Here i will hold this place for us to talk about books. If youre into knowledge like me, you read books. And i know you have some great books. Everyone should post some great reads along with books you have read and reviews on the book. Please no spoilersXD
Im currently reading “Manifesting Minds: A Review of Psychedelics in Science, Medicine, Sex, and Spirituality” its not youre everyday book. Its by MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.
Its not a regular book. It has many authors including Sasha (Alex) and Ann Shulgin, Ram Dass (richard alpert), and Timothy Leary.
Its made up of essays and interviews from these guys plus many many more. It talks about things like parenting with psychedelics to why some music doesnt sound right untill youve taken some psychedelics. Ive been loving this book soo much!
Master Keng Sang Chu, a disciple of Lao Tzu, Became famous for his wisdom, and the people of WeiLei began to venerate him as a sage. He avoided their homage and refused their gifts. He kept himself hidden and would not let them come to see him. His disciples remonstrated with him, and declared that since the time Yao and Shun it had been tradition for wise men to accept veneration, and thus exercise a good influence. Master Keng replied:
"Come here, my children, listen to this.
If a beast big enough to swallow a wagon
Should leave its mountain forest,
It will not escape the hunters trap.
If a fish big enough to swallow a boat
Lets itself be stranded by the outgoing tide,
Then even ants will destroy it.
So birds fly high, beasts remain
In trackless solitudes,
Keep out of sight; and fishes
Or turtles go deep down,
Down to the very bottom.
The man who has some respect for his person
Keeps his carcass out of sight,
Hides himself as perfectly as he can.
As for Yao and Shun: why praise such kings?
What good did their morality do?
They knocked a hole in the wall
And let it fill up with brambles.
They numbered the hairs of your head
Before combing them.
They counted out each grain of rice
Before cooking their dinner.
What good did they do to the world
With their scrupulous distinctions?
If the virtuous are honored,
The world will be filled with envy.
If the smart man is rewarded,
The world will be filled with thieves.
You cannot make men good or honest
by praising virtue and knowledge.
Since the days of pious Yao and virtuous Shun
Everybody has been trying to get rich:
A son will kill his father for money,
A minister will murder his sovereign
To satisfy ambition.
In broad daylight they rob each other,
At midnight they break down walls:
The root of all this was planted
In the time of Yao and Shun.
The branches will grow for a thousand ages,
And a thousand ages from now
Men will be eating one another raw.
This is from, “The Way Of Chuang Tzu.” It was written by Thomas Merton a trappist monk who loved Asian philosophy.
He wrote this after reading four translations, two English, one French, and one German and these were his favorite stories… The original philosophy is from around 550 to 250 b.c. If you notice the complaints of everyday struggle and politics hasn’t changed much from this story. It is a bit dark but i find myself flipping to it often.
I used to live on Surfside Island Texas, A toll bridge connects Galveston to Surfside. De Vaca was a story we were told as kids, i can barely remember.
Roberto Bolaño (Chile/Spain): 2666.
The Hell is on the Earth n we humans are the only devils…
“Welcome” to Ciudad Juarez (called “Santa Teresa” in the novel) hell…
Bolaño is one of the greatest comtemporanies Hispanic writers: he died so young, but he would be sure “Premio Cervantes” (like the Literature Nobel, but only in Spanish)If he would have been alive today…
The New York Times awarded It like “The best book of 2008”, an Oprah W. n Stephen King are same of the USA Bolaños lovers, I think… But Bolaño is thousand miles away from S.King: Bolaño is in Hispanic Literature History next close to G.Garcia Marquez, Vargas LLosa, Borges, Augusto Monterroso or Goytisolo…
PD: @Stonervet68, in the novel one protagoniste is an old II.W.W German soldiers livin in Mexico, who is allways rememberin the fight against Sovietics in Ucrania n SouthWeastern Russia… I think maybe It can be interestin for ya…
Roberto Bolaño was a great dogs lover, too… Before his World literature succes, he worked like " private security man", alone with dogs keeping Touristic Campings in the night…
If Don Quixote is so long to ya, ya must read “El lazarillo de Tormes”. It’s a very funny but very hard n sour/acid " dirty realisme “short clasical Spanish novel. Wrotten 50 years before " Don Quixote”, it inspired Cervantes a lot.
History tell the live of a social pariah in 1550 in Spain: the son of a poor worker black man, n a even more poor white woman who will must work like prostitute when her husband dies hunged cos he must finally stole to the family survival… We can see how Lázaro (el lazarillo : a person who guíe blind people, like dogs today) must forguet his moral convictions in order be able to rise in the social scale… MASTERPIECE, short, very easy to read: It catch your total atention like the better actuals “best-sellers”…
FULL TEXT IN ENGLISH:
Hopes ya all will enjoy with it!
@Stonervet68, It shows the worst face of our society durin the Empire “Where The Sun Nevers Falls Down” Age… N maybe our sins then arent so much diferent from now…
The English Speakers literary critics sais, like only a little example:
“Long before the Emile (Jean-Jacques Roqusseau) or Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens) or Huckleberry Finn the anonymous author of Lazarillo treated a boy as a boy, not a small adult.
Long before Moll Flanders (Daniel Defoe), Lazarillo describes the domestic and working life of a poor woman, wife, mother, climaxing in the flogging of Lazarillo’s mother through the streets of the town after her black husband Zayde is hanged as a thief.
Long before modern treatment of “persons of color”, this author treats sympathetically the pleasures and pains of an interracial family in his descriptions of life with his black stepfather and negrito half-brother, though their characterization is based on stereotypes.”
I agree Mig, modern racial insensitivity is a sad thing to behold. You would think that our modern society would be a bit more enlightened than to still be straddled with such antiquated and backwards social conceptions. Being from the heart of Dixie I see this on a regular basis. However I am living proof that one does not have to be a product of one’s environment. Traveling the world and trying not to be killed by foreign people has given me a socially accepting perspective that these morons will never have,lol. I have no enlightened social peers. They are pretty much all beetle-browed knuckle-dragging Neanderthals,ergo my ex communication from them,lol.
But in “El Lazarillo”, @Stonervet68, ya can see how, at end, economycal, socialclass (n religiouses in that age, of course) diferences n discriminations are the principal guilty of the moral degradation n hipocresie of the Spanish Golden Age…
(Cos a rich or famouse black man in that age was “less black”, as well as in a NativeAmerican man case: the Azteca/Mexica Royal Family who survived to Spanish Conquest will join into the Spanish Highest Aristocracy, like an example… (Like today, no?)
A famouse Caetano Veloso song, sais more or less in its Brazilian Portuguese lyrics:
" Thousand of persons marginated n sufferin…But all of them are black… or 3/4 black… or half black, or 1/4 black…or 3/4 white… or nearly white or white…But all of them are poor, very poor… N all the poor people is just like the black people… N ya actualy knows in how way the black people must be dominated.")
Ja, ja, ja !.. Hey, imagine how It would be If these foreigner people ya “meet”, not only not wanted&tried to kill ya, but even they invites ya to a paella, n an old dark rum n a fruity n happy sativa joint like desert… It must be amazing, je je…
And I wonder if I went to Spain that I would find foreign people like that there,lol… good food,good friends, good booz, good weed,no death and dismemberment, what more can any human being ask for,lol… would there be any muy hermoso senoritas in that mix by chance too?.. if so give me a few days to go renew my passport and I’ll hop the next plane on over,lol.
English words of Nahuatl origin include “avocado”, “chayote”, “chili”, “chocolate”, “atlatl”, “coyote”, “peyote”, “axolotl” and “tomato”. From wikipedia.
Yeah, but ya take It from Spanish (cos we take It from Nahualt first, of course).
As well we take TOMAHAK from English, not from a NorthAmerican Native tongue… (I think we have only a few Seminolas/Pueblo/Zuñi/Hopi words…)
Spanish has vocabulary from Nahaualt, Caribe, Taíno n “Maya” words, more than from the other HispanicAmmerica Native tongues, I think… More from than Quechua(Incan) or Guaraní…
But of course the most of our vocabulary cames from Latin, Greek n Arabic. N less from Galize Tongue (Gallego, the origin of Portuguse) n Euskera (Basque Tongue) .
This is possibly the first book that led to christian beliefs. It is quoted in the bible directly and indirectly. It is controversial so that makes it even more tantalizing for me. This doesn’t contain the Dead Sea Scroll additions to my knowledge. I hopefully can find those later.
Here is a disturbing book I just finished.
I had been meaning to read it for a long time. I have never seen the movie which was inspired by this memoir.
This book provides an interesting first person account of being committed to a “loony bin” in 1967. The author describes, quite vividly, her experience inside a mental hospital.
Here is the first page which hooked me immediately😎
