Peter Conners' "White Hand Society": Book Review

The title refers to a drinking club of two Timothy Leary started at Harvard, around 1960. It never amounted to much, but Peter Conners uses it for his book, which links Leary to Allen Ginsberg over the decades, from the Beats to the Hippies, and into the Watergate era, the War on Drugs, and the final days of both countercultural pioneers. Their partnership is not an unfamiliar story.

What Conners contributes that is fresh are his excerpts and summations from the Ginsberg archives of his correspondence at Stanford; added to the referenced material from Barry Miles’ and Bill Morgan’s published research on the poet, Conners maps the trail of where Ginsberg’s paths intersected with Leary’s over three-hundred readable, well-paced, straightforward pages. While Conners does not credit Michael Schumacher’s 1994 Dharma Lion biography, which focused on the poetry itself, his use of Miles and Morgan among others, along with a reliance on Robert Greenfield’s 2006 biography (see my review) of Leary, makes for a welcome overview for those seekers who may not wish to tackle those hefty volumes in their quest to find out about what linked, and sometimes divided, these two visionary pranksters.

Via such vignettes as a deadpan recital of an early mushroom trip under Leary (Ginsberg calls the operator to contact Jack Kerouac: “What’s my name? This is God. G.O.D.”), Conners reviews Ginsberg’s poetic and cultural impact. He explains Leary’s professorial and clinical LSD studies starting in 1958. William Burroughs enters the circle. In February 1961, Leary tells Ginsberg about his newest convert to his mushroom experiments. “And it all goes so well, pieces falling into place, running along with some great nine foot tide that’s pushing the white hand.” Conners explains the Society, such as it was: Ginsberg introduces Leary, at the start of the Sixties, to the artists who can influence the Great Society. Leary exposes Ginsberg to “powerful hallucinatory visions.” By making psilocybin and mescaline respectable, under Harvard’s sponsorship, Leary sought to break out of academia while using his position within it to, at least not yet, drop out. First, he wanted America’s elite to tune in and turn on.

Leary dominates most of the ensuing saga. As a “nirvana salesman,” his entrepreneurial skills and charlatan flair enabled him, for example, to go AWOL from the Ivy League to hang out in Hollywood on behalf of his front group for psychedelic experimentation, The International Foundation for Internal Freedom. He crafted and timed his failure to show up for the end of the spring semester of 1963 so as to make it seem as if Harvard fired him “for taking and advocating the use of psychedelics.” With such publicity, Leary launched his movement.

In January 1967, Leary and Ginsberg convene at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park. “Only a half-dozen years after they had sat in Leary’s kitchen at Harvard, they were now watching its physical manifestation in the form of 25,000 psychedelic voyagers grooving together in a field in San Francisco.” The Pope of Dope urged the crowd: “The only way out is in. Turn on, tune in, and drop out. Out of high school, junior executive, senior executive. Follow me!” He then sat down and played patty-cake with a little girl for most of the afternoon.

This was the carefree appeal, and the practical problem. As Ginsberg represented the activist, Berkeley, politically radical contingent, Leary spoke for Haight-Ashbery’s psychedelic flower-children, the pacifists and resisters to conformity, or to revolution. As the following month’s “Houseboat Summit” on Alan Watts’ boat in the San Francisco Bay documents in an appendix, how to drop out and from where, as Ginsberg and Gary Snyder challenged Leary, remained the practical problem. Leary insists that a portion of society will be able to withdraw from the straights, analogous to a day off every seven days in our work week, and that the world can survive. Ginsberg wonders how the engineers and astronomers will pass on their knowledge and skills to those who leave the universities for the prairies and woods.

Leary’s “applied mysticism” did have idealistic qualities. Leary convinced himself and earnestly, if fumblingly (as the Summit records) tried to convert such as Snyder and Watts along with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters to the concept of raising consciousness by chemicals so as to allow dropouts to transform the technocratic capitalist machine into an ecologically gentler, anti-urban, and subversively sexy society. The showdown, as chronicled incompletely by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), at Leary’s Millbrook manor-commune (the conflation is telling) between the West Coast Pranksters who followed Kesey’s “Get them into your movie before they get you into theirs” contrasts with East Coast Leary’s game-theories, linguistic grounding, and more unified front approaches to psychic liberation—thus the White Hand Society and IFIF and other monikers.

The rest of the story takes up Leary’s increasing advocacy of radical change by violence rather than peace. The shift to engage, on terms even beyond Berkeley’s and Ginsberg’s stances, can be attributed to the Federal government’s crackdown on Leary’s possession of marijuana in 1966, his first run-ins with nemesis (and future tag-team lecturer on the college circuit) G. Gordon Liddy, and prison time after his arrest at the end of 1968. His Brotherhood of Eternal Love, another front, this time for drug smuggling and production, angered his mellower, spiritual followers. Leary grandstanded running against Ronald Reagan as California’s governor, and by 1970, Leary was locked up. There, he was administered his own psychological test, and he gamed the answers to get him better conditions that would lead to his flight.

His escape, dramatically retold by Conners, led to a manipulated limbo at Eldridge Cleaver’s Black Panther embassy in Algeria, which had no extradition treaty. When Cleaver tired of Leary’s empty promises for a share of the book advance for the tale of his prison break (the project was shelved), Cleaver had no use for hanger-on Leary. Edgy, suspected, his open letter to Ginsberg from Algeria signaled his espousal of Weathermen rhetoric. He proclaimed a new slogan: “Shoot to Live/Aim for Life.”

Subsequently, if told in a too compressed a form by Conners, Leary worked with the FBI and DEA in exchange for release from a second term in California’s penitentiary when he was recaptured after uneasy passages with shady minders, via Geneva and Kabul. By the 1980s, Ginsberg eased into the role of elder statesman to the non-territorial tribe he helped shepherd. Despite the War on Drugs and the Reagan years, both men wind up their lives with a degree of grace.

Leary “with a puckish twinkle in his eye and the rumpled demeanor of a pleasantly stoned Classics professor,” for his keep turned to debating Liddy on the road. Space travel occupied his interests in the 1980s. His ashes, after his death in 1997, joined those of Star Trek’s creator Gene Roddenberry to circle the earth aboard Spain’s first satellite, for two to ten years in orbit.

Ginsberg lamented that government research on “human mind engineering” had, except for a few military projects, been stopped, and he mourned the control of heroin by the mafia and police. He too lectured on the college circuit, continued to advise LSD use “for an intelligent kid,” and stood to the left of the mainstream—even if the mainstream had moved closer towards him over the past generation. While less confrontational, his stands on homosexuality, spirituality, and ecological issues, as Connor reflects, had been adopted by millions since he had first expressed them publicly. As a Buddhist and in more genteel fashion, he spoke in 1987 of not challenging the neurotic and incompetent anymore so much as trying to enrich those who needed inspiration and guidance.

While Leary may have gained more notoriety, and may have been unable to shake his need to stay in the spotlight as an agent and a provocateur, one closes this dual biography convinced that Ginsberg may prove the more lasting contributor to personal freedom and social liberation. Conners ends his book by summing up what Ginsberg worked on in 1997, during his final days: a long poem “Death & Fame.” He wanted a “big funeral” where all who were touched by him and who touched his life could attend. Conners concludes: “Allen’s list in ‘Death & Fame’ is long, but nowhere near comprehensive. That would have been impossible.” (Featured at Pop Matters 1-3-11 & posted to Amazon US 12-5-10.)

Oona Frawley's "Memory Ireland: History & Modernity": Book Review

This first of four volumes explores the replacement of chronological historiography with a more fluid, less rigid approach that investigates what is remembered from the Irish past. Oona Frawley edits a wide-ranging and deliberately open-ended collection of scholarly essays. Contributors share no single approach, so the results may therefore appeal more to researchers seeking articles on their own particular interests in this anthology.
"Memory and History" by Barbara A. Misztal introduces theory, but she does not explore the Irish academic shift as recently "enhanced by the cultural turn in history" in any detail. Next, Frawley's essay applies cultural memory to an Irish postcolonial context. She defines this type of memory as "remembrance among social groups that manifests itself in multiple forms and relies upon acts of narration." She incorporates a "narrative imperative" that traces how scripts and schemas develop, but again the specific examples from Irish fiction are scarcer than one might expect. These are generally mentioned in one paragraph, with no details, compared to the theoretical discussion, which takes up nearly all of her entry.

A section on "Remembrance and Forgetting in Early and Premodern Irish Culture" opens with Christopher Ivic's study of early modern Irish "collective memory," and here the chronicler Edmund Campion gains extended attention, for his audience and his aim: to undermine the "Old English," that is, the Catholic settlers in Ireland who had been hibernized and therefore degraded, as opposed to the reforming English in the wake of the Reformation. Ivic concludes with a look at Geoffrey Keating's Foras feasa ar Éirinn, a rebuttal to both the older and newer English historians and polemicists.

Mary Helen Thuente ponders the harp "as a palimpsest of cultural memory," and illustrations would have complimented her informative survey well; this volume (in galley as reviewed) lacks all but one instance of a visual compliment. Guy Beiner documents clearly the revivals and revocations (as "social amnesia") around the failed Irish rebellion of 1798, the "Year of the French," which sparked the two-century campaign for republicanism. He contrasts the centenary's commemorations with those of folk memory, and how the evangelical and pro-British Ulster population often resisted, contested, or erased traces of their role in the nationwide uprising a century before.

Máirín Ní Cheallaigh examines another struggle. How did women help to preserve a much more attenuated memory, that of preserving archeological monuments in the nineteenth century? Antiquarians tended to be male, so female participation in this conservation and restoration project has been ignored.

Modernity enters with Malcolm Sen's situating memory studies into Ireland's "fractured, semicolonial" entrance into late nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century orientalist, spiritualist, and antiquarian debates. The Celtic Revival bloomed, and with it, political as well as cultural ideologies that sought change, as they "sacralized" the project of nation-building. The playwright John Millington Synge and the politician Charles Stewart Parnell enter P. J. Mathews' chapter, two "unconventional Anglo-Irish gentleman" who shared a County Wicklow origin, who sparked controversy over sexual morality, and who left an Ireland divided by the people's response to their impact.

Anne Dolan raises the vexed questions around what is remembered about the wars for Irish independence. One preceded and one followed; the victory by the rebels had left the island partitioned and the new republic bitterly divided between republicans who fought against those who accepted a partially free Irish state. Dolan digs into the National Archive accounts to unravel in one famous case who was an informant, who angered the I.R.A., and what happened to policemen murdered as a result. She compares the memorialization of the dead of the first war, 1919-21, with those killed in the civil war of 1922-23.

One revolutionary who survived, the one who led the resistance, Éamon de Valera, himself left a vexing legacy in Irish memory. His longevity and cunning allowed him to blur what was remembered with what was current. Mary E. Daly neatly compiles the way de Valera was both "practioner and interpreter, guardian of the living record" as living history himself, eventual leader of the Irish nation he fought for, against, and then presided over for decades.

In an Ireland proclaiming freedom but still repressed, Emilie Pine uncovers another long-lived institution, the Magdalen Laundries. These religiously-run workhouses kept "fallen women"-- a term loose enough to include those mothers pregnant out of wedlock-- and were part of the network of orphanages and industrial schools were such children might be confined. Women as "penitents" were signed away to the laundries by "a family member and a parish priest." Some stayed there the rest of their lives. Pine studies three fictional representations in film and print alongside other depictions of this carceral Irish subculture, and she fairly notes their exaggerations as well as truths.

The Abbey Theatre stands for an Ireland that the outside world felt better about celebrating as "typical" of its culture. Holly Maples in a solid essay shows how the financial crisis of that theatre, around the time of its centenary, added to its woes, for it had long been--at least in Ireland itself--criticized as being in decline. As opposed to decline, David Cregan finds "Pink Power" among recent movements for equality seeking to reclaim homosexual pride in a country too long determined to suppress its manifestations.

In an inventive essay, Irish-language scholar Brian Ó Conchubhair pairs the post-9/11 war on terror with the paranoia that sparked F.B.I. fears. A couple conversing in Gaelic in Chicago, Fourth of July 2002, were taken in by the Feds as Arabic speakers. So the story went, spreading in the press and on the Net. But it was a hoax. Ó Conchubhair places this anecdote within an examination of how Irish nationalists using the other native (or learned, sometimes in prison) language have been suspected by the British authorities.

Multiculturalization, a feature of recent Irish life, complicates narratives of a cohesive, nationalist origin for the Irish today. Lorraine Ryan takes on how immigrants into, as opposed as out of, Ireland challenge the norms. She critiques the Celtic Tiger rhetoric as itself biased in how it reduces and suppresses an Irish past with racism and injustice. She favors an Ireland ready to incorporate the rest of the world into how it remembers its past and builds up its future.

Finally, the afterward by Irish-language critic Alan Titley turns back to "The Great Forgetting," when the destruction of the traditional culture accompanied the rapid erosion of its original language. After the famine, retrieving what Gaelic locked in itself became difficult for generations raised with English. The language shift wiped out folk memory for many families. Silence became preferable to speaking in Irish, which was punished in British-run schools, seen as backward, a sign of poverty in a nation resigned to immigration to survive. Instead of bilingualism, as in many European or colonial counterparts, the Irish speakers "atrophied and localized," until they could no longer easily understand each other, cut off by regions into dialects. Even today, as Titley might agree with Ó Conchubhair, the relegation of Irish speakers if not as subversives than as marginalized continues, in an Ireland that so many other contributors examine as European, globalizing, and diverse. (Featured 12-31-10 at New York Journal of Books )

"Fodor's Ireland 2011": Book Review

Certainly a vibrantly hued presentation of images and lots of words, aimed at the comfortable traveler who has money to spend but in this very expensive country wants to do so wisely. The appendix of golf courses indicates this audience, as do the "In Focus" inserts, almost like informercials, about Cork cookery, traditional music, the Rock of Cashel, or the craft revival. These appeal to the eye and break up the standard columns of text and marginal symbols that any guidebook features. It's an attractive resource, one that I have used along with the Lonely Planet and Rough Guides aimed more at younger or fitter visitors wishing more on the nightlife, the hostels, and the pub scene than found here, where handsome hotels, nicer restaurants, and more elegant accomodations beckon.

The foldout map's more of a sketch when compared to the likes of a Michelin one; you get lines linking market towns with cities by (non-numbered) major roads but many more scenic or byway routes are not listed. Oddly, none of the six counties of the North are filled in on the map. However, the guide is organized not by county but by major areas, so this may not confuse the visitor as much as with other guidebooks which keep to the region, then county, then town or locale, breakdown for organization.

Again, Fodor's takes pains to incorporate local talent. Alannah Hopkins with her Cork residence and Paul Clements based in Belfast have long experience as journalists and travel writers; Anto Howard weighs in from his native Dublin. Spot-checking three entries for this review, I found their contributions helpful. I tested what I know against details, for some of this material's covered in every guidebook, other material's not or is skimmed over.

Glencolmcille in Donegal has its new Ionad Siúl walking center as the one place to stay, but the Guinness cakes (as of my last visit) were sad to say not sold at the Folk Museum's tearoom anymore. I'd love to be corrected on this. The three pages given over to this village feature two lovely photos. But, no pubs, no shops, no food places, no other places to stay are mentioned, whereas in other guides, this information may be common. It may show that the writers expect visitors to pass through some places rather than settle down for a week or so. Still, the pictures, the feature trumpeted by Fodor in this edition, may convince more than one more paragraph about archeological sites around the area may to visit.

For a larger place, but one often rushed past or ignored, Drogheda on the Boyne gets great coverage as to how to get there by bus: how much the fare, how often the buses run, where they drop you. Fodor's maps (unlike some competitors) are usually reserved for the truly popular cities and destinations, so for example, none here. But you get a brief sense of the medieval walled town, its historical attractions. For it, a country club and a trendy hotel the two places listed to stay, but nowhere can be found recommended to eat!
What about Dublin? The writers know the hotels and the eateries. They describe them succinctly and accurately. The emphasis is on the mid-to-higher end, albeit in a city where few bargains exist. Nice to see a list of bookstores, decent maps of the city center (small streets may not always be given, but the keyed numbers mapped to what's listed in the guidebook get you there), and a pro-con (as in all the accomodations) for the good-bad of the hotels. Many seem to have slipped a bit in service from what they were, as an aside.

The book starts with a frank acknowledgment of how the recession's hit Ireland. Prices may have slipped a fraction for where you may stay due to a glut, but food (if not a pint) and amenities will cost you more. In the appendix, I think they needed to warn American drivers more about the fact that insurance for a rental car may not be covered and that you must purchase it from the renter directly--the authors note the costs that can be added but they do not cover what can double the amount paid for a vehicle. They give good advice about phones (US ones tend not to work overseas as is), tipping, credit cards and transaction fees, and the ways to get around what can be with or without a car a daunting place to navigate.

The writers prepare you for an island nation not what romanticized readers might expect, and they honestly weigh their own pros-cons of the rapid pressures of sophistication and drive for accumulation that characterize today's Irish culture. The history and myth tend to get blended into the presentation rather than separated as in some other guides. I'd say there's less attention to some of the ancient monuments, churches and medieval structures, and Irish-language culture than other books provide. Instead, Fodor's seems to pitch its contents towards a middle-of-the-road visitor, perhaps a bit less eager to rummage around relics on display than to buy a scarf, find an inviting dining nook, or to play golf. This is not a critique but an observation!

At nearly seven-hundred pages, in an appealing format, this is a solid mainstream reference. I liked the website, admission fee, bus-route type of data integrated into entries. The visual breadth, as in the insert on the Ring of Kerry, adds of course to the interest conjured up for the tourist planning a stay. It may not direct you to the more quirkly or less-frequented sights, but for a single-volume compendium, Fodor's combines enthusiasm with guidance well. (Posted to Amazon US 12-29-10 & Lunch.com 2-20-11)

Anne Bancroft's "The Buddha Speaks": Book Review

Many books endure by telling you about the Buddha, but this is one of the few telling you in his own words. Recorded by his followers, these discourses survived in the ancient Pali language. As the Sanskrit versions later were destroyed by invaders, these Pali texts taken down from Indian oral tradition remain the earliest renditions of his dharma-teaching recited three centuries earlier. Anne Bancroft compiles them into an accessible vernacular which improves upon the Victorian-era rhetoric from those who gathered them for the first Western audiences.

Ten sections guide the reader toward enlightenment. They begin with the Buddha’s own account of his realization of suffering as the inescapable root of earthly existence, and the way out of its habitual grip by the discipline of meditation and the exercise of compassion that leads to one’s enlightenment. “Awakening” phrases this clearly: “Since all the world is so attached to material things, it’s very difficult for people to grasp how everything originates in conditions and causes. It’s a hard job for them to see the meaning of the fact that everything, including ourselves, depends on everything else and has no permanent self-existence.”

Such a style speaks well for the Buddha’s own speech. It revives the rhythms we hear. What became defined as “dependent origination” by Buddhists in the above excerpt comes across clearly. It remains profoundly subtle, as the Buddha acknowledged. But this changeless insight leads to freedom from attachment, he discovered within, for those who put this into practice.

As the Dhammapada sums up: “You should do the work yourself, for buddhas only teach the way.” Buddhism demands application, not theory, and action, not merely contemplation or study. “Love,” the topic of the second chapter, urges the follower what the Buddha urged for his own son: to bring loving-kindness into the world out of one’s awakened self. Ill-will and harm and cruelty, by this cultivation, fade away. “By liberation of the self through love,” its practice inspires Buddhists to free themselves and others from pervasive suffering.

“Clarity” brings one closer to “uncreated and unconditioned reality,” that is, a detachment from attachment to body or wealth, life or concepts. “When you are no longer dependent on name or form, you will indeed become a seeker.” This non-duality, this refusal to limit perception to a mind-body or spirit-matter dichotomy, breaks down the habitual mentality that obscures insight.

“Body and Mind” reminds the reader that the Buddha taught that the world’s length and breadth and origin and termination all lay within “this very body, six feet in length, with all of its sense impressions and its thoughts and ideas.” Forms arise, and forms cease: this “embodied world” must be “penetrated and realized,” so as to be understood. A middle path avoiding ascetic excess or abundant indulgence allows seekers to care for body and mind sensibly. It also invites them to detach themselves from sensual attachment so as to prefer subtler delights.

“Contemplation” brings the Buddhist into reflection upon such possibilities. Steadiness by controlled posture and regulated breathing centers the practitioner. Water frequently occurs in dharma teaching as a metaphor, where the ripples do not disturb the depths. In these earlier texts, it occurs as a rejoinder to the Brahmin rituals: unclean secretions wash away, but the water stays untroubled and not disgusted, as all impurities flow away under its power.

“Sorrow” cannot be blamed all on one’s self or others; the Buddha explains how everyone’s deeds “are conditioned by ignorance” as the origin of suffering. If ignorance ends, wisdom may begin. “There is no separate self to suffer,” and this understanding, The Dhammapada tells, leads to clarity. In an all-changing array of arising and passing away, nothing remains for long. “If you want to get rid of your enemy, the true way is to realize that your enemy is delusion.”

Grasping to any fixed being, any concept, any item, itself will lead to folly. Happiness emerges if the insubstantiality of the delights and terrors of this world equally appear as beginning and ending. “The hunger of craving pollutes the world, and the pain of suffering causes the greatest fear.” Mindfulness, a conscious commitment to freeing the self from impulsive habits, beckons.

“Truth” saves, lives in many places, and endures eternally. Like a lamp in the dark, so it should be held by seekers, the Buddha said as he was dying. A chariot, in his famous parable, cannot stand on its own as an absolute. It consists of its parts, but not in any entity that exists outside of its components. Similarly, there can be no “I” or “I am” that is absolute; no “body” endures always. Neither does truth exist in terms of a right-wrong reasoning that outlives its own transience. One may notice how the Majihima Nikaya has been referenced twice in this paragraph, as two versions of eternal truth have been paraphrased. This, too, may reveal the challenges within.

“Life and Death,” speaking of binary components, represent another tension. The Buddha skillfully sidestepped those who sought to pin him down about the post-mortem survival of a body, the origin or fate of the universe, the beginning or end of the soul, or even the conditions of birth and rebirth for an awakened one. He regarded such speculation as irrelevant. His concern remained with “the end of suffering and the finding of happiness.” With one’s own freedom inherent, as all can seek enlightenment, disentangling the self awaits a pure seeker.

“Time and Infinity” illustrates how an “unborn, uncreated, unformed, and unconditioned” condition permeates for those who leave behind the realm of time and creation, life and death. Awareness of this draws the seeker towards liberation from a deeper nature than that conditioned by flesh, gold, beauty, fear, desire, or delusion. Friendliness and compassion bring out the best in the one seeking perfection; letting go of one as apart from the world enables one to become more comfortable within the world, which is recognized as fleeting and rootless.

“Wisdom” tells how thoughts themselves make the world; that is, harmful thoughts lead to trouble “as the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.” Ignorance can be overcome by insight. Even stupidity, according to the Visuddhi Magga, eventually becomes indistinguishable from wisdom. That is, all blends together “in the great ocean” of wisdom in the awakened mind. Reality in its ultimate nature undercuts all definitions, all distinctions, all definitions.

“Self and Society” reminds the practitioner not to stop with one’s own self when it comes to the path to enlightenment, for the path cannot be followed when it stops with one’s self. The Digha Nikaya advises one to become “an island and a refuge to yourself,” by overcoming one’s dependence on the body and on feelings. Greed and desire enslave the weak. But the weak also need assistance. Buddhism enjoins compassion and fairness: a proper wage, a basic level of sustenance for farmers, a secure income to alleviate poverty, and capital for traders.

Wealth is in itself a neutral force. It’s lawful, but its means of gain must also be lawful. Harming others cannot justify its accrual. Attachment to riches will not bring lasting happiness. It must be held on common on behalf of all beings, not to ensnare one within the lures of materialism.

Similarly, wrongdoing can be avoided. Hatred can be replaced by a refusal to retaliate in ill-will. A Brahman asks why all of the Buddha’s followers do not reach Nirvana. Rather than parry him by a clever retort, he explains how directions to a place may be given, but the inquirer on the road may or may not use them to travel correctly. “All I can be is a shower of the way.”

Many of these sayings draw from The Dhammapada (reviewed [by me recently] in New York Journal of Books) compilation of versified sayings, as well as sutras including the Nikaya collections. These became linked with Theravada, Southeast Asian schools of Buddhism, and the monastic interpreters of these dharma-teachings. They were classified by length, theme, or content, but Bancroft does not explain their provenance in her brief introduction. She focuses on the message rather than the medium.

Although this anthology neatly presents the pith of the dharma, free of footnotes or clutter, too minimal a presentation does provide one letdown. Bancroft is not credited as a translator but as a compiler and editor. Still, she does not credit her source texts beyond a credit such as “Samyuta Nikaya” or “Dhammapada.” Nor does she offer any documentation.

This underwhelming editorial support, given this book’s publication by a leading Western Buddhist press, appears to shortchange the pioneering translators and diligent editors, past or present, who enabled her own fluent popularization. Fuller documentation for these elegant modernizations might have guided the reader back to monastic commentaries and a deeper appreciation, at least for these few inquirers, of their textual and contextual Buddhist roots.

For many, all the same, Bancroft’s inviting compilation will goad the seeker toward a path to enlightenment, as if revived in the everyday words attributed to the Buddha. (Featured at the New York Journal of Books 12-28-10.)

Reginald A Ray's "Tibetan Buddhist Reader": Review

This anthology compiles sayings of over two dozen lamas, past and present. Following the naturally emerging path into Buddhist practice, Reginald A. Ray arranges the contents: “what the path feels like, how meditation unfolds in our lives, the particular problems and obstacles that arise for practitioners, the way to be genuinely helpful to others, and how the vividness and clarity of realization begin to dawn within our awareness.”

Oriented for users rather than scholars, this provides a compact collection that may also inspire contemplation, and putting the fruits of such recollection into action.

Seven chapters model the upward process toward the Himalayas of spiritual accomplishment within the “Vajrayana” diamond-sharp methods of Tibetan teaching. Terminology is glossed (if sometimes too tersely for a newcomer) in an appendix, along with the sources for each excerpt and brief biographies of the gurus themselves. Emphasis remains on the pithy comments themselves, which challenge the learner to enter loneliness as the hard-won way towards wisdom. Others become touched by the learner’s own struggle as self-knowledge humbles one towards compassionate outreach.

As Patrul Rinpoche urges in the first chapter, “Foundations,” the practitioner must “cultivate disenchantment with it all.” Death and impermanence goad the seeker. In the second chapter, on the path, The Dzogchen Pönlop Rinpoche puts this into terms today’s reader can understand. A theistic, mundane interpretation of religion treats us as powerless; the programmer’s an “external being or external energy” that holds the keyboard and does the programming for us.

For Buddhism, we program, we control the keys, we “press the command keys,” so “we get what we want on the screen.” These commands constitute the dharma teachings given by the historical Buddha. Buddhism being non-theistic, one’s own skill and one’s input energizes it.

Meditation, in the third chapter, resists easy incorporation into one’s practice, despite stereotypes of blissful lotus-posed devotees. True meditation demands discipline; veterans of this regimen warn of familiar seductions that trap even the advanced advocate. “The most subtle and the most difficult” obstacle, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche warns, persists as “the demon of seduction,” the voice that puts off meditation or “practice” due to the pressure of work, the commitments surrounding us, the idea that “next month or next year” will give us finally the time we need to settle down.

The Buddha compared this struggle to that of a dog vs. a lion. Distracted, a meditator will pursue each stray thought as a dog chases a stick, retrieving it over and over. If you throw a stick at the dog, he keeps bringing it back to you. But if you toss a stick at a lion, the lion hunts you down. Your first throw will be your last. While the dog scatters his energy in repetitious activity, the lion gets to the source of the disturbance, and settles it once and for all. A lion-like surety, an ability to rest on the surface of thoughts as one encounters “empty awareness,” as with thoughts that ripple a lake but do not disturb the depths, becomes the desired state for the calmed meditator.

Compassion in the next section emerges from meditation. Foremost among dharma teachings, this represents the “awakened heart” that the Buddha possessed and reminded his followers that they too possess, beneath the ripples within the depths. The present Dalai Lama speaks of no need for temples or “complicated philosophy,” for one’s own brain and one’s own heart make a temple of kindness. This leads to enlightenment: a challenging exchange of one’s own happiness to relieve the suffering of other beings. Compassion signifies inner strength; this bargain for Buddhahood combines peacefulness with power, courage along with generosity.

Eventually, emptiness represents a higher meaning for the skilled practitioner. The lack of lasting substance within any “real” being or thing, Buddhism argues, upends reality itself. One lama quotes: “In the moment of love, the nature of emptiness dawns nakedly.”

This insight can unsettle. Training requires the meditator to break through an intellectual understanding into a direct experience of this knowledge. Concepts dissolve, and awakening presents the adherent with a farewell to illusions and dreams, especially waking ones.

The “mind of the Buddhas,” as chapter six, stresses the inherent nature of this awakening. This naked awareness of mental insubstantiality and physical limitations, Tulku Urgyen explains, resembles a customer at a buffet. If one only looks at what’s displayed, one stays hungry. Being told about Buddha-nature without bringing it into one’s self leaves one unsatisfied, and empty.

Finally, realization of this awareness permeates the practitioner. As with the sky, the eternal presence persists of the awakened mind, no matter the turbulence of passing phenomena, the clouds obscuring the blue vista. Nirvana exists within the mind’s own coming to be. This may sound paradoxical. But those lamas whose lifetimes of training are distilled into the paragraphs and verses that Ray includes argue that this understanding compresses into intuitive truth. A “natural clarity of mind” pierces the cloud cover.

Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche tests the validity of one who claims to have succeeded at meditation and practice. Within ordinary life, the practitioner keeps steady, freed from distractions. Wisdom persists as recognizable, and this persistence proves the lesson for those yearning for spiritual instruction. “Constant awareness” transcends the sitting session, the formal practice period. For Buddhists, this liberated state does not wait until the afterlife to descend.

Ray presents these complicated teachings in accessible, brief entries. Meditators may wish to consult one or two as examples for daily reflection. Students of Buddhism may find here an easier way to figure out what more specialized texts present in technical language as to Tibetan teachings.

Affordable, and by its organization a book that keeps the teachings themselves front and center on each page, this simple collection of what the lamas profoundly share offers those in the West eager to investigate the legacy of Tibetan traditions a recommended resource. (Featured at the New York Journal of Books 12-28-10.)

Joe Humphreys' "God's Enterpreneurs: How Irish Missionaries Tried to Change the World": Book Review

A century of endeavor by Irish missionary priests, brothers, and sisters ebbs away. Their average age over seventy, their reticence leading them to be tarnished rather than praised by the many who currently criticize any enterprise associated with Catholicism, and their homeland itself transformed by the greed and avarice which their preaching and good works sought to diminish in poorer countries in the Southern Hemisphere, the condition of missionaries from what was the First World's most reliable exporter of young men and women determined to make a difference undergoes a sympathetic but even-handed critique by Joe Humphreys.

Along with reporting by Ruadhán MacCormaic, Sarah MacDonald, and Brian O'Connell, Humphreys, a journalist for Dublin's Irish Times with long experience as an African-based correspondent, provides a history and update on "how Irish missionaries tried to change the world." Sparked by the failed Irish uprising of 1916 against the British, restless, energized clerics sought to bring a message of spiritual independence and what came to be anti-colonial tinged liberation to beleagured Catholics scattered in poverty abroad--often in British colonies. The Irish clergy also promoted, to skeptical patrons, the advantages of competing against the Protestants for the souls of converts. The Columban Fathers, and Medical Missionaries of Mary, among other congregations traditional and upstart, came to dominate the Irish-accented ranks of those overseas.

They were not hesitant, if necessary, to use film and publicity to recruit at home. The Irish Catholic population had remained stagnant 1910-1970, while the number of priests doubled in that time period. By the later date, a fifth of Irish priests worked in the missionary field, and for many men and women back home, the attraction of a more adventurous life, and one in which they might find themselves more in charge than if stuck in a parish or convent waiting decades for advancement, appealed in an era when a vocation was prestigious and an opportunity to combine practical action to help others with one's own adventure in spiritual growth. The realities, as Humphreys and colleagues emphasize for the Columbans and "MMM" sisters, could be dismal. The new members often were sent out while still in formation (if sisters) or just out of training (if priests) and with little chance for acculturation or even language learning often, found themselves running hospitals or schools or parishes in impoverished areas under great stress, left to rely upon their faith, their instincts, their cunning, and their deep-rooted faith to succeed.

By this example, many Irish grew up in the past century admiring missionaries. They may have been misled by naive or stereotyped conceptions of what the Third World stood for, but Humphreys locates in this appeal to the better nature of an Irish regard for those worse off the roots of what U2's Bono, and Bob Geldof, helped in the mid-1980s to jumpstart as Live Aid. Groups such as Concern and Trócaire brought more of the laity into missionary work, and the Radharc film series sponsored by Irish state television publicized social and international issues that involved missionaries. Especially after the Biafran conflict in Nigeria, which led to the Holy Ghost (Spiritan) congregation's own tangled involvement in that civil war, the Irish profile as not only do-gooders but rabble-rousers became prominent. Liberation theology and the preferential treatment for the poor advocated a leftist, Marxist perspective which many Irish missionaries adapted as their new creed.

What characterizes a particularly Irish form of missionary contribution? Humphreys suggests that the disdain for time-based strictures, the "flexibility and casualness" inherent in Irish culture, may have prepared missionaries for the similar mentality in the Third World. It may have also prepared them for the missionary apostolate based less on dogma than on off-the-cuff practicality combined with a determined preference among missionaries for reticence, a reaction that may, however, work against missionaries as their legacy comes under scrutiny.

Added to the now-publicized abuses which Humphreys documents which have stained the Church's human rights record, the many, if humbler and less-promoted achievements in helping the poor at great cost to the clergy's health took their own toll. Most priests, brothers, and sisters who took their vocation seriously suffered deprivation. Some found martyrdom. Many more fell victims to exhaustion or disease, others to mental breakdown.

Today, Humphrey explores a shrinking world. Aging missionaries, disenchanted with the Irish transformation towards a secularized and selfish society, may prefer to not go home again. The Drogheda motherhouse of the "MMM" has only three of its eighty members not retired; the Columban Fathers have not had an Irish-born ordinand since 1999 and all its seminarians studying in Ireland today are coming from abroad. The elusive nature of what the Irish or any missionary brings to their work confounds observers. No systematic analysis of the Irish impact has been carried out. Often the missionaries flee from attention, preferring to do whatever works on the spot, improvising for success that no survey can pinpoint. Converts are not the goal; witnessing to the Gospel is. "Measuring success in such circumstances is like judging performance art."

Orla Lynch of the Loreto Sisters represents a rare figure: a younger nun. When she went to school in Bray, near Dublin, she met a woman who did not fit the stereotype: "I began to realise that you could in fact be young, youthful, vibrant, maybe half-crazy as well, and be a sister." Humphreys shows how Sister Orla's work in the Sudan characterizes the last echo of this long Irish twentieth-century burst into missionary work. Whomever follows will likely be not from the dwindling ranks of very few Irish entering the vowed clergy. Instead, missionaries may perhaps volunteer for a few years rather than decades, and will reflect the shorter-term commitments of those in Concern or Trócaire who devote time when they can and not over a celibate lifetime.

The missionary's core remains not one of ideology, at least for Irish Catholics today, so much as "charism," the anointed quality that distinguishes those delegated to proclaim the Good News to all nations. A Christian Brother working in Paraguayan prisons, Michael Lynch exemplifies "all of the infuriating blend of practicality and other-worldliness; radical and irrational thinking" which defines an inventive foot-soldier commissioned to preach the message of freedom inherent in the presence of Jesus among the outcasts. In Humphreys' view, Lynch "doesn't so much have an ideology as a way of approaching ideology." Contrary perhaps to more evangelical proponents, in this reviewer's estimation (this is an issue that this study does not delve into), Brother Michael "strives to be logical within the framework of a deep and profound faith." The contradictions inherent in this statement sum up the challenge for a clever if--as Humphreys suggests--anti-intellectual approach that fits a pragmatic, canny Irish response to the societal and ecclesiastic and economic system that has disappointed so many over the past few decades.

In conclusion, this popular, readable, and brisk overview reminds us of what the missionaries can teach Ireland. For a nation drawn from tradition into modernity the past forty-odd years, where Catholic pieties increasingly turn cruel caricatures after so many scandals, Humphreys wonders what lessons for better and worse the missionary example, once so devoted to a heady idealism mixed with brute calculation, can offer the homeland. Missionaries fail. The poor will always be with us, the Son of God reminded us. Yet the humility that the missionaries represent, their decision to give up lives of comfort for ones eked out "at the interface between different cultures, with tolerance and integrity," may inspire even a few of us lolling in the consumer's paradise. "Their kind of life might even be called sustainable. It is certainly simple and more in tune with the real world than the self-centred, comparmentalised existence that most of us enjoy."

Humphreys and his contributors remind us, therefore, of the challenge that the Christian gospel, and perhaps any call for renunciation of the goods and rewards of this world, embodies. The missionaries, for all the opprobium heaped upon them as crusaders, as colonialists, as capitalists and even as Catholics, in their best incarnations counter the modern rush to equate self-worth with financial worth. They stand up against despots and dogmatists, even popes and prelates, for the dignity of the forgotten man and woman, so often invisible to those of us who claim to have advanced toward, across what we boast of as the "developed" world. (New York Journal of Books featured 12-28-10.)

Tony Bailie's "Ecopunks": Book Review

This novel combines the story of a German eco-activist, a Japanese maverick archeologist, and an Irish acid casualty-mystic. In 225 pages, it covers global ground, and links intriguing ideas such as Robert Graves' analyptic analysis, our narcotic addiction to tv, the entrapment of minor celebrity, and Charles Hapgood's theory about prehistoric continental drift. Tony Bailie, a Belfast-based journalist, integrates into this fiction his sober take on the media's creation of and distortion of events so as to caricature those before the camera and how many everyday folks today seek their own sort of secular salvation, lifted up as reality-TV heroes from their obscurity to their own triumphs over adversity.

The three storylines take a while to connect, but there's no disappointment in the wait. Wolf Cliss, the eco-warrior, certainly manages to juggle relationships (for a while) and to traverse the planet as he stays in front of the reporters who mock but dutifully cover his exploits as he seeks, for sincere but easily manipulated reasons, to alert the public to environmental destruction. Meanwhile, Kei Yushiro falls for Wolf, and their child, Irinda, leads the couple separately and together into the path of the third protagonist Lorcan O'Malley's own wanderings, this time less geographical than psychological, as he tries to figure out what the "chink" lysergically prised open after a drug-induced vision in his hippie days may portend as to the discovery in the Sahara that Kei makes.

The plot moves neatly, and (despite a discouraging number of typos, the one drawback) all the pieces fit. Fittingly, the networked nature of the ways activists communicate and connect today serves to emphasize the conjectures that Kei wonders about in her excavation, and that Wolf uses to try to figure out his own origins.

In his first novel, "The Lost Chord" (see my review on Amazon or my blog), Bailie had explored the side of fame less attended to, that of the musician who nearly made it, one who labors in the shadow of one who did. For Lorcan, his stint in an Irish folk trio at the dawn of the Age of Aquarius recalls Bailie's interest in this milieu, and he captures well the collision of Celtic past with countercultural present, as in Lorcan's gig playing in Antwerp while strippers "gyrate their naked crotches inches from his face like real-life sheela na gigs." After Lorcan's sudden come-down from such heady delights to Irish seclusion, his half-scholarly, half-spiritual quest appears inspired by John Moriarty, the late Kerry-born mythopoeic sage. Bailie patiently aligns marginalized speculations with scientific possibilities from our ancient past about how current research, even if maligned by the mainstream, may point to networks as intricate once upon a time as those you and I use to read this review today.

Also, the novel conveys a message that allows its mediators to preach a bit even as they know they are doing so. It's for, after all, a good cause. Nobody's entirely good or bad in this tale (even if a certain corporation with unexplained initials may indeed do evil), and these human qualities in its characters sustain the reader's empathy. There's one lurch into brief violence, but this hastens the climax and in the context of the threat, remains believable.

The plight of a planet in which devastation is seen as the inevitable exchange for jobs and economic growth is compared to a cancer, which may currently break out in isolated regions but has yet to metastasize. The impact of the earth so far may appear small, but it is like pebbles rolling down a slope after the rain: "the mountain--seemingly vast--varied and unchanging, but closely and almost imperceptibly being eroded until one day nothing would be left." (80) Relationships in this novel appear as fragile, and subject to their own global disruptions and sudden upheavals.

In Spain, after Wolf's intervention fails to halt a river diverted to feed a subdivision: "The trees in the forest didn't get a chance to die from thirst as they were chopped down and their wood used to build garden fences, some of them in the new housing development." (85) The wry note combines with the poignant one.

And even a familiar topic such as another hi-tech blight, that of our bodies and minds by television, gets a fresh spin. Instead of saints and martyrs, today we admire those such as one "who just a few days ago was caught in the same drudgery as most ordinary people now has, by the power of TV, been transformed and taken to a paradise on earth." (196) The slow drain of this eight-hour-a-day addiction, as with any sedative, makes one wonder about the long-term effects, on the individual and on our culture.

The denouement, after the rapid pace of most of this narrative, stands on its own as a haunting evocation of what Kei had discovered, or rediscovered. It ties together the ending, but it leaves it open with the careful twist that allows the imagination to enter the reader as the book is closed. (Author's website. Posted to Amazon US & Britain 12-25-10.)

Sandow Birk & Marcus Sanders' "Dante's Purgatorio: Book Review

This follows the pair's illustrated, surfer-Californian speak, pop culture-enriched version of Dante's inferno. That dragged us downscale into a strip-mall, back-alley, gang-tagged, trashed and hellish inner-city if still palm-fringed Los Angeles. The sequel's much more pleasant, befitting the hope that energizes those who work of their sentences and in free verse express their determination to overcome their failings and climb the purgatorial heights that rise in San Francisco.

While St Francis will not appear until Paradiso, an angel or two does. Birk's drawings again evoke a contemporary take on the medieval underworld. I liked the strip club of the Garden of Eden in SF placed here as the entrance into the Earthly Paradise that crowns the mountain, and the three lovely ecsdysiasts who as Faith, Hope, and Charity grace the floor. Added to this, of course, is a zaftig, multiethnic brunette Beatrice in a short black dress, talking to Dante. He's abandoned the backward baseball cap that he wore in the Inferno, and now with his hoodie looks more monkish as well as more relaxed. Virgil still drapes himself in flags as well as mantles, but he guides Dante this time only so far. The rest of the vista will await the finale.

Meanwhile, the atmosphere here, so full of fogs and inclines, fits this NoCal locale. "I felt lighter and looser,/ like I had done some yoga and was ready for a hike." (76) There's a relaxed, optimistic undertone to the whole journey, and enhanced by Brother Michael Meister's preface that explains the odd pageant and mystical references atop the Mount, readers will appreciate this infernal sequel. We get a barefoot Imelda Marcos, an envious Tonya Harding, and Oprah and Elvis among the gluttonous, but the pop culture figures somehow appear less noticeable than those sinners in Birk and Marcus Sanders' hellhole.

Dante's part two-- as with part three-- is often far less read than that raw, wrenching otherworldly predecessor (compare the number of translations, reviews, and ratings!), but I found this Purgatorio stimulating and satisfying as a contemporary rendering of this venerable, very Christian call to repentance and reformation. Birk and Sanders appear at ease as they climb to the summit, and they capture the humanism as well as the dogmatism smoothly. As with their Inferno (also reviewed by me), the notes may have to be accessed from another, more scholarly translation and footnoted edition, but especially for newcomers to Dante, this is a welcome excursion. (Posted to Amazon US 10-24-10 & Lunch.com 10-28-10.)

Sandow Birk & Marcus Sanders' "Dante's Inferno": Book Review.

As a native Angeleno, reading about my hometown depicted as hell the week the temperature in my neighborhood hit 118 (the municipal thermometer broke at 113 downtown) made for some poetic justice. The tag of the gang that dominated my neighborhood graces a wall in one of the many illustrations that recall Dore as well as graphic art that Birk's known for, as in his witty SF vs. LA "war"-- it figures SF gets to be Purgatorio by comparison.

I have ten translations of the Inferno, and I like to compare their opening lines to judge the fidelity or flexibility of each version. "About halfway through the course of my pathetic life,/ I woke up and found myself in a stupor in some dark place./ I'm not sure how I ended up there; I guess I had taken a few wrong turns." This shows the casual prose and the matter-of-fact reporting that characterizes the mood of Dante's quest.

Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders offer a surfer's translation, and while this may feel as dated as, say, the Beats' hip slang in a half century from now if not sooner, it does ring true as the vernacular I hear around me now. The placement of such as Slobodan Milosevic, Jim Bakker (misspelled in the text), and Anna Nicole Smith, as well as Porta Potties, Duraflames, and Fred Flintstone's inflated figure in the subway may lead to puzzled readers soon enough, but for now, pop culture references may hook an audience on the original, many translations graced by excellent renderings often side-by-side with the Italian.

The most harrowing scene for me has always been Canto XXXIII, Count Ugolino having to eat his sons. The simple plaint: "'Why don't you help me, Dad?' were his very last words" combines contemporary tone and eloquent power.

The liberties taken with the text, as with the illustrations, naturally are the reason this version's published, so the carping with the freedoms by some reviewers appears beside the point. Birk and Sanders love their wretched city, show compassion for those trapped here, and give voice to the outraged and the outrages in 1300 or 2000.

Many sections rely on digression to incorporate recent references, and then cut medieval ones, and the summaries before each canto do compress a lot, making likely any reader having to go back to a more comprehensive edition for footnotes and commentary. Brother Michael Meister's accessible introduction does assist us, however, and the illustrated map of Hell is clearly drawn. While this may not be the end of one's Dantean adventure, it may be for some readers put off by more scholarly or fussy texts an ideal enticement to descend into classic terror and enduringly moral, and very Christian and ethical, drama. (Posted to Lunch.com & Amazon US 10-13-10)

Choinne dhá pionta go céilí

Fhreastail Léna agus mé go céilí ómós a thabhairt do Pháidín Dé Domhnaigh seo caite. Bhí lá bréithe é aice. Thiomaint muid go teach tábhairne i bPairc Ghlassell in aice leis chomharsanacht againn.

Bheul, chonaic muid Teach Tábhairne Verdugo i dtús báire. Shiúl muid trí an doras tiubh isteach. Bhí sé níos dorcha istigh.

D'ól Léna gloine bpiorra den leann ar dtús. Rinne "Grúdlann Aonghus ag fánaíocht" ag imeall Naomh Didacus é. Bhain sult as aice é go leor.

D'ól mé pionta áitúil le "Grúdlann na gCarraig Iolar" ag glaoite "Forógra." Ach, ní raibh maith liom é, go cinnte. Bhlais mé é. Bhí ro-searbh é orm.

Lhabhairt Léna leis Máití, an stócach seasta Pháidín ar chúrsaí oibre scannán. Bhí mé tanall comhrá a dhéanamh leis sí faoi punk-roc doléir ina tamall fada. Bhí chuimhne léi níos mo de reir, gan amhras.

Chuaigh trucail loin ansin. D'ainmithe "Fostaitheoir Ribe Róibéis" é. D'íth Léna agus mé sceallóga leis iasc. D'alp muid siad is géarr, ceart go leor.

Faoi deireadh, bhí muid ag dulta ar ais faoi choinne pionta aríst isteach. Cheannaigh mé leann dorcha "Siúcra Dubh" le "Grúmlann Lochanna Beag" i gContae Marin i gCalifoirnea ar thuaisceart; roghnaithe Léna beoir Bheilgeach shamhraidh. Rinne sé le "Grúdlann na nGráin Seacht" i bPlacentia. Bhí breá linn beirt óil ann!

Getting a couple of pints at a party.

Layne and I attended a party in honor of Patty last Sunday. It was her birthday. We drove to the pub in Glassell Park near our neighborhood.

Well, we saw Verdugo Bar first of all. We walked in through the thick door. It was very dark inside.

Layne drank a pint of pear cider to start. "Wandering Aengus Brewery" around San Diego made it. She enjoyed it a lot.

I drank a local pint from "Eagle Rock Brewery" called "Manifesto." But, it did not please me, certainly. I tasted it. It was too sour for me.

Layne and Matt, Patty's steady boyfriend, talked about film work. I was making conversation with her about obscure punk-rock long ago. She had a very good memory on this account, no doubt.

A lunch truck came there. It was named "Shrimp Pimp." Layne and I ate fish and chips. We gobbled them rapidly, sure enough.

Later, we went for another pint again back inside. I bought a "Brown Sugar" dark ale from Lagunitas (~"little lakes") Brewery from Marin County in Northern California; Layne selected a Belgian summer beer (saison). It was made by "Seven Grains Brewery" in Placentia. We loved the pair of drinks there.

Robert Thurman's "Inner Revolution": Book Review

Thurman's easy to fault and easy to forgive. As he'll remind you, he's the first Tibetan Buddhist monk ordained from America; he studied with the Dalai Lama before he was a household name and Thurman's pioneered the promotion and study of Tibetan practice in the West. Promoting activism and furthering translation, he combines moral with academic ambitions admirably.

While scholarly peers such as Donald S. Lopez (see my review of "Prisoners of Shangri-La") fault Thurman for his naive insistence upon a practically utopian Tibetan feudal past as a peaceful theocracy committed to spiritual technology, science of the mind, and individual liberation free of strife, Thurman here does appear to underplay what his 2008 "Why the Dalai Lama Matters" (see my review) admits in passing: the Tibetans can survive on their mountain plateau three miles high where others have not adapted.

That aside, this 1998 popularization of an inner-guided revolution has a few inspiring passages amidst rambling detours. The familiar story of King Ashoka's reforms and "cool heroism" among other, perhaps lesser-known Buddhist leaders deserves telling; Thurman enjoys relating Buddhist heritage in lessons that may confuse skeptics (he can be an awkward advocate) even as they assure the faithful.

Contrasting Western "conquest and unification" by technology with Tibetan "harmony and creativity within one global society," he proposes a reformation that makes modernity less frontier-directed. Instead, he provocatively suggests that our Western attitudes betray our need to plunge into a safe territory to let out our repressions of "the untamed wildness of the involuntary emotions of an unintegrated subconscious." (36-7) I lack Jungian or Freudian expertise, I admit, to judge this. He compares Westerners' expansive imperative to an "inner modernity" that needs social isolation lest it's "smothered by the outer modern conquest." Tibet being the case study, the problem remains that it was overrun by a belligerent larger power who had weapons, manpower, and Western-derived technology for mass destruction of the ancient culture and its people on that plateau.

Later he does come around to noticing this, but practically as an historical oversight. He then states the obvious. "Unilateral disarmament causes you to become totally vulnerable to your former and potential enemies." Tibet had barely any forces to resist the Chinese. Thurman lists "late-first-millennium C.E. India, the Jewish nation in exile, modern Tibet, and modern Mongolia" as casualties: "Societies that have become truly civilized in the sense of behaving nonviolently." (125) A hundred pages later, he does muse about how a "middle way between the two extremes of authoritarian repression and self-defeating nihilism" may be blazed by applying Buddhist principles to the inner self as successfully as we've harnessed science and systems to free ourselves within and from outer nature. (218) How this may be done is left to an inevitably idealistic platform for social renewal-- as appended.

When it comes to Buddhism as a not a religion or a belief system, he's on to a controversial idea that may appeal to many disenchanted with theism, or those who wish to blend dharma practice ethically and spiritually within their own religious orientation. He stresses how the Buddha taught the need to separate one's self from ritual actions mandated so as to nurture critical wisdom. "He taught the relativity of social structures and the supremacy of the individual's right to freedom." (59) Here Thurman seems on firmer ground related to other studies putting dharma into understandable "engaged Buddhist" contexts, but this narrative tends to pack so many disparate ideas into its scope that it may bewilder as many as it reassures.

It ends, however, with you unable to gainsay Thurman's sincerity. His subtitle of "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Real Happiness" neatly hearkens back to visionaries Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson who also kicked against the deistic conventions and political platforms of their day as they inspired revolution. Out of this ideal, Thurman finds precedent for a link to the future Buddha Maitreya, who has been predicted will "shatter his inherited jeweled sacrificial post and distribute a piece to each of his thousands of disciples, all of whom will immediately attain liberation and enlightenment." (287) As with any such myth, its beauty nestles amidst its imagery, not its possibility. Yet, Thurman allies democracy to dharma, as he concludes by reaffirming our "mission to restore the jewel crown of the natural royalty of every individual to every person of this planet, letting the authoritarian personalities of dictators and dictated melt in the glow of human beauty and creativity released by freedom." (288)

Few may believe this lofty rhetoric, but few supported Paine then and even today his rationally based treatise remains too revolutionary for many Americans. Perhaps it may take another 2500 years, as has also been foretold in Buddhist myth, for Maitreya as another Jefferson or Paine to fulfill the prophecy that Thurman seeks here to hasten to fruition. This offbeat manifesto may startle many readers, but it may cause some to at least think again about how they believe or defend what they do, and how this warps or smooths their path and the lives of those around them.

(Posted to Amazon US 9-12-09. P.S. John and Elizabeth Roberts in "Freeing Tibet" --an excellent counterpart reviewed by me, with diplomatic and cultural history combined with boycott strategies, divestment goals, and plans for activists to apply to Tibetan liberation; published later in 2008 than this book, so covering Beijing Olympics protests and reprisals after the Tibetan national uprising-- seem less optimistic than Thurman does here or in his counterpart from 2008, "Why the Dalai Lama Matters", also reviewed by me. Finally, see my review earlier this month of "Mixing Minds" by a Buddhist psychoanalyst, Pilar Jennings.)

Robert Thurman's "Why the Dalai Lama Matters": Book Review

"Tired of feeling that Tibet is doomed," friend for 45 years of the Dalai Lama, leading scholar and earnest activist, Thurman explains why China can change, how Tibet can survive, and how they can both be happier. He explores the Dalai Lama's appeal, proposes a plan for compromise, and envisions a "Tibet solved, freed, restored" as an environmental sanctuary, a spiritual center, and an economic entity.

My sympathies are with the message here. But, the tone may fail to rouse skeptics towards this noble cause. Some Tibetan scholars, while admiring Thurman's academic record, shrink back at his emotional embrace of his mentor, and have argued that such naivete and hero-worship may detract from rather than further the Tibetan struggle. I'll mention three other books that those opposing Tibet's predicament may find useful in my review. The first third of this narrative I found the most interesting, but it bogs down when it gets to the details, sort of like after a keynote speaker's introduced, gets through the warm-up, and settles down to business over a long, intricate, and detail-laden scheme. I don't fault the concept here, but the presentation and delivery may, I reckon, make some restless in the audience.

I suspect this book will preach to the converted. Nothing wrong with this, but many more may scoff. The tone of this work will unsettle rationalists. It may put off secular readers accustomed to less fulsome praise of any religious leader today. It will not teach you much about Buddhism, or even Tibet's milieu; I recommend Thomas Laird's "The Story of Tibet" via conversations with the Dalai Lama, and Pico Iyer's "The Open Road" for context (both reviewed by me). Yet, Thurman does try to account for what many-- not only Laird and Iyer-- attest to in the Dalai Lama's presence: he adapts with inner flexibility to his interlocutor, while radiating a charismatic humility, a balanced power, and an engaging wit that disarms perhaps all but the likes of Chairman Mao or President Hu of the PRC. He's somehow grounded in deep tradition while eager for the latest discoveries in science and technology.

Thurman writes as one who has faith in his subject, literally. He builds upon his immense knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism with his Western sensibility, and his American confidence in righteous transformation for a better world. Tibet becomes a symbol of the "inner revolution" that all can aspire to for transformation, no matter their own beliefs or lack in conventional religion.

Thurman reminds us that the fall of the Soviet empire was predicted by few when it happened. The PRC cannot, he holds, live for long as the jailer next to the prisoner. The six million in Tibet face a genocide; the parallels haunt us with last century's ideological tyranny imposed upon a herded and battered people, their ancient and modern legacy of learning and wisdom, and their rich faith.

He parallels three sections of Buddhism with three roles for Tibet's leader. "If Buddhism is one-third ethics, one-third psychology and religion as therapy, and one-third scientific wisdom," then as a teacher, practitioner, and as a philosopher-scientist, we can work for the recognition of the Dalai Lama as a "Prince of Peace" who in his reincarnations as Avalokiteshvara intervenes for the Tibetans. This may confound outsiders, but he's a sort of renewable messiah. Contrasted with Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Jews, all of whom await a first or second coming of a savior-figure, Tibetans regard the Dalai Lama as their protector who, as the boddhisatva's name can be rendered awkwardly but accurately, "'the looking down compassionately on the suffering' of 'a God.'" That is, he intervenes for his people rather than expecting them to wait for "a God who floats above, aloof in his own freedom and bliss." (128) Heady stuff, as are the claims that Thurman as a believer holds for His Holiness, but he gives an introduction that shifts us from our Western skepticism into Eastern understanding of how Tibetan Buddhism regards its spokesman.

For non-believers, the benefits of the Dalai Lama and an autonomous Tibet would counteract our own economic malaise, moral relativism, and capitalist consumption. The Dalai Lama speaks of shared kindness as our social bond. He knows no religion can be perfect either. He tells Muslims and Christians: "There is no such thing as a religion of hate!" (52); Thurman posits this same claim for a conflicted regime such as Communist China.

The Dalai Lama compares four trends in the 21st century that augur well. War is seen as not the answer to geopolitical conflict; capitalism no less than communism gains trust so much as individual initiative; spirituality offers solace and meaning to those for whom "the dictates of materialistic science" have been found wanting; environmental preservation has gained our awareness as a necessity. (94) Thurman prophesies an Asian Switzerland. The book at this point may bog down with a lot of enthusiastic brainstorming, but the ideals and the possibilities open up what, for fifty years, no other methods have succeeded in doing to advance Tibet's freedom.

He and the Dalai Lama imagine Tibet as a possible land of true freedom. But, governments, consumers, corporations, armies: all would have to change their evil ways. Thurman provides detailed speculation combined with the Dalai Lama's own words on many policies and agendas that could be worked out, if China listened, if the rest of the nations cared, and if we believed enough to act for change. He concludes with no index, but a brief bibliography and websites where you can get involved; the maps and photos dazzle with color and detail; his Ten Points of Hope do rally the committed with an inspiring, eloquent, and idealistic conclusion.

Can the Dalai Lama as a philosopher-king, in his next incarnation, evade the Chinese puppet of a "False Lama" that has interfered in the Panchen Lama's similar case? Thurman urges a federation between Tibet and China as a way to ease tensions. John and Elizabeth Roberts in "Freeing Tibet" (an excellent counterpart reviewed by me, with diplomatic and cultural history combined with boycott strategies, divestment goals, and plans for activists to apply to Tibetan liberation; published later in 2008 than this book, so covering Beijing Olympics protests and reprisals after the Tibetan national uprising) seem less optimistic than Thurman. They cite the Dalai Lama's bold plan to get the world to notice Tibet. He'll come back next life as "a beautiful woman"! (Originally posted except for last paragraph & links to Amazon US 8-14-09) Book's website: "DalaiLamaMatters.com"

John B. & Elizabeth A. Roberts' "Freeing Tibet": Book Review

Credit Allen Ginsberg! His Beat quest crossed, in New Jersey, with Geshe Wangyal's Kalmyk refugees who founded the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery in a garage. While Ginsberg's popularization of the dharma, repeated in this book, is well-known, Wangyal and his Tibetan colleagues provide the other side of a symbiotic relationship between the counterculture and the Establishment in their struggle to raise not only consciousness but funds and resistance within the occupied homeland for the cause of freedom.

The CIA, as the first part documents (within limits as much remains classified), tried to work within Cold War tensions, India-China frontier clashes, and propaganda benign and black to support Khampa freedom fighters in the Eisenhower administration. But, after secret guerrilla training in Saipan and Colorado, and airlifts into Tibet, the People's Liberation Army, in 1961, slaughtered the rebels in a "second Bay of Pigs" that today still is largely hush-hush, even to the Beltway-insider authors, who in this narrative rely on CIA operatives and released security directives to explain the role of spies and arms in the failed first stage for Tibet's struggle against Communism. With the Asian geopolitical tensions rising in the early '60s, Tibet was abandoned by Washington.

Part Two shows how Beats and then hippies-- and Ginsberg seems to be always in the vanguard-- took over the "ethical obligation" to Tibet. It concludes with an intriguing reflection. After the CIA's failure to support a popular uprising against vicious PLA reprisals, "shared spiritual values instead of political expendience" entered the awareness of the West. Therefore, "what appeared as a double-cross by the American government-- cold-hearted reneging on solemn promises to support the Dalai Lama during his exile-- was in reality a criss-cross, a moment in time when the surging counterculture took over from an establishment that had discarded the goal of Tibetan liberation." (173)

Published in 2008 after the latest uprising, Part Three therefore shows the little we know, given Chinese manipulation and censorship-- of the protests that March, that failed to derail international acclaim for the Beijing Olympics, and that did not result in Western leaders having the courage to boycott the most favored of all trading partners. Yet, the Roberts pair insist that, as with apartheid-era South Africa, divestment and boycotts can and would work against China to force a sort of Catalan autonomy within Spain parallel for Tibet.

Their proposals, on economic, moral, and environmental grounds, dovetail nicely with the book also from 2008 by an advocate they both quote often, Robert Thurman in his "Why the Dalai Lama Matters" (see my review.) What frightens one in the last stages of the Roberts book is that the present, aging Dalai Lama may not reincarnate, or that his reincarnation may be stage-managed as the Panchen Lama has by the Chinese.

The steady erosion of Tibetan culture, where 8 monasteries out of 6000 survived intact after the invasion and then the Cultural Revolution, continues. Native tour guides in Lhasa are replaced by Han Chinese parroting the party line of a grateful nation happy to be released from serfdom and pits of scorpions run by mad monks. The rail brings in immigrants; Tibetan is not taught but Chinese remains a must for traders and advancement of the dwindling indigenous population against the incomers who bring capitalism without ethics or respect for the Buddhist and local traditions.

While this efficient account moves smoothly through such details, it stumbles a bit in the early section, perhaps burdened inevitably by lots of diplomatic minutiae that historians and analysts will nonetheless welcome. The second part, with the Beats and hippies, moves more fluidly; the third part weighs one down with the realization that cheap labor and high profits from the PRC trump any commitment by the East or West to lasting Chinese reform.

I'd have added a couple of clarifications. The 1904 British occupation of Lhasa by Col. Younghusband did lead to a treaty that forced Tibet's trade with the British in exchange for the Empire's recognition of its independence, but it also meant that the Chinese could twist this treaty with a foreign power into a reason to take over Tibet. The Manchus were deposed but the new Republic of China never ratified the Simla Conference of 1913-14 that acknowledged Tibetan independence. This issue is not mentioned by the Roberts, who maybe march too rapidly over early 20th century diplomatic foundations upon which the present Chinese later justified their long domination of Tibet.

Also, in the Dorje Shukden controversy, the "rival sect" possibly entangled with the murderous debate over the 17th Karmapa seems worthy of more coverage. The Roberts do not elaborate, but the controversy over the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT) in the West that has spread an anti-Dalai Lama campaign taken up often by pro-PRC media appears deserving of attention, as this plays into the current political and cultural skirmishes over the Dalai Lama and his role in governing Tibetan affairs from his Dharamsala exile.

Still, these are minor asides compared to the moral necessity that most in East and West have shirked-- outside of a few celebrities, musicians, more low-key activists, and brave protesters. Our leaders tell us to trust in "blind faith that capitalism has some magical quality to transform China from a one-party communist state to a multi-party democracy." (246) We buy cheap goods, we send them our factories, and we rely on them to support our debt. But, we fail to make them a fairer regime for the Han let alone Tibetans. I hope this book finds an audience, and I hope it changes the complacency and indifference with which many dismiss Tibet today. (Posted as above to Amazon US 7-10-09.)

P.S. At Amazon, 3-16-10, Charles H. Harpole added to my review: "This review misses a very important point... that HH Dalai Lama has announced that if he reincarnates, it will be in a place NOT UNDER CHINA'S CONTROL. He stated that if someone thinks he has identified the reincarnation body and it is under Chinese control, IT IS NOT HH DALAI LAMA. Thus, in a single statement, HH has trumped China's ace, the ace of holding the Panchan Lama in China's control. Today, China is the master evil empire of all, and the world deserves, by its kowtowing to China, the century of Dark Ages China's dominance brings." I responded that I was unsure if this book treated this trans-border "trump." For, my copy has been returned to the library months ago.

Kurt Andersen's "Heyday": Book Review

1848: "What kind of fool celebrates the vanquishing of Mexicans at ten and the freedom of the French at midnight?" (148) "An American fool."

Andersen's sixteen months, from that April past August 1849, span a Paris uprising, Darwin's discovery, London gentry, Marx & Engels' manifesto, that Mexican War, the Gold Rush, New York conflagrations, the rise of photography, bordellos, arson, and Manifest Destiny. As with his millennial romp, "Turn of the Century," Andersen loves New York City, as he celebrates its rich variety of characters, slang, and customs. What he adds to "Heyday": a novel of adventure that skips lightly over the fresh ideas and social transformations that challenge its three protagonists. Ben Knowles arrives from England, soon falls for Polly (an actress-model-whatever in a much later slang term) and follows her and her brother, Duff, a Mexican War veteran with secrets only half-hidden. Accompanied by Timothy Skaggs, an enterprising jack-of-some-trades, Ben joins the trio as they deal with love and death and surprise.

This picaresque narrative takes awhile to leave Manhattan. It does not lag, but it does take its time in the city, soaking up its atmosphere and allowing scoundrels to skulk and thicken the plot. Coincidences abound. These do give, however, a mid-19th c. air to the enterprise, and it's enjoyable to see neologisms and slang enter the lexicon as it's spoken, mainly by Skaggs. The air is also somewhat melodramatic, but it does recall Dickens inevitably in its fascination with the clash of cultures, philosophies, and accents. Andersen keeps the story moving. He rarely stops for set-pieces or editorializing, keeping the point-of-view moving between his three characters and also their pursuer. This can be dizzying; months pass for the protagonists in NYC, but a journey westwards by way of Panama passes in a blink.

But, symbols do work well, enriching the plot now and then. A house in upstate New York is being moved from its foundations onto a wagon so a railroad can be built. "As the house began to move forward, pulled by more oxen than it seemed possible to harness together, its chimneys crumbled and fell to the ground." (360)

Around pg. 350 of 620 pp., the trio leave for a transcontinental journey. I will not spoil the suspense, for it does build as this section commences. Polly wonders why not go all the way, past their original Middle Western goal, to the Pacific Coast. "Why should we not proceed to a wholly new place? A place far beyond what 'is,' beyond the Mormons and the anti-Mormons, beyond the priests, beyond the upper-ten snobs and the revolutionist shouters, beyond the Whigs and the Democrats, beyond 'this' world, a place of plenty where we might fashion our own world." (247)

Throughout the novel, the restlessness and the excitement of this age recalls our own giddy sensations from political chicanery, imperial conflict, technological inventions, fads and fashions, and the passing buzzwords and neologisms. Capitalism makes, if for a season, California as a place where neither rich nor poor live, only those looking for gold in a fresh, levelled playing field; Marx and Darwin contend with DeTocqueville in struggling to describe a world remade and renewed and seen anew. Andersen captures well in his protagonists this fleeting glimpse of wonder.

"Kings overthrown overnight, the nation ribboned with rails and telegraph wire by the day, California conquered and turned into a gold mine, their own settled lives in New York and London abandoned in a flash...According to Skaggs's theory, they now 'expected' outlandish surprise and speed and high adventure-- even needed them, as people acquire a taste for spiced food or drugs. 'Perhaps the quiet meandering and murk of ordinary life,' Skaggs said, 'is now too ordinary for the likes of us. We've been spoiled.'" (512) (Posted 1-19-10 on Amazon US.)

Ag dul go hIarsmalann na gContae

Chuaigh Léna agus mé go hIarsmalann na gContae inné. Choniac muid saothair ealaíne éagsúlaí ar ndóigh. D'iarr beirt uainn ag dul amach le linn an lá breá.

Bhí sí ag iarraidh ag feiceáil taispeántas fótografach le William Eggleston. Is grianghrafadóir é ag teacht aneas ina Meiriceá Thuas. Rinne sé grianghrafái cuma dhearóil de radhairc tíre agus saol ina mbailte tuaithe. Shíl mé go raibh siad mír ag plátáilte ach bhí sé ag usaid sáithiú go maith air.

Is maith liom seo uaidh is fearr. Níl sé teidealta chomh an chuid is mó le Eggleston. Ach, ceapaim go bhfuil an gort go halaínn ann.

D'imigh siad go gailearaí ealáine eile. Fuair siad foireann troscáin Tibéadach. Bhreathnaigh siad fideo géarr le Ladakh. Abair go mbheimis ina Hiomaleatha ag cur cuairt mainistreachaí ornáideachái, ag ól tae leis im gheac.

Ansin, d'fhág siad go ealáine lucht an lae inniu. Thosaigh muid leis na líníochtaí fadó riamh le George Grosz. Pictiúir sé duine cathrachaí scigdhealbhaímaithe ina Ghearmáin agus ar feadh Chogadh Dhomhanda an chéad a tharraingt.

Duirt Léna fúthu go raibh siad cósulacht "Chagall leis P.M.S." Nílim ábalta fáil níos mó i rith idir 1910-20 go cruinn, ach faighim seo. Is cuimhne liom é faoi ag léamh Céline im bParas le dó seo bheith ar siúl go díreach.

Rug orainn saothair ealáine le Bauhaus agus Mothálacht Gearmánach. D'éirigh seo go tobann ina aghaidh mise féin. Phéintáil é Ludwig Meidner i 1912 . Feic Radhairc Apacailpteachaí eile air anseo.

Bhí maith léi í, rud atá le céill. Bhí maith liom í fós, mar sin féin. "Dia ag ainliú le hathaint na uiscí," dealbh a ghearraidh as plástar le Hans Barlach i 1922.

I ndeireadh na dála, shiúl muid suas go taispeáint le saothair ealáine Mheirceánachaí. Ag dul thart trid na gailearaithe, d'fhoglaim mé an chuid is fearr a thoghadh ormsa. Is "Cluain Poipín i gCalifoirnea" (1926) é. Tá cárta poist seo le ealaíontóir féin, Granville Redmond, tamall fada os cionn mo deasc ag oibre agam.

Ní fhaca Léna togha uirthi. Bhí "An Baisteadh" le Julius L. Stewart i 1891 ag curtha as taisce. Thoilleadh sé ar aon láthair, phioc mé maighnéad beag sin uaidh nuair ag raibh sáite ag feiceáil ceann le Redmond ina siopa ina ndiath! Ní raibh fhios agam go raibh an dealbh céanna féin go raibh breá go deo le Léna!

Going to the County Museum. 

Layne and I went to the County Museum yesterday. We saw various works of art, of course. The pair of us wanted to go out during a fine day.

She wanted to look at a photographic exhibition by William Eggleston. He's a photographer coming from the American South. He took forlorn photographs of landscapes and life in country towns. I considered that they were a bit stereotyped but he was using saturation well. 

This one pleases me most. It is untitled as most of those by Eggleston. But, I think the field's lovely.

We went off to another art gallery. We found a set of Tibetan furniture. We looked at a brief video from Ladakh. Imagine ourselves in the Himalayas paying a visit to ornate monasteries, drinking tea with yak butter.

Then, we went to the modernist share of art. We started with the early line-drawings by George Grosz. He depicts caricatured city folks in Germany and during the First World War.

Layne told of these they were like "Chagall with P.M.S." I'm not able to get more examples from the era 1910-20 precisely, but I find this. It reminds me about reading Céline in Paris at the same time this was happening.

We caught Bauhaus and German Expressionism artworks. This leaped out at me suddenly. Ludwig Meidner painted it in 1912. See his other Apocalyptic Landscapes here.

She liked this better, as is her nature. It pleased me too, all the same. "God hovering over the waters," image sculpted from plaster by Hans Barlach in 1922.

Finally, we walked up to an exhibit of American works of art. Wandering the galleries, I studied the pick of the lot for me. It's "California Poppy Field" (1926). I have had a postcard of this by the artist, Granville Redmond, for a long time above my desk at work.

Layne did not see her choice. "The Baptism" by Julius L. Stewart in 1891 was put into storage. But amazingly, I picked that very magnet when browsing to see one by Redmond in the shop later! I did not know that that same image was the one beloved always by Layne!