Gary Snyder, Tree Canopies & Suburbia.

Gary Snyder, Tree Canopies & Suburbia.

 Dana Goodyear's "Zen Master" profile of Gary Snyder (see link to abstract below) in the New Yorker cannot be found in full on-line, which makes me wonder I subscribe; you'd think that paying for the issues would allow you access, but this imperious publication sniffs at displaying all its wares, even for us paying for them in print. I've never read Snyder, but I happened to find out in my recent Buddhist reading an aside about a poem he'd done on the goddess Tara, about whom I'm interested in, even if my etymological forays detailed here last summer came to naught but a coincidence in linking Éire with Aryan with Himalaya, the Indo to the European.

Goodyear's piece dutifully tells us what I needed to know, even if it didn't inspire me much. She gives few examples of his verse; the one I liked best I've included. What connected this article with one in the New York Times (also see below) that I found the same morning, in its "Escapes" section, on tree canopy zip lines (an unfortunate combination of four words I wish had never been yoked)? That old paved paradise and put up a parking lot, Joni Mitchell's follow-up warbled to her own urging all those hippies to get back to the garden.

Nevada County's booming, as its southern section deepens Sacramento's concrete footprint. Meanwhile, lured by Snyder who, somehow on a self-proclaimed working-class poet's income, bought in his Beat days a hundred acres on San Juan Ridge in the northern section. Part Japanese farmhouse, part Indian lodge, Kitkitdizze pioneered what's now an extended community of like-minded seekers. Students from Berkeley and Antioch College helped him, and many, I reckon, never returned to the dorm.

Since Snyder raised his place in 1969, thousands left and leave smog and smoke to build geodesic domes, kerosene-lit cabins, and haul perhaps a VW bus or two amidst pines and ponderosa. I remember noting the preponderance of signs for yoga teachers when I drove through there a while ago. I speculated on the ratio in the local economy of "off-the-grid" enterprises to legitimately licensed businesses. Ananda-- an offshoot of the Self-Realization Fellowship (predating even the Beats back to 1925) that crowns its own eminence a mile from where I write this, long since absorbed into northeast L.A.'s roofs and Range Rovers-- set up its yurts, so to speak, there. The mountains teem with pot growers, countercultural dynasties, and earnest types that for fifty years now, starting with the Beats, learned about this region's charms.

Yet, even as I recognize how we need nature, and how five decades worth of Beats and hippies have beckoned so many to enter it, the treatment of Snyder ignores an irony inherent in this native of the Northwest's lament. He preaches getting away from it all, but around him, in his exile, he will gain disciples no less than the medieval hermits turned their reclusive huts into monasteries, or Jesus himself when John and Peter, on Mount Tabor, told Him it'd be a cool idea to set up tents there and camp out. We cannot help but bring with us our own axes when we seek to live under the branches.

Snyder had joined Ginsberg and Kerouac at the Six Gallery reading in the city where he was born, San Francisco (he was raised on the outskirts of Seattle, grandson of a Wobblie, son of a dairy union organizer) fifty-three years ago this month, in 1955. There, "Howl" first proclaimed itself in public; "A Berry Feast" by Snyder may not have become as iconic, yet its message became such, repeated in hundreds of songs, stanzas, and stories about ticky-tacky little boxes that all look the same. Goodyear:

"The poem, which traces the destruction of forests to the building of the suburban house-- 'a box to catch the biped in'-- is infused with the Buddhist idea of impermanence. It forecasts a time of 'People gone, death no disaster,' and ends with Coyote surveying a depopulated city where resilient nature still thrives-- 'Dead city in dry summer,/ Where berries grow.'"

My father-in-law, dead now just over a year (and a dozen years older than Snyder), in the Depression fed himself with blackberries in the fields around Puget Sound himself, much as Snyder might have when he "had grown up poor in Stumpland," a logged-out district. Visiting Seattle last year, I contrasted its confident, brisk feel with the far more remote terminus where Al'd been a child, Port Angeles. He'd lived both places. I wondered where he'd wandered there, in fields and along its ferry building, far across the Straits of Juan de Fuca.

His daughter's grand-niece and her family moved, post-Rodney King riots, from Layne's childhood San Fernando Valley, "the Valley," to Grass Valley in the splendid Gold Rush country. Where Lola Montez once kept a bear down the street from her protegee Lotta Crabtree (guess who had the better name, the former Eliza Gilbert born in Co. Cork; see Bruce Seymour's excellent biography that I reviewed on Amazon), and where a gal at least in post-49er times could walk about town without fear of assault. Yet, she's moved back to the city, to pursue her own dreams in the realm of comedy-- such is the lure of fame in Hollywood.

I wonder if for every restless resident who leaves the forest for the gridlock, there's another who makes the reverse journey? Layne found, when holding a "New Leaf" reusable bag at Trader Joe's for the checkout clerk to fill, that the employee was a recent grad of Felton High, now in Silverlake to follow her own media-fueled storyline. It'd be a neat exchange if city mice could change places with our country cousins, so no more trees would have to topple. That'd keep our sprawl under control-- if not by polyandrous marriage as the thrice-wed Snyder once advocated-- with fewer parking lots, but as the ads in the NYT remind us, with nearly all of our net demographic growth driven by immigration. 400 million by 2039. 60 million, perhaps by then, in California. The Highway 49 corridor now intersects with the exurbia east of Sacramento, and subdivisions invade the Sierras.

So goes the West, others scoff. All of us plead guilty who live here, from Edward Abbey on. My house may have been the first one on this street, about fifty-five years ago, so does this make its builder equal to Snyder? After all, there was nobody else here before. So, why should I complain?

I ponder these issues while the bulldozers keep whining and the saws keep whirring. I have had to go down to my study for a respite from the fracas, day after day, years on end. Hearing birdsong (even if as Alexander Theroux puts it in his endlessly quotable, endless novel "Laura Warholic": "Birdsong is squabble.") out my kitchen window today as I did the dishes startled me, so close was it and so little of it I've listened to lately.

The Lebanese man's moved his extended family into the triple-lot house still under construction (I've lost count if it's going on four or five years now), even as the for sale sign now perches outside its dirt, graded from what once was the end of a declivity where my boys romped, if under my careful eye. Barren ground in every direction. A few yards away the other side of my home, a Filipino family sold their fresh structure, no yard, hacked out of the sandstone cliff, to what so far seem absentee African American neighbors. Mexican investors next door to that still-raw edifice have not finished their cookie-cutter triple-story framed carbon copy. Across from it, on the side stretch next to our immediate neighbors also from Mexico, a couple of Latinos have parked an old Winnebago. They're living there. I can hear their generator humming when I step outside.

Quod erat demonstrandum. People from everywhere else keep coming into our megapolis. The appeal of a brand new home, or even a site to watch across from three such structures, entices many still. So too, the past silence our household enjoyed gradually fades, as mornings dawn with a engine's roar, while newly installed garage and security lamps outshine every hazy night.

Yet, the Ukrainian immigrant who came here from the Soviets as a child lives happily with her Modesto-born partner next door, and having bought the land between our houses, they've freed that patch-- as vegans, former citizens of both Santa Cruz and San Francisco, and therefore kindred spirits to Kitkitdizze. Destruction loomed when yet another pair of families, recent arrivals, were starting to erect their own two-story tribute to the American dream. Only the collapse of the real estate bubble rescued the trees, birds, and those damned squirrels. I suppose, with the Zen impermanence of all, amidst articles on extreme sports high in groves meant for avians and not bipeds, we must be grateful for small mercies. The Wright Brothers newfangled idea can only go so far.

We're all complicit. We all crowd no longer open space. None of us asked to be born. So, how do we soften our primal stomp? I agree with my recent Hello Quizzy results; in 1400 A.D. I surely spent a previous life as a monk, likely a cranky, bookish, myopic Irish anchorite! I long to end up in Northern California far away from this encroaching din. Probably in a wooden box for bipeds. Right next to where, idealistically, a century-old legacy of earlier, spiritually connected Christian campers sought a dignified retreat in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Unfortunately, since this past summer, the zip lines hoisted by their less-respectful great-grandsons now imperil the watershed. Mammon changes everything.

As Snyder valiantly argues in Goodyear's essay: "The watershed is the first and last nation whose boundaries, though subtly shifting, are inarguable." He also warns, presciently: "If public lands come under greater pressure to be opened for exploitation and use in the twenty-first century, it will be the local people, the watershed people, who will prove to be the last and possibly most effective line of defense." Rightly, Snyder's been credited by Bill McKibben as a leading voice in bio-regionalism, living off the land and as close to it as possible.

Still, I cannot tally his glee with saving up his twenty-five-year-old vintage cabernet to go with the venison he looks forward to hunting. I'm confused about how his promotion of "'ahimsa,' or non-harming," works with such a lifestyle, but then, the Dalai Lama craves Bacon Bits. (He, like other Tibetans, long ago gained a reprieve from vegetarianism due to the rigors of survival on the plateau; he tried to go meat-free but his health suffered.)

The bullfrogs he cultivates before brining, I admit, earned slightly less sympathy from me, but I do lament my own childhood when in the foothills I tried to stone to death mating toads, as if some warped manifestation of a one-man biblical Sanhedrin itching to make an end of a magdalene caught in flagrante delicto. Karma comes around, and I have contemplated what demerits I unknowingly racked up in Thompson Canyon. That frenzy to couple no matter what peril lurks-- our samsaric imprint. That the deities are shown in blissful yab-yum without the onerous difficulties of spawning may be one of the most appealing delights of the Buddhist nirvana.

And so, with such urges to reproduce, earth fend for itself, we all carry on in lower realms of humans, hungry ghosts, animals. With our country facing another hundred million people within a few decades, and half a billion soon after, the loss of trees, open space, and farmland pains me more deeply as I grow older. One of my formative experiences was both living by a lemon grove and playing in the chaparral that stretched to those frog-happy foothills north of Claremont.

And, one of my most heartbreaking sights has been seeing, when I returned a decade later for grad school, the one time I went past where I had once hiked, on my bike looking for a place to rent, and found that-- exactly in the same retail and architectural models as in Nevada County-- stucco and strip malls blanketed the horizon where orchards, scrub, and pocket goat or rabbit ranches once had nestled. I never went in that direction again during my year in Claremont. Nor have I since then. I can't reconcile today's sterile panorama with that cherished as an imaginative ten-year-old.

"The Bath": Gary Snyder.

Sweating and panting in the stove-steam hot-stone
cedar-planking wooden bucket water-splashing
kerosene lantern-flicker wind-in-the-pines-out
sierra forest ridges night—

Masa comes in, letting fresh cool air
sweep down from the door
a deep sweet breath

And she tips him over gripping neatly, one knee down
her hair falling hiding one whole side of shoulder, breast, and belly,

Washes deftly Kai’s head-hair
as he gets mad and yells—

The body of my lady, the winding valley spine,
the space between the thighs I reach through,
cup her curving vulva arch and hold it from behind,
a soapy tickle a hand of grail

The gates of Awe

That open back a turning double-mirror world of
wombs in wombs, in rings,
that start in music,
is this our body?

"A hand of grail/ The gates of Awe." After the recent closure of the book of Life, sealed for this next now new Jewish year, after the ten days of Awe, by its Author, who will die by fire, who by water, who by another's hand, who by one's own-- these phrases reverberated for me.

"Zipping Through the Treetops" by Roger Zummer, New York Times, October 17, 2008.

"Zen Master" [Abstract only.] Dana Goodyear, The New Yorker, October 20, 2008.

Photo Caption from the NY Times article: "COME FLY WITH ME. Zip lines have become popular at ski areas and other sites and get visitors close to fall foliage. At the Spring Mountain ski area in Pennsylvania, Rick Buchman Jr. zooms by."

At least Mount Hermon was not mentioned; one advantage of East Coast-centeredness. Visit for essential information on how this Santa Cruz Mountain site's redwoods and the watershed of Bean & Zayante creeks face assault by thrillseekers: Mount Hermon Christian Conference Center

Black Mountain: "Into the Future": Music Review.

One of the leading contenders for our decade's innovators? Like their debut, also reviewed by me, I still argue that the band has room to grow. This second LP shows their maturity. The male and female vocals blend and twist around each other appealingly and sinously. The bass-and-drums combo can provide solid support that ranges from Zep-stomp to gentle balladry. While I predict their best music, luckily, will still be to come, this album as with their first one, grows on you.

It's taken me a while to get the feel of it. Working with early 70s influences, not only on the epic "Bright Lights," but on the other tracks (and if you can find the limited edition bonus disc, there's more evidence on its first track, all on "Bastards," more of a Paisley Underground Opal-Rain Parade-Dream Syndicate mood crossed with a bit of Jesus & Mary Chain), the bridging of 1980s college radio's neo-psych with 70s classic rock makes for a clever mix. I'd like to hear the band, as with Oneida, expand into their own take on Krautrock and more space rock, as with Farflung. What I continue to find this Vancouver band's strongest element: the voices, and their layered production.

On top of flute and harmonium, keyboards and processed effects, you can hear how the folkier, more wistful aura of West Coast late-60s sounds carries into the heavier delivery of more raunch and thunder. Yet, the band keeps the pace off-beat, and shifts the songs and their order on the album to stave off sameness. It's an intelligent record, not that commercial, yet not that obscure, and it deserves a wider audience.

(Posted on Amazon today, conflating the bonus disc limited edition review with the one for the single disc.)

Ag Léamh Leabhair Sula Faighim Bás.

Scríobhann muid as Gaeilge faoi bás ach an méidin seo de dhifear. Gheobhaidh muid bás. Sin é, faigheann muid bás le cuidiú bás ag fáil chugainn. D'fhoglaim mé an leabhar mór ó chianaibh, "1001 leabhair go caitheamh tú léigh sula faigheann tú bás." Inniu, inseoidh mé faoi ag dul teidil beagán de a chuardach ar an leabharlann ina Pasadena inné.

Bhí scór rogha go raibh maith agam ann atá ag scríofa ar an mír páipéir liom. Níor fuair mé gach uile acu ar an áit ansin. Féach mé roinnt ar na seilfeannaí finscéaliochtai gceann cúpla nóiméad.

Iarraidh mé a lorg na úrscealta le Séamas Mac Mhuirneachain Ó Fearghail le gairid. Areir, thosaigh mé "An Léigear Khrishnapur" faoi an India Victeoiriach. Bhainim leis orm féin de: "Béim síos" le J. M Coetzee faoi An Afraic Theas agus "Meath agus Titim" le Evelyn Waugh faoi na fichidí ina Sasana.

Bhailigh mé ar Léna ceann eile. Chruinnigh mé uirthí trí leabhair. B'fhéidir, beidh maith léi "Urchóid Fiafar" le Esther Freud, faoi ionnarbaidhí (?) ina Maracó na seascidí. Ar mhaith léi "Na Deireadh Scéil," leis Lidia ní Dhaithí, faoi banscribneoir chur a cuimhne grá aici ar na mallaibh? Ar oscailt mo bhean a tí an teacs mhór faoi Londain coiriúil, "Gabhann Méire" le Sarah ní Thuarisc, ar feadh an naoú céad deag.

Rachaidh sí féin ag tiomaint go dtí gContae An Chros Naofa go luath. Eistfidh Léna ar an dluthdioscannaí ag labhairt de ghuth ard leis úrsceal eile. Tá sé is faide, mar sin féin. Is maith liom nuair ag leite mé seo go leor! Cloisfidh sí "An Piotal Cocardhearg agus An Bán," leis Mícheál Faber. Tá sé faoi Londain ina naoú haois deag fós.

Léifidh mé leabhair eile ar an liosta go deireanach. Béarfaidh mé orthu "Germinal," le Emile Zola agus "Amhrán Éin," le Sebastian Faulks. Léifinn scéalta eile. Ní mbeadh sin ar an liosta na 1001 ann. Mar shampla, bheinn go dtóga mé "Túr Baibéil," le A.S. Byatt, "Coirp Suarach" le Waugh, agus "An Tiarna na Domhain," le R. F. Benson.

Nílim ábalta teacht suas le eile ar an leabharlann seo go raibh mian liom. Ach, tá siad i gcuntas amárach anseo: "Samhas," le Seán-Pól Sartre; "Agus Eagla d'anama ort," le Amalie Nathoub; "Cursa Londan," le Iain Sinclair; "Jack Miggs," le Peadar Ó Ciardha; "An Seomra Ábhalmhór," le E.E. Cummings; "Shikasta" le Doris Lessing; "G" leis Seán Berger; "Aer Marbh," le Iain Banks; "Atlás Néil," le Daithí Mistéil; "Teach Dhoctuir Deigh," le Peadar Ackroyd; "Cé deanach go bhfuil sé, cé deanach," le Séamas Kelman-- agus "An Droichead ar an Drina," le Ivo Andric. Go críochnúil, tabhairfaidh mé Léna an úrsceal de Alban, "Gach Rud go teastaíonn tú," le A. L. ní Cheinneide. Sin é faoi láthair.

Reading Books Before I Find Death.

We write in Irish about death but this with a slight difference. Death will get us. That is, we find death by means of death getting to us. I studied a while ago a big book, "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die." Today, I will tell you about searching for a few titles from it in the library in Pasadena yesterday.

There were twenty choices in it that I liked which were written on a bit of paper with me. I did not find every one of them at the place there. I looked at a portion on the fiction shelves in a few minutes.

I wished to obtain the novels by J[ames] G[ordon] Farrell recently. Last night, I started "The Siege of Krishnapur" about Victorian India. I got out for myself from there: "Disgrace," {literally "Struck Down"!] by J. M Coetzee about South Africa and "Decline and Fall" by Evelyn Waugh about the Twenties in England.

I collected for Layne other ones. I gathered for her three books. Perhaps, she will be pleased by "Hideous Kinky" ("Twisted Perverseness"!) by Esther Freud, about expatriates in Morocco in the Sixties. Will she like "The End of the Story" {Story's End") by Lydia Davis, about a woman writer who's remembered a love of hers from late? Will the woman of the house (=wife in Irish!) open the big text about criminal London, "Fingersmith" ("Smith of the Finger") during the nineteen-hundreds?

She will go herself driving up to Santa Cruz County soon. Layne will listen to the compact discs reading out loud ("from a high voice") another novel. It's longest, all the same. She will hear "The Crimson Petal and the White," by Michel Faber. It is about London in the age of the nineteenth century also.

I will read other books on the list recently. I will catch up on them: "Germinal," by Emile Zola and "Birdsong," by Sebastian Faulks. I should read other stories. These are not on the 1001 list. Of course, I should take (up) "Babel Tower," by A.S. Byatt, "Vile Bodies" by Waugh, and "The Lord of the World," by R. F. Benson.

I'm unable to come to (assemble) the others at this library that I have a want for. But, here they are for the future record: "Nausea," by Jean-Paul Sartre; "Agus Eagla d'anama ort," "Fear & Trembling," "(="And fright out of your soul") by Amalie Nathoub; "London Orbital," by Iain Sinclair; "Jack Miggs," by Peter Carey; "The Enormous Room," by E.E. Cummings; "Shikasta" by Doris Lessing; "G" by John Berger; "Dead Air," by Iain Banks; "Cloud Atlas," by Daithí Mistéil; "The House of Doctor Dee," by Peter Ackroyd; "How Late It Was, How Late," by James Kelman-- and "The Bridge on the Drina," by Ivo Andric. Finally, I will get for Layne the novel from Scotland, "Everything You Need," by A. L. Kennedy. That's it for now.

Iómhá /Image: Signs by Brendan

Joseph O'Connor's "The Salesman": Book Review.

"When you looked for Ireland on the weather map in my father's News of the World, the Republic would actually be missing; all you would see is Northern Ireland, an island now, floating a few miles off the Mull of Kintyre. I lived in a place that did not exist." (33)

So narrates Billy Sweeney of his working-class youth, until the Beatles came to Dublin, he fell in love, and he thought he'd live happily ever after. He does not. His wife leaves him and takes his two daughters; one of them is in a coma. Three of her assailants are convicted, one jumps bail. Billy hunts the fugitive, Donal Quinn, down. He tells what happens next to his daughter, Maeve, who lies comatose in the hospital, in case she awakens one day to read his diary.

"There are times in every life, I think, when the things you have fantasized about are suddenly on the point of coming true, depending on the action you take or do not take, depending on the range of your choices. And those are very dangerous times." (58) He's driven to hunt Quinn down by simple revenge. O'Connor-- as in his later 19th c. Irish American historical epics, both told with verve and erudition from a multiple narrative and fractured assemblage of documents, songs, oral history, and images, "Redemption Falls" (reviewed by me here and on Amazon US) and "Star of the Sea"-- loves relating everyday speech, long-simmering hatreds, and feuds that erode relationships, choking out like weeds the roses that once struggled to blossom in love's garden.

As with his other fictional counterparts in those two later novels, Billy detests the slow and fumbling process of justice by the law. "Did you ever hear of a more stupid unnatural thing in your life than turning the other cheek?" (73) His marriage gets mired in Irish patterns of resignation and incrimination. "Thinking that things would get better somehow had replaced hurling as the national sport in Ireland around that time, and after a while your mother and I got to be champions."(114)

Billy drinks, his wife sulks, and the inevitable happens. "Anyone who has been in a dying marriage-- and I suppose that is what ours was by then-- knows that not putting words on unhappiness is the moral equivalent of leaving the lights out so you cannot see the monsters coming." (141) In a passage that reminded me of Joyce in its indirect first-person voice of delicacy and reticence, they do, years later within their estrangement, attempt one moment of reconciliation.

"We went upstairs and into our old bedroom where we took off some of our clothes and kissed again for a while. After a time she asked me to turn off the light and I did. In the darkness I could hear her removing the rest of her clothes. She asked me to do the same. We embraced for a few moments, I was trembling. She asked if I anyone else had been in this bed with me and I said no, nobody had, which was the truth. We slid under the sheets together and made love very gently. I remember-- and you may as well know this too, love-- that afterwards we just lay in the dark, holding each other for a long time and crying." (188-89)

Such intimacy battles in this novel with wry demotic, drawn from south County Dublin. "'There wouldn't be the power in that shit-heap to power your mott's dildo,' he said." (91) Milkman Nap critiques his van. "'She'd eat the leg of the Lamb of God, wouldn't you sweetheart?'" (88) Billy's wife, Grace, muses about her baby, Lizzie. "Back in the car I got the handcuffs out of the box and tried them on. They were fine. They had a little pink fake-fur lining on them, 'for comfort', the instructions explained." (163) Billy prepares to kidnap Quinn. "She'd peel a fuckin' orange without takin' it out of her pocket, Mr Sweeney, and that's the gospel truth." (224) A Dalkey publican confides about his wife.

The novel does go on for too long. I understand the arc that O'Connor constructs. It's ambitious, and belies the dull title. There's almost no depth as to the work that Billy does, the sales he makes being all but absent. These omissions may be intentional, but they may discourage an audience given the bland "Salesman" as the come-on to what combines an (sub)urban thriller with a failed love story or two. I stayed up turning its pages, wondering how he'd resolve the storyline. Yet, all of my citations have been drawn nearly from the first half, prior to the abduction of Quinn and the hunter-becomes-the-hunted plot that ensues. Another Amazon reviewer liked the book until it got "all Tarantino." These portions, if perhaps a bit tediously, do, however, convey in graphic and truly unsettling terms what it's like to suffer, to have your life turned utterly unrecognizable, and to give and take violence in its elemental brutality.

They are also, if you push on into the final chapters, followed by further plot complications. While I found some of these less plausible or at least more mundane than much of the earlier force of this often scarifying book, this effort merits attention by those readers, like me, wanting to seek out previous fiction after enjoying "Star" and its sequel, "Redemption." Redeeming one's self certainly plays a crucial role here for both Billy and his antagonists, domesticated or untamed.

Sweeney finds his salvation after nearly going mad among his suburban aviary. O'Connor does not draw parallels directly between this 12th c. Irish tale "Buile Shuibne" ("Frenzy of Sweeney," translated by Seamus Heaney in 1983 as "Sweeney Astray") let alone the Flann O'Brien episodes in "At Swim-Two-Birds," but perhaps the ornithological allusions and the Dalkey setting prove subtle if telling enough?

Paul Hoffman's "The King's Gambit" Book Review.

As a beginner learning about chess, I've been reading accounts aimed at a non-playing as well as insider audience. This follows my recent (blog and Amazon US) reviews of J.C. Hallman's "The Chess Artist"-- about his trip to chess-driven Kalmykia, his encounters with chess culture, and his friendship with a man who aspires to become the first African American grandmaster-- and David Shenk's topical history of "The Immortal Game." I'd begin with Shenk's combination of chronological survey and intellectual overview, and then move on to Hallman's pioneering and wide-ranging appreciation of the uses and abuses of this pursuit.

Then, I'd pick up Hoffman. The subtitle, "A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game," appears confusing until the last chapter. Hoffman does treat (on and mostly off) his relationship with his father, an amateur who wrote about the game as part of his own journalism, but only at the end does the author reveal how his own son, Alex, has established his own connection with his father, Paul, through chess. This makes a poignant if attenuated comparison, as the writer's own marriage, like that of his parents, has crumbled-- as he wrote "The King's Gambit." Hoffman, suffering medical problems after giving up what would seem dream jobs as editor first at "Discover" magazine and then running Encyclopedia Britannica, searches the world of chess-- largely at the tournament level-- to explore the perceived danger for its top-ranked players.

As a play-by-play sort of "color" commentator of the game, Hoffman excels as he narrates how his own games work. Playing champions on- and off-line, explaining mindgames as well as endgames, or taking on a "simul" with Kasparov, he shows you how the strategies work along with the tactics. He describes only "en passant" the basics of the game, and so reading Shenk's introductory work and Hallman's speculative chapters about the development of the pieces would be recommended prior to Hoffman's treatment. He's fascinated by openings, and while this out of the three books is the only one without diagrams and with little notation, you will figure out these moves, eventually.

Unlike Hallman or Shenk, Hoffman does not concentrate on a more evocative sense of the game by extended metaphor or sustained speculation. I found fewer exemplary passages in Hoffman to show his stylistic range. He's not a lesser writer, but his own editorial background may make his drier, wryer approach better suited for a reader wanting a slightly more advanced study of how contests unfold in terms of strategy and psychology, rather than the intellectual or cultural explorations favored by Hallman and Shenk.

"I wanted to get a sense of how the minds of champions worked and whether their minds differed from mine. I wanted to witness how chess professionals handled the emotional highs and lows of victory and defeat. I wanted to talk to others who were as excited and bewitched by the game as I was. I wanted to figure out why chess was so addictive." (30)

He investigates the realm of women players, sexism, bogus Freudianism, and street hustlers. Befriending Jennifer Shahade and Pascal Charbonneau, respectively U.S. and Canadian champions, he learns how they deal with grace or its lack under pressure. He goes to Moscow, endures Libya, and wonders if insanity will be brought on by too much immersion.

He mingles, as do Hallman and Shenk, his own anecdotes. Like Shenk, he relegates some of his best material to his endnotes. Hoffman divulges lots of tales and debunks many myths in these annotations. He moves from personal reflections to chess stories easily, if rather (too?) broadly; for example, he places within the depiction of professional Joel Lautier his own memories of his father's Red sympathies, shifts to his teenaged years at Quaker summer camp to prepare a c.v. that would keep him out of Vietnam, and relates his own college cramming of Marx while on Dexedrine at Harvard-- before bringing the chapter back briefly to a debate over drug testing in the sport.

Dealing with Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, FIDE president and ruler of semi-autonomous Kalmykia in the former Soviet Union, Hoffman combines scrutiny with compassion.

"Versailles bankrupted a country and fomented a revolution. Ilyumzhinov may well do the same, in Kalmykia and FIDE. What will endure, he knows, are the exquisite chess games that he facilitated. They will survive as long as earthlings are still pushing pawns and moving knights. In his disturbingly elite royalist calculus, the creation of immortal beauty apparently outweighs any human suffering he may have caused." (313)

Discussing British champion and rival to Kasparov, Nigel Short, Hoffman considers-- in a rare use of metaphor-- how Short advanced so well in chess but remains at heart a child in his temperament:

"I had a fanciful notion that the development of specialized skills and character traits in early childhood is like a country fair in which you are allotted a fixed number of tickets to spend on the various concessions. This particular fair is of short duration and happens only once a lifetime. Nigel took the chess roller-coaster a dozen times, and rode the honesty ride twice, and so he had insufficient tickets left to take the Train Beyond Adolescence more than a stop or two. I myself missed the athletic concession, and I should have ridden-- damn it-- the chess coaster three or four times." (335)

He finishes with a middle-aged leap back onto the coaster. The book ends with him seeing Pascal compete for the grandmaster's rating. Hoffman realizes he longs for the same dream's fulfillment. Not for the money, but

"for the unadulterated pleasures of peering further into the abyss of chess and glimpsing the game's deeper beauty. I want to work magic with the chess pieces the way Morphy and Fischer did. I want to launch daring, unexpected attacks the way Jennifer and Pascal do. I want to achieve a small degree of immortality by the ingenious manner in which I coordinate my knights." (384)

It occurred to me, reading Hoffman's commentaries as he played his matches, how it may resemble football. Vaguely! The Johnsonian definition he cites of "a nice and abstruse game, in which two sets of puppets are moved in opposition to each other" aligns more closely with such defense-offense pairings, if football had no downs and the ball was handed back each play.

What I will mention as my main disappointment: five sections for which a recent precedent in print remains uncredited: 1) Hoffman plays with the "Kalmyk high muckety-muck" himself. 2) He recounts the tale of a notorious Virginia prisoner, the high-ranking Bloodgood. 3) He goes to a strange, bleak, and suspect Third World land for a tournament amidst sinister overseers. 4) He hangs around as a "second" with a master. 5) He wonders as a journalist if he should have some sympathy, as he interviews Kalmyk leader and FIDE president Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, with dissident Larisa Yudina's fate. She was found murdered after she prepared an exposé of the ruler's funding for Chess City.

"The Chess Artist" preceded Hoffman; Hallman made these same five "moves" years before Hoffman. Yet he never mentions Hallman's "The Chess Artist." (This was published in 2003. Shenk's book's copyrighted as 2006; Hoffman's as 2007.)

Not sure if it'd be some sort of etiquette to acknowledge Hallman, at least as an aside in Hoffman's own ambling annotations. I scoured them repeatedly. I find it hard to believe that Hoffman did not draw upon "The Chess Artist." I find this omission very strange in both Shenk & Hoffman, so this is one reason I have reminded readers of "The Chess Artist." It's a necessary and enjoyable companion to these other two works, all three accessible for the general reader as well as the insider.

Playing Myself in Chess.

Bobby Fischer did, so why can't I? Now, I do remember that he wound up crazy. Long prior to his final exile in Iceland with a considerably younger Japanese grandmaster as well as mistress. The media decades ago reported vague rumors, pre-Internet, of how the Brooklyn prodigy haunted Pasadena, full of bile for the star-spangled-Zionist conspiracy. The Philadelphia Inquirer found out in 2002 that not only was his pediatrician mother-- a Communist fellow-traveller of Polish descent, Swiss birth, and St. Louis upbringing-- Jewish, but his true father. He was not her German bio-physicist husband. He had tried to enter the U.S. in 1939; rejected due to his Communist connections, he wound up in Chile.

Fischer's engenderer? A Hungarian physicist with whom Regina Wender Fischer Pustan had an affair in 1942. Paul Nemenyi was working for the Manhattan Project in Chicago. Bobby was born there, but his parents divorced soon after and he was raised by her first in Arizona and then in NYC. Nemenyi made child support payments. It's uncertain if the young boy knew of his true paternity. The FBI spied on Regina and Bobby as suspected Soviet spies. She had studied medicine first in Germany and then Moscow in the 1930s. This may account for his hatred of his native land-- and his parentage. I completely forgot, until I verified these details, that Fischer died at the start of this year.

Not that I am trying to emulate the former hero of Cold War America but his downhill trajectory does intrigue me for its utter unpredictabilty. To think of the world's most famous chess success muttering shades of Howard Hughes, only a few miles away from me. The added frisson that he wandered in his craziness along placid streets through which I drive to pick up my boy from school, to go to the dentist, to see the doctor, to check out the library, for me makes this juxtaposition of genius and invert even more surreal.

Fischer did learn how to play at six. He read the instructions, and for a year competed against himself until at seven he took instruction, from the president of the esteemed Manhattan Chess Club. You know the rest. At the height of his fame, it turned to notoriety, as from 1973-75 he bickered about the details of defending his title against Anatoly Karpov, to whom he forfeited the crown, and for twenty years, Fischer did not conduct a public match.

Wikipedia notes, about his days closer to my home:

On May 26, 1981, a police patrolman arrested Fischer on the sidewalk of Lake Street in Pasadena, claiming that he matched the description of a man who had just committed a bank robbery in that area. During the arrest, Fischer was slightly injured. He was held for two days and subjected to further assault and interrogation. He was released on $1000 bail and the matter was later dropped. Two weeks later, he published a 14-page pamphlet detailing these experiences and expressing outrage that the arrest had been pre-arranged.

Here's Fischer's side of the story: "I Was Tortured in the Pasadena Jailhouse!". I have added the cover above in the interests of thoroughness. An overlooked episode in local history.

On another trail of run-ins with The Man, my wife and one son watched the documentary (which I'd seen already) on the Weather Underground. Then she endured some arthouse abuse fest, "Tarnation." I spent those three hours, and more, last weekend in my own imaginary film, starring both as black antagonist, white protagonist. I found myself in a curious predicament-- my left hand, so to speak, pretending not to know what my right hand was doing. The time before the travel board I cradled as I sat on the couch drifted by. I found myself finally figuring out the implications and not only the basic moves. The long-range patterns eluded me. A lifetime of memorization of thousands of attacks not in my retirement plan, I will content myself with novelty, small gains, and cultivating my eclectically intuitive garden of the mind.

I react to chess the way I played what used to be called a halfback in soccer. I love defense. I'd untangle the ball away from the forward, and then pass it off to a teammate. In chess, I like blocking any moves by the opposition, but I find it difficult to develop, as they say in chess, my own pieces to make a solid offense. Perhaps I am born for stalemates and détente, as a child of the Atomic Age. I did spend brief but memorable moments in my formative years huddled under a desk, at 10:15 a.m. the last Friday of the month, as the Civil Defense sirens blared and we seven-year-olds practiced "Duck and Cover."

I also, unlike real players as well as the Soviets vs. Yanks, tend to forget if I just played Black or White. I probably threw my impressively even-handed contest off by moving twice a side, so long did I dither about my tactics. I kept turning the pegged miniature board about to examine it from each color as I switched. Then, lost in thought, I'd forget if I'd already moved. Perhaps that's why contestants often make notes as they go along, or why there's chess clocks? As for differentiating my immediate moves from my ultimate strategy (the same distinction was challenged by McCain of Obama's Iraq policy in their first debate), I plead ignorance.

Also, the dogs keep knocking even the tiny plastic pieces out of their drilled holes, so I am shopping for a magnetic chessboard in the color easiest on one's eyes (green). To my surprise, this seems not a common set, or at least in my modest price range. I'll have to ponder the pattern for a long time, so I might as well get the shade most suited to my squint. If I will buy the cheaper one I've located, 99% chance it's Chinese. Many fine examples-- if none in green-- come lacquered from India in sheesham and rosewood, but I'm not an earthtone sort. I may spring for the rougher-hewn, but appealingly more handmade, Carpathian model even if it's an unlucky thirteen more dollars, to support those diligent Slavs. The former Soviet bloc does appear to like to keep the coordinates painted on the side; this predilection I regard as some Jungian archetype of the Piklok pocket set, from a White Russian exile in 1920s France, as eulogized by Nabokov in his preface to "The Defense.")

All apropos of fallen walls, foreign policy, trade deficits, and our reliance on imports. But, nobody makes this product in the U.S. Even finding a European manufacturer took considerable scrabbling. I had wanted to purchase magnetic pieces without a board to use on an old backgammon-checkers set in the garage, but nobody makes them; how to find 32 magnets the right size to affix with Krazy Glue to the bottom of some cheap plastic array has confused my thrifty reverie. In such manner I spent today a share of free time musing. Since I've been stressed, and not only due to Dodgers, I rationalized.

With my younger son having learned well the fundamentals in a few hours practice with me two weeks ago, and despite his playing me to a tough endgame over hours, I cannot lure him back to the board. Blame the birthday boy's video games and, sigh, replacement iPod. I had tried to tutor myself at about twelve. This would have coincided with the Fischer-Karpov standoff. After one desultory game pushing pieces on my little magnetic set-- which I can't find for the life of me now after having it for decades-- with a forgotten junior-high classmate sitting at the lunch tables, I gave up. Like classical music, vegetarianism, and Catholic piety, it's a trait others assume I have instantly, and my disclaimers in middle age I suppose have inspired me to see if I could, after all, convince myself differently. They say that you should tackle a new language to stave off senility, but my Irish efforts, here on this same blog twice-weekly, attest to my mature difficulties with an teanga beo.

My older son shows no interest in the 64 squares; my wife's cowed by 32 pieces. I took up chess in avuncular hopes that I could entice another domiciled here to join me, and to deepen in my dotage a new cerebral corridor that might improve my spatial skills. As I have no mathematical ones; the jury seems to be out on whether chess takes more from the calculating abilities of its players or one's conceptual talents. I might lean towards the latter if I flatter myself. I found my suspicions confirmed in my current bedside book by one champion who gloated how "of course," in his silent, speedy reviewing of possible moves during a match, he could visualize instantly for each option twenty moves ahead.

In reading about the venerable game, I have kindled my intellectual interest. I suppose millions watch baseball-- amidst the predictably imploding Dodgers of late, and even the Red Sox, my back-up team to root for-- and love journalism about a sport that they can barely manage to swing a bat past. For chess, the algebraic notation, the elegant simplicity rendered into 10-120 power the number of possible games vs. 10-80 power for all the electrons in our universe does show the almost mystical aura of this invention. There's a beauty to it that approaches infinity. And, a terror of this glimpse of the void. You encounter reason, skill, and mystery. This quest, then, can entice even a non-player like me to want to understand the combination of rigor and imagination inherent. These two nouns remind me "en passant" of novelist Jane Smiley, trained as a medievalist, in arguing why she loved the period-- enough we do not know to make the Middle Ages fertile for speculation today, and enough we do comprehend to enforce critical discipline.

Such pairings of supposition and summation also enter into J.C. Hallman's "The Chess Artist." He engagingly narrates his quest in Kalmykia (near the Caspian Depression, which says it all) with his friend who seeks to be the first African American grandmaster. I followed this with David Shenk's brisker survey of "The Immortal Game." I'm now nearly finished with Paul Hoffman's "The King's Gambit" (the first two reviewed here and on Amazon US; the third's tomorrow's post). I've discovered a similarity in this chess trio with my reviews a short time ago of three tomes on the Beatles by Bob Spitz, Steven Stark, and Jonathan Gould.

As with chess, I find it intriguing to read about a level of creativity I can only gape at. I realized that I found more entertainment with my encounters in print than listening to the Fab Four. As my childhood came a bit late, but still in rough parallel with their ubiqitous (even for a bookish, eccentric, Nabokovianish boy-man) tunes, I don't have to hear them anymore. They all, from wretched ditties like "Piggies" to underheard melodies like "Things We Said Today," pop up in my mental jukebox. The late theologian Hans Urs van Balthasar sold off, I recently found out, his Mozart collection (I presume the complete set of CDs which Philips sold for the bicentenary of the composer's death, a pricy package notwithstanding the Jesuit's vow of poverty. Must have been a gift.) The reason? He had it all in his head. Considerably more impressive than me with "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?"-- which I wish I could never recall again. Maybe I should have stuck with the Accelerated Dragon: 4...g6 variant of the Sicilian Defense, not Top 40 radio.

Photo: This 1966 Bantam mass-market paperback has the same cover font as my nearly as old early 70s Steinbeck "Travels with Charley." In a downtown L.A. sorry mini-Borders at the 7th Street Plaza whiling away time before I taught, I noticed it, but did not buy. No royalties for bigots. Sudoku took up three shelves in the "Games" section a third of a century after Fischer's Reykjavik victory. His remained, however, the only chess title. It stays in print, but Amazonians split on suspecting it or praising its thick contents, many claiming it was ghostwritten to boot.

Fischer by repute-- at least at the apogee of his celebrity-- supposedly made no time for any pursuits but those on the board, famously claiming "Chess is life" as a riposte to another master's "Chess is like life." He also smirked: "Chess is better" than sex. He did father in the early '00s a child with a 22-year-old Filipina. Not sure if his Japanese bride agreed with his libidinous pronouncements. The two ladies settled in court after a battle over his $2 million estate. I speculate if and how our homegrown hero had much time or incentive to spend typing rather than playing, obsessively, with and without himself.

Ag seinm na gruaim.

D'fhoghlaim mé go raibh an frása "tá sé tromchroíoch" an lá eile-- as Beárla deirimid seo chomh "feeling blue"-- ag taghtha dó An Theas Mheireaceánach. Bhain sclábhaithe gormachaigh de plúirin ina bplandáil. Bhí obair go crua. Mar sin, tháinig tallann ghruama acusan féin.

Is focal é "gorm" seo as teanga céann go bhfuil ag taispeáint cad go mbheadh an fear "dubh" as Béarla. Ach, deirimid "dubh" in áit ghorm. Is mór an chuid suime é seo. Tá "lionndubh" fós as Gaeilge ann. Is cosuil le "gruama."

Is planda é go bhfuil eádach a thogann a salachar. Fágann sé smál ar lamh níos fusa. Saláionn sé cadás súiteach. Ar ndóigh, déanaimid sé in úsaid leis deinim (?) ina léinte agus briste géine.

Is iontach agam faoi seo, mar sin féin. Gheobhaidh tú go mbeidh deinim bheith fóinteach chun ruda. Is acra a bhíonn in úsaid gach lá. Ar cuimhne linn an bunús ann? Tá sé imithe as ár chuimhne faoi na fulaingt is mór leis na pobail gorm ina hAfraic agus Meiriceá. Caitheann réaltai rhóc "na gruama"-- chomh déanaimid-- agus seineainn siadsan féin seo freisin.

Scríobh Ruairí Ó Dúill faoi lascannaí idir na fir gorm agus ná pobal Éireannach ina a lheabhar "Na Fiacha." Bhí sé greann garbh, go cinnte! Bhí maith fir Éireann a cur siadsan féin i gcomórtas leis fir gorm ann. Is beag is ionann iad; ní comórtas ar bith dá chéile iad go fírinne i bpian buan.

Déanimid sinn uile ag rómánsaíocht ár éadóchas. Cén chaoi inseodh Bono chuige An Faobhar, "A Fhaobhair, seinn na gruama"? Is briathar idirdhealaithe in Éirinn nuair ag seinm ceoil. Ní raibh focal amháin as Béarla. B'fhéidir caitheann muid anseo grá cheoil? Ní fhaigheann muid ar bith ar cheol maith go minic. Bogaionn sé gruama againn.

Playing the Blues.

I learned that the phrase "he's heavy-hearted" the other day-- in English we say this as "feeling blue"-- came from the American South. The black slaves picked indigo on the plantation. It was hard work. Therefore, they came to reckon themselves as (in the) blues.

This word "blue" in the same language is shown what would be a "black" man in English. But, we say "black" {or "dark" in Irish) in place of "blue." This is very intriguing. There's "dark-filled" in Irish also. It's similar to the "blues."

It's a plant that gets stains on stuff. It leaves a smear on hands very easy. It colors absorbant cotton. Of course, we make it in use for denim in shirts and jeans.

I wonder about this, however. You'll find that denim will be of use as an item. It's an article in use every day. Do we remember the origins of it? There's forgetfulness in our memory about the greater suffering of the black people in Africa and America. Rock stars wear "the blues" now like we do-- and they sing them too.

Roddy Doyle wrote about links between the black men and the men of Ireland in his book "The Commitments." This is broad humor, certainly! The Irishmen in it liked to make connections with the black men. There's little in common there; there's not much of a tie to (join them) truly together in lasting pain.

We all romanticize our despair. How would Bono tell the Edge, "Edge, play the blues?" It's a distinctive verb in Ireland when playing music. There is not the single word in English. Perhaps we have lost here the love of music? We do not often appreciate at all good music. It eases our blues.

Main Street as guilty as Wall Street?

One small advantage of the financial tremors may be fewer animated ads online with dancing rabbis or svelte coeds hawking mortgage refinancing. Downtown L.A. having lost 700,000 jobs, you'd figure there'd be not as many panini purveyors opening, but au contraire. Still, there's hope; with more of the latte-toting crowd downsized, I'm anticipating a drop in Range Rovers blocking my view ahead on the road. Unless you're on the Westside or the exurbs. Finally, shows like "The Real Housewives of Atlanta" may ebb. On the other hand, the Depression brought those MGM musical galas and RKO's comedies about Fred & Ginger.

Stephany Yablow's letter to the Los Angeles Times on October 11, 2008, along with all other submissions, doesn't appear on the paper's website. I checked today, the day after, and the day it was published yesterday. No idea why, but her comments echoed my own populist if unpopular reactions, and I transcribe them the old-fashioned way for posterity and for the Net. I'll even overlook the Valley-ish spelling of her first name.

The Main Streeters are just as guilty as the Wall Streeters. When every Tom, Dick and Harry signed up for a 401(k) and invested his paltry paycheck in the stock market, every Tom, Dick and Harry wanted stock values to go up, up and up.

He didn't care how. He didn't care what the CEO got paid, he didn't care that illegal immigrants or Chinese slave labor were providing cheap labor, he didn't care that somewhere in America a child was hungry or had no healthcare because his dad lost his job.

Every Tom, Dick and Harry was bombarded with images of the lush life of the rich and famous and came to believe that he too deserved to live that life-- on borrowed money. Every Tom, Dick and Harry was told he deserved to own a house, so regulations were discarded, interest rates were kept low and lenders were pushed to throw out loan underwriting guidelines. And when the whole scheme imploded, there was Uncle Sam.

Yes, the romance of Main Street is alive and well, but everyone has come to believe that they are entitled to live on Park Avenue. Stephany Yablow, North Hollywood. [Opinion section, A-18.]

Photo courtesy of Katherine Boyer via my wife's blog. Not sure of its provenance. But it's appropriate.

Pity the Poor Immigrant?

I've sent much of what I've cited below to the L.A. Times' blog following a two-part series on illegal Mexican immigrants who were burned, some fatally, in the Harris Ranch fire in San Diego County. I may anger everybody reading this, but I try to view this endlessly divisive topic from all sides, even as my own inevitable bias emerges. This issue ignited a virtual blaze, as the two dozen posts ahead of mine railed against nativists, politicians, lawmakers, the media, and each other. This contentious debate has long been gingerly consigned by Obama & McCain to the sidelines; I imagine they're grateful for Wall Street's wild ride. Yet, it's tied to the economy, to our philosophical tenets, the planet, capitalism, our good nature, and our own sustainability. As taxpayers, consumers, residents, workers, and perhaps employers-- if one step removed-- we all share in a discussion with no easy answers.

My contribution concerns the "logic" expressed by one of the burn victims for his treatment. Is this government generosity under medical obligation like insurance? Few criticize the fairness of having to pay premiums that fill coffers from which we may or may not gain our fair share from days or years later. Or, is this footing the bill like dividing the check equally for a meal? If so, how can those who could afford less square their frugal portions against those who gorged on the martinis and the mudpies?

I suppose yesterday's entry on Adam Gopnik's review of John Stuart Mill might tie in as well. What's the responsibility of a conservative to support a corrupt capitalism where rich people-- such as many GOP voters who flock to exurbanized estates devastated by these conflagrations-- thrive while their carwashers, groundskeepers, maids, and cooks suffer? How much should liberals shout for open borders and march smugly with banners claiming "we are all illegals" when those who abide by laws find government services that they've paid for diminished or eliminated, due locally often to the burdens of dealing with those tens of millions who break the law?

What this boils down to is how much we're responsible as Good Samaritans for caring for an injured fellow human being, and how much we must continue to spend to do so, given our dwindling resources, our medical imperative to give care to all who enter a hospital, and our eroding middle-class charged to pay for indigent patients. Maybe a billion dollars matters little next to our three-hundred-trillion dollar debt. Yet, this hits us locally; our cities and counties must pay for this, not the Feds. And, perhaps I wonder bitterly, what matter anyway-- we must fund UC San Diego's hospital nevertheless, along with Stryker tanks, bailouts, and bridges to nowhere. A price exacted from us all for what makes a modern society humane, and also horrific.

I've heard the rejoinders. Better to care for the poor with medicine rather than let disease run rampant. Teaching their children trumps despair. I've spent my life among inner city and urban students, most of whom come from other countries, or at least their parents. I ride the train and take the bus. I live in a place full of Spanish and Chinese ads, faces from across frontiers. I accept my contradictions. Yet, given that no New Jerusalem awaits, no massive restructuring of our wealth to ease the impoverished and to afflict the complacent, how much can a overwhelmed state-- with 38 million and never decreasing-- keep ladling out? Lions won't lie down with lambs no matter who's elected. Washington ensures the bombers being built, but Sacramento and San Diego and L.A. must pay the doctors and teachers.

Many religious groups castigate any who dare to challenge our mandate to favor the poor. Many good-hearted citizens, and many immigrants too, also may ask how long we can keep bearing this massive commitment in times when we face job cutbacks, higher taxes, and inflated deductibles. Is this the price we pay for being different from so many other nations? If so, do we have bottomless purses? The compassionate side of me knows that we must comfort the sick and heal the wounded. The calculating side of me wonders how long we can continue to do so as our jobs and finances dwindle.

Nicolas Beltran "also recognizes that many Americans are angry about the cost of medical treatment for illegal immigrants, estimated at $750 million to $1 billion annually. But he figures that taxes deducted from migrants' paychecks helped pay for the nearly $1 million in healthcare he received from the UC San Diego hospital. {. . . .} Now that he's stronger, he plans to work as a handyman for $10 an hour in cash, until he and his girlfriend can save enough money to go home."

So, can you spot the contradiction? My sympathies extend to him and anyone else in such a horrific situation. Others have commented on this, and whether "karma" or Christian mercy has been or has not been shown by critics or advocates of the medical care afforded Beltran and the others rehabilated.

The tone of Marjorie Miller's article, however, tends to chide anyone who might question the expenditures continually made for such care to those who cannot pay, in a nation where those who have paid into such a system may not receive equivalent benefits. The Los Angeles Times, to me, often appears conspiring with a Pollyannish media which refuses to accept that the only way we can regain any control over housing costs, traffic, schooling, and public infrastructure is if we slash immigration, rebuild our tax and employment base here, and practice birth control.

We should be paying people not to have babies, rather than hiking an immigrant-driven fertility rate that keeps rising higher than other sensible, advanced nations. Canada & Australia take the trouble to identify educated applicants to admit; we're stuck in this foolish gesture of having to take everyone, and we're charged with racism if we protest. If 14 million Canucks sidled over here and insisted on Americans footing their medical, educational, housing, loans, and welfare bills too, I'd protest the same.

We work and watch our health coverage crumble. We pay for millions of cases of subsidized health care for people who have contributed little or nothing to its funding. Beltran justifies this largess by his past infinitesimal contribution from his tiny paycheck. Presuming his also guilty boss followed part of our hopelessly impotent laws in the first place. Now Beltran's going back in the underground economy, cash changing hands for his exploitation, and there'll be no further deductions for his or anybody else's publicly funded hospital stay.

The left loves the massive waves of legal and illegal immigration for the Democratic votes that gerrymander districts like mine into undulating portions that will vote for the donkey through infinity. The right loves the immigrants to keep undercutting our wages while stoking our nativist frustration.

Legal immigrants with training waited to come here and have the smarts to contribute to our nation. I understand that nearly all of us descend from border crossers. Ethically, we have to treat anyone injured. But, our morality makes us also a stooge for those wishing to take advantage. We do not have an endlessly expanding nation needing to double in population. But, I feel our mayor, most of our politicians and their donors, and many of my neighbors would love this to happen.

This is not a frontier anymore. It's not a century ago. There's not 50,000 people in L.A. Our county grows by 100,000 yearly.

Neither party cares about those who apply patiently, possess skills that the market demands, and who refrain from reproducing at levels that will bring us a half-billion people crowding into a land already ecologically devastated. The media cheerleads open borders, portrays anybody who questions the status quo as Know-Nothings. Yet the LAT dares to wonder why there's so many drivers on the freeway, so much suburban sprawl, so much density.

"Massive fire turned a perilous trek deadly for border crossers." October 5-6, 2008. Marjorie Miller. Los Angeles Times. Caption: Concepcion Peralta, far right, gets help from the Angeles del Desierto search and rescue group in planting three crosses near the site where his daughter, her husband and a friend died in last October's Harris Ranch fire.

Adam Gopnik on John Stuart Mill.

The New Yorker's "critic-at-large" not only gets to live in Paris, he also can read and write whatever he wants for a living. He, like Mill himself, shows how we peons may benefit from the leisured class who put pen to paper, fingers to keyboards. As Gopnik with earlier essays on Philip K. Dick and G.K. Chesterton showed me, he's worthy of attention for revealing not only what we half-recalled from our previous encounters with his literary subjects, but for reminding us that we half-learned from them lessons worth remembering.

Here's excerpts from his October 6, 2008, review "Right Again" of Richard Reeves' biography: "John Stuart Mill-- Victorian Firebrand".

After introducing Mill's maddening perspicacity, his always having arrived at progressively informed judgments about feminism, equality, liberalism, or freedom 150 years ahead of us, Gopnik explains how this troubles biographers.

Every time we turn a corner, there is Mill, smiling just a touch too complacently at having got there first. Admiration for intelligence and truth easily turns into resentment at the person who has them; Aristides the Just was banished from Athens because people were fed up with hearing him called Aristides the Just. It is one of the many virtues of Reeves’s funny, humane biography that it brings Mill to life in the only way sententious great men can be brought to life, and that is by showing us what he was like when he lost his heart and when he lost his reason. Both happened to him just once, but that was sufficient. Mill’s is a story of a man out in the pure sun of reason and rational inquiry, lit at night by the romantic moonlight of a little bit of love and just enough madness.

His notorious education at the hands of his Utilitarian, hyper-rational father summarized, his early success in political and economic philosophy related, Mill-- still only twenty-- suffers a breakdown, and turns to the arts for solace.

Though he was able to continue working, he could no longer write. With his quick intelligence, he recognized that the problem lay somewhere in his formation, in things that had been given too little attention. He turned to music for solace. It helped for a while, until he grew obsessed with the thought that there are only so many notes, and so many combinations of notes, and that, sooner or later, they would be used up, and all melody exhausted.

I think of chess in the same way; I wonder if Kafka or Beckett or Nabokov did! Others might contemplate "the prison house of language" such in Borgesian convolutions rather than Frederic Jameson's obfuscations. Speaking of postmodern tenured elites, it's bracing to find that Gopnik argues for a contrary position regarding Mill's embrace of the aesthetic imagination to soothe his overheated radical journalism.

His love of poetry and music and art also led him toward conservative thought. Aesthetes always bend to the right, in part because the best music and the best buildings were made in the past, and become an argument for its qualities. Someone entering Chartres becomes, for a moment, a medieval Catholic, and a person looking at Bellini or Titian has to admit that an unequal society can make unequalled pictures. To love old art is to honor old arrangements. But even new and progressive art is, as Mill knew, a product of imagination and inspiration, not of fair dealing and transparent processes; the central concerns of liberalism—fairness, equity, individual rights—really don’t enter into it. Mozart, whom Mill loved, would have benefitted as a person had he lived in a world that gave him the right to vote for his congressman, collect an old-age pension, and write letters to the editor on general subjects, and that gave his older sister her chance at composing, too. But not a note of his music would have been any better. Art is a product of eccentric genius, which we can protect, but which no theory of utility can explain.

Mill urges his readers towards a pioneering "self-development," one that employs the liberal arts in their own "radical" etymology. Perhaps one of the first to do so by blending ethical utilitarianism with "hedonic calculus," ingeniously?

A good life for Mill, post-madness, is not one where you have queued before the slot machine of utility and got the candy it dispenses. It is one where you have gone out into the world to build the best self you can—travelled where you wanted and seen what you could and said what you had to, sung your own songs and heard your own poems. Mill was a romantic and an epicurean in a gray tweed suit, and his mature liberalism is both what a narrow historian means by liberalism—a theory of free conduct justified by its good results—and what the rest of us mean when we say that someone is liberal-minded: open to all the pleasures of life and generous in their enjoyment.

Even my condensation of Gopnik on Mill itself expands. Being a Victorian, expecting his audience to take more time and to possess more patience than you or I may have with a method of communication by blog, digest, and mediary, Mill's hard to reduce to the bite-sized chunks we gobble up as daily wisdom.

Mill’s sentences sway and ponder with the heavy grace of elephants, and are often about the same size. Defending a philosophy of hedonism, he writes sentences that contain more philosophy than hedonism: “The happiness which they meant was not a life of rapture; but moments of such, in an existence made up of few and transitory pains, many and various pleasures, with a decided predominance of the active over the passive, and having as the foundation of the whole, not to expect more from life than it is capable of bestowing.” “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” in other words, but no rosebuds fall on the page. Whatever the subject, Mill surveys the ground, clears it of underbrush, builds a house of straw to demonstrate what a shoddy house looks like, sets it on fire, and in its place builds a house of brick, which he dares you to knock down. The house of brick is, as Victorian brick houses usually were, lacking in grace and lightness and charm, but it still stands. You don’t come away from Mill dazzled, as you do with Ruskin or Carlyle, but you come away with a place to live your life.

Since my wife and I have been carrying on these recent months a spirited if attenuated discussion about theodicy, why not bring Mill into the symposium (a term I lately was reminded about-- from the Greek for a 'drinking as opposed to dinner party')?

When someone says that proof of God’s existence can be found in Nature, he doesn’t say it’s bosh. He asks what this would actually entail if it were true, and infers that such a creator would have to be limited, inept, well-meaning, forgetful, and in a daily contest with another power: “A Being of great but limited power . . . who desires, and pays some regard to, the happiness of his creatures, but who seems to have some other motives of action which he cares more for, and who can hardly be supposed to have created the universe for that purpose alone.” What natural theology, taken seriously, shows is not the great Watchmaker or the All-Seeing Jove but the absent-minded Landlord, a sort of eternal Lord Emsworth, who, though he helps the young lovers, cares mainly about his pig.

But Mill really means it: take the argument for God’s existence seriously, and that’s where it leads you. That’s the key thing about Mill, hustling between London and Avignon, climbing mountains and administering India and surveying churches: he always really means it.

What a great riposte to the natural law argument! A conservative might charge that one may not place one's genitals anywhere not 'designed' for reproduction. A liberal, if not libertine, may parry that a hammer, if used for cracking walnuts rather than pounding nails, can still be used for a different function effectively. Mill learned about the utility of his open-minded thinking in pleasant practice. He married his apparent mistress who had been trapped in a miserable marriage, Harriet Taylor, after what for mid-Victorian convention would have been a scandalous courtship, near the rhino's cage at the London Zoo where they dallied. Gopnik compares her to Lennon's Yoko, both an intellectual's match and a surrogate mother.

The result of their collaboration still may rattle cages today. One considers our cultural contradictions within which Sarah Palin's rise to scrutiny has brought claims that she's both the epitome of today's working woman and an unfit (grand)mother. I learned yesterday that the U.S. rate of teen pregnancy (overall at a third before twenty, with 70% of blacks and 50% of Latinas) ranks us among levels of former Soviet satraps.

Mill and Taylor, in their later writing, most famously in the 1869 “The Subjection of Women,” aren’t content to show that women would be happier if freer; they go right to the ground and ask what reason we have for thinking that any restraint on women’s freedom is just. The arguments against women’s liberty have to do with what is natural for women to do, or what women are capable of doing, or what some men would be offended by. They take each case and show that its only rationale is our slavery to custom. Women are naturally passive? Go tell Queen Elizabeth. They are happy in their lot? All slaves say as much to the slave master. They are “designed” to have children? No argument from nature can ever alter an argument from ethics: if women want to raise children, excellent; if they don’t, there is no natural reason to think they must any more than there is a reason to think that male philosophers should all put down their pens and go out hunting for mammoths.

Mill demolishes any sally that we humans should look to rhinos or Romantics as our role model.

In his essay on “Nature,” he writes, “Nature cannot be a proper model for us to imitate. Either it is right that we should kill because nature kills; torture because nature tortures; ruin and devastate because nature does the like; or we ought not to consider what nature does, but what it is good to do.” Mill’s rejection of a natural case isn’t that anything goes; it’s that nobody can really know what goes until someone goes farther. He doesn’t believe in a blank slate on which anything can be inscribed; he believes in the power of the chalk-holding hand to change the sum on the blackboard.

Such confidence, so typical of his century, does show Mill's expectation that rational behavior would banish the shadows. Harriet had died after only seven-and-a-half years of marriage, but he dedicated "On Liberty" to her the next month. He learned much from her, and did not waver in his convictions. Let all beliefs into the forum for contention, and we, he figured, would choose the sensible plan. This does, Gopnik avers, leave Mill perhaps too sure that the ameliorative would always equal the calculable.

It’s also true that many things the Victorian Mill couldn’t even have imagined being asked to tolerate have come to be tolerated under the sway of the argument he began. The idea that people would demand the freedom to practice sodomy would, I think, have astonished Mill as much as anyone else in his day. (The topic isn’t mentioned anywhere in his writings, though Bentham did write a courageous essay against hanging men for it—and then thought better of publishing the piece.) Yet, demanded on Millian grounds—no harm; no foul—the freedom has been granted. In a sense, social conservatives like Rick Santorum are right: there is a slippery slope leading from one banned practice to the next. Give rights to blacks, and the next thing you know you are giving rights to women and sodomites and then the sodomites are renting formal wear and ordering flowers for their weddings. The slippery slope is what Mill called liberty. Every time we slide a little farther down, what we find is not a descent toward Hell but more air, and more people breathing free.

Yesterday, near Nixon's old "Western White House" in San Clemente, I drove behind an older couple in a Cadillac, with a "Yes on Prop. 8" bumper sticker. Layne told me she'd have slashed its tires. She gave money the day before for its defeat. Backed by Catholics, many Christians, and most of all Mormons, this seeks to define Californian marriage as limited to a couple of the opposite sex. Today, pondering Gopnik on Mill, I nodded at this passage. Turn to a Victorian sage, and you'll find a contemporary guru.

Conservatives, politically and culturally, get a lot of flak. Yet, as Gopnik reminds us, we need them. Not to limit who can marry whom, I'd explain, but to encourage us to analyze ourselves how far we should go in proposing legal and moral changes, and how quickly we should alter our ways. The brake that principled rather than ignorant caution drags on the liberal rush to tear down the open road I find an essential component of our society. Mill shot his mouth off and called Disraeli's Tories "necessarily the stupidest party," and I guess you could label the GOP similarly. Gopnik clarifies what Mill's comment intends:

He meant that, since true conservatism is a complicated position, demanding a good deal of restraint when action is what seems to be wanted, and a long view of history when an immediate call to arms is about, it tends to break down into tribal nationalism, which is stupidity incarnate. For Mill, intelligence is defined by sufficient detachment from one’s own case to consider it as one of many; a child becomes humanly intelligent the moment it realizes that there are other minds just like its own, working in the same way on the material available to them. The tribal nationalist is stupid because he fails to recognize that, given a slight change of location and accident of birth, he would have embraced the position of his adversary. Put him in another’s shoes and he would turn them into Army boots as well.

This instantly brought mental pictures of not bin Ladin whom Obama's vowed to arraign, or the surge which McCain's promised to surf, but my perspective on Irish republicanism. The districts in Derry, the loyalist of the Fountain minutes from the Bogside, that of Van Morrison's Cyprus Avenue so near Gerry Adams' Pound Loney. Or, of the local gang, eight hundred strong and lasting forty years, that's terrorized the few blacks who dare to move into the barrio around my home.

Near the article's end, Gopnik reminds us of Mill's influence on abolition, and how he championed so much that ideologues and demagogues have distorted in the past 150 years in pretending to rally us for liberal programs or radical ideals. Mill endures, despite our prejudice that perhaps still makes Marx peddled as an icon cooler than his calmer British neighbor, as a voice of reason. If Millians had been more dominant than Marxists, what society might we enjoy as rentiers manque today?

There is a non-stupid conservative reproach to Mill. It is that his great success at changing minds has made a world in which there is not much of a role for people like him. Mill and Harriet, to a degree that they could hardly recognize, flourished within a whole set of social assumptions and shared beliefs. Respect for the mind, space for argument, the dispersal of that respect throughout the population, even the existence of a rentier class who could spend their time with ideas—all of these things were possible only in a society that was far more hierarchical and élitist than the society they dreamed of and helped to bring about.

You can also fault Mill for not grasping something that a crazy reactionary like his friend Carlyle recognized: the depths of violence and rage and hatred beneath the thin shell of civilization. Mill is like a man who has spent his life on one of those moving walkways you find in airports. He takes the forward movement so much for granted that he never makes it his subject. “Most of the great positive evils of the world are in themselves removable, and will, if human affairs continue to improve, be in the end reduced within narrow limits,” he wrote, a little too assuredly. Mill’s work, intellectually so thick, is psychologically thin. There is too little room for Rhinos in it—too little room for the irrational drives that he recognized in his own life but could not entirely blend into his philosophy. It is rich in arguments for freedom, but poor in insights into why so few people want freedom when they can have it. Though no one is more free from the taint of twentieth-century totalitarianism—- among Mill’s London contemporaries, it was Carlyle whom Hitler adored, and Marx whom Stalin fetishized—- Mill displayed no prescience about it, either. Enshrined popular reason was his goal; permanent popular rage beyond his ken.

Still, most philosophical projects die with the philosopher. Mill’s thought, as his biographer says, is alive right now on every page of the morning paper. When we debate gay marriage, or abortion rights, or due process for the Guantánamo detainees, we’re still working out the consequences of his thoughts and his practice.

(Illustration of Mill & Harriet by Ralph Steadman from the article. For Gopnik on Dick, see "Blows Against the Empire," Aug. 20, 2007. For Chesterton, "The Back of the World," July 7, 2008.)

Des Kenny's 101 Irish Must Reads.

This being one-tenth the mortal span of the recently reviewed (by me here and on Amazon US) "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die," I suppose, it's fitting that the Irish version, by Galway bookseller and critic Des Kenny, proves less formidable and more realistic. I wonder if it's all fiction? Also, it's heartening as an aside that although the shop I loved on the high street in the medieval town center's been shuttered now-- and after its remodeling, frustratingly-- there's a browsable store out on the "Liosbán Retail Park née Industrial Estate" as a bit of recompense. The "white 'spotted or chief fortress'" of its Gaelic name clashing with English functionality, in a typical culture clash. The webpage touts the location as akin to an "American style Bookbarn," but at least there's comfy chairs and free parking. Less atmospheric by far, but perhaps more commodious for the thousands of books it must surely shelve.

My next visit to the City of the Tribes, whenever that may be remaining only theoretical given the current economy, will certainly find me there mooning over spines, even if I have to walk miles down the congested Tuam Road from my spartan B&B. Rather fitting that the first seller on the Net became an unwitting victim of its move from High Street, as Des cited that even Galwegians were ordering on-line from him rather than making the trek down what after all have become increasingly touristed haunts jammed by street buskers and mimes the past decade.

The new place-- pictured above-- offers 50,000 titles in 700 square metres. I guess they sell 'coffee' too, as their "jpg"'s so tagged. Depressingly, the strip mall location also advertises on the website "Books by the Foot." It's a testimony to the marketing savvy of a family in the business since 1940, and a testament to our society's transition in how "books do furnish a room," if not perhaps how Anthony Powell might have wished. Still, the postcard of the green-painted former storefront, dog and window-shopper snapped by Liam Blake, sent when I became a subscriber to the books-on-approval scheme a decade ago stays up in my office.

Until the cost of shipping from Ireland became exorbitant, added to the expense of increasingly inflated offerings from small and academic presses that I craved but could no longer afford, the book packages sent from Kenny's remained a thrice-yearly treat. Trouble was I also had to ship the books back I did not want, and this turned out to be a sizable chunk of more than change, books being the one burden anybody having to haul them learns to their muscular exertion. I spent more money there than any other bookstore, a considerable achievement, although quickened by the collapsing rate of the dollar to the euro which hastened my termination of such largess and my domestic increase to our national trade deficit.

On my first visit, twenty years ago, I asked Des himself, unaware of his polymathic presence, about what I thought an obscurity, any pamphlets on Lough Derg's St. Patrick's Purgatory. I walked off a short time later with not only rare booklets from decades ago, but a handsome thirty-five pound anthology just out from a local history society on that very place, exactly what I needed and precisely what I would have never found even on the shelf of my research university yet, perfect for my dissertation.

My last visit, perhaps the summer before their Easter closing, I had picked up a pair of Irish-language plays by Antoine Ó Flatharta, hard to find in any retailer even on the edge of the author's Gaeltacht. Des began talking to me 'as Gaeilge,' and to halt the rush of 'blas,' I had to embarrassedly confess my limits as a Yank struggling with the dramatist's macaronics to improve my shaky grasp of Irish. On that same stop, I met Des' brother, Tom, and talked with him not only about an imperious put-down made by his near-neighbor in their native Leitrim, John McGahern-- whom I had just heard speak from his then-forthcoming "Memoir" but also about the area where I'd figured out my birth mother had been born. He kindly noted my query and later placed it in his column on "Old Galway" in the local paper. Their mother, in her 90's, I nodded to politely, as she was engaged in a heated reminiscence with a customer and friend in the crowded aisles.

Reading Joseph O'Connor's novel "The Salesman" on the train the other day, unsurprisingly the narrator, stuck in Galway, whiles away his afternoon browsing there. Ken Bruen's novels curiously find Jack Taylor always getting his reads, on the other hand, from a friendly clerk at Charlie Byrne's, just across Middle Street from the back entrance to the old Kenny's, now the Art Gallery's rear door. Taylor even enters Eason's a few blocks past K's. I wonder if there's some reason for the choice Bruen, a native son, makes for his erudite protagonist's patronage?

Anyhow, speaking of selections, it's a shame that we foreign-based scholars and bibliophiles and amateur critics face such difficulties in finding the titles that few libraries here ever import, as budgets diminish on the municipal, university, and personal levels. While turning to interlibrary loans and haunting the checkout lines that my tax dollars rather than my own income support, it's tough to winnow the gems from smaller Irish-based presses that Kenny's often displays. I have found, more than once, on the jacket of an LAPL or UCLA acquisition from a few years back a little sticker with Kenny's price still affixed in punts.

Here, from the hometown paper The Galway Advertiser, 9 October 2008, a blurb of sorts on the book's release. I've excerpted a few of Kenny's spot-on observations.

101 good ideas from Des.

Book expert gives readers the benefit of his years of reading

'I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!' said the author Jane Austen. 'When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.'

A good way to start building that library, and exploring and experiencing the rich and influential world of Irish writing - one of the nation's great gifts to itself and the world - is to read a new book from Galway bookseller Des Kenny, entitled Kenny's Choice - 101 Irish Books You Must Read.

Kenny's Choice is Des' personal selection of Irish fiction, poetry, and history books he feels are too important not to read, have been overlooked or neglected, or are worth rediscovering. For this Des drew on his love of books as well as his knowledge as a leading Irish bookseller.[. . . .]

'It's to celebrate the Irish book,' Des tells me, 'and it's also as a tribute to my parents, the work that they did, and the love of books they gave us.'

The book features 101 reviews - some written as Gaeilge - with author information. Each review is only two pages in length and written in an accessible manner, yet still manages to yield a wealth of information - always the mark of a good critic. In short, it's the kind of book you can pick up to check on one review and end up reading for ages, coming back to dip in and out of every now and again.

Major Irish writers such as John Banville, Seamus Heaney, Jennifer Johnston, Brian Moore, William Trevor, Samuel Beckett, and WB Yeats are included. Co Galway authors are well represented through Walter Macken, Pádraic Ó Conaire, Brendán Ó hEithir, Ken Bruen, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Liam O'Flaherty, and Tom Murphy.

While the above are obvious inclusions, Des also wanted to champion writers whose work has suffered neglect or marginalisation over the last few decades and to convince people to read them again.

'I wanted to underline the fact that there is more to a good book than what’s on the best seller lists,' he says. 'I also felt there was a significant amount of good books not getting the recognition they deserved. Two generations of Irish people have not opened books by Maurice Walsh and Francis McManus and they should be made aware of them.'

Des cites Jack Heart's In The Wake Of The Bagger, Mervyn Wall's The Unfortunate Fursey ('The funniest book you'll ever read,' he says), and Spike Milligan's Puckoon as further examples. He also says Brian Moore's The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne and Jennifer Johnston's How Many Miles To Babylon? are now viewed as 'school texts' and avoided as much as possible. 'There is more to them than that,' he says. 'They are too good to be ignored.'

It's a welcome and fresh perspective for such a book to adopt and it is good to see Christy Moore and Pat Ingoldsby included alongside more obvious writers like JM Synge and Frank O'Connor. Many may consider Des' inclusion of Maeve Binchy's Light A Penny Candle odd though.

'Maeve Binchy, and that book in particular, opened the door for other Irish women to feel that they too could tell their stories and write fiction,' he says. 'I hate the term 'chick-lit'. I despise it! It's just another way of marginalising a style of writing by and for women.'

However the most surprising thing about Kenny's Choice is not an inclusion but an omission. James Joyce is nowhere to be seen on Des' list of essential books.

Des has reasons both practical and provocative for leaving him off the list. He points out that most people are well aware of Joyce, aware of his reputation, and can name a number of his books even if they have not read them.

'This book is not about Joyce, it's about the other men and women who deserve attention,' he says.

Des also says, somewhat mischeviously, that there was little point including Joyce as 'most people claim to have read him'.

It is a fascinating aspect of the James Joyce phenomenon that no criticism is permitted of the writer and those who dare suggest - no matter how well versed they are in Joyce or their academic qualifications - that Ulysses has any flaws, suffers an immediate 'belt of the crozier' from the Joyceans. Des' third point is bound to send them through the roof.

'I was going to include Dubliners but in the end I didn't,' he says. 'I was talking to Con Houlihan once about Joyce and I suggested to him that I find a lack of generosity in Joyce's writing. Con thought about it for a moment and replied: 'You're nearly right.'

'I find that in Beckett and Yeats there is a greater feeling and generosity towards other writers and towards the reader. Many people just think of George A Birmingham as a comic novelist, but reading this Protestant minister again I found a deep rooted socialism and social concern for people. In Joyce it always seems to be about what you can do for him, not what he can do for you.'[. . . .]

Kenny's Bookshop