Friday, December 16, 2011









Northern Lights














Hawk


Peterson Field Guide

Peterson Field Guides









Wild Love Birds in Arizona









Cactus Wren


Road Runner
















Painted Bunting






Bobolink


As migrant songbirds go, few can outdo the Bobolink when it comes to endurance. Breeding in grassland habitat in the northern US and southern Canada, a single individual may fly 6,200 mi (10,000 km) south to its winter range in Paraguay and Argentina - and then back again come spring. If you believe the poet William Cullen Bryant, the bird's common name is a shortening of his full title, "Robert of Lincoln"; but it's more likely it's simply a phoneticization of its beautiful, metallic song. Do you hear it?
[Photo by JanetAndPhill on Flickr; CC-licensed]














Cats



Monday, December 12, 2011

Woman Leaves $13M Fortune to Pet Cat


By Kevin Dolak
Dec 12, 2011  
abc tommaso cat dm 111212 wblog Woman Leaves $13M Fortune to Pet Cat
ABC
A 4-year-old stray cat that was rescued from the streets of Rome has inherited a $13 million fortune from its owner, the wealthy widow of an Italian property tycoon.

Maria Assunta left the fortune to her beloved kitty Tommaso when she died two weeks ago at the age of 94. The feline’s newfound riches include cash, as well as properties in Rome, Milan and land in Calabria.

As her health began to fail two years ago, Assunta, who had no children, began to seek out a way to see that Tommaso was properly cared for after she died. In November 2009, she bequeathed her entire estate to the alley cat that she’d rescued.

Initially, Assunta had instructed her attorneys to “identify an animal welfare association or group to which to leave the estate and the commitment of looking after Tommaso,” according to the Daily Telegraph.

Unable to find a satisfactory association to see to it that Tommaso was loved and cared for, Assunta decided to leave all her money to the cat via her nurse, Stefania, who cared for her until her dying day. Her last name has not been disclosed.

“She had become very fond towards the nurse who assisted her,” Anna Orecchioni, one of the lawyers, told Il Messaggero newspaper.

“We’re convinced that Stefania is the right person to carry out the old lady’s wishes. She loves animals just like the woman she devoted herself to right up until the end.”

Stefania told the Telegraph that she had no idea the woman that she was caring for was so incredibly wealthy.

“The old lady suffered from loneliness,” the nurse said. “She looked after that cat more than you’d look after a son.

“I promised her that I would look after the cat when she was no longer around. She wanted to be sure that Tommaso would be loved and cuddled. But I never imagined that she had this sort of wealth,” she said. “She was very discreet and quite. I knew very little of her private life. She only told me that she had suffered from loneliness a lot.”

Tommaso and Stefania, along with another cat, are living outside Rome at an address that is undisclosed, so to avoid con artists and potential kidnappers.

“We have gotten lots of email messages from candidates who wanted to adopt the little Tommasino,” the cat’s lawyer told ABC News.

The windfall for Tommaso places him No.3 on the list of wealthy pets, behind Kalu the chimp, whose owner left him $80 million dollars, and top dog Gunther IV, a German shepherd who inherited $372 million dollars from his father, Gunther III, the beloved companion of an eccentric German countess.

Real estate magnate Leona Helmsley famously left $12 million to her little dog Trouble, although her human descendents contested, and Trouble’s pot was cut to $2 million.

Friday, December 9, 2011

Yoga in Practice



Yoga is a body of practice that spans two millennia and transcends the boundaries of any single religion, geographic region, or teaching lineage. In fact, over the centuries there have been many "yogas"--yogas of battlefield warriors, of itinerant minstrels and beggars, of religious reformers, and of course, the yogas of mind and body so popular today.

Yoga in Practice
is an anthology of primary texts drawn from the diverse yoga traditions of India, greater Asia, and the West. This one-of-a-kind sourcebook features elegant translations of Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and even Islamic yogic writings, many of them being made available in English for the very first time.

Collected here are ancient, colonial, and modern texts reflecting a broad range of genres, from an early medical treatise in Sanskrit to Upanishadic verses on sacred sounds; from a Tibetan catechetical dialogue to funerary and devotional songs still sung in India today; and from a 1930s instructional guide by the grandfather of contemporary yoga to the private papers of a pioneer of tantric yoga in America.

Emphasizing the lived experiences to be found in the many worlds of yoga, Yoga in Practice includes David Gordon White's informative general introduction as well as concise introductions to each reading by the book's contributors.

David Gordon White is the J. F. Rowny Professor of Comparative Religion at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His books include Sinister Yogis and Tantra in Practice (Princeton).

Endorsements:

"This volume fills a vacuum in yoga studies. An indispensable resource for teachers and students, it is also of immeasurable value to every thinking yoga practitioner. Through an astute selection of key texts, White effectively demonstrates that yoga is a collection of vibrant, disparate, and distinctive traditions, and he also highlights continuities that unite ideas and practices of yoga through two thousand years of history."--Suzanne Newcombe, Inform, based at the London School of Economics and Political Science

"Yoga in Practice deals with a topic of great academic significance and broad popular appeal, and the contributors are solid scholars who know their material inside out. Yoga is a global phenomenon, and this collection provides clarification of key points and careful contextualization of the history of ideas that has produced yoga. There are really no other books comparable in range, presentation, or quality."--Joseph S. Alter, University of Pittsburgh

"This anthology makes available a wide variety of translations of primary sources on yoga, especially texts focused on practice, and places each in the broader context of the Indian traditions of yoga. The volume breaks new ground by including little-known texts and offering new perspectives on more familiar ones. Many of these texts are unavailable in translation elsewhere."
--David Carpenter, Saint Joseph's University

Table of Contents
Another Princeton book by David Gordon White:
Tantra in Practice.
Series:
Princeton Readings in Religions
Donald S. Lopez Jr., Series Editor

Subject Areas:
Religion
Asian and Asian American Studies

Mind, Body, Spirit
bookjacket

Richard Wilhelm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Richard Wilhelm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

"Richard Wilhelm (May 10, 1873, Tübingen, Germany - March 2, 1930, Stuttgart, Germany) was a German sinologist, as well as theologian and missionary. He is best remembered for his translations of philosophical works from Chinese into German that in turn have been translated into other major languages of the world, including English. His translation of the I Ching is still regarded as one of the finest, as is his translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower; both were provided with introductions by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, who was a personal friend."


Book to look into:
Richard Noll, The Jung Cult (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) pp. 333–4




Introduction to Jungian Psychology:Notes of the Seminar on Analytical PsychologyGiven in 1925 C. G. JungOriginal edition edited by William McGuireTranslated by R.F.C. HullWith a new introduction and updates by SonuShamdasani

In 1925, while transcribing and painting in his Red Book, C. G. Jung presented a series of seminars in English in which he spoke for the first time in public about his early spiritualistic experiences, his encounter with Freud, the genesis of his psychology, and the self-experimentation he called his "confrontation with the unconscious," describing in detail a number of pivotal dreams and fantasies. He then presented an introductory overview of his ideas about psychological typology and the archetypes of the collective unconscious, illustrated with case material and discussions concerning contemporary art. He focused particularly on the contra-sexual elements of the personality, the anima and the animus, which he discussed with the participants through psychological analyses of popular novels, such as Rider Haggard's She. The notes from these seminars form the only reliable published autobiographical account by Jung and the clearest and most important account of the development of his work.


'via Blog this'




Princeton Tigers

Bollingen Series (General)

http://press.princeton.edu/series.html

"Never before in the history of publishing has there been an author list as distinguished as that of Bollingen, nor has a publishing program had a more telling impact on the thought of its time. . . . It is safe to say that any of the titles . . . is a book of lasting value by a top scholar in his or her field, and any library . . . should acquire as many of the Bollingen books as possible."--Jean Martin, Wilson Library Bulletin

The publication of Bollingen Series was inaugurated in 1943 as a program of the Old Dominion Foundation, which Paul Mellon had founded in 1941. 

In 1945, Bollingen Foundation was formed as a separate entity, not only as the vehicle for the publication of Bollingen Series but also as a source of funds for fellowships, subventions, and institutional contributions in a variety of humanistic and scientific fields. Major grants were made particularly in the fields of poetry, archaeology, and psychology.

The Bollingen enterprise, named for the small village in Switzerland where Carl Gustav Jung, the founder of Analytical Psychology, had a private rural retreat, was established jointly by Paul Mellon and his first wife, Mary Conover Mellon. 

Their initial motive was to assure a wider audience in the English-speaking world for Jung's scientific works. In Paul Mellon's words, "The idea of the Collected Works of Jung might be considered the central core, the binding factor, not only of the Foundations' general direction but also of the ultimate intellectual temper of Bollingen Series as a whole."

The first editor of Bollingen Series was Mary Mellon. After her sudden death in 1946, John D. Barrett was editor until his retirement in 1969. During the years 1943-1960, the Series was published by Pantheon Books, Inc. of New York City. In 1961, when Pantheon Books became a division of Random House, Inc., the Foundation assumed publication, while Pantheon Books continued as distributor. In 1969 the Series was given to Princeton University Press to carry on and complete, and the Foundation became inactive.

Bollingen Series includes original contributions, translations of works previously unavailable in English, and new editions of classics. It consists of 100 numbered publications, the whole constituting more than 250 separate volumes, some in two or more parts.


After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. A.C. Danto.

The Voices of Silence: Man and his Art. (Abridged from The Psychology of Art). A. Malraux; S. Gilbert, trans.


__________________________
From:


The Bollingen Foundation was an educational foundation set up along the lines of a university press in 1945. It was named for Bollingen Tower, Carl Jung's country home in Bollingen, Switzerland. Funding was provided by Paul Mellon and his wife Mary Conover Mellon. The Foundation became inactive in 1968.

Initially the foundation was dedicated to the dissemination of Jung's work, which was a particular interest of Mary Conover Mellon.  The Bollingen Series of books that it sponsored now includes more than 250 related volumes.  The Bollingen Foundation also awarded more than 300 fellowships.   These fellowships were an important, continuing source of funding for poets like Alexis Leger and Marianne Moore, scientists like Károly Kerényi and artists like Isamu Noguchi, among many others.  The Foundation also sponsored the A.W. Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art.


In 1948, the foundation donated $10,000 to the Library of Congress to be used toward a $1000 Bollingen Prize for the best poetry each year. The Library of Congress fellows, who in that year included T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and Conrad Aiken, gave the 1949 prize to Ezra Pound for his 1948 Pisan Cantos.  Their choice was highly controversial, in particular because of Pound's Fascist and anti-Semitic politics. Following the publication of two highly negative articles by Robert Hillyer in the Saturday Review of Literature, the United States Congress passed a resolution that effectively discontinued the involvement of the Library of Congress with the prize. The remaining funds were returned to the Foundation.

 In 1950, the Bollingen Prize was continued under the auspices of the Yale University Library, which awarded the 1950 prize to Wallace Stevens.

In 1968, the Foundation became inactive. It was largely subsumed into the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which continued funding of the Bollingen Prize. The Bollingen Series was given to Princeton University Press to carry on and complete. Over its lifetime, the Bollingen Foundation had expended about $20 million. 

As Thomas Bender has written, "When Paul Mellon decided in 1963 to dissolve the Bollingen Foundation, he said that the founding generation was reaching the age of retirement, and it would be hard for others to maintain the original mission and standards. 

What he might have said was that the Bollingen Foundation was the work of a single generation. For two decades its concerns had been at the center of Western intellectual life, but the 1960's saw a shift in the cultural preoccupations and critical concerns of intellect in the United States and Europe."

References

McGuire, William (1982). Bollingen: An Adventure in Collecting the Past (Princeton University Press:Bollingen Series, New Jersey).

Bender, Thomas (1982). "With Love and Money,"
review of Bollingen: An Adventure in Collecting the Past in The New York Times November 14, 1982. 

Online version retrieved November 10, 2007.
 "Bollingen Series (General),"
webpage maintained by Princeton University Press. Retrieved November 10, 2007.

McGuire, pp. 311-328. McGuire gives a complete, alphabetical list of the Fellows including the year of the Fellowship and a condensed description of the project.

 "The Bollingen Prize for Poetry at Yale,"
webpage maintained by Yale University. Retrieved Nov. 9, 2007.
in Poetry's Catbird Seat (the consultantship in poetry in the English language at the Library of Congress, 1937-1987) (Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.). ISBN 0-8444-0586-8 . Online version retrieved November 10, 2007.


GET A TATOO TO DISTRACT YOURSELF
weird-tattoos-anth0nyc.jpg

WE DIDN"T START THE FIRE;  Billy Joel

A TOUCH OF GOA TRANCE MUSIC

The Pink Panther - Twinkle Twinkle Little Pink


A laugh: to start or end your day with.

Thursday, December 8, 2011

America in the '70's

The Atlantic Home

DOCUMERICA: Images of America in Crisis in the 1970s

A Dune Buggy races down a dune in a recreational park near Florence, Oregon, in September of 1972. (Gene Daniels/NARA) #

Source:
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/11/documerica-images-of-america-in-crisis-in-the-1970s/100190/