Books, Photos and Music

Beloved Totnes here in South Devon, UK has its fare share of treasures in human form.

We can now add to the list singer/songwriter Ben Howard, 26,  in the folk/Indie tradition of music. Ben lived in Totnes since a small boy in primary school and attended Kevics, the local comprehensive high school. …

Another treasure from Totnes – singer/songwriter Ben Howard. Lend an ear on You TubeRead More »

I received for Christmas a great music CD. I know tastes in music vary a lot. Nshorna, my daughter, gave me for Christmas the year’s best selling album by Scotland’s Emeli Sande – Our Version of Events. 19 tracks. Five stars. Better still. Six stars.

Emeli Sande offers a personal, social, political comment in her music. She is a woman with a wonderful , wonderful voice. …

Emeli Sande – a classically powerful voice with personal and social concerns..Read More »

The period of Leonard Cohen’s time in the summer of 1960 in Hydra, the Greek island, has gained the status of Greek mythology in his creative career.

After taking the five-hour boat journey from Pireus,  the Athens port, Leonard hung out in Hydra with a handful of other young artists and spiritual seekers, including Dr. Sheldon Cholst, a New York psychiatrist and poet, who experimented with marijuana, hash and LSD. It had cost Cholst his freedom in the UK where he spent 21 months in jail for being in possession.  I stayed with Sheldon in Vientiane, Laos in 1968. Back in the USA, his friend, Timothy Leary, got a 30-year sentence for possession. …

An Experimental Life for Birds on a Wire in Hydra, Crete and Vientiane in the 1960’sRead More »

Do you ever come across a brilliant,  and I mean a simply brilliant author, and wonder how one had missed for so many years such creative and imaginative writing? …

Do you ever come across an author with an original mind? Try Jorge Luis BorgesRead More »

I received from my daughter for Christmas 2010 a Kindle that enables me to download as many as 3000 books. It has proved an invaluable resource. I have downloaded the Middle Length Discourses and Connected Discourses of the Buddha into the Kindle, plus other books and PDF files that prove very supportive for my travels as a Dharma teacher. …

E-books and the shrinking number of printed booksRead More »