Book Sales, Buddhists, and Beauty in an Overhead Projector

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HOME BOOKSHOPPING: This month, readers with a book-buying budget to spare are able to bid on and possibly win purchasing rights to a variety of hardcover titles from all sorts of genres. What’s that, you say? You can already do that on eBay? Maybe true, but is eBay local? Do its proceeds benefit the Beach College Academy? I didn’t think so. But both are true of the Santa Barbara Book Auction. Intrigued buyers and browsers can examine the stock from the comfort of their own desks and, if overcome with the desire to snag any of it for themselves, can make their bids up until 8 p.m. on Thursday, August 20. For more information, call 899-2145 or visit sbbookauction.com. And for book lovers looking to thin rather than fatten their collections, email dean@beachcollege.net for details about donating books to the next auction.

Khenpo Tsering

MEDITATION EDUCATION: How many sources of discontent can you name in your own life? An unsatisfying diet? Nothing good on TV? Wish you knew more about Buddhism? Teacher of Buddhism Khenpo Tsering Samdup might well argue that the latter is the source of your melancholy. To this end, he’ll be giving a few lectures at the Bodhi Path Buddhist Center (113 W. Gutierrez St.) titled, in a bit of a nod toward modernity, An Inconvenient Noble Truth. But where Al Gore argued that humankind faces great peril due to our ignorance of large-scale climate change, Samdup is more concerned with our ignorance of what Buddhists call the Four Noble Truths. These truths have to do with locating the internal source of our troubles and meditating our way out of them (though I’m sure Samdup has a more elegant way of putting it). The next of his talks takes place this Thursday, August 20, at 7 p.m. Call 252-6137 or visit bodhipath.org/sb/ for details.

SHREDDING TO SATORI: In other matters Buddhist, journalist, photographer, traveler, surfer, and seeker of enlightenment Jaimal Yogis will visit Santa Barbara—and head straight to Chaucer’s Books (3321 State St.)—this Tuesday, August 25. And that’s not just because he happens to like reading; Yogis has written a book of his own called Saltwater Buddha: A Surfer’s Quest to Find Zen on the Sea. Having suddenly bolted from his Sacramento home to launch a new life on the waves of Hawai‘i, Yogis has filled the time between then and now with just the kind of travels and adventures that good memoirs are made of: encounters with indigenous culture, romantic turmoil, tutelage under wise mentors, journeys from Berkeley to Brooklyn to France and beyond, and plenty of straight-up visceral experiences that may or may not provide the gateway to inner peace. Part surfer and part spiritual quest-er, one has to wonder how this fellow could not play well in California. For details on all Chaucer’s events, call 682-6787 or visit chaucersbooks.com.

Daniel Barrow

THERE’S LIFE IN THE OLD 3M YET: Fans of experimental lectures, take heed of what’s on the horizon. On Thursday, September 3, the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum’s (653 Paseo Nuevo) Forum Lounge series—a program of monthly events meant to showcase multidisciplinary, multimedia events not usually found in Santa Barbara—brings in Winnipeg’s Daniel Barrow. An artist with a strong interest in obsolete technologies who was featured in Portland, Oregon’s 2009 TBA Festival, Barrow will give a presentation laden with his very unique style of animation. Think drawings, layers of light, and overhead projectors à la the ones you remember from elementary school. Titled Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry, Barrow’s presentation begins at 7 p.m. Call 966-5373 or visit sbcaf.org for event information.

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