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There is a pressing need to explain all the unexpected qualities of the collective unconscious as if Jung himself just awoke from a vivid dream and produced this essay at his bedside. Of course, this dream extends back to his doctoral studies and his mentors Freud and Adler, but there is something more to it as well. The Great War when he first wrote, and its inevitable sequel by the fifth edition, echoes into today.

No time to dillydally with the story as Raspe figures out late in the first volume that Baron needs to get somewhere, and so sends him forth and back to England: shot by a cannon, a fall through the planet via Mt. Etna, across the ocean and all over the Americas by giant eagles in the supplement. The second volume’s preface pronounces its apolitical stance while preparing to send him off to colonize Africa - yikes!

The telling of tall tales includes second-hand knowledge from a fictional father to contemporary explorers like Phipps, Hamilton and Cook. The shape and scope of the world was shrinking as massive European empires extended beyond their borders. Nevertheless a boasting Baron evinces that there is still enough wilderness left unconquered, especially with a return to the moon and whirlwind tour of the inhabitants there.

The second part moves away, slowly, from Buddhist recorded history to more of a freestyle riff in the tradition of koans and za-zen while still connecting to the enigmatical answers from masters to their confused monks. Watts brings in the western point of view which also includes such mysteries as pre-Internet cybernetics, but really hits his creative stride when writing about the arts in Japan being implicitly Zen.

Enthusiastically honouring of immersive storyteller Lady Murasaki’s Tale of the Genji centuries ahead of other novelists, the rest of Keene’s account of Japanese literature becomes one of diminishing returns. From the epoch of the ‘floating world,’ his assessment of literary pursuits gets outdone but Western examples hardly anyone reads today. Natsume gets downplayed and Akutagawa not even mentioned!

The design of a research project owes much to the philosophy of the researcher, more than just the philosopher most quoted throughout a thesis. While I am still enamoured by the arts-based approach that permits creativity and expression to emerge from experience, it is only one of the many ways to state a case. With mixed methods, there is an emphasis on pragmatic use of data, antithetical to arts but still creative.

Not content to expend all his frolicsome fury of animals in sport, the Baron decimates entire garrisons of humans, sinks armada and plays similar pranks with hot-air balloons, occasionally in the service of various Turkish and English warlords but more often just for personal kicks. An ancestral sling once used by David as well as Shakespeare is just one of the fantastical objects to be accessory to his merry mayhem.

The straightening out of Zen’s wiggly history is a task Watts handles with ease, drawing upon the main precursors point by point: Confucianism, Taoism, Vedic Hinduism and earlier ways of Buddhism. And yet perhaps there is another reason its history is not found in such a chronological form in other sources, a koan-ish enigma that defies initial understanding that Watts seems to be aware of but tells his story thus.

An affable windbag Baron recounts his early career and adventures and they start to sound like a madcap pastiche of the first few chapters of Leviticus, where the torture and sacrifice of animals is conducted in a sporting gentlemanly manner, far from the morality of the ancient Israelites. His travels also have a scattershot approach of being vaguely continental with indistinct initial visits to Russia and the moon.

For all the apologetic diffidence over the slimness of this book, Keene covers a lot of literary ground with enough room to quote text in both Romaji and equivalent English translations. Not only does he explicate the well-known passages of Basho and Zeami, but seeks out illuminating examples of poetry and drama. The greatest feat, however, is his effortless connections to Western arts, for Western readers after all.

The sudden switch from economics to experienced well-being comes a little too late in the game, very difficult to get on-board with lifestyle changes that are based on gains and losses (or winners and losers represented by percentages). And then to discover that much of the preceding chapters were more succinctly stated in the academic articles in the Appendices prompted more frustration. Does it ruin the whole book?

What started out as a more pious version of Raiders of the Lost Ark becomes a calamitous cautionary tale of the information age’s eventual demise and an infertile earth remaining a millennium later. Fairfax is a far cry from Indiana Jones; Captain Hancock makes a more suitable stand-in in that role but perhaps not a hero this world needs at that point in history, rather a faltering priest and a lucky lady.

What a relief to find the mountain a mountain once again, the river a river, as Suzuki’s writing returns to its simple poignancy after so many pages of it not being so. He turns to such timeless topics as nature, philosophy and art to reinforce the properties of Zen that need not be forced. It is especially thrilling to read his thoughts on the poet Basho and find him not a monk but a devoted “Zen-man” like me.

After my crash course in arts-based research over the past four years, I am ready to rediscover other methods touched upon from earlier PhD courses, especially as more empirical methods may soon come into play for my career. Leavy has the breadth and brevity to consider multiple formats in five major categories with comprehensive how-to’s on elements and ethics. Really intrigued with CBPR as culmination of inquiry.

After an electrified kiss between Susan and Christopher, one would have expected John Hancock to be a duped fifth wheel of this adventure but Captain H takes hold of the reins and leads them to a more exciting mystery. With the help of a heretical historian and his Sancho Panza, they unearth the mystery of the pre-Apocalypse ancients, and I am impressed how closely Dr. Morgenstern’s fifth conjecture matches my own!

If no-mind is a technique, I must have mastered it while reading this chapter, as I can barely recall a single point that Suzuki makes about consciousness or the unconscious, just my vague recollections of monks and novices in dialogue with the Zen masters and hardly getting a straight answer out of them. To say Suzuki rambles page after page misses the subtle point: what can I expect to learn from rational language?

Having established his philosophical triforce in earlier chapters, Rocha continue to promote phenomenology as a link between social and personal worlds, related to the generative inner wisdom a teacher shares with learners, and the dark power of the bureaucratic hangman who seeks to make schooling our own noose. It takes a courage to be one of the folks he writes about, with his family shining a light for his theory.

sheesh its over all of it and one has to wonder how much of the seven years labour couldve been curtailed with at least some editorial trimming but now Ill never have to hold this book again once Ive read the appendices and tried to figure out why so many scholars have given over a better part of their careers to straightening out and making sense of a story tossed off on a June afternoon on a stroll with Nora sheesh

This brave new world Heidegger philosophized from is a curious mixture of art, poetry, technology, transcendence and possibilities, and yet he is infamously regarded as an anti-Semite at one of those unfortunate periods in history where such hate was de rigueur. Inwood stakes his claim on Martin being no saint but rather projecting his own rootlessness on an oppressed people as others have done and still do.

Once again, the historian Harris pulls off an impressive twist, right at the end of chapter three, to give his late medieval adventure a postmodern flavour, as Christopher Fairfax rides into a small village to deal with a dead pastor, but finds evidence that the world we know suddenly switched off, much like I had discovered in my thesis, and the bits and pieces of what remain from the switched on era spell his ruin.

Another seemingly little book that has a lot to say about how education happens and why people study. Rocha connects the rich phenomenological heritage of philosopher like James and Heidegger while mining the deep, personal connection his life as a researcher provides. He also draws his son into the discussion in a fatherly, perhaps even embarrassing way, revealing how every scholar is an impetuous “not a goose.”

Did Joyce randomly write replies with an auto-text generator?
The first thing that is the only way that you could be with your own and the ego that is not only the one you have done for the next week and a week and I have to a couple weeks ago that you are going on the weekend and the next weekend of next weekend and we can set up a time to meet you guys and I have to go back into town and get a few more of the stuff

Inwood provides a thoughtful analysis of why Heidegger wrote and specifically gave the title for Being and Time while developing the always present notion of Dasein, even the eventual death all of us face. And yet for topics at hand, perhaps Heidegger would have preferred the title “Hammers and Death” which would have made for a less resolute philosopher but a curiously progressive proto-punk rock album.

The shell game of misdirection continues with any amount of money from a couple cents to a million dollars acting as a stand-in for the rubber ball that is often tucked up the huckster’s sleeve. Kahneman occasionally calls out his long running ECON scam, but not really enough to cross back over to the HUMAN side he left out. Rather than exploring reality as it might be, he has only provided a faulty frame of greed.

Don’t be fooled by supposed return to narrative normalcy here, the chapter “Eumaeus” is as poorly plotted and randomly assembled as any of the preceeding ones; more like “You Mar This” or “Huge Mean Ass”- ha, got ya Joyce! Totally nailed it, since he goes out of his way to make the familiar tale into such a misremembered mash, somehow bringing in some sailors just because that sense had sailed long ago.

For a philosopher whose main claim to fame has a revamped definition of Being that overturns Aristotle’s hegemonic hold on western minds, Inwood could have been a little less ambivalent about introducing Heidegger. In this book’s case, he is either marvel or a monster. Perhaps an enigma is precisely the point that this one-hit opus delivers Dasein to the world. Hope for a bit more specificity when reading about Time!

All the classical erudition Joyce vomits up in this way too long chapter becomes a gross pastiche of Walpurgisnacht (an already overstuffed quasitheatrical text), and the only highlight is the brief reappearance of Gerty limping onto the scene to call Leopold a creepy sexist jerk. So now I can tell what kinky thrills so many of the Bloomsdayians get up to every June 16th and no Philip Sober to throw the book at them?

The concluding chapters of Ethics mostly explore the seemingly benign topic of friendship; this notion has become a trite meme as in the often sarcastic “friendship is magic” but I get the sense that in Aristotle’s age of slavery, torture and barbarism, people who decided to do the opposite of these social norms were a wonder to behold. A bit suspicious that the happiest people live a life of the mind.

The mercantile nature of nineteenth-century schooling system is one of Dickens’ hobbyhorses, allowing for much social commentary on incompetent educators, but despite the Blimbers, Pipchins and Tootses crafted for satiric effect, Little Paul learns a great deal of nautical life lessons, particularly like one his dear friend Walter will soon experience firsthand, how suddenly the wave will reach a far distant shore.

Of course after a brief half chapter of understandable prose, the next fifty pages take an entire millennium of British literature, puts it in a blender and somehow makes it sound like boastful brogue bros in a bar talking bs. And somehow all of this is emblematic of the birthing process, incensing Woolf even more than the previous chapter as she writes indirect ire at Joyce (by way of Eliot’s praise) for his gall.