Motley Kamuka

  Taking another run at ancient Greek mythology. One person leads to another. Semele to Selenos to Ampelos to Ikarios to Ariadne. It's like Gravity's Rainbow with a new character introduce every page. Reading Athena now by O'Connor, like these graphic novels. Thinking about Athena by The Who, which isn't about Athena, it's about Theresa Russell. One of my foundational mythologies is The Razor's Edge (1994), not the book, the movie. My father says The Eternals (2021) isn't a good movie but Angelina Jolie is Athena, called Thena.  Links: TED ED on Prometheus by Iseult Gillespie.  Understanding Mythology with Joseph Campbell YouTube Books read: George O'Connor Dionysos

Instinctual subjective list: Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut New York Trilogy by Paul Auster Emma by Jane Austen Moby Dick by Herman Melville The Sellout by Paul Beatty Malloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett The Hobbit by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway Franny & Zooey by Jerome David Salinger One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Haruki Murakami Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte Middlemarch by George Eliot Parable of Talents by Octavia Butler Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosiński

I'm listening to Mark Chernow's book about Twain . Clemens is idealistic and doesn't like racism until he goes to New York, and then he becomes an out of town rube from Hannibal Missouri, and racist. He rejects a religious life because they support slavery. He's a prankster, joker, comedian, story teller. He works as a printer, but he's fairly internerant. His brother found a slave on an island, and that is the basis for Jim in Huck Finn, the point of listening to this book is to give some background to understand a rereading that book.  Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in 1835. Samuel refused to go to school. His mother was the story teller and held the family's emotion. The family's fortunes would go up and down and at one point his mother had to cook for a family so the family could have housing. The father was a humorless judge, among other things. Clemens remembers one joke in his life with his father. His father got sick and died young. Should we see...

Introduction: Thomas Pynchon 's probable last novel drops October 7th, he's 88 for goodness sakes, and I've been trying to force myself to finish Gravity's Rainbow . I'm in the 500's of a 760 page novel for the longest times as I join 3 books clubs, and don't really follow through with most of the book. It's October now and there's not much time before the book comes out.  I'm on page 505 of Gravity's Rainbow on October 1st and I've got to read 43 pages a day, which sounds easy, but not with Pynchon when you're looking up everything. I've posted a lot about looking things up, but I can't do that down the home stretch. I can't write about what an ax bell is, a new discovery of something in the world I didn't know existed. That's what I like about Pynchon, he's always teaching me things. I will update this post as I get the book and read it.  There are just too many amazing quotations (p. 509 GR): "Tempor...

Gravity's Arc  by by David Darling is a fun book in which I am learning a lot. It's way past what I need to teach my 4th grade daughter about gravity. Strato is an interesting cat. Roger Bacon is an interesting cat. Nicolo Tartaglia is an interesting cat.  Darts was a game developed to help people learn ballistics for the military. I had a darts phase my senior year in high school, and would drink beers and play darts in the basement. I got a boars hair dartboard. 

  They took down this photo, as part of the pedophile's vision to not admit to any mistakes about slavery, or make anyone feel bad, in his love for white supremacy, and tyranny.  There's a part of me that wants to reread Greenblatt's Tyranny, about Shakespeare's presentation of tyrants. Maybe I should read Hannah Arendt's article "Lying in Politics." My pile of books started today with Gravity's Arc by by David Darling. History of science is really fun to me. Leviathan Wakes was only half read in the month I had to read it. I both feel released from the obligation to read it, and I want to finish it. I also have Zeal by Jerkins to finish, so now I have 2 books hanging around my neck, and I don't think I should take up a book club book until I finish these two books. I'm always reading Right Concentration by Leigh Brasington, and Tibetan Mysticism by Govinda, because I have to read dharma every day. I'm also reading Jack Kornfield's ...