Motley Kamuka

Portrait of Devotion: The spiritual life of Alice Coltrane by Shankari C. Adams The introduction starts: “It was August 1975; a group of us had gone to a music hall in Northern California to hear Alice Coltrane perform in concert. Certain recreational activities, such as drinking and smoking, had been banned from the evening venue. This allowed for a higher vibrational energy to fill the room’s atmosphere. It felt clean and clear. Subsequently, the consciousness of those present felt elevated. The audience was seated and filled with joyful expectation.”

Book club picked the book I voted for. I feel guilty winning, there were 3 other worthy memoirs by women:  House of Sticks by Ly Tran,  Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong,  A Living Remedy by Nicole Chung. I'll try to get those out of my library maybe. I loved this book, and it made me think and write a lot of things. I was interested in why he was still friends with a dopey friend with bad taste. That's an exaggeration, but maybe not in terms of what pushed him away in their relationship, which was actually quite strong. Stay True  won the Pulitzer Prize for memoirs in 2023.  Hua Hsu is the son of Taiwanese immigrants. His friend Ken's family came from Japan many generations ago. He starts out talking about wanting friends in his car hearing his latest mixtape. I found a playlist of songs and artists mentioned in the book. I played the music while reading the book. I always think a lot about what music to play when I'm reading a book, and when there's a 77 ...

433-447 : The enemy is listening, Der Feind hoert zu. 33 more sections left, including this one. Tyrone Slothrop, a lieutenant in the U.S. Army toward the end of World War II. Stationed in England, he is sent on a strange mission to locate the staging area both for the V-2 rockets bombarding England and for the prototype of a new rocket, the A4. The A4 is even more destructive than the V-2. The Germans are preparing to launch it in a desperate effort to change the course of the war. Slothrop goes to the French Riviera, to Switzerland, and ultimately to the “Zone,” occupied Germany after the hostilities officially have ended. Slothrop is a naïve young man who is never fully aware of what he is doing. As an infant, he had been experimentally conditioned by a famous behaviorist, and the behaviorist psychologist Ned Pointsman tries to make use of that conditioning for his own purposes. Made aware on the Riviera that he is being manipulated, Slothrop escapes from the surveillance t...

My local bookstore has a zoom book club, so I thought I would try it. We read Orbital by Samantha Harvey, and I really enjoyed it.  I listened to it, which was a unique experience. I bought the book and when I got home, my library delivered the audio book to my phone. So I listened to it. Listening is good, because you just keep rolling, but I also space out and can fall asleep. So talking with 15, I just counted from my notes, and exactly right, was interesting. I love listening to others. I also found myself expressing myself, I thought I was pretty eloquent. I was in a book club at my children's school, and it was pretty good, then the social worker retired, and someone who wasn't good at running a book club took over and killed it. A new one started up, but she wasn't good either. My cousins are in a book club they've been in for like 15 years, and I wish I could get into it, but the invitation has never arrived. I really like book clubs, I should do more, I'm ...

From pp 397-433: Franz Pokler , a German rocket scientist. He is marginally associated with early attempts to develop rockets in the 1920's. During the war, Weissmann controls Pokler, giving him routine assignments and keeping him in line by allowing him yearly visits from a girl who he says is Pokler's daughter. The girl spends the rest of the year in a concentration camp, and Weissmann's implied threat is that she will be killed if Pokler fails to cooperate with Weissmann's scheme. Weissmann's purpose is to use Pokler to make one small part for the A4 rocket. In the end, having performed his task, Pokler is released; Slothrop meets him living quietly in the ruins of a children's village after the end of the war. His daughter also survives. Wiki notes on the Franz Pokler section 397-433 Abstract of "Franz Pökler's Anti-Story: Narrative and Self in Gravity's Rainbow" by Robert L. McLaughlin. (access the article  here  from  Pynchon Notes ) Gra...

Struggling with The Magic Mountain and Gravity's Rainbow right now, so maybe not the best time to launch reading projects, but after watching a bunch of Jane Austen movies, I moved on to Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch and Jane Eyre.  Sense and Sensibility (1811) Pride and Prejudice (1813) Mansfield Park (1814) Emma (1816) Northanger Abbey (1818, posthumous) Persuasion (1818, posthumous) Middlemarch 1842. Jane Eyre 1847. Wuthering Heights 1847. Great Expectations 1861, then read all of Dickens. 

I'm ambivalent about Thomas Pynchon, I find him quite complicated. I've struggled so much to read GR, I'm on p. 402 of 760. I have read V, Vineland, Inherent Vice, The Calling of Lot 49, Bleeding Edge. I still have to finish GR, Slow Learner, Mason & Dixon, Against The Day. Inherent Vice is my favorite. He's 87 and most people pooh poohed any more novels, but it's looking like The novel, “Shadow Ticket,” is due out on Oct. 7 from Penguin Press! That puts a deadline on me finishing GR, I can push to get it read by the time this new novel comes out. I'm not exactly done with everything so it's not as urgent as perhaps other thirsty fans. R/ThomasPynchon is going wild. I gave a gift article of the Times report on Bluesky . I did the math, if I read 2 pages a day from now until October 7th, I'll be done with Gravity's Rainbow and ready to read the new novel Shadow Ticket when it comes out.