Hiatus
I am currently going through a transitional period and have suspended all book sales and swaps.
We sold our house back in March and are going to close on a new home in the next two weeks. I will also be enjoying a out patient medical procedure in the next few days. Nothing serious.
I passed the baton on the tech help visits to the Legacy. The resident’s disregard of a potential life-threatening pandemic was remarkable. Fox News would blare on TVs, their email inboxes stuffed with right-wing propaganda. Most of the residents were nice enough but I did receive the occasional lecture on the evils of “socialism”. From people who were getting tech help through the local public library, subsidized by a government grant. I would explain this calmly, non-confrontational and understanding. Yup, they didn’t what know what socialism was, and vaguely equating it with Black Lives Matter and CRT. The management was inconsiderate of my time and the resident’s needs. Which happens when you pay most of the staff minimum wage. Contracting COVID despite all of my precautions was the last straw. My breathing has not been the same since.
In general though the future is looking bright and I look forward to once again having a basement full of books, ready to swap and sell.
Cheers
Blade II
Spoilers included
I didn’t watch this to celebrate spooky season or for any other particular reason. When I have insomnia on Saturday nights, I open my Plex app and hit shuffle.
I’m sure I watched this some twenty years ago but remembered pretty much nothing. And now I know why.
There is a voiceover in the opening sequence that catches you up to speed with the plot which is corny but useful for a random viewing. We get introduced to the big bad, and Blade frees his mentor Whistler from some sort of vampire stasis.
The movie, as you can imagine is mostly fight scenes (which bore me), leather, toxic posturing, ‘magic’ science gibberish, and a new animalistic enemy that hunts vampires.
Best part is that it cured my insomnia.
Andrew from the Library
During, but not necessarily because of, the pandemic, I stopped providing freelance tech support and consulting. Reasons to remain personal. And since 2017, I have not been available through the Victor Farmington Library (cuz I needed dental).
Today I met with Bianca from Legacy at the Fairways Assisted Living and Greta from the Library and we put into motion plans to utilize a grant given to the Victor Farmington Library for providing tech help to the elderly. I will be available alternating Saturdays at the Legacy and conversely at the Library from 9am-1pm starting in December and regularly in 2022.
I will be available by appointment only at both. The grant is limited and I have a spouse whose company I enjoy so if no one signs up, I’m not showing up. I charge the Library by the hour so once the grant money is spent, we will see if there is enough demand to get a new grant or figure out some other way to pay me. Legacy will historically not pay me out of its corporate coffers. 
To make an appointment at the Legacy you have to be a resident. To make an appointment at the VFL you have to call 585-924-2637. No library card needed, no residency or age limit check. Mask required.
I know my way around Windows, Android, Chromebooks, and Kindle. I am proficient at iPhones, iPads, various printers, Google Homes, and Alexis. I have never owned a Mac, which means I’m going to take a little longer to suss it out. My Google Fu is strong. Linux? seriously go home and do it yourself. All Apple hardware problems should be taken to your nearest licensed Apple expert, which I am not.
Most importantly I am patient, experienced, and calm. No question too small. I can walk you through email, social media, bluetooth and Office. I am not your therapist or your buddy.
So once again, I will be know in the halls of the Legacy as “Andrew from the Library”. I have been called worse.
How to journal
I won’t lie, I didn’t always enjoy reading this book. So often I was having huge existential crisises, pondering pain and humanity’s systematic cultivation of poison to “relieve” said pain.
Spoiler, so was Henry. But he did the work & made the painful diary entries.
Fuck John St. John. This is the example.
“How do I leave a comment?”
This is not a high traffic site. I don’t post in full thoughts, I don’t have many visitors. Which is as it should be. But every couple of months, someone will actually use the Contact Us page to ask how to comment. Usually, late at night. So I ignore them.
I have the comments disabled because I weary of deleting spam. Whether it’s bad products, porn, or techno-fascists, subversives, state actors spewing bile, I don’t care to deal with it.
As with all things, this too will change. I am undergoing life churn and should be posting more and will possibly be seeking out actual correspondence. Or I might just randomly open/close the comments. You will have to be logged in to a WordPress account and your comment will have to be approved.
Cheers.
Magick in Theory and Practice
“Hey, Zaphod’s just this guy, you know?”
I find it important to avoid hero worship, to always remember that Zaphod’s just this guy. Part of my being a Thelemite is to avoid the lazy trap of becoming a Crowleyite. Uncle Al was very human. Of course, another trap is letting someone’s flaws convince you to disregard everything else about them, see Miles, Lovecraft, Allah (Clarence 13X), Ye, etc. Of course, YMMV, there are artists that I will avoid wholesale because of their stupidity. Looking at you Lydon.
I first read this book first over 30ish years ago while I was tussling about with a Thelemic boy-toy and my beatnik roommate had a copy. I was (and am) well-read and had a foundation in mysticism and meditation, with a healthy (?) skepticism. I was a hungry spiritual seeker and wanted to KNOW dammit! I knew Crowley by reputation, especially from Colin Wilson’s The Occult, yet had not yet given the devil his due.
Needless to say, most of this book went over my head. Oh but I Got IT! I wasn’t sure if Crowley and Thelema were the Way but I was willing to try.
Back to 2021, I have kept Thelema close. I have also become an adult with a disposable income and have started updating my Uncle Al collection. This was a fun re-read, insomnia at 3am (eternal) on a Saturday, I took over the couch and read this all the way through, stopping for coffee and breakfast, smooching the wife et al. Oh, it’s a completely different book than that young man in Queens read so long ago.
A few years ago, in my effort to finally become an adult, I took some advice from Rodney Orpheus’s writing and rewrote the LBRP to my own ethos. This re-read helped me understand why it was working and gave me clues to rework the Hexagram rituals.
All Al’s foibles and pomposity seemed larger, almost like self-mockery, to be treated as blinds.
I look forward to re-reading his rest, although I will take it slow.
Jeeves Takes Charge
By A. Wallis Mills(Life time: 1878–1940) - Original publication: The Strand MagazineImmediate source: https://www.madameulalie.org/strand/Jeeves_Takes_Charge.html, PD-US-expired, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62767318
He makes me laugh. P.G. Wodehouse’s writing tickles me. His command of British upper class slang is wondrous. His characters are caricatures, and yes, the whole thing feels like a sardonic send-up of blue-bloods.
This is a short story and pretty much an introduction of Bertie Wooster, the man of leisure, and his competently in-charge valet Jeeves. It is from Bertie’s POV, making Jeeves mysterious and crafty behind the scenes.
Somehow Wodehouse belies my instinct to over analyze. The parameters are clear, Bertie is a very privileged, entitled, clueless wanker whose life is subtly controlled and protected by an expert manservant. Hilarity ensues. The prejudices and dark side of the supremely entitled are glossed over for the sake of a good yarn.
All in all, don’t expect an Marxist class analysis nor a terse defense of the Manor Life. Relax and let Wodehouse make you giggle at silly men.
The Shadow in America: Reclaiming the Soul of a Nation
A collection of essays based around the Jungian idea of a shadow self, the dark part of all of us.
There is this idea that as we work on ourselves, work to become blessed, enlightened, closer my God(dess) to Thee, we become better people. We correct ourselves to become pure beings of light.
This is obviously a one-sided, zero-sum idea. It is born from the idea that is Us vs. Them, Good vs. Evil, Light vs. Dark. Aristotelian dichotomy fed through Manicheism that somehow went from a proclaimed heresy to current Protestant orthodoxy.
This essays in the book discuss, from various points of view, the dark shadowy parts of our nature, from the deeply personal to our issues as a nation.
I’ve read this once so far, sitting serving on a Grand Jury during the government shutdown. I wasn’t that impressed at the time but the concept has kept with me. Sure, it is in part because we are watching America simultaneously confront and celebrate its Shadow self. Watching grown men punch teenagers in the face for asking that they wear a mask, racist vigilantes condoned on network television, children dying in cages, and large aspects of our democracy dismantled.
It will be a while before I can come back to this book objectively, if ever, through no fault of its own.
Under the Green Star DAW #30
Burroughsian. I tend to use the term for two different currents of thought. Here we mean it for Edgar Rice, and not William S.
Lin Carter was a huge fan of Burroughsian heroic adventure. There are countless imitators of ERB. Lin Carter, at his best, can be judged against the master.
The premise is simple. Our crippled yet wealthy protagonist learns soul-casting or astral travel from Eckanar and an ancient Tibetan tome.
Let’s clear up the term Eckanar. This is a New-Age religion founded in 1965 by Paul Twitchell. The religion does teach that the Soul, or True Self, is able to separate from the body and travel across planes of existence in order to reach and conjoin with G*d. The term itself, according to the church, is to be translated Co-worker with G*d, which is the stated aim of their spiritual practice. It is not necessarily a “science of soul-travel”, as I’ve seen in many reviews and blurbs about this book. Another example of sloppy scholarship gaining a life of its own.
Lin Carter wasn’t the best writer, his quality varies. This sword-and-planet novel has thick, flowery prose, which I enjoy but is certainly not to universal taste. My next read of this I will pick out all the fun vocabulary words to share.
There are heroic ‘elven-esque’ warriors, fierce giant sized monsters, a shifty adversary, and stunningly beautiful women. One of these women is a strong bandit queen, another … well this is where it gets a bit problematic.
The love interest is a 14 year old princess. “She was young, a girl, a mere child: she looked perhaps fourteen when I saw her first in the Great Hall of Phaolon.” Later, Lin skirts around the age issue, pontificating on how the Green Star society doesn’t measure time like we do and not actually coming out and stating the princess’s age. She is very definitely described to look like a young adolescent. The word ‘lithe’ is thrown around a lot.
This pretty much ruined the re-read for me. My exploration into an inner bibliography has let me re-examine so many of the tropes that shaped me and all these ‘lithe’ love interests and ‘swarthy shifty’ bad guys are indicative on why ridding myself of this type of thinking is an on-going struggle.
All said and done, this a great example of the flawed (E.R.) Burroughsian tradition, warts and all.