Mercurius Ah, um ... .

A few mistakes I've caught over the last three days of posts ...

The full title of the Clapton album is Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. Duane Allman was invited to join the recording sessions after Clapton basically tracked him down at a concert. Derek and the Dominoes were already gigging in clubs by that time. Clapton got his rhythm section (Carl Radle and Jim Gordon) from Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs and Englishman (a live recording that is a classic). The keyboard man (Bobby Whitlock) came from Claptons' gigs with Delaney & Bonnie and Friends (another super live recording worth seeking out).

The album does not begin with "Bell Bottom Blues." The lead track is called "I Looked Away." The chords I was hearing in my head when I wrote that sentence a few days ago were the chords from D&D's version of Hendrix's "Little Wing." Hendrix himself died about two weeks after D&D recorded it. (The original is found Hendrix's best studio album: Axis: Bold as Love.)

The Sufi who wrote the narrative poem known as Conference of the Birds was named Fariduddin Attar, not Ghazali. El-Ghazali wrote many Sufi masterpieces, just not that one.

The last post also had a lot of "fonky" writing in it I may clear up one day. It was mostly written off the top of my head, but I did have Shah's The Sufis in my lap for reference. If I'd just thumbed back two chapters or so, I would have caught the above mistake before posting.* 

In a post last month, I wrote that Phoebe Zeitgeist was drawn by Wally Wood. It was actually drawn by Frank Springer. The writer was Michael O'Donoghue. I'm sure interested parties have already trained their Googly eyes on screenshots of the strip at flickr. I have.

Also, let me drop a few more names ...

If you're interested in finding a more or less authoritative Rumi translator, you might want to look up Kabir Helminski. He's actually a leader of the Mevlevi Sufis in Turkey. The Mevlevis are the famous "whirling dervishes" -- the group Rumi founded. Helminski also has edited a collection of Rumi verse published by Shambhala. Some Coleman Barks translations are in it. I see it at the mega bookstores all the time.

Ibn 'Arabi was far from the first Sufi to write extensive theosophical works. One of his 11th Century forebears was Ibn Sina -- known as Avicenna in the west. Avicenna was a writer on a huge variety of subjects, and he (I think) influenced Aquinas.

It's probably worth reminding readers again of a caveat made earlier: This is a personal journal written by a guy with a bachelor's degree in English lit, and that's all. It presupposes no more than that. Nothing in this journal should be taken seriously or literally by anybody. It is for entertainment purposes only. Any "serious" writing in it is done to stimulate thinking and exchange, and to get off whatever chip mercurius_21 has on his shoulder at the time. The user info contains the theme of the journal. Writing in italics is my direct communication to you. Writing in regular font is from my persona, at least for the purposes of this journal. mercurius_21 usually writes directly into the livejournal rich text editor, reads it over once or twice and then posts it. Corrections, apologies, explanations, emendations and the like usually come later.

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*The rationale I used was that if I stopped long enough to think about what I was writing, I probably wouldn't write it. So, an adapted "stream-of-consciousness" style stuck pretty much throughout the life of the livejournal account usernamed "mercurius_21".  If I had a resource at hand, it was usually just there to jog my memory or help me phrase things.


LJ orig.: 09/04/07