I’ve been reading Sara Maitland’s A Book of Silence. I haven’t finished it yet but my quest for as much silence as is possible in my current life has made it an obvious reading choice. It’s a difficult thing to achieve is silence. Even the book starts off “talky.” She tells about her early familial history, about her religious movement from Anglicanism to Catholicism, about her days in the feminist g/literati.

Not that the book isn’t worth reading. I will continue over coffee and lunch breaks to run to the cafe and sit with espresso and text.

I get closer and closer to the time when I will go for a 30-day silent retreat. Hopefully on some land somewhere, with permission, I can camp silently. No other people, just the rustle of night beasts under the vegetative canopy and the sound that stars make as they wheel.

30 days of listening while beading, of quiet permission, the doors unlocked and the demons will rumble, surfacing. Then the quick flash of words and rhythm.

All I want to do is write a book of poetry.

While I recognize the inherent danger in baiting cops of any sort, I have to tell you, this is hilarious.

via Wimp

(I deleted the player. Couldn’t stand it anymore.)

OK so that’s one way to get music in a post. Clunky though. Tried using the upload music icon but all it did was boot to the site and didn’t actually play the music. Not what was intended.

The code suggested at wordpress audio support produces this by just dropping in the code:

[audio http://www.musictown.com/marylupin/playlists/288592/288592.mp3]

OK so then I had to get my admin password, which I didn’t know, and install the plugin, and find the other password to all the upload (which I had stored on a bit of paper). So now…

288592.mp3

That’s the music uploader. Nope.

Then this:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Progress: the player displays…but it just keeps buffering, so not a fix yet.

What about:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Nope.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Nope.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I thought I had it there :>(

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Maybe I need another place to store the mp3 files? Maybe I need to ask a question or two of my hosting help desk? (Asked…now waiting.)

I’ll keep trying. Any suggestions?

BTW – tried to stop the auto play. Changed “true” to “false” in both places but it didn’t quit. Going to have to disable it soon. Driving me crazy.

This weekend is the Coeur d’Alene Stickgame Tournament at Worley. I want to go but I am so tired after the last couple of weeks that I am just going to stay home and sleep. It’s a long drive from here. Maybe I’ll go a little later in the year to some of the public games. I don’t gamble, but the songs are wonderful. I find myself missing them deeply.

peardg, photographer

This is what our “winter” Olympic weather is like. Cherry blossoms. In February. Gads, the implications.

Jeff Dunham tells some pretty dangerous jokes – ones based on religion, sex, politics – using the mouth of his puppets. And it works. This is really, really funny. Coming out of the bony mouth of Achmed the Terrorist, jokes about being a Jew, about being Catholic have the sting that make humor such a powerful tool in the reshaping of social and conceptual life. We can accept the reexamination of strongly held social beliefs from a puppet long enough to get a glimpse of another view, that of another possible world – one, in this case, where terrorists and other religious fanatics are not something to battle in the silent dark of a social nightmare, but rather something to battle in the light of the love of life and the enjoyment of each other. And while jokes like Achmed’s do sting, and you feel that it has taken you perilously close to that cliff of divisiveness, when Jeff then pulls us back, there is a shared surge of survival-joy that makes the adrenaline rush even more enjoyable.

What makes this all work is that he poking fun at terrorists – that thing that had been used to scare us into foreign and domestic policy submission for 8 very long years. The bit in the clip below about the 72 virgins is howlingly funny, but even more important it takes the terrifying unknown and reduces it to something that seems just silly and therefore manageable. This is one very important societal function of humor. Now, every time I see a picture of bin Laden, I know I am going to see Achmed the Terrorist’s bony little face flash up against this dude’s image in my imagination. That is a good thing.

I am definitely going to watch more of Jeff Dunham and his puppets.

I am struggling with Versluis. I keep running into things that tick me off. Why keep reading then? For a couple of reasons. The first is that the subject matter is important to understanding the Western mind and because he is an academic writing about a subject I consider to be important (I expect a certain quality and tenor to his presentation based on this.) It is this last bit, my expectation, that keeps getting nicked by the jagged edges of his presentation.

The thing is he appears to be a practitioner. Not that this is a problem in itself. Every human being comes to a subject with a point of view, with a set of beliefs and ways. The problem is that he doesn’t seem to be able to bracket his beliefs to allow for the reader’s, nor to take into account that some of his beliefs may need support. At least that’s what I think is the problem.

For me writing about the magical mind requires this bracketing as much if not more than any other subject. For one thing, the magical mind by its very nature posits more than one reality. To understand it, to get a glimspe of its workings as part of the human mind, multiple realities must be maintained, not just the belief in multiple realities.
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