Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935-1938 by Walter Benjamin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Three essays into this gizmo & I'm totally awed by this guy! Overarching syncretizing intelligence: art, commoditization, architecture, archetypes, epochal dreams of bourgeois markets evolving through 19th century Paris: arcades, dept stores, high end gunk...upper middle class striving 2 b & 2 show as the merchants enjoy the freedom of post empire France...But then 2 an extraordinary review of Brecht's 3 Penny Novel!" I'm can't wait to continue reading!


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Zen Baggage: A Pilgrimage to China by Bill Porter
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Go all the way to 10th century China carrying a cell phone, riding a bus, drinking tea, getting cold wet and tired...Go all the way! Travelling with Red Pine is so much fun and then he throws in his vast knowledge of Chinese Buddhism and literature, especially poetry. I hang on his footnotes. This book is the next best thing to travelling China with Red Pine. What an exceeding generous host to a world very far away and hard to reach.  Only a few pass through and fewer yet come back and share the tale.


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The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures) by Victor Witter Turner
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Somehow I think it would have been much more fun to be in a graduate seminar at the University of Chicago with Professor Turner or even a bar on the South Side listening to the Blues applying all that knowledge, insight and creativity. I have heard some good stories. This book is definitely for the anthropology minded. But the liminal mind as accessed through ritual whether African, Episcopalian (and now I guess we have both joined being the African Episcopalians are a major force in that branch of the universe) Tibetan or Zen.  We offer light, incense, fruit, sweet tea and our consciousness to pass through that threshold, that gateway which even Heidegger talks about and probably stumbled through as far as I can gather from his later mutterings.  Be careful oh scientist, philosopher, your methodology cannot protect you. There is no working condom for life.


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