Good for Practice....

7 Tips for Giving up Gossip

1. Recognize that gossip doesn’t undo the situation you’re talking about. It only puts in motion another situation based on negative feelings.

2. Know that comparing yourself to others is useless. Everyone has his or her own talents. In this way, give up jealousy and the wish to put others down.

3. Be aware of and transform your own thoughts, words, and deeds rather than commenting on those of others.

4. Train your mind to see others’ positive qualities and discuss them. This will make you much happier than gossiping ever could.

5. Forgive, knowing that people do harmful things because they are unhappy. If you don’t make someone into an enemy, you won’t want to gossip about him.

6. Have a sense of humor about what you think, say, and do, and be able to laugh at all of the silly things we sentient beings carry out in our attempt to be happy. If you see the humor in our human predicament, you’ll be more patient.

7. Practice saying something kind to someone every day. Do this especially with people you don’t like. It gets easier with practice and bears surprisingly good results.

-Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron, "The Truth About Gossip"

Struggles in Nepal continue...

BBC Article on newest continuing strike in Nepal

 

 Maoists have been holding a strike (bandh) since May1st. They are trying to kick the current prime minster out on false pretenses stemming from Maoist Leader Prachanda's unskillful firing of the Chief of Police last May.  Though, that is only one point on the discussion table.

The reality that the deadlline (and the funding) for the constituent assembly to have finished their draft of the new constitution (May 28th) is rapidly approaching. 

People in Kathmandu are frustrated and fed-up with the political elites making decisions only to benefit them. 

Limits - Thoughts on WNYC's Radio Lab Podcast

"The act of forgetting is crucial to create preciousness."

how does this relate to desire and passion in the human experience? 
do we perpetuate not-knowing?

Storytelling

Collecting definitions of words and concepts that relate to storytelling (and thus applicable to lecturing, writing about storytelling, and getting more smrt). These are words I use all the time when I am speaking with students, or scholars, usually to sound more smrt, but I think it is time to start using them properly and actually understanding their meaning.  AND reading the works that are connected with the constructs as I know them in literary theory.

Allegory 

Monomyth

Semiotics


Rhetoric

metaphor

Top Grammar Reminders - Spring 2010

1. Know the difference between their, they’re, and there  
2. Eliminate your contractions (including they’re) – there are NO contractions in scholarly writing. 
3. Check your comma usage around quotation marks.    
4. Do not use single quotation marks as you would with your fingers in general speech.  Technically, the single quotation mark does not exist in scholarly writing.  
5. Possessive apostrophe usage: Ben’s sitar, Akbar’s tomb, Chelsea’s elephant.  The most common mistake this semester has been writing, “It’s,” when you mean, “Its.”
6. Proper colon and semicolon usage. 
7. Proper usage of italics - words in another language. 
8. SPELLING – especially names and places. 

Looking for a comic/graphic novel version of the Buddha's life story

Here are some good finds, but not exactly what I am looking for.  My target audiences are high school, gap year, and university students who are hearing about/learning about the story of the Buddha's life for the first time.  The aim is to help the students understand from an historical/mythological perspective who the Buddha was and why he is so important to the structure of South Asian history.

As Mary said today, "He must have been a cool dude if we are still talking about him 2600 years after he died."  The same could be said for all the prophets of all religions.  It is the same myth that is perpetuated, though Buddhists differentiate by clarifying the Buddha's teachings did not have the same focus of eternalism that the messianic religions had, or developed.  Nor did the complete opposite nihilistic view encompass what the Buddha said he discovered.  But the myth remains - the story of a prince who gives it all up to find a way out of suffering.

I asked a good buddy who knows comics to help me find what I am looking for.  These were some sites he found:

www.buddhanet.net has great teaching tools for primary and secondary students - I need to do some more digging to find out who these guys are and from where they are pulling their information.  This coloring book of the life story of the Buddha is quite detailed and cleared up a few of my questions and confused other facts I thought I knew e.g. in this book, it says that the first person to give the Buddha food after he fainted during his six years living and practicing as an aesthetic was a young nameless boy.  I had understood that Sudhana gave him rice and milk and this was enough to realize that the way of denial of physical needs was the opposite spectrum and there needed to be a balance to that.  Hm.

Deepak Chopra also has an illustrated book of the life of the Buddha - here's the cover.  I am not sure about this one.  I didn't know that Deepak Chopra was a Buddhist ? ?

Then, there is a famous Japanese graphic novel called Buddha by Osamu Tezuka in eight volumes.  People I talked with seem to know this one best.  I endeavor to read this as soon as possible.  Here's a review of the series.

Other suggestions are most welcome.  I leave you with this found here.

Hegemony

Italian activist/thinker Antonio Gramsci (1891 - 1937) introduced concept of cultural hegemony.  He was one of the most important Marxist thinkers of the 20th century.  He died at age 46 after being released from a prison sentence in conjunction with the accusation of an attempted assassination of Mussolini.
Gramsci expanded upon Lenin's ideals about hegemony with a thorough analysis of why the Marxist revolution of the proletariat had not yet happened despite the prediction of it

Need to read more about this.  Read Prison Notebooks. 

Relevance to FSS - Edward Said quotes Gramsci extensively in his introduction to Orientalism (1978).  Here, Said discusses Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony (a process of moral and intellectual leadership through which both dominant and subordinate classes consent to their respective roles as opposed to being forced or coerced into that role) as a way to discuss the structure of the West's need to understand/dominate that which they view as Oriental. 

Seems to me that Said's use of Gramsci is a bit radical.  Especially because he is speaking about Orientalism as a construct of the West, and western thought/literature/imagery, that continues to perpetuate and inform the West's understanding of the Orient.  This relationship does not seem to be one where both parties are informed about their role and consenting.  In fact, Said expounds that this is not the case at all - that the occupants of the Orient in the eyes of the West fully created and controlled by Western observations as a fulfillment of some fantasy that defines the West as significant and powerful. 

Need to read more.