Barry Graham's Blog, page 28

With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want… Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold—Christopher Columbus

Today the U.S. celebrates an inept navigator who thought that San Salvador was Japan and Cuba was China, and who enslaved, mutilated and murdered the natives of the lands his ineptitude took him to.

Also, it’s not true that most people thought the earth was flat in those days.

I think it’s fitting that the U.S. cel...

Autumn in Portland, and the city is as beautiful as it always is at this time of year. But, as much as we enjoy the beauty of brown, gold and red leaves falling, we’re less inclined to appreciate the same thing in ourselves…

I turned 50 this year. At a City Cave Zen sangha service last year, I was making the incense offering, which includes three full prostrations to the altar, something I’ve been doing for many years. But this time I noticed that something was different. After each prostratio...

I just watched Shadow Boxers, an excellent documentary about female boxers, with a focus on Lucia Rijker. Somehow, I didn’t know before that Rijker is a Buddhist. As well as being a devastating fighter (aided by the counsel of the great Freddie Roach), she chants the Lotus Sutra beautifully.

I haven’t yet seen the film Hell or High Water, but I was struck by this sentence from The New Yorker’s review by Richard Brodey:“The characters have no memories, no identities, no range of interests, no personal connections, no idiosyncrasies beyond the dictates of the plot and the numbingly clear point that the filmmakers use it to make.”

This“criticism” makes me more eager to see the film, because I find it irritating when storytellers explain their characters with backstory, reducing them...

sumi-no-neko:

野村文挙 Nomura Bunkyō (1854 - 1911)
レンゲ草に雀, 1898

On a bus in Portland, OR, a man talks about how he used to sell burial plots. He says it was easiest to sell to aging couples, but only if they were both present.“Then I could play them off each other, saying to each of them, Well, what if… It was harder to make a sale if it was just one of them.”

The way so many people are forced to live, having to sell things, or sell concepts, convince other people to buy, even if they have to do it by invoking death. Survival dependent upon a hustle...

That’s Daimajin, the demon god who protects working class people. The hand, like the figurine, belongs to a certain mad monk and kaiju fan.

newyorker:

Alan Moore is an artist committed to his own invented system of symbols and divinities. Read the full story on the graphic novelist, who, on his fortieth birthday, declared himself a ceremonial magician.

“Don’t live in the present. Live in the deep past, with the language of the Koran or the Mabinogion or Mother Goose or Dickens or Dickinson or Baldwin or whatever speaks to you deeply. Literature is not high school and it’s not actually necessary to know what everyone around you is wearing, in terms of style, and being influenced by people who are being published in this very moment is going to make you look just like them, which is probably not a good long-term goal for being yourself or mak...