to make clear, he will tell anyone who asks him: “I love nerds!”

The firm loosened up in other ways, too. There was a lot more celebrating – PwC regularly held events for partners and staff. In some respects, this was happening across the sector. The consulting divisions of the big four firms (which also includes Deloitte, EY and KPMG) were all growing rapidly, and weaving their way into every aspect of the economy. So, it followed that they started to develop a hard-charging drinking culture – akin to that of a sales-driven company or a finance outfit – to match their new hard-charging corporate cultures.

Harrington, the firm’s CEO between 2000 and 2008, once said leading PwC required enough spleen to handle the partners who would “challenge every directive”.

Sayers’ view was that the partners were in business together, part of a family that was trying to do something sensational. Another way of thinking about it, is that the fast-growing partnership was like an extended, and tribal, wealthy family. It was the partners versus the world.

Luke Sayers was CEO of PwC Australia for more than eight years, between April 2012 and May 2020. Darrian Traynor

Sayers, through a spokeswoman, declined to comment for this series. Instead, the spokeswoman referred the Financial Review to Sayers’ previous comments that he had no knowledge of the confidentiality breach involving Collins, and had tried to resolve the ATO’s issues with the firm.

The Financial Review called Seymour repeatedly, left messages and then sent an extensive list of queries and points relating to his career at PwC and the tax leaks matter. Seymour instructed a law firm to provide a response, without allowing the Financial Review to publish any of it.

Until the tax leaks scandal happened, PwC’s tax advisory business liked to say it was twice as big as the combined tax advisory practices of Deloitte, EY and KPMG. In truth, the business has always been bigger than Deloitte and KPMG. Until recently, EY had a practice either bigger or of similar size, but this may have changed with multiple tax partners moving to upstart Alvarez and Marsal.

The several hundred-strong PwC tax advisers “consistently outperformed their peers outside the firm”, says *Alexander, the consulting partner who left last year. “It’s a regulated business, like auditing, so you get above-market returns.”

When many people hear “tax exploitation scheme”, they understand it as a loophole in the tax laws, whereas for PwC partners, it meant their intellectual property.

This long-term outperformance stemmed from the simple insight that once they developed a successful tax scheme, it could be sold over and over to existing and new clients.

To be fair, this attitude wasn’t limited to PwC. By the early 2000s, all the major auditing firms had realised that everyone could make a lot more money if they shared their IP because this was the key to monetising the product.

“They used to have an online database full of tax schemes, hundreds of them, with a dollar value attached of indicative fees for PwC that could be used as a guide for any tax staff to use and market the scheme to their clients,” says a junior tax adviser who worked at the firm from 2001 to 2006.

For a decade at least, the firm maintained an annual list – sometimes called a “pitch book” – of the top 10 tax schemes that it looked to sell to current and prospective clients. A former tax adviser described it in more anodyne terms, as simply a repository of “known tax problems that have been solved”, or, even more benignly, as a “marketing document”.

Some tax people were good at delivery, others were good at selling. The Rovers could turn a small job into a big job.

When a scheme was challenged by the Tax Office, as was becoming increasingly common as the years rolled on, the firm would say PwC’s lawyers could represent the client in court. An ATO officer describes this as the firm that got you into trouble, offering to get you out of trouble. All for a handsome three- or four-figure hourly fee for the tax partners involved, of course.

Under Sayers and then Seymour, the firm’s tax advisers became better at selling than anyone else. They achieved this in a number of ways.

Cross-selling was encouraged. Audit partners were encouraged to put their differences with tax advisers aside and introduce them to their clients. For conservative auditors, requests to introduce clients to aggressive tax advisers could be uncomfortable. The goal, of course, was revenue maximisation.

In a firm full of very confident individuals, a handful of tax advisers were unusually brash – and typically couldn’t help but let others know just how clever they were. When tax managers with conservative clients worried about anything edgy because they dealt directly with the ATO, PwC’s advisers would target the CFO, implying their tax people were not being aggressive enough.

The firm was also a big political donor, and its advisers were not afraid to attack the ATO in public forums. They were there for the client.

Another innovation, introduced by Seymour in 2009, was known internally as the “Rover” model. Partners thought to be technically brilliant were asked to relinquish their client book and instead assist their fellow tax partners win more work.

The idea was to have the firm’s best and brightest tax advisers “rove around the market supporting those doing the delivery,” says former consulting partner *Alexander. “Some tax people were good at delivery, others were good at selling. The rovers could turn a small job into a big job.”

David Maister: progenitor of the Rover model. Penny Bradfield

The Rover idea was inspired by the teachings of David Maister, a now retired Harvard Business School professor and guru on how to manage professional service firms. Instead of partners competing with each other, the program was about increasing collaboration in the name of increasing sales.

*Timothy, the former partner and tax adviser, says the firm’s more conservative tax advisers and its “tax controversy” experts (the lawyers called in after a structure had been put in place to negotiate with the ATO), learnt not to kick up a fuss when their colleagues came up with something particularly edgy unless they could definitively blow the idea “out of the water”.

By 2015 there were almost a dozen Rovers out of the firm’s 110 tax partners. Within the firm it became a prestigious and sought-after role that was also highly profitable for the Rovers and the wider firm. For Australian taxpayers, it was a very different story.

It’s possible to see just how much PwC’s runaway tax advisory culture has cost Australian taxpayers and the broader society by looking at some of the big numbers that came out of it. Consider just two of the tax controversies involving the firm: the $88 million loan structure for Orica that the Federal Court found was tax avoidance; and the huge loans that energy companies such as Chevron loaded onto their Australian operation to reduce taxable income.

In 2015, Justice Tony Pagone in the Federal Court ruled the Orica loans were a $900 million tax avoidance scheme.

And in 2017, Chevron lost the landmark legal case brought by the ATO over its tax practices. Immediately at risk for the energy giant was roughly $340 million in taxes, penalties and interest on a 2003 loan. Chevron later told a parliamentary inquiry that the true amount in dispute over all years was $1.062 billion.

In late 2022, the ATO estimated the successful case against Chevron helped it reduce deductions in the resources sector by about $40 billion – yes, billion. Put another way, the court decisions rejecting PwC’s Chevron tax structure delivered, by October 2022, about $12 billion in extra revenue to the federal budget.

While the ATO may have reined in many of PwC’s most aggressive tax schemes during the past decade, settlements by their nature never recoup the total amount of tax that would have been owed with a more conservative structure. There is also the enormous cost to the public sector of the ATO having to constantly battle the firm’s advisers.

And all this while the firm’s hyper-confident advisers were telling themselves and the wider public that the firm was “contributing to the health, wellbeing and sustainability of Australian communities”.

PwC argues that the tax division provides diverse services and the international tax advisory work in question is only a small part of the practice. But in a culture that had evolved to value revenue above all else, it was an important part.

“There was absolutely no doubt that revenue, and profitable revenue, was important,” says *Timothy, the former partner and tax adviser at the firm. “The revenue KPI was far and away the most important part of the conversation [as a partner]. Keeping your nose clean was great, but what kept you as a partner was your revenue.”

The Financial Review’s reporting found those at PwC who knew how the tax advisers operated were split on their conduct. The positive view was the tax division was performing well, going from strength to strength. The more circumspect view acknowledged there were a handful of tax advisers, particularly the international advisers, who were cowboys.

Either way, the assumption within the broader partnership was that someone – presumably the firm’s leaders and the internal legal and risk experts – were overseeing it all and protecting their interests. They were wrong.

It would take until Seymour’s webcast in May 2023 for the wider partnership to finally understand what a small group of advisers had been doing for years. By then, it was all too late.

Tomorrow, part 2: Sharing government secrets

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~ Janis Joplin

As Nietzsche says, the true path is the one which is currently darkened, where you don’t know what’s around the bend. So remember if you care about your rights, you should care when other people are stripped of theirs.

“You’re nobody until somebody hates you,” Tom Wolfe told his daughter. Like Tom, by that metric I am too a great success...

THE FINE ART OF COLD RIVER FAILURE: Rejection, not acceptance, defines writing life.

“You learn more from losing than winning. You learn how to keep going.”
~ Jackie Robinson

In the immortal words of Popeye the Sailor Man: “I yam what I yam and that's all that I yam.”

'The truth shall set you free.'
Truth is true even if no-one believes it.
A lie is false even if everyone believes it.
Seek truth, reject lies.

A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn't become right, and evil doesn't become good just because it's accepted by a majority.
~ Booker T. Washington

Memories can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car … If we can't make memories, we can't heal
~Leonard Shelby, Memento

When we long for life without difficulties, remind us that oaks grow strong in contrary winds and diamonds are made under pressure.

“To be alive at all is to have scars.”
John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

I Am The River, The River Is Me “You’re only here because of everything your people survived.”

I don’t live by the day. I live by the second

“I’d rather die trying to take them down than die giving them what they want.”
~ Andor Recap: Sink or Swim

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
—Haruki Murakami

People who are afraid to die, die many times !!!

But books, like people, die too. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a great book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.
~ Anthony Doerr

“Democracy is not an easy form of government, because it is never final; it is a living, changing organism, with a continuous shifting and adjusting of balance between individual freedom and general order.”
—Ilka Chase

If a story is in you, it has to come out.
— William Faulkner, born in 1897

While tourists follow a trail, a High Tatra mountaineers find one…

History repeats itself, Marta Chamilová reminds us in the book coined ‘Cold River’ — our present will soon become a past that informs the future. There are decades where nothing happens; and there are days where decades happen. Well, where do we start? Sometimes the most unlikely things can change the course of our lives. Memories are bullets. Some whiz by and only spook you. Others tear you open and leave you in pieces.
~ Richard Kadrey

If with all your effort and might you do not reach the mountain top that is not failure; failure is that you did not even try.

The biggest mistake you can make in your life is to be always afraid of making a mistake.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an anti-Nazi dissident, who died on 9 April 1945 few weeks before the end of WWII

Edward Teller once wrote: “I tried to contribute to the defeat of the Soviets. If I contributed 1%, it is 1% of something enormous.”

Don't mistake the gentle strides of a lion as weakness.

John Quincy Adams once observed, “I am a warrior, so that my son may be a merchant, so that his son may be a poet.”

“Honesty is a very expensive gift, Don't expect it from cheap people.”
~ Warren Buffett

". . . [E]very book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute."
~George Orwell, "1984"

In his samizdat existential stories Vaclav Havel used to quote Absurdist Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer who suggested that every problem (or truth) passes through three stages on the way to acceptance: “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

Stephen King is completely different than celebrity. King has a magic all its own:
“Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.”

The Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce, who came of age in the 1930s and observed with horror the emergence of Mussolini’s Fascist regime in his native country, warned that “the widespread notion that the age of totalitarianisms ended with Hitlerism and Stalinism is completely mistaken.”

~ Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

Mark Twain knew all about forbidden fruits and freedom: “Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent”

I taught myself how to do research, how to dig out the pieces... I discovered in the process that, contrary to the notion that the past is a dead thing, that in fact wherever you scratch the surface, you find life. And it was the life, the people and what happened to them, that was the pull for me.
~David McCullough

It's so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.
— Harold Pinter, born in 1930

Sometimes events happen just “for some reason,” a favorite phrase of Leo Tolstoy's indicating that no theory could ever predict them. Tolstoy had the unerring ability to see what we see and predict that Cold War and Rivers of Peace stories would take ages to write: “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”

“[E]very true reader has a secret life, which is equally intense, complex, and important. The blogs or books we read are no different from the people we meet or the cities we visit. Some books, people, or places hardly matter, others change our lives, and still others plant some idea or sentiment that influences our futures. No one else will ever read, reread, or misread the same books in the same way or in the same order.
Our inner lives are as rich and real as our outer lives, even if they remain mostly unknowable to others. Perhaps that is why books matter so much.”
Lonely Bohemian Impulse of Delight

“Literature has nothing to say to those people who are satisfied with their lot, who are content with life as it is. Literature offers sustenance to rebellious and non-conformist spirits and a refuge to those who have too much or too little in life; it wards off unhappiness and any feelings of lack or want.”
Literature it wards off unhappiness

It's not possible to search for God using the methods of a detective... There is no way. You can only wait till God's axe severs your roots: then you will understand that you are here only through a miracle, and you will remain fixed forever in wonderment and equilibrium.
— Karel Čapek, born in 1890

"The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic."
– Jozef Stalin

In a repressive society, dark political jokes allow regular people to describe what they see with their own eyes.

I love the notion that the whole course of the war was changed by this small group, hunkered down in a smoky basement room
~ Michelle Ashford

You never appreciate what a compost your memory is until you start trying to smooth past events into a logical and rational sequence. What happened to my memories was what happens to most people’s stories when they are confronted by mistakes or disasters too big to be borne; they let in the reality of it inch by inch, as it were, a little bit at a time, avoiding at all costs the full, total shock of it. The shocking events in our lives are always the result of a sequence of tiny details.

As I reflect back on my life, I am full of regrets, yet the choices we make are part of who we are. Our words carry power to quote Etta James: “If I did it any other way, It wouldn’t be me.” (Life, Love and the Blues.) So If I don’t write this book my way about Morava River, no one else will. No one will know what hasn’t been written... How We sort of drifted into the business of escape. A peculiar aspect of surreal escapes across the symbolic Iron Curtain is that a significant portion of them reads like fiction. They have the metaphorical Kafkaesque-Roth power of sublime fiction. Everything I wrote was struggle against the impossibility of writing, attempts to preserve something of the escape or perhaps to rediscover the wall of the cosmos and our small place within it.

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.
~ Leo Tolstoy

Writers Are the Middlemen Between the Human Race and Immortality

Stories of escape are infectious like the bastard child of William Shakespeare, Franz Kafka, Milan Kundera, Toni Morrison, and Jane Austen all mixed together. ~ Book of Faces

We are taught that the hero’s journey is the journey from weakness to strength, but I am here today to tell you that those stories are wrong. The real hero’s journey is the journey from strength to weakness.” John Green offers the unsugar-coated advice that, no matter where we go after school, we’ll be back at the bottom of the totem pole and that, if we can muster the humility and patience to handle it gracefully, we’ll be better off for it. “In learning how to be a nobody, you will learn how not to be a jerk.”
~ John Green

Whatever the history, whatever the nuances, whatever the charged sentiments associated with political realities, the thirst for freedom is very simple: It means believing that if regimes built 10ft wall you will create a 12ft ladder.
~ Wade In From the Cold!

We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.
~ Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

In the middle of the journey of our life, when we begin to start to feel the weight of the crimes we are hauling behind us, we might turn to literature for wisdom. It is not readily available, but I have always found it in Leo Tolstoy and his War & Peace. Both Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Confession demand that readers reflect on what the inevitability of death means to us, and on how we shall face our own end.

… Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.
~ Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection

I also won’t pretend to understand why in the middle of the night some of the deep and stirring quotes and manifestos came to me. Why do I oppose communism and fascism? Because they will eventually come for you. That’s why. The loser like me is strong because he has nothing left to lose. People who are life’s winners, apparently, are weak because they have so much they want to hang on to. The upwardly mobile are particularly afraid. We are afraid of losing what we have attained, because it is not secure. neither morally nor financially. There are events in seemingly far away places that have significance way beyond their immediate implications. Every story starts with water ... and the Morava River keeps our Cold War past alive. Lives are like rivers. Eventually they go where they must, not where we want them to. It is said that before entering the sea a river trembles with fear. . . But there is no other way. The river can not go back.

“Authors do not choose a story to write, the story chooses us.”
― Richard P. Denney

I have tried in my way to be free

This world. This human race. It isn’t divided into sexes. Everybody thinks it’s divided into sexes but it isn’t. It’s the givers and the takers. The kind and the cruel.

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag

“So be wise, because the world needs more wisdom, and if you cannot be wise, pretend to be someone who is wise, and then just behave like they would.
And now go, and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make good art.”
~ Neil Gaiman also tried in his artistic ways to be free

Stephen King compares writing to crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub, because in both, "there's plenty of opportunity for self-doubt." Not only will you doubt yourself, but other people will doubt you, too. "If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all"

… at times it is only the angry who are in a position to apprehend the magnitude of some injustice. For they are the ones willing to sacrifice all their other concerns and interests so as to attend, with an almost divine focus, to some tear in the moral fabric. When I am really angry, it is not even clear to me that I can calm down—the eyes of the heart do not have eyelids—and the person making that request strikes me, to adapt a locution of Socrates’, as trying to banish me from my property, the truth. They are calling me “irrational,” but they seem not to see that there are reasons to be angry.
Why I Am Angry .”

“If I live till I am 80 years old,” Charles Darwin wrote to a friend in November 1837, “I shall not cease to marvel at finding myself an author.”

Tim Harford: James Baldwin, once said: “History is not a procession of illustrious people. It’s about what happens to normal people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.”

I have no reason to suppose that he, who would take away my Liberty, would not when he had me in his Power, take away everything else. — John Locke, born in 1632

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
— Rudyard Kipling, born in 1865 - You thought I/we’d lay down and die?

I read my verse to dragons, waterfalls and clouds:
I will not die in a bed
before a notary and a doctor,
but in some wild gorge
drowned in thick ivy.
~ Nikolai Gumilyov - 35 years old (1886-1921)

You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don't try to forget the mistakes, but you don't dwell on it. You don't let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.
~ Johnny Cash

A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed.
— Henrik Ibsen, who died in May 1996 when Gabbie was four

It is a little embarrassing that after forty-five years of research and study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.”
— Aldous Huxley born on 26 July 1894

I once asked my friends if they'd ever held things that gave them a spooky sense of history. Ancient pots with three-thousand-year-old thumbprints in the clay, said one. Antique keys, another. Clay pipes. Dancing shoes from WWII. Roman coins I found in a field. Old bus tickets in second-hand books. Everyone agreed that what these small things did was strangely intimate; they gave them the sense, as they picked them up and turned them in their fingers, of another person, an unknown person a long time ago, who had held that object in their hands. You don't know anything about them, but you feel the other person's there, one friend told me. It's like all the years between you and them disappear. Like you become them, somehow.
Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

I have survived far too much to go quietly; let a meteor take me, call the thunder for backup, my death will be grand. The land will crack, the sun will eat itself.
~Rupi Kaur

“Sooner or later… one has to take sides. If one is to remain human”
– Graham Greene – The Quiet American

Tyranny is always and everywhere the same, while freedom is always various. The well and truly enslaved are dependable; we know what they will say and think and do. The free are quirky. Tyrannies may be overt and violent or covert and insidious, but they all require the same thing, a subject population in which the power of the word is dulled and, thus, the power of thought occluded and the power of deed brought low.
Underground Grammarian

Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.
— Doris Lessing, born in 1919

It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people.
— Simone Weil, born in 1909

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“...they turned to the bloggers, who might be unfiltered and full of shit, but they were fast, prolific, and allowed you to triangulate the truth. Get your news from six or nine sources and you can usually it tell the bullshit from reality.”
“Everything is ‘just a story.’ Tragedy, comedy, end of the world, whatever, it’s just a story. What matters is making sure it’s heard.”
― Mira Grant, Feed that eery and alien torch to the truth

People need trouble - a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.
— William Faulkner, born on this date in 1897

This book. . . springs from the desire to have something survive, to bring the past into the present, . . . to give voice to the silenced and to mourn the lost. Writing cannot bring anything back, but it can enable everything to be experienced. Hence this volume is as much about seeking as finding, as much about losing as gaining. . . [The] difference between presence and absence is perhaps marginal, as long as there is memory.”
~ Judith Schalansky

“Think about the word destroy. Do you know what it is? De-story. Destroy. Destory. You see. And restore. That's re-story. Do you know that only two things have been proven to help survivors of the Holocaust? Massage is one. Telling their story is another. Being touched and touching. Telling your story is touching. It sets you free.”
- Francesca Lia Block, author

Alessandro Pertini makes a deep and meaningful point which is often lost on people who define success as winning at all cost or whatever it takes: “Sometimes in life we must fight not only without fear, but also without hope.”

Only the fairy tale equates changelessness with happiness... Permanence means paralysis and death. Only, in movement, with all its pain, is life.

— Jaccob Burckhardt, who died in 1897

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” ... "The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us.” So wrote James Baldwin in 1965, in words that echo 21st century.

“Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.”
― Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose and Cold River

If someone puts their hands on you make sure they never put their hands on anybody else again.
~ Malcom X

The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
— Hannah Arendt, born in 1906

There are lots of things I don’t know. I don’t know if there is life elsewhere in the universe, though I find it hard to believe we are alone. But I do know this: Right this minute, we are all here together on this beautiful planet. It is the only one we have, so we should take care of it.

“If you are a creative person and you’re honest, you realise how little you know. The depth of your ignorance is something you are constantly aware of – knowledge is a bottomless pit and you keep finding new things. I’m forever coming up against a question I can’t answer. And that’s what keeps me going.
- Desmond Morris

Some people come into your life as blessings. Some come into your life as lessons.
- Slavic Mother Teresa

Traditional Media Dragons continue the exploration of pioneering lessons learned. It is useful to trigger mittleuropean collective memory by channeling Faulkner’s famous aphorism— The Past Is Never Dead–Is It? We don’t appreciate what we have until it’s gone. Freedom is like that. It’s like air. When you have it, you don’t notice it.

So continue to do what scares you ...

To die for one’s people is a great sacrifice. To live for one’s people, an even greater sacrifice. I choose to live for my people.
— Riyo Chuchi

Books are like Aladdin’s lamp,” Wasserman, the miteuropean ghost, enthuses. “You don’t rub the lamp, the geni doesn’t come out. And a book that lies on the shelf is in something of a coma.”
Writers need readers to complete the work.”

We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
~Elie Wiesel

I have failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.
- Michael (not related to Chris) Jordan

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so as long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.”
~ Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?...We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more that ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”
~ We repeat we did not start the fire! We blame Kafka

As that inspirational leader Alyssa Milano has said: ‘First, accept sadness. Realize that without losing, winning isn't so great.”

Brene Brown nailed it when she pointed out that "courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen."

“There must always be two kinds of art, escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.”
~ W.H. Auden, “Psychology and Art To-day”

I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things. Life is a series of things that seem to be your fault when it's that damn butterfly flapping its wings in the High Tatra Mountains.
–Surreal Kafkaesque

“What is life but an ongoing war ... So read like a butterfly, write like a dragon. History tends to be written by the victors, but it's victims who write the memoirs."
Douglas Coupland asks us: “Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don’t (…) Imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two of them together? That’s me and my memories.”

“If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.”
- Bruce Lee - Take Risks

An artistic butterfly on the move does more than a dozing dragon or ox ...
"To move the world we must move ourselves.”
― Socrates knew that nothing succeeds like failure ......a butterfly is like the soul of a person, it dries out in captivity

The question any blog is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living ... And are great deed wrought at great risks. Deep bloggers know well that God doesn't promise an easy journey, just a safe place to land. . .

“I am the reason the birds are missing… I am made of dirt and grit and stars and river, skin, bone, leaf, whiskers and claws. I am a part of you, of this, nothing more or less. I am mycelium, petal pistil and stamen… I am energy and I am dust. I am wave and I am wonder. I am rich in an impulse and in an order.”

One who bathes willingly with cold water doesn’t feel the cold. When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds. In 1970s Václav Havel recited: " True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say?... Just remember that the Communists are splendid while they fight, and intolerable once they have won”
In 1980 the Czechoslovak Communists demonised us for our escape across the Iron Curtain. In 1990 the freedom loving democratic government built a memorial for Ondrej and Milan ...

'The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.'
~ William James, like Jozef Imrich, shares first names as surnames

“Whether you know it or not, your desire to write comes from the urge to not just be “creative,” it’s a need (one every human being on earth has) to help others. A well-told Story is a gift to the reader/listener/viewer because it teaches them how to confront their own discomforts.”
- Shawn Coyne, The Story Grid

Some words are more than letters on a page, don’t you think? […] ‘They have shape and texture. They are like bullets, full of energy, and when you give one breath, you can feel its sharp edge against your lip. It can be quite cathartic in the right context

Not everyone gets the chance to write their escape story. First-generation migrants and exiled are worst generation migrants. They do not feel at home anywhere. Neither in Czechoslovakia where my roots are, nor in Australia where my branches are. Strange mixed feelings about belonging never die ...

You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all."

Books are the anchors
Left by the ships that rot away. The mud
The anchors lie in is one’s recollection
Of what life was, and never, late or soon,
Will be again ...
~ ‘The River in The Sky’ by Antipodean Clive James

“But on paper, things can live forever.
On paper, a butterfly
never dies.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming

“Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they
could just say, So what. That's one of my favorite things to say. So what.”
― Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

“I did not tell half of what I saw, for I knew I would not be believed”
~ Marco Polo

Uncovering the powerful stories from your life and learning how to share them in ways that resonate with audiences. . .

Good books do not invite unanimity. They invite discord, mayhem, knife fights, blood feuds. . .

I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am
bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and
stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.
~ Abraham Lincoln

“The dragon is brave to walk alone.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

"We all need secrets, just to keep sane, to feel that the world doesn't own us."
~ Deepest MEdia Dragons

'Techniques are replicable and skill is surpassable, but the only thing you can't hack digitally is time. This is the crown jewel, the most valuable piece of art for this generation. Like 19 years old Media Dragon, Beeple is worth $1 billion

As William Golding observed 'if man did not produce evil as a bee produces honey' we would not need to move the world ... or toil over surreal stories which expose brutal isms and adversities ...

Juraj Jánošík saw royal police pull fish out of the water just to watch them not breathe.

Qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum
Let him who wants peace prepare for war
If you have no enemies, find a way to make them.

Homo sapiens have a substance abuse problem, and the substance is corruption

Hans Hansen, his real name, had the finger on the pulse of the society in all kinds of isms when he observed that ... "It takes nothing to join the crowd. It takes everything to stand alone."

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”
― William Faulkner on the unrestrained freedom of life - Why The Unbearable Lightness of Being Matters

Life has more meaning in the face of Death

One of the smartest things one can do in life … is to play stupid.

“Don’t bend; don’t - water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
— Franz Kafka who perfected the bohemian art that must be exact about the uncertain

As blogging trailblazer, Hunter S. Thompson, mercilessly suggested: “So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?”

“Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time." Like MEdia Dragon, Svetlana Alexievich is on a mission to dare greatly in order to collect memories before they disappear, to correct for the rewriting of history by propaganda...
"It takes two flints to make a fire."
-Louisa May Alcott Curiosity is Dangerous Sensation

“Man cannot stand a meaningless life,” Carl Jung observed as he contemplated human personality

Putting into words what is beyond words … If you’re not scared a lot you are not doing very much... A Society Is Only As Free As Its Most Troublesome Political Dissident

"Within a day's breathing you will in all likelihood inhale at least one molecule from the breaths of every person who has ever lived. And, to boot, every person who lives from now until the Sun burns out will from time to time breathe in a bit of you. At the taxing and legislative atomic level, we are in a sense eternal."
Eternal Bohemian Bill

Being an (Eternal) Oscar blogger isn’t about being a creep. It’s about doing your thing without apology, no matter how strange it looks to “normal people.” It’s about weird passions and showing the side most people are scared to reveal such as shameless self promotion:

It’s better to cross the line and suffer the consequences than to just stare at the line for the rest of your life ... Freedom has a story: Memories of Moving Cold War River deliver tears and smiles in ways that many stories try, but few achieve so soulfully ... the flawed storyteller from Cold War era you have never heard of . . .
Sole survivors' voices tend to come from places which had never had a voice, never been granted real existence, before ...

“If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.”
— Wally Lamb

“Failure is never quite as frightening as regret.”
Contributed by Sages at DB

You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.
~ Thomas Wolfe, born in 1900

“The beautiful thing about fear is that when you run to it, it runs away.”
~ Robin Sharma

The taxing and legislative world of isms is peppered with all kinds of characters, however Being kind to the unkind is a higher art of kindness ...

“There are a million Bohemian and Antipodean Jozef Imrich stories, and they’re all true, even the ones that never happened.” The old bohemian maxim still holds: ‘Stories happen only to people who can tell them.’

“According to history, quite a few times simple man turned out to be the significant man.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.”
- Adlai Stevenson

“When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful.”
– Malala Yousafzai, activist

You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.
~Jessica Mitford, Deep Blogger who penned The Hons and Rebels

My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight there will still be left a member [of our school group] to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon. For the death of one of its members cannot, I am determined, dissolve [the group]. Death can make us loathsome and helpless as individuals, but it cannot put an end to the immortal four! May God bless you my dear John Ronald and may you say things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them if such be my lot.
~ Just prior to his death, G.B. Smith wrote a letter to J.R.R. Tolkien

Books like waterbirds
flying over bookshelf pond
Splash! Some land, most gone

“High sentiments always win in the end. The leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.”
– George Orwell, trailblazing author and journalist-(blogger) more insightful now than then

Orwell was a good MEdia Dragon example that ignited in generations of reformers the passion for justice and human rights - a bittersweet reminder that, in Zadie Smith’s beautiful words, “progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.”
Speaking of Orwell who wrote is seminal 1984 in 1948, my gradparents' land was conficated in 1948 and my parents and especially godmother Sidka never managed to get the land back again as the land was given by the communists to the fishing association - yet the great news is that it is part now of the common wealth as there is a hot spring and these hot waters work miracles with sick bodies ;-)

“As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.”

Haters of doorstopper fame love to pick on MEdia Dragons and Vegemite Lovers

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline paraphrased writer G. K. Chesterton

Among the native peoples a myth exists that in the extremest cold words themselves freeze and fall to earth. In spring they stir again and start to speak, and suddenly the air fills with out-of-date gossip, unheard jokes, cries of forgotten pain, words of long-disowned love.
~ Thubron, In Siberia

“The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”
—“Milan Kundera Warned Us About Historical Amnesia. Now It’s Happening Again,” Ewan Morrison, Quillette

“There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man.” ~Rod Serling “The Twilight Zone"

Whom the gods would destroy they first make him to write his memoirs. As the luckless protagonist of Detour, one of those film noirs Media Dragons love to digest, dourly reflects "Whichever way you turn, fate sticks out a foot to trip you." I used up way more than my nine lives. . .

Even in 2019 AD, Russia investigation courtesy of the Mueller report shows that bad guys who play dirty, like Trump, always win ...

“Because of the goodness of God, I have had a happy unhappy life, which is preferable to an unhappy happy one.”
~ John Lukacs

I have another quote that I’ve kept on my bedside table for years. “There's nothing to be afraid of. . . Everything changes — don’t be afraid.” It’s a motto I’ve tried to live my life by, and it is, of course, from Deadwood.

We are all potentially characters in a novel — with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full ...
— Georges Simenon who was born in 1903

"If nothing else is left, one must scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity"
~ Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam who heard my loud whistling sounds and voices coming out of Cold War River...

To paraphrase Nadezha ... No agent or publisher ever knows for certain what will work. Their doors, and minds, must stay open out of self-interest? However, even if you made it into print, your book might well sink without trace

MEdia Dragon is guided by George Orwell’s statement: “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

“Each person who may chance to pass you by,
even just once — only to disappear (kottke) —
has her own story, her own mystery,
her luckiest and her most bitter year.”
“Everybody hurts” (At Mittleuropean Dinner Tables, Everybody Wants to Own the End of the World and Lifelong Bondi Iceberg Swimming Membership )

In most Cold War stories, you are dealing with events, and I’m really dealing with trauma and wounds ...
'Our Chief Means of Breaking Bread with the Dead'
Words fall short, but sometimes their shadows can reach the unspeakable...

My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him, all good things - trout as well as eternal salvation - came by grace; and grace comes by art; and art does not come easy.
~A River Runs Through It (Naration) via Antipodean Democracy and Making of Sausages

What a great song and story makes us feel is a sense of awe

For Hugo, Stonehenge, the Parthenon and indeed Notre Dame are “books of stone” pregnant with meaning.

Life begins where fear ends. No guts, no story
~ Chris Brady

"Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm."
— Winston Churchill whose Crown Employees and admirers nicknamed MEdia Dragon the “Bouncing Czech”

Robert Frost wrote the sequel memoirs of my other exiled adventures, marriage, fatherhood, divorce ... “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.”

. You reach a stage in life where the horizon ahead of you starts to look narrow and the shadows from behind you begin to loom large. The concern that gnaws at you in the present is the task of integrating the past. You try to come to terms with how your life has worked out ... The ghosts of drown friends, who died in 1980, as well as revolutions devolved into the same tyranny that gave birth to them haunt this tiny blog ...

Control freaks under any 'ism' fail to understand this: "The more you try to bully people into NOT reading something the more they will do so. Freedom matters."

"Words are what matter,” Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote, “the sharing of words.”

Every (good) thought vibrates through the universe.
— Dorothy Richardson “Excelsior!”

Every Story Is A Prayer [ Remember my brush with death and also Andrej Warhola’s So What ]

"May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve."
- Sappho ( c. 630 – c. 570 BC) Expresso for the Mind

“You were born an original work of art. Stay original always. Originals cost more than imitations.”
~ Suzy Kassem

“Do you know I sometimes think I’m a man of genius, half finished? The genius has been left out, the faculty of expression is wanting; but the need for expression remains, and I spend my days groping for the latch of a closed door.”
~ Henry James, Roderick Hudson ;-)

“I wear my mistakes like badges of honor, and I celebrate them.”
― Amy Schumer, The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo

I saw the worst of politics. I had a ringside seat ... As Maya Angelou once soulfully observed “there is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you”...

“If you want to know what a man’s like, take a look at how he treats his inferiors not his equals.”
— Sirius Black, character in the Harry Potter series ;-) Happiness is like water…We’re always trying to grab onto it, but it’s always slipping between our fingers.

"Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.”
~ Hermann Hesse

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.
~ George Steiner

'Cold River' illustrates Hemingway's 'iceberg theory', which requires that a story find its effectiveness by hiding more than it reveals.

Compacted into this very, very small amount of writing was almost everything that explains the totalitarianism in the world … Concepts like international law, for instance, concepts of human rights, all these kind of things—ultimately, they don’t go back to Kafka, Orwell, Havel ...

Be wise and only trust someone who can see these three things in you: the sorrow behind your smile, the love behind your anger, and the reason behind your silence...

“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
– Winston Churchill

In your eyes
The light the heat
In your eyes
I am complete

“They will call you immoral if you dare to describe their immorality”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana

The friends we have lost do not repose under the ground ... they are buried deep in our hearts. It has been thus ordained that they may always accompany us.
— Alexandre Dumas - They Shall Not Grow Old

“Tears are a river that take you somewhere…Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace better.” ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

“A man dies… only a few circles in the water prove that he was ever there. And even they quickly disappear. And when they’re gone, he’s forgotten, without a trace, as if he’d never even existed. And that’s all.”
– Wolfgang Borchert, The comeback is always greater than the setback

We became bloggers to come as close as possible to the heart of the world.

“We've seen how grassroots journalism by blogs has had an impact at various points politically, as ordinary people have amplified stories that were being ignored by the traditional press.”
~ Jimmy Wales

“ ‘Blogging’ will kill you, but it will keep you alive while you’re at it.”
— Horace Greeley

Song: “Right Hand Man”
Lyric: “Dying is easy, young man. Living is harder.”

“Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.”
~ J.K. Rowling(ova)

Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much. In life, if we don’t risk anything, we risk everything.
~ Helen Keller

Life always offers you a second chance. It is called tomorrow.
— Dylan Thomas

Something in me
despite everything
can’t believe my luck

If There Can Be A Single Book That Defines Death and Iron Curtain, It’s This One [It is so easy for us to say or think that we, in our ourselves, are powerless ... Cold River tends to comfort the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable ― Free Inter library loan National Library - One hell of a scary book 'Cold River' memoir is blamed for losing several nights' of sleep]

“Every experience, good or bad, is a priceless collector’s item.”
~ Isaac Marion

Like all profound mysteries, it is so simple that it frightens me,” the Scottish poet and mountaineer Nan Shepherd wrote in contemplating the might and mystery of water. “Mysterious, Cold and Hot, Rivers run through our civilisations like strings through beads ...."

As Jack Handey once observed "It's funny that pirates were always going around searching for treasure, and they never realized that the real treasure was the fond memories they were creating. . ."

I don't want poetry books to be bestsellers. For, if you sell more, that means you are resonating with the mainstream. Poetry is the voice from the outside. Its survival depends on resisting the mainstream.
According Mother Theresa, I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples ...

Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything. #JustDoIt pic.twitter.com/SRWkMIDdaO
— Colin Kaepernick (@Kaepernick7) September 3, 2018

There is no time to be voiceless, lonely, scared or intimidated.

“I can conceive of no better service… than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy.”
Walt Whitman on Democracy" [What most bloggers are doing is really important]

There is more information on the Internet than any human can absorb in a lifetime. What you need is tools to separate chaff from wheat located on blogs of Deep Bloggers and Media Dragons... The Little Blog That Is Making the Case for Big Thinking

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.
~Franz Kafka

Man is in fact nailed down — like Christ on the Cross — to a grid of paradoxes . . . he balances between the torment of not knowing his mission and the joy of carrying it out, between nothingness and meaningfulness. And like Christ, he is in fact victorious by virtue of his defeats.
As quoted in "Václav Havel: Heir to a Spiritual Legacy" by Richard L. Stanger in Christian Century (11 April 1990).

To start with, look at all the vibrating blogs.

... even those non award winning ones:

A Barlow-like Bohemian spot for sharing words and stories that really matter by a storyteller who offers no escape ...

Whatever is bothering you, don’t let it ...

“The meaning of (blogging and) life is that it ends”
― Franz Kafka

“I’m the kind of writer that doesn’t know jack shit about anything,” says Stephen King.

Non-Award winning Media Dragon, of Deepest Cold River fame, is the backpage of the Internet trends and the brilliant, yet embarrassing, bloggers who focus on Brainstorming and Fact Czeching stories that are timeless and/or filled with hard core ironies ...

As for ME(dia Dragon), all I know is that I know nothing.
~ Socrates

The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it. — George Orwell

Like the character Mopsa in The Winter’s Tale, who crooned: “I love a ballad in print, alife, for then we are sure they are true.” Mopsa today would implicitly trust the big-ticket newspaper and TV networks. Fate loves hard core irony as Bill Shakesbeer mocks the uneducated person's reverence for the printed word inside Winter's as well as Cold River's Tales ...

MD IS PREFERRED SUPPLIER OF INSIGHTFUL INFORMATION TO BOHEMIAN ANTIPODEAN MOVERS AND SHAKERS

You can learn a line
from a win
and a book
from a defeat.
~ Paul Brown who shared with deep bloggers the old saying "no good deed goes unpunished."

Of all the virtual gin joints in all the towns in all the world, you walked into my MEdia Dragon

Punch back twice as hard, the wise exiled bohemian man once said

I discovered that the world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards.
Forty-Five Things I Learned in the Czechoslovak Gulag, Bear Pit and Latitude

Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few.

"Far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it.”

“There are no great men, only great challenges that ordinary men are forced by circumstances to meet.”
~Beirne Lay Jr. and Frank D. Gilroy, screenplay for The Gallant Hours

Those who live in the shadow of death are often those who live most.

Nothing is only one thing. Nothing. An egg is both a womb and a prison ...

There is a delicious old Soviet observation about nothing is only one thing on Radio Yerevan: a listener asks: “Is it true that Rabinovitch won a new car in the lottery?”, and the radio presenter answers: “In principle yes, it’s true, only it wasn’t a new car but an old bicycle, and he didn’t win it but it was stolen from him.” (Old Soviet Jokes Are MEdia Dragon's gift from beyond the grave)

Our sins are more easily remembered than our good deeds.
~Democritus

Nothing is new here. The tragedy is so old, but even within it there are actors — some who’ve chosen resistance, and some, like X, who, however blithely, have chosen collaboration.

Each breaking egg of a wave, each rush of the sea on the slope of sand, reminds me why these places of pilgrimage matter. They matter to me because in the long view, I do not. I am driftwood. I am rockweed. I am osprey and the mackerel in the clutch of her feet. I am a soul standing on the edge of the continent looking out.

"Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done."
~ Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice - Written Words Never Die

It's impossible that the improbable will never happen.
~ Emil Julius Gumbe An impossible escape even by a cow can be an inspiration to us all

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
- George Bernard Shaw

Paths are made by walking.
— Franz Kafka, born in July 1883

Like most haters, fake communists failed to understand human nature - "The more you try to bully people into NOT reading something the more they will do so. Freedom matters."

It is commonly suspected that the writings of Jozef Imrich are not actually mistakenly written by JI, but by another medium of the same terrifying name or initials.

"When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free."
~ Charles Evans Hughes, Supreme Court Justice

“I want to tell a story, in the old-fashioned way – what happens to somebody – but I want that ‘what happens’ to be delivered with quite a bit of interruption, turnarounds, and strangeness. I want the reader to feel something is astonishing – not the ‘what happens’ but the way everything happens.”
–– Alice Munro

“You must be doing something right if you’re pissing people off. I just wish it was easier to piss people off.”
Big Historical Charter 77

You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories.

One of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, wrote: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?"

If you must write, you must do it in the face of all opposition. […] Do not spend too much more time on culture & reading, these are traps. When everything conspires to make the thing impossible, when you are tired, worried, with no time, or money, it is then that things get done.
~ Samuel Beckett to Claude Raimbourg, 16 May 1954

What is a legacy?
It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see
Let me tell you what I wish I’d known
When I was young and dreamed of glory
You have no control:
Who lives
Who dies
Who tells your story?
~ Our Place In The World ("Never Trust Anyone Who Doesn't Have Skin in the Game.")

We have been granted 2 billion seconds on this planet, give or take:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
—William Blake from Auguries of Innocence

“I will not be another flower, picked for my beauty and left to die. I will be wild, difficult to find, and impossible to forget.”
― Erin Van Vuren

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion memorably wrote

“The only way that we can live, is if we grow. The only way that we can grow is if we change. The only way that we can change is if we learn. The only way we can learn is if we are exposed. And the only way that we can become exposed is if we throw ourselves out into the open. Do it. Throw yourself.”
― C. JoyBell C.

We made love stories up so we could believe the night sky was not so vast, so unbearably vast, that we barely mattered ...

“I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees.”
– Stephane “Charb” Charbonnier (1967 – 2015), publisher, Charlie Hebdo.

Do yourself a favor: Put away the self-help guides and just read "Cold River" ... What might have been written off as a futile gesture became a defining symbol for a generation

"My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world''.
~George Bernard Shaw

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
— Vrbov proverb shared at Iconic Bondi Icebergs

A tale of Cold River, manages to trap a tiny speck of theatre of absurd of the kommunist Czechoslovakia in amber and then put time in a bottle, forever uniting them in our collective memory and imagination ... History has failed us, but no matter

We live and breathe words... via Who Will Buy Your Book? - 'Skin in the Game'

“You can choose courage, or you can choose comfort,
but you cannot choose both.”
– BRENÉ BROWN

This poetic sentence will reverberate in all cultures and language forever:
"Tis not the first time that, dreaming of freedom, we build a new prison."
-- poet Maximilian Voloshin

The taking of offence is what rests in the bosom of the stupid ones.
— Ecclesiastes 7:9

Once all villagers decided to pray for rain. On the day of prayer all the people gathered, but only one boy came with an umbrella.
That is faith ...

Speaking of faith, Cold River is a story that is meant to survive, just as its sole survivor has. This is a memoir that crosses all borders and speaks directly the human heart as it reminds us of the preciousness, the miracle! of freedom.

"... The most important expression which the present age has found… a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.”
~ T.S. Eliot lauding 'Cold River' in our dreams ;-)

Joseph Epstein penned a story entitled “First Person Singular,” an essay published in The Hudson Review in 1992. It begins: “The best time to write one’s autobiography, surely, is on one’s deathbed.” He identifies “only a handful of splendid autobiographies,” and goes on to identify them:
Odd, but very few of these really splendid autobiographies have been written by novelists, poets, and playwrights. Saint Augustine, Cellini, Rousseau, Gibbon, Franklin, Mill, Alexander Herzen, Henry Adams, the men--and there have thus far been almost no women--who wrote the monumental autobiographical works were none of them primarily imaginative literary artists...

A fluent stream of words awakens suspicion within me. I prefer stuttering for in stuttering I hear the friction and the disquiet, the effort to purge impurities from the words, the desire to offer something from inside you. Smooth, fluent sentences leave me with a feeling of uncleanness, of order that hides emptiness.
~An Untouchable Fire: Remembering Aharon Appelfeld

“We begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy.”
W.B. Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil

Robert Louis Stevenson, who said, “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” And, “Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.”
"I am not a survivor, I am a crumbling remnant” of the end of the 500-year-long Age of Books

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
cc ~ Uncle George in his Cold River Nightmares

Within a few generations almost all of us will be forgotten. Those who are not will have no bearing on how we are remembered, who we once were. We will not be there to protest, to correct. In the end we might exist only as a prop in someone else’s story: a plot device, a golem.

You write not after you’ve thought things through; you write to think things through

Without the story — in which everyone living, unborn and dead, participates — men are no more than bits of paper blown on the cold wind
George Mackay Brown born in 1921 - hat tip to that great Irish clan of O'Neill

“Some of the best things that have ever happened to us wouldn’t have happened to us, if it weren’t for some of the worst things that have ever happened to us.”

Only an artist can tell what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it. What it is like to die, or to have somebody die; what it is like to be glad
~ James Baldwinc

Defying every expectation of what communism used to be, imagine a system where the key to success wasn’t hard work or merit, but conniving and politics. If you sold your soul to the devil, you were rewarded Hey Millennials: Communism Sucks, I Lived It

It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen.
— George MacDonald, born in 1824

"The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink." f
-- T.S. Eliot's words were wrapped in razor blades

Jasmine, the talented grand-daughter of John Hatton AO, one of the Australian Living Treasures, turned blood into a wonderful painting of freedom...

“People have had enough of well-constructed intrigue, clever plot hooks, and denouements… Take it from me, readers expect something different from literature and they’re right: they expect the Real, the authentic. They want to be told about life, don’t you see? Literature mustn’t mistake its territory.” ~ 'Based on a True Story’ by Delphine de Vigan – The Mysterious Lady L.

Wisdom listens ... As the wise Vrbov Cemetery mortalist, David BenATAR, once noted even turning blood into ink is bad as "our lives are ultimately meaningless. We cannot satisfy the need for meaning in the mundane." Our human 'iron curtain like' predicament also means that it is impossible to realise genuine escape: "We are in a bind, a fix, a jam, we can't get out, and there is no one to help us ...We are caught in an "existential vise" between life and death ..."

Kneading memory makes the dough of fiction; which we know, sometimes never stops rising ...

Being motivated by a deep sense of injustice can be a costly thing. How do you begin to write about one of the most terrifying and momentous event in our lives? A lot is needed to create a book worth reading. You require a strong voice yearning to tell a story with passion. It helps to have spent years mastering a craft, bringing it to the level of art. In many cases, piles of research are also needed.
And either a big stack of paper and pens or a laptop that won’t talk back [ Continue to learn the value of being an effective troublemaker]

“Human life begins on the far side of despair.”
Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mouches ...

We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full. ~ Marcel Proust

The virtues of reading books we don’t understand.

"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will."

And we lived by her fierce folklorik dictum: “Fitting in is death. Remember that. You want to stand apart from your peers. Always. As dead men tell no tales... "

The Cold (War) River is finished, I am sensible how imperfectly, but certainly to the best of my limited abilities ... WE HAVE NO VOICE, AND SOMETIMES IN THIS SHORT LIFE ON EARTH WE MUST SCREAM!

"We Became River"
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it."
— G. K. Chesterton via AFL Legend and a Briliant Aboriginal Mittleuropean Mark Heiss

According to a quote sometimes attributed to not so great Jozef Imrich and the great Albert Einstein: "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay in trouble and with problems longer."

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

There is nothing original about me except a little original bohemian sin. I hope you will be treated unfairly ...

Don't ever be embarrassed by your stories of failure, butt (sic) at the same time, don't ever be embarrassed by your successes! Embrace YOUR life as is ...

"The important thing in this life is to link your sadness to the sadness of others."
~Shusaku Endo who loves sharing parables

"My position is that you cannot work towards peace being peaceful. If the peace is to be one where everybody’s quiet and doesn’t open up ... share what’s unspeakable ... offer unsolicited criticism ... defend others’ rights to speak and encourage discourse — that peace is worth nothing. It reminds me of the kind of peace that was secured in my old country under the Communist regime. That is the death of democracy. That might have consequences as bad as war—bloody war and conflict. So, to prevent the world from bloody conflict, we must sustain a certain kind of adversarial life in which we are struggling with our problems in public."
~ Krzysztof Wodiczko

Like a recurring nightmare, in MEdia Dragon bohemian saga entitled 'My (Not So) Perfect Life', about a tall towerish crown (clown) employee with strange latitude to oddballs and outsiders, and where "tyranny is always better organized than freedom"
— Charles Péguy

“The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true authority in the use of the comic, an authority which by one word transforms as by magic the reasonable creature one calls man into a caricature.”
~ Søren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way

"Cold River's" history keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose. [Cold as ice, but in the soulful hands the story melts ... a literary treat you, insomniacs, can enjoy for years (because that's how long it will take you to get through it ...)]
~ John le Carre

"Read Shakespeare. There's more in Shakespeare about power, decision-making, ambition, and how people are blinded by their own needs that's so incredibly applicable [even today]. To see it in that context is something that makes it real."
Brad McMillan

“There is no other life than this. You would not have stumbled into the vastly imperfect, beautiful, impossible present.” Unbelievable River...

Thomas Aquinas’s ultimate act of apparent humility occurred on December 6, 1273, St. Nicholas’s Day, when he was forty-eight or forty-nine years old. Aquinas was celebrating Mass in the chapel of St. Nicholas, and he again had a vision. What exactly he saw is unknown. But afterward, he did not resume his dictation as he usually would. Reginald prodded him to get back to work, but Aquinas responded, “I can do no more; such things have been revealed to me that all that I have written seems to me as so much straw.” He stopped writing altogether, leaving his Summa Theologiae—the summary of theology, and his masterwork—incomplete.

“An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about; he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that he does not notice that he is saying nothing of the slightest importance about either.”
~Randall Jarrell, “Ten Books” (The Southern Review, Autumn 1935)

Regardless of what you may think about social media, it remains a global microphone for voices of survivors like Jozef Imrich to tell their stories - as according to Tom Wolfe: "Nonfiction is never going to die"

"I am the youngest by far of six children and I am rich because I come from a blessed family"

People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.
~James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard"
- JFK

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality - the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.
~ Walter Bagehot

They tried to bury Media Dragons. They did not know we were seeds ... Cold River proves that truth is always stranger than fiction.
~Noro Cervenak - … an absurd living testament to the incredibly improbable trip that we’re on

What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.
— Harold Bloom, born in 1930

"Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.”

Just like blogging, 'Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better..."
— André Gide

Blogging is a dirty and crazy job , but someone has to do it ...

François-Marie Arouet aka Voltaire tends to share the most profound observation: “God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh”

However meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth … steps in and does something. So, the poet Robert Frost said, "no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader".
Is it more foolish to risk your life or risk wasting your life? To live at all is miracle enough ...

Q. How did you get into philosophy in the first place?
A. Failure
— a soulmate, Simon Critchley

If my films don't show a profit, I know I'm doing something right.
Woody Allen

We are our stories, stories that can be both prison and the crowbar to break open the door of that prison

What a strange world this is … Before I’ve even had time to blink they’re already calling me old, when inside I’m like an unripe fruit...

“The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.” ~ Bohemian-born Tom Stoppard, Arcadia in 2006 Sydney

MEdia Dragons are keen observers of leadership and politics in all its drama and absurdity.

“My theory has always been to write a real small story against a big background.”
~ Burt Kennedy

As Dr Cope once observed about knowledge and wisdom "...all the data in the world is in the ocean, however the value is in the fish"

There’s so much that’s unsayable and unspeakable about Iron Curtain escapes, but when it comes time for the story to be told, it takes over...There is more to it than any summary could hope to capture.

“We are born with some things in our veins... When I compared in Cold River humanity to a flower growing in the shadow of a chemical munitions factory, it may be that I was being unfair to flowers ...”

Dylan Thomas pointed out that the best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps ... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.

Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone.
— Henry Green

Cold River is like a secret image, a photograph is a secret about a secret. It is about surviving and playing the cards that are dealt you, even if it looks like a losing hand. The more it tells you the less you know... The anthropological folkloric tale is about the strange relationship between a secret and knowledge. A secret is, necessarily, relational—like difference, it needs another just to exist, whether to be shared in confidence or because it cannot be shared. It is a perfect book for COVID paranoid times ... Great riches in remarkably few pages

'This story is more than a history of escapes. It’s not easy to say where, exactly, you would shelve it. It could be under memoir. Or is it more like anthropology? . . . The other option would be farce just like the life under communism ... The aim of Cold River is to prepare a person for death...

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. (According to Robert and Shel,) You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart

"We all know that funny feeling of filthiness, of contagious ickiness. It's a feeling we call the prick of conscience when we make a compromise that we have doubts about. So we think about it again and again, and... we even worry about it somewhat, even though the compromise may have made life easier, compared to what would have happened had we not made it. But for myself...I see that my bravery comes out of cowardice, because I am afraid of feeling that ickiness of feeling that I've done something wrong, that I've made an undesirable compromise, that I've side-stepped; and conversely when I do something that I know is right, I can even have a feeling of euphoria."
~ Vaclav Havel

If you think you're too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a closed room with a mosquito

"We acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of country throughout Australia and their continuing connection to land, waters and community. We pay our respect to them and their cultures, and elders past and present."

Frequently, one of the best ways to get insight into a culture is through its humour ...
So under communism when we wanted to hear God laugh, we made meticulously planned escapes from the totalitarian regimes. Our young fragile ironic stories under totalitarianism were not crying out to be told. And yet ....

Mark Twain once said, “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs. ~ German Shepard Bessie The Act of Reading All Kinds of Books

Like the ForeReads or Outline, Cold River and Media Dragon are not for everyone. It's for bohemians like you... Outline

Good blogging like journalism is sharing what somebody else does not want printed; everything else is public relations... It is our business to know something about every subject – or to know where to get the knowledge (Dr Cope, J Hatton, MO'N etc ) One of our strengths is finding stories in unexpected places ...

MEdia Dragons are known for their 6-foot-2 stature and are often expected by totalitarian characters to play villains... There’s a deeper poetry and music that runs through and beneath the Cold River...

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you." ~Matthew 7:7 (Ask, Seek, Knock )

Consider why you should not go through life without seeking Simon Sinek or seeking the story of the Cold River ...Please suspend your disbelief: “I write about my father and mother, their generation, and my own limited experience, our struggle for individual freedom and self-expression in the Mitteleuropean Orwelean society. Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it. We need to remember that all rivers are fearless and free. They come and go as they please, and borders or governments do not bind them. All rivers are filled with liquid histories and stories. Shame, failure, despair, utter horror, these are all stations on the journey, even after completing a ‘draft of a draft.' Slavic Blues Memoir, the offspring of the slave narrative ...
Certain stories that get virtually no traction nevertheless involve phenomena that are quite important in understanding the way the world operates. For instance, not a lot of people know that 'Cold River' is everywhere as it is the history of the entire world: As every of the tyrant it has deposed ...
Many things in life – oh so many more than we think – can never be explained at all... “One must be something in order to do something,” Goethe counseled a young friend in 1824 ..." Our story emerges from our bones! And why we are not satisfied with simply making an impression; why do we want to mark our readers and listeners for life?"

Great writing is like diving: anybody can get from the platform to the pool—or the pavement—but some, with grace and sweat and just a bit of swag, can make that brief passage through the air angelic in its beauty and terror. “We started talking about dying long before the first one of us jumped ...

"No one leaves home, unless home is the mouth of a shark. You only run for the border when you see your whole city running as well. You have to understand that no one puts children in a boat, unless the water is safer than the land." ~ 'Home' by Warsan Shire

If you are in the business of finding out what’s true — whether that business is social science, military intelligence, journalism, the hard sciences or something else — there is an elusive quality you find among the best in the field. It might be called the Cold Eye. It’s not a term you will find in textbooks. It’s a matter of character as much as professional skill. It’s some combination of having the mental discipline to gird yourself against your own biases, the instinct to resist the tendency to think that knowledge once learned is static and an ability to look at more signals, data points and ideas from disparate places than other people usually do. Perhaps more important, the Cold Eye is motivated by a deep intellectual independence and a passionate psychological connection to telling the truth.
~ Tom Rosenstiel

I even ignored advice to change my name ... If I wasn't Jozef Imrich, I'd probably think that Jozef Imrich has a lot of answers myself.

We can be heroes
We can be heroes
We can be heroes
Just for one day
We can be heroes (Flashback Bowie: Heroes by Berlin Wall)

Most writers waste people’s time with too many words. I’m trying to reduce everything
down to the minimum. My last work will be a blank piece of paper.
— Beckett

What an ordinary, artificial life I’ve led. And how ordinary and artificial it is to write about it, as if for ‘posterity’. What do I have to say? In an absolute sense, nothing. And that’s what I’m saying.
— Frenet, Journal

Most of us do not like risk and uncertainty. That's too bad, because there's no shortage of either. Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.
Industry Leader and Risk Taker Steve Monaghan

“Strange how people who suffer together have stronger connection than people who are most content.”
~ Nobel Bob Dylan

The hard core irony will undoubtedly be lost on some except gals and guys at the Google news, but by failing to reach NY Times reviews, Cold River, a book of a lifetime, succeeds brilliantly. Without any doubt the story of the human race is war

... “If a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr
“Show me somethin’ dat caution ever made!” ~ Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Freedom or Death: Ondrej a Milan
"I have one consistency, which is being against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right. The Totalitarian is the enemy

There are no depths of irony, or bad taste, to which extreme communists or rotten capitalists won’t sink if they think they can grab power or make money out of it...

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come… We live everything as it comes, without warning.

We can only compare Cold River to reading the Bible :-) So escape the beaten path ...

Your Fingers Will Be Frozen From Turning the Pages of This Memoirs
+ The Cold War River Comes in From the Cold
+ Digital River - Kindle Edition
+ Yes. This really happened at Book Depository
+ Cold River in the Land of Down Under - Iceberg Edition
+ The Drowned and the Saved: Making a Difference
+ Water underpins everything: Iron Curtain Brought to Book
+ Nothing Left To Lose: Spared to Tell Story
+ Sink or Swim: If It Were All So Simple
+ Small Fish in the Big Pond
+ Cold River: Telling Tales Against The Tide

When you read your own work as something fresh, something strange, it can be very exciting – especially if there’s time to make revisions. But then, once published, you almost inevitably discover typos, mistakes, and causes for regret and even remorse. As in a lover’s quarrel, sometimes we wish we could take the words back. But it’s almost never possible. …

“You don’t find the books that change your life by accident; nor by design. One finds them the way a ragpicker finds something useful in the garbage, or the way a hunter accidentally encounters his prey. The enterprise demands vigilance, says the philosopher Walter Benjamin: it takes practice to lose one’s way in a city in order to discover something important about it.” Some books show us a new world, others vindicate our own experience...

2015 MEdia DragON

Breaking News

We live in a world of radical ignorance

“The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga

Support Us by Supporting Our Trendsetter
Get comfortable with being uncomfortable, because this is where the magic happens.
It may seem really strange but I feel as though I actually died some time ago and I’m living in an afterlife. Only in the age of Amazon.com age is a Tale like Cold River by Imrich possible … in 21st century after all,the greatest things in life are shared on the web

Cold River: fast-moving digital waters

Double Daring Publisher: DDP
• The Double Dragon Publishing •

Global Dragons: Virtual Heads & Tails
• US
• Australia
• UK
• Germany
• Japan
• Canada
• France
• Switzerland
• Belgium

Recommended Points of Impact:
There is no truth. There is only action. – Blaise Cendrars

There is no word only a way of living as the hunter, collector or gatherer. It is rather eclectic to collect antipodean and bohemian talking pieces and artifacts...

“It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters." But at least, daughters, like geese, “know the obligation to return home”.

Past Is A Strange Country: Girls of the Velvet Revolution
*Chi Chi Bella
*Sasha
*Lea: French Family Connection

Agape: Unconditional Love

Bohemian Gabbie: Casting Artistic River

Sa(r)sha of “Oh Boy Blind ” Fame

“Do you worry about your worth? The tiny river that creates a great canyon does so by existing. You make a deep impression by being alive.”
~ John Patrick Shanley

Media Dragon has been live since June 2002 ...
(“In Internet years, the blog is about a thousand years old")

The new brave virtual world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love!

Why I Love Blogging?
Bloggers are like the little first amendment engine that could: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win If you like taking the path less travelled: Dive into Deep Books

“If you know how to read, you do not need many books […] Learn to meditate on a few lines, even from a mediocre author; nothing bears fruit unless it is rooted in meditation.”
~ Jean-Baptiste Henri-Dominique Lacordaire (1802-1861), the French priest who reestablished the Dominican Order after it was neutralized following the French Revolution

We are not the wordly boys we used to be on the interrete. We are no longer desirable, We are off-putting in some way. It’s not just that We have put on weight, or that our face are puffy from the drinking and the lack of sleep; it’s as if people can see the damage written all over us, they can see it in my face, the way we hold ourselves the way we move ...

What Lies Beneath: Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
Indeed, the power of a story comes from what's not in it
jozefimrich@authorsden.com

Maybe we are crazy. Maybe we will change the world: If you live life to the point of tears every Negative has a Positive, You just have to look for it. Blogs Help to filter the world ;-) Without Struggle/No Freedom ...

“Media Dragon Loves Us”
-Evangelists Robert Scoble & Shel Israel
“I like Media Dragon”
’A blog, you see, is a little First Amendment machine’
-Priceless Jay Rosen
“Jozef Imrich is a prolific researcher”
-Antipodean Hugh Martin
"Never settle" he wrote to MEdia Dragon and We (royal we) never did ;-) -Steve Jobs thinking differently

God will never give you anything you can't handle ... Guardian Angel: Andrej Imrich

Tragedy, like irony, is an unpleasant way of saying the truth. You don't cross the Iron Curtain and come out without scars or appreciation of the words of wisdom by Rudyard Kipling. They are as true and applicable today as when Kipling wrote them!

Sole survivors might often be thought of as anonymous, but we never want to be voiceless. Why true stories and icebergs say so much ... The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. Till taught by pain or borders less travelled, men really know not what freedom's worth: # Each Age Calls forth its own Bohemian Voice... Elena Ferrante

Stay Hungry. Stay Googlish

*Digital immigrant's testimony to the power of the powerless. I have been dead all over the world:
#Daily Beast
#Cold War Digger
#Daily Political Dust

Sandra Cisneros tells us, Write about what makes you different.
Your readers want to see the world through your eyes ... A sole survivor explores the world where the 'other' fears to tread and creates the most unlikely true story you'll ever read. You are different and so is Cold River:

You're not going to read a book, You're going to cross the Iron Curtain!

“A good, blogger, intel analyst, writer always works at the impossible.”

The tale, not the teller,
is what matters most! This is a book that will remind you why you love freedom ... A book, like revolution, can change the world and fill the information gaps.
#1 Powells Power
** Jozef Imrich: The Elder at ABCTales

*Amazon: Sink or Swim
*DP Roseberry (angel/writer/editor)
*Every Sentence was a Struggle
*Every Stroke was a Struggle
*For Love of Freedom: A Tale of Desperate Acts
*Kollector of Surreal Stuff
*Long Dragon Tail
*Meeting with Disaster & Triumph; Treating Them Just The Same
*River of Coversations: The Kindness of Strangers
*When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it
*When you publish a poem - crazy bohemians edit it

My Checkered Crown Employee and Taxing Careers
There is an old saying attributed to Prince Bismarck that “to retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making.”
“Dieu me pardonnera; c’est son métier.
(God will pardon me. That is His business.)”

Media Dragon blog is worth $16,936,200 ;-).
How much is your blog worth?

Nota, Nota, Bene
Blog Father: Classified Links
Sydney City of Exiles
Michael West
Ask Sydneyrella Man
Renaissance Ideas
Samizdat - Praha City of Spires
Intercept
Vanity et al
In This TechHour
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13 Things on Internet MMXXII
KC

There may be no greater act of bravery for someone with a fear of needles than to donate blood. Of course, it's this kind of giving that is so important to maintaining the Red Cross's life-saving stocks

Explore the World of Spectators:
Protect What Matters

Live Love Bondi: Troika - Terry Burke,
Maurizio Terzini and Mario Venneri

If you encounter a registration screen, try this:
Bug MEdia Dragon Not
or
A Trick to Avoid Registration

Bloggers Down Under

Directory:

Eatonweb directory (Australia)
List of Ausie Blogs (via Anthony Hicks)

Election Coverage:

John Hatton: Fair Man

A Bunch of Sheilas and Blokes who blog:

Altreuter, Gregory
Anderson, Alan (The Razor)
Andrew Welder
Appleyard, Baden
Aussie Obsever
Barista
Bartlett, Andrew
Bahnisch, Mark
Batey, Paul - Daily Flute
Being A Dad
Bitchin' Monaro Guide
Blair, Tim
Boud, Daniel
Boynton
Carr, Bob
Chrenkoff
City State (Sep 2004)
Connors, Brett, - Being A Dad
Cook, Trevor
Corr, Robert
Coulthart, Ross a.k.a. NINE
Crazy Brave (Zoe)
Cumes, James a.k.a. LAKATOI
Daily Addict
Dawson, Ross
Dog Fight At Bankstown
Dunlop, Tim
Dunlop, Tim II
Electron Soup
Fifth Estate
From a LAN Down Under
From the Trenches
Gomes, Philip (June 04)
Hack Watch
Hardy, Marieke
Hatton, John
Heidelberg, Harry
Hornsby, Roy
Jericho, Greg: Grog's Gamut
KINGSTON, Margo
Lambert, Tim
Living Room
Loewenstein, Antony
Loewenstein, Antony *
Martin, Hugh
Mayne, Stephen a.k.a. CRIKEY
Mike Stuchbery
Morgan, David
Mornington
Morrow, James
New Matilda
News With Nipples
Observant Little
Parish, Ken (Dewey Classification of Political Siberia)
Polywise
Quiggin, John
Rank & Vile
Ray, John
Reasons You Will Hate Me
Robson, Alex (via Libertarian Society)
Sam and the City
Schaap, Rob
She Sells Sanctuary
Silent Running (successor to War Now)
Slattery, Bernard
Soon, Jason (Catallaxy)
Southerly Buster
Spin Starts Here
Starkoff, David (Inchoate)
Suki has an Opinion
There Aint no Sanity Clause (GG)
Tiley, David: Barista Extraordinaire
Tash
Washington, Stuart - TuMuT
Weatherall, Kim
Wickstein, Scott
Will Type For Food
You Cried for Night

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist,
wrote Salman Rushdie. The Iron Curtain came down since Rushdie's novel, the Satanic Verses, earned the Booker Prize-winning novelist death threats, but the question persists.

MEDIA DRAGON

We search the world ... So you can read thoughtful and down to earth media dragons at one place

ANTIPODEAN
If you find savvier writers/bloggers anywhere, drop me a line...
APO
Art Links
Apolitical blogs
Philip Adams
Australian Regulatory Review
Julian Burnside
Drawing Board
Margo Kingston (NHJ)
Antony Loewenstein
Chris Masters ::
Media Watch
Newcopia
Newcopia News
Alan Ramsey
Jim Soorley

*Archives - Election 2004
*SMH - Antony Loewenstein: Counterspin
*ABC - Matt Liddy: Poll Vault

AMERIKAN
A Hippercritical
A Media Savvy
Eric Alterman
Paul Colford
Richard Connelly
Cynthia Cotts
Ian Donnis
Dan Fost
Peter Johnson
Steve Johnson
Mark Jurkowitz
Mickey Kaus
Keith Kelly
Dan Kennedy
Staci Kramer
Howard Kurtz
"Media Person"
Michael Miner
Seth Mnookin
Robert Novak
Steve Outing
Sridhar Pappu
William Powers
Steve Rhodes
Michael Roberts
Tim Rutten
Danny Schechter
Jack Shafer
David Shaw
Russ Smith
Norman Solomon
Erik Wemple
James Wolcott
Michael Wolff

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EUROPEAN
An Eastern European Literature ;-) Havel, Kafka, Imrich
Daily Czech
Douglas Arellanes
European Dragons
European Overview
Bohemian Amerikan
Fistful of Euros
Guardian Weblog
Boris Johnson
McMillan
Michael Olson
NicMoc
Prague Blog
Russia of Dicovery
Spyblog: UK
The Budapest Mafia:
Rick Bruner
Nick Denton
Peter Maass
The Prague Rebellion:
Cinema Minima
Henry Copeland
Amy Langfield
Matt Welch
ZNet Czech & Slovak

Can one person make a difference?
It's easy to be cynical about the power of one. But a person's importance, so difficult to quantify in life, is perhaps more easily measured in death – and the gaping holes left behind

LOCAL

1stHeadlines.com
A Local Google News
ABCTales
Aussie Scan - Jeff Venture
Belinda Williams - Outback Painter
Bronte Capital
Bayosphere Gillmor: MD
Blogometer
Bookmarklets Every Blogger Should Have
Car Brokers: John Drayton
Competitive Capital: Steve Monaghan
Deep Blog
Dojo Cuts: Music for All Seasons and Reasons
Google.com
iTalk news: MD
Malleys Lawyers: Iceberg
Point of Impact: Lance Schafer
Prime Factor: John
Radical Reference
Sutton Place: Colm
Slow Lane: by William
Tactical Insulation: Peter
Wentworth Courier
Woollahra
World of Ribbons
Z - Topix Blog News

GLOBAL

101 Best Sites (Writing)
Battelle Media
Beautiful Atrocities
Best of the Rest
Blog Herald
Center for Democracy and Technology
Common Dreams
Cross Continent Manu
Council on Foreign Relations
Counter Terrorism
Crooked Timber
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Amitai Etzioni Notes
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Greatest Jeneration
Homelessness: Choice Or Necessity?
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Litblog Co-Op
Literature Study
Market Sentinel
Mas Media (Military)
Master New Media
Memeorandom
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Memigo
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Minate, Jim
Morph
News Motto
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Open Media 100 List
Peek: The Blog Of Blogs
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Political Fact Czechers
Pre Surfer
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Rittenhouse Review: James Capozzola
Scobleizer
Slashdot Politics
Smart Mobs
SreeTips
Struth: CNNN
Tech Dirt
Tom Paine
TPM Cafe
Your Right To Know
ZNet

Virtual Mausoleum
Blair, Tim (hiatus Dec 04)
Russell, James (rip Apr 05)
Sheil, Christopher (hiatus Nov 04)

Google in Society
Google Culture: Amazing Googol (10100)

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Monday, August 05, 2024

The Luke and Tom show: Inside the undoing of PwC

The Luke and Tom show: Inside the undoing of PwC

Read more about the PwC tax leaks scandal