The Beatles: Songs and Lives
This week I finished re-reading The Beatles: The Biography by Bob Spitz, the best biography I’ve read of the group that defined music, culture, and style in the Sixties: the…
reading
Musings on Reading Literature
There’s a passage from the novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog (by Muriel Barbery, Europa Editions, 2008, p. 116-117) that so delighted me when I came across it that I…
Musings on Shakespeare Guidebooks
Unless you’re an academic who has studied The Bard for your entire career, you really need a guide, a Virgil if you will, to enter the dark forest of Shakespeare…
Musings on Cats and Philosophers
British philosopher John Gray thinks cats can “often teach us much more about living the good life than philosophy ever could.” As a lifetime cat owner, I can vouch for…
Musings on Downsizing Shakespeare
While downsizing my library earlier this spring (25-30 boxes of books already removed from the shelves and some titles still left to cull), I had to think about what books…
Killing Commendatore
I’ve been a fan of Haruki Murakami’s novels for several, recent years, and have read nine or ten of them already. Those I’ve read have all fit into the category…
Musings on Poets and Poetry
For me, reading the American literary critic, Harold Bloom, is often like wading in molasses. Intellectual molasses, to be sure, but slow going nonetheless. His writing is thick with difficult…
Guiding Lights In A Collapsing World
Who are some of the guiding lights in terms of what must be done? I would suggest Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Emerson, Thoreau, Chomsky, Vandana Shiva, Bookchin, EF Schumacher,…
The Top 12 Books For Understanding The World
Or, Why A Critical Reading of History Is Now Critically & Urgently Needed The details are important, but an understanding of the major patterns of history are even more important.…
Primary Influences
What are my primary influences? Among them: Buddhism, Taoism, the perennial philosophy, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi and Thoreau, along with the values of the Enlightenment: liberty, equality, solidarity –…
Independent Bookstores Succeeding Despite Pandemic and Amazon
This century bookstores have been struggling to survive due to the rise of Amazon and changing entertainment consumption patterns. When the pandemic started many bookstore owners thought it would be…
The Long Read Lost
“What we read, how we read, and why we read change how we think, changes that are continuing now at a faster pace,” wrote Maryanne Wolf, a neuroscientist, in her…
Censorship, Big Tech & The Closing Down of Society
Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, and the MAGATs – Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon and Twitter – are all now embedded and engaged in censorship, data mining, privacy invasion, the new global…
The Failure of Propaganda, The Crisis of Legitimacy, and The Resort to Fascism
The propaganda is hitting Goebbels level, it is getting that obvious and stark. The elite are losing the propaganda war – hence, the increasingly shrill and panicked, desperate measures. Keep…
Shakespeare’s Mirror
Grant that, and then is death a benefit. So are we Caesar’s friends, that have abridged His time of fearing death. Stoop, Romans, stoop, And let us bathe our hands…
I Struggle With Milton
Confession time: I find a lot of epic or narrative poetry a slog. Milton, Homer, Dante… I have read my way into them all, but unlike my other books, I…
Know Your Enemy
Know your enemy and know yourself, and you will be victorious. – Sun Tzu * Never underestimate what a few individuals will do in pursuit of wealth, privilege, or power.…
Books To Read, or Re-Read
(Notes to myself, and anyone else who may be interested) Desert Solitaire The Monkey Wrench Gang Hayduke Lives! A Wizard Of Earthsea The Essential John Muir Essays – Thoreau…
Mass Digital Addiction vs Reading
Remember, as Thoreau said, “Read the best books first, otherwise you might never read them at all.” And in this age of pandemic digital addiction, media overload and mass information…