Memory & Tibet

Greetings,

Here are a couple of new reads for you.

Moonwalking With Einstein...by Joshua Foer. 

..."Before writing was common, human beings had to use their own brains for information storage, and before books were indexed — making it possible to gain access to them in a nonlinear way — people labored under the “imperative to hold” books’ contents in their own mental hard drives simply to find particular bits of information. Poets in the oral tradition, like Homer, relied on repetition and rhythms and other patterns to recite their work from memory, and in the ancient world, exceptional memories were both exalted and widely known."

Colin Thubron a travel writer and novelist has published To A Mountain In Tibet. He has written about the Near East, Russia and The Silk Road.

“You cannot walk out your grief,” he tells himself. “Or bring anyone back. You are left with the desire only that things not be as they are.” This is the reason he has resolved to go “walking to a place beyond your own history, to the sound of the river flowing the other way.” 

Metta.

Just One Breath

Greetings,

Here is a fine article on Poetry and Meditation by Gary Snyder in Tricycle. Beyond wild.

Teasing the demonic 
Wrestling the wrathful 
Laughing with the lustful 
Seducing the shy 
Wiping dirty noses and sewing torn shirts 
Sending philosophers home to their wives in time for dinner 
Dousing bureaucrats in rivers 
Taking mothers mountain climbing 
Eating the ordinary

Metta.

Who cares?

Greetings,

Here's an article on literature and how novels come to the internet by Laura Miller in The Guardian. She writes for Salon.

..."Do the people who constantly pester us for our opinions care what each and every one of us really thinks? Sort of and not really. What they require are opinions in bulk, so many of them that they can be analysed and averaged out and processed into useful data. Only then can they be sold, and then used to encourage us to buy more stuff. Our judgments matter, but primarily in aggregate, which makes us not so different from the faceless mass of television's audience as we are sometimes led to believe. The main distinction is that the crowdsourced are active collaborators in the commodification of their opinions, while TV viewers just get to sit on their duffs."

The Guardian...

Metta.

T.S. Elliot Prize

Greetings,

Brian Turner is one of ten major poets shortlisted for the T.S. Elliot Prize on January 23rd and 24th. Readings will be held at the Royal Festival Hall in London.

Brian's recent book, Phantom Noise, was published last April by Alice James Books. It continues his poetic journey begun with Here Bullet about his time and experiences in Iraq. 

We met by chance in Cambodia last February on a boat exploring a floating village. Delightful. 

Poetry Book Society 

Metta.

 

The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Greetings,

"Artists are magical helpers. Evoking symbols and motifs that connect us to our deeper selves, they can help us along the heroic journey of our own lives. 

"The artist is meant to put the objects of this world together in such a way that through them you will experience that light, that radiance which is the light of our consciousness and which all things both hide and, when properly looked upon, reveal. The hero journey is one of the universal patterns through which that radiance shows brightly.

"What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There's always the possibility of a fiasco. But there's also the possibility of bliss." - Joseph Campbell

Read more...

Metta.