Motley Kamuka

6/11/25 When I finish a book I'm focusing for a book club, I fall back onto my pile. Today it was Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism: According to the Esoteric Teachings of the Great Mantra, Oṁ Mani Padme Hūm by Anagarika Govinda, and I've been reading this book for years, but I really liked chapter 9. He brings in Rilke.  I was reading This Is What It Sounds Like by Susan Rogers, and Ogi Ogas. And I learned about Shaggs , outsider music. A father made 3 daughters practice music all day, and never gave them a lesson, and then recorded an album in 1969, which is the weirdest thing in the world. The engineers would ask why they stopped, and it was because they made a mistake. The engineers thought it was all a mistake. But it was rediscovered in 1980, reprinted, and went through several reprintings. It's really bad, but authentic. Lots of famous musicians liked it. I read some more of Rumi's Masnavi book 1, and he's telling a story about clergy who teach the wrong th...

P Djèlí Clark is Dexter Gabriel (born 1971), known by his pen name Phenderson Djèlí Clark, is an American speculative fiction writer and historian, an assistant professor in the department of history at the University of Connecticut. He uses a pen name to differentiate his literary work from his academic work. This pen name, "Djèlí", makes reference to the griots – traditional Western African storytellers, historians and poets.  In 2022, his fantasy novel A Master of Djinn won the Nebula in 2022 and Locus Awards for first novel. ( Wikipedia ) Vocabulary ( A Master of Djinn):   Mamluk ,  Jellabiya  (Which he spells "gallabiyah") and Bawab , Fatimids , Ottomans , ulama , Al-Jahiz , Ifrit , Qareen . Kabed is a kind of bread. Mish is traditional fermented cheese from Egypt and Sudan. Souk is an open air market. In ancient Egyptian religion, Hathor was a powerful and popular goddess associated with love, beauty, music, fertility, and joy. She was also a protec...