Motley Kamuka

Joni Mitchell is amazing. From folk music to jazz, she's an amazing artist. I was reminded of that when I saw this article about her pre-debut work, a 5 disk compilation is coming out. ( NPR discusses. ) I first started listening to her with my first wife. Then I listened to Blue at my uncle's place, he said he got laid to Blue so many times. I later learned that the cover of Court and Spark was shot on the frozen Lake Mendota when she was in Madison. You can listen on Spotify . Here is a fascinating article of awesome music recommendations by Joni.

Quipu : an Incan kind of abacus.  Ceilidh : An Irish or Scottish social gathering, that can be a social call, or include music and dancing. Skiffle : is a genre of folk music with influences from blues, jazz, and American folk music, generally performed with a mixture of manufactured and homemade or improvised instruments.

This book is brilliant in all kinds of ways, including the prediction and the effects of a pandemic in 2010, but I found this extended passage quite descriptive of my eldest son (I lost paragraphs): "In fact, he’d never read a whole book all the way through, not even when he was supposed to for school. He would read only as much as he had to in order to do the assignment. Depending on the book, he might skim all the pages or he’d read a chapter or two from the beginning, middle, and end. Sometimes he’d just Google or SparkNote the book. He’d never once got into trouble for not reading a whole book—proof that reading every page could not be all that important. He wasn’t making any kind of statement. He was truly bored by most of the reading assigned at school—and he wasn’t the only one. Besides, he thought his parents were wrong. The kind of reading they did was something almost no one did anymore. Lots of successful people didn’t read books and the smartest kids at school weren’t ...

 "Oh God no, I never hope. Hope is pouting in advance. Hope is faith's richer, bitchier sister. Hope is the deformed addict bound incest monster of entitlement and fear." This is a quote from Frankie on Community.

Matthew Shipp is my favorite living pianist. You can watch his concert last night on YouTube at Roulette. you can see  Fujiwara/ Formanek/ Halvorson in Thumbscrew the night before. I like Halvorson . My daughter says she doesn't like the music and it's yucky, but then she can sit and look at it some. The cool move in this kind of jazz is to play a bunch of ear jarring stuff, build up your tolerance, and then they do a short riff of some sweet and simple. The contrast makes it amazing. Shipp came up playing with David Ware, the great Saxophonist and William Parker the great base player.  You can't really say what his music is like, but I think of Keith Jarrett in his unique performances on piano. Unfortunately Jarrett had 2 strokes . I guess you could call it avant garde because it's dissonant and unique, but every jazz performance is unique. I like Jason Moran too. And Ethan Iverson . And  Brad Mehldau . My favorite jazz pianist is Bill Evans . But I like Bud Powel...

My guilty little pleasure is Star Trek. Idealism and utopian future, confronting aggression. I don't have a TV so I haven't seen the new Picard series. I got a book called Picard , so I'll be reading it without seeing the show, my favorite way. I can create my own visualizations and then when I see the show I'll be a bit disappointed by how they visualize the story. I'm making my way through DS9 on Netflix, a show that deserved more of a following, and has probably gotten it in the post-TV world. I love not having to watch commercials, I would say that is the biggest quality of life issue that has happened in my lifetime. I was watching an DS9 episode where Jake wanted to buy his father something because he was down, but he had no money. The Federation exists in a post monetary world. I want to read Trekenomics , an economist examines the post-scarcity universe. I hope to read more into this subject. Reading Picard , I realized what the Romulans represent. They repr...

Sigrid Nunez's book Mitz is about Leonard Woolf 's marmoset. It includes a little biography about the couple. Leonard seemed to be quite a caretaker. I should like to read his novel of Ceylon . His stuff is free on Project Gutenberg .  It turns out I read her 2 great novels when I was in England in 88/9. I've read a biography of her, a short one. I've read The Hours too. I can't but help see her walking into the Thames.  Some recent articles: How Virginia Woolf’s work was shaped by music by Emma Sutton Why Do Fashion People Love Virginia Woolf So Much? Links Wikipedia Great Lives BBC Some of her photographs. Michael Cunningham on VW  (NY times)

  My dear friend told me his new favorite author was Sigrid Nunez . My library has a few books by her that I can get electronically. I got Mitz first. It's about a marmoset that Leonard and Virginia Woolf had. Nunez  has 8 novels and a sort of memoir of being around Susan Sontag and dating her son. She published her first book in 1995, when she was 44. She was an editorial assistant for the New York Review of Books. Her mother is German and her father is Panamanian-Chinese. Her first novel sounds like a memoir of her early years. Books: (x=read) A Feather on the Breath of God Naked Sleeper Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (X) For Rouenna The Last of Her Kind Salvation City (X) Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag The Friend (X) What Are You Going Through (X) Links NPR Interview The Friend : "With ‘The Friend,’ Sigrid Nunez Becomes an Overnight Literary Sensation, 23 Years and Eight Books Later" (NY Times) "she decided to write a novel about a woman who is grieving...

I should read Watt, which is on my shelf. I have quite a good post on Beckett on my abandoned Shakespeare Blog . But I wanted to have a Beckett post on this blog, so I could post things that come along like: J.M. Coetzee on 7 ways of looking at Beckett . Mental Floss Fruit of a life’s work deciphering Beckett

I'm drifting off literature, but reading the New Testament I can't help but raise these questions. How would god make herself known? If it's an activist god, then they could perform miracles. Bend conditionality or break how we understand the world of cause and effect, or create a world where evil is punished. Like god could have given Hitler cancer and killed him quick and we would just have thought it was causality.  My feeling is that if god gave man free will, he or she could still give cancer and we wouldn't know if it was god's hand or not.  So you get god's son, Jesus. The holy ghost puts an immaculate conception into Mary. Mary wasn't pregnant before she married Joseph, after sleeping with another man. This is the legend that grew up. Maybe Mary wasn't a virgin, and Jesus came up with that story, and Joseph was a good bloke because he loved Mary. And Jesus was a very spiritual person and wanted to spread monotheism. And maybe he was in a world of...

The Buddha talks about a mustard seed, but he tells a grieving woman to find one from a house where nobody has died. She learns that everyone has lost someone and that death is the way of the world. Jesus goes the other way. He's talking about heaven, and not in the here and now, but an afterlife.  Buddhism has the image of a net. The net has jewels in each axis and each jewel shines on the other jewels. So the teachings reinforce each other and illuminate each other.  Jesus throws out the garbage fish in his net. Mt. 13:58--Jesus doesn't do miracles in a town where they do not have faith. Seems like you should go the other way on that. I mean, do a really good miracle and they would probably convert. In other places he hangs out with bad people on purpose to convert them. Maybe he knew these people were not somehow open or receptive. I'm the kind of person that is easily incredulous because in my experience there is a lot of hooey out there, and people don't speak clea...

Mt 10:  The Buddha had 40 arhants go out and teach. Jesus had 12 disciples. Sangharakshita ordained 12 people in the founding of the WBO. He didn't want 12, but it ended up being that number for various reasons. They all taught a narrow path that was not easy. The fall of a sparrow is used in Hamlet. I liked "...be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves."  Mt. 11 "...those born of woman..." is a phrase from Macbeth.  Interesting quote through the mist of time. Children singing: ‘We played the pipe for you,  and you did not dance;  we sang a dirge,  and you did not mourn.’ There's a kind of I told you so aspect to this, but it comes from children perhaps busking and begging. Later there's a thing about performing miracles, and even that didn't convert you. There's a kind of spitefulness. I mean I'm a father and my children don't always listen and there's a part of me that quotes the phrase, "...those that don't listen w...

I got to the beatitudes, and got hung up on the first one: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven." I read a few interpretations and some people do go on a bit without saying anything. I guess it could mean a number of things, like start where you are, or all this is for people who have a blank in this spot, or even you know, the people who pretend to be spiritual aren't necessarily going to get into heaven. I do feel like it is paradoxical, or I don't know what the original Aromaic word for spirit really means, or maybe it was Luke who got it right, and Matthew just added "in spirit" for his own reasons.  5. To continue there is some business about light. He says he's building on the laws. He says murder is wrong. He says try to reconcile quarles, and resolve issues before they get to court. Adultery is wrong. It's better to cut your eye out than to commit adultery in your heart, better than going to hell. Divorce shoul...

I'm going to read the New Testament  as literature. It's so important to understand references to the bible in literature, so really there is no escaping it. I live in the USA, and while the people who say they are Christians, their actions say otherwise. That's an ethnic Christian. Someone who is raised up in the tradition but hasn't really committed to the spiritual life. They can go to church and give money to the church, they can even be a priest. But if you're not trying to live the spiritual life, then you're only just an ethnic Christian, you were raised in the tradition and you follow along enough to seem to be spiritual but underneath you're just a regular person without spirituality. And that's OK. I'm coming to see the spiritual life as a rare option.  I like the God of love, though it's speculated that that was a later insert, and there is a quote where Jesus rebukes the person who rebukes the woman for giving him expensive oil, sayin...

I'm down to reading  The Sun Also Rises  every other year, but he was my second favorite author. I would also consider reading  For Whom The Bell Tolls  and  A Farewell To Arms  and  A Movable Feast  if I go to Paris again. The stories are good too.  (My favorite fiction authors go like this: Vonnegut, Heinlein, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Kundera, Paul Auster, Raymond Carver, Philip Roth, Octavia Butler, Murakami, Shakespeare, Flannery O'Connor, Becky Chambers, Sigrid Nunez.) The last thing I read was half of a biography about him. Turns out he was a shit to Sherwood Anderson and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Anderson helped him get his first break, and Fitzgerald really saved  The Sun Also Rises  by editing it. He never credited them or thanked them. Also he was a shit when he was wealthy and his family got onto hard times. I still like his writings, nobody is perfect. He has clay feet.  The other important thing about Hemingway is that hi...