Having lunch ("dinner" to us farmboys) at the Shelter, it being the end of the month and I being broke, I had a most informative chat with Jim afterwards. He told me a couple of very interesting things:
1. The Chinese "government" (however it's defined) has been bugging the Dalai Lama to try to get him to declare where he's going to reincarnate when he dies; which, not unnaturally, he refuses to do. Meantime "China" (or its "government") has been levered into an admission that it (or they), in all deadly seriousness, believe in reincarnation.
2. The end of "Frank Goodnight," Special Forces, two tours of duty voluntarily in Iraq, torturing and murdering children; the same as to whom, some five months ago, in response to his question, "Say then that America is bad. What would you do with me and those like me?" I said, "I would shoot you all in the back of the head at close range." "Frank" and I never spoke after that. A couple of weeks ago Jim was standing right next to "Frank" when two very buff men all in black (bounty hunters? Blackwater?) jerked him to his feet, handcuffed him, and hauled him away, saying loudly that he was wanted for armed robbery on the Mainland.

Going back for a refresher in a very matter-of-fact survey of the development of Chan Buddhism, from the 5th century onward: Amazing what a difference in perspective and substantive understanding my late readings on the effect of Confucianism on Chinese Buddhism have afforded. I, like most Westerners, I daresay, had always dismissed the all-pervading Confucian basis of Chinese civilization as irrelevant--intrinsically biased, essentially untrue, philosophically contemptible, at least as compared to taoism; and with no conceivable interest to Buddhists. How wrong I was! Not that Confucianism is not biased, untrue, and contemptible; but, alas, it has been anything but irrelevant to the development of Chinese Buddhism.

Finished in one sitting last night Gregory of Tours' History of the Franks. I have read in various places stunned, halting, barely coherent allusions to the "unspeakable" Merovingians; but the reality as far outstrips the rumors as Giles de Rais does the Comte de Sade. Now I understand the significance of Charlemagne--and of all subsequent history of feudalism and state-sponsored terrorism. Now I can get cracking on those books on torture: I have established the historical framework. Think now (Can I ever forget?) of the horrid murder of Clotilda's young grandsons, despite her best, pitiful efforts to save them; and remember Clovis's wolfish/crocodilian half-humorous wish that he knew of some more close relatives--so that he could murder them too. I can't think of anything, even in Chinese history, or the plain facts of the necropornophilia of John Negroponte or Adolph Hitler, which so horrifyingly bespeak a tiger-sandshark or Kali-Durga underlying reality of evil.

Don't know why, but recently I've spun into a long, slow stall over the early Middle Ages, from Clovis and Clothilda at one end, to the Goliards and the Abbe Suger at the other end. No doubt, it takes my mind off the curriculum in torture, ancient and modern, that I've set myself, while at the same time it affords a logical, historical perspective on the dreadful topic. After all, having read a fairly particular account of the last years of Gyorgy Dozsa, as well as much of the trial testimony of Giles de Rais and his servant/accomplices, I've got a pretty fair general notion of what, really, the CIA, NSA, and FBI are up to.

Reading: one Ivan Gobry's Charlemagne, Fondateur de l'Europe--about halfway through. I never dreamed it would be this interesting. Here, for example, is the true story of the Chanson de Roland; who our eponymous hero was in real life, and why and how he was killed. And here is the appalling true story of the Empress Irene (minus, curiously, what I know to be true about her blinding her son rather than letting him take power); how precariously she clung to the Purple; how in the end (at fifty-something years of age) she fell sick (perhaps nothing worse than a flu or a bad cold), and so relaxed the oversight of her palace-household, which was therewith filled in the space of a day with servants of her political enemies (of which she had many), who sequestered her, then seized her and shipped her secretly off to the island of Lesbos, where three years later she died "in misery." And here also is the very interesting true of William of Orange, whom Charlemagne called "comte," whose eponymous epics, particularly the Charroi de Nimes, I liked so much more, and found so much more interesting than the hoary old Chanson de Roland.

About to read: Four medium-sized books on torture: one by Mark Danner on the horror of Abu Ghraib; one on the torture practised in Brazil by their military, with the participation and advice of the United States Military and Interpol figures (We shall never forget who Dan Mitreone was and what he did); two fairly succinct general histories and theories of this nastiest of all nasty subjects. I have pretty much given up on reading the collected works of Clive Barker. I still think "Confessions of a (pornographer's) shroud" sublimely witty, and I very much admire Barker's Queer Sensibility when he chooses to exhibit it; but I am appalled by the heterosexual pornographic aspects of most of his writing, and the sheer morbid unpleasantness and undisciplined sloppiness of too much of it. Whenever, for example, Barker tries to say something about Music, other than the dreadful rock 'n roll he likes and (so far as that goes) understands, he opens his mouth and farts: "Trying to compose herself, she made a pot of tea and put on a flute concerto." Later, in a different mood, she "put on a horn concerto." Is it the English/Liverpuddlian lowness of his class? It has that wrong-class kind of ineptitude. Pity. Because when he's good--like the disowning of the queer son by the pompous ass heterosexual father, towards the end of Sacrament--there's none better.

A couple of weeks ago I read, in an anthology of modern ghost stories by male authors, a story called "Confessions of a (Pornographer's) Shroud," by one Clive Barker--possibly the wittiest thing I ever read. And so, full of enthusiasm and delight in the new-found, I ordered everything of Mr. Barker's that I could find in the library catalog; and in short order I was inundated under a weighty flood of the prolific Mr. Barker's novels, plays, movie scenarios, and short story collections. The plays were very good, but only the novel Sacrament, and one other short story, "In the Flesh," for the rest, came up to, or close to, the standard of "Confessions of a (Pornographer's) Shroud." Thus we learn that being prolific is not necessarily a good thing.