Barry Graham's Blog, page 110

criminalwisdom:

The Gentleman’s Guide To Amputation
Via Dangerous Minds

For the real deal see our previous post: THE GENERAL METHOD FOR AMPUTATIONS

A Zen student asked me if everyone has the same amount of ability for awakening, or if it varies in the same way that athletic or artistic talent varies.

I told him it varies just as much as any other innate ability. It is a Buddhist truism that, because all beings have Buddha-nature, everyone can awaken. The reality is that some people awaken deeply and quickly, others take a long time, and some never do, because, as Charlotte Joko Beck puts it, “They’re not strong enough.”

I...

Someone please tell me I’m hallucinating…

Foreign Policy has just published its selection of the top 100 global thinkers of 2012. Slavoj Zizek is listed… but at #92. The top of the list includes - I am not making this up - those well-known philosophers Dick Cheney, Bill and Melnda Gates, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and, I swear, Paul Ryan.

Yes.

Paul Ryan.

Also listed are Barack Obama, Condoleezza Rice and Binyamin Netenyahu.

Since it’s not April Fool’s Day, and there ha...

Larry Fondation asked me: “Pound-for-pound, who would you say is the best boxer in history? Loaded and unanswerable question I know, but anyway…”

I replied: “Hagler, definitely. Ali in second place, and, behind him, Jack Johnson, Duran, Robinson, Benny Leonard, Henry Armstrong.”

I think Marvin Hagler clearly stands alone as the greatest boxer so far. He was the perfect fighting machine, and what made him great was a unique versatility - he had no specialty, and was...

Someone asked me, “Do you write such stark, short books on purpose, or does it just come out that way?”

What I aim at when writing is the antithesis of self-expression. I move towards silence, towards saying nothing, or as close as I can get to an empty page while retaining the story. I know a book is complete when there’s nothing else that can be taken away without losing the story.

Of the books I’ve written so far, I think the ones that have gotten closest to this are...

In response to my posting the call for a boycott of Wal-Mart on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, a few people said that no one should shop there on any day, ever.

To judge people for shopping at Wal-Mart, to declare where they should shop, is classism. It assumes that everyone has a choice, and ignores those who shop where they can afford to, not where they “should.” Wal-Mart enforces an economic cannibalism in which people are kept so poor they can only afford the products of their...

With what’s going on in Gaza, I urge everyone to read Joe Sacco’s book Palestine. A brilliant piece of journalism in comic book form, it was published ten years ago, but its reporting was done ten years earlier - showing that what is happening there now is nothing new.

Sacco combines his own eye-witness reporting, interviews with Palestinians and Israelis, and a history of the region to show - without ever stating it - that the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is one of the gr...

We should all sing in praise of indoor plumbing,
We should prostrate ourselves before the magnificence
of the toilet,
perform libations with the hot running water –
beyond love and good health, what is there
to be more grateful for than that which sucks away
our shit and piss, leaving no trace, just clean white
porcelain! And hot water at the twist of a knob,
filling the tub, sanctuary for every injury and aching muscle!

No need, in the fourth year of this century, for walks outside
with a...