READINGS IN BUDDHISM

Donald S. Lopez, Jr., Rebecca Bloom, Kevin Carr, Chun Wa Chan, Ha Nul Jun, Carla Sinopoli, & Keiko Yokoto-Carter, Hyecho's Journey: The World of Buddhism (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2017).

Frederick J. Streng, Emptiness: A Study of Religious Meaning (Nashville & New York: Abingdon Press, 1967).

IMAGES OF THE BLACK

Vercoutter, Jean, Jean Leclant, Frank M. Snowden, Jr., & Jehan Desanges, The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume I: From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 1976).

Devise, Jean, The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume II: From the Early Christian Era to the Age of Discovery Part 1: From the Demonic Threat to the Incarnation of Sainthood (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 1979) ("May readers and researchers not forget this Notice, which is in effect a warning and which applies to both parts of the second volume. Indeed, [the authors] wish to state clearly that this book is a beginning, a groundbreaking, and invitation to look further, to be curious: it is not the soft pillow on which the hasty certitudes of hurried civilizations too often fall asleep." Id. at 8.).

Devise, Jean, & Mollat, Michel, The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume II: From the Early Christian Era to the Age of Discovery, Part 2: Africans in the Christian Ordinance of the World (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 1979) ("Many see the sixteenth century as the starting point of relations between Europe and black Africa, and in a way this is not inexact, give or take fifty years. This book, however, proves that these relations had a long prehistory. If Africa hardly dreamed of Europe before the middle of the fifteenth century, Europe, on the other hand, had had certain ideas and certain images of the black continent and its peoples for centuries before. The least one can say is that a real conditioning of European reflexes and opinions was already in existent when actual contact with the black world was reestablished." "That contact coincided with the development of the African slave trade and also with the affirmation of a mentality and of a conception of art already modern. In a few years these facts eclipsed an image of the black that was the fruit of a centuries-old evolution. It seems to us all the more important to rediscover that image through the documents that fixed its various forms and so to show the vertiginous abysses from which have emerged some of the behavior patterns of the Europeans of today." Id. at 258.).

Bindman, David,  & Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III: From the the "Age of Discovery" to the Age of Abolition: Part 1, Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2010).

Bindman, David,  & Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III: From the the "Age of Discovery" to the Age of Abolition: Part 2, Europe and the World Beyond (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2011).

Bindman, David,  & Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III: From the the "Age of Discovery" to the Age of Abolition: Part 3, The Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2011).

Honor, Hugh, The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume IV: From The American Revolution to World War I: Part 1, Slaves and Liberators (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 1989).

Honor, Hugh, The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume IV: From The American Revolution to World War I: Part 2, Black Models and White Myths (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 1989).

Bindman, David,  & Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume V: The Twentieth Century: Part 1, The Impact of Africa (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2014).

Bindman, David,  & Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume V: The Twentieth Century: Part 2, The Rise of Black Artists (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2014).

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #47

Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Headless Corpse (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Curtis Howard (New York: Penguin, 2017).

"THE US CONSTITUTION WAS NOT A PANACEA . . ."

The American Revolution led to a constitution that incorporated the results of debate and compromise, in which long-established customs and expectations were defined and endorsed. The US Constitution was not a panacea, or a comprehensive doctrine by which all life should be guided. It left the citizens in charge, free to adopt whatever way of life might conform to the purely negative constrains of the central government–and that was its greatest virtue. All this is contained the famous first amendment, which affirms that 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people to peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition (New York: All Points Books/St.Martin’s Press, 2018), at 71-72.

Doug Balliett - Dragonetti and the 3 Stringed Bass

Renaud Garcia-Fons: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

IMMATURE AMERICAN POLITICS

Alan Wolfe, The Politics of Petulance: America in an Age of Immaturity (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

Brooks and Marcus on what's fueling the president's 'ramped up' rhetoric

The Mavericks, "How can you mend a broken heart"

THE IMPORTANCE OF LIBRARIES!

Susan Orlean, The Library Book (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018).

THE BANJO

Bacon Banjos Catalog (c.1930).

Bob Carlin, Banjo: AnIllustrated History, foreword by Tony Trischka (Milwaukee, WI: Backbeat Books, 2016).

Cecelia Conway, African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions  (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995).

Laurent Dubois, The Banjo: America's African Instrument (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2016).

Epiphone Banjos, Epiphone RecordingBanjos (c. 1928).

Gibson, Banjo Catalog (c.1930).

Philip F. Gura & James F. Bollman, America's Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

Robert Shaw, J. Kenneth Moore, Rex Ellis, Bob Carlin, Peter Szego & George Wunderlich, The Birth of the Banjo: Katonah Museum of Art, November 9, 2003-February 1, 2004 (Katonah, NY: Katonah Museum of Art, 2003).

The Vega Banjo Co., Vega Banjos Catalog (c. 1930).

Robert Lloyd Webb & MIT Museum, Ring the Banjar!: The Banjo in America from Folklore to Factory (Anaheim, CA: Centerstream Publishing, 1984).

H. A. Weymann, Weymann Banjos Catalog (c. 1928).

Robert Winans, ed., Banjo Roots and Branches (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018).

INSPECTOR MAIGRET # 46

Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Minister (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Ros Schwartz (New York: Penguin, 2017).

Matt Whitaker's History Of Time-Travel, Toilets & Bigfoot

California Firefighters To President Trump: 'You Are Wrong' About Wildfi...

THE VOTE IN AMERICA

Allan J. Lichtman, The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present (Cambridge,Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2018).

The mentally strong

HERMANN HESSE

Gunnar Decker, Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow, translated from the German by Peter Lewis (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018).

MINSTREL

Bob Carlin, The Birth of the Banjo: Joel Walker Sweeney and Early Minstrelsy (Jefferson, North Carolina, & London, England: McFarland, 2007) ("Joe Sweeney was the Elvis Presley of this time, a white man who could sing like a blackman, to borrow and paraphrase the words of Elvis Presley's mentor Sam Phillips. Sweeney served a parallel role in the 1840s to Jimmie Rodgers in the 1920s, Bill Monroe in the 1940s, and to Hank Williams or Elvis in the 1950s. In their heydays, these men of Anglo-American heritage 'crossed the tracks' to sample African American music, adding to it white sounds of previous and current generations, and therefore creating something new and unusual out of their personal musical consciousness. At a time when African American music and musicians were unacceptable or inaccessible to main street America, these players provided a suitable version of black music for most listeners." Id. at 1.).

Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, with a foreword by Greil Marcus (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, 2013) (From the back cover: "Taking up white America's long fraught relationship with African American culture, Love & Theft examines the role of the blackface minstrel show in the years leading up to the Civil War.").

William J. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum America Popular Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

Caryl Phillips, Dancing in the Dark: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2005) ("In California I nearly starved to death in the streets, singing and dancing and begging people for money, and then I stole a banjo. The face of the man I took it from is a sleeping face. Did I really steal a banjo from a sleeping man? But I could play the instrument, and owning a banjo made it easier to loiter on the street corners and try to earn pennies from passersby who felt sorry for me. Easier than it was to beg the managers of the various theaters for work. All the way from Kansas and I had been reduced to a banjo-stealing, banjo-playing beggar. I know full well that what I did was wrong." Id. at 161.).

Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character, introduction by Greil Marcus (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 1931, 2004) ("[F]or the rise of the Negro minstrel coincided with a marked change in his place within the nation. Little Jim Crow appeared at almost the precise moment when The Liberator was founded; and minstrelsy spread over the land and grew in popularity as the struggle for emancipation gained in power through the '40's and '50's. The Negro minstrel joined with the Yankee and backwoodsman to make a comic trio, appearing in the same era, with the same timely intensity. The era of course was the turbulent era of the Jacksonian democracy, that stormy time when the whole mixed population of the United States seemed to pour into the streets of Washington and when many basic elements in the national character seemed to come to the surface. The Negro minstrel was deeply grounded in reality, even through the impersonators were white, even though the figure was a myth." Id. at 85-86.).

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #45

Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Dead Girl (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Howard Curtis (New York: Penguin, 2017).

Chris Cuomo panel GOES OFF the RAILS after Trump-loving guest calls Apri...

Chris Cuomo panel GOES OFF the RAILS after Trump-loving guest calls Apri...

Shields and Brooks on midterm results and GOP ‘lockstep loyalty’ to Trump

The Entertainer

PROOF White House Doctored Jim Acosta Video

Renowned Historian: Sessions Firing '10 Times Worse Than Nixon' | The Be...

READING LAWRENCE LESSIG IS ALWAYS A GOOD INVESTMENT OF TIME.

Lawrence Lessig, America, Compromised (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

ANATOLE BROYARD

Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (New York: Carol Southern Books, 1993.

     An innocent, a provincial form the French Quarter in New Orleans and from Brooklyn, I moved in with Sheri Donatti, who was a more radical version of Anais Nin, whose protege she was. Sheri embodied all the new trends in art, sex, and psychosis. She was to be my sentimental education, I opened a bookstore, went to the New School under the GI Bill, I began to think about becoming a writer, I thought about the relation between men and women as it was in 1947, when they are still locked in what Aldous Huxley called a hostile symbiosis. In the background, like landscape, like weather, was what we read and talked about. In the foreground were our love affairs and friendships and our immersion, like swimmers or divers, in America life and art. This book is always a narrative, a story that is intimate personal, lived through, a young man excited and perplexed by life in New York City at one of the richest times in its history.

Id. at viii.

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #44

Georges Simenon, Maigret Goes to School (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Linda Coverdale (New York: Penguin, 2018).

Bari Weiss | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)

MAX BOOT BOOTS HIMSELF FROM TRUMP'S GOP

Max Boot, The Corrosion of Conservatism: WhyI Left the Right (New York: Liveright, 2018) (see Damon Linker, "Political Convert," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11.4.2018, at 16).

Robert Reich: Trump's 30 Biggest Broken Promises