Barry Graham's Blog, page 7

Narcissus by Caravaggio Writers who describe themselves as "survivors," even though they haven't experienced anything life-threatening, tend to be bad writers.

Good writers tend to be people who love books and want to write them. Bad writers tend to be people who want to be "heard," or "seen," and who value their "voice."

Bad writers want to express themselves. Good writers get over themselves.

Most of the above also applies if you replace "writers" with "people."

The crime writer Damien Seaman has just published an interview with me, and a review of my book One for My Baby.

Zen Buddhist author Barry Graham: "Most publishers couldn't sell weed to Snoop Dogg"
Elmore Leonard meets Henry Miller: an in-depth review of One For My Baby by Barry Graham

Zazen by the River Kelvin, first day of the year

window silvertone clouds electric sky
weather report overcast and rain

Tom Leonard died yesterday, the Winter Solstice. It’s impossible to discuss him without using superlatives; he was one of the greatest Scottish poets of the last hundred years, and one of the most important political thinkers, and his impact on the language is equalled only by that of Fergusson, Burns and MacDiarmid.

Although I lived a few minutes walk from his place in Glasgow’s West End in the mid-1980s, I never met him during that time, though I was as affected by his work as every ot...

Jikan Batty and Dogo Graham, June 2018 Today Jikan Horai (Ordinary Silence, Dharma Thunder) Michael Batty Sensei received Dharma Transmission from me. Jikan Sensei is also a novelist who publishes under the pen name Bart Lessard. From the U.S., he moved to Scotland at the end of 2016. He is one of only two teachers I have ordained; the other is Daishin Stephenson Sensei.

It gladdens my proletarian heart to see that the new issue of the Pacific Zen Institute's magazine Uncertainty Club contains an excerpt from Red Rosa, the excellent graphic biography of Rosa Luxemburg by Kate Evans. There's plenty of other good stuff, including writing by John Tarrant Roshi and art by Allison Atwill Roshi.

I was unaware of this wonderful record until Daishin got it for me a few weeks ago. Since then, it's become my favourite outsider music. Recorded in a Canadian school gymnasium in 1977, the performances — vocal and instrumental — are by children with no previous musical experience, taught by an inexperienced music teacher... and the result is sublime. The beautiful, broken singing on "Desperado" makes it the most powerful version of that song I've heard. My other favourites are "Sweet C...

All that is solid melts into air."
Karl Marx

Today is the 50th anniversary of the death of Thomas Merton. In a talk he gave a few hours before his death, he said Christianity is inseparable from communism. I agree with him, and I say the same is true of Buddhism.