Getting ready for Halloween

Small skeleton figures on table at the gun show a few years ago, part of an array of figurines, many with biker motiff.  Similar to Mexican Day of the Dead figures such as the skeleton bride and so forth, I recall a shop in Nogales, Mexico that had quite an assortment.  I will have to take some shots of them sometime if I can avoid getting shot myself, given the border situation.

You can purchase skeleton bride costume for Halloween now as well, so popular it has become.  But I kind of like these two deadbeats.  A cultural reminder of the truth of impermanence.

Spooky sculptures

I like these aged rusty homemade sculptures sitting in front yard of artist's house, presumably.  A Southwestern theme no doubt.

 

 

 

 

 

My favorite crazy video

A video with Cave Dwellers' song "Meditation" is pretty hypnotic.

Warming up to Kindle?

I notice some college has started an experiment with putting the reading list of a few courses on Kindle and enabling all the students to obtain a device.  I was wondering how long it would take someone to do that and see what happens.  In this case, many of the students seem to be negative about the experience. 

I purchased a Kindle2 mainly to download book collections, especially from Mobi which has inexpensive collected works of famous authors.  I'm not interested in reading newspapers or blogs for a fee on Kindle.

So far I have downloaded enough to last a couple lifetimes.  Some of the collected works have 30 to 100 books and stories in them.  That does not mean they are really the complete works of that author, for example, the Hawthorne collection has only selections from his Italian, French, British and American Notebooks.  I guess they got bored with Nathaniel's detailed observations and psychological analysis of his children's antics around the house found in the American Notebooks.

So this is my fairyland of literature and history caught inside a white carapace:

Thousand and One Nights -- Richard Burton translation
Complete Wizard of Oz books
Complete William Shakespeare
Diary of Samuel Pepys
Discourses of Epictetus
Divine Comedy - Dante, English and Italian
Emerson's Essays
Essential H. G. Wells
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Gibbons
History of the Pelopennesian Wars - Thucydides
Illiad and Odyssey - Homer
King James Bible
Lectures and Interviews - Robert G. Ingersoll
The Prince - Machiavelli
Varney the Vampire - Thomas Preskett
Works of: Dumas; Dickens; Defoe; Poe; Chaucer; Maupassant; Melville; Balzac; Conrad; Verne; Lewis Carroll; Twain; Hawthorne; Robert Lewis Stevenson; Kipling, Sir Walter Scott; and last but not least, H.P. Lovecraft.

So far I have resisted the temptation to reread the works of Jane Austin, Dostoevsky, or Friedrich Nietzsche, or to wade into the ocean of prose created by Tolstoy or Henry James, with whom I am less familiar.  I am beginning to wonder how much space could be left on my machine, since each work takes up many times the space of the average novel.

Buddhist statues

Some more locally made Buddhist statues, for art show, did not pay attention to the program describing them, unfortunately. But all nicely made, about 6 or 7 inches tall like the Padma Sambhava one I have.  When I see such religious objects made by local practitioners, it reminds me of the many wall frescoes found in the Tarim Basin of the old Silk Route, in what is now western China.

This Silk Road connected the Roman Empire to India and China for a while.  I recall one commentator about these caves and crumbled monastic ruins in the desolate desert of the Tarim Basin, who mocked the monks who went to such efforts to create long-lasting religious establishments that were overcome by time and hostile religions.  As if the Buddhists who created these works of art were not aware of the law of transience which is one of the central doctrines of their creed!  What a jerk.  What these works of art did help accomplish was the transfer of Buddhist iconography and doctrine from one great civilization (India) where it was doomed to Hindu and Muslim extermination, to another (China, and hence Korea and Japan), where it survives to this day.

Maybe someday a few hundred or thousand years hence a religious scholar will unearth these statues and have to rewrite the history of American religious art to explain their significance. First one is Vajrasattva, then Yeshe Tsogyal, White Chenrezig and last White Tara.

Little yellow teacup

Saw this for sale at my favorite Chinese restaurant and could not resist it.  The dragon has a red ball with lines coming out from it, apparently this symbolizes a flaming pearl which represents good luck and wealth.  The dragon in Tibetan lore is called Druk; Trungpa Rinpoche is known to his students, for example, as the Druk Sakyong or Dragon Earth Protector.  The dragon in Chinese lore is a symbol of imperial authority, as well as the ruler of water and weather.

Below is a closeup of said red ball.

 

Padma Sambhava

A statue made by a local Buddhist practitioner...Padma Sambhava or Guru Rinpoche is revered in Tibet as culture hero and founder of Tibetan Buddhism.  His story could be a great movie, I wonder if anyone has attempted it.  Along with Yeshe Tsogyal, his consort, he had quite an extraordinary life filled with adventures and dangers, as he vied with the established Bon shamanistic religion for the favor of the king.

Fierce Guard Dog

Polar Bear the warehouse guard dog, fangs and all, so ugly he is beautiful.  Ready to run down trespassers and corner them for the police to catch, but lovable to those he knows.  He had a mate for a while but she ran away when her owner left town.  Not much of a tail so he wags his whole butt when happy.  Nice enough so far not to bother my caged parrots I carry into work everyday. 

Van Jones Out

It is wonderful how how Associated Press can "report" the resignation of Van Jones, a self-declared Communist and Marxist, without mentioning those two words. If Jones had not resigned they would undoubtedly have continued to bury the controversy he aroused, as one after another of his past statements was uncovered. Obviously AP is still acting as Obama's watchdog, under-reporting his flaws and over-reporting his virtues. Even Wikipedia froze editing of their Van Jones article last night, and refused to allow anyone to describe Jones as a Communist.

Of course liberals don't think we should be afraid of Communists in our government anymore...but the obvious response to that is the fundamental hostility of Marxism to a limited concept of government as embodied in our Constitution. Marxist theory presupposes the supremacy of government in all phases of life, until a perfect state of communism arises of course, when society becomes classless and stateless. Of course, until that utopia comes, the iron hand of of the state must be wielded with harsh discipline to obliterate the parasitic bourgeoisie.

One cannot but suspect liberals don't care about the Constitution either, every day they are inventing new "rights" government bureaucrats must insure...the right to force others to provide people with anything that pops into their heads, food, shelter, health care, a job, dignity and so on. As if people were so guileless they had no idea how to go about providing these things for themselves. The only real rights we have are those that do not coerce others into taking care of us, such as the right to free speech and press, bear arms, life, liberty, property, due process and so on. All these other so-called rights are just an excuse to create a super Nanny state run by omnipotent bureaucrats. All powers not granted to the federal government are supposed to be reserved to the citizenry.

Nathaniel Hawthorne Remembered

I thought I knew my Nathaniel Hawthorne stuff but upon rereading The Blythedale Romance I discovered to my chagrin that the story was nearly new to me after all these years...but it was great to finally nail it down and figure it out once and for all...I used to think the town of Blythe, California, on I-10 on the Colorado River was named after the novel...no such luck, it was named after a gold prospector...oh well, another unverified fantasy exploded...anyway, to get back to The Blythedale Romance, I was originally attracted to it as a historical study of one of the mid-19th century utopian communes, Brook Farm, of which Hawthorne was the treasurer for a while apparently. There is a great blog commentary on the novel located at

http://zhiv.wordpress.com/2009/04/17/the-blithedale-romance-nathaniel-hawthorne/

One of Hawthorne's contributions to psychology is his study of Hollingsworth, a monomaniac who resembles the True Believer Eric Hoffer went on to describe a hundred years later. Zenobia is an interesting study of an early feminist leader, erotic and assertive, who, however he dooms to self-destruction unrealistically. She was a bit airy-fairy, lightweight intellectual, and that bothered him...although one gets the impression such strong women frightened him. Not that he was adverse to creating strong female characters as Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter.

It is rather touching that Hawthorne was one of the first tree-huggers, he was virtually the only person of the day to oppose the building of the Erie Canal in New York for the sole reason that it would destroy the forest. And in The Blythedale Romance we find his protagonist climbing a pine tree to get away from it all in a treehouse made by an enveloping grapevine...this guy really was a tree-hugger. He was also very human in his patriotic appreciation of General McClellan's grandiose military parades at the start of the Civil War, thinking like the other Northerners that such a great organizer and disciplinarian would soon rout the Rebels...of course it turned out McClellan was not only an idiot, coward and traitor, plotting to remove Lincoln, and then trying to lose the Civil War altogether by planning to allow the South to secede and become independent...but old Hawthorne cheered him on in 1861 or 62, who can expect an old literary genius to be a good judge of generals???

So the Blythedale Romance has very little to do with utopianism, merely a few wry comments about his inability to be creative after working so hard at farm labor all day...he actually does defend his unnamed companions as having the best of motives to create something new and just to contribute to the world community, but leaves it at that and concentrates all his attention on the triumvirate of Hollingsworth, Zenobia and Priscilla...when you come down to it, rather ordinary people, except for intimations of Zenobia's wild side, which is never shown...so the plot just goes on to show how these three suffer the consequences of having rejected the protagonist: Hollingsworth who tried to bully him into becoming a mere follower, is reduced to social and political impotence at the end, Zenobia, who failed to appreciate our hero's ego and ideas, kills herself, and Priscilla, who fails to favorably react to our hero's attentions, has to become a mere emotional crutch to a broken Hollingsworth. Our hero is really both jealous of and afraid of Hollingsworth, it is said H is merely the combination of 3 or more real persons of the day such as Horace Mann and Emerson, but I think he has to be based mainly on one real person Hawthorne knew during his Brook Farm period, given Hawthorne's intense emotions describing this character...not sure who yet...

The Big O Express Presses on towards Trainwreck

Events may bring about the day when the charismatic demagogue will be shunned by everyone except Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers...unfortunately, this will only come about at the expense of the American people, when the Big O's administration fails to seriously confront Islamic terrorism, and we suffer the consequences. It is only a matter of time now...the clock is ticking...every tinpot dictator is grinning from ear to ear now that the socialist Democrats are running things...a great opportunity for everyone from Kim Jong-Il to the Castro brothers to run amok without fear of American opposition...of course how could a guy who thinks there is a language called Austrian and gives the British prime minister a bunch of unusable DVD's of American movies, have a chance in the real world of international politics?...not to mention his inability to stop apologizing for imaginary American faults every time he opens his mouth while overseas...an empty suit, inflated by the party-line doctrinaire media as the Savior...I guess we deserve what we get...

Get Your Wheelbarrow Ready

In the 1920's it is said Germans had to use wheelbarrows to take their money to the market to buy food, thanks to hyper-inflation...well we might as well get the wheels greased on our wheel barrels, because Obama's war on our economy is in full swing and he is spending money and printed greenbacks like there is no tomorrow...no acceptable tomorrow for our children to be sure...if we or they survive his soft-on-terrorists foreign policy...one wonders if this neo-Carter would even oppose an attack by some rogue state like Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Cuba, the list goes on...he wants to make friends with these monsters, and ditch our friends like Great Britain, Poland, Hungary...throw them to the lions in the name of better international relations with anyone who is anti-American...so get your wheelbarrows out and pump up the tire and remove the rust, you are going to need it to get to the nearest supermarket with your worthless dollars very soon...