Ummagumma

This year I spent a lot of time thinking and reading slowly. Part of this slowness was due to the demands and interruptions of life.  Part of it is a sort of lessening of energy I am experiencing either due to aging or my increased workload or both.  I find my career more fatiguing than rewarding, regardless of the necessary money it makes me. The health insurance alone saves me several thousand dollars a year.  All that is factored in and I accept it for now. I try, instead, to see my “job” as a meditation in action, or at least an obstacle course to strengthen my resilience. But working about 50 hours a week (and decompressing from work – I run and do yoga) slows my life in various ways. Since May I have been considering and reconsidering a post about various absurd perspectives on human consciousness. I find the linking of human consciousness with some sort of larger "force" or "agency" in the universe to be about as grounded and worthy of respect as The Force

When I was in college I read two short erotic novels by Anaïs Nin .  I did not know anything about Nin really other than she was a woman who wrote naughty books.   Delta of Venus and Little Birds struck me at the time as rather poetic but not animalistic enough, though the sensual passion in each work was striking at times, and I truly enjoyed Nin's style. She has a wonderful literary voice. But Nin was not someone who particularly interested me the way other writers did.  I did not purchase any of her novels ( or her infamous diaries ) and so I gradually became blind to her in my life.  In 2015 I decided to reacquaint myself with her through the purchase of The Portable Anaïs Nin and Nin's five short, loosely related novels published together under the overarching title Cities of the Interior . Reading Anaïs Nin gives me insight into articulation of the feminine experience of pleasure, desire, need, fear, chaos, sadness, love and artistic expression.  Nin churns these

Warning: there are a few spoilers below but none are related to the really good stuff from The Force Awakens . I remember seeing the original Star Wars: A New Hope as a late teen when it was released in late-May of 1977.  I had just graduated high school and was an avid science fiction fan.  It was my primary reading material at the time.  The movie featured exciting action set in a fantastic intergalactic universe and I recall seeing it multiple times over a few weeks with numerous friends.  It was an exciting movie to talk about over hamburgers afterwards.  I even took my younger brother to see it at our hometown theater.  We sat through it twice in one day, with only a popcorn break in between. He was only six and was as enraptured with it as I had been the summer of 1976 watching Jaws . The intial shot in Star Wars left most of us either hooping with delight or staring with our jaw open from sheer awe. The empire battle cruiser chasing Princess Leia in one of the opening sh

Long-time readers know that Coldplay is my favorite contemporary band.  It does not bother me that the more success they attain in terms of popularity, the more the critics put them down.  Coldplay may be the essence of kitsch for all I know.  But, I don't care.  Their music makes me feel good.  That is why I listen to them. But their most recent effort, A Head Full of Dreams , is a full-throttle disappointment to me.  I suppose it continues with a transition in style the band first began with 2014's Ghost Stories .  Unfortunately, with their latest record, the transition has gone so far that, for me, the band has become a stranger, invisible.  This is Coldplay being something that is not, for me, Coldplay at all. Normally with a Coldplay album, I listen to it a couple of times and end up with a tune or two resonating in my mind off and on over the next few weeks.  I will catch myself humming a new Coldplay song while driving or just sitting at my desk.  New Coldplay