Blogtrotter

Ag éisteacht go leabhair léamh ag údair

2012-01-31T00:00:00.000-08:00

Le déanaí, tá mé ag éisteacht a roinnt leabhair nuair ag tiomaint go obair agus ar ais. Cuirim fáilte roimh seans a foghlaim faoi cinn éagsúlaí gach lá ar an bóthar mór ag imeall i gCathair na Áingeal. Scríobhfaidh mé faoi ag cloisteáil cúpla dóibh inniu.

Tá mé spéis sa Hiomoliatha fada. Mar sin, chuir mé cóip na "Sa Aer Tanaí" sa leabharlann. Is maith liom mar raibh inste os ard le an scriobneoir féin, Jon Krakauer. Chuaigh sé go Sliabh Everest chomh sliabhadóir; d'inis sé faoi ag tharla go dubhach ansiúd. Insíonn a ghuth an fulangach go díreach.

Go cosulacht, éist mé a scéal eile i bpian le fear Éireannach. D'inis Proinsias MacCuairt, ar ndóigh, ag insint faoi a óige i Luimneach. Meas mé go faigthe a aithris aige cumhacht speísealta go "Luaithreach na hÁingeala."

Tá suim agam leis ábhar eile fós. Mar shampla, thosaigh mé "Dia agus Fear: Reiligiúin Chomhparáideach." Thug leachtaí a thabhairt le Ollamh Robaird Oden. Bím ag imirt teíp de cúrsa léachtai anois.

Is gaire, fillfeadh mé chuig ar an leabharlann ar ais a cruinniú dhá leabhar go leor go luath. Bíonn beirt ag fanacht dom "1984" agus "Ag Fanacht Leis an Scuad Goon" le Fionnuir Nic Aodhagáin. Mar sin féin, nílim ábalta a éisteacht leabhair seo ag léamh le na scribhneoirí siadsa, go beo nó marbh.

Listening to books read by authors

Lately, I have been listening to some books while I driving to work and back. I welcome the chance to learn more about various items every day on the highway around Los Angeles. I will write about hearing a few of them today.

I have a long interest in the Himalayas. Therefore, I got a copy of "Into Thin Air" from the library. I liked this because it was read aloud by the writer himself, Jon Krakauer. He went to Mount Everest as a mountaineer; he told about what happened tragically over there. His voice tells the suffering firsthand.

Similarly, I listened to another story of pain by an Irishman. Frank McCourt, of course, told about his youth in Limerick. I reckoned that he gave a special power to his recital of "Angela's Ashes."

I have an interest in another topic too. For instance, I started "God and Man: Comparative Religions." These lectures are given by Professor Robert Oden. I'm playing a tape of this lecture series now.

Next, I will return to the library to gather two more books soon. Waiting for me are the pair "1984" and "Waiting for the Goon Squad" by Jennifer Egan. All the same, I'm not able to listen to these books read by these writers, living or dead.

P.S. Aistriúchán go Gaeilge le Pádraig Breathnach den leabhar ‘Angela's Ashes’ ó Frank McCourt/Translation into Irish by Patrick Walsh of the book "Angela's Ashes" from Frank McCourt. Order from/Ordú ó An Siopa Gaeilge anseo/here.

Geoff Dyer's "Otherwise Known as the Human Condition": Book Review

2012-01-29T00:00:00.000-08:00

Dyer likes the odds-and-ends he's gathered from '89-'10. Doughnuts, desert, lots of sex and drugs, photographers, jazz, book and art and music reviews, and autobiographical fragments fill these readable pages. Even when the topic didn't interest me, at least I paid attention, in case I might get interested. The unpredictability of his observations keeps you as alert as he is to what appears total recall of whatever this enviable Oxford grad (even if working-class background and after university unemployed for a long stretch) has seen, read, or done. His diaries unearthed from the early '80s attest to both his powers of recollection and his occasional lapses, which themselves gain, ironically, lavish documentation in his attempts at recalling when he was fired, when he met so-and-so, when he bedded her, when he got high with him, while thriving on the dole.

He has somehow constructed a career "as a gate-crasher" doing whatever he wants, writing when he wishes, wandering when he doesn't, or when he gets a magazine to pay for his expenses to write. A Serbian bus driver, sex in hotels, Airfix model planes and Marvel comics, unwanted books, being an only child. What appeals here as in his fiction and travel reporting and non-fiction remains his ability to capture a restless, disheveled mood. In Algeria, he remembers his stay. "In a restaurant--womanless, smoky--I order a beer. It comes in a green bottle and that is the major pleasure it affords. The food--chicken, brochettes, couscous--comes on a plate and half of it stays there."

One aspect that could have improved this collection? It begins with many eloquent essays from catalogues of photographic exhibits. Yet, few photos are included. This forces a reader to rely more on Dyer's evident skill with words to tell us what is shown, but often, it's frustrating to have so few examples as illustrations. That being said, William Gedney's power as an artist leaps off the printed page, thanks to Dyer's verbal skill.

An encounter with Def Leppard ends perfectly; another with Richard Misrach's photos and the Utah sand flats ends with a scene "like a contemporary monument to the Donner Party," where "a family car has sunk up to its axles in an area of sudden mud." Rebecca West's massive "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" represents for Dyer a model of sprawling reflection on his own Balkan quest: "as a kind of metaphysical Lonely Planet that never requires updating." The strength of this admittedly diverse and diffuse anthology for all its "unruly" assembly testifies to West's disciple, another restless and engaging guide to one eccentric, lively, and unfailingly erudite, take on his--and perhaps our-- human condition. (Amazon 12-9-11)

Peter Englund's "The Beauty and the Sorrow": Book Review

2012-01-27T00:04:00.000-08:00

This “intimate history of the First World War” blends twenty accounts by those who fought, and those who nursed, watched, waited, and were imprisoned. Peter Englund provides a narrative framework which avoids the usual summations of battles and fronts; a chronology for each year of the conflict precedes the excerpts from diaries, letters, and memoirs which enhance this military historian and war correspondent’s panoramic array of individual experiences. This book retells forgotten tales of an international and diverse set of participants, in combat or as civilians, at home or in the trenches.

Olive King leaves Australia to drive a Serbian ambulance; Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky goes home from the front to stumble into the Bolshevik uprising; Vincenzo D’Aquila sails from New York City to join Italy’s forces, only to be jeered at by native recruits unwilling to fight for a collapsing nation; Rafael de Nogales as a Venezuelan adventurer winds up on the Ottoman side witnessing the Armenian genocide.

At first, many are eager to join; the initial enthusiasm fades as rapidly as hopes that the war would be over by Christmas 1914. Mr. Englund observes how the previous European conflict, between Prussia and France in 1870-1871, had been brief, and the difference between that clash and the Great War unfolds through his attention to Mesopotamian, East African, Italian Alps, Galician, and Russian conflicts. His focus beyond the Western Front may remind readers of why this war merited its new adjectives.

A commander, after the war to take the name of Kamal Atatürk, at Gallipoli earns a cameo in one of many footnotes from Mr. Englund which add commentary or insight. This Turkish leader told its 57^th Regiment: “I am not ordering you to attack. I am ordering you to die.” His regiment was annihilated.

Gaza falls, and de Nogales rides into its ruins. “On the blackened walls of buildings that were still smoking and tottering on the point of collapse could be seen large purple patches that resembled red carnations, carnations of blood marking where the wounded and dying had rested their chests of heads before drawing their last breath,” he recorded.

Peter Graves translates this from Swedish seamlessly. Mr. Englund’s compilation slows in pace as the war drags on, its coverage can weary, his index needs more listings, but his details educate. Men depended on horses for supplies; their casualties soared as did the troops. The cavalry’s replacement as a secret weapon had been rumored in advance as a “tank” carrying water. Skirts shortened as women’s fabrics thinned. Soldiers, to evade service, might rub in gonorrheal pus from prostitutes.

Cigarettes freed soldiers’ hands, while lessening the stench of corpses and excrement. Close-cut hair eased treatment of head injuries. The war’s first skirmish was in Australian waters against a German ship. Many who enlisted faithful to the Continent’s monarchs found themselves radicalized. If the Germans had known of widespread French mutinies late in the conflict, they might have achieved a breakthrough, but word never reached them across No Man’s Land.

Brutalization wears down, early on, all who write. At first, a kind of beauty might be glimpsed amidst sorrow. Sarah Macnaughtan learns to dress wounds a month into the war when already many await her care in Antwerp: “Some of them bury their heads in their pillows as shot partridges seek to bury theirs among autumn leaves,” she reports.

Soon, deprivation and tension erode empathy. Pál Kelemen after being wounded sees in a mirror “a strange, yellow old face instead of my own.” Edward Mousley reflects after being able to see a man shot beside him and for himself to go on giving orders: “Am I callous? No, only less astonished.”

After ten days in the trenches at Verdun, René Arnaud can leave. The rule is that when a company loses seventy-five percent of its strength, it may be replaced. There are so few left of his comrades that they are amalgamated into another battalion, another number. After ten days “face to face with death,” he realizes: “I had lost my youth.”

Elfriede Kuhr, in her German schoolgirl’s diary at fifteen, lives near the eastern border. She remains one contributor who is spared direct conflict, but its impacts weaken her own youth. She describes the mood by the summer of 1917: "This war is a ghost in grey rags, a skull with maggots crawling out of it.”

Fourteen of the twenty included here were in their twenties when the war broke out. Three will die, two will be wrecked, two will be captured, and two, one a Belgian flying ace, will become heroes.

D’Aquila sails home at its end. His ship passes another. Signals are exchanged. “’Is the war over?’ The answer came, technically correct. ‘No, it’s only an armistice.’” The envoi to this history reminds us of the enduring if sinister truth of this remark, as a soldier who had served as a runner of messages for what had been the Austrian forces laments the defeat of his homeland. He learns in the hospital of his homeland’s defeat. The text ends with Hitler’s vow: “I decided to become a politician.” (Featured in edited form at New York Journal of Books 11-8-11)

Michel Houellebecq's "The Map and the Territory": Book Review

2012-01-25T00:00:00.000-08:00

Michel, appearing in his own fifth novel, has his artist-protagonist Jed Martin's father say of their creator: "He's a good author, it seems to me. He's pleasant to read, and he has quite an accurate view of society." He later's "a loner with strong misanthropic tendencies; it was rare for him even to say a word to his dog." His anodyne, but dryly witty summation characterizes the feel of Houllebecq's streamlined, yet often curiously detailed, fiction. I've admired his previous fiction, "Whatever,'' "Platform," and especially "The Elementary Particles"; "The Possibility of an Island" tried to be too ambitious, but it remained readable and thought-provoking as the first three novels. (All reviewed by me.)

Gavin Boyd's translation keeps the hermetic, slightly antiseptic feel of Houellebecq. For all his detail, here lavished upon the art world as well as the vagaries of male power and female "plenitude" marshaled as how our third millennium's establishing its time-tested control over we weaker consumers, he remains distant even as he digs into how we create, buy, sell, and ruminate, in everyday language and coolly observed branding. Transport, cuisine, shopping as in earlier novels earn his scrutiny and inclusion in efficiently conveyed prose. Naturally, the evolution of European sensibilities via the visual arts within a networked, high-tech world is discussed, in the academic tones of an historian. Therefore, the author's delivery usually keeps you at a safe remove from Jed--Houellebecq shrinks from predictable emotion or facile melodrama. He likes to stand back from indirect narration via Jed to adapt a stance of an art curator or critical scholar.

Taking photos of Michelin road maps, Jed finds a perfect title for their exhibition--"The map is more interesting than the territory." Typically for Houellebecq, this opens up a rigorously factual, while speculative, novel of ideas. Jed's efforts tie into making the French countryside "trendy" for the first time since Rousseau. Jed's relationship falters; after setting up background, Houellebecq in part two returns to the novel's opening.

Jed goes to the airport town of Shannon in Ireland (and then to his place in his native land) to meet and to arrange a sitting to paint Michel. He takes along a Samsung camera to shoot him first, a mechanism oddly described in typical terms, and ten years' gap shifts forward and back in expected form for this novelist. Damien Hirst, Bill Gates, Jeff Koons, and Steve Jobs pop up, subjects of other sittings. So do discussions of William Morris, Le Corbusier, silicone breasts, and Tocqueville. As in earlier novels, suicide of a loved one looms large as a revelation for the main character; his anomie and midlife ennui are juxtaposed with success by bourgeoisie standards. "Sexuality is a fragile thing: it is difficult to enter and easy to leave." Upending what you'd expect?

Well, I will leave part three to you. Suffice to say it's clever if not that unexpected, given it's from a French intellectual au courant not only police procedurals but with textual theory. (Amazon US 12-20-11)

Johnny Fincioen's "India Charming Chaos": Book Review

2012-01-23T00:00:00.000-08:00

For five weeks, this Flemish couple, now living in California, visited Northern India. Dozens of temples filled their itinerary, and as with their dutifully memorizing guides, the array of facts and dates slowed the pace of how much they or we the readers could keep up with such unfamiliar data. So, illustrations help us take in images when words may tire. Johnny Fincioen wrote the text and his wife Claudine Van Massenhove took 178 photos, some within the pages and many more linked to the e-book. These capture what words cannot, and the combination of Johnny’s careful, precise descriptions, and his Claudine’s photos make this a virtual slide show, as it were, with extended narration. (I’ll call them by their first names, as they become familiar here as if characters themselves.)

I liked Johnny's observations about Indian culture and modernization within tradition. Social engineering’s impact on the poor in education earns thoughtful consideration; “affirmative action” programs fail rather than ease disparity. Long-term implications of “gendercide” also gain reflection as female fetuses are aborted throughout Asia. The culture so reliant on inequality makes itself known as Johnny and Claudine are treated far more considerately by many of their hosts than how Indians treat each other.

Johnny offers novel insights into Flanders-Indian ties to nationalism, cultural celebrations, religion, and WWI memorials. He keeps a jaundiced view of how religion generates scams, no matter the faith. He wearies rapidly of business as usual full of middlemen, bribes, and “offerings.” The wealthy build Hindu temples to generate donations from the poor while owners rake in tax-free, untraceable income. Still, “charitable contributions” given by the couple for hard work done do get money directly to those who labor to serve tourists and who merit reward for diligence, and this, the author reasons, beats handouts.

An afterword by Dr. “Reddy” balances with a Hindu’s perspective, perhaps to counter the skeptical view of Johnny advanced doggedly in the previous 250-odd pages. Similarly, a forward by Dr. Koenraad Elst from Antwerp sets this narrative within a context of how India’s policies have or have not advanced the nation, and how the impacts of technology will alter what his compatriots have seen in these pages.

Traffic congestion, lack of rules, roadblocks for the Delhi-Mumbai highway to create business along the side of the road, the stenches and sights and smells--all are described with clarity and wit. Luckily for the couple who have a background in exporting Belgian beer, Kingfisher bottles, if no comparison for their native brands, manage to show up in most places they visit. While the details do weigh down the narrative at times, more a journal for privately recalling one’s hosts and costs and purchases rather than one a reader might expect, the level of attentiveness to such a journey’s requirements and expenses does put you in the same position as Johnny and Claudine as they deal with the unexpected detours as well as the planned itinerary. One learns not to plan too tightly, too cheaply, nor too ambitiously!

For a multilingual writer, Johnny does a solid job of expressing his honest, forthright report in conversational English, and the added angle which he and his wife’s Flemish upbringing and European mindsets provide enriches their encounters as set out on the page. The book may err on the side of generosity when it comes to the level of information shared. For once, we get a travel account which does not edit out any meal, driver, payment, meeting, or sight seen.

The e-book is split into two volumes due to the welcome abundance of photos. The first half goes from Delhi to Naguar and Jaipur, then to Agra and the Taj Mahal. Orchha, Khajuraho, Varanasi and the Ganges, Allahabad, Kanpur, Bithoor, and Old Delhi comprise part two.

The amount of data about temples and lunches and accommodations may please those wanting to consult this as a practical guide for planning a similarly ambitious and thorough visit. For me, as for now a traveler only via a book, this reminded me of listening to a sharp-eyed, sharp-witted pair who’d come back from a journey with lots of photos to share and lots to relate. We hear—language barriers permitting-- from everyday Indians, and not only guides or docents. This adds to the grittier texture of the travelogue, but it may make its fidelity to the daily grind too burdensome for some. How much detail is welcome and how much is overwhelming may depend on how much you as an audience wish to hear or see. Overall, passing these data heaps amassed along the couple's long Indian road, it’s an intelligently rendered, if very minute-by-minute, intensive journey worth following.

Johnny sums up wryly one of India’s newest inventions: "Nano, the mini-car sitting twenty Indians on four seats." He and Claudine see, one morning in Orchha, silent old men crossing a river bridge into the jungle. These eccentrics move as if zombies "with their eyes set on infinity and their brainwaves tuned to zero." Such scenes, and Johnny’s humanistic but business-savvy tone, make this a fine companion for an armchair traveler, and one which may inspire some readers to become actual visitors to India themselves. There they can match their own perspectives with those captured by Claudine’s camera.

(I note I was provided a copy online {Kindle E-book] of this by the author who requested my review, posted on Amazon US 12-19-11.)

Lodro Rinzler's "The Buddha Walks into a Bar": Book Review

2012-01-21T00:00:00.000-08:00

This follows the Shambhala practices introduced by Chogyam Trungpa to America to the counterculture; Rinzler updates them for today's alt-culture or perhaps mainstream hipsters. The publicity claims this targets "Generation O." While for me strongly reminiscent of Dzogchen Ponlop's "Rebel Buddha" published a year before (see my review), the emphasis on adapting Tibetan Buddhist teachings aimed not at endless prostrations or mantras or deity yoga but a down-to-earth approach--aimed at younger folks who like a drink, have sex, and love their cellphones (nearly?) as much as their similarly frenetic and chattering friends--has its relevance.

Rinzler risks aiming at trying to sound trendy and winding up like the preachers who marketed denim-clad bibles to the Jesus People in the hippie era; that is, packaging tradition for mass appeal. However, Rinzler's audience like that of Jesus or of the Buddha lives in cities more often than in monasteries! Rinzler wants to go into the dive-bars, the cyber-cafes, the cubicle, and to show how Buddhism can calm, can soothe, and can rouse.

He does this by taking venerable teachings and using parables, anecdotes, and everyday tales to make dharma matter. He translates "the four dignities of the Shambhala" empowerment teachings for us, as tiger, lion, garuda (man-bird), and dragon. "Windhorse" teachings, in Shambhala, enrich these practices which sustain a bolder sense of wise fearlessness as a way to make what insights come to one in meditation become self-actualized. These animals are metaphors for not otherworldly "Super Friends" from above but as qualities we desire to embody.

The "three yanas" or vehicles of dharma comprise the structure of this guide, as they do many introductions to Shambhala and Tibetan practice. Yet, the vocabulary's lightly sprinkled (if more than in most of "Rebel Buddha.") Focusing on relationships, careers, and attachments, Rinzler moves happily between pop culture and literary references (more the former than the latter) to draw in one chapter from "Ocean's Eleven," "Hamlet," the Green movement, beer, and hailing a cab from Grand Central Station.

Certain chapters, as on compassion in sexual relationships, zipped by too rapidly. But on accepting a degree of using materialism and dealing with money, as with Trungpa, so with Rinzler: his enthusiasm carries many pages with zest; he pushes a vision, as did his guide Trungpa, that will better the world as well as the individual. Meditations on lovingkindness, death, and basic goodness will be familiar to readers of Trungpa and followers, but they may be fresh and new for those who open "The Buddha Walks into a Bar" who may not have encountered Trungpa or Shambhala concepts before.

There's a winning ethical dimension that Rinzler, all of 28 years old, extends, true to the slangy, conversational, but firmly (if oddly skewed at times) moral mission of Trungpa, and the other teachers he has studied and whom he presents here. Although Rinzler's reading list's surprisingly terse, the book's value lies in putting its advice to work, not in mulling it over for a seminar or keeping it for one's own retreat. This isn't for intellectuals or monks, but for us stuck in the 9-to-5 or 24/7 wired world.

He relies on his own inspiration of Sakyong Mipong, reformulating this lama's teachings for a wider readership. Sometimes I wanted more depth from his student; although this is a galley proof given for review, it appears to be more or less complete in this version. Lodro Rinzler loads on the references designed to make this up-to-date, but the risk of a shorter shelf life when quoting a particular drink mix or rapper or '80s kid's show does loom. (I think of those earnest recastings of the Good News for Flower Power.) For me, a generation older than Rinzler, I fall into the awkward gap between Chogyam Trungpa's Aquarian Age cohort and Rinzler's--maybe I'm closer to the "hardcore zen" of Brad Warner or as an older brother for Noah Levine's "dharma punx" who grew up after the hippies but before the maturing of a perpetually wired audience. I'm glad to see that Buddhism continues to be rethought and reframed every few years.

So, as I'm interested in how Buddhism gets transmitted to the West today, I find Rinzler's urban, artsy-Brooklyn tone appropriate. He tries, as does Trungpa, Warner, and Levine, to remind us that the Buddha may not have been as ascetic as his monastic interpreters intended him to be seen by his followers among the laity. Rinzler touches lightly on this, but his placement of Buddhism in a bar-hopping, night-crawling, texting and frenzied atmosphere makes for a novel and necessary translation of the dharma to a less austere, if no less idealistic-- and maybe not so hedonistic after all--set of "early adapters" in this new century. (Amazon US 12-24-11--see my reviews of all of Warner and nearly all of Levine and many of Trungpa's works on this blog and there...)

Noah Levine's "Against the Stream": Book Review

2012-01-19T00:00:00.000-08:00

This "Buddhist manual for spiritual revolutionaries" may appeal to the tattooed and shaved crowd that the author and cover beckon. Levine sums up how not to be a Buddhist but a Buddha. He emphasizes actual experience, not book learning, so this is short on the usual history and cultural contexts other introductions provide, but this is not a shortcoming. He suggests a few sources, but Levine conveys dharma directly.

Good books by Buddhists tend to tell their message clearly and concisely. His 2003 memoir (summed up as a preface) "Dharma Punx" (see my review) narrated on his own rebellious quest and travels in Asia rather than give substantial content about the dharma. This 2007 follow-up covers little about his own struggles. Instead, Levine puts the knowledge he shares into action.

He distills the Buddha's message: "Pain is unavoidable. Suffering is self-created." (19) Levine demonstrates how we can overcome attachment to the cravings that inevitably arise that keep us tethered to things, people, and concepts that prevent us from growth and tempt us away from insight. He teaches, but free of jargon, Theravadin Southeast Asian-Sri Lankan "insight meditation/vipassana" traditions that he's studied for twenty years. He conveys them in calm, but forceful tones.

"Against the Stream" is counterinstinctual; this phrase from the Buddha means to go "against our very human instincts to accept pain and not chase pleasure." (100) As one in recovery, Levine conveys the difficulty of breaking patterns of how we react to pleasure and avoid pain. "Our conditioned tendency is to push or pull or grasp or run." (103) As a solution, he gives us three stages-- corresponding sort of to the "three jewels": the Buddha, the dharma teaching, the sangha of community-- that comprise the heart of his emphatic presentation.

He starts with the Buddha's life and his guidance. Levine offers helpful perspectives on "basic training" and his treatment of the Eightfold Path is free of jargon. Change being constant, dissatisfaction's inherent in us. Mindfulness (even if nearing pop-culture cliche now) regains its power when Levine provides this analogy: we need to let each moment die naturally. Attachment to or aversion from the passing moment means we try to "resuscitate or kill an experience. Mindfulness allows us to receive the experience directly and to respond more like a compassionate hospice worker than an aggressive ER doctor." (28)

Levine illustrates the complex idea of "dependent origination" and how karma's responded to with the example of craving ice cream, buying a triple-scoop hot fudge sundae, getting full after three bites, but scarfing it down anyway, before feeling queasy. He explains another tough concept, how the mind "experiences itself" so we realize we are not the mind or even its contents. (31) He advises that the reader learn to regard the mind as impersonal, so as to detach one's identification from its passing fancies. Letting go, as renunciation, helps to let the self separate from the causes of desire and suffering. It also helps us put into action "the intention to stop hurting ourselves and others." (32)

"Cognitive disobedience" makes this a difficult practice, for meditation rebels against the mind's defenses. As "the highest form of the inner revolution," Levine argues that this liberates the practitioner from the "dictates of the mind," for one can choose "for ourselves how to respond to the "thoughts, feelings, and sensations of being alive." (45) Throughout his book, he refers to easily understood instructions, compiled in an thirty-five page appendix, of "meditative trainings" keyed to these various stages on the path.

The second level enters "boot camp," as the practices emanate from the person outward, to get off the meditation cushion into one's livelihood, encounters, and activities. Compassion, loving-kindness, appreciation, and especially the often-overlooked quality of equanimity represent the goals for a spiritual revolutionary. (For more, see his 2011 "The Heart of the Revolution: the Buddha's Radical Teachings on Forgiveness, Compassion, and Kindness.")

No divine revelation enters, and no entreaties to a higher power need be sought. Instead, the experience of freedom, as the Buddha taught, comes not from books or observation, but from experience. Pain continues, and bliss does not descend for long, but the way people react to suffering, and the growing ability to detach from one's dissatisfaction and to create satisfaction for one and others, begins to tidy up some of the messiness of unpredictable reality as lived by the dharma practitioner.

Part three as "field guide" engages with our common reality. The "outer revolution" that follows the inner one will take time to transform society by positive change. Sexuality earns an extended reflection, and even if Levine's advice for celibacy may be surprising for some readers, and not an option for many whom I assume are in committed relationships, he does caution all of the need to accept the unavoidable presence of "the truth of impermanence" in intimacy, and the suffering that it does bring for all partners, eventually. (93)

As with the Brahma god's conversation attributed in legend with the Buddha after his enlightenment, the appeal of this rigorous approach may not be among the masses but the few, the elite, the renunciators "with but little dust in their eyes." I felt, as with "Dharma Punx," that this portion of Levine's regimen relates to those who can commit to celibate periods, extended residential retreats, financial independence, familial support, and distance from the chores, duties, demands which fill the hours of working folks with partners and children.

More discussion of how the renunciation of intimacy relates to many of us ("married with children") would have enriched this section. It's helpful for its reminders of what people do want to forget, but its lesson's directed more at those able at his most "radical" level to live as sort of on-off monks, not a realistic option for many Westerners after a certain age. Levine notes how temporary celibacy, as with his sexual relationships, remains "the most challenging realm of his practice and the cause of the most suffering in my life." (94) [For another p-o-v, see "hardcore Zen" Brad Warner's books, all reviewed by me, especially "Sex, Sin and Zen"]

Like Brad Warner, Noah Levine speaks as one in his forties to a crowd impatient with "the delusion of knowledge" vs. the nitty-gritty immersion of those raised with punk (or hip-hop) and after the 60s & 70s, the period when Noah's father Steven emerged as a noted American Buddhist teacher. For Noah, he shares his father's countercultural resistance to what culture creates as philosophies with all the right answers neatly packaged. Bliss cannot stay, and pleasure vanishes. Gurus in Levine's version of true Buddhism are not to be found: one cannot gain the magic mantra or dispensed wisdom secondhand. Insecurity and ignorance must be overcome by a constant battle inside one's self, as that self itself begins to be dismantled.

In its place, the "present-time experience" grounds a practitioner not in belief but in action. Freedom comes as one's awareness of passing desires and pains and pleasures diminishes their hold on one's conditioned tendencies to grasp or to flee. He closes with a "manifesto." By serving others with a renewed energy to better them and ourselves, we can "defy the lies" of material comfort and dogmatic oppression as the way to satisfaction; "serve the truth" with honesty and integrity, not violence and greed; "beware of teachers" as "no one can do it for you!"; and to "question everything" until one has experienced it for one's self. I found it sensible and worthwhile as a practical guide free of technicalities. (Posted to Lunch.com & Amazon US 3-14-11.)

Noah Levine's "Dharma Punx": Book Review

2012-01-17T00:00:00.000-08:00

A dropout at fifteen, and by nearly thirty, a grown-up, Noah Levine shares his troubled journey. The son of a prominent American Buddhist teacher, Noah was raised in Taos and Santa Cruz, two not-exactly hardscrabble countercultural enclaves. Still, he seems to have spent little time with his father and stepmother, and early on became alienated from his mother and stepfather, turning to drugs by the age of ten or so, and then integrating hardcore (and then Straight Edge) punk and skating, tagging and panhandling, stealing and crack, into his lifestyle spent on the streets. He rails for much of his upbringing against hippie idealism and spiritual messages, but as the title indicates, he manages to survive stints in juvenile hall, twelve-step programs, and among many rebels in the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years who wind up in prison and/or dead.

He tells the story with lots of did-this, done-that detail for the first half of his narrative. He tends to fill pages with who he hung out with and what happened next which may be interesting if you were there with him, or were listening to his anecdotes now and then, but after a few chapters of similar-sounding mishaps, travels, parties, girlfriends, and concerts, it blurs as much for a reader as it must have for Noah back then. I sympathized with his torment, but it played like a long episode of MTV's "Behind the Music"--by a fan.

Halfway, the narrative lightens and widens. A solo camping trip to Big Basin park to see the redwoods he loved sounds predictable. But, the emotion invested in his sight of a deer, and the feelings evoked, demonstrate movingly, in his entrapment in temptations, how estranged from nature he has become.

His share of his mother's inheritance must have stood him in good stead, for he travels a long time across the US and all over Asia. To his credit, earlier (as with "My Name is Earl," I thought), he repays those he ripped off and makes amends to those he cheated, and he does put his fairly-earned income from medical and social work to good use, going off for stays to Hindu ashrams and Buddhist shrines, as well as a Sufi encounter. He follows his parents' model of acting as if he had a year to live, and he lives it up, and down, on his travels.

At Bodhgaya, where the Buddha sat under the bodhi tree, Levine seeks his own "intention to awaken in this lifetime" and to overcome his fears and mistakes and loneliness by "a victory over suffering." (161) Such self-surrender contrasts with his ornery past, and restless present, disdain as a punk for those who have chosen to play along with the system. Slowly, he realizes his own complicity with such a stable system, grateful for the safety it allows him as an American, compared to the assaults on the senses and body that much of India inflicts.

On his second trip to Bodhgaya, to see the Dalai Lama, he realizes his inconsistencies. "The day before I had taken a vow to be compassionate and there I was threatening some crazy Indian man with a stick. The absurdity of it made me laugh. I was very far from becoming a bodhisattva but at least I was trying." (205)

He tells of his on-again-off-again relationship with a girl named Lola, and of his gradual acceptance of their life that must be spent apart. He struggles with his desires, and despite his vegan, hardcore, purifying blend of dharma and punk ethos, he finds the practice as difficult as ever. But, he channels his rage and revolutionary idealism into a positive energy. "I had found the solution to my once-hopeless situation and lack of faith had been replaced by a verified understanding of the path to freedom from suffering. I knew that the path led upstream, against the current, and was the most rebellious thing I had ever done." (217)

As that last sentence of his shows, he can be a writer who struggles with a more fluent style, but the rawness, despite a typo or gaffe now and then, does reflect an honest account that surely has wide appeal for his audience, those who have come of age alongside him, and not the hippies of their parents' (or by now, grandparents') era. Levine can merge the discontent of punk with the First Noble Truth of Buddhism. By the end of his tale, he's finished college and started grad school in a program combining psychotherapy with spirituality, and he's serving the kinds of people he grew up with in Santa Cruz, with a Mind Body Awareness prison ministry, a safe-sex outreach program, and AIDS education.

He contemplates the funeral of one of his best friends, one who saw him both shoot up and meditate, and Levine resolves to keep doing better. He notes how few punks break through their anger at consumerism and conformity to get to "the causes and conditions of the suffering and falsehoods." (230) In dharma, personal freedom and a solution to the wrongs that fill society, he reckons, come together in his deeper, mature understanding. While this will not teach you much about what the Buddha taught, it's a nudge in the right direction. It's a rough ride over two decades, and the feeling that his father and his renowned colleagues intervene more than once to bail him out does persist. Still, the Buddha himself lived as a pampered prince before he saw the reality outside the palace gate. The rich as well as the poor need guidance, the suburbanites along with those in the slums. Therefore, especially for younger readers turned off by musings from his father's generation, Noah's energetic, if rambling, memoir should prove a wake-up call.

P.S. The title may promise more dharma, but it gives you more punx. Here, Levine appends an overview of his father's meditation practice based on breathing but you'll need his 2007 "Against the Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries" (see my review) as "a navigational chart" for that inner journey that returns to helping others along their own path. His 2011 book, "The Heart of the Revolution" shares his take on the Buddhist teachings of forgiveness, compassion, and kindness. For comparison, along the Zen path and amidst American hardcore punk and Japanese monster-movie culture, the similar memoirs and studies by Brad Warner (all four recently reviewed by me), are recommended. Like Levine, Warner mixes his own (sometimes repetitious, but entertainingly self-deprecating) punk saga into the Buddhist quest; unlike Levine, he's more insistent and more explanatory about how you can and should accept the regimen of Zen as a path to dharma. (Posted to Lunch.com 3-14-11 & Amazon US 3-11-11, the latter an attempt at balance among severely bipolarized reviewers; I've since reviewed his third installment, sign of his growing if delayed maturity: "The Heart of the Revolution" in 2011 for NYJB.)

Ag féachaint do aon 'anglais tae'

2012-01-15T15:56:00.000-08:00

Tá mé ag féachaint tae níos mó anois. Nílim ábalta fáil cinealáchaí éagsulaí dó ina margadh i gCalifoirnea Theas anseo. Ina theannta sin, sílim go bhfuil 'anglais tae' a fáil sa cheantar.

Is maith liom tae níos laidre agus braiche, ach leis bainne. Mar sin, bhí cuimhne liom fógra beag go feicthe i gcúl 'An Nua Eabhracnach'. Chuir Upton Tea Imports a fógra ar iris sin.

Fuair mé níos mó na 420 chinealachaí de tae duille scaoilte ar díol leo. Chaith mé chuid de tráthnóna ar lorg a clár eolasach agus léirmheasannaí le custaiméirí ar líne inné. Roghnaigh mé fiche samplaí a chosnaíonn triocha dollar, lena n-áiritear loingseoireachta.

Líon mé cáirt leis cinn difriúlaí. Déanfaidh mé iarracht naoí samplaí leis caiféin ina maidín go hiondúil. Sa tráthnóna le dinear ag an obair, gan bainne, iarraidh mé seacht tae leis torthaí nó blás fanaile.

Sa bhaile, leis bainne aríst ina tráthnóna anois agus ansin, ólfaidh mé ceithre cinn gan caiféin. Scríobfaidh mé san iarrach seo nuair a bheidh mé ag críochnaithe na samplaí sa iarrach. Inseoidh mé agaibh cinn go beidh mo roghannaí deiridh a ordú cúpla pacáisti--ach níos mó!

Searching for not "watery tea"

I'm searching for more tea now. I'm unable to find various kinds in my market in Southern California here. Moreover, I think that 'watery tea' [literally "English tea" in Irish!] is found locally.

I like stronger, maltier tea, but with milk. Therefore, I remembered a little ad seen in the back of "The New Yorker." Upton Tea Imports advertised in that magazine.

I found more than 420 brands of loose-leaf tea sold by them. I spent part of an afternoon peering at their informative catalogue and reviews by customers on line yesterday. I chose twenty samples costing thirty dollars, including shipping.

I filled my cart with various types. I will choose nine samples with caffeine in the morning as is customary. In the evening with dinner at work, without milk, I am seeking seven teas with fruit or vanilla flavor.

At home, with milk again, but in the evening now and then, I will drink four kinds without caffeine. I will write about my selections when I will have finished the samples by spring. I will tell you all the ones that will be my final choices to order a few, but larger, packages!

Jack Kornfield's "Bringing Home the Dharma": Book Review

2012-01-13T00:00:00.000-08:00

Over twenty-five years of reflections merge into this thoughtful anthology. Jack Kornfield's one of America's pioneers when it comes to bridging the gap between the often challenging dharma of Buddhist instruction with the struggles that Westerners tend to encounter as they try to align what happens in the heart with what happens in the mind. As one of the nation's leading teachers of Insight Meditation--derived from the Vipassana Southeast Asian-based school of looking inward for analysis as well as calmness, stability, and the experience of emptiness and transcendence (as in Tibetan and Zen methods)--Jack Kornfield emphasizes his subtitle: “awakening where you are”. He shows how his audience can heighten wisdom by increased, and less selfish, self-awareness. He presents his guidance through a careful examination of one's potential to overcome one's shortcomings by increasing compassion and altruism.

This inner-grounded, other-directed approach mingles often in Western Buddhism with a stress on "emotional intelligence" and a gradual outward integration of self with society. In turn, these concepts are gaining wider acceptance through therapies and self-help treatments outside of the circles of Buddhist practitioners. However, as the title of this book reminds us, Dr. Kornfield's training as a clinical psychologist allows him additional consideration of how this spiritual practice can enrich one's mental, physical, and social health as he seeks to help readers connect the teachings and findings gained from retreats with the everyday, workaday, world. Bringing it all back home means to blend the elevated or heady accomplishments gained in solitude or sitting meditation with the necessity to direct the insights gleaned to assist one's self and those around the practitioner.

Therefore, "bringing home the dharma" allows a reader to comprehend through these linked inclusions Dr. Kornfield's varied suggestions about how what may be learned on intensive retreats, or in a monastery as a monk or nun, strengthens the practice of those who may not have the luxury or the time to benefit from such intense, prolonged immersion into a total atmosphere of lived Buddhism. Too often in this reviewer's opinion, Buddhists tend to overlook the pressures and difficulties of those in the West who try to take on the disciplines of the East, but who due to work and family and budgets cannot afford the separation from the rest of the world to pursue an in-depth regimen of meditation apart from daily life. This contingent, I assume, comprises many readers of this collection.

Despite his prominence in the American Buddhist leadership, Dr. Kornfield keeps this discussion down to earth. Part One explores how mindfulness links to meditation and then putting into practice what one may perceive first in contemplation. For those with the "monkey mind" so easily distracted, he makes the analogy to training a puppy. The mind must be gently but firmly halted, lifted up, and corrected if one is, like a puppy being potty-trained, to be disciplined to change one's habits.

Speaking of habits, this first section also investigates how political change, better parenting, and the cultivation of love and joy can be encouraged through a more life-affirming vision of dharma. Countering the nihilism or death-haunted versions of Buddhism as seen by some practitioners and some detractors, Dr. Kornfield counters in Part Two with a vision of a more mature dharma based on his own Thai stint as a monk decades ago. He writes with great affection of his mentor, Ajahn Chan, and returns to his example frequently throughout this book.

As a young countercultural adept, Dr. Kornfield learned from his monastic experiences how to lighten up as well as bear down on himself on the road to enlightenment. He presents detailed accounts of his days in a Thai forest establishment, half-hermit and half-communal monk. He shows how a mature form of practice seeks not only the heady delights of the transcendent, which can prove illusory, but the more prosaic rewards sifted from daily life. He may refer to an Argentinian tennis pro or a San Francisco inner-city coach to make a point, as well as to his many students and teachers, all of whom gain his respect as characters in brief examples interspersed to clarify or elaborate a telling point.

Part Three recapitulates and expands accounts of his spiritual teachers, Ajahn Chan, the Indian female guru Dipa Ma Barus, and the controversial Tibetan lama Chögyam Trungpa. For Mr. Chan, his student celebrates his humor, his honesty, and his unflinching conviction to instill humility in those he led. For Ms. Barus, her love and affection endure. For Mr. Trungpa, his quirky, unpredictable ways of battling "spiritual materialism" among Westerners seduced by fads and charlatans as well as his innate mysteriousness impel Dr. Kornfield to admire his legacy.

The last section of essays confronts the impact of such teachers as Mr. Trungpa upon the Western followers creating their own eclectic, but informed, dharma style. As the historical Buddha warned that the dharma itself was but a raft, to be abandoned and not clung to once one reached the farther shore, so Dr. Kornfield uses this parable to stress the necessity of liberation. He considers sexuality, drugs, the roles of meditation teachers, and personal pain as obstacles or portals to freedom. He tells of his efforts, with Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg, to found (while all three were in their twenties) the Insight Meditation Society in Vermont. This was later joined by Spirit Rock in Marin County, California; these now stand as two leading centers for Vipassana meditation in the United States.

He addresses an audience impatient with platitudes, who understands that the Buddhist path offers no shortcuts. This book, for those already informed about dharma and knowledgeable about its practice, should illuminate at the hands of a master guide some of the pitfalls along the slow way out of one's dark corners. Such readers represent at such centers a new flock of seekers: contemporary, likely lay and maybe urban, who come to Buddhism but do not perpetuate territorial, sectarian, or denominational strife that has divided Eastern adherents and some Western disciples.

Instead, democratic decision-making, feminism, the pursuit of wisdom, and a shared practice that frees itself to take what is best from each tradition becomes Dr. Kornfield's model for Western practice. Three essentials endure: kindness of heart, inner stillness, and the promotion of one's liberating potential to assist all who long to break free of pain and suffering. As a clinical psychologist, he advises the connection of freedom found by therapeutic methods with those of meditation, dharma study, and the practice of actions aimed at compassion and joy.

Rather than the fearless warrior model often promoted by Asian societies for the practitioner, Dr. Kornfield suggests that of the Buddhist learning to let go of self-hatred and self-judgment as a more healing treatment for what ails one's psyche and hinders one's mind and body. Fearlessness can remain, but the shift from stoic warrior to gentler seeker, he reflects, seems likely to do more good.

His book concludes with three short meditation practices. As well as the forgiveness and lovingkindness ("metta") exercises, the simple one (at least on the surface, as it is perhaps the most profound) one of taking on the dignity and simplicity of "taking the one seat of the Buddha" as the core practice for any meditator says it all, without saying it all. In four paragraphs, Dr. Kornfield manages to hint at vast insights and wisdom that escapes verbal summary. His eloquence and accuracy, here as throughout his collected articles and essays, demonstrate his own mastery of many of the everyday and ethereal insights he sums up skillfully and elegantly.

(Published in the New York Journal of Books 12-8-11)

Moh Hardin's "A Little Book of Love": Review

2012-01-11T00:00:00.000-08:00

After forty years, Moh Hardin distills his “practical advice on bringing happiness to ourselves and our world” into a few pages. As often with books by long-time Buddhist teacher-practitioners, the prose may be brief, but the insights emanate from the depth of unarticulated experience. Inspired by the example of his Tibetan émigré mentor, Chögyam Trungpa, the author seeks to cultivate love beginning with one’s self. Then, moving to one’s partner and child, the circle widens to those around us. Gradually, “skillful means” and wisdom applied from the Buddhist tradition allow seekers to include others in this attempt to heighten compassion and wisdom, until all beings receive the goodness inherent in creation.

Such profound ambitions characterize the message of the Buddha. Mr. Hardin starts by reminding readers how a gentler approach does not preclude truth, when it comes to becoming one’s own best friend. Rather than a platitude, this foundation remains necessary, for upon an acceptance of one’s own self, without harshly judging one’s own ability, one can learn to strengthen one’s own potential to “wake up”, as the meaning of the term “Buddha” promises, and to recover one’s own “Buddha nature” as the “fundamental nature of our being”. This aligns with his mentor Trungpa’s definition of “basic goodness” as an understanding of one’s own presence. This energizes one’s own life, and offers a forgiving alternative to Christian concepts of original sin and guilt, and to scientific materialism which reduces life to mechanical functions.

This acceptance in turn stimulates inner strength, kindness to others, and the warmth of friendship. It flows away from self-recrimination towards meditation, and then action based upon a balanced perspective that analyzes the good and the bad within us, as we see this same blend within our close friends, with whom we continue our relationship even as we do not overlook their flaws or exaggerate their perfections. This draws us away from ourselves to our partner.

Here, Mr. Hardin encourages the reader to allow “giving space” to one’s lover, husband, or wife. That is, to diminish friction, one must begin to pause before reacting to another’s irritation. Basing his teachings on those again of Trungpa, one learns not to possess but to appreciate another person. This exemplifies “bodhichitta”, the “awakened mind or heart” which generously holds a partner free from one’s own projections. Trust and “right speech” play key roles here.

These “skillful means” carry over to the raising of children. A parent’s duty and responsibility must be to “touch a child’s basic goodness”. He or she teaches a parent to grow as well. By “focused attention”, a child can find encouragement to be open alongside a parent. This exchange of goodness allows “bodhichitta” to deepen, and this nourishes a child’s healthy ego, one that can live among others as with the self, confident that life can be faced and enjoyed.

Part Two expands this “basic goodness” to embrace those outside the home. The “Four Limitless Ones” or “immeasurable” components of the Buddha’s message apply: love, joy, equanimity, and compassion. This other-directed “bodhisattva path” moves an awakened heart to care about more than one’s own preoccupations. Mr. Hardin narrates how difficult such an aspiration proves. “May all beings be happy” can be an elusive wish to fulfill by one’s intentions and actions, given the reality of an often grudging reaction to those whom one judges or demeans. “Sympathetic joy”, the author explains, helps this progress towards caring about others. That is, being in touch with the happiness of others and wishing them the best can begin to replace the habitual envy, bitterness, and jealousy with which many of us have been raised to regard the accomplishments and successes of those with whom we live and among which we work.

The section on “True Bravery” incorporates Shambhala Buddhist concepts popularized by Trungpa. It stresses openness to others as they are. By a “flash of generosity”, the potential to do more may ignite one’s energy. Self-discipline, patience, exertion, and even the control of anger may play roles in teaching readers to “catch ourselves” before acting out negatively. By this re-direction of energy, one may come closer to the ideal of wakefulness promoted by the Buddha.

“Love and Loyalty” combine in the final chapter. The latter concept is defined by the author as “not giving the other person any reason not to trust you”. He cites Albert Einstein’s notion of an “optical illusion of consciousness” trapping human conception, as if we remain ego-grounded, separate from what’s “out there”. This denial of interconnectedness with all beings and creations, for Buddhists, represents a fundamental conceptual flaw within our understanding of existence.

Trungpa’s teaching of loyalty, strengthening gentleness combined with an abiding quality of causing no harm, stems from a determined “warrior” balance embedded not in weakness but in power. Open-hearted confidence in one’s power to change comes from one’s moral progress. A warm-hearted yet strong-minded, person, in this model, possesses an “innate basic goodness, the natural, clear, and uncluttered state” of being.

Discernment keeps a practitioner steady as one progresses towards virtue, with a fearless recognition of potential and action in the present moment. This transforms into an “authentic presence.” No clouds persist, for behind them, one sees “the sun of basic goodness” as always present, no matter how shadowed by the moment.

Combined with brief but practical exercises for meditation and actualization, Mr. Hardin’s small guide should prove beneficial to anyone seeking a handbook for one way out of egotism towards a self-confident, other-directed practice of Buddhist compassion. This path, as directed in this little book, may generate more happiness beginning with the reader and then circling outward. (Featured 12-27-11 at the New York Journal of Books)

"Nixon Under the Bodhi Tree": Book Review

2012-01-09T00:00:00.000-08:00

What's this first-ever anthology of "Buddhist fiction" offer? Editor Kate Wheeler comments how according to dharma, everything's already a fiction; stories represent "a redoubled version of the existential mistake that lies at the heart of all suffering." (xiv) Still, traditions in Buddhism tell stories, and the ones here come from contemporary writers, a few well-known, many humbler practitioners. I preferred the longer stories to the shorter-- they can range from the standout not-quite holiday in Cambodia "Beheadings" by Kira Salek at thirty-four pages and the fine first chapter from Keith Katchtick's ambitious novel "Hungry Ghost" (see my review) to three-paragraph glimpses of insight.

I liked the stories that took on the curious predicaments of people trying to learn about Buddhism or attempting to practice it while questioning its estranging qualities in daily life; those by some writers from within the tradition tended to be less gripping, perhaps from insider's situations unfamiliar to me. Some entries appeared to be memoirs rather than fiction. Sharon Cameron's essay on meditation in its disorienting intensity seems not so much fiction as self-dramatization; Anne Carolyn Klein's account of translation appears non-fiction; Pico Iyer's excerpt from his Japan narrative feels factual.

Others by certain, higher-profile writers may have been chosen more on their content or the reputation of their contributors rather than merit that a "blind" selection process might have selected, I suspect. Some of these, taking place in monasteries or on retreats, appear aimed at the likely audience already in the know. Still, especially for experienced students and teachers, I suppose many of these entries might satisfy-- the key verb for inclusion Wheeler notes--most readers.

Gerald Reilly's title story and M.J. Huang's parable "Rebirth," start off this collection promisingly. Ira Sukrungruang's "The Golden Mix" keeps the oddness of its setting, an animal shelter, and its visitor without becoming cloying or cute-- which in less skillful hands could have decayed. Instead, we get this easygoing, yet unsettling, tale in everyday dialogue and ordinary Midwestern settings infused with a bit of mystery. Such offbeat, without being coy, moments enrich Francesca Hampton's "Greyhound Bodhisattva" and Easton Waller's "The War Against the Lawns," paired well together, as are many entries as arranged by Wheeler.

Salek's inquiring narrator takes us into the longest story, "Beheadings," which in the best manner feels as if told to us first-hand, as real life. It concludes perfectly. Seeking her brother in Cambodia as the Khmer Rouge still occupy parts of the territory, she looks for her vanished, damaged, suffering brother. "David might have said my karma was good, though he couldn't have known how much I tempted the world. How much I hated it for its senseless parceling of benevolence and pain."

This tough-mindedness, in Reilly, Huang, Sukrungruang, Hampton, Waller, and Salek, makes this anthology at its strongest far from a sentimental or pat assembly of platitudes. Buddhism upends many from their meditation mats. In some of the best stories, these challenging rather than comforting teachings are confronted and puzzled over by those on the outside looking in, in more ways than one.

Victor Pelevin's "The Guest at the Feast of Bon" shows why his postmodern novels attract a cult following. I can't give away much, but this reminded me of his Russian forebears, or Hesse or Camus, in his philosophical reflections merged into an eerie meditation. "We call God that which we are not yet capable of killing, but once we have killed it, the matter is closed." (237) Killing one's self, the narrator reflects, "is an attempt to kill the God dwelling within us. We are punishing him for condemning us to torment, we are attempting to match him in omnipotence, we may even usurp his function by putting a sudden end to the puppet show he began." This existential tale takes on Japan, St. Sebastian, belief, death, and dragons and it ends as the penultimate entry in this collection hauntingly. (Posted to Amazon US 4-17-11 & Lunch.com 4-21)

Anne Donovan's "Buddha Da: A Novel": Review

2012-01-07T00:00:00.000-08:00

Three tellers narrate, in dialect (which flows fluidly even for foreigners after a few moments), what happens in their Glaswegian family after Jimmy McKenna starts attending a local Tibetan Buddhist center. He cannot explain it, but the comfort he feels overcomes his awkwardness and what began as a lark turns out to be a fascination with "this incredible feelin of peace come ower me, soft like. So ah just sat."

But, this happened on New Year's of the new millennium: Jimmy'd gone to the temple to avoid the drinking that had led him at his birthday party to make a fool of himself on video, and his discontent with his immaturity and his marriage amidst his career making a living as a housepainter leads him to renounce first meat, then alcohol and, at least for now, sex with his wife.

Donovan sets this Scottish situation of domestic strife and inner searching up nimbly, and the tension moves this deservedly award-winning 2002 novel along swiftly. In a Barcelona Review 2003 interview, she explains how Liz responds to smells and senses; Jimmy to visuals, and Anne-Marie to sounds and hearing, and the chapters do sound similar among the three family members while keeping subtly distinctive tones, word patterns, and attitudes. The book moves quickly and fluidly as Donovan uses the novel of family relationships to explore the appeal of the exotic and the surprising as they enter each protagonist's experience. Jimmy's birthday party, Anne-Marie's concert, a New Year's celebration, and a funeral all set up dramatic showdowns that integrate the shifts in the dynamic, as Liz's power seems to grow as Jimmy steps aside, as the novel continues over a year or so full of challenges.

Liz feels she must deal with raising their daughter, who tells her own reactions to her parents' strife as she works on a tape to enter in a music contest, blending Tibetan chants with the "Salve Regina," and she finds herself soon living with a father who's does not stay at night at home, but in a sleeping bag at the temple. I felt her character needed more elaboration, and given Donovan was a long-time teacher, Anne-Marie's school settings appeared very underdrawn and dull, but that's a minor point in a very solid storyline. Maybe they reflect the girl's reaction towards school but she's meant to be a good student, so her seeming lack of attention to her environment and the comparatively little time devoted in the book to her studies puzzled me.

As Liz reminds him, Jimmy misses Anne-Marie's school concert "tae go and see this wonderful lama who's an enlightened being and is gonnae unlock all the secrets of the universe tae yous special people who sit on yer arses every night wi yer eyes closed while we unenlightened beins dae unimportant things like dae a washin or make a dinner or iron yer claes..."

Meanwhile, Liz finds her own escape. Her decisions create the uncertainty that she and Jimmy must deal with, if not solve, as the novel reaches its satisfying, open-ended conclusion. Liz watches in a doctor's office "the wee pulse of light, like a faraway star," and that symbolizes the possibilities that the author, in the voices of three convincingly related characters, creates to delve into the mysteries beneath the mundane working-class life in Glasgow that she, a native, invigorates with recognizable emotion and sympathetic compassion. (Posted to Amazon US & Lunch.com 3-6-11)

Keith Kachtick's "Hungry Ghost: A Novel": Review

2012-01-05T00:00:00.000-08:00

A dissolute photographer, well-meaning but wayward, almost forty, falls for a Catholic convert thirteen years younger who's determined to save herself for marriage. Carter Cox's travels take him to shoot glamorous models worldwide for upscale magazines and ads that mirror his own conspicuous consumption in his Manhattan apartment. But--as the title shows with its Buddhist reference to the realm where unsatisfied "pretas" must wander until they gain liberation when they realize that their parched, greedy, tormented existence is an illusion--Cox's own journey will take him for his latest assignment to Morocco, and there, he and his new companion, Mia Malone, confront the meaning of their existence.

Kachtick brings ambition and range into this narrative, as Carter integrates, half-successfully, his growing commitment to Buddhism with his louche bedding of more women in his thirties than the time Mia's been kissed. We find this and all information conveyed in a daring, and initially off-putting, voice in the second person. Carter's taken this on "to fully disassociate" awareness "from the obstructing, lower-self 'I' that thinks in terms of 'me' and 'mine' and 'may I unbutton your blouse now, please?'" (14)

He attempts to desire to be without desire, and this telling of his tale as he tries to overcome his passions shows how he fails, and how he succeeds, in a book combining character studies with adventure, and social commentary with spirituality. This narrative voice, we later find, is the omniscient one we readers recognize, but with a deepened dimension I will leave you to discover.(I found a similar approach in Wilton Barnhardt's novel "Gospel" years ago, and it works as well here as it did there.)

Because of and not in spite of Carter's weaknesses, I cringed at and cheered him on, as a caddish fop, but also a struggling dharma practitioner, engaging with Mia's own formidable belief system. (Even if she claims to volunteer with a "Jesuit nun," inaccurately.) He grew up wondering what many may in a rather worldly, vaguely Christian upbringing: "Where was I before I was born? Why does my body feel like a guest house?" (51) He meets Mia at a Tibetan retreat at a former Catholic monastery upstate. She "possesses the milky-white skin and praying mantis beauty of someone who haunts museum archives and listens to Chopin while baking bread." (65)

Kachtick has a challenge in giving us a twenty-six year-old determined to wait for Mr. Right. She regards sex as sacred, so much that it is worth the wait to make it a sacrament. She disagrees with what she regards as a Buddhist contempt for the world and the flesh: "The work of heaven is material, the work of hell is entirely spiritual." (83) She then bums one of Carter's cigarettes, a sign of her own links to the body. They debate their differences and find similarities. They discuss Thomas Aquinas, cite Thomas Merton, and mull over St. Francis. Then, they make out. "She can't decide whether God has sent you into her life as a test or a gift." (88)

The tension within Carter goes beyond the bedroom, as he courts Mia, to a degree, while after she goes back to school, he beds others more compliant, if less intriguing. Later, as his Morocco jaunt brings him and her into conflict over their relationship, he reflects: "You'd long fancied yourself as a talented juggler of pleasure and ethics" (216)-- but this balancing act fails, as he must face what his teacher, Christopher Wolf (a skillfully depicted, poignantly captured character), warns him of: for bachelors perhaps in particular, the abyss where middle-aged lust leads into fear.

As the Buddha taught, drinking saltwater never quenches one's thirst. Whether in a New York City nightclub or binging on Entenmann's cookies, prowling for porn DVDs or amassing more gadgets, seducing tourists in Mexico or dealing with a temperamental model or vain windsurfer on a shoot, Carter faces his demons, even if disguised as long-legged angels: "you're like an alcoholic who punishes himself by drinking more." (232)

The novel takes a daringly imaginative twist. I feared Kachtick would let me down, but he does a deft fake-out and save and he pivoted gracefully, in more ways than one. If you lack a grounding in Buddhism, some of this novel may stall, but as a committed Buddhist himself, Kachtick's trying to merge his own compassion into a novel that entertains and instructs. He may switch to the former mode, almost as in a script made for Hollywood, later on, as if to make up for the earlier discussions that Mia or his teacher, Christopher, have, but for a thoughtful story that demonstrates right and wrong in scenes that take place in the bedroom or bar as well as on retreat or in meditation, this fairly conveys what a modern urban seeker, Catholic or Buddhist, may face when testing their faith against their works. Kachtick wants a wide audience for this novel, so he accommodates all these elements.

I will leave it for a reader to discover where the plot roams as Mia and Carter arrive in Morocco. The second half accelerates, and the pace moves rapidly. Conflicts thicken as the spiritual collides with the social, the Third with the First World.

Kachtick's to be commended for his energy and his range, and with Christopher as well as Mia and Carter, he creates characters you care about, no matter their own weaknesses, which endear them more rather than make them contemptible. He makes out of our urban, unhinged, dehumanized, web-obsessed, consumer-driven, sex-and-drug-and-media hookups a tale of morals and choices as profound as that of Henry James, if far more fun for me to read, as it's branded in the latest (as of 2002!) fashions, gizmos, and labels. (Posted to Amazon US & Lunch.com 3-6-11. See review by my friend Tony Bailie on his "Ecopunks"blog. )

Eric Weiner's "Man Seeks God": Book Review

2012-01-03T00:03:00.000-08:00

"Confusionist,” reasons agnostic fellow traveler Eric Weiner, defines his "spiritual-but-not-religious" outlook. As a "gastronomical Jew" but not raised with any belief, this skeptical, neurotic journalist begins his global exploration by recounting a nurse's whisper to him as he lay on an operating table: "Have you found your God yet?" This inspires his search among eight "varieties of religious experience," as he credits William James’s pioneering study. He starts, as do many seekers, by going to California.

However, Mr. Weiner does not last long on the Mendocino coast at a Sufi camp. Falling down a "New Age rabbit hole," he laments that the establishment's more "camp than Sufi." As a National Public Radio correspondent, he had witnessed the darker side of Islam, and he wishes now to find the meaning of that word's core, "submission," in its more mystical manifestation. He departs for Istanbul, visits sites connected with the medieval visionary poet Rumi, and finds that surrender to Sufi's spell, as shown in the famous whirling dervishes, comes closer to the power of love than of capitulation to a cold creed.

His trek into Buddhist wisdom leads along a well-worn path, to Kathmandu. His guide, a Virginia-born investment banker who left Malibu to model in Asia before finding his fulfillment as a student of Buddhism, leads him first to ponytailed ex-pat Wayne from Staten Island, a fellow "middle-aged Jewish guy" in a baseball cap. From Wayne, Mr. Weiner learns to meditate, and not to do it as he does it. The process of self-examination as the way to liberation feels as if biting his own teeth, endlessly self-referential, but he perseveres a bit. He finally has a brief audience with a Tibetan guru. "Meeting a revered lama is like having sex with a woman you've fantasized about for a long time." That is, anticipation leads to anxiety, bewilderment and disappointment.

His breakthrough comes not with the guru, nor with an attempt to learn about the often-sensationalized Tantric approach. (That works less effectively for him than a visit to a massage parlor.) Wayne goads Mr. Wiener towards what gives him "pause." Between the moments, choices are made to attach or let go, and effects happen for better or worse. Buddhism elongates awareness of these moments, and allows practitioners to choose how to act and react to such endless situations daily.

Many Buddhists and a few Catholics praise fewer possessions as a way to increase spiritual maturity. With the grey-clad Franciscan Friars of the Renewal in the South Bronx, Mr. Weiner learns of their "radical dependency" on a life committed to poverty. Unlike most Franciscans today, these friars have returned to a rejection of most possessions, truer to the intent of their founding saint. They manage in their gang-plagued neighborhood to act as both "savvy and naive". Accompanying Father Louis, who gave up a successful career in Manhattan, and Brother Crispin, Mr. Weiner witnesses their challenges, as they strive to detach themselves from their duty towards good works, doing tedious tasks to serve the poor, without congratulating themselves for doing so.

As one friar confides: "You find yourself trying to love somebody who doesn't want to be loved." Mr. Weiner receives advice for his own skittish need to underline books, to analyze what he finds: "When in doubt, give thanks." Rarely thanked, these diligent if weary friars persevere.

Indulgences are discouraged for Franciscans, but encouraged by Raëlians. This, "the largest UFO-based" and IRS-registered as tax-exempt religion, glories in bonding, and hands out condoms. Founded by "a second-rate French journalist” who, for Mr. Weiner, espouses motivational-seminar speak as if "Tony Robbins in a space suit", Raëlism invites or expects less respect than the previous religions. One chant surrounds him at an enthusiastic meeting: "free your breasts free your mind."

To his credit, Mr. Weiner lets his prejudices ebb even as he keeps his critical acumen flowing. Talking to a convert, John, in a "gender-switching workshop," Mr. Weiner shares the appeal for many educated and scientific types of a religion based on a modern myth. He deftly connects strands of Raëlism with Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, and Muslim predecessors, even if he cannot commend, finally, its lack of rigor or lowered expectations, where easy pleasure dominates as its "theme-park" message.

Next, the search brings him towards not a myth but the ancient homeland of a five-thousand word "short ode to conciseness," the Tao te Ching. Traveling to China's Wudang Mountain (gifted with an mist generator after "The Karate Kid" was filmed there), Mr. Wiener learns from a fellow American on tour, Sandie, how smoking and drinking are fine as pleasures as long as one is "in the moment." Taoism may share something of offbeat Raëlism as well as affinities with Buddhism, and Taoism looks to this world and this body as the gateways to truth. They "shape their God-shaped hole with a hole-shaped God." Their elusiveness--that which can be defined as the Way, the Tao, is not the Way," as the Tao te Ching opens--intrigues him. Sandie goes with the flow, literally, at the heart of the Tao. Whereas most religious folks, Mr. Weiner supposed, care more, Sandie as a Taoist tells him she grows to care less.

Taoism lacks a center, however. What if a religion had not one doctrinal approach, one god, but hundreds? What if it allowed choice, and inspired invention of new gods and goddesses? Wicca, as Mr. Weiner finds in Index, Washington, offers Jamie the witch this chance to guide herself by an ethical system open to possibility. Magic can be channeled for good, and what is conjured up as if invented then takes on a real power for those willing to guide its forces towards healing and renewal.

Mr. Weiner imagines the passion and intensity of Wiccan ritual to echo that of the now-faded ceremonies at the start of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Freed of sin, compelling its makers to use the forces for goodness and not harm, Wicca's ethical component resonates with Mr. Weiner.

Its demands for moral accountability gain careful explanation. He tells of this often caricatured religion's attempts to direct natural forces to generate righteous behavior and careful choices. Yet, as with other religions he has encountered, it fails to appease his own darker side, his melancholy. Figuring that paganism's "lowercase gods" would have little time for him, he turns towards perhaps the ancient ancestor of witchcraft, and religions that have evolved slowly since, that of shamanism.

Shamans, after all, were primitive psychiatrists. Today, Dana, a former executive in Beltsville, Maryland, hosts a drum-led circle: "now materialize your power animal." Participants fantasize and let go of their worries. guided into realms of the spirits. While all this pleases the "smart-ass" Mr. Weiner more than he may have expected, he cannot shake the mental image of one dream weaver's companion, Sasha the Poodle, whose eyes lock into his as they both wonder what those humans are up to.

Finally, he faces his ancestral Judaism. Dreading the meeting, he goes off to Tzfat (Safed) on the Sea of Galilee, settled by Kabbalists expelled by the Spanish Inquisition. This settlement, orthodox yet open to Jewish misfits, endures as a spiritual center. What makes a place such, Mr. Weiner wonders, may elude explanation: is it the place that imbues its residents with an aura, or do holy people wind up in such a hallowed place?

This thoughtful section of his tale takes him deep into difficulty. His psychological unease grows. He finds that one can convert to one's "own" faith, but the memory of his brother who embraced Orthodoxy creates more rather than less tension.

In Israel, Mr. Weiner faces the Jewish reverberations of a faith dimly known but evaded and avoided for a lifetime. His Jewish soul, his "nefesh," a variety of patient teachers show him, reveals itself by patience, and by "kavanah," intention, within such a soul. Shabbat in Tzfat, when time appears to halt, opens up the promise of living within space devoted to peace, worship, and community. Here, he glimpses the potential of the oldest of all the organized religions which he has participated in during his quest.

The wise observer of the hopes for religious harmony in Israel, writer Yossi Klein Halevi, tells Mr. Weiner that the Jews need him. Those who turn him off, by rules and rituals, will choke the life out unless Mr. Weiner brings what he has learned from Kabbalah--that such teachings open up life by its eternal forces. Mr. Weiner cannot agree with Yossi; he insists that he remains temperamentally a seeker who must wander. He convinces himself as he leaves Israel that he is not a dilettante, but a universalist. He argues with himself, and sometimes others, how his orientation transcends any denomination or affiliation.

In conclusion, Mr. Weiner remains faithful to his convictions. This narrative moves smoothly between erudite quotes from James, Jung, Heschel, Chesterton, and Durkheim. (It also recalls strongly here and there a recent work, J.C. Hallman's The Devil is a Gentleman, that had its author travelling to sites founded by America's new religions over the past century. It mixed personal interviews with Hallman's own story, through an application of William James's sociological research from a hundred years ago.)

God Meets Man: My Flirtations with the Divine scans rituals so venerable they lack inventors and doctrines so fresh he watches them evolve in Washington State and Las Vegas. True to Mr. Weiner's nature, he constructs a composite God. One that cobbles from all the faiths he's studied, and more, yet has an identifiably Jewish angle that he finds he can admire. Mr. Weiner confesses that out of small steps, progress towards understanding emerges. He no longer flinches from observing the Jewish holidays with his little girl. (Featured at New York Journal of Books 12-5-11 in condensed fashion--about half the length of above!)

Interviewing Myself

2012-01-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

This self-interview via "Vilges Suola" at the wonderful blog "Lathophobic Aphasia" and "Bo" at the equally rewarding "The Cantos of Mvtabilitie" inspired me to fill it out myself. I've even adapted it, with some dumbing down ("poem you know by heart" becomes "movie...") for my Speech students to use when interviewing each other week one. Maybe you'll fill it out too? Happy New Year: I figured this'd be a fine way to begin again, with the only form of small talk I can tolerate.

What three adjectives would you use to describe yourself?
Self-directed, intellectual, introverted. (Jibes with my INTJ Jung Typology/Myers-Briggs results.)

What is your greatest achievement?
Finishing my Ph.D., with all due credit to my wife's logistic support and rapid typing assistance.

What’s your favorite smell?
Lemons remind me of now-vanished groves behind my childhood house where I played.

What is your favorite taste?
Garlic and onions on a white Fugazetta pizza from nearby Glendale's El Morfi restaurant.

What’s your favorite piece of music?
"Coinleach Glas An Fhómhair": Clannad--before they bought synthesizers and did New Age soundtracks.

What book would you like everyone to read? Why?
The Bible. With a (post-)modern commentary. Then we might discuss sensibly and calmly how to handle, and progress from, its cluttered transmission of hopes, confusions, contradictions, ideals, and failures.

What website would you like everyone to visit? Why?
Religion Dispatches. The older I get, the more I view religion as a spectator sport, or an Olympics of various competitions. I may cheer some, jeer some, and watch events or turn aside from them as I wish. Yet, as with sports, a childhood part of me wants to participate, to join in, to gain the thrill of accomplishment. And, the adult part of me knows that such contests are but attempts to capture this fleeting moment forever.

What is your favorite sound?
My family's voices, suitably muted.

If you were an animal, what animal do you think you would be?
An owl. I want to turn my head all the way around.

What do you like to do in your spare time?
Reading and listening to music.

How many languages do you speak and why?
As this came off an EFL teacher's site, it's tilted against me. Speak: Spanish and Irish in basics. Reading knowledge predominates as it's my medievalist background: Latin, Old and Middle English. Smatterings of Hebrew, Welsh, Manx, bits even of Czech, Hungarian, and NT Greek from past forays. I wish I was skilled at language learning, but I am not. A visual learner, vocabulary's easier to acquire; grammar's a challenge.

What do you like most/least about your job?
Most: being left on my own with enough trust to carry out my classroom, online, and administrative duties given my experience. (I'm in my twenty-seventh year of teaching and my sixteenth at my current institution.) Least: mandated meetings every term as required. Face-to-face can be tedious. I'm tired of PowerPoint.

What would heaven be like if you were in charge?
Comfy recliners, surrounded by my beloved cats and dogs who've preceded me, drinks to cheer you free of hangovers, food that you could enjoy untiringly and with no harm, family and friends worth talking to, noise-cancelling headphones linked to endlessly blissful playlists to shut out revellers next cloud over. Dark, not raisin-eyed houris-- women could enjoy similar companions, however refurbished to suit their recliners.

When and where are you happiest?
Sitting by Bean Creek watching its purling, susurrant flow in the Santa Cruz Mountains under the redwoods.

Something you are never without.
My glasses, or within reach of them.

What is your most appealing habit?
Is having a bibliographical mind and nearly total recall of authors and titles a habit?

And your least appealing habit?
My inability to hide what I'm thinking or feeling: my face betrays transparency.

What is the trait you most dislike in others?
Entitlement: displayed in body-language, words, fashion, accomplishments, and/or acquisitions.

What is your most treasured possession?
I spent hours looking for my wedding ring when it slipped off.

If you could have a supernatural power, what would it be?
Immortality as long as it brought me happiness: I've always feared death.

What words or phrases do you overuse?
Domestically I have been long criticized for "I'm not a ___ kind of person." And, "I prefer___" instead of stating a dislike directly. I was brought up and beaten up to be polite.

What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
Until it's no more wage-slavery thanks to a MacArthur grant afforded me in perpetuity for this blog's brilliance, less of a L.A. commute; I live so far from work there's no non-freeway option to take.

How would you like to be remembered?
"Sly and tender"--the way my gaze has been described by my wife. And "quietly foolish," as an acquaintance summed me up in my formative years. (Better than a grad school prof's summation: "superficially brilliant.")

What music do you enjoy listening to/playing most?
My family years ago mocked my midlife struggle to teach myself the tin-whistle. I wish I'd learned music as a child. I have a good ear for tunes, and I like droning folk and rock best, often repetitive or psych-tinged.

What did you dream of being when you were younger?
An astronomer until I found out about my lack of math skills. A composer although I could neither play nor read music. An architect (math again--INTJ's are stereotypical scientists, damn it). A priest until I contemplated my disdain for groupthink. A baseball player until I hit a ball once in two years of Little League.

What were you like as a student at school?
More autodidact than model boy. Teachers disliked my lack of cheery cooperation. I muttered, smirked, lost patience. I chose to work on my own and to overcome challenges without assistance. I wasn't a team player who wished to wait for others to catch up. I'd finish my assignments early and then read what beckoned. I kept to myself and as we moved so often, I had difficulty making friends. I found solace in books and music.

How do you cheer yourself up when you are feeling down?
Listening to music, often what I loved growing up; I suppose this is normal no matter how critically sorry the bands or the decade. We associate beauty and comfort with tunes and sounds from our formative years.

If I hadn’t been a teacher, I would probably have been a...
If I had taken that INTJ test as a teen, a form of research less people-oriented would have enticed me. A librarian or archivist holed up in an office far from an importuning undergrad-- unless she was attractive.

Who has been the best teacher you have ever had?
No particular person stands out, but overall those who encouraged me to find my own way. A philosophy professor the day I finished college advised me when he found out I was headed for grad school never to make myself a slave to any one theory, and that's suited my eclectic and interdisciplinary direction well.

Something that few people know about you.
I found out a few years ago my great-grandfather was found "drowned in mysterious circumstances" in the Thames after having gone in 1898 from Co. Roscommon to London as part of a Land League delegation.

If you could travel back in time where would you go and why?
Certainly that event mentioned inspires me to travel back to find out why. It's that "grandfather paradox" of science fiction and time-travel, isn't it? You can't stop your own grandfather from being born. His younger brother, who became a minor politician, was conceived already when their Fenian father was found drowned.

What’s your best learning memory from school?
Finding out in third grade that before a vowel, we (usually) use "an." This excited me: I'd learned a rule without knowing one, and such patterns of language inculcated before being taught in class fascinated me.

Are you a tidy desk or a messy desk person?
Tidy. I clear off my desk at work. I share an office, soon to be demoted to an open cubicle, so this is wise.

What’s your favorite thing to do when it rains?
Go back to sleep.

A poem you know by heart.
Sonnet 55 by Shakespeare; I had to memorize a poem for Beginning Acting class freshman year of college.

What would you like to learn to do next?
I'd like to figure out Welsh: its look has always enchanted me, inspiring Lloyd Alexander's "Chronicles of Prydain" discovered by me around ten, which led me into Tolkien's Middle Earth and "eurocatastrophe."

What question would you have liked me to ask you?
Is there life after death?

What would have been your answer?
When I find out, I'll get back to you.

Ag dul isteach na coillte dorcha

2011-12-31T00:04:00.000-08:00

Sílim go mbeadh uaireanta crua liomsa go minic. Tá brón orm go leor, ach deánaim iarracht chun nascadh le dóchas, a cháirde. Léigh mé an oiread sin: "Faoi láthair ghlacann tú le trioblóidí tú gur tógadh, beidh an dorais oscailte...Rumi."

Is cuimhne liom ag leamh na línte chéad le Dante fós. Scríobh mé dhá bhliain ó faoi shin aistriúcháin éagsúla seo oscailt drámatúil. Bhí meas í gcónaí mé ar na véarsaí scáthfhoglaimaí, ar ndóigh.

Mairfeadh siad dom i mo lár aois. Níl fhíos agam an slí ar fud na fírinne. Tá me ag cuardach ar an cosán caol i mo shaol.

Dá bhrí sin, iarraim ag éisteacht taobh istigh orm. Mhian liom freisin ag foghlaim le duine eile níos mó. B'fhéidir, tógann sé tamall fada dom a aibí.

Mar sin féin, féidir liom teacht solas agus sonas go lag. D'fhoglaim an ceacht doimhin seo Dante agus Rumi fadó, tar éis gach. Bealtaine na bliana nua a thabhairt daoibh áthas go leor.

Entering the dark woods.

I think that hard times may be mine often. Sadness has come upon me a lot, but I make an attempt to connect with hope, friends. I read a short time ago that: "The moment you accept what troubles you've been given, the door will open...Rumi."

Reading the first lines of Dante comes to mind too. I wrote two years ago about the various translations of this dramatic opening. I've always admired these shadow-like verses, of course.

They endure for me in my middle age. I don't know the wide way of truth. I'm searching on the narrow path in my life.

Therefore, I seek to listen inside of me. I also desire to learn from other people more. Perhaps, it takes a long time for me to mature.

All the same, it may be for me that light and happiness come slowly. Dante and Rumi learned this profound lesson long ago, after all. May this new year bring you all joy galore.

Greanadh: Ag dul isteach Dante na Coillte Dorcha le/ Engraving: Dante entering the Dark Wood by Gustave Doré.

"Thinking myself into certitude"

2011-12-29T00:00:00.000-08:00

I've spent much of the past month reading up on Soka Gakkai's Buddhism. This advocates a self-actualizing, pragmatic, and this-world orientation rather than an introspective, detached, and renouncing one. I'm curious about how its globalizing, humanistic, and multicultural aims might enrich my study of Buddhism in the West, and how it's marketed, transmitted, and adapted by seekers and scholars today.

You can find six basic works on its teachings in the past six entries on this blog (and Amazon US). What intrigues me, as a sympathetic skeptic, is how its message via medieval Japanese reformer Nichiren makes sense for those who join SG International today. SGI affirms, as do other sects of Nichirenism, a direct channelling of a cosmic life-force via an inscribed mandala, a Gohonzon, and by recitation twice daily of a daimoku invocation of to what these Buddhists regard as a mystic law. This law, excerpted in the gongyo passages from the Lotus Sutra, is taken by believers to energize them and to bring about both "conspicuous benefits" in material gain and achieved results as well as more altruistic fulfillments leading to world peace, cultural enrichment, and environmental healing.

I began with Daniel B. Montgomery's "Fire in the Lotus" about Nichiren, his times, and his followers. I then entered the academic survey "Global Citizens" by Bryan Wilson, David Machacek, and colleagues which verified how initially converts often seek to gain material goods but then progress into less tangible but more lasting (perhaps?) gains in better relationships, communal harmony, and inner confidence. I also found out in "Soka Gakkai in America" how perhaps 10% of members stick with the program, but how this committed core works all the more diligently in terms of an ethos aligned with American values, to generate visible results that better one's self and others for practical goals. Its members tend to come from creative, entrepreneurial, or corporate fields. They're open-minded, ethnically diverse, liberal or even (morally) libertarian, "post-materialist," bookish if wonky types. Finally, I learned how believers interviewed by leader Richard Causton in "Buddha in Everyday Life" and academic observer Richard Hughes Seager in "Encountering the Dharma" support the SGI ideals as beneficial to good works built on an earnest faith.

Still, none of the six works solved for me a problem. If you chant and you don't get what you want, what then? As with our hopes however secular or our prayers however sincere, we're left with what Robert Wright in "The Evolution of God" calls "explanatory loopholes." No religion survives without qualifiers to its claims.

SGI-UK members report to Professors Wilson and Karel Dobbelaere how if they failed to get what they asked for in chanting, it was not meant to be, or they lacked faith, or the time was not right, or the request came about in an unexpectedly altered fashion. Of course, the scholar or skeptic might respond. W & D's "A Time to Chant" briefly examines a sociological interpretation of what might be prevarication, compromise, coincidence. Causton's insider's view stresses the necessity for diligence, and he narrates inspiring accounts of those considerably beaten down by life who in chanting find renewal and hope. One haunted me: a man loses a child to stillbirth and then another's stricken by cerebral palsy. Other Job-like afflictions come, yet this man reasons that they all happened because this was the path by which he found his way to Buddhism.

No religion, even a technically non-theistic (in theory often more than practice as Rodney Stark's "Discovering God" reminds us), can survive long except for intellectuals and a few hardy monastics. Ordinary folks need comfort, and SGI gives them a way towards buddha-hood in this life, not deferring it to an endless delay of rebirths as, say, Tibetan versions might present, or the conundrums of severe Zen, or even the more amenable self-reflections of "insight" Vipassana Buddhism deliver to many Westerners who cotton to analysis.

Yet I wonder, inescapably, how a system can lead to results. The fine print (you failed to believe enough; the time was not right; it may happen later but not when you asked) puts paid to the affirmations by SGI's millions that it works now and works reliably if only you are committed enough to make it happen by your diligence. This attitude fascinates me, as it's at odds with a lot of Buddhism I've been studying, but it remains for me a desideratum, with the same countercultural resonance that brings me back to 1972 when I saw the poster of Desiderata on the wall of a hippie-ish pair of dog breeders my parents went to visit (on business) up by Big Bear. I wish SGI well and I understand it much better. It can't be reduced to a "personality cult" as media stereotypes have claimed as it spread from postwar Japan among blacks, Asians, and whites the world over. I take note of its reportedly transformational powers, even as inevitably my own intellectual distance persists. I wryly recall a bumper sticker no car dares sport in my 'hood: "Nothing Fails Like Prayer."

This reading and reflection finds me at a very difficult time personally. The question mark, faint but indelible, imprints itself on my soul or spirit or mind. Maybe Providence might have played its sly role, speaking of coincidence or there are no coincidences, via the professor at San Jose State who after my talk on Maura O'Halloran's Irish Zen quest introduced herself as an SG member, who'd gained her doctorate in Ireland.

I never knew SGI existed there; Laurence Cox and Maria Griffin's newest research on Irish Buddhism alerts me in a note (on pg. 48) that a temple had existed in Dublin a while ago, and its membership's as in many lands a combination of multicultural immigrants and emigres from Japan with natives. The professor at SJSU told me that they numbered now around 300, doubling from mid-decade. While I had mentioned Daisaku Ikeda's claim in my "Celtic Buddhism" essay (pg. 69 of ibid, "Ireland's New Religious Movements") that the dharma had perhaps been transmitted via Alexandria to the ancient Western realm, Cox & Griffin's earlier article, which I had consulted in my own research, had not included SGI. So, thanks to her (I'll keep her anonymous) for alerting me to this presence, and for encouraging another direction for my research.

This blog's title comes via its own detour. On John W. Smart's political site, I'd posted at "Eyes of Newt" Gingrich's explanation of his conversion to Catholicism. I'd added that the legions of JWS's liberals and Newt detractors might consider the 150+ comments, as they comprised a perfect cross-section of pro-con reactions to Newt's decision. I encouraged JWS's political junkies to consider how the remarks boded well or not for his campaign, as economically and ideologically (contrary to past patterns or persistent stereotypes) Catholics represent a perfect sample across the voting spectrum and class system in our nation.

"Sophie," who shares my own ethnic background and my marital blending, replied how one commenter had cited of all converts Hilaire Belloc. I posted about him, with a bit of surprise that anyone knew of this doughty Catholic apologist of nearly a century ago, and she commented on his prescient perspective on the rise of Islam in Europe. Anyhow, I then told her I'd been a cradle Catholic but had wound up walking on my own, and she mentioned how hard it had always been politically or spiritually "to think myself into certitude." I concur, and it seems the perfect phrase for me to typically adopt or pause upon in my own endless search.

As I wrap this up along with a challenging 2011, it occurs to me how that installation depicted here resembles a butsudan, the cabinet housing for Nichiren Buddhists not an icon of Shakyamuni, but instead, in its denomination's reforming and aniconic light, the written scroll itself. In that, it reminds me of a Torah, and a synagogue faithful in its lack of figurative art to the First Commandment. I chose the illustration before I knew what I'd write today, and it shows its own coincidence, or lack of such. It also aligns with its artist's own mission for "active engagement" rather than a separate "work of art." For Nichiren's followers hold that the Buddha to be followed, not as an object of veneration so much as a mirror of one's own buddha-hood, is not a statue or an amulet anymore, but truly within one's self, as one finds and shares self-realized enlightenment.

Illustration by Julius Koller. Tate Gallery information:

Question Mark b. (Anti-Painting, Anti-Text) 1969
Otáznik b. (Anti-Obraz, Text-Obraz)

Latex paint on wood. Object: 50 x 500 x 330 mm. Sculpture, T13312.

Described by the artist as an ‘anti-painting’, this object was made using a wooden tray, which he covered in white latex paint. Koller’s techniques and choice of materials were intended to position his work as an active engagement with everyday life, rather than existing as a separate ‘work of art’. The question mark inscribed upon the object’s surface was a recurring motif in Koller’s work, reflecting the atmosphere of uncertainty in his native Czechoslovakia during the years of Communist rule.

Richard Hughes Seager's "Encountering the Dharma": Book Review

2011-12-27T12:04:00.000-08:00

This sympathetic survey of "Daisaku Ikeda, Soka Gakkai, and the Globalization of Buddhist Humanism" combines a personal narrative of this professor's encounters in Japan, Brazil, and America with an accessible introduction to its function as a modernizing "vehicle" (98) for change. This small reform movement spread from a 1930s "value creation" in education society to a postwar missionary effort bent on a self-actualizing Buddhism to an export via war brides and immigrants and businesspeople to hundreds of locales today. As a professor specializing in Asian religions in America, he's well-suited to study this phenomenon, even if as he admits he has a lot of catching up to do about Japan.

Richard Hughes Seager, as a secularized scholar and a somewhat lapsed Catholic, confesses how his "capacity to entertain faith while remaining the skeptic" (6-7) allows him critical distance. Yet, he finds himself, after the sudden death of his wife and his own midlife predicament, warming to the earnestly presented if impressive achievements of Ikeda and his followers. He learns to regard Soka Gakkai as benevolent rather than calculating, and he finds its outreach to the "favelas" in Brazilian slums, its energy from its encounters with the civil rights and countercultural upheavals of the 1960s in America, and its Japanese endurance despite media suspicion all worthy of respect.

He meets Ikeda, the president of SG, and the professor overcomes his skepticism, if unable to make the "leap of faith" himself. Hughes accepts the Japanese model of a "mentor-disciple relationship" as benign, and he watches carefully as a scholar how Ikeda and supporters react and respond before relaxing into an appreciation of SG's Japanese presence and power. Still, he remains a scholar, trained to observe, even if he wonders early on "whether my critical disdain is related to my intelligence and academic education, as I like to think it is. It may be that I'm just spiritually indolent and existentially lazy." (122)

This admission enriches this investigation. One aspect that remained underexamined is how the chanting and good intentions of SG members transform into altruistic projects, seeing they demand so much of those who often volunteer funds and time. (The finances raised aren't examined in much detail--this appears odd, as both supporters and critics might wish for this professor's unbiased coverage of this issue.) His visit to Soka University in California doesn't elaborate its Pacific Rim aura or explain his allusion to why faculty were at odds with administration as the school opened.

I also wished that, given a reported high rate of SGI attrition (see my review of "Soka Gakkai in America"), that more context was provided in how members convert, and why many may not persist. How Buddhists from other denominations relate, or don't, to SGI could have been integrated, given the author's earlier "Buddhism in America" study. A lot of SGI's material appears filtered by its directors; he acknowledges this but at times it feels an "authorized" version. Everyday folk who support SGI tend to come later in the storyline, in a current-events style which feels more journalistic than analytical, even if it remains always readable.

However, his loneliness and his own quest deepen the relevance, in 2001-02, of this series of encounters. As he sums up SG's appeal: "its teaching of empowerment of self and other to achieve happiness." It's a "modernist spin" on ancient and medieval dharma. It adds to that teaching's "quiet contemplation" the "energizing power of daimoku and gohonzon, the former the performance of Buddha nature, the latter its graphical representation, the two mirroring in each other what Buddhists understand to be a liberating power inherent in the fabric of the universe." (205) Professor Seager's ability to sum up complex theories helps to convey this movement's ethos and accomplishments for a wider, scholarly--and perhaps popular--audience.

P.S. I've also reviewed complimentary studies: Daniel B. Montgomery's "Fire in the Lotus" on Nichiren Buddhism; "A Time to Chant" on SGI-UK; "Global Citizens" by various scholars, ed. Bryan Wilson & David Machacek; and "Soka Gakkai in America" by Machacek & Phillip Hammond. Also see from an insider's p-o-v a book not cited by Hughes, "The Buddha in Everyday Life" by British SGI leader Richard Causton. (Amazon 12-9-11)

Hammond & Machacek's "Soka Gakkai in America:" Book Review

2011-12-25T00:04:00.000-08:00

How does a Japanese "new religious movement" replicate the Reformation, as it exports a global Buddhism bent on world peace, self-actualization, post-materialism and transmodern values? Two UCSB sociologists survey 400 Soka Gakkai members in 1997, and their findings compliment those for British counterparts in "A Time to Chant" (1994; see my review). There, Bryan Wilson and Karel Dobbelaere found many SGI-UK converts from self-employed and creative, artistic professions. Those in America who answered Phillip Hammond and David Machacek's questionnaire tend to be more from corporate and knowledge-industry occupations, but the members' outlooks and scholars' findings resemble each other.

"Accommodation" examines the evolution into 35,000-odd U.S. members, of diverse ethnicities and religious or spiritual backgrounds, of a movement imported in the mid-1950s with a few Japanese wives married to U.S. servicemen. It outgrew its immigrant roots and flourished in the counterculture when its post-war seekers found a spiritual match for discerning "postmoderns." This refers to one of four responses to modernity by American religions. Modernists reject religion as superstition and favor reason and science, breaking up cohesion of past loyalties. Counter-modernists reject modernity for tradition. In between, some take a liberal balance, as mainstream Protestants, that accepts science to "enhance religious understanding." (127)

That leaves SGI-USA among postmodernists, who affirm modernity's limits regarding scientific progress, the human condition's humility, environmental harmony, and a "therapeutic orientation" on "healing and wholeness." They also have "a fascination with the exotic" (128) which celebrates matter joined with spirit, male with female, and culture with nature. This openness also invites consumerism, but more for cultural and artistic pursuits rewarding self-improvement rather than mere acquisition.

This also connects with the outward direction of committed members. While chanting for material benefits has been assumed by observers to be a primary motivation, Hammond and Machacek lean towards data which show a shift from marginal to active to core members that draws SGI's faithful into more communal service as their chanting draws them into work and action that optimistically helps others along with themselves. It's an "ascetic" worldview which converts do not form on joining, but which attracted them as jibing with their previous perspective, as these often young, single, uprooted people found a congenial fit with SGI.

Soka Gakkai's orientation does not reject American culture but reinterprets it. SGI offers a framework that "is now coherent and endowed with sacred meaning." (140) SGI's promise of chanting offers a way to tap into a life-force and to channel energy into not material benefits but a promise of "compensators such as faith, a sense of personal happiness, and confidence" (76) Hammond and Machacek sensitively examine how what members chant for relates to and differs from SGI's collective goals, and why benefits gained may not equal the goals sought. However defined, success makes the convert feel at home with an accommodating force for change that aligns with American beliefs in human potential and responsible use of an optimistic attitude.

The authors explore how SGI-USA aimed not at a foreign-looking, lifestyle-altering, anti-mainstream "cult" status, but a "soft-sell, low-tension strategy" (178) that resulted in less growth but more sustained adjustment to American mainstream society, where SGI blended in rather than stood out.

While the authors estimate, on the high side, 90% of those who've "received the Gohonzon" (56; the venerated mandala that serves as a mirror for one's practice defining Nicherin Buddhism) from SGI-USA have lapsed from membership (if not practice, for this is hard to tell in a survey drawn from the organization's own list), those who remain turn out to be more committed. The investment in learning chants in archaic Japanese, in attending meetings, and in giving time and donations to SGI pays off for a smaller, but more convinced, cadre. Unlike other Eastern imported movements, SGI-USA appeals by tailoring its mystical philosophy to a pragmatic set of rewards combined with an altruistic appeal. (The authors downplay criticism of its president's influence, which detractors have charged as nearing a "personality cult.")

SG enriches the "mundane world of daily life with religious significance." (140) Conversion reinforces social values as SGI members socialize "with like-minded others, and legitimates them with a Buddhist religious tradition." (140) The authors demonstrate this by excerpting interviews with marginal, active, wavering, and core members--and a few defectors gleaned admittedly (more than in Wilson & Dobbelaere) from a small sample, given scholars relied on membership lists from SGI for research. One difficulty shared by both reports is this built-in lack of context for more of those disenchanted, but "Soka Gakkai in America" improves upon its British predecessor by trying to document as completely as possible the range of members and outlooks.

This makes a fitting companion to "A Time to Chant"; that book's recommended for its deeper historical context of Nichiren Buddhism, and its study of the split with the priestly caste in 1991. I also note that Wilson with Machacek followed this with "Global Citizens" (2000; see my review), an academic collection of essays by scholars on SGI worldwide, past and present. There's far less background in this very slim volume, but with these two other books as supplements, readers may easily look up more. (Also see Daniel B. Montgomery's "Fire in the Lotus" on Nichiren and all varieties of Nicherinism; it too's reviewed by me.)

One fresh element added by Machacek and Hammond: supply-side and demand-side economics are mooted as models for SGI, one for the availability of late 20c options in a spiritual marketplace, the other for its ability to meet the needs of seekers. While less vibrant in its narrative than the British version, full of articulate informants, this American successor, even with more "textbook"-toned interpretations of the surveys, incorporates the same conclusions as before that match SGI abroad to a shift into a consumerist, yet ethical and practical, social phenomenon and religious movement. (Amazon US 12-1-11)

Richard Causton's "The Buddha in Everyday Life": Book Review

2011-12-23T00:04:00.000-08:00

After evaluating three scholarly studies of Nichiren Buddhism, I compared this insider's version aimed at inquirers. Causton was Soka Gakkai's British leader; this revision was finished the year of his death, 1995. It revamps his 1989 "Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism: A Popular Introduction to the Worldwide Religious Movement That's Showing Millions How to Find Peace and Prosperity in Everyday Life." This merits mention, for the schism that separated the lay-led SGInt'l from priestly Shoshu control in Japan shifted how an affirmation of this pragmatic, ethically flexible, peace-promoting, diverse, international society would be conveyed to Western readers.

Bryan Wilson (quoted here as a sociologist of religion; this lacks paginated citations but lists a few references) analyzed what's now SGI-UK in "A Time to Chant" (1994, with Karel Dobbelaere) and in a 2000 collection edited (with David Machacek) as "Global Citizens." Wilson (who cited Causton's earlier ed.) found that British SGI adopts a freer, libertarian bent, as it's far from Japanese influence and considerably multicultural. Causton's rendering of SGI's neither analytical nor academic, in contrast with the two above (reviewed by me). His can be very philosophical and complex. He aims to convince seekers of SG's merits. This provides strengths and shortcomings for one seeking a balanced view of SGI. It's informed by members, not critics.

Strengths are its friendly tone, its use of vivid narratives by members of how they overcame difficulties, and its insights from such sources as Hardy, Donne, Dostoevsky, Einstein, Proust, Tolstoy, Wordsworth, Primo Levi, and Tom Wolfe. Good for savvy, clever, creative folks, curious about SGI's message. Causton assures that chanting as practice equals no "magical cure" (91; cf. 194), but a transforming power of "daimoku" (125) tapping into what's released as a "cosmic life-force" (193) sparks environmental and personal change. SGI uses this to prove how chanting creates, by greater energy and practical benefits, "value." A neutral observer may wonder if "success" comes by the chanter's compromise, prevarication, or coincidence, as Wilson & Dobbelaere aver; note p. 194 again. SGI believes a member will see the "conspicuous benefits."

This is not to diminish the sincerity and good works of this sometimes controversial movement. I wish to discuss what other {Amazon} reviews by those convinced have not: such a book is not by definition going to contain objections, for after all, it's aimed at persuasion. But some critical material might have strengthened it; one finds here a sharp, rapid tilt away from conventional Buddhism to Nichirenism. It displays a minimal foundation in earlier Buddhism before it reconstructs it with SGI's reformed "testament." Everyone can become enlightened; Nichiren supplants Shakyamuni as the latter-day Buddha model. Attributing radical changes in personal and communal success (see the subtitle of the original work) by chanting is the promise at the heart of SGI's interpretation of Nichiren's radical message which keeps only the Lotus Sutra as the "Middle Way" between latent and manifest effects that can literally alter the course of karma for the better.

This book's openness to rationalism and science enrich its contents, which can be challenging even as this simplifies Nichiren philosophy, itself no easy task. (Compare my review of a work aimed at a similar level on this subject, Daniel Montgomery's "Fire in the Lotus.") It elaborates karma intriguingly; it compares life and death, manifest and latent powers to a black cat, seen and not seen as it walks a "zebra crossing"! (138) I found its explication of the Ten Worlds doctrine sensible and engaging; SGI-UK's study guide online sums up this version of Causton's presentation. Ten Factors earn analogies to a knife, a lover's breakup, and a Van Gogh painting, for example. Also, its ties to physics, sleep research, and anger management prove valuable.

The modern vs. the ancient in light of what scholars say about the origins of the "Mystic Law," on the other hand, comes free from the critical examination that might be wished for by a reader looking for an intellectual context to accompany the inspirational one dominating here. The Lotus Sutra's understood by scholars to have been composed hundreds of years after Shakyamuni Buddha is said here to have delivered it as his definitive teaching. "Roughly 3,000 years ago" is given for the historical Buddha's career, further back than conventional estimations. This implies (255-6) wiggle room for periods of 500 years that comprise Nichiren chronology, but Causton never mentions those widely accepted birth-death ballpark figures for the Buddha.

I know that SG and Nichiren ease the impact of the historical Buddha, to elevate Nichiren and the Mystic Law, but those opening this book to find out about "Buddhism" as conventionally rendered may not glean much, compared to SGI's insistence on how Buddha-hood for all has been manifested by Nichiren and his followers since the 1200s. You understand, say, "Four Higher Powers" but "Four Noble Truths" gain a cursory mention; "Six Lower Worlds" earn abundant detail, but how they emerge via "Six Realms of Existence" gets little attention. (It's like reading about the Catholic Mass with barely a glance at a Passover Seder. Even in a defense of a denomination today, more credit of nonsectarian influences might be expected.)

If this sounds like quibbling, it's central in fact to how SGI leans towards a more exclusive, if globally accessible, "mission" with their Buddhism as the ultimate, definitive version. This book tends to blur dharma's historical context and denominational varieties; it's akin to a work introducing one to evangelical Lutherans which skims over the control of the medieval papacy, or how the 95 theses were composed. Daisaku Ikeda, revered SGI president, gains many quotes and serves as Causton's role model. Therefore, Causton provides as expected the "authorized" expression of SGI, but for those curious about what religious scholars have to say about the historical creation and textual evolution of the Lotus Sutra and Nichiren, his account will not offer much critical context. This book's meant to welcome one into SGI, not to dissect its ideological claims.

Therefore, if you want an introduction to SGI from one convinced, this is recommended. If you prefer an academic study, check out Montgomery for Nicherinism, and Wilson's co-authored two studies above. (Amazon US 11-29-11)

Wilson & Dobbelaere's "A Time to Chant": Book Review

2011-12-21T00:00:00.000-08:00

I didn't expect such an engrossing, engaging sociological survey of British "votaries" of this Buddhist self-actualizing, libertarian-tinged, socially aware and creatively populated movement. These two professors interviewed hundreds of Soka Gakkai ("value-creation society") members around 1990, and they place SG within a response to a secularized Britain and a post-Christian ethos based on not an externally imposed system of moral codes but an emerging commitment to personal responsibility and communal action in peace studies, the environment, and global harmony. While for some critics this has smacked of a personality cult and an eerie Japanese export, Bryan Wilson (Oxford) and Karel Dobbelaere (Louvain/Leuven) argue that SG represents a reasonable reaction to an era when Christian morality emphasizing delayed gratification and an ascetic work ethic has been replaced by a consuming culture encouraging rapid fulfillment and "psychic liberation" from guilt and sin.

Nichiren Buddhism, defined as a "permissive, optimistic, and positively oriented religion," (33) takes its impetus from a thirteenth-century reformer who challenged the emerging feudal system. (See my review of Daniel Montgomery's "Fire in the Lotus" for more context.) Some of its followers, in the 1930s, began a lay-led society that eventually, by the time of this book in 1990-91, broke with their sponsoring Japanese priesthood in a controversial schism. An appendix explores the ramifications of this split, and the writers compare it usefully to the Protestant Reformation and modernizing tendencies. What they have in common is a move towards lay control, and less ritual and authority placed in a hierarchy.

Of course, a system of local and global leadership is the reason for SG International. Therefore, part of the interest in the interviews transcribed and the data arrayed is to see how SGI members in Britain gravitated, all being converts, to a situation where their own libertarian, generally anti-authoritarian outlooks fit into a democratic system based on local circles of "votaries" who then serve their own structured system for mutual support and globalized goals of reform. It may reflect my own bias, but I would have liked more investigation of how a membership composed of those intellectuals, creative types, self-employed, artists and fringe occupations found a congenial mix of a self-motivated chanting and D.I.Y approach to morality within a structured, communal, and mutual-support society stressing cooperation.

Wilson and Dobbelaere separately contributed essays to a subsequent collection of essays, "Global Citizens," [see my review] and these can be consulted for more of their scholarship on this intriguing movement. "A Time to Chant" due to its depth allows a more nuanced examination of SGI, however, and some of the questions that I had when reading their essays in "Global Citizens" are better answered in "A Time." That is, I wondered how chanting for goods or success aligned with altruism or less-selfish or individualized goals, and the interviews and data included here examine this topic.

It may or may not be the fault of this book, but I remain hazy on how traditional Buddhist ideals of letting go of goods and attachments square off against SGI's encouragement of using chanting to generate goods as part of its acceptable goals, but I understand somewhat better the process of how chanting works to spark action, from these interviews. (One note: nearly none of those responding had exposure to other Buddhist practices before SGI, so useful research here as of 1990 was not truly possible.) Chanting, the scholars propose, may serve adherents as a means and an end, that is, those who attribute the fulfillment of their goals to the practice that is at the heart of SGI (and the larger Nichiren Buddhist approach) may express the dual methods of "self-examination and self-help" (186) at the core of the daily practice.

Naturally, the self-selecting limits of such a study, based on a list of members, is itself a predicament, for those responding tend (90%) to be regular practitioners. But even here, the professors take pains to share the honest answers of the few dissidents and skeptics that they can glean, as they seek to make this study the best it can be. Granted the boundaries of this report, its introduction provides a great overview of the organization's history and background, and its conclusion (however briefly) places SGI within countercultural and secularizing trends that in the two subsequent decades have rapidly accelerated in much of our society. (Amazon US 11-22-11)

David Machacek & Bryan Wilson's "Global Citizens": Book Review

2011-12-19T00:00:00.000-08:00

This collects scholarly articles on Soka Gakkai's Japanese, reformed Buddhist ethos and worldwide expansion. Most of the pieces, therefore, examine its growth in the later part of the 20th century. Emphasizing cultural (and also political) contexts, it combines theory with narrative histories, and then multicultural, sociological case studies.

Jane Hurst's "A Buddhist Reformation" cogently parallels the Protestant rebellion with the Soka Gakkai movement's rejection of a "priestly" for a "pragmatic" religious form (85-6). Collective ritual gives way to individual faith, and sacraments to practicality. Traditions recede while mysticism fades. Scripture trumps tradition. While a lack of authority may diminish an engaged, lay-led system's clout, and while ideological purity can be diluted, a global and rational enterprise gains by harnessing individual action to achieve progressive, egalitarian goals in a time of technological transformation and humanistic engagement.

David Machacek studies with Kerry Mitchell how Japanese immigrants spurred initial growth of Soka Gakkai in America. This began as war brides took the movement overseas after WWII. (259) The authors note how declining zeal of those raised in a such a radicalizing version of a faith often occurs, contrary to their parents who may have been converts, but they record how second-generation members appear to be steady with, if less diligent towards, practice. Unlike "world-rejecting" religions, Machacek and Mitchell see in SGI a heartening engagement with repairing social and environmental problems that bodes well for its future sustainability. (279)

In a related article, Machacek studies how "isomorphism" accounts for why SG sparked little controversy as opposed to other Eastern imported varieties of religious experience: SG parallels better the social bonding expected of hard-working Americans, even as its celebration of happiness and success appears to be at odds with Judeo-Christian practices oriented towards self-denial and otherworldly reward. (282) It looks legitimate, it acts respectably, its members keep a low profile. They do not undergo outwardly dramatic or exotic changes; the movement's progress, along often volunteer and now totally non-clerical lines, continues.

Instead of Jan Nattier's claim (qtd. 301) that evangelical Buddhism best defines SG, David Chapell substitutes "socially inclusive" (325) as distinguishing the notable presence of Americans and immigrants of European, African, and Asian descent in its ranks. Unlike the overwhelmingly white presence in Zen, Tibetan, and vipassana "elite" or "ethnic" Japanese cohorts, those involved in SG in the U.S. represent great diversity. Social development, he concludes, accounts for this prominence, as solidarity grows among members encouraged by welcoming and supportive circles of five or six, these in turn answerable to a district, a local chapter, and so on up a pyramidal structure, all led by laypeople (303-4). Abilities are encouraged, and while materialistic or selfish goals may seem to be accepted as legitimate reasons for initial practice or chanting, these are channeled with time and maturity into transformative skills better suited to one's lasting improvement, and that of those around one's self, in the faith and in the wider community. (324-5)

"Changing one's karma" rather than being bound by it distinguishes SG from other forms of Buddhism. Peter Clarke shows in Brazil how SG's third president, Daisaku Ikeda, in 1960 explained for the first time this notion to a Japanese immigrant, recently widowed, burdened with children. Her adversity was instead inspirational; her predicament became a way to overturn adversity rather than be a victim of fate. (337) Using a Nichiren Buddhist concept of "ganken ogo," Ikeda interpreted this as a method of turning difficulties into a vocation to change one's life by one's reaction to karma, and to overcome fatalism by committed action.

In postwar Britain, Bryan Wilson explains, a post-Christian residue of an "ascetic" outlook was overturned for a few by SG's appeal to a consumerist, individually flexible ethos. How traditional Buddhist discouragement of material accumulation squares with SG's "licensed hedonism" (369) puzzles me, but it redistributes restraint with reward. (353) He lauds the compassionate and secular approach that aligns SG with a community open to members allowed to seek happiness and enjoy fulfillment. A quarter of British adherents, from forty countries, were born overseas, a remarkable fact; some informants were introduced to SG by an encounter at a pub or a nightclub or an astrology class. (361) 3/4 of newcomers were not "seekers," and did not belong to another religion at the time of their first encounter. (363) As in America and Japan, the tilt upwards towards the more educated and professional cohorts appears over the decades to be accelerating, although economic, class, and cultural diversity remain hallmarks of global SGI.

Maria Immacolata Macioti looks at comments by guides and visitors left by those attending a 1990s human rights exhibit sponsored by SGI in a Roman museum as part of a chapter on Italian contexts; Metraux pursues the movement's spread into Southeast Asia. Whether into Buddhist, Protestant or Catholic nations, it appears a few committed members manage to convince thousands of others of SGI's advantages. Even in Islamic Malaysia or Indian communities abroad, a few decide to make the commitment to change and chant.

The remaining essays merit mention: Noriyoshi Tamaru on the historical perspective; Dayle Bethel on Makiguchi's educational message; Hiroshi Aruga on Japanese political ties; Daniel Metraux on the Komeito party; Atsuko Usui on women's roles; Takesato Watanabe on Japanese media coverage; Karel Dobbelaere on the "pillar" organization of SG.

Intermittently, I sensed re: SGI an uncritical bias. The generosity of many members is credited; these scholars support the movement's aims. This may not be a drawback for some readers, but I register how criticism of SGI here remains minimal. These scholars examine the evidence, assert their arguments, and defend SGI.

A few authors roamed into side topics or current issues (as of the year 2000) which neared indulgence or stridency. The results can be dry at times, but essays such as Chapell's despite statistics convince by their incorporation of interviews and testimonial enthusiasm. Overall, this is an accessible (if expensive even by university press standards) volume, aimed at the academic with a sociological slant, but newcomers (such as myself) needing an overview will also find this beneficial. (Oxford UP site.; Amazon US 11-18-11)

Daniel Montgomery's "Fire in the Lotus": Book Review

2011-12-17T00:00:00.000-08:00

This erudite but thoughtful survey looks at Japan's contribution to religious unity and global harmony--amidst seven hundred years of dissension, suppression, antagonism, and idealism. Nichiren Buddhism, founded by a thirteenth-century reformer, challenged the priestly traditions and feudal hierarchies. It served as a parallel of sorts to the Protestant Reformation, in that it elevated lay participation, and confronted clerical dominance in league with political imposition. It very roughly compares to Christian supplanting of Jewish power, via reformer Nichiren--according to many who interpret his own enlightenment as he faced execution, and as he escaped death, as a transformational moment. This rekindled this restive rebel into another Buddha, some say replacing the historical Shakyamuni as the ultimate One who has woken up, and who wants all to awaken.

It's a very complicated story. Filled with splits and schisms, as strong-willed dreamers match their wills against imperious Japanese social structures, Montgomery narrates, with plenty of unobtrusive but solid documentation drawn from a wide variety of sources, how Nichirenism has become, in postwar Japan, its fastest-growing religion and one that appeals to those abroad who have little or no connection with Japanese roots. This globalizing dimension expands the Asian-centered dharma of most Buddhist movements. Human potential for change--and sometimes financial gain and material success as some varieties promise to dedicated devotees--spurs many to missionize, contrary to the mainstream Buddhism of East or West.

This "universal truth, manifested in Japan but applicable everywhere" according to Nichiren's followers as Montgomery introduces the concept, comes from directing "a philosophy of action" (12). It focuses on motivating people towards Buddhist-based enlightenment. Its controversial and energetic (and sometimes aggressive) methods, especially through the largest branch, Soka Gakkai, have sparked controversy and resentment in and out of its homeland, but Nichirenism "remains the most important indigenous expression of the Japanese indigenous spirit" (13) and one that, at least as of this 1991 publication, accounts for some of the same intensity that fueled Japan's postwar rise as an economic superpower.

This aspect does not gain as much coverage as I expected later on, (one drawback in a generally strong study), but in this relatively compact survey, Montgomery prefers to concentrate on the many debates, schisms, and revivals of Nichirinism since its founding. He delves too into the message of the historical Buddha in a marvelously told chapter, full of vigor; his accounts of Central Asian translator of Indian into Chinese texts Kumarajiva, of the bold and rebellious Nichiren himself in his epic life story, and the careers of such disciples as earnest Daisaku Ikeda of Soka and peaceable Nichidatsu Fujii "Guriji" deserve equal acclaim.

Montgomery carefully documents each of the denominations, and he reasons that so many versions exist due to natural tendency in an early religion to engage in fiery bickering as doctrines are contested and scriptures formed, whereas in the later times, of a decaying sect: "The white-hot volcanic eruptions of yesterday are the lifeless subsoil of today." (247) Nichiren had six schools immediately inheriting different interpretations or communal loyalties, and this contention over territory, continuity, and control of the teachings defines then and the centuries since.

Often opposed by the Japanese feudal system and its heirs, today's Nichiren missionaries are freer to promote their energetic message--in Japan, this now involves political campaigns promoting a party representing pacifist, environmental, and humanistic issues in a nation that had fought or co-opted Nichiren's earlier adherents. Elsewhere: "The goal is straightforward: to gain peace for the world and salvation for themselves." (263) The potential lies within the individual to change, however, and this is why, Montgomery shows, the movement's emphasis on one's own conscience and no intermediaries between the believer and the dharma have impelled its often headstrong followers towards strong personalities and self-expression.

The book moves efficiently, but it can be extremely dense in how compacted and intricate can be descriptions of Nichiren's understanding of advanced commentaries on the Lotus Sutra, the core teaching, as well as the multiple and multiplying schools of his followers. It's tough for a uninitiated reader to keep straight Nicho from Nichiko, Niko from Nikko, Nichiren Shu from Nichiren Shoshu. An index, glossary, "how-to" and statistics appendices, and bibliography help. Montgomery keeps control of quite a large amount of data and history and dogma in 300 pages.

This is a work that will please those looking for an introduction that stays unbiased but delves deeply into this movement. "Fire in the Lotus" as of this writing is no longer in print, but it's worth seeking out as a rewarding and balanced introduction to Nichiren's origins and rise as a national and now global phenomenon. (Amazon US 11-14-11)

Chistin na Dolly West: leirmheas beag

2011-12-15T00:02:00.000-08:00

Fhreastail muid an dráma seo ag scriobh le Proinsias Mac Aonghusa faoi deireanach. Tá sé faoi comhlinti go leor ar feadh an dara chogadh domhanda ann. Bíonn sé ar siúl in aice leis an teorann Uladh i gContae Dún na nGall.

Tagann Dolly ar ais go hIódail a teach. D'fhoghlaim sí faoi rúin go leor idir fír agus mná ansin. Faigheann sí grá agus brón leis ar saigdiúrí Sasanach, Meiriceánach, agus Éireannach--agus a baill teaghlaich.

Shíl muid go raibh an dráma níos láidre go luath. Tá sé an-deacair a dhéanamh rún a réidh le coinbhleachtaí teaghlaigh an oiread sin i dhá uair a chloig. Ach, tá na aisteoirí oilte agus cumasach ann.

Bhí an dráma chéad uair in Amharclann na Mainistreach i mBaile Átha Cliath i 1999. Measaim go mbeadh 'iomrall aimsire' de reir an téama homaighnéasachais fadó. Ina theannta sin, b'fhéidir go raibh an cáineadh Caitleacheachais ar cósuil doibh as áit ina deichniúr na Daichidí sin.

Mar sin féin, is maith linn go minic chuig an Amharclann Bhán Sí. Is iad na drámaí ar chighdéan maith. Tá an suíomh tarraingteach beag fós.

"Dolly West's Kitchen": Mini-Review

We attended this drama written by Frank McGuinness recently. It's about many conflicts during the Second World War. It takes place near the Ulster border with County Donegal.

Dolly comes back from Italy to her home. She learns about many secrets between men and women there. She finds love and sorrow with English, American, and Irish soldiers--and her family members.

We thought that it was stronger early on. It's very difficult to make a resolution of family conflicts in the space of two hours. But, the actors are diligent and talented there.

The drama premiered at Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1999. I judge that it might be an anachronism concerning the theme of homosexuality back then. Moreover, perhaps the critique of Catholicism's similarly out of place in that Forties decade.

All the same, it's a pleasure for us often to go to the Banshee Theater. They set the standard for quality drama. It's an appealing site too.

Nasc/link

Alexander Theroux's "Estonia": Book Review

2011-12-13T00:00:00.000-08:00

"A collapsing tiny box-set of a republic that is dark as a cave in winter, shit-cold for most of the year, a strange ignored dorp with no ice-free ports, a queer language, curious laws, rummy food, eccentric people, funny money, and a veritable forest of unreadable signs." This formidably erudite, incorrigibly vexed novelist follows his wife, Sarah, to this Baltic nation in 2008, where she paints on her Fulbright grant scenes of its stolid towns.

Brother of the equally waspish travel writer Paul, Alexander Theroux, meanwhile, skulks, fulminates, studies, and walks wherever he can, soaking up the frigid atmosphere of its people, who totter about "round, turnip-nosed, bulbous." Their hair may resemble a cock's crow, or a potato's shade of brown. Estonians may garden naked in summer, but they remain sour-faced when meeting his gaze. They represent an evolutionary oddity, for in a place where 54% of the population is female, its young women whisk about in tight jeans, Goth-accentuated makeup, and impassive hauteur while their middle-aged counterparts appear "concave" and dumpy. This remains a mystery to me, this mid-life transformation from leggy goddess to hunched crone, but as one of Estonia's many misogynistic proverbs puts it: "Young maidens and white bread age rapidly."

Theroux wanders--once on a bus whose engine sounds like an opened potato-chip bag's rustle--its blue-bleached, white-bright landscapes. They, in this half-forested realm, dominate a flat and chilly niche for a population less than that of the Gaza Strip. The citizens of this land, ranked first worldwide in accident-prone mishaps and second in alcohol consumption, endure as they have within their little outpost for thousands of years. They share linguistic roots more with their Finnish cousins than their Latvian and Lithuanian neighbors to the south. Estonia squirms between two ancient antagonists, Germany and Russia.

"The Nazis visited, but the Soviets stayed." Occupied and brutalized for most of the past century, the only post-Communist Nordic nation, this newly independent country, in this eclectically arranged and intentionally diffused account, represents for Theroux an object lesson in cultural nationalism. It's a third alternative more genial than Benjamin Barber's global clash between "Jihad vs. McWorld." Reasoning that such small lands survive more on their own terms than those of multinational capital and ideological capitulation, Estonia for Theroux turns more intriguing the less genial it becomes. Tellingly, the place is absent from "1001 Places To See Before You Die." Stranded as he is for Sarah's academic year, he must navigate "a ramble through the periphery" with little guidance from books or guides. "I bucked up, although I was never warm. I had heard Estonia got milder, that many are cold, but few are frozen."

Such levity is welcome in what can be (as with his themed essays "The Primary Colors" and "The Secondary Colors," or his daunting if rewarding novels "Darconville's Cat," "An Adultery," and "Laura Warholic, or the Sexual Intellectual" [all reviewed by me on Amazon US & this blog]) a challenging encounter with a cranky autodidact. He appears to remember everything he has read, and he shows this frequently with citations from an unpredictable shelf. Theroux intersperses, in the style of such forebears as W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice's "Letters from Iceland," a diverse array of digressions. In a chapter ostensibly given over to "Antiques," six pages castigating the Israeli occupation of Palestine enter the contents. Newer fulminations against such outrages as waterboarding and the trial of former Nazi guard John (or Ivan) Demjanjuk join habitual rants about American illiteracy and laziness, part of the vast jeremiad that expanded the satire of "Laura Warholic."

The author takes comfort doggedly if bitterly in a nation with little luxury despite its high levels of technology. (Skype was invented here, and nearly everyone reads and uses cellphones for every function that can be digitized). He rallies against the Estonian determination not to play his welcoming host. He knows that to the Estonians he looks as if another Ugly American. Oddly, the stoicism of the people and the difficulty of the language drive Theroux, an already contrary character, into a stubborn effort to account for the glum mood of his dour hosts. (Estonia's acclaim for Depeche Mode may or may not explain so many long faces.)

This is where the book turns intriguing, if more in glimpses than sustained analysis. How long can a people sustain surliness? "Grimly you begin to see good manners take effort, attention, style, but rudeness takes none." In bewildering Estonian, "smile" and "turnip," at least to Theroux, appear as if near-cognates.

Not that he seems cheerful. Theroux delights in putting down his hosts along with his fellow Americans. He despises Bush and praises Obama. He hates U.S. foreign policy and suspects Zionism. He remains a New England type, flinty and sharp. He deploys bombast, overkill, and ridicule to pepper his perennial pop-up targets of greed, lassitude, and stupidity.

He includes here his caustic if characteristic habit of lists, ruminations, and rants. For all his predilection for careful observation of how people look, sound, and move, he inflates, if maybe in sly self-deprecation, the impact others have on him--rather than vice versa. In a chapter on Sarah's fellow Fulbrighters, "The Whole Squalid Lot," he returns to what has captivated him since his debut 1972 trio of short stories, "Three Wogs," and which dominates long stretches of "Darconville" and "Laura": the admiration of amplification.

He claims to name Sarah's fellow Fulbright grantees: "Katerina the Crank, Benny Profane, Currants and Queel. The noxious Butterheads. Sairey 'Is That Your Nose or Are You Eating a Banana' Golomb who in a discussion we recently had actually thought the Ottoman Empire was a chain of furniture stores. The notoriously cheese-paring Belk, the miser. And how about Capybara?"

Theroux habitually gives such quaint, oddball names to those he excoriates, or, far less often, encourages. This metaphrastic register--heaping up recondite vocabulary, obscure obsessions, and highbrow observations--may strain Theroux's voice on the page. Even in the comparatively compact (for him) "Estonia," a few pages for those new to this maximalist practitioner may suffice until one becomes acclimated to the wintry blasts of his prose.

His frostiness blends form into content. Not much snow, but a lot of bluster mixed with icy gusts typifies a land where March may be its sunniest month. Its people, Theroux finds, meet his lowered expectations. Try as he may to accommodate himself to their glares and guffs, Theroux struggles vainly to make sense of his inclement exile in this strangely dispassionate setting. "The advantage of consciousness can prove a disadvantage when the society you meet, the culture you confront, is almost imperious in its strangeness and the fealty it exacts of you in merely coming for a visit."

Perhaps, Estonia can be seen "figuratively as a tiny, self-sacrificing, hard-working wife to her husband, Russia, slaving away always to appease him, doomed to spend years appeasing her demanding spouse but asking meekly for nothing." The tart, sour, and tangy flavors of its pork, its predilection for dullness fueled by vodka, and its obsession with communal singing make Estonia a tiresome residence. In a chapter "What Did I Hate About Estonia?" such jagged gems prickle as this: "I hated their idea of their naive, simpleminded singing like the Whos in Whoville as a sole defense against the guile of black-hearted totalitarianism."

Yet, another chapter, "Carmen Secularae," finds Theroux moving from a predictable diatribe against televangelists into a thoughtful consideration of the impact unbelief may wreak upon a nation so beaten down as modern Estonia. This analysis segues into an elegant defense of Pauline Christianity, one of many unexpected connections this ramble makes along its many peripheries. Theroux later adds (in an aside illustrating his command of a short remark amid so many long grumbles): "In the Bible there is no mention that the sky is blue--we yet locate heaven there."

Full of endnotes, translating many phrases he quotes in their original languages, and graced by a few of the couple's photos and Sarah's plein air oil paintings, this provides a suitably quirky introduction to Theroux as an essayist and critic. Far better copy-edited for Fantagraphics Books than was "Laura," its publication by this press fits into this press's emphasis upon graphic novels and comic illustrators, too. As the author of two Fantagraphics short studies on Al Capp and Edward Gorey, Theroux's elliptical style and elongated perspective delineates an American tradition of satire that connects him to Thomas Nast's political and cultural caricatures of a century and a half ago.

I wish this handsome volume had a map, but then, Tallinn and the other major city of Tartu appear about it, in terms of notable Estonian locations. Instead, we rely on his onrush of big words and biting phrases to tell us about this forlorn entity. These chapters compile much that most may relegate to byways, detours, fumbles, and trivia, but he explains in a "Valedictory" his guiding principle.

"I daresay my Estonia is as much about me and my crotchets as it is about anything else, but as Thoreau pointed out in Walden, 'I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.'" He notes, "paranomasiacally, I left no Estonian unturned. Those who are less charitable may even insist that I left no turn unstoned." Catch the wit and the venom, the depth and the breadth, of this honest account of a "a strange, unlooked-for place at the back of beyond" where "the fascination of its strangeness" renders it a fitting subject for a curious report by a memorably talented, ever off-kilter, chronicler of oddity. (Featured at PopMatters 11-23-11 & Amazon US.)

Péter Nádas' "Parallel Stories": Book Review

2011-12-11T00:00:00.000-08:00

Robert Musil, early last century, tried to bring a modernizing and warring Central Europe into a massive work; he left its second volume unfinished. Péter Nádas picks up the saga a few decades later, as another war brings a neighboring nation into the struggle, and follows Hungary through its revolution in 1956 and its predicament in 1961 through to 1989, the year of its liberation. This enormous novel combines, as its title promises, different characters and various approaches towards exploring personal and political survival within this sprawling, intricate story.

The scenes set at Buchenwald, and among those surviving the Nazi terror, recall a socialist realist form of narrative, heavier on action and, if not heroism, than revenge. For other segments during and after the war in Germany as well as Hungary, a inwardly focused novel of manners and subtler tensions shifts overlapping tales into revelations of betrayal, appropriately conveyed in asides, incriminations, and hesitations as much as confrontations. The opening section which begins the investigation of a murder in 1989 Berlin follows the edgy, swaggering, uneasy mood of a mystery, full of diversions and evasions.

Imre Goldstein, who translated Nobel laureate Imre Kertész’s works set in and after the same world war in similar situations, brings to Mr. Nádas’ work the same fluidity. (See my review of Fiasco) The challenge of expressing Hungarian, a slowly spoken language full of heavy long words with opening stress, into conversational English has eluded many. Mr. Nádas’ prose carries in Mr. Goldstein’s rendering the sensation of solidity and density, and this creates the pleasure and the pain within this epic work.

That is, the commitment to over eleven-hundred pages of serious writing that roams from character to character without warning, and which depends upon an alert reader able to appreciate the considerable demands that a work eighteen years in the making and four in the translating expects may make this encounter a rarified one, for those able to navigate these confusing and chilly depths. Mr. Nádas rarely has his characters laugh, and only one scene here made me chuckle. For a work concerned with eugenics, conspiracy, anguish, lust, evasion, and compromise under a variety of oppressive regimes, levity may be a rare commodity, after all.

Jewish and Gypsy, Catholic and Protestant, fascist and fanatic, Nazi and Hungarian characters, many of which themselves are of mixed parentage, contend. They are almost never happy. Those in power resent those beneath them. Sex enters many relationships, but it never connects people beyond such moments. The explicit nature of this detached novel, conveyed with its intricate and extended descriptions of the aroused males and their pursuit of sexual release, less often in its fulfillment than its postponement, makes for a very difficult book to enjoy.

The blurb portrays this as the story of three men, spies in the Cold War era, but only two of them play large roles: Hansi von Wolkenstein aka János Kovách, and Ágost Lippay. Hansi was sent, as a bastard child, to a Nazi school where such youths were studied—this plays off other characters, including his mother, involved in eugenics schemes which employ Mengele among others, in Hungary as well as the Reich. One scientist muses over “independently inherited narratives” as intertwined within heredity, and this theme extends its tendrils over much of this work’s construction and intentions.

For instance, Ágost will entwine with his lover Gyöngvér, whose coupling takes most of seventy-five pages, certainly among the liveliest in this colossal story. Even here, however, Mr. Nádas refuses to give the reader a conventional narration. The mechanisms of the male member earn great elaboration—both male-male and male-female pairings elicit clinical observation combined with if not soothing than enervating bouts rendered over many pages and many places, most of which are decidedly less than romantic. An underground pissoir, a cockroach-infested bathhouse, rough trade in the park of dark Margit Island, and a dismal room in a dreary flat typify the settings where men, with or more often without women, pursue their release. Even the shadows of Buchenwald for a brief moment become a place full of such a possibility.

Mr. Nádas interrupts that precisely narrated encounter (and the semi-humorous interruption by a dim old lady of the dimly lit couple makes for my chuckle) with Ágost and Gyöngvér’s memories, which drift off and come back. “Stories about the soul and about social relations scarcely touch each other; rarely is there a direct connection between them; they are two different categories written side by side.” So a neighbor reflects, in an interlude during the couple’s lovemaking. Nobody in this novel has their time on stage for long, even if dense chapters may roam over dozens of pages.

The lack of tonal difference among many who enter this story to articulate their unhappiness, beyond the genre shifts earlier mentioned, discourages easy progress. Mr. Nádas prefers to cloak hundreds of scenes and many characters (an appended list would have helped, as this novel exceeds even Tolstoyan lengths) within an elongated, distended, wandering style which tucks revelations and explications within its narrative as if asides. This demands attention, and this attention flags over so long a book.

However, certain moments persist. As in 1961, when young Kristóf Demén pursues Klára from the counter at the candy store where she works across Budapest. This segues into a recollection of his burrowing into a bombed-out cellar as the Soviets crushed the 1956 rebellion; this then blends masterfully into a tense re-creation of how a bread line created competition and then panic, heightened in turn by the arrival of tanks. One points its turret straight at those in line.

The resolution of this showdown, as is typical, will be delayed for many more pages, and then it will be related in passing. (By the way, the translator’s footnotes now and then do assist the reader less versed in Hungarian references about politics and history.) Péter Nadás may infuriate readers accustomed to a Tolstoyan resolution of a series of interrelated stories and characters and times and settings. The author refuses to resolve his unhappy stories. Each will remain open-ended. Time and space, for him and his modernist creations, create a human and social longing to flee elsewhere, free of backbiting and spying, secret societies and endless bickering. Hungary represents a hopeless realm, confined between German power and Russian control.

The impersonal flesh contends with the personal imagination, the omniscient, if not exactly straightforward, impersonal narrator reflects. Neither passionate lovemaking nor desperate pick-ups will satisfy these men and women. They stay predators. They fail to find rewards across these restless decades.

Murder, sexual assault, backstabbing figural and actual, and the insistence upon compromise for surviving these brutal times occupy the actions for most of these characters. When Providence is invoked, it is more likely by a Nazi eugenicist than a devotee, for few in these pages praise any power higher than their own desperate struggle to stay alive. Fulfillment stays distant, and self-hatred curdles. For more than one of those condemned to be born when and where they are, betrayal becomes the promise, if not the realization, of liberation from regimes and police states. (Featured at New York Journal of Books; published 11-5-11.)

Ride's "Nowhere": Music Review

2011-12-09T00:04:00.000-08:00

A buzz surrounded the twentieth anniversary of Loveless by My Bloody Valentine and Nevermind by Nirvana this year. Certainly both albums represent wonderful achievements; another from this era earns its own celebration. Ride, four young men just out of school and all of about twenty, released its own impressive debut, after three strong four-song e.p.'s earlier in 1990. That fall, a few Americans like me who had paid import prices for whatever appeared on Alan
McGee's Creation label found ourselves paying again, if for a Sire record, for the eight songs on the British full-length Nowhere were appended by four from the latest of those e.p.'s, Fall.

Alan Moulder's mix reveals, in these Rhino remasters, a grittier coating over the hazy smear. The original album felt ethereal and woozy. As Jim De Rogatis' liner notes record, the "gigantic oceanic swell" of its cover art match Moulder's "disorienting" blend of aggression and delicacy. While shelved with shoegazers My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive upon its release, Nowhere hearkens back to this Oxford band's influences: the eclecticism of psychedelic Beatles, the guitar constructions of The Smiths, the lazy drift of Rain Parade and L.A.'s Paisley Underground, and the measured beat of The Velvet Underground.

The backwards loops opening this album, on "Seagull," signal the band's determination to re-create their favorite sounds. What the quartet adds is an aggression that takes from British post-punk what The Smiths and the Paisley Underground pioneered: a meatier guitar attack overlaying a more expansive, subtly folksier vocals. Andy Bell's Rickenbacker 12-string takes charge, electrified, phased, and distorted. Mark Gardener supports on guitar, with a wistful, understated voice that wafts over the sonic waves: the swaying drums of Laurence "Loz" Colbert and Steve Queralt's steady bass. De Rogatis' comparisons of this rhythm section to that of The Who are, typically for this astute critic of Sixties rock, well-chosen.

"Kaleidoscope" brings, as its title promises, a swirling style, lighter as Gardener's lyrics float upon a propulsive, yet jittery melody recalling a gentler ballad, pressed into service of a more demanding, dreamily echoed direction. "In A Different Place" resembles The Smiths, a steadier pause after so much whirling action. "Polar Bear" roams into a more desolate landscape, closer to Echo and the Bunnymen, but replacing Ian McCulloch's stolid moans with Gardener's softer regret. Colbert's control of the snares and toms emerges in the production well to anchor this more simply composed tune.

Nearing the halfway point of the original album, "Dreams Burn Down" slows the pace. Colbert adapts a slightly funkier tap, backed by Queralt's own thumps, to introduce this melancholy evocation. Gradually, the guitars rise into an angry response, retreat into reconsideration, and flare into a final hiss.

In another version a standout song (missed on the accompanying L.A.'s Roxy concert in April 1991 disc), "Decay" showed on the BBC radio sessions Waves how the band could transform this tune based on an Eastern modal progression into a vehement expression live in the studio. In its original version here, it remains too muffled to reveal its full power, but the fading snare in the last seconds hints at what production might have captured.

The Roxy concert, on tour with Lush, shows a Ride diligently trying to capture its striated studio sound before an enthusiastic crowd on a small stage. The album's title track here distended, the early song "Like A Daydream," and two standouts dating back to their original demo tape--"Chelsea Girl," and the closing "Drive Blind"--allow the band a looser, unsettled energy that transforms their live abilities best. These particular songs at the Roxy compliment those on Waves, along with those on Live Light a few years later.

The band's most consistent songs came early in their brief career; they got grandiose, they tired, and they bickered and burned out. Even their original album needed to pause after so much energy expended.

"Paralysed" hints at Andy Bell's subsequent band's sound; Oasis could have written this. The fact I prefer Ride to Oasis may show the relative position of this track in how I rank its songs. It follows its titular feeling, or lack of feeling, too closely. Effects mask a weaker tune. Moulder's attempts to improve Marc Waterman's original production (abandoned in the making of the record) wander off into a work in progress. Its best moments remain a creepy sample, as if a crowd at a football match is being trampled. Perhaps a sly joke?

With "Vapour Trail" grace returns, and beauty arrives. A basic "la-la" garnishes the gentler vocals, and the music (augmented by keyboards and ending in strings) delivers an accessible example of a short shoegazer song. While the twin guitars of Ride earn critical acclaim, again I credit the drums for their constant guidance.

This album, in its American version, now takes over. "Taste" shows a lighter production style, more Beatles -meets-Byrds. This may document a period of the band before Moulder's direction, as these next three songs were on the British Fall e.p. "Here and Now" with its harmonica shuffles a mid-Sixties reference into a lysergically tinged, sleepy mood. It tries to move ahead, but the ambiance drags it back. This exemplifies the band's adaptation of earlier post-punk bands merging their perspective into that of previous visionaries. However, the song outlasts its welcome. By now, Nowhere, a dense, thick collection, needed to end.

The original U.S. album closed with its heavier title track. It imposes itself on the listener, over Gardener's half-chanted invocation. Harmonica wafts again, but now ghostly, above an array of processed guitar drones, an uneasy drumming pattern, tambourines, and a bass turning in on itself into a growling sound mix. This feels more like a bad trip than a pleasant ramble. It crumbles as if a plane going down into the sea, and the water washes over the remains of this song and the album as composed, as a seagull soars above the crash landing.

This re-release adds four songs from their fifth e.p., 1991's Today Forever. One can hear the next album, the prog-rock leaning Going Blank Again, already approaching. "Unfamiliar" stands more detached as the voice sinks into the churning, not chiming, guitar effects and the bass and drums thicken into a less distinguishable mass. Sustained pedals continue with the acoustically based "Sennen" while "Beneath" returns to the janglier feel of Fall. It finally wraps it up with a nearly symphonic, cinematic "Today" which could inspire Sigur Rós. Ride's tone keeps dispersing, as the band fades into its sleepy phase. This band stretches itself, and in these final songs the expanded Nowhere leaves behind a punchier, cheerier sensibility to sail into vast introspection. (Amazon US 11-27-11; featured at PopMatters 12-15-11)

The Fall's "Ersatz G.B.": Music Review

2011-12-07T00:00:00.000-08:00

With a studio album each year since the punk era broke, I was wondering, as this year neared its close, if The Fall would deliver its annual contribution to my not-so-short shelf. I've been listening to this Northern English band before their albums appeared in the U.S., and their career has found them on many labels, with some records never released overseas, others released in the U.S., and most re-released over and over, adding (for better or not so much) to their legacy. Live, they prove unpredictable; within a studio, they prove recognizably innovative if often infuriating in their truest commitment to punk's iconoclasm. They refused to conform to punk in the late 1970s, and they refuse to play by anybody's rules but those broken by their leader, and sole founding member, Mark E. Smith.

Studio record #29, Ersatz G.B. delivers a heavy, ornery style of discontent. It's one of their best. For a singer nearing his mid-fifties, Smith insists upon his idiosyncratic approach. His mumbling, self-referential, literary, and demotic blend of insider jokes, baffling references, sly narratives, and winking humor remains intact. His band, cemented here by his wife Elini Poulou's keyboards, works mightily to satisfy its leader's difficult standards. The music, I am pleased to report, responds to Smith's challenges, and it's a tough, sassy album. Not as melodic as recent triumphs from the past decade, but it works by its own unrelenting concentration upon a stripped-down, solid stomp.

This starts off with a febrile, dense "Cosmos 7" compressing words and snarls from Smith into a mash of Elena Poulou's keyboards and backing vocals and the band's assault, until it suddenly ends, in less than three minutes. It's a promising opening, recalling the best moments from The Fall's strong albums five years or so ago. It swaggers but does not brutalize, with meaty production.

Track two "Taking Off" sounds similarly cosmic. It features an off-center dub rhythm section, with a repeating riff over keyboards which skitter against the confident anchor of Keirion Melling's drums and David Spurr's bass. It stops with a nod to an Eastern snatch of a pop tune, barely registered in its final moments.

"Nate Will Not Return" comes back to the opening sound, very "live" and jittery in Pete Greenway's guitar and growling keyboards in another strong mix of direct, congealed melody. Smith mutters about deception over a chordal pattern recalling the experiments of PiL decades ago by Keith Levine; the vocal here rejects John Lydon's wails, however, for insisting that "I am Nate" in a tale about Ukrainian imports of sinister fashion and "maybe New Jersey state".

Lacking liner notes (at least in the download provided me), the listener must depend on the passing reaction to what the words at the moment suggest. Repeated listens to albums by The Fall bring out their nuanced layers of assault and delicacy, and their wordplay and considerable, if wry and dry, wit. At six minutes, compared to some tunes on recent records by the band, "Nate" moves with catty precision and never wears out its initial promise.

"Mask Search" brings back in a brief tune a familiar pattern for longtime fans: a hint of the American rockabilly roots that tangle some of the more obscure cover versions that Smith favors. It's a somewhat simpler delivery than the previous three songs, yet its production, as relentlessly determined as before, matches the mood of the CD.

"Greenway" finds Smith straining his voice: "it's good enough for" a variety of targets, until it segues into a typically bizarre tale of the singer watching a video in a Danish hotel of a man who looks like him. He goes to a neighboring room to ask for a way to record this astonishing sight. This leads to predictable complications: "people like that really get on my nerves." Here, the famously cranky Mancunian vocalist adopts a different tone, grainier and even more raw than his usual tipsy warble, and the band follows suit in a backing support of male voices that channel the sound into a tunnel of dark threats.

Keyboards find a simple way into a tune that Poulou delivers, as a "Happi Song". It's not quite Nico alongside Lou Reed, but her articulation of similarly careful English reminds me of that avant-garde European predecessor. It's rare on an album from this version of The Fall to promote for an entire song one by another vocalist, so this variety helps. It's musically not as intriguing as the five songs so far, but it does not depart from the style of Ersatz G.B.. This record's far more consistent than many of the band's hit-and-miss output.

The saying among fans goes that a weak album follows a strong one, but the previous Our Future Your Clutter was respectable. All the same, Ersatz G.B. easily betters it, for its devotion to a more monolithic construction. Far from this weakening the structure, the preparation of deceptively simple rock band ingredients sustains a firm, weighty, and smooth direction that rarely wavers or wobbles.

This album benefits by concision. Any listener of the band can volunteer past Fall tracks which wore out their welcome, so the seven minutes of "Monocard" serve as the test drive for the handling of this year's model. It doesn't wander into wankery or get mired in silliness. "Laptop Dog" returns to the album's first half, and while not very distinguishable from those tracks, continues the progress where parallel stretches in other Fall albums have sagged and the pace has slackened.

"I've Seen Them Come" swings back to the PiL template, with a rowdy call-and-response siren call tucked into the male backing vocals for Smith, and the interplay of guitar-bass-drums with the competing and overlapping voices keeps this an exciting song. Six minutes does not diminish the focus of this track. The impact of early 1970s German progressive rock on PiL as on The Fall must be acknowledged, and if Lydon had persevered as has Smith, one wonders how the best of post-punk's pioneers thirty-odd years on would have evolved. The slap of the drums and the whir of the keyboards keeps this song punchy to its end.

So does the percussion opening "Age of Change". Blocks might be thudded; it's hard to tell in the sonic fog. The production staggers the vocals slightly, and keeps backing voices martial against a static-frosted Smith. The textures, throughout this sprightly record, above the phasing of the keyboards, make this closing track wonderfully propulsive. Forty-one minutes produce a wonderful album by Smith and his willing musicians, who rise to his exacting leadership, until he cracks up declaiming the last lines about a "dam of vast proportions will break over hawk's hahahah"--or something. With him, you're never quite sure what he's onto. This keeps The Fall like Smith: fresh, and sour. (Amazon 11-26-11; 12-5-11 at PopMatters)

Magazine's "No Thyself": Music Review

2011-12-05T00:00:00.001-08:00

The titular pun, allusive and mocking, literate and "classic" in at least a double sense, typifies this pioneering post-punk band's approach. Howard Devoto's adenoidal delivery, his poetic or satirical lyrics, and his direction of a band bent on keyboard-guitar dominated aggravation make their fifth album (the first in nearly three decades since their heyday), as consistent as ever. Whether this wins them new fans as much as woos old ones remains uncertain. Magazine's a group committed to an uncompromising attitude transmitted through an arch form of dense New Wave, while backing ex-Buzzcocks founder Devoto's willfully theatrical, petulant or defiant poses.

"Do the Meaning" begins with a hint of PiL's guitar swirl, its riff connecting with a keyboard-driven sound reminiscent of their standard style. A chunkier, stuttering guitar characterized the innovations of original guitarist the late John McGeoch; his successor Noko--who paired with a solo Devoto in Luxuria--remains faithful to this direction. This continues on the next track, appropriately named "Other Thematic Material".

However, Devoto's preference for a sparer, theatrical mood often slowed the pace of Magazine's albums. Here, "The Worst of Progress" follows this form. Discordant tones fill many songs by the band, even if "Hello Mister Curtis (With Apologies)" integrates piano chords that hint at George Benson's version of "On Broadway" of all tunes, at least to my ears. I am not sure if Devoto, being a Mancunian contemporary, refers to the departed singer of Joy Division here, as I have no lyric sheet but only a downloaded sound file.

Despite Devoto's mannered articulation and phrasing, "Physics" manages to be nearly a ballad by comparison with most of this album. "Religion, it wasn't meant for everyone" becomes the refrain, and no lyric sheet's needed to make that message out. "Happening in English" fits into a typical early-1980s style for the band, with some nods to a more tribal percussion from that era's John Doyle, who returns on drums.

Dave Formula, their loyal keyboardist, contributes the most to keeping this reunion record close to its predecessors. He joins with Noko's lively guitar and new recruit (although the talents of original member Barry Adamson are missed) Jon "Stan" White on bass for "Holy Dotage" as the CD's punchiest song.

The noir shuffle of "Of Course Howard (1979)" evidently refers to some event back then, mixing a nearly spoken-word alteration of Devoto's vocal registers into a menacing entry. Yet, as with other such Magazine tracks in the band's career, this plods along and drags down the album's trajectory. Their albums always stop and go, hurry and dawdle, and true to this erratic form, after thirty years, this one follows suit.

"Final Analysis Waltz" by its title may anticipate this judgment. Despite a jerky guitar with lilting piano and bass interplay that gave many of the band's songs their distinctive sonic stamp, this fails to keep a listener's interest for almost five minutes. "The Burden of a Song" again appears well-chosen as a name, for this fights against the ennui incorporated into its title by a welcome brush with a snappier melody, if in shards.

Tired and battered, the breakdown of "Blisterpack Blues" reminds me of the band's nearly unrecognizable, crawling, collapsing cover version of Sly Stone's "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)"; it drags down the album to its close. The willful direction-as-misdirection of this solid, if unspectacular by earlier standards for this creative band, record typifies their refusal to conform to expectations. Unless they are those of any listener fond of this Manchester-based quintet, who from their first single, "Shot by Both Sides" in 1978, never could fit into any mold except the ones they broke and melted and remade. (Amazon US & Published to PopMatters 11-21-11)

(P.S. Blame no liner notes or line-up ones on the bare download provided me but credit to Rosalie Cunningham for backing vocals--I always liked one Maria Teresa who did the same for the final Magazine LP and Devoto's one solo record, half-great, half-not, the aptly titled Jerky Versions of the Dream--see my review!)

Charalambides' "Exile": Music Review

2011-12-03T00:01:00.000-08:00

Tom and Christina Carter celebrate twenty years making music together. This husband and wife duo produce tunes jittery, reflective, ornery, and contemplative. This eclecticism may mirror their relationship as well as their craft.

Tom plays guitar, along with Christina, who sings. With only minimal backing by two string players on one track in the New England studios where Exile was recorded over five years, her direct, rather unadorned voice dominates this spare disc. Their prowling, restive guitars wander and burrow, strum and storm.

"Autumn Leaves" opens with patterns of simple chords over the hiss of amplification before halting. "Desecrated" takes this buzz and layers it with more instrumentation topped by Christina's gentle, but insistent delivery of poetic longing. "Words Inside" tucks hints of piano into its depths, as her voice howls and moans above an angrier arrangement.

"Immovable" recalls a restless, haunted mood, as the strings vibrate and tense and release over and over, again showing the pair's characteristic repetition of silence among the guitar shapes they construct over a very "live in the studio" ambiance. "Before You Go" features a chant of "Maria" within massed guitar overdubs, rising to an uneasy climax that recalls moments of John Cale's exertions captured in "Black Angel's Death Song" by the Velvet Underground.

Some label Charalambides as psychedelic, more for the squall they sometimes raise than the quieter, reflective moments that may surge and ebb in the same song. "Into the Earth" builds from softer to sizzling tones in a few minutes, defining their chosen method which amasses their force in structures resembling those of traditional folk tunes, matched to a love of carefully sequenced distortion. "Wanted to Talk" almost strains Christina's vocal register, over a circular riff gently repeated until the tension of such plucked energy threatens to madden, instead of sooth, the listener.

Fourteen minutes long, "Pity Pity Me" as the refrain cyclically revolves as the final track. (A double-LP adds two bonus tracks not on CD). Christina tells of liberation from the factory's drudgery in the company of her lover, until ten minutes in, the guitars begin to stretch and scream. The tensile nature of the recording highlights the threat within the music, until it too, stops without warning, as did the first song on this album.

The unexpected shifts of the sounds here are not played for novelty, and are more subtle than shocking. The organic quality of this intimate, disturbing as well as comforting record for me conveys the meaning of its title well. After two decades as a couple on stage, in the studio, and in life, this anniversary record may capture the feel of how an intimate relationship mellows, tempers, and toughens. (Featured at PopMatters 11-14-11 & Amazon US.)

Occupy L.A.: Two months, gone

2011-12-01T16:44:00.000-08:00

Well, it's over after the LAPD gave the protesters lots of time to get ready to move on out. Over 300 arrests, and lots of cleanup, two nights ago. Protesters vow as they have elsewhere to continue; some say next spring and better weather will spark an "American Spring."

As for seasons, one blessing is that the tents came down right before "hurricane-force" Santa Ana winds roared in. I couldn't have left home even if I had to today as an enormous jacaranda branch blocked the driveway, and a pepper tree one the garage door. The local train line was shuttered, a disaster zone declared where my son goes to school, and another at the school he goes to tutor. Our version of a snow day, if more blustery than powdery. Hope it's not earthquake weather.

My younger son was able to go to tutoring and to school yesterday. So, by train, he who had been there a few times at OLA again stopped off from the Red Line in the aftermath. He reported a chain link fence around the site kept a few screaming protesters from those who were starting to haul away the mess left when the campers were forced out, if comparatively in polite fashion by a LAPD chastened by its public image and private machinations over the past--how many years or decades of "codes of silence"?

Over at John W. Smart's blog, I've weighed in plenty about my own observations and those of many others, locally, nationally, and abroad, who'd watched Occupy L.A. and its sister sites. Some remain, many vanished. Here's a representative array of JWS blog reactions by left-leaning if dissident, largely progressive sorts, to one enthusiastic OWS report. Lots of pro, con, black, white, and, if me, gray.

Back in mid-October, I'd sent our mutual correspondent, Tamerlane on JWS and at his True Liberal Nexus, a list via Nation of Change's alternative media site the twelve demands of Occupy Chicago. He analyzed each one and weighed in with his political acumen. He'd been active organizing in the same Northern California town where my wife's niece lives. He blogged on the likelihood of their wish-list's fulfillment.

Speaking of wishes, demands were only organized for presentation to the local honchos at City Hall on Thanksgiving, after the LAPD announced OLA's impending shutdown. I wondered if its general assembly should have taken the city’s offer of office space, farmland, and an alternative to too many tents in a City Hall “park” (never that bucolic or verdant, but I feel sorry for the ficus tree now to be removed) turned dirt?

My family was split over the dinner table. My wife figures the Occupiers (my Latin declension favors Occupii, as in Elvii or Winkelvii) were predictable if principled in turning down City Hall’s offer. My 16-year-old grumbled after seeing it himself more than once that if they wound up inside a building, who would care, three years on, what Occupy had stood for. My 19-year-old rolled his eyes and dissed them for their pothead antics rather than their practical actions. As I’ve weighed in here, I sympathize and I donated, but I also lament their ultimate lack of pragmatism. It came down to claims of public health, and what could have been a political force to educate the city became more, at least locally, a place for more and more people to kickback, waiting for The Man to deliver change, hope, reform, or a stash or six-pack. Those who, like a 20-year-old young man of my acquaintance (in junior college, not employed), lived at OLA to make a stand, and not to make a score, resided next to those who were there for the buzz and the smokes.

This was commented upon in the L.A. Times, maybe not in the beginning, but as of month into the occupation: Riot is not political and says most of the other homeless people at the camp aren't, either. "The majority of the people don't know why they're here," she said. After a while, she wandered over to the drum circle, where dozens of people beat madly on instruments late into the night.

When day broke Saturday, there were beer cans on the ground but no food.

A group of men were hawking bottles of malt liquor for $2 and cigarettes for 25 cents, but the volunteer at the food tent said there had been no donations for breakfast.

Here are two excerpts from Thanksgiving coverage in the L.A. Times on the final phase of OLA:

“For much of the day Thursday, demonstrators did exactly what they’ve been doing for so many weeks: occupy the once lush Civic Center park. One bearded man twisted into yoga positions as another danced to rancheras and another drowsily yelled out from his tent, “Dude, where’s the pot?”‘

In the “spirit of the holidays.” a non-Thanksgiving “International Day of Giving Thanks” (how does reversing the words change this into a PC-approved version?) was celebrated, with two turkeys donated by the police. Typical of the spirit, for better or worse: :

The Utah native moved to the City Hall lawn from skid row after he heard he could keep his tent up all day. “On skid row, the cops would make me take it down at 5 a.m.,” Gregory said. “But here, it’s cool.” He took part in a few marches, he said, but mostly he steered clear of Occupy meetings because “they argued too much and never got anything done.”

Over at JWS, this complaint echoed. On leftist sites, more sympathetic spin on the lack of cohesion allowed many to defend the Occupy movement's inability to pin down who was in charge, or why. It also enabled other dogged journalists to burrow in with those on the ground, and to champion "alternative" perspectives.

Skylaire Alfvegren blogged for the L.A. Weekly as an observer-participant of OLA's last stand: With dawn breaking, a CNN reporter whines, "There's an incredible amount of filth -- dog food, medicine, toilet paper." The mayor made a statement that Occupy had to go when he learned that "children were living at the park." A sanitation official talks about compromised irrigation and dead grass, and how it could take "months" to re-landscape: all bullcrap.

I opened the L.A. Times this morning to find this counter-statement, of $400,000 to repair the lawn, of a tree needing removal, and a million (not sure if LAPD overtime gets factored in) in costs to the city, which is us. Compare this with the $260 million or so in tax breaks given by the mayor and City Council to the billionaire investor for L.A. Live's complex, and the shoo-in for his Farmer's Field football stadium with 40 digital billboards proposed--free of any environmental impact report--a couple miles south of this encampment. LAT tells of the massive cleanup, with hazmat-clad workers (see photo above) looking like extras in a post-apocalyptic flick, roaming the remains of the 1.7 acre "park." The local paper (note our LAW blogger's remark about which media had access by the LAPD) reports 30-tons of debris left behind at City Hall tent-city, including a vinyl LP by "the punk band X."

I posted about this media discrepancy via a mutual friend on FB (at Occupy Providence) who'd shared the LAW piece. Skylaire Alfvegren herself promptly responded: The idea that was pushed by City Hall--that the lawn was being suffocated--was pretty shallow. I will say that Occupiers complaining of their belongings being thrown away--where that 30 ton figure comes from--are their own fault as they had plenty of time to move their tent to La Placita, etc... but the Hazmats suits were a bit much, c'mon. There had been a flu outbreak, but news mentions of staph infections were I think bogus. It was sooo clean the night the LAPD came back, no trash anywhere, and recycling was of paramount importance.

It was orderly when we'd dropped off our gauze, books, granola, bottled water, and cereal. I blogged about this at "Occupy L.A.: One month on". I wonder where our three-person tent wound up. The north side, a small section, was nicknamed "Westwood" for its first aid tent and library tent. The fascination of this local movement, and its frustration for me, was its lack of organization to push aims forward, as well as a lot of discontent and disgust which I heartily share for our "corporatocracy."

Of course, OWS began mid-September with an intent to raise outrage and make a stand in a logical urban setting. I first heard about it a few days in, as I taught an ethics in the workplace course and we watched clips from the corporate avengers The Yes Men, who later showed up at the nascent OWS. I found out about OWS only when Irish friends posted on FB links to the Guardian--it took a while before the media noticed it here, and it became a tag line on Comedy Central, a debating point to be mocked by the GOP or glossed over uneasily by Obama, and then a viral parody of Pepper Spray Cop (who makes $110k/year) last week.

What happened was that a half-public performance, half-ragtag movement set on drawing attention to a variety of injustices became, at least in my city, one that de- or evolved from 30 tents on Oct. 1 to 350 mid-month to 500 a month later, then 780. That influx came from the homeless more than activists, and the fact that at OLA, unlike Skid Row, tents could stay up all night. Handling the problem of the homeless is part of a complex situation, but this situation per se was not what the Occupy movement was formed to solve. I compared it early on more to a Bonus March, not a Hooverville, if you can see the overlap and distinction.

One overlooked situation in the OLA response to the LAPD shutdown–the park could have been used for peaceable assembly, but not overnight camping. The prospect of camping free of hassle is what led so many to walk a few blocks up from Skid Row to OLA to set up their tents–or to get one donated, I suppose.

The elephant in that park was the homeless occupation, as at many of the sites. The media sometimes downplayed this; OLA appears to have morphed into a greater proportion of homeless overnighters compared to activists who visited daily. City Hall park is a symbolic but poorly chosen place if you, this being L.A., want to attract a mass movement. While across from the L.A. Times & the L.A.P.D. h.q., it’s not the heart of today’s downtown. The Financial District (where the BofA plaza attracted an attempted sit-in on the “Day of Solidarity” Nov. 17th before arrests were made on what was owned by the same managers as Zuccotti Park--I blogged on Bunker Hill, banker mentality) would have been more fitting a capitalist target.

Better yet, a space to stretch out in, near another train station, plenty of open air, just north of Chinatown a couple of miles from the Civic Center, the state park recently opened as the Cornfield--which is today proposed as a new site, along with some at another symbolic if miniscule one, La Placita near Olvera Street. That historic parish has been a radicalized "refuge" for "undocumented" people for decades. The danger is that removed from the cops and press cattycorner from City Hall, marginalization may occur, but I suggest that the Cornfield might prove more pleasant and less gritty. Near City Hall, parking's near non-existent although the subway station's adjacent; I reckon that this discouraged donations and marchers who might have come down to make this less a homeless encampment and more representative of diverse L.A.

While this homeless contingent in part’s proper “solidarity” with the ultimate casualties of downsizing, full of drifters and dreamers, it also shows how the idealism of OWS & its largely Millennial-gen offspring (led by one radical vet and pal of our mayor, a "media liaison" whose leadership of CP-USA here was oddly never mentioned in the frequent LAT quotes from him I read) encountered, and failed to deal with, so many showing up to hang out, get high, and get grub. They might have joined General Assemblies that tried at least early on to generate some hand-jive human-mic action, if not only GOP-but-banker-bashing, Obama-opposed, anti-"Citizens United," principled pragmatism. When this "horizontal decision-making" consensus itself dragged, momentum did. Many waiting for Occupy (note Boston's parallel situation with the homeless) to take the struggle not to downtown parks but to the streets--of the powers-that-be (funded by fatcats in their billion-dollar fundraising campaigns for the Oval Office) in our Nation's Capital--wearied.

The Occupy movement, as at City Hall, represents a symbolic protest, but it needs to become more real.

One telling anecdote is that pasted above. OLA’ers woke to no breakfast as donations had run out, but the malt liquor was doing steady business in the “underground economy” along with the pot. When we had donated granola and cereal, as no cooking was permitted, we were told at first aid they needed gauze and at the food tent that they'd had no water for awhile. We returned dutifully with both in abundance, but what if we had not come, or come back, that cold night? My views on marijuana legalization aside, this decentralized, ad hoc manner of living off the kindness of us strangers, while pot wafted, didn't sell its populist goals to a Middle America given the mockery of Comedy Central, Fox News, and the usual pundits.

Not sure how much one can blame Wall Street for this end to OLA; but I’m sure progressives would use this to prove how drugs pacify the proles and muffle the underclass. Or, do I risk “blaming the victim”..?

Ag leamh Virgil

2011-11-29T00:01:00.000-08:00

Faoi deireanach, bhí ag léite trí leaganachaí de an Aeneid. Bheul, ní raibh trí leabhair gach go hiomlán. Chriochnaigh mé leis mo triúr de na haistriúcháin.

Fuair mé i mo gáraiste an tríur le chéile. Is oraiste agus beag an leabhar le C. Day-Lewis. Is uaine agus mór an leabhar le Allen Mandelbaum. Is dathannaí airgid agus dubh an leabhar le Robaird Mac Gearailt.

Réasunáithe mé go raibh ag tús a chur leis Day-Lewis. Thaithin sé liom an líne fhada go raibh in aice leis an méadar Laidin. Bhí sé níos dluth chomh na eile, ach bhí maith liom é nios fearr.

Ina theannta sin, i gcomparáid mé Day-Lewis leis an dá cheann eile. Gan amhras, is bréa liom is fearr an dara caibidil faoi an heachtraí na Aeneas ar feadh chogadh na Troy agus an éalú siar ar fud an Méanmhara. Go cinnte, chomh maith le sin, bhain mé taitneamh as grá tragóideach idir Dido agus Aeneas ina roinnt ceathrú.

Tar éis tamaill, áfach, faigheann an scéal iomlán achrann agus fola. Éirionn sé níos lú airgtheach. Céimnithe hídéil. Tá súil ag deireadh. Daoine troid agus daoine argóint agus daoine bás thar talamh agus ar shaibhreas. B'fhéidir, is cósulacht ár saor go fírinne ansin anois mar.

Reading Virgil.

Recently, I had read three versions of the Aeneid. Well, it wasn't three books each entirely. I started with my trio of translations.

I got from my garage the trio together. Orange and small's the book by C. Day-Lewis. Green and large's the book by Allen Mandelbaum. Silver and dark-colored's the book by Robert Fitzgerald.

I reasoned to begin with Day-Lewis. The long line pleased me that was near the Latin meter. It was more dense than the others, but I liked it better.

Furthermore, I compared Day-Lewis with the other two. Without a doubt, I loved most the second chapter about the adventures of Aeneas during the battle of Troy and the adventures westward across the Mediterranean. Certainly, equal to that, I enjoyed the tragic love between Dido and Aeneas in the fourth section.

After a while, however, the story gets full of strife and bloodshed. It turns to less invention. Dreams fade. Hopes end. People fight and people argue and people die over land and wealth. Perhaps, it's similar to our life truthfully then as now?

(Péinteáil/Painting. Éalú na Aeneas go Troy/Aeneas' Flight from Troy (1598): Frederico Barocci)

The Dalai Lama's "Becoming Enlightened": Book Review

2011-11-27T00:00:00.000-08:00

This ambitious account delves much more deeply than I expected into Buddhist philosophy, drawn from ancient teachers such as Tsongkhapa and Nagarjuna. It sums up Tibetan concepts, as expected, but given its rarified explorations of higher-level approaches to liberating one's self from suffering and embracing the rejection of lust, hatred, and ignorance, it may not be the best place to begin, despite its welcome approach for all readers.

After quite a few introductions and some advanced texts about Buddhism reviewed, I came to this with interest. I've weighed in on Amazon [and this blog] about the Dalai Lama's other works "Beyond Religion," "The Universe in a Single Atom" and "The Way to Freedom." I've also reviewed his adventures as told by Stephen Talty in "Escape from the Land of Snows," and Tetsu Saiwai's manga graphic novel on the same. Also, Robert Thurman's books about the DL interested me, and Pico Iyer's interviews in "The Open Road."

I say this to set in context my repeated textual encounters with the Dalai Lama; after a while, his familiar stories and often cogent examples tend to blur or repeat somewhat altered in his talks as edited by his translation team, so this does not diminish but enhance the motifs he returns to as he emphasizes his teachings. He is accessible and his topics are diverse and well-chosen, but it's not an easy read. More than once, this jumps about in challenging fashion.

Following a great overview of how "religion" differs from or resembles certain Buddhist interpretations, the DL leaps about in what seem more like transcribed talks from various places and audiences. Some are considerably more intricate than others, and it's a long way into this work before even a basic Buddhist introduction to doctrine is given. The delayed nature of this exposition of basics, rather than a "chronological" approach from the life and times of the historical Buddha forward into his legacy and then Tibet's refinement of the concepts, adds another layer that may discourage newcomers to these complex ideas and subtle moral lessons, often drawn from enumerated lists of three-this and ten-that that fill many pages, in a somewhat scholastic and dry method that hearkens back to perhaps traditional ways of inculcating doctrine, but which seem to smack of the seminar or treatise.

Jeffrey Hopkins, one of the first American students of Tibetan Buddhism (along with Thurman), renders this teaching in a similarly academic manner. On the audiobook I heard this as, Professor Hopkins reads it in an avuncular, teacher-like tone. I rewound many passages, to get the meaning clear or to stop my mind from drifting, as this naturally contemplative theme, combined with some difficult points, demanded close attention. This is not to diminish the value of this work, but I wanted to advise audiences that this is quite a lot of important material, conveyed in an equally mature, and perhaps not the easiest, fashion, for those entering the high summits of Buddhism with such a compact but dense volume. (Amazon US 11-16-11)

Gao Xingjian's "Soul Mountain": Book Review

2011-11-25T00:00:00.000-08:00

This existential, postmodern, mystical quest is based on the writer's 1983 trek into southern China. After he learns his diagnosis of lung cancer is false, he seeks renewal as he searches for "Lingshan," the allegorical and actual goal of his title. While a novel, it feels based on fact, and as Gao Xingjian mixes reverie, folktales, adventure, and history, it provides a look at the deforestation, modernity, and lack of will to keep to old ways of self-discipline and customs as the Communist regime erases the traditions of mountain peoples.

Chapters flow easily, over all sorts of subjects. Erratic in nature, often shuffled about, the manner of this relating may annoy Western readers. We can't catch all the references, I reckon, caught in translation at least. Still, enough of the texture of how life's lived far from cities keeps one's interest. Watching a Miao tribe's boy-girl dance-mating ritual, the writer reflects how "the human search for love must originally have been like this. So-called civilization in later ages separated sexual impulse from love and created the concepts of status, wealth, religion, ethics and cultural responsibility. Such is the stupidity of human beings." (228) The writer wonders how much culture's needed anyhow, under a system bent on eradicating it, on ignoring it.

Such editorializing happens a lot. I didn't mind it, but many chapters drifted, and my level of attention varied. This novel comes and goes, like its characters, not wishing to impose a fixed meaning on it all. "In fact human life amounts to this"-- so one woodcutter for a Daoist temple shrugs about his precious seclusion.

What's innovative is how the author elaborates his own narrative voice. He adds to the "I" a "you" even if talking to himself. Then, "he" is created out of the "back of the head" as "you" turn away. "She" often arrives in the narrator's plot, as real bed-mate, as imagined folk seductress, as magic temptress, as symbolic mate. Memory and sense conjure up many of her representations, and she shows the "I" and "you" how to get out of one's self, one's mind, one's body, if for a while.

The journey's a metaphor for life. Five hundred pages, and what happens? Can even personalities survive the pressure of fiction, anymore than fact? A critic arises, castigating the writer's attempt to ape the West in this narrative experiment. "You've slapped together travel notes, moralistic ramblings, feelings, notes, jottings, untheoretical discussions, unfable-like fables, copied out some folk songs, added some legend-like nonsense of your very own, and are calling it fiction!" (453)

The pace slackens more than hastens. You adjust to it, as with life, or you fight it. Not every page draws me in, but none pushed me away. Despite the distance from the references and contexts, enough comes through this translation (rather British, by an Australian professor) to make this worthwhile as a leisurely companion. It ends in a burst of otherworldly revelation that caught me off guard. Not sure if it's an easy resolution or an inspired conclusion, but I found it memorable.

Well, it works, if not as a gripping, page-turning thriller, but a meandering, wandering, reflective passage of the later 20c in time and a slice of southern Chinese space as felt and seen and heard. Given it's for a Chinese readership, consider how much is suggested in a simple sentence about the rule of Mao: "Organizations and colleges came under military supervision and people discontented with their lot all became contented." (322) Composed in Parisian exile a few years later, this helped him win the Nobel Prize for literature in 2000. (Posted to Amazon US & Lunch.com 5-8-11.) [P.S. Compare to two accounts that also took place ca. 1985, Ma Jian's travels in "Red Dust" and Colin Thubron's "Behind the Wall"-- both reviewed by me since.]

Ma Jian's "Red Dust" & "Stick Out Your Tongue": Book Review

2011-11-23T00:01:00.000-08:00

In 1983, this dissident left a failing marriage, his daughter, and Beijing to wander China three years. This travelogue compresses and distorts time; it's matter-of-fact and mundane. Not a lot happens a lot.

Similar to Kerouac's perigrinations, Ma Jian reads a lot of his predecessors who seek bohemian and countercultural lifestyles. He works as a holy man of sorts, a barber, a vendor of cleansing powder sold off as "French" dentifrice too strong for sensitive Chinese palates--so he tells one displeased customer the morning after! What he sees as his country changes from the Cultural Revolution's ravages to the beginnings of capitalism if not personal freedom (Democracy Wall he sees in an earlier, pre-Tiananmen Square period of expression followed by crackdown) is often grim.

On the Yangzi River, where the poet Li Bai wrote of clouds and monkeys, fertilizer plants and cement factories spew yellow waste. "Where the green slopes have been cut away, the earth shines like raw pigskin." (162) This river divides the bureaucratic north from the entrepreneurial south; neither seems to please him much. "The government has liberated the economy, the country is moving, and the south is moving faster than the north. The waters of the Yangzi look tired and abused. When man's spirit is in chains, he loses all respect for nature." (163-4) Like his counterpart Gao Xingjian who the same year started his own meandering, if more mystical, pilgrimage south that became the philosophical, Nobel Prize-winning, novel "Soul Mountain" (see my review), Ma Jian seeks to flee an urban China that wearies him with oppression, conformity, and inertia. (Compare my review of Colin Thubron's 1987 travelogue on his 1985 tour, "Behind the Wall.")

Yet, Ma Jian finds surprises beneath the surface. He talks to a complicated, deceptively ordinary-seeming girl he'd met earlier a few months ago when he runs into her (what are the odds?) in Shenzhen."You would never guess she has a child in nursery, a husband in prison, a married boyfriend, a girlfriend, a Canadian lover and an opium addiction." (225)

Flora Drew's translation reads well to convey such straightforward observations. Here, the colloquial, often unadorned style of Ma Jian's reports makes this narrative flow smoothly, if often without much excitement. It feels honest, for that. I found more interest as he made his way south, and, by 1985, into Tibet. The chapter "A Land with No Home" conveys a lot in a little, and much of it, I found from the section "The Woman and the Blue Sky," shows up nearly verbatim, if with subtle shifts of emphasis or description, as the first story with the same title in his short collection of five disturbing, detached tales from Tibet, "Stick Out Your Tongue." (The title refers to the natives' traditional greeting!)

His afterword to that follow-up 1998 edition (written in 1987, in English 2006 also via Drew) admits this small volume of stories roused tremendous controversy in China. It can be existential and it can be hopeful, in the Beat spirit. The religious temperament pervades as God and man, myth and legend tangle: in an eerie tale of initiation, the narrator confides: "I am writing down this story in the hope that I can start to forget it." (66) Revelation does not descend for Ma Jian either in his travelogue or his storytelling from Tibet. Monks live amidst Maoist slogans; Ma Jian himself gains pocket money by "painting propaganda murals outside the local radio station." (86) He does not comment on this apparent irony.

Graphic as these spare stories can be, if for me rather than the PRC censors they seemed far from "pornographic," a demystified and deromanticized version of life on the plateau. They may benefit from a prior reading of "Red Dust," at least the Tibetan chapter; without some grounding in dharma Tibetan-style, the concentrated allusions and contexts may elude readers.

"Stick" dismantles the natives as "gentle, godly people untainted by base desires and greed." Ma Jian notes that "in my experience, Tibetans can be as corrupt and brutal as the rest of us. To idealise them is to deny them their humanity." (92)

Certainly, in "Red Dust" and "Stick Out Your Tongue," the steady, direct account of a very young woman, dying after a botched childbirth, in her sky burial--when a corpse is left for the vultures after the bones have been pounded down and mixed with dough to be fed to birds, and after the skin has been separated and the viscera and flesh dismembered after blessings have been recited--seems determined to get rid of any lingering attachment to delicacy. I found Ma Jian's account, reading it twice echoed in two versions, sensitive and dignified, although other readers were predictably revolted. For a sympathetic explanation in a book that I reviewed, compare Colin Thubron's trek around sacred Mount Kailash, "To a Mountain in Tibet (2011)."

Ma Jian doubts, even as a budding Buddhist, that his faith or that of his fellow adherents can save Tibet. Communists import greed: "As soon as a road is built, kindness vanishes." Values of one collective, perhaps communal and somewhat refined, civilization cannot withstand those of individualism masked as communism. "I came here hoping to see man saved by the Buddha's compassion, but in Tibet the Buddha cannot even save himself." (297) Ma Jian winds up distrusting Buddhism, and dismissing capitalism as well as Communism. No wonder that he left for Hong Kong the year he wrote these stories, fearing prison. He moved to Germany and he now lives in London.

He sees a pert woman's bosom jiggling as she shakes on a bus ride, with a "bent paper clip" holding her shirt in place instead of a button. This image reappears in "Stick," as does a character Sonam, in "Red Dust" half-Chinese, half-Tibetan and torn in loyalty; a skull-bowl's vividly imagined origins inspire another bold story; a third ends with a forlorn, supplicating young woman exposing her breast from under a market table, a scene first seen in "Red Dust." The oddness inherent to the fiction and the fact combines into a reflection on Tibet's uncertain future, and that of Ma Jian and his homeland where he must return to the great capital.

He concludes his "Red Dust" travels by going back to Beijing. "People are changing with the times. Everyone can see their paths. But society travels along an invisible road and no one can tell where it is going." (323) [Posted as two separate reviews in revised fashion to Amazon US & Lunch.com 5-21-11]

Colin Thubron's "Behind the Wall": Book Review

2011-11-21T00:00:00.000-08:00

After reviewing his excellent "To a Mountain in Tibet" (2011) and "Shadow of the Silk Road" (2007), I enjoyed this 1987 account of his 1985 Chinese travels. Thubron's unsurpassed when recounting the distance between foreigner and native, observer and participant in the passing scene. Without exaggeration, every other page of these three hundred could serve up an eloquent example of his prose and his perception.

I'll share a few of my favorites. He visits a Beijing classroom: as a teacher plays on a harmonium, the children chorus "like mechanical birds: vivacious and dead." (21) In Nanjing, interviewing a priest, he seeks to get past his persistent divide, as he "sensed that my questions were subtly irrelevant to them, my Western preoccupation with suffering and conscience merely a measure of my isolation, a sign of my not understanding." (98)

This struggle permeates his finely crafted narrative; he focuses on what he sees rather than who he is or what he's done (his books tend to be quite reticent), but he filters all he sees through his p-o-v, so we ponder what he does. It's not egocentric, somehow, but universal in his reflections on his fellow men and women. As with his Silk Road book (more than his Tibetan trek), he may annoy those readers wanting a less acerbic, or more romanticized view, but for me, cross-referencing this with Ma Jian and Gao Xingjian as native travellers at the same time exactly, their accounts align with his about his criticisms.

The lethargy, staring, constant scrutiny, relentless rudeness, noise and filth of China gain frequent attention. Dissimulation, helplessness, disdain, and catcalls follow his every move, it seems, over much of his ten-thousand mile journey, as "above the charming photographs on the identity badges of waitresses, the real faces are a rockery of sulks and scowls. Their lidless eyes have been invented for avoiding yours." (111)

In Suzhou gardens promising peace, he finds bad art galleries, shops, and photographers everywhere. "A glaze of cigarette stubs glazed the lakes." (135) Yet, in this same visit, he hears a young woman tell a blind man of what she claims to see: dragons writhing on the water, lions on their backs; lions roaring over the lake.

Similarly, he balances wit with despair, as in his woeful description of his meal of "braised wildcat" he must endure in Canton; he redeems himself later by liberating an owl from a horrific caged city market of dogs, cats, and birds as some recompense. He listens to those he suddenly shows up among, and he tries to hear their tales of terror, not long after the end of the Cultural Revolution. He also attracts attention, gawking, standing out as an alien before questioners who ask him how many children Charles Dickens had, or tell him that their father studied math at Cambridge.

He shows up in a peasant's rubber grove near the Mekong. "Momentarily I saw myself in his eyes--taller than anyone he had ever met, uncannily pale-haired, and fattened by the mystery called England." (222) Thubron's basic Mandarin allows him some deeper insight into common humanity. And, as a "foreign devil" he can sometimes hear what natives might not dare to say aloud. Later, a young lecturer opens up to him about a failing marriage and a lost love: "It would be like confiding in a star or a tree." (267)

Still, much of the beauty of this account lies in the distance in a crowded country, the scenes glimpsed as he passes. On a train into the hills of Fujian:

"Beyond my window, as the afternoon wore on, the mountains unlocked isolated valleys which the falling sun varnished into the illusion of peace. Village roofs dipped and swung above the green stairways of their terraces. Whitewashed walls were bright and unreal in the silence. Momentarily I thought: how beautiful. And I gazed at them with the acquisitive longing of someone hunting a weekend cottage. But they were filled by a rude poverty, I knew: their people were here in the train, bellowing convivially together. So I would greyly discount these idylls, and return to my book. But in the next valley the dream would reassert itself, and the glimpse of a tiled roof under a white wall incite again a childish mirage of Elysium." (167)

That masterful passage shows Thubron's power. Read this journey across China to find out much more in similar scenes. Highly recommended by an acerbic but wise writer at the peak of his talent. (Compare my reviews of two others who wrote of the same year, 1985 or so, in China: Ma Jian's travels in "Red Dust," and Gao Xingjian's philosophical novel "Soul Mountain."; posted to Amazon US & Lunch.com 5-21-11)

Bunker Hill, banker mentality

2011-11-19T00:00:00.000-08:00

I watched the Occupy LA protests six hours live-streamed Thursday, four miles from my house. The progress of the Day of Solidarity can be seen from the videotaped standoff near 4th and Hope after the occupiers set up tents in front of the Bank of America tower. Then, inevitable late-afternoon arrests. The LAPD lined up in front of admittedly privately-owned (Brookfield-Trizec, same as Zuccotti Park) tiled promenade disheartened me: police (with lord knows how much cost to taxpayers like me in this decaying city) lined up to protect the powers that be. Some of the protesters appeared callow, but I could tell many were sincere. Their "supporting" unions, contrary to LAT coverage, seemed to melt away by mid-afternoon.

I asked myself: why don't I take the subway down there? But, I had to earn a living (paperwork online), while I waited for my wife and son to come home. By then, even though I mulled over trying to head by the protest site first, these arrests were already in progress. That area was locked down around Bunker Hill. How could I support this national November 17th Day of Solidarity? I'd found out about this live-stream, globally, from Evie in Dublin; then Mouse via John W. Smart's blog told of the Zuccotti Park crackdowns. I then shared the OLA live-stream on FB and JWS, as well as with a Boston writer-activist who'd been to OWS often. I worked, and I began a massive novel assigned for review, Peter Nádas' Parallel Stories; a footnote for we English readers explained the revolt against the Soviets in Hungary, as if already forgotten.

How long would my children remember the encampments here? My older son demurred, until my wife reminded him that similar marches had ended a war once; my younger son had accompanied my wife and myself, and he wrote a report about it for school. I get the sense lately it's already receding into nostalgia, book-deals, a movie pitch or three, Obama's re-election spin, teleprompted jokes, all by way of The Onion.

Later that night, I'd take supplies downtown---not to OLA as before, but for concessions to Silverlake Children's Theater Group to support them by sales at performances starring my son and a cast of dozens. My weary, generous, volunteer (no less for SCTG than those for whom she'd sent granola and gauze, cereal and water, a tent, our books--those who marched downtown, for a better society, in our microcosm) wife had loaded the car with drinks and supplies. I hauled it and my son past a few dense or dismal, destitute and dreary blocks from the encampment and the BofA. The plays this season will be featured at a fittingly titled Inner City Arts center, albeit a spotless, squeaky new edifice. Near The Midnight Mission and a Greyhound depot, Skid Row adjacent's full of the homeless. Their tents or boxes, lacking signs, aren't on a live-stream.

Driving down, I listened as NPR aired a program that noted about Occupiers the need to shift from "the symbolic to the real." The host concluded that "occupation" had meant having a job; now it meant "political protest." I added one tiny part to a big project yesterday to help someone's dreams of acting on stage, or seeing their child or sibling perform in one of three (!) plays this weekend, while I watched a protest that on an amateur's wobbly camera appeared more visceral than the clean soundbites fed us by the MSM.

I found its live-stream "journalist," who labeled himself as an occupier and protester on his UStream site, a bit disingenuous, as he claimed there to be at a camp for three weeks at OWS and now at OLA, but when asked by the LAPD on camera, he distanced himself, saying he was "press" and that he possessed a "letter from a magazine" as credentials, which failed to convince the officer. But I sympathize with this young man's subterfuge. I commend him for his day-long diligence under trying circumstances. A FB feed could be seen alongside the stream, with generally supportive comments (that he often responded to via his voiceover) but with a lot of snark tossed in, as this was the Net. I also listened to this young man comment all day long, and I wondered how many of the students I taught would have the inspiration or stamina to do this for free.

Understandably, "Jordan" appeared to dance around the drama of how much he wanted to capture on tape the mayhem that some wanted to spark. Being in the crowd ("Mic-Check: Global Revolution and U-Stream have 11,000 viewers" he would call out from time to time to tell the crowd "the whole world [in part] was watching") but also wishing to capture it for those of us away from the front lines. After all, he needed to act as if a journalist, for survival. I wondered what 1870 Paris or 1917 St. Petersburg or 1956 Budapest would have been with such an eyewitness. And, he was a journalist, if one of the masses and not a professional.

As with many commentators, then and now, he sided against the authorities, appearing at times to rush towards a confrontation to record, but he did try to remain in control, chatting with Officer Braun when the camera appeared stuck on him ("man-crush?" one commenter jeered) for what seemed like hours during the standoff as arrests neared. I observed how often during scuffles or tension, "Jordan" recited badge numbers and surnames. I learned that the LAPD's green weapons held beanbags while those that looked like paintball guns had rubber bullets, again via the feed. "You are the 99%," "This is what democracy looks like," and "The people united will never be defeated" rose and fell as chants among the small crowd.

At one point, around 4:15, arrests were imminent after a fifteen-minute warning had been announced by the LAPD to clear the plaza when "negotiations" had ended between OLA organizers, police, and owners of the non-public space. His camera went black. An officer had been heard telling "Jordan" he was being arrested, but luckily this did not happen. He remained on the flat tiled walkway steps outside the tents set up on an elevated plinth-parklet where the police, after setting up a tarp to block the cameras seemingly as much in evidence as protesters, cleaned up the city in the name of private property instead of the First Amendment.

Point being: did I offer for "solidarity" a better duty that night by assisting in my clumsy manner a less-noticed portion of the L.A. community in a less dramatic way? Or, did I weaken OLA by my absence at a rally where I could not get near, as the BofA plaza was cordoned off? I tried later, when picking up my son, to steer towards the plaza, but 72 arrests had been made, the LAPD cleared the zone, and it was 10 at night.

Bunker Hill, ironically or not, is well-named in its L.A. setting: a fortress for the banks and the philanthropists who fund and name the art museums and Disney Hall that replaced the flimsy Victorians, the Native American neighborhood, the old cityscape that my blog shows at left in Millard Sheets' "Angels Flight" painting and in one of my favorite novels about my love-hate relationship with this hometown, John Fante's "Ask the Dust," which I read long before its film version, I proudly add, back in college in the early '80s. Bunker Hill, all gleaming steel and buffed granite, shines as the proverbial city on the hill, Reaganesque.

The annoying but accurate Mike Davis noted 20 years ago, pre-Rodney King riots (or "urban uprising" or "Justice rebellion" according to Davis and his cronies, whom I imagined influencing the glum bearded youth in a Mao cap who refused to applaud a spokeswoman's call for non-violence aired by "Jordan") in "City of Quartz" how this "urban core" keeps away the restive. This city is skilled, as a "carceral" setting that isolates those who resent the banks and towers. As I drove, and wound up going the wrong way in my diligence, I pointed up to my son to cock his head so he could see back over my shoulders a glimpse, awkwardly, of the BofA's massif, second highest on the skyline. Its logo shone in red and blue above the incoming whitish haze.

"Hundreds held in Occupy protests across nation"--this implies the SEIU as having more involvement all day, when the live-stream shows them leaving by mid-afternoon. Union reps served in vests as crowd control, which appeared to miff "Jordan" and his nearby marchers when they kept them off the street. I must say I side here with the authorities, for traffic was snarled that morning by the initial march on BofA. I have no liking for those who jam public thoroughfares, congested as workaday L.A.'s downtown core always will be.

"How will Occupy L.A. end?"-- the LAT wonders if it's time is up as a physical presence soon. Six weeks on, Lice infest, lawns die, and pot wafts, as my Occupy L.A.: One Month On previous entry had noted. This embeds many links, some updated since the original, to reflect media attention and competing reactions.

Photo gallery--shows the situation at the Bank of America, as well as OLA's home camp near City Hall and protests in NYC yesterday. This LAT online site did not feature my image, Arkasha Stevenson's print ed. photo of cops vs. sit-down protesters, but Pan African News blog site did. (So much for mainstream media.)

Elizabeth Cunningham's "Red-Robed Priestess": Book Review

2011-11-17T00:00:00.000-08:00

Imagine Mary Magdalen was born a Celt, foster-daughter of a hero who then rapes her. She then falls in love with a certain gifted foreign exchange student who comes to (what is now) Wales from Palestine. She rescues him from sacrifice by the Druids, so they must flee back to Israel. They will create a daughter, together. There he will meet his fate with --and apart from-- her. Meanwhile, her first-born daughter, taken from her by the Druids, a “misbegotten child of a misbegotten child,” grows up to lead a native rebellion against the Romanization of Britain.

After a career roaming the Levantine, where not only Jesus but Paul of Tarsus embraced her with various consequences, this red-robed priestess, born Maeve Ruadh, Mary the Red, sails from Gaul across the Channel. Her hair now faded to grey, at sixty she returns to the land of Britain where she was raised, to seek out her first-born daughter, rebel queen Boudica. During an uprising in Britain a generation after the Crucifixion, Maeve will witness through her shape-shifting self the fate of her homeland and the decisions made by both her headstrong daughters.

This ambitious novel completes Elizabeth Cunningham’s lively series, The Maeve Chronicles. As a first-time reader of Maeve’s adventures, I found the start of this complicated saga slower going. Still, Ms. Cunningham integrates the past gossip and guises of her appealingly flawed, wittily droll heroine deftly. The author blends what can be known from the historical record—as with the three earlier installments—into a winning mixture of fantasy, romance, epic, and meditation upon the struggle between Christian notions of peace and pagan insistence upon power, and how these principles themselves warp and mutate and shrivel as the cause of the Celtic Britons clashes with that of the Roman (or Romanized) imperial settlers.

Without taking herself or her creation of unpredictable, seductive Maeve too seriously, Ms. Cunningham manages to extend the relevance of this novel beyond a mash-up tale of “Magdalene returns to the Druids”. Her pace rarely pauses to allow us to catch up, but Maeve can shift via dream states conveniently across Britain if necessary, a helpful narrative device that compresses the defeat of the Druids on the Isle of Mon (today’s Anglesey off the northern Welsh coast) with the rebellion of Boudica that burned down London and two other Romanized cities before the Celts were crushed by the Roman forces. The predestined nature of the true part of this tale, therefore, requires skill in keeping the reader involved in a doomed epic. It is a testament to Ms. Cunningham’s ability that she can keep the plot moving rapidly while insisting upon depth given to the magical and mundane characters from history and myth who hurry across these busy pages.

Maeve, telling us her tale, muses early on about her relationship with the Roman commander. She recalls how both of them “kept straying into each other’s story, as if some incoherent dream insisted on inhabiting waking hours.” The chronicle, colloquially rendered in modern-day English, succeeds in avoiding the mustiness of many alternate histories. Maeve addresses herself to our time as well as hers, and this allows Ms. Cunningham to connect her predicament with that of anyone forced to take the side of those who murder or those who will die.

Tangled into the machinations of Celts and Romans, directed by the come-and-go voice of Jesus and the messages from earlier chronicles in this series now and then, Maeve struggles to make the right decisions, as her daughters must confront the presence of their mother in unexpected circumstances, and as she must admit uncomfortable revelations about her own background and her own long absence from the lives of her two girls.

“I sighed. Once again, the choice. Suddenly I was tired of spinning tales, spinning the truth, tired of spinning. They say deceit weaves a tangled web. But fabrication is an art form. The truth is the raw, and often unappealing, material.”

Maeve’s admission compels her to alter allegiances, and to test her loyalties. Ms. Cunningham presents a fair-minded portrayal of both sides in this British conflict, and this is enriched by Maeve’s own understanding of the lessons left for her by Jesus. “What does it mean to love your enemy on the eve of battle? Do you spare your enemy even though he won’t spare you? Do you kill him, because he will kill you? Which is worse, death or murder?”

The tragic resolution of this dramatic showdown comes after hints of stories perhaps nearly as ancient, the roots of King Lear and Hamlet, as well as plenty of Celtic divination and Druidic debate. Ms. Cunningham notes how she had to return, a final time, to allow her heroine the chance to return to her homeland, to settle the last story which Maeve’s long life had created. This final episode in The Maeve Chronicles, for all its carefully recreated battle and bloodshed, lingers in the mind equally as long for its introspection and revelation. This offers a welcome examination of the ties of love and the conflicts of loyalty on the intimate as well as epic levels. (Featured at the New York Journal of Books 11-15-11; Author's website.)

Ag breathnú míoltaí móra

2011-11-15T00:00:00.000-08:00

Fhreastail mé An Chomdháil Mheiricéanach do Léann do Éireann i Naomh Seosamh in aice leis Naomh Críos. Lhabhairt mé faoi an saor agus saothair de réir Máire Ní hAllmhuráin. Thógaidh sí i mBaile átha Cliath agus ansin ag imithe sí An tSeapáin ar feadh na n-ochtóidí go luath.

Chuaigh sí ar shiúl mar sin go raibh an dúil mhór aici ag maireachtáil chomh mar 'manach na tSen' ansiud. D'imigh sisean ar an taobh Thior i bhfad chun stadéar a dhéanamh Búdachas. Fuair sí bás nuair a bhí ach seacht mbliadhna ar fichead d'aois, i 1982.

D'fhan muid ar lar na cathrach i Naomh Seosamh ag trasna na basilica stairiúil agus dhá múseaim na healaíne agus teachneolaíochta. Shiúl muid ag cheantair sean 'solas-dearg' ina hoíche. Anois, measaim go raibh na colbhaí 'salach' leis carachtair amhrasach faoi na lampaí galánta fós.

Thug muid cuart air ár chairde dhíl Bob agus Crios ina dhiadh. D'ith muid ag am lón ag an caladh ina Naomh Crios. Bhi ag féachaint ar an chuain agus an clárchósan go hiontach.

Chonaic muid míoltaí móra léim ard amach as an aigéan. Ní fhaca mise féin riamh an oiread sin i mo shaol. Is radharc go mbeidh mé ag cuimhneamh ar feadh i bhfad. Is cuimhne liom aríst faoi ár shaol gearr i hiontas tapaidh agus an rúndiamhair laistigh de gach créatúr.

Watching whales.

I attended the American Conference of Irish Studies in San Jose near Santa Cruz. I spoke about the life and times of Maura O'Halloran. She grew up in Dublin and then left for Japan during the early Eighties.

She went away as she had a great desire to live as a Zen monk over there. She departed herself for the Far East to study Buddhism. Death took her when she was but twenty-seven years old, in 1982.

We stayed in the city center of San Jose across from the historic basilica and two museums of art and technology. We walked in the old "red-light"district at night. Now, I reckon the curbs may still be "dirty" with suspicious characters under the elegant lamps.

We paid a visit to our dear friends Bob and Chris afterwards. We ate lunch on the wharf of Santa Cruz. We viewed the harbor and wonderful boardwalk.

We saw many whales leaping high out of the ocean. I never saw myself so many at once in my life. It's a sight I will remember for a long time. I recall once more our short life in quick wonder and the hidden dimension within every creature.

(Above/Suas: Teach Solais Rinn le leon codhlata na fharraige/Lighthouse Point with sleeping sea lion. An caladh na Naomh Crios/Santa Cruz wharf. Photograph/Grianghraf le Chrios de Barra/Chris Berry, 30ú Samhain/October 30, 2011.)

Andrei Znamenski's "Red Shambhala": Book Review

2011-11-13T00:01:00.000-08:00

Why did early Bolsheviks sponsor expeditions for occultists obsessed with a Shangri-La? A Russian historian of shamanism answers this in his engaging study of characters caught up in an unlikely pairing. It matched Marxist communal ideology with New Age-tinged notions of totalitarian theocracy. It conquered, if briefly, the steppes of Mongolia as a vanguard for a pan-Buddhist takeover of Central Asia. Even before the October Revolution, plans to spark uprisings in the inner Asian fastnesses grew. Secret plans by geopolitical instigators circulated that the fulfillment of apocalyptic promises loomed, so the communist conspiracy to sign on fellow travelers here recruited strange companions.

Careful manipulation of shamanic myths and Buddhist prophecies crafted by self-made scholars and savvy spies sought, after the 1917 Revolution and during the Red-White Civil War, to advance the Communist cause. Convincing natives in the Siberian and Himalayan regions, a few adventurers reasoned this call to unity could challenge the British rule of India, weaken the Whites, and totter the Chinese warlords. Adventurers seduced by Orientalism told their Soviet overlords that native peoples across the East would rally towards liberation, and as ancient predictions came true, the nations that the U.S.S.R, inherited would take one giant leap closer to the Soviet-sponsored global triumph of the poor over the pampered. Professor Znamenski combines his expertise in shamanism and Central Asian teachings with Western esotericism, and the results, enriched by newly opened Soviet-era archives, provide an accessible entry into a fascinating saga.

He prefaces his narrative with essential cautions. Rather than try to argue how one version of the famously puzzling tantric and hidden teachings of Buddhism combined with native lore do or do not align with the true version of Shambhala's myth, he regards each version as fitting whatever time and place created it. Znamenski regards every religious or spiritual manifestation as fluid, and this open-minded quality allows him to remain detached from the notoriously convoluted applications of difficult texts to simplistic political solutions. Even if the characters themselves appear less than logical about how Buddhist teachings can square with Marxist materialism and Leninist class warfare, the author here wisely keeps his distance from such fruitless attempts to make sense out of nonsense. However, as an aside, this book appears under the aegis of a Theosophical press, so I note that when it comes close to assessing the veracity of Madame Blavatsky's own inventions, Znamenski chooses to remain guarded or nearly reticent.

Certainly, a century ago many looked to the East via Theosophy, magic, spiritualism, and the New Age to answer their doubts and dreams about the potential chaos and coherence of the modern era. The counterculture then romanticized, as did the Beats, hippies, and backpackers later, the appeal of an Eastern teaching. Both conservative and radical misfits reasoned that Eastern promises could redeem Western corruption and bring about equality, order, and the restoration of goodness over wealth. Many self-taught adepts wished or claimed to harness the inner powers latent in those who had forgotten arcane doctrines and magical methods. The repository for such solutions lay waiting in remote Shambhala, and the forces unleashed from its Central Asian or Himalayan hideaways could be harnessed to the Marxist goal of liberating the oppressed to fight for a golden era once the proles destroyed the aristocrats.

This tale opens--after some lucid and at times lurid introductory material on Tibetan and Mongolian teachings, cultures, and doctrine--with Alexander Barchenko. His occult pursuits influenced his idea for social reform. Discouraged by the Red Terror that obliterated the White resistance to communism after the October Revolution, Barchenko sought a peaceful method by which equal rights could be established and Marxism implemented without bloodshed. As a "Red Merlin" he wished to build a communist theocracy "controlled by peaceful and spiritually charged high priests of Marxism".

His boss became the chief cryptographer of the most secret of the Soviet intelligence agencies. This agency experimented with telepathy at a distance, re-engineering of mental powers, electronic surveillance, and what we would label parapsychology. Its chief, Gleb Bokii, agreed with Barchenko that Marxism possessed an appeal for Asians as a surrogate religion, if a transitional stage that could be manipulated among the peasants and nomads to convince them to join the Leninist banner and to bring about the victory of the downtrodden.

Many appealing details enliven this stage of the story, as a few visionary Soviets support this strange plan. Whispers of mind control, nudism, orgies, mummified penises, a talismanic meteorite, and black magic circulated, while Znamenski neatly relates how eccentric and bold many early Soviet intellectuals might dare to be in a time of cultural disruption and erotic innovation. Watching over this scheme, the secret police amassed careful files which would later weigh against Barchenko and Bokii, as Stalin's paranoid executioners extracted confessions interspersed with salacious details from the brief heyday of 1920s radical indulgence. These reports were edited by the secret police to condemn a decade-and-a-half later culprits who flouted convention in the first flush of triumphant Red fervor.

One who escaped the purges, Nicholas Roerich, takes on the role of a lifetime. Already well-versed in an odd mix of New Age and messianic ambitions, he and his wife had left tsarist Russia. This charismatic if manipulative pair of artists and occultists used whomever they could to further their hopes of a "Great Plan" that would unite Tibetan Buddhists across all of Inner Asia under the Panchen Lama. They even convinced a future vice president under FDR, Henry Wallace, to support their ideals, and the Roeriches erected a "Master Building" as a world headquarters which still stands on Riverside Drive today in Manhattan. The Roeriches dreamed of converting the planet to their scheme of transformed equality via enchanted transports of visions.

For a while, after the revolution, the determined couple returned to Red Russia to reconcile their ambitions with those of Marxism. They calculated that they could advance their plan better by aligning it with communist ideals of communal equality. They convinced a coterie to join them, financially or in person, to hasten their takeover of Central Asia, the epicenter for what they saw as an inspirational revolt of the peasants and monks against their lamas and warlords. The Roerichs donned costumes and roles as if natives. Nicholas posed as a reincarnation of the Fifth Dalai Lama so as to convince the local people of his mission.

He and his entourage plotted with the Soviets and indigenous sympathizers carefully, but their plans to enter Tibet to make it a Marxist-Buddhist realm akin to the region of Mongolia--that region had recently been swayed by prophetic revisions to accept a materialist-millenarian combination of mystical overlords and enforced communism--rapidly failed. The party nearly froze before they were allowed to enter the suspicious and firm jurisdiction of the British representative over the Himalayas in Sikkim. There ironically their claims that the Soviet mission had for its success to overthrow British dominion in India were proven, if indirectly.

The narrator comments how Roerich wore a face like a mask, one that it appeared he could remove at will. The couple, as with the other protagonists in this dramatic episode from early Soviet history, appear often as if to act with disguised motives. Znamenski uncovers in the archives of the secret police and recent studies from Russian-language sources the hidden facts unknown to the players then or until very recently scholars at large.

The early Bolsheviks boasted: "We are born to make a fairy tale into reality." For a few years, they tried to do this, in an unbelievable and rather cynical fashion. They chose to distort shamanistic teachings to play into mass resentment against imperialism and to upset the poor who would then presumably wish to seize wealth. While the juxtaposition of Buddhism with its teaching on non-attachment and Marxism with its materialist class warfare clash, this disparity escapes any comment by those participating in its proclamation in these pages.

The Soviets in hindsight tolerated the games of the Buddhist role-players as useful to their own strategies. For instance, they had the Roerich party travel under the Stars and Stripes so if their mission met with unwelcome attention, it could be disowned by the communists; if successful, it could undermine the White Russian refugees fomenting trouble, while it strengthened the power of native nationalists, who would be employed by Soviet interests to counter Japanese imperialism edging by the 1930s into Inner Asia.

By the time of the Japanese takeover of Manchuria, the U.S.S.R. tolerated less imaginative methods of exporting Marxism. The failure of world revolution to spread westward and Stalin's fears of rebellion caused the Soviets to contract their power inward. The fascist Japanese and the wary British were both feared. The Great Terror caught up those who had provided the vanguard of Soviet rebellion back in 1917. Even those who tortured and murdered Barchenko, Bokii, and thousands of loyal communists from the days of Lenin were themselves put to death a couple of years later. Stalin eliminated the cadre of any rivals to his regime, imagined or actual.

Near the end of this history, Znamenski tells of a representative vignette in this sorry saga. A former junior lama took over Mongolia as a communist fanatic. He vowed to make the feudal system into a more equitable one. He killed resisting monks and lamas and drafted the compliant remnants into the army or concentration camps. By 1940, the Mongol Buddhist clergy was wiped out. The lamas were sent off to Siberian prison camps. But many thought they were headed to northern Shambhala, the predicted land of bliss.

Those lacking specialized knowledge of arcana have not learned much of this story, for until the fall of the Soviet empire, many records have been sequestered or linger in Russian-language academic journals. A few very minor slips in English usage reflect the author's Russian origins, but these occasions are far outweighed by the valuable contributions he provides so the rest of us can learn about these events and their scholarly sources. The transcripts forced out of doomed prisoners about their role in this Red Shambhala project make for poignant reading.

They remind us of the fragile nature of idealism, and the moral costs of suppressing those who tried to temper the fury of the Red victory with some sensitivity to the cravings of the spirit and the capabilities of the mind. While the practical experiments of laboratories bent on superhuman creations failed as surely as did the subversive aims to spark revolt on the Mongol plains or in the Tibetan monasteries, the lesson of this unbelievable plot lingers in this thoughtful, instructive, and sad testament of grand hopes and puny fates.
(Featured at PopMatters 8-12-11; debate over this title ensues at Amazon US, but I stay reticent, although I posted this as my 1300th review there 8-16-11.)

Janwillem van de Wetering's "The Empty Mirror": Book Review

2011-11-11T00:11:00.000-08:00

This iconoclastic memoir provides one of the earliest "I went to Asia and tried to find enlightenment" narratives from what became the counterculture. After philosophy studies, affairs, working here and there, at 25 or so, in postwar Japan, van de Wetering winds up in Kyoto, ringing a bell he should not to enter a monastery to study Zen as a voluntary monk. As a Dutchman with no knowledge of the language or culture, he stands out in many ways; he says that he was among only 27 Westerners in Kyoto in 1958. His brisk, reflective, but restless and anarchic account shows what few back then witnessed: how, just as for others Zen met Beats, a fidgety young man seeks to better himself and to find truth amidst a world he seeks and flees from alternately.

Buddhism appeals to him as "a possible path, not a vague theory" that refuses certainty but eschews "questions about the why of everything" by "a disregard of doubt." (32) If the Buddha could do it, and others could follow this way, van de Wetering figures it aligns better with his skeptical mindset than other methods. He seeks to cut down his self without committing suicide.

He tries to get over logical ruminations or god-centered ideas. His master, once a neurotic boy, now a composed presence, encourages his wayward student: "The intellect is a beautiful instrument and has a purpose, but here you will discover a different instrument. When you solve 'koans' you will have answers which are no longer questions." (51)

Unlike his fellow, native monks, who get a somewhat easier way to solve koans to speed their way along the standard three-year stint required before they are ordained to take over temples and make their careers, as a volunteer monk and a foreigner, van de Wetering struggles against the regimen. He feels like a "circus bear" compared to the native-born monks apart from whom he lives in a tattered dirty cell. He knows that the Japanese work by many written laws, but also unwritten ones that keep them from killing themselves too often, so he learns with Peter and Gerald, fellow Zen "gaijin," how to balance his life with the monastic rigor.

He barely masters the half-lotus position, and how he can meditate remains to him and to the reader a mystery. He tries to stick with it for a year and a half. Anticipating the regular sessions of intensified practice: "that was why I had come, to visit an old Japanese gentleman who ridiculed everything I said or could say, and to sit still for fifteen hours a day on a mate, for seven days on end, while the monks whacked me on the back with a four-foot log lath made of strong wood." (79)

Peter reasons about "now" being synonymous with eternity, and doing what one must "now" for it to happen. Van de Wetering muses how so many answers given in Zen seem "brilliant, deduced from the one and only reality, but which I couldn't make use of because as soon as I started to have a good look at such an answer its message proved to be well outside my reach." (113) He seems to resist giving in to the compassion and detachment he admires and which he knows must be sought in dharma. But, in typical Zen form as non-form, is his master even a Buddhist? Han-san answers his pupil: "Is a cloud a member of the sky?" (140)

The later part of his stay gets blurred over. A shift inside's weakened him, but I felt this stayed too distant from the reader. It means he lives outside the walls of the monastery, with Peter as his tutor, but Janwillem appears to slacken in his discipline, as his wanderlust appears to return, and eventually he leaves Kyoto with little formal notice. He respects those he leaves behind, however, and this remains a jittery, self-deprecating, and honest attempt to make sense, fifteen years later, of what must have marked the author indelibly. For at his departure into where the "world is a school where the sleeping are woken up," the master tells him that he "is now a little awake, so awake that you can never fall asleep again." (146)

(For another account, see my review of Kaoru Nonomura's fine narrative. At thirty, he enters forty years later at Eihei-ji: "Eat Sit Sleep: My Year at Japan's Most Rigorous Zen Temple".) (Posted to Amazon 3-27-11 & Lunch.com 4-21)

Peter Matthiessen's "The Snow Leopard" & "Nine-Headed Dragon River": Book Review

2011-11-09T00:08:00.000-08:00

These overlapping works blend memoir with history, travel with insight. They present Zen Buddhism filtered through a keen eye and a sympathetic voice. While Matthiessen's familiar to many readers, these are his only works I've read, and as for "Snow" re-read, if after twenty years.

I remembered "Snow" as sharing with another narrative back enjoyed back then which I've returned to, Andrew Harvey's "A Journey in Ladakh" [reviewed here in the previous entry] a "drop-off" scene where all the noise vanished, as if a silent passage in a film, and a mystical experience unfolded on the page, floating into my mind. But, in "Snow," this time I failed to find it. It may be that my intervening reading, especially the past few years, in Buddhist studies has eased me into other accounts, so "Snow"'s impact was muffled, but in following Matthiessen through the Himalayas again, I enjoyed his trek, forty-five days at the end of 1973. He and a naturalist companion with their porters and guides trudged over the Nepal plain, up the river trails over into Inner Dolpo's enclave of a widely demolished (by the Chinese) or eroding (as Colin Thubron's companionable "To a Mountain in Tibet" documents recently; see my review) native culture where it perches on the edge of the Land of B'od, that land's vast plateau.

The spiritual side contends with the physical rigor. Matthiessen deftly balances his personal story with his wife's recent death from cancer serving as a poignant counterweight to his own adventure. The title seems to imply an adventure into the animal world, but as you will find, this symbolizes more than represents an actual encounter, which makes the quest to see the leopard even more engaging. Meanwhile, the mountains abide, as his Zen koan "why do the mountains have snow, but this peak is bare" appropriately accompanies his journey into his soul as he wrestles with the needs of the body and of the spirit equally.

He struggles to an understanding of the unity of all existence, he faces despair and disgust at his impatience and irritability, and he seeks hope. In a way, a very simple story, imaginatively told and magnificently rendered. While I wish photographs were included (all I had with the hardcover was one image I imagine of Shey Gompa, the monastery at the foot of the Crystal Mountain, their long-sought destination where the blue sheep gather near the snow leopard's haunts), their lack may push the reader into an inner imagining of the scenes captured so well in Matthiessen's sinewy, self-aware, disciplined prose. Like his mystical musings, the mountains and ravines, the terrible cold and isolating snow, the intense sun and the eerie atmosphere all combine into a memorable presentation of a man's search in the most remote and severe of habitations, where people live three miles high.

For "Nine," this title refers to the river where Eihei-ji, the sprawling monastery founded by Dogon, the iconoclastic, brilliant monk who started the Soto school of Zen, climbs up its Japanese slopes. This book places the core of the journals from his Himalayan trek in 1973 that also appeared in "The Snow Leopard." These are prefaced by his account of how Zen came to America, and how he helped build the upstate New York community he served at, becoming there a lay-monk. Interspersed nimbly are excellent summaries of Zen teaching. After the "Snow" passages, Matthiessen includes a travelogue-journal during his 1970s travels to Buddhist sites.

I felt this book provided some of the best insights into Zen I've ever found. Matthiessen's American commonsense fits well with Zen's practical, clear-eyed, boldly existentialist attitudes, and it's easy to see why Dogen becomes the most cited personage, with dazzling reflections prefacing each chapter. (See also my review of Brad Warner's "hardcore Zen" commentary on Dogen's "Treasure of the Great Dharma Eye" rendered as "Sit Down and Shut Up"!) Dogen's role as reconciling practice and everyday realities with ultimate truths and enlightenment, simply summed up but elusive and difficult to grasp in words, emerges through Matthiessen's interpretations vividly.

But often his chapters skip about, the "Snow" ones being drawn from his journals kept with frozen hands. He never shies away from his own delusions and his passions, as the intellectual heft and idealistic mission within Matthiessen's countercultural ambitions contend. He blends autobiography and anthropology, if from a post- Carlos Casteneda tone at times, given this work's shamanistic genesis and hallucinogenic sympathies.

While the "Snow" material (I read this right after re-reading all of the original "The Snow Leopard") skillfully excises the best of that book's contemplative moments, I wondered why it had to be repeated, as it tends to throw off the Japanese sections before and after these two chapters. The latter portion, as Matthiessen goes from site to site, piling up names and dates, loses the power of the introductory sections, where the pain of his wife's death (she brought him to practice Buddhism, overcoming his reluctance) from cancer overwhelms you alongside him. Pain also tends to madden the author, as he pushes himself in the strident Japanese manner to fight his own physical limitations and sit in "zazen" at punishing length at marathon "sesshins." He never shies away from his own delusions and his passions, as the intellectual heft and idealistic mission within Matthiessen's countercultural ambitions contend.

Both books sum up famously challenging Zen Buddhist philosophies and regimens. They combine a love for the natural world with a respect for the lonely path of those who share his need for beauty and clarity within some of the most rugged landscapes, as well as the most tamed, that Asia offers. Matthiessen's discipline nourishes his writing, which keeps sinewy and supple, while it also helps readers come closer to his own rather formidable commitment to master mountaineering and Zen, both short paths up steep slopes to vistas of wonder. (Posted and edited as separate reviews to Amazon 3-27-11 & Lunch.com 4-21 )

Andrew Harvey's "A Journey in Ladakh": Book Review

2011-11-07T00:04:00.000-08:00

Not a journey "to," but "in" this Buddhist enclave, before or as it succumbs to the rest of the world's ways, Harvey's quest takes in his own spiritual and existential condition as much, if not more, than his travels. While you gain a sense of how this barren, golden, light-bright landscape looks, Harvey shifts to the appeal of its monastic traditions, as he falls hard for Thuksey Rinpoche, a Tibetan refugee lama. Harvey meets Dilip & Moneesha, two delightfully drawn characters, up from Delhi, who introduce him. Gradually, Harvey's defenses erode and he learns what moves him.

Nature takes up much of the first portion of this carefully composed, often understated narrative. Compared to Peter Mathiessen's "The Snow Leopard" (see my review of this and the overlapping Japanese-oriented "Nine-Headed Dragon River") which takes place over the Himalayas around this same time, sometime in the 1970s, in another monastery also called Shey, "A Journey in Ladakh" does not give as much attention to the mountains climbed. One shortcoming for readers may be this relative attention to the conversations he has (he speaks many languages) and the thoughts he shares. The book turns more inward as it develops, mirroring the shift Harvey makes as his journey turns vision-quest.

Harvey's settled more in a few places and not as much a trekker as he is a pilgrim. Unlike Mathiessen, who comes to these mountains already a Zen practitioner, Harvey's a Cambridge-educated poet with a secular or disenchanted, detached perspective. His erudition's evident, if worn rather lightly, thankfully.

But as his friends and teachers here note, he wants to change from his English-educated, somewhat distant attitude towards the spirit, even if he does not realize it at first. He signals this subtle change as he walks to see a monastery, but he never gets there. Instead he stays in the lovely scenery on the way. "I have no choice but to be alive to this landscape and this light: I must let this light do to my spirit and my words what it has to." (66)

He knows the folly of his mission. Hans, a visiting professor, tells him that by his own academic fieldwork there as well as Harvey's presence, they attest to the erosion of what they seek to document and preserve in Ladakh. If Harvey "bears witness," a last testament for his readers to what's vanishing, Hans reckons: "aren't you inviting them to a rather corrupt party? 'Another moving study of a doomed culture'?" (96) With the Rinpoche, Harvey wonders what Hans'd say about his transformation as he seems to enter his teacher's mind. "In this old man from another, unknowable world the writer has found the perfect way to aggrandise himself, advertise his spirituality." (150) This self-aware skepticism about his own struggle to let go, in the Buddhist sense, enriches this study for the outsider, such as Harvey still is.

Even skeptical Hans and cautious Harvey admit they're moved by the generosity of their hosts. Drukchen, another lama, tells Harvey how the teachings represent the loss of illusion, of the end of "false hope or consolation," as Tibet falls and its teachings spread abroad through its exiled adherents. "Buddhism will flourish in the West," Druckchen predicts, for the West "is coming of age; it is becoming adult, able to bear the radical clarity of the Buddha, hungry for" the wisdom that brings "a practical, severe analysis of things as they are, of the mind as it is" (180), free of salvation unless it comes from within the seeker. Compassion, wisdom, and a hard look at reality's own constructs accompany this vision of absolute change, for those unable to believe in Christ as a god anymore, but only as a man.

A Swiss student, Charles, annoys but then appeals to Harvey's own search: not to use it "as an anaesthetic," to cling to "a great wall of experiences and meditative ecstasies and learning between me and the world," as Charles had done in vain. Instead, hang on to "no insight, no experience, no learning--it is to be simple and unprotected. It is to be practical, in the highest sense, with everything that is around you, with all the energies, good or bad, of the present." (191)

This is a difficult story of inner entry and outer adventure to control, but Harvey succeeds. He tells of an out-of-body experience as he watches a Tantric ceremony, and as he forgets "all my fear and self hatred in those moments," he sees insubstantiality surround him, all "a transitory fiction." (205) Later, Drukchen tells him of his confidence that Harvey must return to the West. The lama warns that "the East is not a large convalescent home for the West," a place to "play at being spiritual," but "it is a place of power, of new power, a new kind of strength which must be used in the world." If Harvey's sincere, he will succeed in sharing his discovery with his audience: "If what you have learnt is true, it will hold." (226)

Finally, as he prepares to leave, he visits the Rinpoche. He takes the Bodhissatva vow not to enter Nirvana until all sentient beings he can assist will precede him there, and he's a Buddhist instead of an "almost" one as his friends had noticed before. He is told: "The true journey is toward the enlightened self, and you are that already. You came, across your life, across Ladakh, to this room, to this morning, to me, and now another journey is beginning, the journey which you have travelled here to begin." (233)

I read this again after two decades, and like "The Snow Leopard," it sustains its energy and compels the reader to follow an outsider's struggle within these mountains to find beauty, meaning, and truth. Harvey's voice controls this compelling, yet modest, presentation of his own nuanced self-awareness. He conveys deftly his own evolution into a wiser, humbler pilgrim who returns with quite a story to tell us. (P.S. I reviewed the original 1983 edition pictured here; an unread by me 2000 version adds an afterword criticizing some sacred cows which some felt gored by, as Harvey since became a New Age-ish popular author and speaker. Posted to Amazon US 4-6-11 & Lunch.com 4-21)

Lisa Napoli's "Radio Shangri-La": Book Review

2011-11-05T00:04:00.000-07:00

A solid combination of travelogue and memoir, this takes us into a land where until recently, few could enter. And, with the tourist tax and limited access now, few can afford to visit. It reminded me of Jennifer Steil's Yemen encounter as "The Woman Who Fell From the Sky" (2010: see on Amazon US or my longer review on PopMatters): a driven but weary journalist in a high-powered profession, unattached and searching for meaning, on short notice and happenstance leaves the big American city to advise those in a remote country who want to become more Westernized in their media, within a strongly traditional culture. Like Steil, Napoli seeks love and finds it, so she thinks, among the ex-pats in the capital city. Yet, as readers will find, Napoli's maturity may make for a more satisfying moral than Steil's to her journey, as much delving inside herself as describing what she sees on the outside in this Himalayan kingdom.

Similar to Steil's time abroad in its scope and events, Napoli's itinerary during 2007, the Year of the Female Fire Hog, seems rather limited, for time and sights. She tells of what happens at Thimphu's newly launched Kuzoo 108 radio, even if her tale tends towards the everyday in a globalized pop culture blur that links her to her Bhutanese hosts as often as what keeps them still so much different than Americans. As she does not get out of the capital much, there's not a lot that happens. But her enthusiasm, tempered with her growing understanding of Buddhist transience, enriches her straightforward narrative. She's not a flashy writer, so the depth comes more from subtle transformations inside her, compared to the rapid ones in a nation eager to tap into what it sees as the excitement, comforts, and goods of globalization.

The irony of her (a native Brooklynite) leaving downtown L.A. (working for NPR's "Marketplace") to quiet down in this place that seeks to settle people into a happiness based on not materialism but spiritual balance does not escape her. She and her radio crew try to promote a "Symphony of Love" for Valentine's Day while she comes to terms with the lessons of what may appear to be lifelong love, but in fact may be a pleasant encounter. Her tempered wisdom works well in her telling.

Later, her return to Bhutan, twice in a brief time, brings already the sense of a rapidly Westernizing realm. It's one that appears in her perspective as a protective one, like that towards a lover, worried about the object of her affection becoming too altered, too quickly. But that attachment's not the Buddhist way, either, as she learns.

While I learned much less about Bhutan itself than what I'd expected, a bibliography, some fact-filled chapters late in the book, and a list of websites point us towards more information. The tone's therefore a bit uneven, but this may reflect her own preoccupations as they shift from first visit to follow-up complications. (I wish photos were included: they were needed to enhance the rather low-key account of what Bhutan looks like, at least beyond Thimphu, where she's settled in for most of the events.)

Napoli favors her own vantage point, as character-driven rather than focused on scenery or excitement, and she keeps the story a modest one. She reveals enough of her past to inform her own transformation but she does not linger. She keeps the story moving, and although the tone of later chapters, after her first return home and then back again, feels altered, she's changed from her Bhutanese stay. Her own sudden embrace of being a godmother, and her own insights as she connects more with a country in need of contraception and all sorts of careful planning with temptations all around it, make for a satisfying, delayed-coming-of-age tale. (Posted to Amazon US & Lunch.com 3-1-11)

Occupy L.A.: One month on

2011-11-03T00:02:00.000-07:00

We took supplies to the protest on its one-month anniversary. At night, downtown's famously empty, even with 30,000 hipsters, artists, and/or professionals having moved down there the past decade. Some of them undoubtably were watching the dancers, lit in white, as drums pounded, on the south side of City Hall. Peripherally, I noted them, but my wife and I, and later my younger son on our return visit that same evening, were more intent on weaving through the onlookers in the dimly-lit dusk all around the shadowy crowd, pressed onto the patio's uneven Spanish tiles by the crush of tents (30 on October 1st, two weeks later estimated at 350, and now...500?) that covers whatever grass had grown here in the pocket park--and which threatens the historic fig trees.

The first jaunt took my two dozen mint-condition books, mainly practical ones. I now lamented having sent hundreds of books to the thrift store a few months back on a summer cleansing campaign commanded by my wife, so not much remained that I judged of even slightly wide appeal. However, perhaps some diligent tent-dwellers may benefit from two copies of a great public speaking textbook, two more of a pair of fine rhetoric-grammars, one on multicultural communication with a testbank and instructor's guide included for a slightly out-of-date Business Communication set, so no harm done!. Perhaps a pristine literary anthology nearly a thousand pages, or odd reads gleaned from the garage. I hoped those books under a plastic sheet would be safe from the rain which would come soon, if the camp endured. My wife promised to come twice weekly with supplies "as long as it lasted."

The shelves were nearly full. Nobody around. It was hazy. As I crouched and found spots for my haul, I glanced up at Catherine Cookson and Jodi Picoult romances, Marxist tracts, a blur of furrowed colored spines of mass-market offerings in the unlit nook. However, I noted on the ground at the lending library in its tarped gloom a prominently placed paperback of Elias Canetti's "Crowds and Power."

At the First Aid tent, I noted how animated my wife looked. She found out they had, I suppose, enough condoms now, and maybe toothpaste--two earlier needs filled? Hairbrushes, festooned with Dora the Explorer, and combs and mouthwash were earlier ferried down there by her when she found out what was desired. Now, it was gauze--a sign maybe of the harsher conditions after the initial revelry?

We passed a few officers from the LAPD, standing and walking up the recessed steps off Main Street, at the back of City Hall. The photo above shows how tall this icon, on a cop's badge if you recall from "Dragnet" or "Adam-12," stands, even if dwarfed now by skyscrapers and L.A. Live a few miles south. These Blade Runner shapes prove a municipal harbinger with its $248 million in tax breaks to billionaire builders of Farmer's (as in Insurance) Field, about to be approved for the NFL team which apparently our city cannot flourish without, fast-tracked free of "job-killing" environmental (or traffic mitigation it appears) impact reports. Not publicized are the 40 digital billboards that will surround said stadium, visible from one of the most congested interchanges in an already gridlocked (even at night often) downtown, if not the blocks around City Hall.

Nearer the historic downtown core across the 101 Freeway--and adjacent practically to Skid Row--City Hall, diminished on the skyline downtown, is post-1960 off the beaten track, compared to where tourists strut and fans flock. That massive stadium's approved by the same city council and mayor who are wooed and wined by these tycoons in the municipal chambers, I suppose, above where now the main entrance (at least after hours) is cordoned off with signs directing you to the side where the LAPD waits. The protester in the photo above was three weeks ago, before I suppose the wide handsome steps off Spring Street were blocked off to us, as residents, visitors, donators, supplicants, voters, dwellers (it's technically illegal to be in a park after 10:30 p.m., but the officials have overlooked this for now), and/or citizens.

The Food Tent was in the center of the south part of the park, hard to get to as the tiled paths are the only way into the middle. Tents take up all the surrounding ground. An articulate young woman as its staffer told my wife she used Twitter; my wife scoffed and said the old fogies used Facebook. As we unloaded a shopping cart full of granola bars and Special K cereal, "Deirdre" told us that tap water was not available and that they'd run out of bottled water or jugs full of it. Cooking being prohibited, she informed us that bananas and oranges were favorites, and that peanut butter had run out. I smelled marijuana nearby.

We went to get our son from his theater rehearsal, bought four boxes of bottled water, some gauze, and drove back--he and I unloaded the water while my wife circled the block--you cannot park around this area. A line of white trucks with satellite dishes filled the spots in front of the county courthouse. My wife asked me why they were there, and I figured they were waiting in case something happened. (LAT's sample coverage on the site's lapse into slovenly bickering and how malt liquor's plentiful while nothing's donated for breakfast.) It only occurred to me after we got home why the press had lined up across the street from City Hall. Around the block from that very newspaper, grabbing more headlines, Michael Jackson's doctor's on trial for murder.

A black man in what seemed an orange Native American get-up (?) welcomed those who passed his prominent place facing Main at the front of the tiled path leading to the drum circle. I think he was selling votive candles. No other evidence of commerce could be found, even if the Green Party had a table and I saw discarded the inevitable evidence of any non-mainstream political rally, LaRouche flyers.

A woman was speaking when we had returned, wrapping up the day with announcements after the dance. In the shadows, just the other side of the dancing and drumming, the way to the Food Tent was gloomy, as if taken from some wartime footage, and I couldn't make out the back of the tent, so crepuscular its depths. It was if a refugee settlement emerged. The demographic tilted half my age. For all of its bustle, it was but a tiny encampment, limited to its little fringe of flat around a tall building, hemmed in by big buildings, pavement, concrete, laws, and cops.

Is this extremism from the left, wannabee hippies, our era's silent majority, a lot of malcontents lining up for grub? Growing pains of democracy, for all its mocked gawkiness? No Central Committee, no logo (I hear OWS wants a trademark, however), no buttons, no t-shirts--yet? Meanwhile, look at these downloadable posters here!

How dreamers, the downsized, deadbeats and Deadheads could move the powers that be to change seems sobering, so utopian. (See here for one skeptic's fine account of her conversion, in Oakland. Compare a sympathetic skeptic on OWS and a third Awl blogger reporting on Occupy L.A.'s inability to agree on banning pot from the park. Video of OLA. [Update: attempted march on Financial District 11-17 Live stream video.] Today's news: Obama spends a $100 million of PAC money against Romney in digital attack ads. Our mayor in this eternally Democrat city had handed out ponchos on one day of sudden rain last month. After an initial welcome, the City Council debates whether to move the restive camp.

My stance, despite--and amidst--spirited bickering pro-con over at my fellow Angeleno and political commentator John W. Smart's eponymous blog, has been to wait and see, and cautiously hope for reform outside the bipartisan system, pledged to and seduced by the capitalists. Many there criticized even my hesitant support, but many more join me (see Noam Chomsky's speech: he and Chris Hedges [after I wrote this, he was arrested at OWS protesting GoldmanSachs] are slated to appear at OLA on Guy Fawkes Day the 5th) in insisting that after bemoaning so much corruption and collusion among the corporatocracy that rules our nation and world, change must come, even if we are not able to control it the way we might judge most pragmatic.

I passed a man in an Anonymous-V for Vendetta Guy Fawkes mask. He held a smartphone up to his hidden gaze as he crouched on the pavement, interviewing it seemed a young woman in front of him, squatting, unmasked. We walked past so many signs, some scrawled and left on the dirt, some attached to tents, some overturned. "The First Amendment is our permit" stood out most.

Most of the small tents were shut tight on the hard soil against the chill. Which one was that three-person model we'd sent via the Occupy L.A. Amazon Registry and UPS a few weeks ago, I wondered? On my way out, I saw a silhouette behind a plastic sheet of a standing man reaching out to embrace another figure.

Haruki Muratami's "1Q84": Book Review

2011-11-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

Inventive, engrossing, and imaginative, this memorable novel will earn acclaim. Haruki Murakami blends fantasy, dystopia, speculation, mystery, murders, sex, death, radicalism, and love into nearly a thousand thoughtful pages. Originally published in three volumes during 2009 and 2010 in Japanese, the translations of Jay Rubin of the first two-thirds and Philip Gabriel of the concluding section convey its contents into fluid, natural, and straightforward, if slightly elevated and subtly nuanced, English.

"Things aren't always what they seem," a cabdriver warns the first of this saga’s two protagonists. A personal trainer, thirty-year-old Aomame leaves a traffic jam on an elevated expressway to exit via a hidden staircase on a fateful walk down back into 1984 Tokyo; her city and her life and her world may look different, the cabbie tells her, from now on. But beneath appearances, he says, one reality persists.

She will have ample cause to doubt this. Nimble in body and clever in mind, Aomame moonlights as a vigilante against men who perpetrate sexual abuse against women. During one such mission, as if her sensibility gets split in two, she wonders about her predicament. "Call it the Zen of the killer."

She starts to want to hear, as a signal of her departure from reality, a song first heard in the cab, the Czech composer Janacek's Sinfonietta. She suffers dislocation. Frenzied sex neither with her erstwhile lesbian friend nor the men she picks up (slightly balding, middle-aged) in bars can ease her spiritual and emotional frustration. She receives eerie glimpses into a strange realm, where she then sees two moons glow over our earth—a sign of the shift that the cabbie warned was coming as Aomame left the traffic jam, determined as if on impulses sent from beyond to escape 1984 Tokyo. What she enters, she reasons, she christens 1Q84: a question mark replaces the number nine in this Orwellian year.

Meanwhile, a man the same age as Aomame, Tengo, teaches mathematics and writes literature on the side, albeit unpublished. He takes on an assignment to edit, and to polish, a strangely half-assured, half-faltering submission by Eriko Fukada. Her tale, Air Chrysalis, has been submitted to a story contest. Tengo and the contest’s director conspire to rewrite the work as if hers, touching up the awkward yet appealing manuscript bearing the name of the seventeen-year-old dyslexic and oddly blank-eyed young woman under the guise of “Fuka-Eri”. Her mysterious past, and her gnomic lack of affect, confuse and intrigue Tengo. He finds, as he gets to know her, a premonition about Fuka-Eri; she shines a "special light" into the void he always has had, the "blank space inside him”.

Tengo and his colleague learn of another Orwellian connection in this 1984. After the communist radical protests of the 1970s led to violence against the Japanese state by some rebels and the establishment of an organic farming commune by peaceful dissenters, the latter faction began, itself fragmenting, to create "mindless robots" in a rural retreat. Here, Eriko Fukada was raised after her radical parents went underground. The elder Fukada resisted this conformity, but he and his family became enmeshed in a quasi-Buddhist mind-control cult. A reaction against "footbinding for the brain” as Tengo phrases it, after talking with Fuka-Eri, sparks his quest to learn the truth behind the fictional Air Chrysalis.

Aomame’s adventures alternate with Tengo’s search over the first two books, each 24 chapters. Gradually, Mr. Murakami introduces an investigator, Ushikama, hired by the cult to try to find out what Tengo knows about Fuka-Eri and the secrets which may be exposed by her book. He joins Aomame and Tengo in his own chapters in the third section, as the year of 1Q84 under two moons hovers over a transformed hyper-reality for these three seekers of the cult’s hidden truth.

Their lives become much more complicated. This tense situation creates an "endless battle of contrasting memories" for Aomame; she envisions at one of many stressful points a Tibetan wheel of passions--at its center, she takes courage by glimpsing love as its steady axle. As the novel progresses, Aomame and Tengo find their own imaginations and dreams directing them towards a destiny that Air Chrysalis appears to conjure up, in its evocations of what the Sakigake robotic cult may be up to.

Tengo faces his own challenges. He is haunted by a vision of his mother. When he was a baby in bed, he recalls her next to him, suckling erotically a man not his father. Confused, as a grown son he now seeks out his elderly, demented father. This subplot enriches the tone with themes of mortality, longing, and thwarted desire. His father tells him: "Your mother joined her body with a vacuum and gave birth to you. I filled in that vacuum." Not all is solved in a conventional fashion in this version of a mystery; some readers may be puzzled and others pleased by the open-ended nature of its plot. While Mr. Murakami neatly fits many elements together by its conclusion, he is careful, ironically if faithfully, to leave certain revelations or explanations unresolved, to increase verisimilitude.

Halfway through this trilogy, Aomame meets the Leader of the Sakigake cult whose mysteries Fuka-Eri has dared to reveal in her book. The Leader explains to Aomame how in the account of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough “one who listened to the voices” took control over the destiny of those he ruled as king. The nature of the voices he hears during his sacrificial rite—enrich as one of many cultural and literary aspects this erudite but unfailingly entertaining book’s forays into grace, belief, truth as verifiable and provable, lust, feline fears, and lunar appeal. On the Beach, “Stalinist Zen”, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Proust, Jung, the nature of a shifting force of good and evil, the food we eat, and the Esso slogan “Put a tiger in your tank” all feature as conversational or meditational topics for these erudite, yet accessible, characters. The final section will reveal the fate of Aomame and Tengo, as well as the destiny of he who enters to try to make sense of it all under two moons, private investigator Ushikawa.

The Leader convinces Aomame: "Violence creates certain kinds of pure relationships.” In the lethal confrontations which ensue, Aomame and Tengo try to find out more about the cult and its link to the Little People, whose presence may not be as benign as a Disneyfied version of such beings connotes. These creatures remain, while keeping the suspense alive, the most underwritten of its many intricately drawn features. This intentional lack of detail, however, invites the reader to invent backstories. This gap leaves (as a speculative work should) some unease and lack of closure that may strengthen rather than weaken the power of the novel as a whole. Facing these disturbing revelations, Aomame considers at one crucial point a decision that appeared too melodramatic for me, but in retrospect, Mr. Murakami may have included this scene, as a mystery writer may, to demonstrate how a character exhausts all possibilities in his or her determination to uncover the nature of the perplexity that propels the plot.

For the remaining portion of this ambitious novel, this review will reveal only what one protagonist figures out. "Two story lines at work, starting at different starting points but running parallel to one another." Luckily, Aomame, Tengo, and Ushikawa pause now and then to remind themselves and us where the plot has been headed and what has been figured out so far, during this alternate 1984 year.

Besides the deftly rendered details that uncover a conspiracy, which may remind a few readers of another sexually adventurous girl who kicks over a hornet’s nest even if she lacks a dragon tattoo, Mr. Murakami offers us appealingly recognizable characters. These are his lasting strength, for he never lets the metaphysical level of his tale overwhelm its resonance with our own longings and anguish.

At moments of passion, pain, and puzzlement, all of his figures remain human, fully rounded in their light and shadow. I missed them when I finished this book. None are caricatured, and the minor walk-on parts, as in a well-directed epic film or sprawling mini-series, remain as engaging as those main characters with whom the reader will learn to live with as if friends, or enemies, over the course of the hours and days spent immersed in this satisfying, off-kilter, and slightly open-ended combination of romance, adventure, urban commentary, novel of ideas, mystery, thriller, and speculative saga.

New York Journal of Books featured 10-25-11.

Samhain ar bhaile?

2011-10-31T00:00:00.000-07:00

Chuir mé cuairt ar na hÉireann coise tinne go Maigh Nuad dhá bliain ó shin. D'inis mé faoi é anseo. Ar feadh Oíche Shamhna, chonaic mé cat dubh ag trasna mo bealach in aice leis an droichead ard!

Ar bhaile, ní bhíonn a tharlaíonn sé i bhfad níos go hiondiúl. Níor thainig paistí ar ár tstráid ciúin mar riall. Ina theannta sin, thóg muid geata adhmaid nua os comhair ár dteach an tsamraidh seo!

Scríobhím seo roimh oíche eile, go fírinne. Ní mor dom mar go agam a bheidh ag taisteal ar mo bhaile ina gCathair na hÁingeal ar ais ag imeall Naomh Críos an trathnona ar leith sin. Beidh mé tar éis labhairt go An Chomdháil Mheiricéanach do Léann do Éireann i Naomh Seosamh in aice leis Naomh Críos.

Ina dhaidh sin, beidh muid tar éis fanacht trasna ó ár gcairde Bob agus Críos. Beidh Bob ag ceiliúradh a lá breithe. Chéiliúr mé mo breithe-lá leo Mheithimh seo caite, agus an Meitheamh roimh!

Dá bhrí sin, nílim go cinnte faoi ag insint agaibh anois. Níl fhíos agam fós cad a tharlóidh níos mó ansiud. Ach, tá veigeatóirí Bob agus Críos más rud é nach faoi dhraíocht. Mar sin féin, is féidir é a chinntiú go mbíonn agaibh de réir an áit álainn agus draíochtach suas ann.

Halloween at home?

I paid a rainy Irish visit to Maynooth two years ago. I told about it here. During the night of Samhain {Halloween}, I saw a black cat crossing my way near a high bridge!

At home, not much happens out of the ordinary as a custom. Children do not come on our quiet street as a rule. Moreover, we built a new wooden gate in front of our house this summer!

I am writing about this another night, in truth. I must do this since I will be traveling to my home in Los Angeles back from near Santa Cruz that particular night. I will have spoken to the American Conference for Irish Studies in San José near Santa Cruz.

Afterwards, we will have stayed across from our friends Bob and Chris. Bob will have celebrated his birthday. I celebrated my birthday with them this past June, and the June before!

As a result, I'm not sure what to tell you all about now. I do not know about what else will happen up there. But, Bob and Chris are vegetarians, if not under a spell. All the same, I can assure you all about the lovely, enchanting place up there.

(Cartún le/Cartoon by Mark Parisi.)

Scott Berry's "A Stranger in Tibet": Book Review

2011-10-29T00:00:00.001-07:00

After Colin Thubron's "To a Mountain in Tibet" reminded me of this account, I read it with pleasure. As an expat American living in Tokyo, Berry's well placed to navigate between cultures, and he retells with verve, erudition, and insight the saga at the dawn of the last century of Kawaguchi Ekai, the first Japanese to enter Nepal and Tibet, and the first non-Tibetan explorer since the middle of the 19th century to see Lhasa. Kawaguchi's priggish, hapless, and humanly unpredictable as he spends six years in the Himalayas, seeking to obtain a complete set of Buddhist scriptures to take home.

As an on-off again, but dedicated if eccentric Zen monk, Kawaguchi resists temptation by Tibetan women, resents what he regards as falls from grace by fellow monastics he meets, and reacts with honesty and bluffing both when his cover is about to be revealed by suspicious natives. They're determined to resist any incursion by a foreigner whom some regard, in their isolation, as even an "Englishman" sent via India to spy on Tibet, in a time, then as now, of international intrigue. Berry smoothly integrates details such as the evolution of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism, or the curiosities of the language, or the feel of village life, with aplomb.

Of his first stage, entering Nepal: "there is no more glorious time of year than January on the north Indian plains: the crisp, cool nights and clear, sunny days are enough to lift the heart of even the most jaded traveler." (52) In disguise as a Chinese monk on his way back to Lhasa, Kawaguchi found himself in a place where "one can get away with virtually anything by making it seem pious." (84) This was when he stayed in shape, on his typical one vegetarian meal at noon, at twelve thousand feet, by carrying rocks as he ran up and down slopes.

He tends to look down on Tibetan monks who were his hosts, who ate meat and sometimes lived with women: "Torn between his beliefs and the ragged reality of everyday life, Kawaguchi often had to give those who did not live up to his own strict standards the benefit of the doubt." (106) Later, the going gets rough. On the way across western Tibet's wilderness: "It was almost as if Kawaguchi himself were going over a checklist: robbery, exposure, starvation, snow blindness; now what else could possibly go wrong? Well, he had not yet been attacked by guard dogs." (140) The mastiffs rear up, on cue.

The first third of the book shows his early life, his preparations, which seem few, and his scholarly and geographical approaches before crossing into Tibet. The second part brings him into Lhasa. Berry shows us what Kawaguchi would have seen in 1901: the mix of peoples around the Potala on the Barkhor market route in the holy circuit around the Jokhang. Women with their hair in 108 plaits, menacing police-monks, crazed holy men, nomads in sheepskins, babies nursing, trinkets displayed, visitors and shoppers and pilgrims or all three, "smelling of butter and yak-dung smoke." (175)

Berry reminds us that Kawaguchi "was the first sincere Buddhist traveling simply for the sake of his religion" (176) into Lhasa. Unlike Burton or Burkhardt sneaking into Mecca, Kawaguchi came as a real pilgrim, if necessarily in secret. There his linguistic ease, his mastery of the sacred texts, and especially his ad hoc medical skills bring him to the attention of the Dalai and Panchen Lamas, for better and worse. The harshness meted out by the Tibetan lamas and their police to those who aided Kawaguchi in his deception and his escape (amidst lots of corrupt border guards and customs officials) darkens any expectation of this tale as a carefree retreat to a Shangri-La.

After his return to Japan, Berry shows how Kawaguchi cannot fit in again: he's spent too much time among the "barbarians," and his own people seem to suspect his tales. After eight years studying Sanskrit in India, he goes back for three more years to Tibet, and finds the land already changed, from its new contacts with the British and after having expelled the Chinese. This period is rushed by comparison to the earlier stint, but Berry seems to hint that as a more tolerant repeat guest in Tibet, Kawaguchi's more placid demeanor makes for fewer moments of deceit, danger, or drama. In his retirement in Japan, before he died in 1945, his mellowness winningly contrasts with his censorious youth among his Buddhist peers, at home and abroad.

Berry wraps it up with a postscript on his subject's first published account, "Three Years in Tibet," noting its many inconsistencies and sloppy preparation, while praising its vignettes of a land few had seen as explorers, but none other, at that time, had witnessed as a participant-observer, and as a pilgrim scholar. This is a moving, clear-headed, deromanticized, and skilled re-creation of the land and its longtime visitor, at a time when almost nobody else could have told what he could, as an Asian monk among his fabled confreres.

Illustrated with drawings and period photos, a few endnotes, and an afterword, Berry blends scholarship and travel, history and biography, with ease. (Also titled "A Stranger in Nepal and Tibet," originally issued 1989. Posted to Amazon US & Lunch.com 2-27-11. I reviewed Colin Thubron's Tibet trek here.)

Stephan Talty's "Escape from the Land of Snows"" Book Review

2011-10-27T00:00:00.000-07:00

This very accessible narrative carries wide appeal. With so many eager to learn more about the Dalai Lama, this popular, yet well-researched account aims at the curious reader who may want the dramatic story without too much historical analysis or political detail. Talty pitches this at such an audience, and he aims at the sweet spot of dramatic personal reports and thoughtful cultural observations.

Most of the action takes place in twenty-one days, after March 10, 1959 inspired Lhasa to join what had been a scattered uprising in the countryside against the Chinese PLA military occupation. The Dalai Lama's flight, disguised as a common Tibetan soldier, ensured the king would survive but his realm would vanish, at least as an independent entity. A third of Lhasa came to protect their leader after the Communists seemed to set up a trap for him, and the PLA and collaborationist officials and bureaucrats, bought off with bags of silver coins, earned the hate of most natives.

But in a nation where there was no word for "religion" such as was its ingrained presence in a sparse and remote land set up to run monasteries as the central institutions for an agrarian society under harsh conditions, and where for centuries even the words for "military aggression" had faded from memory, the Tibetans faced slaughter while struggling to justify self-defense by violent methods. The Dalai Lama could not express himself, as the Chinese watched, and in his year earlier in the 1950s when he toured China, Mao let slip in an aside to the Dalai Lama not propaganda of feudal overthrow but the truer Marxist truth: "Religion is poison, of course."

Talty tells this well. He cites many observers and participants, and the first half of the story brings the Dalai Lama's life into this milieu that he faced as he came of age and sought to direct Tibet just as the newly victorious Chinese entered this newest of their territories to "liberate" in 1950. Shen Choa, a diarist with the PLA in 1959, demonstrates the gap of "false consciousness," perhaps, between supposed liberators and those whom the Marxists could not believe took up arms against their armed emancipators: "They are raising up such havoc all through the city that it's as if some imperialist invader had entered our land." (qtd. 84)

Meanwhile while the CIA had aided Khampa rebels (see my review of John & Elizabeth Roberts' "Freeing Tibet" for more), many stayed ignorant. Allen Dulles, CIA head under Ike, did not at first know where Tibet was on a map. Its isolation meant that few in the West knew much more than romantic stereotypes. Talty discusses the "foreign brother syndrome" which celebrated the Tibetan "who shares the West's values," somehow preserving them from antiquity while separated by centuries and geography from them today. (But this is a point he does not cite directly, only via "an expert," and this section lacks full documentation, although on the whole the book, seen in proof galley, appears to list sources conventionally. It also merited photographs; some maps lack detail.)

The second half of the book covers March, when the Dalai Lama's poignant escape begins, and when the rebellion bursts into an heroic, but hopelessly outmatched, ten days or so of war in Lhasa as monks and citizens fight the PLA artillery. He would have heard the propaganda loudspeakers: "You are like ants scratching at the elephant's feet. China is as mighty as the sun and wherever there is sun, there the Chinese are also." (123)

These fearsome conditions worsen, Talty intersperses well the saga of the Dalai Lama's clandestine flight, while Lhasa learns of his escape only to fight back all the more against the Communists and their sympathizers. When they learn of the leader's vanishing under cover of night, the danger grows, for turncoats and spies lurk. (Chogyam Trungpa's "Born in Tibet" --also reviewed by me--offers a similar story, from a monk's experience.) The Dalai Lama and his entourage face pursuit across grim and formidable conditions that daunt even the Tibetans.

Outraged and embarrassed by the Dalai Lama's plan, the Chinese attack those back in the capital. The vast monastic fortresses turn chaotic charnel houses. One defender's account is summarized: "Soepa remembered conversation after conversation with people who emerged out of the darkness and the billowing dust, only to disappear again on an errand or to be scattered by a shell dropping from the sky." (146) The bombardments and bloodshed gain vivid description as Talty mixes primary accounts, interviews archived, and oral histories skillfully.

When news of the desperate escape attempt reached the West, a race for reporters began. Two London-based reporters, the proto-activist George Patterson, and the celebrity yarn-spinner Noel Barber competed to get to where the Dalai Lama seemed likely to cross into India. A New York Daily News headline captured the mood: "Godless Reds vs. a Living God in Tibet" that summed up Cold War sensationalism mixed with tabloid Orientalism.

Tibet as a real place, too, turned famous "just as it ceased to exist," and Talty mentions (if in passing) how its transfer into today's globalized "place of mind" and as a "cause" started in 1959. The results, which are familiar if still overlooked by too many eager to emphasize the trade and economic benefits brought by the Chinese at the cost of cultural destruction and raw genocide, show the difficulty of knowing precisely what happened in the aftermath of the Dalai Lama's flight. Talty estimates that at least 1:5 Tibetans died.

Those who lived may regret their situation. The labor camps and killing fields wiped out many, while other Tibetans took advantage of the overthrow to persecute landowners, settle scores with rivals, and to confiscate property. In exile, the Dalai Lama emphasized the noble pursuit of freedom, for what he had gained for himself, he knows, comes at a tremendous loss to his homeland.

Fifty years later, Talty visits for a short stay allowed only under constant surveillance in "a parody of a police state." Lhasa, it is rumored, is miked and monitored in tourist areas, and Talty and his ever-present guide find little to celebrate. However, "Lhasa exists around an absence" of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. Even as his books and photos are banned, the people manage, surreptitiously but steadily, to pay homage to his presence. (Posted to Amazon US 3-29-11 & Lunch.com 4-21)

The Dalai Lama's "Beyond Religion": Book Review

2011-10-25T00:00:00.000-07:00

If you've read a few books by (or interviews with) the Dalai Lama, much of his message here's familiar. Rather than a drawback, this may be an advantage, for he (and his editorial team) winnow down the essential kernels of wisdom into an accessible, brisk review of compassion and morality rooted more in what we have in common rather than what may religiously, culturally, or politically separate us. He makes the analogy of tea--it's mainly water, so the particular flavor of our own blend as if in a religious context effects the whole drink far less than the basic nourishment given by the primary ingredient, the universal liquid. In ethical terms, what we yearn for as righteousness and lovingkindness resembles the common nature of water, more than the religiously flavored tinges of a particular tea vintage or sweetener.

To connect this approach to secularism, he turns for this exemplar of "ethics for a whole world" to the Indian concept that tolerates and respects expressions of religion (as in the Charvaka school), whereas the Western historical view tends to regard the secular state or mindset as opposing that of faith. While the Dalai Lama does not deny the good done in the cause of religion, he figures it's far more imperative to find a common level of ethics that people of all or no religions can agree upon. This stems from compassion, that Buddhist essential ingredient coupled with wisdom. By broadening the scope of his teachings so nobody reading this little book of advice can feel left out, perhaps it can widen the impact of his guidance. There's a winning humility in this book that seems very difficult to argue against.

The core of this book, thus, takes up a venerable theme of the Dalai Lama, how to gain personal and then social happiness, and this progresses into compassion, for one's self, and those around us, all of creation. He's not arguing for meekness or escaping conflict, but taking it on out of a sense of righteousness, instilled with the determination to defeat injustice, and who could argue with that? Awareness, in his Tibetan-filtered training, necessitates the establishment of the harmonious goals of science of mind schooling that the Dalai Lama figures can apply to any human being, regardless of religion or non-religious outlook. He detaches as it were the cultural underpinnings from his own background, so as to elevate mindfulness and "educating the heart."

His scientific and cultural reflections about goodness and human potential are ones he has pondered before, and how could he not, given his orientation? (For instance, see my reviews of his "The Universe in a Single Atom" or the interviews in Pico Iyer's "The Open Road.") The gist of this calmly conveyed look at how justice, well-being, and equanimity can be cultivated or "familiarized" by the meditator and the committed actor who wishes to direct goodness from one's self outward, therefore, follows Buddhist prescriptions for healing and detaching one's self from attachment to transience. It's a low-key collection of thoughts, to be read slowly. There's nothing really new about this compendium, and that in itself is a recommendation, for it comes as it were time-tested from the Dalai Lama's own encounter with a fulfilling, peaceful, and principled way of life.

As in many of his works, the Dalai Lama offers altruistic advice in discerning good, furthering ethical treatment of all beings, pursuing an interconnected role in society and in spirituality, and dealing with destructive emotions such as doubt, anger, and fear. Patience becomes key as he concludes this short book of advice, for nothing seems as simple as many leaders in politics or the pulpit may make it seem! Human values, this "old man" tells the reader, need to be applied now more than ever, as seven billion people must integrate as an imperative, however gently phrased, given the demands of a complicated interrelationship that pulls us all in together. (Posted to Amazon US 9-27-11)

The Dalai Lama's "The Universe in a Single Atom": Book Review

2011-10-23T00:00:00.000-07:00

With my interest in what happened before the Big Bang, Buddhism, and ethics, I figured this short book might prove a welcome counterpart to my current listening to the enormous audiobook of Brian Greene's examination of the laws of the universe, "The Fabric of the Cosmos." The Dalai Lama manages, through I assume the diligent help of his translators and editors, to convey succinctly his lifelong interest in science and space, and this reads smoothly. As with many of his musings rendered into English, this feels more like a transcript than a text, and it has an oral quality of thoughtful conversation with an attentive listener.

My favorite sections were on the beginningless universe of Buddhism and how the concept of tiny "space particles" might align with the quantum vacuum idea of astrophysics now proposed: the universe never came out of nothing, but was a residue from what astronomers (if not the DL) call the Big Splat, and so the universe came out of the collapse of a preceding universe before whatever preceded the Big Bang.

His reminder how Buddhism favors first experiential empirical testing of a concept, then reason, and only third scriptural testimony meshes nicely with his emphasis about the scientific worldview's compatibility, or dominance, over what even dharma may claim if the teachings do not hold up under modern evaluation. This sensible approach provides a welcome alternative to the difficulties that literal or fundamental interpretations of religious traditions, or political or ideological ones for that matter, may represent for many apologists. His openness to the wonders and revelations of the natural world, seen and unseen, enliven his recollections.

I also liked his recollections of conversations with such as David Bohm, about the danger of seeing as racists, Marxists, and extreme nationalists do nature and the world as "inherently divided and disconnected," and how the DL relates this to Nagarjuna's warning about believing in the "independent, intrinsic nature of things" (51) as leading us into attachment, karmic entanglements, and afflictions of suffering. Still, as with much here, the insights may rapidly fade as the author moves on to another, loosely related topic within each chapter. For instance, a few pages on (63), he goes into the Prasangika Tibetan school of neither idealism nor materialism, but instead "relative" reality of the external world, but then this is left behind quickly. A suggested list of where to find more about many subjects raised in this short book would have enriched its utility.

However, many chapters seem erratically organized, as if His Holiness is talking to you about one topic before veering off on a tangent or suddenly switching to another sub-topic. Therefore, the nature of this collection of chapters appears more as if talks transcribed than their actual written form, and the looser nature of this volume may have its own advantages or drawbacks for an audience curious about "the convergence of science and spirituality." I wanted more about where to read more--say, about David Bohm's ideas--for while an index is provided, no reading list or annotated bibliography was appended.

A lot of ideas in this book gain some elucidation, even if many remain as mysterious to Buddhists as they do to today's physicists. The DL asserts logically that a primary cause shaping the universe must be outside the laws of causality, but I wondered naively why the First Mover if such could not simply (if so omnipotent) will causation into existence with creation; but, perhaps this betrays too traditional a theistic or scientific stimulus? All the same, in this book, the nature of much of the cosmological content must remain ultimately speculative.

Similarly, the Darwinian aspects are hit and miss; I was never quite sure why Buddhism does not analyze the imprint of sentience into matter, rather than follow the progression from inanimate matter to animate organisms. Maybe due to tradition, the DL glosses over this shift, likely as Buddhism did not divide as Western science has the division between human and animate beings, but between instead animate and inanimate material as itself existing in a world not so much evolved over time as already existing and shifting between karma-driven states of existence for sentient beings? This aspect is developed in this discussion, and it does move the reader to consider how Eastern models stress compassion and altruism over competition and aggression as the Western expectations for why evolution favors certain mutations over others.

In turn, this prepares for an elegant chapter on ethics and genetics. After a long discussion of consciousness and karma, parts of which eluded me, the thoughts the Dalai Lama shares about moral considerations about genetic breakthroughs and applications reminded me of how his insights remain valuable for all of us. He closes with a reflection upon how valid non-scientific models of understanding remain within a world set on a materialistic, reductive explanation for the facts and mysteries around us can be. The spiritual side reminds us of the Buddhist goals of wisdom and compassion when so much of science leaves us forgetful of the need for the ultimate aim of progress that betters humanity. (Posted to Amazon US 9-22-11)