Invisible Cities

I've been meaning to read some Italo Calvino for a long time, but it was Ursula LeGuin's mention of Invisible Cities in The Wave in the Mind that got me off the couch.  It's a brilliant, slim little volume carved into bite sized experiments in paradox worthy of Borges, Lem, and Chiang.  Just the intermittent frame story itself, based on the conciet of Marco Polo regaling Kublai Khan with stories of each of the cities he might well have visited, is worth the price of admission.  But beyond the sheer conceptual joy of watching a multi-headed hydra swallow each of its many tails is the beautiful craft of Calvino's writing.  The cover blurb is spot on when it alludes to what is possible on the edge between poetry and prose.  This is definitely on that will go on the #reread list that I have just now invented.

Nietzsche Project

I recently realized that there is a drawback to having two blogs.  Since this one is not a complete record, I never know where to search for a particular book I've read.  This is easy to rectify though with a short bibliography for each of various projects in which our esteemed colleague over at FPiPE has gotten enmeshed.  Since the Difference and Repetition liveblog project predates the 2020 reboot of The Capitalist Axiomatic, I'll skip that one.  And since the Plato project consisted of a single book Plato: Complete Works, it doesn't bear annotating.  The Nietzsche Project was a little more sprawling though. 

Friedrich Nietzsche -- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Genealogy of Morals

Carl Jung -- Nietzsche's Zarathustra (only Volume 1)

Martin Heidegger -- Nietzsche, Volumes 1, 2, 3, 4

Pierre Klossowski -- Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle

Kathleen Marie Higgins -- Nietzsche's Zarathustra

Lawrence Lampert -- Nietzsche's Teaching

Gilles Deleuze -- Nietzsche and Philosophy

Lectures on Shin Buddhism

This collection of lectures by Takashi Hirose was one of Irene's old books that migrated to our shelf in recent years.  One of the nice things about them is the way they dispense with almost all of the religious aspect of Buddhism.  With a different title, they could almost be passed off as existentialism.  Hirose, it seems, is most concerned with sparking any sort of religious feeling in modern man, and so the lectures center on the simplest sort of reflections on our life.  Who are we?  What are we doing here?  What should we be devoted to?  Given that these are introductory lectures intended for the general public, it's not surprising that Hirose's answers to these questions are neither terribly deep nor very specific.  In fact, the important thing to him is simply asking the question at all.  If that sounds both thoughtful and platitudinously true, then you're having the same reaction I did.  The only thing that will stick with me from the book is the introduction to the life of Gutoku Shinran, the 11th century Japanese monk who defrocked and got married as a demonstration that the Buddha's message applied to laypeople as well as monk's.  This "foolish baldheaded Shinran" went on to found a Pure Land sect that remains the most widely practiced branch of Buddhism in Japan.

The Body

This  collection was another of the assigned books in my MahaSati course.  These Dharma Reflections on Ageing, Sickness and Death by the Nuns of the Theravada Community were originally talks given at various meditation retreats.  While the talks do repeatedly reflect on sickness, old age, and death, they're mostly just standard Theravada dharma talks -- sutta heavy and focused on the four noble truths.  Since it seems that every time I come back to 'standard' material like this I always find something new, I hardly mean this observation as a criticism, and I quite enjoyed most of the talks.  I simply mean to observe that the subjects are treated more or less how they are always treated within Buddhism -- as the three divine messengers that help us turn towards our suffering.  So if you're looking for some way of transcending these conditions here, you are definitely barking up the wrong tree.  In fact, it would be more accurate to say that the talks encourage us to descend into these conditions, to really inhabit the suffering they create, and to gradually become attentive to, present in, patient with, and ultimately accepting of, whatever is happening right now.