Member: Rosinbow

Dear Sher:

Thanks for the comment. Sorry I didn't notice it sooner, but I use LT by fits and starts. I used to sing sacred harp quite a bit in the 60s & 70s, and our group performed at coffee houses and the Mariposa Folk Festival one year, but when the group disbanded I never found another convenient one, though there's one in Erie I'm interested in going to. My first wife was a singer too, but after we divorced I sort of gave it up.

So, yes I'm a musician, but also a historian. I collect records, especially sacred harp 78s, and helped supply the music for Dust-To-Digital's I Belong To This Band. I also played folk music, hillbilly and blues and gospel, playing acoustic guitar, and have a couple of friends who play in string bands sometimes. Because of the pre-war blues and gospel 78 collection, I helped put out some 650 CDs on Document from Austria. Along with the records, I've got the books to explain them, and the guitars to play them. So a lot of the history/sociology/music books deal with the 20s and 30s, especially in the south, black history, race relations, etc. A lifetime of following up what interests me, and that's not even counting the books I've read. My daughter says she'll show me how to put that list on LT, but it only goes back 10 years; a list I kept in high school might still be around somewhere, as I have seen it in the last 30 years.

Anyway, I'm starting to pull books out of storage to catalogue, so there are a lot of projects to do in some random sequence. Hope to hear back, Roger

(PS: use my email instead of LT -- I look at it much more often).

posted by Romis78 at 1:12 pm (EST) on Jan 7, 2010

Hi! I enjoyed Lion of Jordan, which is a huge, thick book, 900+ pages or so, densely packed with all manner of Facts about Jordan, Israel, etc. I got about halfway through it and, to be honest, I think my brain kind of gave out. :D I realized I wanted to read a lot of other things this year, so I put the book aside until "later." It's my hope to pick it up again, perhaps early next year after the holidays. It does, however, offer very interesting glimpses of the creation of the states of Jordan, Israel, Iraq, etc., and it's extremely enlightening in that regard. I do look forward to getting into it again when I have the energy. :)

I'm a few pages away from finishing Esack's Qur'anic guide. He's an eloquent and, I feel, a very fair writer, and that book does a great job of examining the Qur'an and people's reactions and approaches to it, in depth yet easily enough for laypeople to understand. :) I also hope at some point to delve into some of the works he mentions in that book, including some of the historico-critical works.

So many books, so little time! I hope all is well for you. :)

posted by Essa at 12:27 pm (EST) on Nov 30, 2009

That's a pretty fascinating life, not like New York, except it's more like New York than it's not probably, because we're both here on Earth and are human...But I live here, outside the city, but still near enough to feel it despite living in a house 40 miles north in the woods. The thing is, I am not a city person by preference, not much at all. I like green and nature and peace and a meditative life. So while I have made a very good life here, I do think about the time, which will come in time, when I will leave here, and I wonder where I will go. Someplace more like Alaska, I would think.

So you read The Sparrow. It was not bad, i had my problems with it, but I thought as SF goes, and with your interest in the spiritual, it might be something you would like. I'm going to put my thinking cap on.

Have you read The Razor's Edge, by Somerset Maugham?

posted by stellarexplorer at 1:13 am (EST) on Nov 25, 2009

And thank you so much for your very kind comments about my profile page!

posted by stellarexplorer at 1:23 am (EST) on Nov 24, 2009

Hi Rosinbow -- I knew it was you, even without the "Readings in the Humanities" addendum!

You have so many wonderful philosophy/religion books -- I am surprised to see we only share 7 books in common.

Looking at your interests and location -- is Alaska a good place for community? What sorts? I have always wanted to see Alaska -- one day, I hope!

So now that I see your books and some of your interests, I am wondering whether you have read The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell?

posted by stellarexplorer at 12:54 am (EST) on Nov 24, 2009

Dear Sher-rosinbow:
Thank you for your kind response.
Awakening Joy sounds like an interesting course.
I am finding there are more and more courses and lecture series
devoted to women recently.

Another book that I'm attracted to in your library,
is your recent addition of
The Places That Scare You:
A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times.
It sounds very interesting, but the title
does not produce the effect the author is hoping for.
A logical operator, such as "not" or "no",
does not register with the subconscious.
So "fearlessness" causes one's attention to go to fear.
ie. whoever wrote the ten commandments
didn't understand the levels of consciousness,
in the way that I've heard,
in regards to the Hunas, of Hawaii,
and the Espiritiste, of the Phillipines:
"Thou shalt not steal" causes the mind to focus on stealing, etc.

Enjoy your break from academia,
Jennifer

posted by ZeeCharnoe at 2:37 pm (EST) on Nov 23, 2009

Dear Rosinbow:

I notice a book in your library: Choosing Reality: A Buddhist View of Physics and the Mind.
I would enjoy reading that.

I am helped by everything Zeera (Zee) Charnoe has ever written or spoken.
I have had the pleasure of being
his student, partner and assistant for 21+ years.
Zee has taught and studied gnosis, gnostic writings, Huna, Zen, Zen meditation,
Tibetan Buddhism, hypnosis, and a wide range of subjects and disciplines.
He was a physics professor of optics and acoustics, in Denmark.
He has been the CEO of numerous organizations dedicated
to environmental products and services (Life Essential Systems).

There are tens of thousands of pages
of short writings and short books at his website:
http://ecophysics.org

There are four actual books there,
with numerous more writings and books in process:

1. What Life Is and What Life Is For

2. Anaclysm

3. The Soul of a Poet-Philosopher
(poetry and short stories)

4. Language, Literacy and Intelligence:
Made For Each Other ! ? (1986 thesis) (draft)

There are also hundreds of audio recordings
of lectures, meditations and hypnosis scripts,
that are available on DVD's,
and are played (and archived) at a webcast:
ANACLYSM radio program
www.blogtalkradio.com

Zee very much likes to exchange
with others of like mind.

Thank you kindly for your attention.

Jennifer (ecohealth2003)

posted by ecohealth2003 at 6:06 pm (EST) on Nov 15, 2009

It's hard to get something going in lT groups. If you go to the LT groups page, and look at the list of some 100 new groups on the lowere left side of the page, many of the groups only have only one person in it, and if they are at the bottom it's a result of 3 weeks of being there. So, obviously not many people really review the page. I try to get to this page at least once a week.

Some people I am led to believe regular review the Talk page: All Topic tab, where an entry comes up every time someone posts a message. This is kind of random shot too. But people might be intrigued reading "Siddhartha". I only go to the All Topics page about once or twice a month, if things seem a little dry. I usually go to Your Messages, and then to Your Topics, and let it go at that.

You might try doing a search from the Groups page to see if Siddhartha comes up. If it does, you can go to the group which had used the word Siddhartha inits description, and see if the group is active. In any case, there'll be a list of members, whose interests might just be close to yours. And you could offer an invitation. (There is some sort of more formal invitation process within LT -- it is not often used, but might work).

Another idea is to go to the wrorks page for Siddhartha, and it will show people who recently added Siddhartha to their LT catalog. So, these people might have S on their mind. I read Siddhartha a long time ago, perhaps the same year that I read the Glass Bead Game in the late 1960's.

By the way, I believe Siddhartha is the most common book at LT tagged Buddhism. If you look on the left hand side of the Woks page, there is a subtopic called 'Conversations'. Here there are references to messages that refernce Siddhartha, and maybe you ight find an interesting person in there.

posted by vpfluke at 3:32 pm (EST) on Aug 26, 2009

Welcome to LT. I have takena look at your Readings in Humanities group. http://www.librarything.com/groups/readingsinthehumanit
These are sometimes hard to get off the ground.
Sometimes how you tag can help. Tagging helps the social networking at Librarything, when you find that your library shares common interests with others. I think most LTers seem to avoid tags that have classifiers, such as Religion: Buddhism. What most people seem to do is use more tags, so that religion is one tag and Buddhism is another tag. Then, another thing one can do in LT is when you search on tags, you can do what is called a tagmash. This is where you put in religon, Buddhism (a comma indicates another tag), and then you can find all the books that are tagged with both religion and Buddhism. The best way to find out who has all the Buddhism books is just to do a search on one tag (like Buddhism), and then your results page will show (among other stuff) who has the most books tagged with Buddhism.

posted by vpfluke at 6:35 pm (EST) on Aug 25, 2009