Motley Kamuka

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari  is a book I've been wanting to read for a while.  I read 1493 : Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann , which is supposed to be part of the big history genera , from the Big Bang to Present. His point was that at that time, the continents were all connected a way, and made things possible like the pandemic we're going through. When I look at the wikipedia entry I don't see either of their names in the list of people who study it, but I guess they were both popularizers perhaps.  Reading the book, I have thought of 3 other works I have read. Clan and the Cave Bear includes sex between Homo Sapiens and Homo Neanderthal, which tips it towards the assimilation theory instead of the wiping out the other versions of humans. Humans are notoriously mean about little differences, it's not hard to imagine wars between competing human species.  The other work I thought of was the movie franchise...

 "I know you're just barfing Wikipedia entries to avoid feeling." I love the horney Arizona trash, the indecisive Ethicist, the swamp city trash, the upper class people pleaser. I don't really know why the architect does what he does. Janet is of course everyone's favorite. I love it when they're all Janet in the void, I love those kind of moves.  The first season is a setup for the reversal of finding out it's not the good place. Blew my mind the first time I saw that. The second season is a jumble of reboots of the mission, and it's about judging others. In a way it's all about the judgement of what is good, considering people have the potential to change. Perhaps the potential to change is a theme. I took ethics with the glorious Claudia Card (at UW), and she was a student of John Rawls. So I enjoy all the ethical discussions.  I had not hear about the happiness machine. Should we just do everything to make everyone else happy? That would really...

Charlie Parker died at 34, and the 66 years since he has died have only increased his reputation.  The sad thing that happened after a car accident was that he was given heroin and sought it out after recovered. The other sad thing is that his greatness paired with drug use, caused a lot of people to try drugs in an effort to be like him. He was great in spite of the drug use, not because of it.  My journey with jazz started with Richard Davis. I took his class at UW, and when I moved to NYC, I lived with my aunt and uncle, and my uncle had a good jazz CD collection. He favored Miles Davis, but had some great stuff. Zoot Simms, Oliver Nelson were some CDs I loved. I've seen a lot of Saxophone leaders and they were all influenced by Parker. I lived in the East Village, a few blocks from Parker's house. My first wife thought my interest in jazz was weird. I liked it all, wanted to hear it all. Tompkins Square had a Bird Festival every Labor Day weekend. I've gone a few times...

I read Poor People . It was his first book, and conveys the sort of desperate plight of poor people. It is an epistolary novel.  I like his kind of "person on the verge of a nervous breakdown" kind of writing, people on the edge. It's kind of gothic.  His biography could be a novel. Dostoevsky was saved the last minute in a firing squad like it happens in his novels. He was sent to Siberia. He was married twice, his second wife outlived him. Links: Fyodor Dostoevsky  (1821 – 1881) (Wikipedia) Dostoevsky 8 episode series in Russian  with subtitles (Amazon Prime) The Idiot (YouTube) 14 minute video biography (YouTube) Professor Jordan Peterson  (YouTube) Dostoevsky Studies Journal Dostoevsky Society Dostoevsky in Saint Petersburg Complete Books Can Dostoevsky Still Kick You in the Gut? by David Denby in the New Yorker 2012. Irwin Weil on Dostoevsky

 I toyed with coming out saying it was a failed experiment, but if I'm honest, feminine is proving to be very effective. New Zealand and Germany are run by a woman and they very much did the right thing (in stark contrast to the USA asshat). Women work better, they are relational and have empathy. I'll forever feel betrayed by American women who vote for Trump. Like an omnivore's ignoring the subjectivity of animals just as cute as their dog, they withhold sympathy in politics. I can't be bothered to learn the history of suffrage this year. I've got enough projects already: Raise my daughter and create a meaningful life. I'm currently reading Flannery O'Connor and Dostoevsky, I read lots of Buddhism in the Pali Canon, and I gork out watching a lot of Netflix and Amazon Prime videos. I do most of the dishes, and am a pathetic houseminder, but I do spend a lot of time cleaning and taking out the garbage. Homeschooling is hard. How do you explain she can't ...

This confection has the dream girl, just wants sex not a relationship, because she's too messed up. My dream girl is Natalie Portman, so I accidentally watched it. I realized I've watched it before. That's pretty terrible, I've seen it, but I forgot it. That's how memorable it is. Money grab for everyone involved. And lots are involved. People from New Girl. Mindy Kaling, Greta Gerwig. What a stupid movie. I guess it's a guilty pleasure if I've watched it twice. Stormship Trooper used to be a guilty pleasure, but it's got cred, so that makes it ineligible. 

 I know when someone sees a facebook post and does something bad, a thought that crosses my mind is that Facebook should censor the post. In the New York Times , there's an article where a monk had to flee Cambodia because of a "Disinformation campaign on Facebook." Of course the person doing the disinformation campaign, but who is that? They say a "fake facebook profile" had a video of him bragging that he slept with all the women in a family. They think this smear campaign is because he's an activist, a critic of the regimes authoritarianism policies and by extension Prime Minister Hun Sen . Agents of authoritarian tendencies use the technology to "make life better" for their citizens. If they could just get over their insecurities of being criticized. Yesh.  I have sympathy for a monk, but that system seems so foreign. In the USA it's Christian wackos who are doing those type of things. And/or bullies. I need to reread 1983 . I started readi...

Read "The Barber" and "The Wildcat" and "The Crop" in The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor . Now I'm on "The Turkey". Listened to Flannery O'Connor episode 59 on the History of Literature Podcast (on Spotify). Rambling meditations on O'Connor as it intersects with the life of the podcaster. His mentor was a correspondent of FO'C. So I read "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" Pretty bleak. I'll have to reread it to appreciate it more. It uses the phrase "pickaninny". My grandfather used that phrase. I reread a Raymond Carver story for a paper I wrote and it became more and more meaningful every reading.

Finished my 4th watching of Star Trek: Enterprise . It doesn't really hit its stride until the 4th season and then it's all over. I always like the eye candy. It was interesting to read that Jolene Blalock was an awkward child, an outcast, felt ugly. I liked the 4th season when she's trying to control her emotions. Reading that they rushed the last episode, and many think the last episode is illegitimate, they should cut that one. Killing Trip was a mistake. I didn't feel that much of a clang. The setting is an idealized future, exploration, curiosity is a great motive. Greed is often an underlying motive. Or weird ideas of purity. I liked it that there was a struggle to suppress humans only movement on Earth. We've always had that shadow haunting us. Favorite episode were the ones where Archer goes onto Vulcan and finds the original and lost writings of Surak . I found a version of the teachings of Surak .  It's so weird the inspiration of Vulcans was Buddhists...

  I love the show Rita , about a fiery teacher in Denmark. Her friend Hjørdis is a by the books, the perfect foil.  Rita wears tight jeans, she smokes and makes wise faces to gaze off into the distance. I could go on and on, but I came to write about Ale's Stones . One day the group goes on a trip to the ancient site in Sweden. I didn't know about these stones. Part of this blog is about geography. Ale's Stones is 59 large boulders set up in the shape of a ship. They think it might have been some kind of ritual space for death rituals, but they don't actually know what it was for, and there are various theories you can read about on the Wikipedia page.  I went on Google Maps and it's hour and thirty six minute drive from Rodovre Denmark where Rita's school is, to the site in Sweden.

The short stories of Flannery O'Connor book starts out with unpublished stories, her 6 stories for her masters degree. So what you get is a kind a "see the artist develop" start to the book. You can see that she has finely crafted her sentences, she is not just a writer, she is also a great editor of her own work. But this book is everything we could get our hands on. I wonder if there is a 5 best stories book. You can get the way they came out her 2 books with short stories.  She gave us 4 books of art. Digestible is part of the appeal of her oeuvre. There's not an overabundance of writing about her. I'd be curious to see what other famous writers she got to know there. I began to trust her. She will not make careless mistakes, or disappoint. There is nothing worse than being partially abandoned by a writer. There is a movie out about her. In some ways a project you could get sucked into is the idea that she is part of the cannon. Her racism wants to push her out...

 

 So reading Paul Elie's essays, one in  Commonweal : "The inconvenient truth is that O’Connor stated her dislike of “negroes...particularly the new kind” twice in May 1964. That is, she did so very late in her career, after she revised her story “Revelation,” deep into the Civil Rights Era, ten weeks before her death. That is, those remarks defy any claim that she was repentant, “recovering,” or undergoing a “slow conversion” on matters of race." Paul Elie in  New Yorker : "The sight of white students and black students at Columbia sitting side by side and using the same rest rooms repulsed her." I was pretty upset when I found out Hemingway was ungrateful to Sherwood Anderson and Fitzgerald. The first helped him get his foot in the door. The second edited his great work  The Sun Also Rises . Gratitude towards supporters is essential in my book.  "Clay feet" is what my therapist would say. O'Connor thought James Baldwin would be insufferable as a w...

 When you're young it starts at the covers. Or someone reads to you and you only hear the voice and don't know anything about a book.  At some point they cut you off and won't let you read to them. I remember when that happened to my boys. They would just play on their phones barely phased. Ruby will only let me read books she has chosen. No unauthorized reading. She knows what she wants. She is so like her mother. She will be a success, and the winds of the world will buffett her thisa say and thata way. Yessirrrreeee. That's the Flannery O'Connor coming out in me. She's amazing in her own way. I'm writing a blog on Wise Blood . So then it's Hardy Boys and whatever the librarian thinks you might like, to help you make a decision, but the decision is still yours. The covers don't really convey the insides. It still felt like work for me. My friend's sister was going to throw out a box of books. I reached in and grabbed Slaughterhouse Five . I rea...

 Of course I was enchanted with Elizabeth Warren and hoped someone who didn't need it would be elected. We need that kind of ruler, not a galloping egomaniac narcissist rapist who tells us to not believe our lying eyes. My only question is what veep would help the cause. A female is good because nobody would kill Biden, those kind of wackos don't want a woman president. So in a way she would be good assassination insurance. And she would be the best VP in history. She would get so much done. She's a pragmatist who can see the pain in bankruptcy. and if she were not a woman would be a great Republican, except she turned on them and didn't betray her class. But can we depend on a VP that doesn't bring any voters. We need a veep that brings in some votes. Maybe cancels out Kanye West? People on both sides have problems with Kamala Harris. You sort of heard a black woman muttering whenever Donald Trump spoke and she could be that voice, but there's nobody perfect fo...

There is the book, which I'm currently reading. Suddenly (page 93) I realized she was portraying the vacuity of southern masculinity. The negative example, the anti-hero. What not to be. And yet you recognize it more than you would care to admit. He's also an atheist in the Bible Belt. He talks about having a church of the no Christ. Then he becomes Humbert Humbert. But then he has O'Connor's sexuality and wafts away, avoiding intimacy, pushes away the teen who tries to crawl into his bed. There's a kind of lack of intimacy in every character, nobody is really wanted or powerful in any real way. Haze is schizoid. Isolation.  Wikipedia writes: "O'Connor states that the book is about freedom, free will, life and death, and the inevitability of belief. Themes of redemption, racism, sexism, and isolation also run through the novel." There is a movie . It's for a fee on Amazon Prime. The cool thing now is that when you search a movie, they will tell you...

My daughter sometimes comes into my room when I'm falling asleep. She likes to watch Community, a show that is probably inappropriate for her, but honestly it is a little wholesome. Troy loves the actor Levar Burton, and he meets him. They have some food together, and Troy finally bursts at meeting his idol. At one point he starts to sing the Reading Rainbow song, "Butterfly in the sky/I can go twice as high." The full lyrics are here for the Reading Rainbow Theme Song : Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high Take a look, it's in a book, A Reading Rainbow! I can go anywhere Friends to know, and ways to grow A Reading Rainbow! I can be anything Take a look, it's in a book A Reading Rainbow Reading Rainbow! Ooooooooooh I found 2 episodes, one in Egypt, that fascinated my daughter, and one on an African Arts festival in Central Park. Someone recorded 2 episodes on a VCR . I explained a VCR to my daughter but I think she put it in the "Not important" b...