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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
BTRIPP's LiveJournal:
| Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 | |
| 10:28 pm | Caught up ...  This is another book that's taken me a while to get around to reviewing, not (as in the case of the recent Paine review) because I was avoiding typing up a lot of quotes, or that I was particularly avoiding it, but because it's one of those things that just "is what it is" and I'm not really competent to address it on "critical" levels such as translation, or interpretation from original documents.I likely bought Thich Nhat Hanh's Old Path White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha back in the early 90's, assuming that it was something like an "introduction to Buddhism", and it sat on various shelves and in assorted boxes awaiting for "the right time" to pick it up. Imagine my surprise, nearly two decades later, when I discover that it's actually a very charming "Life of the Buddha", and that the somewhat mis-leading sub-title "Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha" refers to sort of "following along" rather than "following" in an active sense! In my defense, back when I bought this (and many other books), I would order dozens of books at a time just because they looked interesting, and had kind of pegged this as something of a "Theravadan guide" rather than a biography. Of course, there is a hazy line there, as the biographical material on the Buddha does come from those Theravadan sources, and is thereby part of the Canon, but what Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh has done here is extract that material and make it read like a storybook (a long storybook at nearly 600 pages) about the life of Siddhartha Gautama. The story unfolds in a series of scenarios, both in "real time" and in reminiscences being told of previous times, with the multitudinous people, places, and events of the Buddha's life being woven through the narrative. Gautama lived in northern India around 550 BCE, the son of a royal family in one of the many small kingdoms (the Shakyas, hence the name Sakyamuni, "sage of the Sakyas") who sought spiritual development rather than the duties of kingship. Through dedication to this quest, he achieves enlightenment, and claims to point to a "middle path" which can free humans from the cycles of rebirth which were a central tenet of the preceding Brahmanism. Nothing in Old Path White Clouds is this "direct", however, as it is not a history book, but a story, so one gets to "walk" through the various scenes of Gautama's life, while picking up much of the philosophy in the forms of addresses he made to gatherings of students, assorted Kings, and those in his inner circle. If one has an interest in Buddhism, this is quite a delightful way of learning about the life of the Buddha, but I think it would be a very good way to introduce folks to Buddhism who don't know very much about it, as it is very clear that Buddha is not "a God", not a supernatural being, but a man dedicated to discovering the spiritual truth, and succeeding in that effort. This also isn't a pure paean to the early days of the Sangha, as many "growing pains" are worked through with monastic rules that only gradually were adjusted to allow women to follow, situations where schism was threatening, and other early difficulties. I was very pleased to see that this is still in print, and it is a testament to the value of the book that the new/used vendors don't have much of a deal to offer on it (even in just "acceptable" condition) compared with Amazon's 34% discount off cover price on this. So, this is one you might want to pick up at your local brick&mortar book vendor, or put it together with something else (to get free shipping) and have Amazon send it out!  |
| Monday, May 19th, 2008 | |
| 8:38 pm | Whew! I'm almost caught up with review-writing! I have one more book to go and then I'll have a long-ish gap (as both of the books that I'm currently reading are over 400 pages long and rather slow going ... but I made my "target" of six books for the month by the 18th, so I figured I'd give some "rougher reads" a shot). In an ideal world, I would like to write reviews as I finish up the books, but as a cursory glance at the differing orders of http://btripp-books.com (my LibraryThing.com catalog) and http://btripp-books.livejournal.com Yeah, I know ... the care-o-meter for most folks on this topic is hovering around "nada" ... but I just wanted to point out why there have been 10 book reviews "Bogarting" my journal this month! |
| 8:17 pm | and another ...  This is another of the books that I picked up the other day at that B&N clearance table ... I wish I'd hit one like that again, The Girls and I went to the one down in the Loop on Sunday, part to pick up a book that Daughter #1 needed, and part to see if I could score some more awesome deals ... we ended up getting her what she needed, but I struck out.Pamela Reeves' Ellis Island: Gateway to the American Dream is another Barnes & Nobel publication, this one being a photo history of the classic entry point for immigrants in the years of massive infusion to the USA from Europe. Most folks here are likely to have had some ancestor who came through Ellis Island (or at least had shipmates who did, the 1st and 2nd class travelers were typically pre-approved for arrival and were ferried off directly into Manhattan). Having had 2-3 forebearers who arrived on the Mayflower, and having relatives who fought on both sides of the Revolution, I'd always assumed that all of "my folks" were here before they started shipping Europeans over in bulk ... but a conversation I had with a cousin turned up that we might have one great-grandmother who came in this way (from Germany), as she'd discovered a photo of said ancestor disembarking. While the book, obviously, concentrates on the massive influx from 1892 through 1924, when 71% of all immigrants came through the Port of New York, over 14 million in those years, it also looks at immigration in general, and the difficulties (physical and political) of absorbing the influx of so many new citizens. One of the key points of moving the immigration processing out to Ellis Island was to protect the immigrants from the myriads scams awaiting them at the old processing facility down by Battery Park at the south tip of Manhattan. An entire sub-culture had developed which lived off of separating the newly arrived from their worldly goods, be it through fraudulent money changing (the book mentions "brightly polished" pennies that were being passed off for far more valuable coins), grossly over-charged food and lodging (rooms with "fake pictures" that would allow thieves access while guests slept), and "travel brokers" who provided worthless train vouchers. The theory was that by removing the initial processes from the con artists, it would ensure that the immigrants had at least a fair head-start. Unfortunately, it seems to have been a constant battle between politically-connected vendors (who would ratchet up costs), and those who were legitimately trying to make the system work. Most of the negatives of Ellis Island seem, however, to be simply a case of the inability to scale services to the level that volume demanded. Long (even week-long) waits were not unusual, families got separated, there were dozens of languages being spoken, some without adequate resources for translation, and, generally speaking, a massive clash of cultures. One of the things that would not be possible in today's ultra-PC hyper-sensitive society were the efforts made to "mainline" the arrivals ... with processing clerks changing names from things that sounded "too foreign" to something that would not be out of place anywhere in the US. I'm personally familiar with one of these stories, as my college girlfriend had a grandfather (or great-grandfather, I forget now), who got off the boat as "Batestowski" and left Ellis Island as "Bates"! Ellis Island: Gateway to the American Dream is, naturally, extensively illustrated with images of immigrant life, the various facilities which preceded Ellis Island, the construction of the famed location (and re-construction after a fire), the various governmental personages involved over time, and the re-development of the site in recent years into a museum ... and, of course, shot after shot of excited, worried, pensive, hopeful, eager, frightened, and otherwise focused immigrants arriving on our shores. As I noted, I got this from a 75%-off clearance table at a local Barnes & Nobel which suggests that it has just gone out of print. If you can find a similar deal, grab it! This is also available via the Amazon new/used vendors for as little as 1¢ (plus $3.99 shipping) for a "very good" hardcover copy. If you are one of the hundreds of millions of Americans who had an ancestor pass through New York on the way into the States, you might well want to pick up a copy of this to get a sense of what that experience was like. |
| Sunday, May 18th, 2008 | |
| 11:59 pm | money stuff ... My job is still paying me less than 1/4th of what the Monster.com salary survey says is the median for my job description in the business' zip code, which means that even though I'm totally busting my ass, we fall further behind every month. Once the "next tier" of financing comes it, this situation should improve, but we had been anticipating this in the door months ago, which makes things difficult. We've liquidated almost everything that we can to stretch things out, but it's getting scary. I probably mentioned that The Wife started a new job a couple of months back (she's getting paid even less than I am), and that her health insurance kicked in the start of this month ... which is good as otherwise we would have been up shit creek on paying for our own (which was due the start of May). She's got a pretty good plan, as we got a refill on the blood pressure pills my new Doctor talked me into ... they had cost $60/month, with the new insurance we're just paying $25! My Boss is off to NYC tomorrow for a HUGE pitch (we'd be doing a multiple-world project for a mega media company), if he comes back with something signed, that should boost my take-home too. I'm just so stressed from this whole situation. I love the work, but I'm getting paid so little for it ... at this point I'd be happy getting something south of the 25th percentile (which would still be 3-4x what I'm getting paid). Not that I was swimming with other options before falling into this, but given that I'm out of the house 13 hours on a typical day, that doesn't even leave any time for realistically looking for something else. It seems like my only option at the moment is to cross all my fingers and toes an say lots of "positive thinking" mantras and hope that the company will make it over the financing hill before Bad Stuff happens and we end up losing our home. |
| 8:32 pm | Wow ...  I've had this sitting around for a while (I probably picked it up about the same time I got the Dick Morris books on the Clintons), but just got into reading it last week. This is, of course, the one that made Ann Coulter famous ... before it she was just a lawyer (formerly with the Senate Judiciary Committee and the 8th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals) and the "legal affairs correspondent" for Human Affairs magazine. After it, of course, she became the Wicked Witch of the Right to all those addled soccer moms and their evil Leftist spinmeisters, and something of a Culture Hero to those of us who felt government should have more to do with Barry Goldwater than Fidel Castro.However, Ann got it into her head, while Clinton was still in office to take a long, hard look at his administration and the concept of impeachment. In High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton she goes down the list of Clinton horrors, from the Paula Jones case (Monica Lewinsky would have never made it into the press had Clinton settled out of court with Ms. Jones, who, ultimately, was only looking for a public apology after the Clinton smear machine had gone to work on her ... Lewinsky was just a corroborating witness being called by the Jones team, leading to Clinton's perjury, obstruction of justice, tampering with witnesses, destroying evidence, etc., in that case), to Whitewater, "Filegate", "Travelgate", "Fostergate", etc. etc. etc. (including some that I hadn't heard of!), picking apart the dynamics of each case and the points of fact in each. These she compares to the legal precedent of Impeachment, from the long history in British law, through the early years of the USA, and even digging around in the Rodham/Nussbaum files (yes, Hillary was one of the crusaders in that fiasco) against Nixon. If anything, Nixon comes off as a choir boy in this, having been Impeached for simply discussing things that the Clintons blatantly perpetrated over and over again! Needless to say, this is not Ann at her most amusing ... at one point, towards the end of Book One, she does slide into the "snarky mode" that we all know and love, but this is very much a book by a lawyer looking at the details of numerous cases and relating these specifically to the body of precedence on Impeachment, although the dozens of blatant Felonies the Clintons committed during their nightmare 8-year reign do get discussed as well, and it is hard getting though this book without wondering just how Bubba & Hiltery managed to avoid long prison sentences (let alone the current "let the nightmare return" campaign). This is another book that I really wish would be on every school's Civics reading list ... the corruption in the Clinton White House, from the two-headed monster (or would that be three if you counted Monica's favorite?) on down the ranks of thugs, influence peddlers, and Chinese spies which populated that pit of perfidy is something that should be a warning to future generations. The office of the Presidency has never been so tainted, and, frankly, if it wasn't the Clintons (who had virtual carte blanche from the leftist press) they would have both been in prison planning their next scam rather than in the highest office in the land, wreaking havoc on the nation. High Crimes and Misdemeanors is, thankfully, still in print (in a paperback edition), but the hardcover (which I have), can be had from the Amazon new/used guys for as little as a quarter (plus shipping, of course). Get it. Read it. Wonder how we got to such a depraved place in history that these scumbags are running for president again, rather than running around a prison exercise yard! |
| Saturday, May 17th, 2008 | |
| 8:20 pm | You MUST read this book ...  I have been putting off reviewing this for months (I finished it in early March), in part due to wishing to somewhat contain my enthusiasm for it (nobody likes a glassy-eyed missionary!) and in part due to sloth (as I wanted to share several quotes, and I hate having to wedge a book open and try to transcribe into the keyboard). Thomas Paine was one of the leading lights of the American Revolution, and it could well be said that without his Common Sense acting as a conceptual catalyst, there never would have been a United States. Paine, however, was always on the "immoderate" end of the debate (much like Ron Paul is in our current political landscape), unwilling to drop his principles to "make nice" with individuals and groups who he considered to be enemies of Liberty. However, all that I'd read of him prior to this still left me wondering why he elicited such vehement disregard as Teddy Roosevelt's describing him as a "dirty little atheist". Well, getting around to reading Paine's The Age of Reason cleared that up for me! To be accurate, Paine's religious views are "Deist" bordering on "Pantheist", but they are extremely heartfelt, and seriously presented. An old saw is that "there are no atheists in foxholes", well, Paine wrote this remarkable volume in the dark days of the French revolution, having finished Part 1 scant hours before he was placed under arrest, and writing Part 2 in prison as he awaited what he had to assume was a date with the guillotine (he escaped execution at one point only by clerical error!). That The Age of Reason was, by his reckoning, likely to be his last statement, makes his steadfast denunciation of the Judeo/Christian scriptures all the more inspiring. I could rave about the words of this great man for hours, but will let him speak here: Needles to say, these are not the words of an atheist, but of a man unwilling to bend to the superstitions of the herd. It is amazing how current his thought appears, evidencing that even two centuries ago, the threat of theocracy was ever-present, and the forces of blind belief were the enemies of science and the freedom of thought!The word of god is the creation we behold: And it is in this world, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man. This is certainly one of those books that I wish all people would read ... heck, it's even available free on the web in various editions. Every Bible-thumping moron who claims that this is "a Christian country" should be required to read it, as Paine is as close to the philosophical core of the American founders as any writer could be, and that "detestable religion" had very little to do with what formed the vision of the great American experiment! Needless to say, there are many choices for obtaining The Age of Reason, from reading it free on the web, to pricey academic hardcovers. The one I have is a Dover book with a very reasonable $6.95 cover price ... toss this in the next time you're a few buck shy of the $25 free shipping on a book order! |
| Friday, May 16th, 2008 | |
| 10:30 pm | I miss traveling ...  There was a time when I got out of town on some exotic excursion at least once a year, so naturally enough, I've been to Stonehenge. The last time I was in the U.K. we took a bit of a road trip and visited a lot of ruined castles, and stuff along those lines, including some "quality time" at Avebury. I seem to recall that we only had an hour or so at Stonehenge, though, which is a pity. On that trip I picked up quite a number of books about the neolithic monuments, and thought I had a pretty good fix on the who/what/when/how of all this stuff. Still, I had a lot of "I did not know that" moments with Julian Richards' Stonehenge: A History in Photographs, particularly dealing with how badly off the site had been at one point, and how much reconstruction (benign, and as I recall barely noticeable) there has been ... particularly in the area of straightening up stones that seemed ready to fall, and re-setting stones that had fallen, yet were still structurally sound.The author of this volume is an archaeologist turned TV writer ... which is neither bad nor good, I suppose. The concept of this could have emerged from either side of that equation, as it's a look at Stonehenge through the window of the photographic archives of English Heritage's National Monuments Record. Actually, the book starts out in the pre-photo era, with detailed survey drawings done in the early 1800's, then moves into the first years of photography (as early as 1867). It is interesting to see how generally "unchanging" the stones themselves are with the ever-changing look of the humans in the pictures. As closely as possible, each image is sourced and dated, even though some "detective work" was needed to specify when certain shots were taken (one in the 1960's was dated via the registration of the license plate on a cement truck!). The author notes that there is a pretty clear dividing line for pictures, as "Stone 56", a large upright, was straightened from a rather precipitous lean into other stones in 1901, so it is at least clear which century the shots come from.. While the book does have the inevitable chapter of speculations on how the stones got there, how they were raised, what it all was for (with some interesting pictures of various "experiments" of bringing stones in on barges, etc.), the bulk of the text is more about the interface of the monument and the population since there has been photography to record same. Again, I had not really been cognizant of just how much "tidying up" had been done to Stonehenge over the years, and a good deal of the book is spent looking at various of these projects from records and the photos which survive. The author does not have much good to say about any of the teams that have worked there, from an archaeological standpoint ... far too much focus has been on the stones, and far too little on the pits and ditches ... but he does at least credit them with having been "gentle" with the major elements of the site. Another thing that I had not been aware of was that the British Air Force had set up a training base just across the road from the ruins back in WW2 ... which is amazingly insensitive when you think that this was essentially inviting enemy attacks which could well have destroyed these monuments which had stood there since 3,000 BCE! Anyway, Stonehenge: A History in Photographs is quite an interesting read for being, essentially, a photo essay. This seems to have just gone out of print (I got this from a clearance table at our local B&N), so you might check the stores first (it's a B&N book). It is available used from the Amazon guys, with "like new" copies going for as little as $3.41 and "new" for as little as $3.66 (although, I paid less in the store). |
| Thursday, May 15th, 2008 | |
| 9:53 am | (sigh) ... I am full of FAIL ... It's because I'm a Libertarian, isn't it? So, the preliminary nomination process has concluded, and my Quixotic quest for a seat on the LiveJournal Advisory Board has gone down in ignominious flames ... all self-nominated candidates had until last night to obtain 100 "support comments" in order to move on to the next round. I garnered only 23.  After this humiliating rejection by the voters of LiveJournal, I guess you'll not have BTRIPP to kick around any more ... |
| 9:48 am | By the way ... There's a real groovy pic of my SL alter-ego Eschatos over in ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif){kind=small} eschatos_graves, which is the LJ RSS feed of my work blog, Eschatos In-World ... hey, why not friend the feed, so you can see my work blitherings too! |
| Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 | |
| 10:35 pm | Oh, dear ...  Sometimes there are books that one really wants to like ... really, really ... but the author seems hell bent to make that ultimately impossible. Unfortunately, Rosslyn: Guardian of the Secrets of the Holy Grail by Tim Wallace-Murphy and Marilyn Hopkins is pretty much typical of this sort of book.Now, one might think that a book titled "Rosslyn: Guardian of the Secrets of the Holy Grail" would be looking at rumors and legends that Rosslyn Chapel, some 7 miles outside of Edinburgh, Scotland, could possibly be the resting place of said relic (along with other Templar treasures) ... it seemed a logical assumption to me. However, this book is nowhere near that linear, and, frankly, that subject is, at best, pointedly ignored in favor of ... well, other stuff. It seems that the genesis of this book lay in the interests of two people who did not live long enough to make it happen, one of whom was Trevor Ravenscroft (he who saddled those very serious Anthroposophical Society folks with so many wild-eyed "seekers" with his books on Rudloph Steiner's student W.J. Stein's purported Indiana Jones-esque escapades during WW2), with whom Wallace-Murphy had co-authored a book. There certainly is a sense here that the authors felt they were committed to producing a book, yet really didn't have a clear idea of what that book should be about! The book meanders from topic to topic, sometimes veering off into "ooh, shiny", sometimes getting lost in the woods. The general drift is that there are these three "researchers" who are trying to find out something that has something to do with Rosslyn. The book, promisingly enough, does start with the Rosslyn Chapel, but then heads off into looks at what I am taking to be a highly romanticized view of the Celts and Celtic culture, the influence that had on the Celtic Church, and then into a look at how horrible the Catholic Church was to everybody they could get their hands on (not the least being the Templars). This ultimately serves to point to a lot of "Gnostic knowledge" having to be encoded into stone for its preservation. This also swings off into Baigent/Leigh/Lincoln territory about a "holy bloodline", but never much makes a point about it. As much as I was amused to have read a very large percentage of the books that get name-checked in here, it was a constant frustration where the authors would give the back-cover-blurb version of something, make some vague allusion to how this supported whatever they were dealing with, and then move on without providing anything of substance! It turns out that the main "thrust" of the book is to posit an ancient pilgrimage route that followed an "initiatory path" corresponding the the chakras from one "ancient Druid site" (now covered by a church) to another, from the Atlantic coast of Spain, up through France, and on to Scotland. Oh, and these Druid chakra sites each were based on which God/planet was worshiped there prior to the Roman occupation (like Chartres being the site of "the Sun oracle" and Notre-Dame being "the Mars oracle"). To be honest, there is a lot of fascinating conjecture in this, with what would appear to be rather alluring possibilities ... and the concept of the "awakening chakras" through power points on the planet was certainly one that I hadn't heard before in relation to Rosslyn! But, again, they veer, and in what appears to be an effort to strengthen their argument, they throw in an extensive section of detailed "Egyptian Mystery School" rituals (all drawn from one book of very questionable scholarship) which is held up as corroborating evidence for their big theory. This was probably my biggest gripe here ... the more "out there" a "newagey" source was, the more likely they were going to cite it as a reliable reference. It boggles the mind when authors rely on other people's "channeled information" to base their own arguments! Also, aside from "name checking" source books without much explanation, towards the end they start plugging in what can only be described as "shout outs" to stuff like reflexology, etc., which seems to fit a "of course I'll mention you in the book" scenario than anything logical in the telling. By the end of the book, things have reached such a mish-mash of newagey twaddle that the voices of "medieval mystics" they're citing manifest in the words of the likes of Chief Seattle, Black Elk, and Chuang Tzu! Again, there are some interesting bits in Rosslyn: Guardian of the Secrets of the Holy Grail, and it's a pretty quick read, but unless you're the airy-fairy type, this is likely to drive you a little bit nuts waiting for the authors to get to the point ... any point. This is a Barnes & Noble book (which I found on a clearance table for 70% off last week), so that might be your first stop if you were interested in picking up a copy ... but Amazon's new/used guys have it for $3 new, and as little as 40¢ used. |
| Monday, May 12th, 2008 | |
| 12:07 am | Mothers day a wash-out ... Well, "best laid plans" and all ... it was an ugly day in Chicago ... We got up and The Girls excitedly plied their Mom with presents (which she actually seemed to like, she's a hard sell most of the time) ... we were going to be going to go see a 10:30am showing of Speed Racer (followed by brunch), but we didn't leave a lot of spare time and when we got outside trying to get a cab, there was nada ... after about 15 minutes standing on the curb in driving cold rain, The Wife said she wanted to go back inside. Pretty much everybody retreated into bed at that time, and nothing got re-scheduled. Bummer. |
| Saturday, May 10th, 2008 | |
| 10:42 pm | Score! Despite having five storage boxes full of unread books around here, I was hitting that "I don't have anything to read" whining zone (most days are not the right day to plow into the 800 pages of "Godel, Escher, Bach" or even the 400-some pages of "The Turning Omnibus" - for instances drawn from recent searches through the boxes), so I did something that I almost never do ... I went out to the book store. As frequent readers know, I buy most of my books on-line, so going out to an actual bookstore is a daunting experience of actually having the books present, which can be as awkward as going to a cocktail party full of folks you've only met on IRC. However, the Barnes & Noble up the street was having a 75% clearance sale on one table, which featured a lot of their publications (which have cover prices about 1/3 of what a comparable book from another publisher would be), so I got 4 new hardbacks and 1 new large-format paperback for between $2.00 and $2.50 each ... with tax the total for all 5 books came to $12.24 ... that's even better than getting a new/used book from one of the Amazon vendors for 1¢ and having to add on the $3.99 shipping! Go me ... this was exactly the sort of deal that I was hoping to hit. I've even started two of them (well, one just getting through the introductory material so that I can jump into Chapter 1 on the subway come Monday), so you'll no doubt be hearing more details soon. |
| 9:43 am | Another new-age memoir ...  This is a book that I got via the LibraryThing.com "early reviewers" program, which, while being a lovely concept, typically runs to 90% fiction (which I don't, as a rule, read), making the pickings rather slim for what I might request. I mention this because, under "free range" conditions, I would have been quite unlikely to have read Mark Borax's 2012: Crossing the Bridge to the Future, although being reasonably well-read on the whole "2012" subject.However, this book has, remarkably, very little specifically to do with the events of 2012, and is, rather, one of those frequently-tedious "personal journey" books that every newager seems to have inside of them, itching to pupate out into its particular narcissistic splendor (heck, Borax notes he's written twenty books, this being the first one to be published). As is typical of the genre, there is a lot more about what the author was feeling rather than what he was doing, so it's a bit hard to really nail things down in this. The book starts with him taking an old (still living with) girlfriend and his new girlfriend up to Mount Shasta to drop acid on the Harmonic Convergence back in 1987 (hey, I was down at Tulum with a Shaman and a Zen Roshi!). He runs off and has a "transformational" trip, while the two gals scream at each other ... both soon fade from the story line (only to be replaced by others, whose relationship dynamics are all the same, but still spun out in exhibitionistic detail), but not before one of them hooks him up with an astrologer. This is William Lonsdale, who Borax latches onto as "a teacher". Borax, who has been doing some sort of itinerant comic book editing up till this point in his life, decides that he really really wants to be an astrologer too, and so begins his association with what he refers to as a "mystery school". I was interested to find that when, before starting the book, I asked friends who are professional astrologers, neither had ever heard of Borax or Lonsdale, and certainly not of any "mystery school" being led by the latter. The deeper I got into the book, the more I found that the "mystery school" was a bit like the newage habit of calling five friends getting together in a coffee shop "a conference", as this "school" was more of an open meeting that Lonsdale was using to "bounce his ideas off people" over a relatively brief period rather than any organized project. The 2012 title comes from Lonsdale talking about a "transformative period" between the Harmonic Convergence in 1987 and whatever "2012" event may be down the road, with almost nothing specific to the date. What is really aggravating here is the presumption that the book "says something" about 2012, yet the narrative stops in 1994 after simply covering the author's experiences over a 7-year period. Did it take him 14 years to "shop the manuscript"? This might have made an interesting "studying with the wizard in the woods" book back in the mid-90's, but it makes no sense coming out a scant 4 years before the 2012 date, when anybody reading it would know that most of what is intimated for that 25-year period in the "teachings" outlined in the text ended up to be pure hooey. Frankly, the surface-level "take away" from this book is so frustratingly pointless that it suggests that this is one of those "look for what seems out of place" projects (to use the awesome Peter Murphy lyric), a book so blatantly off-target that it only serves as a matrix holding a few gems. And, much like The Celestine Prophesy (which, to anybody who had spent time in Peru was "so wrong", yet had nuggets of very advanced teachings in it), this is a slurry of pig manure from which one needs to sieve out the diamonds. Interestingly, one of the "shiny bits" in this is shared with The Celestine Prophesy in terms of reincarnation theory. Oh, yeah. Lonsdale's teachings are rooted in "Atlantis" ... almost a sure sign it's time to get the sieve ... and every time the teaching seem to be making sense it rotates back to somebody or another having been a high-mucketymuck with awesome powers there. Interestingly, one of the possible "gems" deals with Jesus. Now, readers familiar with my writing know that I have no use for the Christian mythos, but Lonsdale posits a very interesting "spiritual dynamic" for Jesus' role in the long-term spiritual development of the race ... that the function of the Christian passion play was to nail (yes, Jesus-as-carpenter trumps Jesus as metaphysical entity) spirit within matter, producing a modality in which working amid the "mundane world" is still a spiritual exercise. There are others (perhaps as many as a dozen) buried in there, but they take a lot of "rinsing off" twaddle-rich text to find. As a basic read, 2012: Crossing the Bridge to the Future probably would only deeply appeal to people within a 50-mile radius of San Francisco (it really is that woo-woo), but if you can stomach the narcissism, there are some very potentially useful concepts, perceptions, and "transmissions" (ala Crowley's "Tzaddi is not the Star") to be fished out of it. As this is brand new (it officially came out in February), it should be available via your local brick-and-mortar book merchant, but it also can be had for about 1/3rd off of cover via Amazon. |
| Monday, May 5th, 2008 | |
| 2:00 pm | OK, me droogies ... I have officially thrown my hat into the ring for election to the LiveJournal Advisory Board! You can VOTE FOR ME by going to my nomination post (HERE) and simply saying "I support this nomination"! Help spread the "Vote Early, Vote Often!" message ... add this banner to your journal! Here's the code for that: <div style="background-color:#fff; color:#213368; padding:10px; border:1px solid #213368; width:23.31em; height:6.88em; font-size:16px;clear:both;"><img style="float:left; width:6.25em; height:6.25em;"src="http://p-userpic.li ... just cut-and-paste! "Thank You For Your Support!" |
| Sunday, May 4th, 2008 | |
| 11:16 pm | I'm glad she wrote this book ...  I finished this a few weeks back, but am only getting around to reviewing it now. I'd been a Republican most of my life (since driven out by the Fundies to the less-stable arms of the Libertarian Party), so I'm one of those guys who actually liked Ronald Regan. As such, there was a certain "preaching to the choir" element in my reading Peggy Noonan's When Character Was King, her heart-felt biography of this iconic figure.I was amazed, when mentioning this book to a "younger person" the other day that they had no idea that Reagan had been a movie actor ... how odd what can drift down the cultural memory hole in only a decade or so! However, there's quite a lot in this book that's been left out of the "general memory" of Reagan, and it's interesting to encounter it all in a go. Noonan has a very special stance from which to write this, as she'd been a producer with CBS News before becoming a special assistant to Reagan from 1984-86 (and later being chief speech writer for Bush Sr.), and much of the feeling here is that of a memoir of somebody she very much admired, rather than a purely objective biography. One of the things that our current P.C. culture likes to forget (in its demand for white/black dichotomy) is how much a "despised minority" the Irish were in the half century or more following the Great Famine in the 1840s, and the resulting diaspora. Reagan's father was of a generation which was all too familiar with this prejudice and discrimination and raised his son in what would likely to be considered a rather leftist bent. Reagan grew up very much as an "old labor" Democrat, and remained so even upon finding minor stardom as a Hollywood actor. It was the blatant (and, again, P.C. culture prefers to ignore this) infiltration by Soviet-run communist organizations into the movie industry that began to make him take a different look at the world. At the time he was the head of the Screen Actors Guild and spent a lot of his schedule giving speeches, which eventually got him noticed as a potential political figure. The rest of his biography is well known, becoming the Governor of California, then running and losing against Gerald Ford for the '76 GOP nomination, and then eventually rolling to victory in '80 and '84. What is less well known, and told as only an "insider" could, were the importance of certain struggles in the global political arena, including how the Air Traffic Controllers' strike was a turning point in how the Soviets perceived Reagan, and how important the "Star Wars" program was in eventually fracturing the Soviet Union. It is fascinating to read Noonan's take on how these various challenges shaped the course of events, and the book is worth the reading just for her perspective on the history being made around Reagan. Nancy Reagan was so successful at protecting the President's privacy after leaving office that most of us never had the sense of his decline, but Noonan pulls up a corner of that curtain and lets us peek in at some of the sadness of his final years, telling stories of how, several years past his leaving office, he did not even recognize the close friends' house where he'd had get-togethers on every one of his election nights, or, in his final year, not even knowing why people knew him or wanted to speak with him. When Character Was King is a great book for understanding this pivotal figure of our time. The book is still in print, but you can get "like new" copies from the Amazon new/used guys for as little a 1¢ (plus, of course, the $3.99 shipping), if you don't want to give the business to your local "brick and mortar" book vendor. This is a very special look at a very special man, and I'd recommend it to anybody but the raving Lefties (who could still probably benefit from reading it). |
| 12:25 pm | Pretty pictures ...  Now, here's one of those books that has been sitting around in the "to-be-read" boxes for 20 years ... a classic sort of purchase from back when I "had money" as a P.R. exec and would order just about anything that seemed interesting.Frank Delany's The Celts is a "companion volume" to a BBC2 series produced in 1986. I don't believe that I ever saw the series, but the premise of the book (I was reading up on a lot of pre-Christian European cultures back then) was lure enough to order it, although it obviously wasn't enough to get it read until I needed a "change of pace" last month! Because this is a "companion book" to a TV series, it lacks the coherency of a project specifically intended as a book, rather (I am assuming) following the pattern of the various programs in the series. The main sections are "Beginnings", "Nations", "Beliefs", "Expressions", "Credentials", and "Bequests", with brief interludes between each featuring some particular bit of Celtic myth and/or storytelling. The inclusion of these, admittedly, does "buffer" what might be a more disjointed information flow, but it also swings the "feel" of the narrative back and forth between modalities. I suppose that one of the benefits of this being a book extracted from a TV series is that it feeds off the visual aspect, and includes many very fine illustrations, ranging from maps, aerial shots of ruins, classic art, sketches of archaeological sites, to a vast lot of museum photography giving very clear depictions of such treasures as the Basse-Yutz Flagons and the famed Tara Brooch. As far as the book itself, it's really "quite a downer", being more a record of the fall (or progressive dilution) of Celtic culture than a celebration of it. This fall is, ultimately, blamed on the socio-political nature of the people, whose small tribal units spent more effort in inter-group warfare than in nation-making, so that when they were threatened by an outside force, be that the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings, or Rome, it was almost impossible for them to form a united defensive front. In this theme, Delany traces the isolation (ala Ireland) or assimilation of what was arguably at one point "the Celtic world" (most of Europe) from the earliest invasions to the Irish diaspora to America, etc. He looks at various "Celtic revival" movements over the past 200 years and pretty much dismisses them all (the modern-day Druids, etc.) as rooted in fantasy, and disparages the few "official" attempts made in some areas. Frankly, from a perspective 20 years down the road, I think he might have been a bit off on this last point, at least from what I've seen from Chicago's "Celtic Fest" and the materials there from the Welsh (Cymru) tourist office ... from a few TV and radio programs that were attempting to preserve the (very difficult) Welsh language when this book was being written, there appears to have blossomed a rather robust "Celtic identity", a least in Wales! While The Celts does appear to be out of print at this point (and, oddly enough, the BBC doesn't seem to have the series available either), the Amazon new/used vendors have "like new" copies of this heavily-illustrated hardback for as little as five bucks, and "good" copies for just $2.28 (plus shipping, of course), should a trip down the years to some possible ancestral culture prove an enticement to you. |
| 11:15 am | Must be doing something right ... This morning, our 8-year-old picked the music for background during the weekly cleaning out of the guinea pig cage, and instead of her usual Hanna Montana, she popped in T-Rex's Electric Warrior! My subversive plot seems to be working ... |
| 12:49 am | OK ...  One might think that W.L. Wilmshurst's The Meaning of Masonry is one of those books that's been filling up my "to be read" boxes for decades, but it's really just something that looked interesting and was cheap to add to an Amazon order to get it over the magic $25 (free shipping) level.Frankly, there is a certain voyeurism involved here, as the book starts out with the rather plain statement that "The papers here collected are written solely for the members of the Masonic Order ..." which I am not (although my father-in-law is a 33rd degree and "all the males" in my Mom's family were for generations). As such, while not coming to the material cold (having read and seen various "Masonic" things over the years), I don't really have the functional familiarity with the ritual/societal aspects which would give this a more solid grounding. The book, however, is aimed at Masons who wish to go beyond the "surface" elements (assuming they are in lodges that don't have a particularly good "theoretical" base), so I suppose that I can assume that I'm hitting this as might a somewhat dense initiate in a rather "surface level" lodge. Unlike many other "tell all" books, this does appear to be at least a semi-official publication, being a 1980 reprint of the 1927 (5th edition) original, which appears to have been initially written as free-standing essays over time (somewhat past the turn of the century), and features a forward by some then-current (in 1980) Masonic official. The book is in five chapters (plus an introduction), which deal with "The Deeper Symbolism of Masonry", "Masonry as a Philosophy", "Further Notes on Craft Symbolism", "The Holy Royal Arch", and "The Relation of Masonry to the Ancient Mysteries". Perhaps as an artifact of the time it was written, the book really does try very hard to pull Masonic symbolism into a Biblical mode ... while at the same time taking it into very "non-Christian" zones. Certainly other religions, cultures, and mythic traditions have become much more generally known since this was written, and so there seems to be quite a lot of "skirting around the issue" where things clearly digress from vanilla Christianity. There is, however, some quite substantial material here. Frankly, I was very tempted to quote at length from the "Form of the Lodge" section of the "Further Notes" chapter, but I'm settling for just this bit: This brief bit is amazing, as it brings to mind native "medicine wheel" teachings, Gurdjieffian concepts of consciousness and awakening, and even Theravada Buddhism! When The Meaning of Masonry is working on this level, it is gripping reading. Unfortunately, there is quite a lot of the book spent "spinning" Biblical twaddle so that it can be successfully used to represent symbolic structures for spiritual growth, ala:The four sides of the Lodge have further significance. The East of the Lodge represents man's spirituality, his highest and most spiritual mode of consciousness, which in most men is very little developed, if at all, but is still latent and slumbering and becomes active only in moments of stress or deep emotion. The West (or polar opposite of the East) represents his normal rational understanding, the consciousness he employs in temporal every-day affairs, his material-mindedness or, as we might say, his "common sense". Midway between these East and West extremes is the South, the halfway house and meeting-place of the spiritual intuition and the rational understanding; the point denoting abstract intellectuality and our intellectual power develops to its highest, just as the sun attains its meridian splendour in the South. The antipodes of this is the North, the sphere of benightedness and ignorance, referable to merely sense-reactions and impressions received by that lowest and least reliable mode of perception, our physical sense-nature. What a pity that serious Masons like Wilmshurst can't simply throw out the Judeo/Christian Biblical mumbo-jumbo and focus in on what is evidently a very strong and clear tradition/system of human development! I must admit, there was enough enticing bits here that it made me think of possibly investigating my "Masonic roots" further, although my timing is not good for that, having had a major HQ for the Scottish Rite just recently moved out of my neighborhood!... To understand the significance of the two Scribes Ezra and Nehemiah it is necessary to recall that, in the Biblical account of the return from Babylonian captivity, these two were leading men. Transposing this historicized narrative into its spiritual implication, Ezra and Nehemiah personify two distinct stages of the mystical progress made by the candidate who essays to renounce the Babel of his lower nature and, by reorganizing himself, regain his native spiritual home and condition. ... If you are interested in taking a look at the theoretical underpinnings of Masonry, I would certainly recommend The Meaning of Masonry (with the aforementioned caveats). It appears to still be in print, with the hardcover having the remarkably low price of $5.99 retail, which makes it a better deal as a throw-in on an Amazon order (how I got mine) rather than racking up the $3.99 shipping from the new/used vendors (and you can get a "new" copy from there for as little as $2 ... making the price a wash). |
| Friday, May 2nd, 2008 | |
| 7:12 pm | Day off for doctor visit ... OK, so one of the least appealing parts of this long period of unemployment (and current period of "sweat equity") has been that I've had to put off a lot of medical stuff. Sure, I ended up in the hospital a few months back with vertigo, but that was pretty much my only interaction with medical services of any kind for a long, long time. While we did have health insurance (very expensive health insurance), the individual deductibles were so high that anything I went in for was, essentially, going to be out-of-pocket ... so I basically figured the insurance was there in case I got hit by the bus or some such. Well, with remarkable timing, The Wife's new job's health insurance kicked in yesterday, the very day we would have needed to have paid the other insurance five grand. To celebrate this, I managed to get myself a doctors appointment today. I had a list of about a half-dozen "issues" that I'd been saving up (and I'm currently kicking myself that I didn't get down far enough on that for my cold/flu symptoms), but the main reason for my going in was to follow-up on the blood pressure meds the doc had set me up with following the vertigo episode. I was amazed to find that I'd lost twenty pounds (and that was with shoes, clothes, wallet, keys, assorted pocket fillings, etc.) and my blood pressure had dropped 20 points (the lower number was now 80, which is "normal"!) ... so I guess those little pills (which cost $2 a pop) are worth it. I am, unfortunately, likely to need to have some vein surgery to get my legs taken care of, but I had all sorts of stuff that I was "worried about" that he assured me were simply "normal side effects of getting older". I ended up coming back and taking an (unplanned) 3-hour nap, which should be a good start on a "laying low" weekend which should certainly help with the cold/flu thing. Yay, good medical insurance! |
| 10:41 am | Another from the "deep" piles ...  This was published in 1989, and I'm guessing that I bought it soon thereafter ... so it's been sitting around on "to be read" shelves and boxes for nearly 20 years, and I finally grabbed it a week or so back.Some books age well ... Terry Landau's About Faces: The Evolution of the Human Face, not so much. While the basic threads of the book are certainly still valid and interesting there is all sorts of "gee whiz!" stuff over fancy computer programs and such which would allow for amazing mirroring and morphing of faces ... stuff that almost any kid today could easily do with free software. The book is also heavy with 1980's celebrity faces, which, at this remove, are not as "instantly recognizable" as they were no doubt intended to be at the time ... would you recognize Princess Diana from just the hair? Heck, there are several halfs of "paired faces" that I still don't have a clue about, and I remember the 80's! Frankly, this book is rather uneven, although I think it's that way due to trying to cover all bases. It begins with the basic evolutionary survey of how hominid skulls developed over time, with reconstructions of how various stages might have looked. It discusses how environment likely developed the various archetypal racial characteristics, and discusses group identity (making one interesting point, that almost all races have a much harder time "individuating" members of other races, while the recognition of differentiating facial detail of members of their own race is quite specific). It then looks at aging processes and moves into the first part of "minimal recognition" patterns. There is an intriguing bit of various reproductions of the Mona Lisa through pixellation filters, from a 3x4 grid on up ... the familiar figure can't be missed at 18x24, and even might be guessed at 9x12. There are also some interesting (although quaint at this point) "line drawing" programs that look at how much distortion can be applied to a picture where it would still be recognizable. The book keeps swinging between science and art, which makes it a bit of a disjointed read. One chapter may be looking at how faces were presented in painting and sculpture over the ages and the next might have dissection diagrams of facial musculature and micro-photographs of the details of skin surface, while running off into histories of various "pseudosciences" and "social theories" in between. Again, there is a lot of interesting stuff in here (like how even never-sighted people will still have most of the standard facial expressions, without a visual model to mimic), and some "freaky stuff" (you like shrunken heads?), but it sort of comes at one in a rush, without an over-all structure. I'm not saying that it's bad or that you're not going to learn stuff by reading this, just that it feels like a collection of random essays that were gathered together just because they dealt on some level with the face!. About Faces does seem to be out of print at this point, so if you'd be interested in checking it out, you'll have to go with the new/used market. Lucky for you, the Amazon guys have "good" copies for as little as a penny, "very good" for under a buck, and "like new" for around two bucks (all, of course, with the $3.99 shipping charge). There are even "new" copies to be had (impressive for a larger format paperback that's been kicking around for nearly 20 years!), should you want the pristine book experience. |
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