CoolGrove

Category: Books

  • MADHYAMAKALAMKARAVRITTI: Shantarakshita’s commentary on his Ornament of the Middle Way

    by Abbot Shantarakshita

    “Scripture, without a logic that is based on
    the evidence of things, will not satisfy even
    faithful followers.”
    —Shantarakshita
    Shantarakshita follows in the footsteps of Buddha Shakyamuni who stated that no one should accept his view without testing it as a goldsmith tests gold. In this seminal 8th century text he deconstructs, illucidates and defends Madhayamaka as the essence and central philosophical bases of Mahayana, as elaborated by Nagurjuna—which work preceded the advent of a Buddhist age over much of Asia for a 1000 years. It’s tenets still remains relevant today with discoveries and inventions based on science investigating the ‘nature’ of nature.
    In the Madhyamakalamkaravritti, his commentary on his root text The Adornment of the Middle Way, Shantarakshita aims to completely clarify the position that, while ultimately reality eludes our comprehension, conventional knowledge is useful as a tool for navigating appearances all of which are no more real than the reflection of the moon in water.
    His method of establishing this relies almost exclusively on one tool: To be real an entity must be one or many. If he can show that all the candidates for the real, such as atoms, matter, space, time, God, the soul, subject, object and causal relations fail this test, that if they cannot be said to be one, because the one is not substantial, then it cannot function to produce many.
    Shantarakshita’s motivation for this radical destruction of our basic and cherished beliefs, is to liberate us from anything that can cause us suffering. If we cling to our illusory world, it will fail us, because it is impermanent.
    In sloka 16, Shantarakshita does make one positive assertion about reality, when he asserts self-awareness. But he is careful not to become trapped in the classic Buddhist model of subject, object and activity. Self-awareness, he argues, cannot be understood in this way. Subject and object are not distinct nor identical, not one, not many. Self-awareness has no substantial existence.

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    Amazon

  • RASA or knowledge of the self: Essays on Indian Aesthetics and Selected Sanskrit Studies

    by René Daumal, Translated by Louise Landes Levi

    Daumal’s most important work”
    —Claudio Rugafiori, in conversation.


    About the author René Daumal:
    René Daumal, best known for his novel Mt. Analogue, unfinished at his death, in 1944 (other works in English A Night of Serious Drinking, The Power of the Word, You’ve Always Been Wrong et.al.) was an auto-didact, ie. a non academic Sanskritist. Following youthful experiments, with poet Robert Gilbert Le-Comte (Black Mirror) & initial instruction in Sanskrit with Rene Guernon, he embarked on a solitary study surpassing his teacher & finally formulating his own Sanskrit dictionary. Daumal translated essential texts on Sanskrit composition & the Bharata Natya Sastra, the world’s first treatise on the Dramatic Arts, ca 4th century. He wrote numerous essays on Sanskrit poetics & their relation to spiritual process, the first to recognize the value of these texts for the artists & the cultural milieu of the 20th century.
    As secretary to Uday Shankar, he wrote the first reviews of Indian music and dance in the West (Paris, circa 1935) and accompanied Uday Shankar’s troupe, which included Ravi Shankar as a 12 year old dancer to NYC. During the 2nd. World War, exiled in the South of France, with his wife Vera who was Jewish, he furthered his literary work, completing essays, translations, reviews while maintaining, with others so exiled. a profound epistolary exchange (see Letters 1930-1944), until his death from tuberculosis, shortly before the alien landing.
    RASA, a ‘cult classic’ edited by Claudio Rugafori, secretary of the Daumal archives and translated by American poet and musician, Louise Landes Levi, has earned its reputation.This is its 3rd. edition, prior editions being New Directions, 1982 and Shivastan 2003 and 2006. [Reprinted fr. Blank Forms Journal, No. 7.]

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  • A Short Introduction to the Philosophy of Shantarakshita

    by Marie Friquegnon

    This is a significant contribution to the study of Shantarakshita, the foremost thinker of Tibetan Buddhism. A Short Introduction to the Philosophy of Shantarakshita succeeds in demonstrating that Shantarakshita

    “is truly a philosopher for all seasons.” Shantarakshita’s conception of what his philosophy consisted in is what makes his philosophy relevant to all times: To believe what is in accordance with reason, and to reject what is not in accordance with reason. The book is an excellent introduction not only to Tibetan Buddhism, but also a philosophically stimulating text on many of the fundamental topics from ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology (as viewed by Madhyamikas). In a non-technical vocabulary Friquegnon explains philosophical ideas clearly. The conversational style of the book will be engaging to students and general readers who are new to the topic. Also of interest to students and scholars of comparative philosophy this book presents unifying themes from the introduction to the conclusion. One major theme of the book is the parallel between Shantarakshita and Kant. The chapter on Shankara and the problem of nihilism is particular of interest to the study of Hinduism and Buddhism. There are insightful analogies between Shantarakshita and philosophers ranging from Kant to Wittgenstein. Discussion of Shantarakshita’s conception of language in relation to Wittgenstein is particularly noteworthy.The concluding chapter provides a succinct summary of the central theses of Buddhism, the elimination of suffering through letting go of attachment and craving.” – Hyun HochsmannChair, Department of Philosophy, New Jersey City University

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    BetterWorld Books

  • Margie in the Morning

    by Robbie Saltaire

    Sam Tanenhaus, former editor of the NY Times Book Review and Mary Lee Grisanti, chair of the Film Department at the School of Visual Arts, are a few of the advance readers who’ve enjoyed this joyous memoir. It begins on August 21, 2001 when Robbie Saltaire finds himself browsing on a website that claims it can Find Any Death. Despite that somber promise and its deceased title character, MARGIE IN THE MORNING is bursting with humor, optimism and pure delight at being alive in general and a young person in particular, wandering through Manhattan on a cool spring night in the early 1980’s. John Lennon, Alice in Wonderland and the girls of his 4th-grade class are some of the stars that guide the author from the Metropolitan Museum through Central Park to his corner bar, his bedroom and finally back to the Park for a memorable morning after.

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    Amazon

  • Culinary Poems / Poemas cocinados

    by Ana Pascual Zurriaga, Translated by Rolando Pérez

    In Culinary Poems / Poema Cucinado by Ana Pascual Zurriaga is a Spanish-English book of poems. Facing pages (left page Spanish, right page, English) allows for comparative reading of the poems. Ms. Zurriaga embarks on her own existential journey as a poet and as a woman poet: through the word and through her pictorial art (her watercolors and socarrats). The materiality of the plastic arts reminds us of the natural elements, organic and inorganic, that are part of our humanity…These poems, brief and seemingly simple, refer to the most profound and complex aspect of human beings: their spirit and their carnality. In short, her well-constructed, culinary poems, nurture like a good stew made of words, metaphors, and images, selected with love. From the Prologue by Rolando Pérez, author of The Electric Comedy (Cool Grove).

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    Amazon

  • The Seven Letter Word Game

    by Clayton Patterson

    Clayton ascribes to the idea that an artist can translate any activity into a work of art. His seven-letter drawings are one example. He’s got lots more.

    Growing up in Calgary, Canada, Clayton knew he wanted to be an artist from early on. He met Elsa Rensaa at the Alberta College of Art and Design in 1972 and they’ve been together since. That was the year Elsa gave him his first camera.

    In 1979 they moved to New York City to work in a printmaking shop. Clayton had successful solo sculpture shows in Soho, the epicenter of the art world at the time, and his work sold to good collections, including the Brooklyn Museum. But he and Elsa felt like outsiders in the commodified, corporate, celebrity-hyped Soho scene of the 80s. They withdrew, and from then on they would make art their own way, while encouraging others to do the same.

    They lived at first on Broome Street, then Bowery; then in 1983 they bought the small building at 161 Essex Street on the Lower East Side. They lived on the second floor over an Hispanic dressmaking shop. “Compared to Soho, we found the Lower East Side totally liberating,” he has written. “You could be whoever you wanted to be, do whatever you wanted to do. Nobody was going to stop you. Everyone was in the same boat. Elsa has said it was like Disneyland to us, everything new and interesting.”

    Following their own path meant inventing ways to make a living while making art. You know how everybody in the world wears a baseball cap? Elsa and Clayton bear some large responsibility for that. In the mid-80s Elsa began embroidering Clayton’s designs on baseball caps, inventing a whole new art form and fashion, the Clayton Hat. As more and more celebrities wore them — Mick Jagger, Matt Dillon, David Hockney, Rob Reiner — the fashion press caught the buzz, and they soon had a thriving cottage industry that was an important source of income for them.

    “My work and life, how I live and what I do, are all parts of my artist’s journey,” Clayton says. “We transformed those baseball caps into small sculptures, and they were every bit as much works of art as any sculpture in an art gallery.”

    In 2021, Clayton’s images would catch on in fashion again, as a Supreme line of Clayton-designed caps, jackets, shirts and jeans sold out practically overnight.

    The income from Clayton Hats gave him to time to spend walking the neighborhood, taking pictures. He became an obsessive, ubiquitous documenter of Lower East Side life. He’s taken hundreds of thousands of pictures, compiling a unique archive in which one can find Crips and Bloods, bikers, dope crews, drag queens, homeless men and hookers, punks and eccentrics, artists, and lots and lots of neighborhood kids, mostly Latino. He posed many subjects in front of his richly graffiti-tagged front door, and began posting some of these portrait photos in the storefront window beside the door, which got to be known around the neighborhood as the Hall of Fame. He also built up a collection of neighborhood ephemera, including heroin bags he picked up off the streets, graffiti stickers he peeled off walls, books, articles, posters, postcards, and tattoo flash, much of it rare.

    Photographing at the Pyramid Club in the mid-1980s, he met Nelson Sullivan, who introduced him to the handheld videocamera, new technology at the time. Video opened a new dimension in his documenting of Lower East Side life. Between photography and videography he covered all aspects of neighborhood action: drug use, drug busts, police actions, fires, marches, protests, riots, art and artists, drag queens, poetry readings, community board meetings, social gatherings, Judaica and synagogues, Hari Krishnas, tattoos, bands, performances, street fairs, doorways and so on.

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    Amazon

  • Buddhist Bubblegum

    by Matt Marble

    Raised in the cornfields of Oskaloosa, Iowa, Arthur Russell (1951-1992) would become a visionary cellist, singer, composer, and producer in Lower Manhattan’s “Downtown” arts scene during the 1970s and 80s. Russell’s enigmatic music blended and transcended genres as disparate as Indian raga, Americana folk, avant-garde composition, and disco. He actively infused popular music into Manhattan’s avant-garde art scene, while bringing a Buddhist-inspired experimentalism into American popular music. As poet Allen Ginsberg recalled, “His ambition seemed to be to write popular music, or bubblegum music, but Buddhist bubblegum; to transmit the dharma through the most elemental form…”
    Following Russell’s premature death due to AIDS at age 40, composer Philip Glass reflected, “Arthur was very, very ahead of his time.” And while a few of his dance singles would remain underground classics, Russell’s work would be significantly neglected for over a decade. However, through the archival releases of Audika Records, a documentary film (Wild Combination) and a biography (Hold On to Your Dreams), Russell’s fearless creativity and radical vulnerability have found an admiring audience in the 21st century. Today, celebrated artists–from Kanye West to Rosalía and Peter Broderick–as well as emerging musical generations are breathing new life into Russell’s music and praising his name. Nevertheless, he has remained as mysterious as he has become accessible.

    Buddhist Bubblegum dives deep into the mystery of Arthur Russell and offers an unprecedented exploration into his lifelong Vajrayana Buddhist practice. Author Matt Marble charts Russell’s spiritual path, from his early life as a Buddhist monk on a Bay Area commune to his maturing engagement with Japanese Shingon and Indo-Tibetan Vajrayana traditions in Manhattan. Along the way, we learn how Russell creatively adopted traditional methods of mantra, mandala, meditation, astrology, numerology, and more. Through extensive archival research, personal interviews, and musical score analysis, Marble highlights Russell’s major works and shows how esotericism and aesthetic theory strategically guided his creative process. The writing is supplemented throughout with numerous archival images, featuring Russell’s original scores, notebooks, and photographs. Marble’s work is indebted to the Arthur Russell Estate/NYPL, Audika Records/Steve Knutson, Tom Lee, and Russell’s friends and collaborators, as well as to the pioneering work of biographers Tim Lawrence and Matt Wolf. Hailed by the New York Times as “groundbreaking work,” Buddhist Bubblegum reveals how one of America’s most visionary artists uniquely fused spiritual and musical disciplines.

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    Amazon

  • Where I Stand in Angel

    by Louise Landes Levi

    In her latest poetry book, Louise Landes Levi is ‘on the road’. Nomadic & hermetic, exiled and initiated, she reveals uninvited encounter and encounter w. the marvelous through the poetics of collage, the cut-up of perceptual process. Mostly untitled, the poems narrate dissociation but also pleasure, poetry as practice, as purification, itself a vehicle for the re-emergent feminine.Her pilgrimage leads to the European city, for her in decline, to her birthplace New York City and to the villages surrounding Mt. Amiata, site of rebirth & in this work reexamination, a marked departure from her earlier Guru Punk (coolgrove press, 1999). “Louise Landes-Levi joins the unclaimed territory of visionary writers and artists like Simone Weil, Mirabai and Hilma af Klimt. Desire and transcendence are both expressed with astonishing beauty. Her sharp eye trained on the human condition in samsara her quest takes the reader through the pain of love affairs, fulfilled and broken, and the elevation and strength endowed by moments of union with the

    divine. In this collection the reader finds herself Dante to Landes Levi’s Virgil. Instead of the circles of hell, she guides us through her chakras, invites us so intimately into her solitary heart and vastly expansive consciousness, that we too are embraced.”- Bonny Finberg (Kali’s Day)

    “Unclear if seeker LLL works for the CIA or Yahweh, however drinking from this ecstase of yearning and soaring on the astral plane will transfer a certain wisdom if not at least a delicious relief, something to strive for amidst the madness of the eros. if we wld. just learn / how to die, we cld. really / enjoy the adventure of being / ALIVE. writes L and damn does she show us one truth of rebirth. Thank Goddess these poems exist, to remind us there is yet fruit in this wasteland: at last, / I appeased my / ancestors … & you wonder why / I memorize the names / of / plants, / Plotting the return, while you plot / w/o knowing it the last / note in the / eternal, / lament. Brava Louise!”- Katy Bohinc (Trinity Star Trinity)

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    Amazon

  • American Poems

    by Azahara Palomeque

    How does it feel to confront a foreign world while speaking a strange language? Can an immigrant ever overcome the nostalgia for the lost country, for the family and friends who were left behind, for the old self that used to be? American Poems describes the deep sense of uprooting that permeates the immigrant experience, and the nuances of a wound which never heals but keeps changing its appearance and meaning as time goes by. Through a rich, witty imagery taken from her surroundings -the snow, the Canadian geese who console the author in her gelid nights-, as well as a careful elaboration of musicality, the fragmented body faces a cultural landscape seen for the first time while adapting to a territory that reveals always uneasiness for the new comer. Originally titled American Poems in its Spanish version, this book narrates the process of becoming someone else from the beginning of a journey that still continues. In its pages, the reader will learn about the arrival moment, with multiple checkpoints and stamps that mark the lyric voice’s identity; about the tough winters and recently embraced work rhythms; about the causes of displacement -the 2008 financial crisis- and their most intimate consequences, all of that expressed with meticulously crafted lines that speak to the mastery of the Hispanic poetic tradition. It is a book that will leave no one indifferent, everyone interrogating their own belonging and displacements.

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    Amazon

  • Roller-Skating Notes

    by Nina Zivancevic

    Teleported across the Iron Curtain, Zivancevic sounds the hidden alienation of a language on the brink, of mantras of the unsayable compulsively disgorged in lieu of a politic of linguistic refuge. Poetry is not, as Adorno claimed, impossible after Auschwitz, any more than it is impossible after the Soviet Union or the present drowning of the planet in commodified junk, but the contrary: such catastrophes make language possible in its critical poetic aspect.- Louis Armand

    In this book Nina Zivancevic is a stand-up poet in the true tradition of the great stand-up comedians, like Lenny Bruce, for instance, like Groucho Marx. But she’s more than that! When Nina Zivancevic’s says in her poem, Active Artists Reforming Action, “No, I’m not an Anarchist/My grandfather did it for me…,” then you’re really in the presence of someone whose every poem is an assault on the senses, a bullet to your ears.”- Gerard Malanga

    This transnational writer reflects on her current life in Paris, France and the situation with migrants, her past in Belgrade, Yugoslavia and its civil war, as well as New York, US and its problems with gentrification. But she also speaks regarding other current or past events, like the civil war in Syria, and Afghanistan. We delight in her reflections on ancient Greece; philosophers like Nietzsche, Freud, Hannah Arendt and Zizek; painters and composers like Chagall, Chopin, and Liszt; and even drug lord, El Chapo Guzman.”- Biljana D. Obradovic, Xavier University of Louisiana

    As usual, Nina Zivancevic’s poems do a bunch of things I’ve been trying to figure out for years. She is basically the master mathematician of ideas translated into poetry.- Malik Ameer Crumpler, author of Beneath the Underground, Collected Raps

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    Amazon