this dude totally sounds like the bearded half of the professor bros.

Why does suicide make you a loser???

Suicide is a very personal choice and I don't think it should be looked down upon always.

Sure it sucks for his fans and people who wanted to read more of his work, but Christ, maybe there was just no other way to find peace for him.

I mean it's not like Hemingway who claimed to be a devout Catholic and value endurance above all else.

But even as the quote from HST above says, Hemingway was troubled and sick, survived two plane crashes with a questionable amount of memory loss or brain damage.

Unless you are going to argue from a Judeo-Christian perspective, I don't see what's wrong with suicide.

i always thought that looked like a harmonica as a kid.

brilliant!

the Japanese continue to raise the strange bar higher and higher.

i totally thought bob hope was kelsey grammer

jesus! people like the beatles

xeni,

well if your with "me" on that stuff, you're with pinchbeck. that's my interpretation of his book.

i agree, putting 2012 and quetzalcoatl in the title is at best misleading, bordering on marketing ploy, but the book is not about an interpretation of mayan cosmology. an earlier commenter criticized him for being purely subjective which is far more accurate of a criticism.

do you think that joseph campbell is a great co-opter and misinterpreter? i think pinchbeck is working more in that vein. he's not saying "hey let's all be mayans and save the world with their magic". but he's looking for universalities across world views. one of the more intriguing ones being the mayan cosmology. and i see the danger in that. i see how culture is a sacred thing and shouldn't be mishandled. but i dont think the scales should be tipped in either direction: co-opting or isolating.

but the largest chapter in the book is about friggin crop circles, so call him out on that rather than the whole 2012 thing. call him out for his thoughts on time at the beginning of the video being straight out of Jay Griffith's A Sideways Look At Time. but really i'm just saying cut out the brown spots and dont throw away the whole apple.

and i'm not a huge fan of pinchbeck, especially after the 2012 book. i thought Breaking Open the Head was far better in research, theory, writing, and as a cohesive whole. but i think people just see 2012 and call BS because they are rightfully skeptical of any prophecy, but i think that is a misrepresentation of what's actually in the book.

he had a dialog with rushkoff a year ago. it's worth checking out because i'm sure most of us wind up in the middle of both of them.

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=pinchbeck+rushkoff&hl=en

xeni and others,

first of all i admit there's something unsavory about pinchbeck in general. he's not very charismatic and it makes his already jagged ideas even more hard to swallow. and when you look at him in the face of mckenna's absence you say "oh thank god, someone's here to fill his shoes", but when you immerse yourself in mckenna and then take another look at pinchbeck you say "this amateur's got small feet".

that being said, there's nothing about pinchbeck's book that tries to co-opt mayan culture or tries to set him up in a position of messiah. like his other book, Breaking Open the Head, he examines the culture at large by pulling together disparate philosophies of myriad philosophers. and really the point of the book is not so much that the mayans say the world is going to "end" soon, but that many cultures and theories and world views all sort of point to this general time period as an ending of one world age and the beginning of another: from the kali yuga to the apocalypse to the switching of the zodiac age, all these are sort of converging. even ray kurzweil's singularity lines up with this loose time frame.

the theory is not that we will wake up one frosty december (or maybe balmy with global warming) morning and the thumb of god will be descending to snuff us out, nor is it that the collective consciousness of an incredibly selfish and isolated people will suddenly click over to utopia mode in the nick of time. it's simply this: bad shit is happening, the planet is suffering, people are suffering, demons are running amok, "the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity," and we will soon be free of all control if we don't pull in the reigns. our view of the world is extremely, extremely narrow, and the proprietors of our world view make a concerted effort to keep it as narrow as possible. there are other, different, and potentially transformative ways of knowing the world. perhaps if we utilize them we could save ourselves.

and xeni, you can't munch DMT. it's not orally active without an MAOI.

DYYBUK,

Ted Haggard's work was all about condemning homosexuality; therefore, he's a hypocrite. His work suffers because his actions conflict with what he preaches. Ginsberg loved boys and wrote poems about loving boys. No conflict of interest there. He also wrote poems about social change and lived a life in tandem with what he wanted to bring about.

that's horror movie material

i noticed this story out of Italy pop up on the AP wire. and of course, like everything else that seems like it should be more important, it kind of just faded away.

http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/news/196116.php