Liam's write-only LJ

In today's excerpt - the letter below was written by eighteen-year-old Keith Richards to his Aunt Patty. It came to light in 2009 and had not been read by anyone outside the family prior to the recent release of his autobiography. In it, he describes meeting Mick Jagger in 1961. Almost immediately, they were regularly hanging out and "trying to learn how to do it." They went on to worldwide fame as the founding members of The Rolling Stones:

6 Spielman Rd
Dartford
Kent

Dear Pat,

So sorry not to have written before (I plead insane) in bluebottle voice. Exit right amid deafening applause.

I do hope you're very well.

We have survived yet another glorious English Winter. I wonder which day Summer falls on this year?

Oh but my dear I have been soooo busy since Christmas beside working at school. You know I was keen on Chuck Berry and I thought I was the only fan for miles but one mornin' on Dartford Stn. (that's so I don't have to write a long word like station) I was holding one of Chuck's records when a guy I knew at primary school 7-11 yrs y'know came up to me. He's got every record Chuck Berry ever made and all his mates have too, they are all rhythm and blues fans, real R&B I mean (not this Dinah Shore, Brook Benton crap) Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Chuck, Howlin' Wolf, John Lee Hooker all the Chicago bluesmen real lowdown stuff, marvelous. Bo Diddley he's another great.

Anyways the guy on the station, he is called Mick Jagger and all the chicks and the boys meet every Saturday morning in the 'Carousel' some juke-joint well one morning in Jan I was walking past and decided to look him up. Everybody's all over me I get invited to about 10 parties. Beside that Mick is the greatest R&B singer this side of the Atlantic and I don't mean maybe. I play guitar (electric) Chuck style we got us a bass player and drummer and rhythm-guitar and we practice 2 or 3 nights a week SWINGIN'.

Of course they're all rolling in money and in massive detached houses, crazy, one's even got a butler. I went round there with Mick (in the car of course Mick's not mine of course) OH BOY ENGLISH IS IMPOSSIBLE.

"Can I get you anything, sir?"
"Vodka and lime, please"
"Certainly, sir"

I really felt like a lord, nearly asked for my coronet when I left.

Everything here is just fine.

I just can't lay off Chuck Berry though, I recently got an LP of his straight from Chess Records Chicago cost me less than an English record.

Of course we've still got the old Lags here y'know Cliff Richard, Adam Faith and 2 new shockers Shane Fenton and Jora Leyton SUCH CRAP YOU HAVE NEVER HEARD. Except for that greaseball Sinatra ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Still I don't get bored anymore. This Saturday I am going to an all night party.

"I looked at my watch
It was four-o-five
Man I didn't know
If I was dead or alive"

Quote Chuck Berry
Reeling and a Rocking

12 galls of Beer Barrel of Cyder, 3 bottle Whiskey Wine. Her ma and pa gone away for the weekend I'll twist myself till I drop (I'm glad to say).

The Saturday after Mick and I are taking 2 girls over to our favourite Rhythm & Blues club over in Ealing, Middlesex.

They got a guy on electric harmonica Cyril Davies fabulous always half drunk unshaven plays like a mad man, marvelous.

Well then I can't think of anything else to bore you with, so I'll sign off goodnight viewers

BIG GRIN

Luff

Keith xxxxx
Who else would write such bloody crap

Author: Keith Richards with James Fox
Title: Keith Richards - Life
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Date: Copyright 2010 by Mindless Records, LLC
Pages: 77-79

http://www.delanceyplace.com/index.php

From Buddha by Karen Armstrong, Penguin, 2001, pp100-103.

The teachings of Siddhatta Gotama (Siddhartha Gautama), the Buddha (circa 500 BCE), did not include such items as an explanation of the origin of the universe, because he was only concerned with those teachings that helped relieve suffering:

"The Buddha had no time for doctrines or creeds; he had no theology to impart, no theory about the root cause of dukkha (suffering), no tales of an Original Sin, and no definition of the Ultimate Reality. He saw no point in such speculations. Buddhism is disconcerting to those who equate faith with belief in certain inspired religious opinions. A person's theology was a matter of total indifference to the Buddha. To accept a doctrine on somebody else's authority was, in his eyes, an 'unskillful' state, which could not lead to enlightenment, because it was an abdication of personal responsibility. He saw no virtue in submitting to an official creed. 'Faith' meant trust that Nibbana (nirvana) existed and a determination to prove it to oneself. The Buddha always insisted that his disciples test everything he taught them against their own experience and take nothing on hearsay. A religious idea could all too easily become a mental idol, one more thing to cling to, when the purpose of the dhamma (dharma, religious teachings or truths) was to help people to let go.

"'Letting go' is one of the keynotes of the Buddha's teaching. The enlightened person did not grab or hold on to even the most authoritative instructions. Everything was transient and nothing lasted. Until his disciples recognized this in every fiber of their being, they would never reach Nibbana. Even his own teachings must be jettisoned, once they had done their job. He once compared them to a raft, telling the story of a traveler who had come to a great expanse of water and desperately needed to get across. There was no bridge, no ferry, so he built a raft and rowed himself across the river. But then, the Buddha would ask his audience, what should the traveler do with the raft? Should he decide that because it had been so helpful to him, he should load it onto his back and lug it around with him wherever he went? Or should he simply moor it and continue his journey?

"The answer was obvious.

"'In just the same way, bhikkhus (monks), my teachings are like a raft, to be used to cross the river and not to be held on to,' the Buddha concluded. 'If you understand their raft-like nature correctly, you will even give up good teachings, not to mention bad ones! '

"His Dhamma was wholly pragmatic. Its task was not to issue infallible definitions or to satisfy a disciple's intellectual curiosity about metaphysical questions. Its sole purpose was to enable people to get across the river of pain to the 'further shore.' His job was to relieve suffering and help his disciples attain the peace of Nibbana. Anything that did not serve that end was of no importance whatsoever.

"Hence there were no abstruse theories about the creation of the universe or the existence of a Supreme Being. These matters might be interesting but they would not give a disciple enlightenment or release from dukkha. One day, while living in a grove of simsapa trees in Kosambi, the Buddha plucked a few leaves and pointed out to his disciples that there were many more still growing in the wood. So too he had only given them a few teachings and withheld many others. Why?

"'Because, my disciples, they will not help you, they are not useful in the quest for holiness, they do not lead to peace and to the direct knowledge of Nibbana.' He told one monk, who kept pestering him about philosophy, that he was like a wounded man who refused to have treatment until he learned the name of the person who had shot him and what village he came from: he would die before he got this useless information. In just the same way, those who refused to live according to the Buddhist method until they knew about the creation of the world or the nature of the Absolute would die in misery before they got an answer to these unknowable questions. What difference did it make if the world was eternal or created in time? Grief, suffering and misery would still exist. The Buddha was concerned simply with the cessation of pain.

"'I am preaching a cure for these unhappy conditions here and now,' the Buddha told the philosophically inclined bhikkhu, 'so always remember what I have not explained to you and the reason why I have refused to explain it.'"

This was today's mail from Delancey Place - a thought-provoking extract every day, for free. Recommended.

I recently saw a rather fun little web page which took various passages from books and replaced all works describing colour with a small block of the colour itself; the object was to try to work out the hue described. You could click on the swatch to see if you were right. (Alas, I can't find the link. Sorry.)

Mostly, though, I was pleased to see that the source of one of the quotes was Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, [part of] one of my all-time favourite novels.

Shortly afterwards, I decided to re-read last year's Stan Robinson epic, the Science in the Capital trilogy. Monday and Tuesday it was Forty Signs of Rain, a much-appreciated birthday gift from fishlifter last year; yesterday and today, it's Fifty Degrees Below.

(Aside: I understand that to make the title work, he has to use Fahrenheit in the title at least, but I wish there was a conversion chart or footnotes or something giving Celsius. He did in the Mars books. Fahrenheit means absolutely nothing to me; it was obsolete before I knew what "temperature" meant, the most useless and dated of the not-at-all-missed Imperial units. I must make a chart, print it and pop it in the book as a bookmark.)

But anyway. This all leads me to one of the many passages in the book I enjoyed...

Walking back to take posession of his new bedroom, he and the salesman passed a line of parked SUV - tall fat station wagons, in effect, called Expedition or Explorer, absurdities for the generations to come to shake their heads at in the way that they once marveled at the finned cars of the fifties. 'Do people still buy these?' Frank asked despite himself.

'Sure, what do you mean? Although now you mention it, there is some surplus here at the end of the year.' It was May. 'Long story short, gas is getting too expensive. I drive one of these,' tapping a Lincoln Navigator. 'They're great. They've got a couple of TVs in the back.'

But they're stupid, Frank didn't say. In prisoner's dilemma terms, they were always-defect. They were America saying Fuck Off to the rest of the world. Deliberate waste, in a kind of ritual desecration. Not just denial but defiance, a Götterdämmerung gesture that said: If we're going down we're going to take the whole world with us. And the roads were full of them. And the Gulf Stream had stopped.

'Amazing,' Frank said.

As tamaranth used to say, all the time: "Oh good, it's not just me."

It amuses me that lilitheve tells me that gas costs $4 a gallon in the USA now and this is causing people to bitch and whine about how expensive it is. A gallon is 4½ litres; $4 is £2 (close approximations). So they're paying about 56p a litre; the average UK price is currently about £1.16.

In other words, US petrol is less than half the price it is in the next biggest English-speaking developed Western nation.

To quote the Hitchikers' Guide, "I've no bloody sympathy at all." Let's see US prices rise to parity with, say, EU averages and then we might see the disappearance of their energy-hogging leviathan automobiles. Better late than never.

P. S. Yes, I know it's a vastly bigger country. Yes, I know they have a very poor public transport infrastructure compared to us in most places. Tough. Whose fault is this? The current situation has been visible as it approached for, conservatively, decades - pretty much all my life.