Reading

I try to focus on one book and push my way through it. I have side books when one book becomes tedious. I also read soccer and Buddhism and poetry, I guess I would call them category books for when I want soccer, Buddhism or poetry. Today I have a day off and I thought to read all the books I'm reading in my bedside pile, and write about them.

The Great White Bard by Farah Karim-Cooper: Race and Shakespeare is a much needed topic. I wrote a review of the beginning of the book on my Shakespeare blog. I find the idea that racism doesn't exist quite offensive. I've learned about the slave trade by Englishmen who got knighthoods during Shakespeare's life. I found out that Kant cited Hume in favor of white supremacy. It's a personal book as well, and she discusses being a Pakistani heritage woman, grew up in America, went to college in England, and trying to get into English academic world was not easy.

Kukai: Major Works translated by Toshito S. Hakeda. This professor passed away in 1984, you can read his NY Times obit. He passed away from cancer at the age of 59. He came to USA around the age of 28, in 1952. He got his doctorate in 1960 at Yale, and joined the Columbia faculty in 1961. 

Kukai (774-835) was a great Japanese Buddhist who created the Shingon sect in Japan, a vajrayana sect. He felt great affinity for a sutra and went to China to study it with traditional masters, and was empowered in the lineage. Today you can walk around the island of Shikoku, and visit 88 temples as a pilgrimage. In his time Kukai was a towering figure that contributed to many subjects beyond Buddhism, and advocated universal education. He set up a GoFundMe page by letter traveling home:

"I, Kükai, was born on an island where reeds grow high and was raised on a tiny strip of land. My caliber is limited and my learning narrow. Yet, at the risk of my life, I have eagerly sought the truth; and to this end I have traveled to many places. Seeking for the sea of teachings in this great country, I hope to pour its waters over the dry land to the east. Entrusting my life to the perils of the ocean, I at last have come here in order to find a means to grasp the truth. Now I am in possession of about three hundred scrolls of Buddhist scriptures, treatises, and commentaries, and great mandalas of the Matrix (garbha) and Diamond (vajra) Realms, etc., which I managed to reproduce in the city of Ch'ang-an. I exhausted all my efforts and drained all my resources in seeking after and reproducing them. Owing to my inferior capacity and to the magnitude of the teachings, however, what I have gathered is no more than a strand of hair. Gone are all my reserves. Since I am no longer able to hire anyone, I have copied them myself, forgetting to eat and sleep. The chariot of the sun does not reverse its direc-tion, and thus the time for my departure has neared. To whom should I open my heart so as to dispel my anxiety? ... Humbly I beg you to reflect upon the will of the Buddha,1 to have compassion on me who have come from afar, and to assist me in transmitting to my distant country, regardless of their quantity, whatever teachings might enlighten the darkness of the people and help save them materially, be these scriptures, ethical texts, philosophical treatises; biographical records pertaining to Confucian-ism, Taoism, and Buddhism; books of poetry or of rhyme-prose (fu); collections of inscriptions; or texts on divination, medicine, linguistics, arts, mathematics, logic. . . ." p. 3

Kukai considered the visual, literature, music but also acts and gestures, and civic efforts to be art. This is perhaps a very wide interpretation of Buddhism to extend into art and civics. This was a huge influence in Japanese society at the time, and the ripples of his action come down to me today in NYC. Along with Saicho (767-822), Kukia is a great popularizer of Buddhism in Japan. The only reason Tendai would become more popular than Shingon was that they assimilated the lessons of Shingon and Saicho was taught by Kukau. The following leaders of the Tendai sects would be more popular than the following teachers of the Shingon sects. They were influential in medieval Japan. 

The Second Murder by Denise Mina. First Philip Marlowe novel by a female writer, that was good enough for me to pick up this book (NY Times). I'm a huge fan of Raymond Chandler, and really need to reread his books. I feel like LA is riddled with the sequelae of great wealth disparity. I google his political views. Someone wrote an article that he was more astute than Dashiell Hammett who supposedly had stalinist views (The Federalist):

"The more politically correct academics see no value in Chandler and dismiss him and his protagonist Philip Marlowe as homophobic and misogynist. To a certain extent, this is valid. Chandler followed the prejudices of his day when dealing with gay characters (in The Big Sleep he called homosexuals “queens” and “fags). But unlike other mystery novelists such as Jim Thompson or James Ellroy today, Chandler didn’t follow the noir theme of a good, honest man seduced and then brought down by a femme fatale." 

Not sure how politically correct it is to be so dismissive of good writing, every author has their flaws. I find the amount of strawman slaying these days to be insane. It is possible just not not like writers and then list misogyny and homonegativity as a reason. You're also allowed to see the author as not necessarily endorsing sentiments their characters say. Chandler wasn't great with plot, and was difficult to read, so if you don't like difficulties and absurdism, then maybe don't read him. Not everything is political. The Federalist is a conservative paper/website. 

"He denounced J.Edgar Hoover as inept and dangerous. He bashed the Catholic Church for having “fascist” tendencies. Yet he also was highly critical of Communism. Indeed, in his estimation, Catholicism came off better. Unlike Communists, they were capable of “internal dissent,” and in a typically pithy passage, he wrote that priests didn’t “shoot you in the back of the head for being 48 hours behind the Party line.”" (op cit)

Ron Capshaw in the Federalist celebrates the flaws of misogyny and homonegativity. He's good because he has characters with dim view on women and homosexuals. That's more extreme to me than making the curriculum more diverse. 

Anyway, having a woman take over the narrative does improve things, and I like the novel so far, hope I finish it. 

I like representation, since graduating from college, where I read a lot of amazing things, I sought out diversity and differences. Ron Capshaw of The Federalist celebrates the flaws of misogyny and homonegativity, as if they are badges of honor. We are not the same.

Back to Philip Marlowe: Chandler is not consistent as to Marlowe's age. In The Big Sleep, set in 1936, Marlowe's age is given as 33, while in The Long Goodbye (set 14 years later), Marlowe is 42. In a letter to D. J. Ibberson of April 19, 1951, Chandler noted among other things that Marlowe is 38 years old. 1903, 1908, 1913 average to 1908. WW1 began 1914 and ended 1918. WW2 was 1939-1945. The Great depression was 1929-1939. 

I'm not sure when this book is set, but Nazi's are a threat. The artist isn't real, he's a fiction. The rich patriarchal families aren't real.

Not half way through and I have that Marlowe feeling. 

I'm at the part in Thoreau's biography by Walls where he's gotten out of prison for one night, and he decides to take a trip up to Maine and climb Katahdin. He arranges for Louis Neptune, a Native American, as a guide to take him and his cousin to the mountain. He doesn't like government, but in the wilderness he realizes the true source of evil is men, not society. In the end Neptune never showed up, and he saw a bunch of logging camps, and clear cut land. This part isn't written so well, perhaps there's not enough stuff, and it's jumbly. I don't read a whole lot. I'll push through it on another day.

I really like the Concord Transcendentalists. Read books on Emerson, Margret Fuller, and now Thoreau. I like Whitman, Dickens, Hawthorn and Melville. I write about Thoreau on my Hiking In Nature blog, among other things. I half heartedly began writing a book, but then I realized I didn't want to just write a biography. 

Same with Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, I'm not wild about it, but I hope I eventually just grind through it. I've gotten past the half way point, so I think I could finish it, but I only read 2 pages today.

Morbo by Phil Ball is about Spanish soccer. He's a good writer, and I look up words, and he knows about soccer. I've really enjoyed learning about the other teams in Spain. I'm a Barca fan, I've read Fear and Loathing In La Liga. I stopped reading the book because he really cuts into the Barca hype, and that really shocked me. I think it's good to be disillusioned, but I put the book down, and I've been reading Inverted Pyramid instead. I put that book down too, I read it in the park watching my daughter after school, but she han't gone to the park that much this summer. Anyway, picking the book up again it's weird to see the various theories about why they chose their colors. Early history can sometimes be all over the place, and confusing, and I don't always experience it as smooth going down, but also not worth grinding out to get the meaning. I read through all of Shakespeare, watching the plays, reading outside books, and reading the plays closely, and I really feel like I punctured some barrier in confidence about grinding through and getting meaning. I know I can grind, but I don't know if it's worth it sometimes. I'm also not just finishing books, I switch if I'm off a book. Today I'm going through my bedside pile, and seeing which ones I want to read. So far it's the Mina novel, but I know I love Mary Oliver and her book is next. I've just read 9 of her books and I'm giving myself a little break.

Anyway, I find soccer writing really fascinating and sometimes crushingly boring and vague, it's a real up and down experience, kind of like the games. I really like Fever Pitch, and How Soccer Explains The World. And I've read a lot of other books that were up and down. I'd say Morbo is better than most books, but it's all over the place.

When I read, I look up people and read their Wikipedia pages. I know Wikipedia isn't perfect, but it oftentimes gives me a larger context to help me assimilate information, and gives me pictures of people. Ball writes about 3 players in the early period Paulino Alcántara, Ricardo Zamora and Josep Samitier. I'm reading that Alcantara supported Franco, and Zamora was in jail, no info on Samitier. They all went to Real Madrid. The lack of information is evocative, you have to fill in the details with your own imagination. 

Supposedly Joao Felix cried when he recently joined the team, but he's not in the squad yet for today's game. He took a lower salary too. Today's Barcelona is a weird team, but I'm trying to flow with it because it was the first team I've ever followed. NYCFC is my heart team, but they suck right now, so I spread my interest out across other leagues and teams to cope. Barca plays at 3:00 and I'll watch the game. My son talks about "prime Barca," when Messi, Suarez and Neymar were on the tean. When I started watching the team was before Neymar came in 2013. My son read children's book on Messi and Neymar as a kid. 

West Wind by Mary Oliver is my 10th book by her that I'm reading. My consumption of her small books is because I'm reading as many of those until I read her last anthology and collection, Devotions. It's like listening to all the albums before you listen to the greatest hits album, except the book is big and contains many poems, so it's more like a box set, the kind of magnum opus. Each little book has really wowed me. She carriers out the Transcendentalist project of being in nature, and writing poems about it. I wouldn't just box her in with that one word, she's more for sure, but she does mention Transcendentalists in her poems and writings. I write a bit about Oliver on my Hiking In Nature blog, which is hiking, nature, Thoreau and Oliver these days. 

The Buddha by Bhikkhu Nanamoli is one of my backup devotional books, a 1992 edition based on a 1972 anthology and translation of the Pali Canon. The Pali Canon is a wild collection of the Dharma. It's so amazing that it comes down to us. I've read most of the Sutta Pitaka. 

I'm reading a lot of Buddhist books though. Buddha Nature by Sallie King, Mindfulness of Breathing by Bikkhu Analayo, Noble Warrior by Thanissaro Bikkhu