Barry Graham's Blog, page 34

I would prefer not to

I got this tattoo yesterday, on my 50th birthday. It’s from Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. Melville’s work was forgotten before he died, and he had no reason to think it would ever be remembered, let alone be tattooed on the arm of a writer from another country more than a century later.

The tattoo was done by Alice Kendall at Wonderland Tattoos in Portland.

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One for My Baby free on Kindle

Today and tomorrow, my book One for My Baby—a neo-noir tale of crime, sex and free enterprise—is free on Amazon Kindle.

No words for Muhammad Ali

“His hands can’t hit what his eyes can’t see—
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee—
Rumble, young man, rumble!”

When Frank Sinatra died, I was working as front-of-the-book columnist at Phoenix New Times. In Seamus McCaffrey’s Irish Pub I ran into Michael Lacey, the then-owner of the newspaper. I told him I had just seen When We Were Kings, the documentary about the fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, and Lacey remarked that Ali was to his generation what Si...

Street, Portland

Street, Portland

class-struggle-anarchism:“one could write a whole history of…...

class-struggle-anarchism:

“one could write a whole history of… the ways one evades the obligation of work, steals labor-power, and avoids letting oneself be held and pinned down by the production apparatus.”

– Michel Foucault, The Punitive Society

estrina:Bodhidharma by Pavel Bratanov. Bodhidharma was a...

estrina:

Bodhidharma by Pavel Bratanov.
Bodhidharma was a Buddhist monk who lived during the 5th or 6th century. He is traditionally credited as the transmitter of Chan Buddhism to China, and regarded as its first Chinese patriarch. According to Chinese legend, he also began the physical training of the monks of Shaolin Monastery that led to the creation of Shaolin Kung Fu.
See more at:
http://estrina.com/Karellin/p268

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Why secular meditation doesn't work

Imagine you have an infection, and your doctor prescribes antibiotics. The pills have a strawberry-flavored coating. You like the taste of strawberry, so you lick the coating off the pills, but you don’t swallow the medicine, so you don’t get well.

This is how it is when you isolate Buddhist meditation from Buddhism.