Picked up The Beastie Boys Book, it is dense with lore and nonsense.
Lots of writing about the early 80s hardcore scene and the formative years of hip hop. Also there’s a cookbook in it.
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Let us know some!
I was really wanting to learn more about Kate Schellenbach’s exit from the group as they switched from New York Hardcore to Hip Hop, I’d always heard it talked around but not directly spoken-to, this has her writing about it directly. Not a big Rick Rubin fan.
They later patched things up and the Beastie’s “Grand Royal” label later published Luscious Jackson.
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This is one hell of a line to encounter in The Divine Comedy.
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I have the divine comedy on my to read list. Looking forward to reading it and hearing your opinion.
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currently bouncing between
- rising steam by terry pratchett; it’s one of his last ones, it meanders, it’s kind of an it’s a small world ride through the disc checking in with some of your faves. i like it!
- the mirror of simple souls by marguerite porete; fairly radical christian mysticism from the 12th(?) century. they burned her alive for this one, folks. i’m not far in but i understand the gist to be that while earthly love and reason can get you headed in the right direction they must ultimately be discarded and the self well and truly annihilated if you really want to know the big guy. neat!
- the leaping hare, evans/thompson; it’s about hares! those guys are wild. they used to race planes at heathrow apparently, just for the fun of it. great folklore texture with meticulously transcribed accents.
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everything i’ve read from that classics of western spirituality series has been really great, so i’ll be happy to add this one to the list.
assuming you’ve read a bit of mysticism if you’re into the deep cuts, but
while earthly love and reason can get you headed in the right direction they must ultimately be discarded and the self well and truly annihilated if you really want to know the big guy
does tend to be about the size of the majority yeah haha
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I know relatively little beyond what I learned during my protestant bible study and the stuff I picked up on the way since then. I also officially left the church last year but I intend to read more about christian mysticism. I’m particularly interested in Meister Eckhart as I heard some interesting stuff about his work.
I’m very interested in how close - at least from my very surface level understanding of both - some of christian mysticism and buddhist schools of thought can get. At least when it comes to the ideas of letting go of the illusion of self and the wholeness and connectedness of all existence.
I want to read about that in the future. I don’t know if there’s a particularly good starting point or if I should just jump in on the deep end assemble my understanding bit by bit the hard way.
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i don’t know much about buddhism (more than the average bear i suppose but not much deeper than a few thich nhat hanh books, though i have been meaning to read the Dhammapada), but from a layman’s perspective i would say this is generally accurate. thomas merton and kierkegaard certainly saw the connections, as did many other thinkers.
i’ve not read meister eckhart directly but a lot of writers i know admire his stuff. i found this to be a really great anthology: The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism by Bernard McGinn: 9780812974218 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
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yeah i’m not remotely religious and i love this stuff. my parents were a lapsed catholic and a lapsed episcopalian respectively, and I’m American so I’ve got this sort of cultural christian background that a)makes this stuff easy to parse b) makes me want a better christianity if i have to live around all these people and c) makes me want piercing refutations of the excesses of the religion that come from within it. and i get a lot out of it too, i feel like a lot of what i read of these people does start to inform a lot of how i think and act towards people even as a very secular person.
totally agree with you on the buddhism thing. i’ve read eckhart, hadewicjh and getting going on porete she’s like far and away the most buddhism adjacent i’ve read so far. or at least it feels that way to someone who really doesn’t know much about buddhism (me!). but i know it’s fairly well worn territory, and the relatively liberatory aspects of both religions are especially notable when you see how close together their rises were historically.
i’ve not read meister eckhart directly but a lot of writers i know admire his stuff. i found this to be a really great anthology: The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism by Bernard McGinn: 9780812974218 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
i haven’t read this but he has an excellent three part series on the history of christian mysticism that i can totally recommend.
esoterica is a great youtube channel about this stuff and the occult more broadly, it’s very academic and respectful and i think really well produced compared to a lot of similar channels on youtube. the linked video is about angela of foligno, a female christian mystic who somehow managed to die peacefully in her sleep lol
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i’ve been reading the buddha manga but turns out that doesn’t count at all
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this is awesome, thank you
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yeah i haven’t hit a dud yet!
lots of paths to same place for sure lol
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That Buddha manga is SO GOOD, though.
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it’s so good, some of that art for the big full page scenes is just ugh
It’s a great book. Lots of music recommendations scattered throughout as well.
This was Nightmare Alley, by the way. I found it “fun” in a way that’s pretty rare to come across, especially for such a dark book. It was one of the most cinematic and sensual books I’ve read in a long time, too. I liked most what it did with time and the last few chapters. There were moments of something special, too.
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is there a NYRB book you haven’t read?
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Nightmare Alley is a heater it’s true. The 1947 movie is good too
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