Category Archives: …and other stuff

miscellaneous postings by Lawrence R. Spencer

...and other stuff, FREE ADVICE, LIVES, MOVING PICTURES, SOUNDS

DEATH and REBIRTH

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Jiddu Krishnamurti  — (11 May 1895 – 17 February 1986) was a speaker and writer on philosophical and spiritual subjects. In his early life he was groomed to be the new World Teacher but later rejected this mantle and withdrew from the organization behind it.  He claimed allegiance to no nationality, caste, religion, or philosophy, and spent the rest of his life traveling the world, speaking to large and small groups and individuals. He wrote many books, among them The First and Last Freedom, The Only Revolution, and Krishnamurti’s Notebook.

...and other stuff, ART, CARTOONS, FREE ADVICE, LIVES, MOVING PICTURES, POETIC NONSENSE, SOUNDS, UNIVERSES

HOW WINGS ARE ATTACHED TO THE BACKS OF ANGELS

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The main protagonist of this short, surreal film is a man obsessed with control. In an automated world drained of all emotion, he is tortured by vague longings. Will he transcend his obsessions, fears and mortality?

How Wings Are Attached to the Backs of Angels by Craig Welch

...and other stuff, READING MATTER

William Shakespeare, The Gangster

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“Exploring this unlighted lane in Shakespeare’s life means, first, looking at the crucial document. “Be it known,” the Latin text begins,

The 1596 writ charging Shakespeare with making death threats, discovered in Britain’s National Archives by the Canadian scholar Leslie Hotson in 1931. The second of the four entries is the one relating to the playwright.

that William Wayte craves sureties [guarantees] of the peace against William Shakspere, Francis Langley, Dorothy Soer wife of John Soer, and Anne Lee, for fear of death, and so forth. Writ of attachment issued by the sheriff of Surrey, returnable on the eighteenth of St Martin [November 29, 1596].

A few pages away in the same collection of documents, there is a second writ, issued by Francis Langley and making similar charges against William Wayte.

Who are these people, each alleging the other was issuing death threats? The scholar who unearthed the document—an indefatigable Canadian by the name of Leslie Hotson, best remembered today as the man who first stumbled across the records of the inquest into the highly mysterious murder of Shakespeare’s fellow playwright, Christopher Marlowe—uncovered a squalid tale of gangland rivalries in the theatrical underworld of Queen Elizabeth’s day.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE ON SMITHSONIAN.COM:

William Shakespeare, Gangster

...and other stuff, ART, FREE ADVICE, LIVES, POETIC NONSENSE, READING MATTER, UNIVERSES

GO TOO FAR

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GO TOO FAR

Albert Camus (1913 – 1960) was a French Nobel Prize winning author, journalist, and philosopher, described as the ″James Dean of philosophy″.  Throughout his life, Camus spoke out against and actively opposed Totalitarianism in its many forms. Early on, Camus was active within the French Resistance to the German occupation of France during World War II, even directing the famous Resistance journal, Combat. On the French collaboration with Nazi occupiers he wrote: “Now the only moral value is courage, which is useful here for judging the puppets and chatterboxes who pretend to speak in the name of the people.”

Camus presents the reader with dualisms such as happiness and sadness, dark and light, life and death, etc. He emphasizes the fact that happiness is fleeting and that the human condition is one of mortality; for Camus, this is cause for a greater appreciation for life and happiness. In Le Mythe, dualism becomes a paradox: we value our own lives in spite of our mortality and in spite of the universe’s silence. While we can live with a dualism (I can accept periods of unhappiness, because I know I will also experience happiness to come), we cannot live with the paradox (I think my life is of great importance, but I also think it is meaningless). In Le Mythe, Camus investigates our experience of the Absurd and asks how we live with it. Our life must have meaning for us to value it. If we accept that life has no meaning and therefore no value, should we kill ourselves?