February 2012
59 posts
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At The Poisoned Pen Tomorrow
Tomorrow at 7 p.m. I’ll be at The Poisoned Pen, reciting from, discussing and signing When It All Comes Down to Dust. Steve Shadow Schwartz posted this review of the book on The Poisoned Pen website: Barry Graham has written another strong and affecting novel. After last summer’s brilliant The Wrong Thing, he is back with a new book that is both short and immensely powerful. This is a...
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The Corporations Who Own Alex Salmond Will Not Own...
The Sun, the U.K.’s ultra-right-wing daily newspaper has just launched a Sunday edition, which broke the news that Scotland will have a referendum on independence on October 18, 2014. The Scottish National Party had not announced the date, but it turned out that Alex Salmond leaked it to Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Sun.
As Gerry Hassan points out in this column, this says something about...
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The Best Way to Avoid Falsely Confessing Is to...
This article in The New York Times should be taken as a reminder that there is only one statement you should ever make to a cop: “I am going to remain silent. I would like to see an attorney.” There is nothing else you can state that will help you, and nothing else you can state that will not hurt you. If you get pulled over, open the car window only enough to hand the cops your...
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Free Dharma Talk Downloads and a Book Giveaway
Many of the Dharma talks I’ve given at The Sitting Frog Zen Center over the last few years have been posted on the Zen Center’s website in mp3 format, and can be downloaded free of charge. The talks were spontaneous and unscripted, and I can’t even remember giving most of them. They’re presented unedited, exactly as they were given, and if there were questions and...
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Stewart Home Reviews Cronberg's A Dangerous Method →
He names Videodrome as his favorite Cronenberg film. I concur. If I had to pick one favorite English-language film-maker, I think it would be Cronenberg. There’s a great book of interviews called Cronenberg on Cronenberg, which I’ve reread dozens of times.
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Book Giveaway: Of Darkness and Light Free on...
To celebrate the publication of my new novel, When It All Comes Down to Dust, I’ve decided to give away my first novel, Of Darkness and Light, free on Amazon Kindle for five days, starting tomorrow and ending on Monday, the day before the launch of the new book at The Poisoned Pen.
When Of Darkness and Light - an urban ghost story set in Glasgow - was published in 1989, Scottish Field...
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An attack on Iran would be an act of criminal... →
US and Israeli leaders are talking themselves into a disastrous conflict that will make Iranian nuclear weapons a certainty
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Barney Rosset Has Died, Aged 90 →
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littleiconsumedbyu asked: In reply to Christian right: There is one standard of righteousness. It is not political. It is the Word of God which is recorded in the Bible. It clearly doesn't align with either political stance in full.
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The "Christian Right" Doesn't Exist
Anyone who does not give up everything he has can never be my disciple. - Jesus Christ I find it fascinating that in America there is so much talk about “the Christian right,” when there is no such thing. You can be right-wing or you can be a Christian, but you can’t be both, any more than you can be a violent pacifist. If you actually read the teachings of Christ, how can you...
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Our unrealistic attitudes about death, through a... →
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Sam Hamill on how poetry saves lives →
“Poetry saved my life when I was a misbegotten, self-destructive kid, and the way of poetry has determined the course of my life. It has saved, can save, and will save many others. Whether traveling on behalf of poetry and social engagement, teaching a little, or starting another press; whether printing on a letterpress or editing for someone else, or simply waiting for the first signs of...
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Book Review: I Was Dora Suarez by Derek Raymond
I Was Dora Suarez by Derek Raymond (Melville House, paperback, $14.95) Derek Raymond never seems to rise far above the ground, but he never goes deep underground either. Invisible to the cultural mainstream, he’s rarely out of print for long. Almost two decades after his death, Melville House has published all five of his “Factory series” or “black novels” in the U.S....
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Paul Babeu's Mexican Ex-Lover Says Sheriff's... →
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An author who's written more than 500 books →
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Sex and Murder in Phoenix: A Memoir
From Why I Watch People Die
I knew the name, and the location on the map, but I still did not know where I was. America was a foreign country to me, and Phoenix the most foreign of all. It was the second half of the last decade of the 20th Century, and, on little more than an impulse, I had left Scotland and moved to Arizona. I turned away from my fears and took refuge in my...
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Scottsdale, AZ Cop Kills for the Sixth Time - His... →
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David Cameron's Fatal Attraction to Scotland
In his argument for why Scotland should remain in the U.K., David Cameron sounds like a jilted boyfriend who insists that his ex-girlfriend should stay with him, regardless of her feelings for him: The fight is now under way for something really precious: the future of our United Kingdom. I am 100% clear that I will fight with everything I have to keep our United Kingdom together. To me, this is...
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Polyphiloprogenitive: A Very Short Note on Eliot
A friend asked me: what should i read by TS Eliot? I’ve read ‘J Alfred Prufrock’ and ‘the Wasteland’ but sort of unimpressed by their… i don’t know, obtuseness? but i think the reason i never really read him was Ezra Pound liked him, kind of dumb. anyway, try not to say, “everything.” where should i start? I responded: Start with the poems...
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Kimber Lanning on the Amazon Effect →
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Allan Guthrie Interviews Barry Graham About When... →
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Trevor Kavanagh learns a hard lesson about human... →
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Over the weekend, I reread Derek Raymond’s I Was Dora Suarez - a grotesque masterpiece - and read James Sallis’ Drive, a masterpiece and certainly his best book.
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Routine Visits of the Dead →
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Routine Visits of the Dead
Late evening, I lie in bed falling asleep as my girlfriend lies next to me watching Detour, a film noir from 1945. The light in the bedroom is off, so there is only the shifting light from the T.V. screen. I hear voices of people now dead as I feel the warmth of the living body next to my own. Into the present comes the past, into a house of the living come the dead. Every day, the dead sing to us...
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Excerpt from my book Kill Your Self in the... →
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Is It Legal for Doctors to Lie to Patients?
Time reports that 55 percent of doctors admit to lying to patients. It doesn’t mention another kind of lying by doctors that used to be routine, and perhaps still is. I remember in the late 1980s, a woman I knew in Scotland had stomach cancer - and never knew about it. The doctor told her husband and other members of her family, who decided not to tell her, so the doctor lied to her and told...
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Is It Legal for Doctors to Lie to Patients?
Time reports that 55 percent of doctors admit to lying to patients. It doesn’t mention another kind of lying by doctors that used to be routine, and perhaps still is. I remember in the late 1980s, a woman I knew in Scotland had stomach cancer - and never knew about it. The doctor told her husband and other members of her family, who decided not to tell her, so the doctor lied to her and told...
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Neither This nor That
The Lankavatara Sutra says: “Things are not as they seem. Nor are they otherwise.” My cat Jimmy was at the vet’s yesterday. He had an ingrown claw that had become infected, so the vet fixed it, prescribed some antibiotics, and put a conical collar on him so he won’t touch the infected area with his mouth while it heals. Although the collar causes him to bump into things,...
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Abortion: Choose Your Ideology and Defend It →
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My Seven Rules for Writing
1. Never resort to the use of irony; if sincerity isn’t enough, be silent. 2. Forget the self. Artists are boring; it’s the art that matters. If you just want attention, go out in the street and pull your pants down. Don’t write anything you don’t have to write. 3. Don’t make people less than they are. 4. Don’t write for other people, and don’t write for...
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Barry Graham & Elmore Leonard at Tucson Book...
I’m appearing with my favorite novelist, Elmore Leonard, at the Tucson Book Festival at 5 p.m. on Saturday, March 10.
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No Good or Bad Meditation
From my book Kill Your Self: Life After Ego:
People beginning a Zen practice often make the mistake of judging their meditation. They talk about a “good” meditation (mind and body calm, quiet, focused) or a “bad” meditation (agitated, noisy mind and uncomfortable body). But these are not different. The calm, quiet, focused state is simply what happened that time, so...
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Guest Blog Post: Very Brief Reflections on Public...
Teacher, firefighter, nurse, police officer, Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), librarian, social worker, lifeguard, park ranger, chaplain. Some of the most necessary and esteemed professions in America. Since August 2008, more than 646,000 state and local government jobs have disappeared – more than a 3% decline. Over a third of those job losses occurred in 2011 alone. Both Bush and...
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Lonna Kelley just sent me a recording of her cover of Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man.” A lovely, sad fever dream.
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Leaves on Sidewalks →
Daishin Stephenson’s new photo blog
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Forks Over Knives →
I watched this yesterday, and found it convincing.
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The Cancer of Occupy →
I agree with what Chris Hedges says here. The same kind of privileged poseurs - comically attired in black, their faces covered with bandannas - showed up at the anti-Arpaio protest march in Phoenix two years ago, and provoked the only violent incident. In a march of between ten and twenty thousand people, there were only five arrests - all of them so-called “anarchists.”
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I just heard it's the Superbowl today...
which reminds me of these lines from Kipling:
Then ye returned to your trinkets; then ye contented your souls
With the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals.
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Film Review: Good Neighbors
I hadn’t heard about this 2010 film from Canada until I happened across it on Netflix. This story of the residents of a Montreal apartment building and a local serial rapist/murderer isn’t a particularly good movie - but there is something great about it. One reason that great noir stories endure is that they are truthful. Most books and films are about characters who are...
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Is Teachers Beating Kids a European Thing?
Something I wrote about it, and a couple interesting comments, can be read here.
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Jan Brewer Pledged Cash For Immigration Fight,... →
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Junk Logic About Junk Food
The other day, as we ate a long lunch in Phoenix’s excellent Gourmet House of Hong Kong, M.V. Moorhead told me about the time he spent in China last year. As we discussed the proliferation of American junk food, I remembered this piece I wrote after hearing a ridiculous talk by James Watson, author of Golden Arches East.
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