Ken Nordine: Alive and Well – Word Jazz Forever
Ken Nordine-Stare with Your Ears
This morning I found myself remembering the early 1960′s when I used to listen to Ken Nordine on AM radio while doing homework. He was the first poet I ever heard perform and to this day I have never heard anyone deliver lines of verse better. I have been to many poetry readings, most readers have a strange, stilted, stiff, and stylized delivery that has little to do with the meaning of the words. I’m sure you know what I mean. Most singers—folk and country especially—render their lyrics with rhythms, pitch, tone, and inflection that express so much more faithfully the meaning of the lines they perform. Ken Nordine is unique in that while he does not sing his lines, the manner in which he speaks them is essentially musical–spoken song, or as he calls it, “word jazz.”
Podcasts of many of his performances and shows are available at his Word Jazz website: http://www.wordjazz.com
If you have not yet had the pleasure of hearing Ken Nordine — please, treat yourself, have a listen:
Poets and Philosophers: Beyond Rhyme and Meter
John Keats(1795-1821)
Poets thrive on paradoxes, creating them, giving them expression; philosophers also thrive on paradox, but by explaining them away. Poets present things as they are; philosophers explain how things come to be.
John Keats:
Letter to Benjamin Bailey
22 November 1817
Letter to his brothers
21 December 1817
Leslie and the Badgers – New to My Soundtrack
Since the 1970s I have lived my life to a soundtrack featuring Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Donovan, Procol Harem, The Grateful Dead, James Taylor, The Moody Blues, and so on and on, and, oh yeah, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, Traffic, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Cat Stevens — I wish I could click an iTunes “Genius” button right now to finish the list.
Recently I came across another group that I think I will be listening to for years, decades to come, Leslie and the Badgers. The things I love about the music of Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, and Janis Joplin are what I love about the music of Leslie and the Badgers — great poetic lyrics, a lead vocalist with unbelievable range and expression, and an ensemble of fellow musicians playing a lot, and I do mean a lot, of different instruments. Playing so many instruments enables the group to give each song a fresh, unique sound. Their sound transcends categories, try a mix of country, folk, and rock performed with heart, whimsy, humor, and a desire to communicate. Is there a name for that?
Here is a list of instruments listed on “Roomful of Smoke,” their new CD: saw, marxophone, rhodes, all types of guitar (lap steel, bass, rhythm, lead, baritone, high strung, acoustic, pedal steel), accordion, horns, cigfiddle, timpani, piano, Wurlitzer Organ, drums, glockenspiel, violin, Hammond organ. They play them all, and well. Again from the “Roomful of Smoke” CD, a list of the musicians in Leslie Stevens’ backup ensemble: Glenn Oyabe, Ben Reddell, Travis Popichak, Charlene Huang, Eugene Fillios, Keven Savigar, David Bianco, James Bianco, Mandy Hoffman, and David Ralicke.
Then there is the voice of lead vocalist, Leslie Stevens—beyond words. You’ll just have to listen.
Here’s a video and some links. Go buy their stuff, check out their schedule, see them in person!
Dogen's "Practice-Realization" and St. Paul's "By Grace – Not Works"
The idea that enlightenment or salvation is always already the case and freely available was taught by both Eihei Dogen, 13th century Japanese Zen teacher and founder of the Soto School of Zen Buddhism and by St. Paul, 1st century Jewish teacher and “founder” of Christianity. Dogen’s short-hand term for effortless enlightenment or salvation is “practice-realization;” St. Paul’s phrase is “by grace are ye saved.”
Here are two relevant texts, Dogen’s “Fukanzazengi” (Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen) and an excerpt from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.
Paul’s first:
“For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.”
Ephesians 2:8-9
Dogen’s is a bit longer. You can download the Fukanzazengi by clicking here.
FUKANZAZENGI
Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen
The Way is originally perfect and all‑pervading. How could it be contingent on practice and realization? The true vehicle is self‑sufficient. What need is there for special effort? Indeed, the whole body is free from dust. Who could believe in a means to brush it clean? It is never apart from this very place; what is the use of traveling around to practice’ And yet, if there is a hairsbreadth deviation, it is like the gap between heaven and earth. If the least like or dislike arises, the mind is lost in confusion. Suppose you are confident in your understanding and rich in enlightenment, gaining the wisdom that knows at a glance, attaining the Way and clarifying the mind, arousing an aspiration to reach for the heavens. You are playing in the entranceway, but you still are short of the vital path of emancipation.
Consider the Buddha: although he was wise at birth, the traces of his six years of upright sitting can yet be seen. As for Bodhidharma, although he had received the mind‑seal, his nine years of facing a wall is celebrated still. If even the ancient sages were like this, how can we today dispense with wholehearted practice?
Therefore, put aside the intellectual practice of investigating words and chasing phrases, and learn to take the backward step that turns the light and shines it inward. Body and mind of themselves will drop away, and your original face will manifest. If you want such a thing, get to work on such a thing immediately.
For practicing Zen, a quiet room is suitable. Eat and drink moderately. Put aside all involvements and suspend all affairs. Do not think ‘/good” or “bad.” Do not judge true or false. Give up the operations of mind, intellect, and consciousness; stop measuring with thoughts, ideas, and views. Have no designs on becoming a Buddha. How could that be limited to sitting or lying down?
At your sitting place, spread out a thick mat and put a cushion on it. Sit either in the full‑lotus or half‑lotus position. In the full‑lotus position, first place your right foot on your left thigh, then your left foot on your right thigh. In the half‑lotus, simply place your left foot on your right thigh. Tie your robes loosely and arrange them neatly. Then place your right hand on your left leg and your left hand on your right palm, thumb‑tips lightly touching. Straighten your body and sit upright, leaning neither left nor right, neither forward nor backward. Align your ears with your shoulders and your nose with your navel. Rest the tip of your tongue against the front of the roof of your mouth, with teeth and lips together both shut. Always keep your eyes open, and breathe softly through your nose.
Once you have adjusted your posture, take a breath and exhale fully, rock your body right and left, and settle into steady, immovable sitting. Think of not thinking. Not thinking-what kind of thinking is that? Nonthinking. This is the essential art of zazen.
The zazen I speak of is not meditation practice. It is simply the Dharma gate of joyful ease, the practice‑realization of totally culminated enlightenment. It is the Road realized, traps and snares can never reach it. If you grasp the point, you are like a dragon gaining the water, like a tiger taking to the mountains. For you must know that the true Dharma appears of itself, so that from the start dullness and distraction are struck aside.
When you arise from sitting, move slowly and quietly, calmly and deliberately. Do not rise suddenly or abruptly. In surveying the past, we find that transcendence of both mundane and sacred, and dying while either sitting or standing, have all depended entirely on the power of zazen. ~
In addition, triggering awakening with a finger, a banner, a needle, or a mallet, and effecting realization with a whisk, a fist, a staff, or a shout- these cannot be understood by discriminative thinking, much less can they be known through the practice of supernatural power. They must represent conduct beyond seeing and hearing. Are they not a standard prior to knowledge and views?
This being the case, intelligence or lack of it is not an issue; make no distinction between the dull and the sharp‑witted. If you concentrate your effort single‑mindedly, that in itself is wholeheartedly engaging the way. Practice‑realization is naturally undefiled. Going forward is, after all, an everyday affair.
In general, in our world and others, in both India and China, all equally hold the buddha‑seal. While each lineage expresses its own style, they are all simply devoted to sitting, totally blocked in resolute stability. Although they say that there are ten thousand distinctions and a thousand variations, they just wholeheartedly engage the way in zazen. Why leave behind the seat in your own home to wander in vain through the dusty realms of other lands? If you make one misstep you stumble past what is directly in front of you.
You have gained the pivotal opportunity of human form. Do not pass your days and nights in vain. You are taking care of the essential activity of the Buddha way. Who would take wasteful delight in the spark from a flint stone? Besides, form and substance are like the dew on the grass, the fortunes of life like a dart of lightning emptied in an instant, vanished in a flash.
Please, honored followers of Zen, long accustomed to groping for the elephant, do not doubt the true dragon. Devote your energies to the way that points directly to the real thing. Revere the one who has gone beyond learning and is free from effort. Accord with the enlightenment of all the Buddhas; succeed to the samadhi of all the ancestors. Continue to live in such a way, and you will be such a person. The treasure store will open of itself, and you may enjoy it freely.
David J. Linden – The Accidental Mind: Point of Inquiry Interview
David Linden
An new interview with neuroscientist David J. Linden provides some physiological context and grounding for reconsidering and thinking anew about what it means to be human.
From the Point of Inquiry introduction:
In this broad discussion with D.J. Grothe, David Linden challenges widespread beliefs about the brain, such as that people only use ten percent of it and that it is amazingly designed, arguing instead that the brain is “accidental.” . . . He discusses the neuron, and how it is a “lousy processor of information,” describing how evolution has nonetheless used it to build “clever us.” He talks about how our brains have constrained us, and may have physically led to the necessity of marriage, family and long childhoods. . . . And he argues that the brain has evolved to make everyone a “believer,” describing the similarities between belief in science and in religion, that both are similar “branches of the same cognitive stream.”
Click here for the complete Point of Inquiry introduction and links to the interview and the iTunes subscription page for P.O.I.
Steven Pinker: The Blank Slate Fallacy
from the TED.com introduction:
“Steven Pinker’s books have been like bombs tossed into the eternal nature-versus-nurture debate. Pinker asserts that not only are human minds predisposed to certain kinds of learning, such as language, but that from birth our minds — the patterns in which our brain cells fire — predispose us each to think and behave differently.
His deep studies of language have led him to insights into the way that humans form thoughts and engage our world. He argues that humans have evolved to share a faculty for language, the same way a spider evolved to spin a web. We aren’t born with “blank slates†to be shaped entirely by our parents and environment, he argues in books including The Language Instinct; How the Mind Works; and The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.”
Click here to go to TED.com for more about Steven Pinker.
Thunderbolt Bookstore, Graduation, and the Beginning of Summer Freedom
Every year, for the past 9 years, after graduation ceremonies, I take a short drive to Santa Monica and wait out rush hour by walking the Santa Monica Pier and hanging out on the Third Street promenade. Walking into the Thunderbolt bookstore I was astonished to find Jesus holding a bag imprinted with an album cover of the late 60′s, early 70′s band, It’s a Beautiful Day. Clicking the image will take you to a gallery of the Thunderbolt Bookstore photos I took that night.
It's a Beautiful Day bag
Gerald Graff and the Future of Critical Pedagogy
In his early books, Literature Against Itself (1979) and Professing Literature: An Institutional History (1987), Graff took as his main subjects literary theory and the institutional history of departments of English and literature, respectively. Literature Against Itself continues to be of interest and value for its discussion and analysis of competing schools of literary theory; and the historical narrative of the history of the post-secondary teaching of English that informs Professing Literature continues to enlighten anyone interested in curriculum design and canon-making. But perhaps these two early books can also be appreciated for their having afforded Graff the opportunity to work out the foundational arguments and historical perspectives that enabled him in his later books — Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (1992) and Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (2003) — to effectively argue and explain why students across the curriculum would benefit from a more critical style of pedagogy. Read the rest of this entry »
Northwestern University – Harris Hall 107 Redux: Bound to Please by Michael Dirda
I sat many hours in Northwestern University’s Harris lecture hall 107 during my years as an undergraduate and graduate student from 1968 to 1982.
As an undergraduate I listened to Alfred Appel lecture on James Joyce, Nathaniel West, Ernest Hemingway, Vladimir Nabokov, and the modernist significance of the great jazz artists of the 20′s, 30′s, 40′s, and 50′s: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, and Charlie Parker. How many college lectures have a soundtrack?
Appel’s lectures on Nabokov and the pop culture motifs that form much of the substance of Lolita informed and entertained us. Much of the content of Appel’s lectures on Nabokov and Lolita can be found, mutatis mutandis, in Appel’s still authoritative Annotated Lolita. Students listened in attentive silence to his lectures on Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” and how Nick Adams found healing and relief for his battle-scarred psyche through fly fishing. This silence was atypical: more often than not, many of Appel’s lectures were punctuated with frequent laughter.
Appel made a lot of people laugh. I’ll never forget sitting in a Romantic poetry class on the second floor of University Hall when, just as Professor Gerald Prince was reciting these lines from Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale, “Away! away! for I will fly to thee, / Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,†Appel walks by the door opening to the hallway, flapping his arms like a bird. The class roared with laughter; Professor Prince, his back to the door, was dumbfounded.
In the early 70′s I also remember two other lecturers who held forth in Harris 107: anthropology professor Stuart Struever and guru to the hippies, Stephen Gaskin.
Hearing anthropology professor Stuart Struever explain how the Vietnam War was essentially “maladaptive” encouraged students to continue or begin their protests of the war. I was so impressed and moved by the perspectives that an anthropological approach to understanding opened up that I changed my major to anthropology. During the 1970′s Struever was host to 100′s of student assistants who helped in excavating the 10,000 year old Hopewell burial mounds in Greene County, Illinois, about 270 miles south of Chicago. Struever was a colorful character who wore denim jeans and khaki short sleeved shirts as often as a tie and jacket, who interjected into his lectures stories of the years he spent buying and selling artifacts for import and trade in Africa. Think Indiana Jones.
One warm spring evening in 1970 I listened to Stephen Gaskin — eventual founder of The Farm coop that settled in Tennessee — give a talk from a seated zazen half lotus pose, a talk about Buddha, weed, psilocybin, LSD, Jesus, and enlightenment — not necessarily in that order. That lecture was eventually anthologized in Monday Night Class, still in print forty years later. I will also never forget wandering outside after Stephen’s talk to the parking lot along Lake Michigan and being invited into one of the caravan school buses that followed Stephen’s lecture tour from the left to right coast and back again. I hung out for an few hours with a several guys and girls who were sharing a converted school bus. To this day the smell of patchouli oil brings back with hallucinatory vividness that evening and that after-lecture party in a converted school bus.
As a graduate student teaching assistant some 10 years later in the early 80′s, I remember Martin Mueller’s lucid background lectures on Shakespeare, especially his talks about The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, and The Tempest. The last lectures I attended in Harris 107Â were given by Henry Binder in a course comparing literary and cinematic treatments of the “American West” with evening screenings of Stagecoach, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, and The Wild Bunch.
These memories of hearing experts of various kinds holding forth on their chosen fields of literature, philosophy, religion, politics, history — memories now thirty and more years old — are a source of exquisite nostalgia. But nostalgia cloys, does not really satisfy, but that is part of its poignant, seductive charm, isn’t it? the fact that it does not satisfy.
Recently I discovered Bound to Please, an anthology of a quarter century’s worth of book reviews by Washington Post Book World editor, Michael Dirda. Dirda has spent his professional life reveling in the writings, thoughts, and works of various authors, translators, biographers, artists, and historians who have each individually in turn dedicated their individual lives to exploring the works, thoughts, or times of their chosen subjects and fields of research.
Reading these reviews is like sitting once again as a bearded young man listening to an inspiring, knowledge-laden professor holding forth in Harris 107.
Postscript: By chance I happened to read recently that Harris Hall is being renovated. New generations of students and scholars — and perhaps a next-gen hippie-guru or two — await.
Do philosophers laugh? If so, why? If not, why not?
What makes something funny? Some years ago I picked up an anthology of pieces (they weren’t quite formal essays), by humorist S. J. Perelman. In the introduction the editor begins to answer the question but leaves off writing to attend to a laughing fit so severe he had to lie down on a couch with a cold wet cloth on his forehead.
Then there is the question of taste and political correctness. I’ll just pose the question: Why are so many jokes that many or most of us would laugh at in poor taste or politically incorrect? One person’s joke is another’s person’s “teachable moment.”
Some humorous writing or telling is good for the moment, while some pieces, episodes, images, scenes have something that triggers the humor center in generation after generation — certain lines and scenes in Shakespeare, for example, or Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels come to mind. I’m sure you can think of your own.
Here is a list of philosophical humor links selected from an even more comprehensive list at http://consc.net/phil-humor.html Some of them are sure to get you laughing or thinking about laughing (can you think and laugh at the same time?).
- Philosophical kisses
- Non-philosopher’s guide to philosophical terms
- Philosophical warning labels
- Philosophy light-bulb jokes
- A Descartes joke
- Understanding philosophy through jokes
- Brain in a vat at the wheel of a runaway trolley
- The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook
- Husserl parody
- The Postmodernism Generator
- Realists Anonymous
- Tractatus Fuselagico-Umbilicus
- Witteringswine’s Philosophical Tribulations
- A fragment of a lost Platonic dialogue
- Tech support, Nietzsche style
- History of Greek philosophy
- Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding
- A rant about Kant
- Philosophy Comics
- Principia Comica
- Philosophy Cartoons
- Lump of Clay
- Berkeley on Locke on the material world
- Kant attack ad
- Kierkegaard
- History of Western Philosophy in 90 seconds
- Monty Python’s International Philosophy sketch
- Analytic philosophy as reflected in the works of Monty Python
- I also dated Zarathustra
- Self-referential story
- Everything is equally interesting
- Socrates’ Argument Clinic
- New logical particles
- Tractatus Logico-Randomus
- Zombies on the web
- Introductory philosophy quiz
- How to be a philosopher
- Nanophilosophy
- Philosophy Action Figures
- The Metaphysics Lecture
- Philosopher Jokes
- Chomskybot
- Mathematical Jokes
- Mathematical Humor
- Physics Humor
- Psychology Humor Page
- Science Humor
- Self-Reference Jokes
- Twinkies Project
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Snow Summit 2
