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Category Archives: READING MATTER
Books I read & recommend
THE DIOGENES CLUB
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“Watson and I gathered our things and a five p.m. set out in a hansom cab from Baker Street to arrive at the one place at which I was certain to locate my brother in the early evening each day: The Diogenes Club.
“There are many men in London, you know, who, some from shyness, some from misanthropy, have no wish for the company of their fellows. Yet they are not averse to comfortable chairs and the latest periodicals. It is for the convenience of these that the Diogenes Club was started, and it now contains the most unsociable and unclubable men in town.
No member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one. Save in the Stranger’s Room, no talking is, under any circumstances, allowed, and three offenses, if brought to the notice of the committee, render the talker liable to expulsion. My brother was one of the founders, and I have myself found it a very soothing atmosphere.”, I informed Watson as we jostled our way through the streets of London in the cab.
This very exclusive men’s club was named after Diogenes, the Cynic. He made a virtue of extreme poverty, begging for a living and sleeping in a large tub in the marketplace. He was notorious for his provocative behavior and philosophical stunts. He carried a lamp in the daytime, claiming to be looking for an honest man. He regularly antagonized Plato, disputing his interpretation of Socrates and sabotaging his lectures. After being captured by pirates and sold into slavery, Diogenes eventually settled in Corinth, where he was befriended by Alexander The Great.
Fundamentally he was a Western contemporary of the ancient Indian ascetics who abstained from worldly possessions and comfort in favor of poverty as an aid toward spiritual purity. He believed that virtue was better revealed in action and not theory. His life was a relentless campaign to debunk the social values and institutions of what he saw as a corrupt society”, I explained to Watson, having read several treatises concerning the life of Diogenes written by modern day Cynics.
Alexander the Great went to meet Diogenes because he was impressed that the philosopher was so highly admired despite having neither money nor power. However, while Diogenes was relaxing in the sunlight one morning, Alexander, thrilled to meet the famous philosopher, asked if there was any favor he might do for him. Diogenes replied, “Yes. Stand out of my sunlight.”
Alexander declared, “If I were not Alexander, then I should wish to be Diogenes”, I said anecdotally, as Watson absorbed my diatribe, as well as the scenery passing by the window of our hansom.
The Diogenes Club was apparently founded, in part, as a front for the SIS, which, as you may know, is the supreme and indispensable brain-trust behind the British government. This organization secures government secrets and advises the best course of covert action to enable Britain to intervene in the affairs of other nations without detection.”
~ excerpt from the book SHERLOCK HOLMES: MY LIFE, by Lawrence R. Spencer
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Diogenes of Sinope was a Greek philosopher and one of the founders of Cynic philosophyhe was born in modern-day Sinop, Turkey, an Ionian colony on the Black Sea, in 412 or 404 BC and died at Corinth in 323 BC.
ART FOR ART’S SAKE
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“Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don’t believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art’s sake.”
— E. M. Forster, British novelist (1879 – 1970)
English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. Forster’s humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: “Only connect … “. His 1908 novel, A Room with a View, is his most optimistic work, while A Passage to India (1924) brought him his greatest success.
WHY I LOVE SHERLOCK HOLMES
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If you speak the English language, (which very few American do), you will appreciate that the period during which Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the Sherlock Holmes detective stories was, without question, the most prolific era in English literature. I have written a fictional “autobiography” which in intended to embody and resurrect the culture, literature and mystique of Great Britain at the pinnacle of it’s Imperialistic and Literary Majesty. Although the British Empire has relinquished it’s global domination of subservient nations, since World War I, to the burgeoning New World Order the English language now dominates as the preferred language the “gods” of the current era, The International Cabal of Global Corporations. Ironically, Sherlock Holmes elder brother, Mycroft, was arguably the most powerful man in England, serving the Queen as the unofficial director of the Secret Information Services in the Offices of the Chancellor of The Exchequer.
I love Sherlock Holmes because he is a man of preeminent 
personal integrity and idiosyncrasy. Above all things he loved music and smoking Latakia and Cavendish tobacco in pipes, which were universally smoked by men during the Victorian Age. I managed a pipe and tobacco store for two years, early in my life, and very much enjoy the avocation of pipe smoking! I the visual effect of observing smoke drifting in languid drafts toward the ceiling, combined with the elegant flavor of fine pipe tobacco evokes a sublime, meditative state of being.
Mr. Holmes also enjoyed solitude, alchemy, intellectual stimulation, cocaine, mystery, action and adventure! He disdained personal notoriety, wealth and sex. Sherlock was an intensely private person, preferring the disheveled, masculine clutter of his rooms at Baker Street, rather than submit himself to the domesticated order of matrimony. Sherlock was a living demonstration of the adage, “If you want to move quickly, move alone”.
This book incorporates and amalgamates the authors, as characters, and their classic works of fiction of the 19th century, into the professional and private life of Sherlock Holmes — as a living, rather than fictional, person — including: Peter Pan, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein, Dracula, Alice in Wonderland, as well as all of the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and the infamous life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself!
During my many years invested in the creation of the Sherlock Holmes “autobiography” I read everything written by Arthur Conan Doyle and about him as an individual. I read all of the literature of the age. Moreover, I applied the principles of investigatory observation for which Sherlock Holmes is universally famous to discover that, in fact, Sherlock Holmes was a real person! The details of an extensive and elaborately convoluted conspiracy to dehumanize the greatest detective in history are revealed herein….
Content of this 15 minute audio presentation:
1) FORWARD: by Mycroft Holmes, and 2) AN OPEN LETTER FROM SHERLOCK HOLMES
