Thursday, January 11, 2007

Zen and Garbage


Been reading a terrific book, The Secret River. Not sure how much weight my literary opinion is worth after I loved Gorky Park so intensely. But The Secret River is a whole other wonderful. All about convict transportation and settlement near Sydney back in the day. Confrontations between whites and blacks. I understand a little of the terror of the frontier, but I never thought about the new hierarchies that the convicts were negotiating. I was pondering how their behaviour was shaped by fear and pride, and that their actions were thus in some way affected, unnatural.

Trekked across Seoul after work to go to a bookstore and sell some books to them. The guy asked me what I thought of Zen and... and I said 'absolute garbage, I wish I could get those hours of my life back'. Then he asked what I thought of Fury, by Rushdie, and I said 'absolute shite, I wish I could get those hours of my life back... so are you gonna give me a good price?'.

Watched a heap of filums of late: Babel; 16 Blocks; Lucky Number Slevin; Jarhead (again).
'Sbeen good. Also got back online and bought some CDs to augment my wacky collection. Great.

Word of interest:: Refoulement
Person of interest:: Anthony Swofford

5 comments:

j. ethan duran said...

did u try to sell that other crap book: jpod.

Bonnie Conquest said...

Um, yeah. I lugged that brick there and said I'd be happy with any price.
I now have a shiny new Vanity Fair and a credit note that I'm gonna give you.

Steven said...

Did he give you a good price? ;)

Steve~

Dan said...

Zen, like in Zen Buddhism? You think it's garbage? If so, I wonder why. It actually changed my life for the better. Taoism too.

But we all have our own paths. And that's perfectly OK!

I think your new profile photo is spectacular, by the way.

Bonnie Conquest said...

Good price? Sure, he took them off my hands. I was happy.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence, Dan, that's the book I'm talking about. It's shite.
I don't think Buddhism is garbage at all.

Thanks for the photo compliment, it was time for an update :)