Simon Young's "A.D. 500": Book Review

What if a Byzantine delegation travelled to the British Isles in the chaos after the Romans left and the Saxons invaded? Young collates what's extant about British Celts, Welsh, Irish, Picts, Scots, and Saxons. He dramatizes this material as if recorded by a scribe editing the earlier ambassadors' log-book. The conceit reveals information that I predict even specialists will learn from, and the generalist will enjoy. It's instruction made entertaining, thoughtful, and even wryly witty.

Young's drawn upon archeological and historical reports that are up-to-date. He favors a rather earnest tone, but this reflects the mood he figures the Greeks would have assumed in reporting the wonders and barbarities they, emissaries from Constantinople, would have witnessed through skeptical, jaundiced, yet credulous eyes. I found the earlier material, as the dozen delegates sail up the Atlantic fringe to land around Cornwall to wander through the Pretanic homelands into Wales, rather familiar, but this time period for all its lack of substantial extant detail has been scoured by scholars. Similarly, the Irish portion must take in later accounts that are back-dated to allow us more insight into customs that presumably lasted long, and went back earlier, for the Celts.

The book does lumber along with the Greek trekkers, stringing along anecdotes but often-- if inevitably given the gaps we face in the historical record-- they seem more strung along than intertwined. As Young admits in his preface: "Though the following pages may not satisfy professorial standards of history, it is far more gratifying for reader and author alike to place the little beads of sixth-century knowledge on a fictional string, than don rubber gloves and forensically isolate them, putting each in its own sterile museum box." (x) I must agree.

I liked the Pict portion, for all its necessarily scantiness, for this people seems the most enigmatic for us. Going down through Scotland, when the party crosses the ruined Roman walls that bordered the war zones of what became England, the narrative quickens and the sense of excitement in the traveller's journals can be felt. "The days of glory, these, when legionaries knelt beside the writhing bodies of dying Picts and tried to read in vain the strange tattoos they found there" strikes the exact tone of a chronicler. (134-5) The dangers surrounding foreigners caught between the crumbling defenses of the Christianized, semi-Romanized remnants of British Celts and the ever-encroaching pagan, brutal, Saxon hordes gain vivid retelling. "In fact, modern Londinium is like a sandcastle barracked by the sea, where a child has begun to dig out its finely sculpted innards to add a few more desperate inches to its walls." (192)

This is a short book, that flows in parts-- especially in the pre-"English" section and also at the end that does not wrap up the events neatly-- too awkwardly due to the Young's task of integrating lore and data into the mindset of a sixth-century scholar editing eyewitness journals of the sights they saw in turn rumored or reckoned, taken in reality from fragmented evidence and textual scraps. Yet, he does manage to convey the horror and wonder that must have greeted perhaps the real Greeks that made it, perhaps from a couple of hints in the records, that far north. His book concludes with abundant references that support his hedges and his claims. For that reason, with hesitations, I recommend it. There's doubtless no easier way for the inquiring non-academic to dip into this century's British and Irish realms. From here, of course, the original texts and the scholarly journals can be entered. This remains my favorite period of history, for we know so little still about what fills imaginatively, if hesitantly, two hundred pages here. (Posted to Amazon U.S. and Britain, 9-17-09)

Captain Lavender

In threes, I find mentions of lavender lately. Closest I come to it's a laundry cachet from Trader Joe's. Even with my poor sense of smell, it reminds me of our one trip up past Tacoma to Port Angeles, far up the Strait of Juan de Fuca, across Puget Sound. Two years ago, in drizzle alternated with rainbows, my wife and I took her dad's ashes-- the half we hadn't slipped out of a baggie off Seattle's Space Needle-- to the hardscrabble town where he grew up with his relatives in the Depression. A failed hotel or boardinghouse nobody's left to point us to, found his family as desperate as he would be, eating blackberries that grew wild around Seattle then and scarfing whatever he could sneak from a fortuitous job as a grocery delivery boy. He'd regale me with the same anecdotes over and over-- as I already tell these now of where his ashes wound up, the only ending I can add to his own story.

We drove past Sequim, the last stop before Port Angeles. We stopped for Layne to use the restroom I suppose and grab one of her diet sodas she craves so desperately. The place had the fake-Western facades in its humble downtown "historic" district but the big-box stores threatened in an under-construction sign in a lot across the street, and the other side of the highway a massive subdivision filled a meadow. Did the dot.com Microsoft-fueled boom echo this far? However, "The Lavender Capital of America" if not the world (not sure how the French felt about that boast) managed to convince us that, a season earlier than the late autumn when we travelled the Cascades together, some fields filled not with stucco but with that purplish barb.

This morning, I'll teach a story by a longtime fellow son of the Port, Raymond Carver, who may not have been born there but in Yakima, but who with his wife, a local, Tess Gallagher, managed despite his teaching creative writing at Syracuse to remain close to the Northwestern shore. Tess in her introduction to the 1990 tribute "Carver Country" speaks of the "sense of removal and wildness on the forested Olympic Peninsula with the snow-covered Olympic Mountains, bordered by the moody waters of the Strait between Canada and America" that encouraged Ray to find solitude in "the stories and poems that would enlarge his work."

The book she co-edited has b/w photos of the landscape and people inhabiting Ray's work: from Yakima down to Arcata, up from Sacramento to Port Angeles, you see the everyday folks that lived in his fiction and verse. "Cathedral" I first read under my wife's tutelage, for Carver's one of her favorite writers. Despite my long march through English Lit (and I admit American contemporary fiction's not my specialty), I'd never read Carver before-- she'd used his stories for her adult ESL classes.

My college students, many not much advanced beyond ESL, love "Cathedral"; luckily despite my lack of choice of the anthology I use for my one course remaining (when it's not cancelled for lack of enrollment) that's an intro to lit, that story keeps appearing in the new textbook. In two hours, after Joyce's "The Boarding House," we will enter Carver Country. Bob Adelman's photo of Jerry Carriveau I cannot reproduce here, but this blind man became the inspiration for "Robert" in this tale told by a resentful, insular man whose wife brings her old male blind friend home for dinner. Carver opens up the silences of the average Joe, as my students hear those they know.

In her introduction, Ray's wife Tess tells of Sequim, "fifteen minutes away from Port Angeles." She's in a fine shot, gracing a poem "In A Marine Light Near Sequim, Washington." I like her picture better than his verse, but Ray does evoke the setting well as it begins: "The green fields were beginning,. And the tall, white/ farmhouses after the tidal flats and those little sand crabs/ that were ready to run, or else turn and square off, if/ we moved the rock they lived under. The languor/ of that subdued afternoon. The beauty of driving/ that country road [. . .]

Tess crouches for Adelman's camera down in the middle of a field there that may be lavender. Behind her stretches fields and foliage that remind me of Ireland, a place where twenty years after this book appeared after her husband's death, she spends part of her time living into the old age Ray never found, with a spry seanachie. To me, monochrome, Sequim's flora looks like chaparral gone to thistle that tries to grow on my own native city's hills, unless shorn for mandated brush clearance to avoid the fires that nature demands-- as we saw two weeks ago with the blazes that consumed a quarter of the immense Angeles National Forest above Los Angeles-- but that man and stucco forbid.

An ex-urban refugee who fled concrete for up North told me of lavender's calming effect. We arrived in its "pacific" heartland too late: the signs told of the nurseries open from spring 'til midsummer. Earlier, it surrounds many places in the Cascades. I suppose it stretches far across the latitude of cooler climes nearer Arctic winds and maritime breezes. An air we never sniff down here in smoggy heat.

Paul Muldoon in a poem that I cannot forget despite my marked inability to keep lines of poetry in mind, penned the powerfully political poem "Meeting the British" (1987). I taught this in a different literature class, as a doctoral student at UCLA, to a different cadre of students:

We met the British in the dead of winter.
The sky was lavender

and the snow lavender-blue.
I could hear, far below,

the sound of two streams coming together
(both were frozen over)

and, no less strange,
myself calling out in French

across that forest-
clearing. Neither General Jeffrey Amherst

nor Colonel Henry Bouquet
could stomach our willow-tobacco.

As for the unusual
scent when the Colonel shook out his hand-

kerchief: C'est la lavande,
une fleur mauve comme le ciel.

They gave us six fishhooks
and two blankets embroidered with smallpox.

"A mauve flower like the sky"-- a flower as heaven. Innocent beauty, natural doom. Hidden in nature, both wonder and threat always lurk. A foretaste of death, a harbinger of release.

While this claim that the British gave the Indians blankets intentionally larded with infection has been debated, for a Northern Irish poet, this claim does not surprise those of us, like Tess and myself I'd reckon, who with our mother's milk imbibe such race memories in our own combative, resentful DNA no matter how far away from Ireland we may have been born on the Left Coast of America the other side of French calls and British responses. Unlike Paul Muldoon and this next poet, we may not have grown up under the British, but ancestral patterns groove deep. So do the reveries in our primal olfactory-memory match as urged on by flowers, thankfully.

Another Northern (the adjective is necessary) Irish poet, Belfast-born Medbh McGuckian, in the title poem in her 1994 collection, published her short verse "Captain Lavender":

Night-hours. The edge of a fuller moon
waits among the interlocking patterns
of a flier's sky.

Sperm names, ovum names, push inside
each other. We are half-taught
our real names, from other lives.

Emphasise your eyes. Be my flare-
path, my uncold begetter,
my air-minded bird-sense.

Today lavender may revive not dim gloom but bright vigor. We lavish its scent into our laundry. No matter how chemical or manufactured, we want our blankets too freed of dangerous smells and nasty odors. For Muldoon, the captain's handkerchief must be scoured as soft as the sky above him and the Indians, who struggle in the speaker's voice to understand the invader Colonel Henry Bouquet--nice surname-- as they try to unlock the mystery of the fragrance that transcends language. But the lavender symbolizes and furthers their encounter, native against militia, fated to be fatal.

For McGuckian, Muldoon's contemporary, in this entry as part of a poem cycle after her father's death (and later the year that Tess posed in the field, her Ray would die of cancer and be buried in Port Angeles), the sperm name enters the woman to jostle along the ovum name, the Captain joining Lavender. Deep beyond what can be stained which demands a washing by hand or machine. Beyond Muldoon's gulled tribesman, fumbling phrases that cannot comprehend the truth of the skin trade, McGuckian reconciles the clash between peoples, the war between the sexes. By reclaiming "real names" we might claw back humanity from "an uncold begetter." We may free human bonds from snares and traps. Beyond the field of blooms, we may soar in sex and aesthetics into "air-bound bird-sense." In the "sound of two streams coming together," deep inside, invigorated by what surrounds us, we restore a purity simple as a Sequim field after soiling our garments in fire-ashen dust far south.

(P.S. I wrote more about Tess Gallagher and the Trip Up There in two 2007 posts, one "Samhain" November 1, the other October 10 "Space Needle" on this blog.) Photo by Tom Dempsey: "Purple Haze Farm, Sequim, WA."

Can you call me Jack?

I hate my first name, my middle, and my last. One could've been different. When I entered kindergarten, my parents asked me if I still wanted to go by "Jack." Never having heard-- this being a few decades ago-- any peers with this rather retro moniker to my five-year-old ears, I declined and opted for the plain form, along with what seems from my generation many more classmates, the last to make "John" a popular boy's name.

I've seen a few Facebook quiz results from peers too; in each of them surveying their posse of Friends, "John" invariably tops the list of most common first name. But, perhaps "Dylan" or "Emily" will displace this if my teenaged sons took the quiz. I don't think I've met one "John" in their cohort, and after a quarter-century of teaching, that name has been rather rare, for what would be now an entire generation before my spawn and their comrades with often bewilderingly bestowed names that do not hearken back as we once had to do to a long stream of other Johns, Joes, and Jims in my family tree (along with a lot of Marys and Margarets this being Irish Catholic). This pattern repeats, I found out in adulthood, with my own birth-family tree also; my name given at birth I only discovered at 22 and verified at 44. Too late to go back to that, but the very uncommonness of my surname proved a blessing, for with that information I was eventually able to find my birth-mother, with a name about as uncommon as my adoptive mother's surname which is my middle name.

The old idea that duty to the departed, in my case my mom's only brother who died in the invasion of Saipan in WWII, directed the grieving survivors to name the child in honor, can be found I suppose in most cultures. Jews still pick if not the name than the initial letter often in selecting their offspring's names in this fashion. At least this would avoid the numbing repetition in my own family, birth- as adopted, of the same few names over and over. These compounded in my adoptive surname which by its utter stereotypical common nature makes my common first name all the more numbing. One Friend of mine on FB has three of her pals, me included, with the same first and last name. Hang out with aging Irish and this is not difficult.

What about the initial? That's worse, as my mother picked her maiden name, as they used to delicately call it, as my middle name to differentiate me. This worked, but unfortunately neither she nor my dad understood that this doomed me, as I could not nickname a middle name from a surname, and I was forced as I saw it into using my dull first name to couple my dull surname. So, I was really stuck, although my assumption of the initial as differentiation happened when I enrolled at my (theoretically) Catholic college to find two other students my year shared my first and last name.

Of course, I should have stuck all along with "Jack." Although at my advanced age I don't expect I can change onomastic horses mid-life mid-stream. I like the snappy nature of it; the roguish quality. The baseball stadium in San Diego was named Jack + my/our surname after its local sports journalist, until the corporate trend to call it in the dot.com boom Qualcomm and now, horribly, Petco Park, took precedence. And, as a Dodger fan, how could I bear a name that related to our hated southerly rivals? Still, it's better than Brooklyn as a name to be summoned by if I must out of my reveries. I read this a few minutes ago when logging on, from a British study:

If you named your baby Brooklyn, he already packs a mean street rep. Of course, the same would be true if his name was Jack or Kyle.

Certain names put teachers on edge, according to a survey by Bounty, a British pregnancy and parenting club.

The 3,000 British teachers surveyed by Bounty said names can peg kids as potential troublemakers. Boys named Brooklyn, Jack, Kyle, Liam and Jake reportedly strike fear in the hearts of educators, as do girls named Chelsea, Aliesha, Brooke, Demi, Jessica, Casey and Crystal.

Image: some TV show I never heard of.

Sunny Schwartz' "Dreams from the Monster Factory": Book Review

Derided as a do-gooder by guards, suspected as a "pillow fluffer" by inmates, Schwartz fought to gain trust in her legal advocacy-- and respect, the currency behind bars, once lost cannot be easily regained. Her even-handed narrative covers her twenty-seven years in the nebulous "prison-service community" at San Francisco County Jail. She mixes her own story as a remedial student, a natural misfit, who when she came out as a lesbian to her Chicago Jewish family encountered her own challenges. Her relationship with a brother who failed to silence his own demons in his increasingly unstable mind adds heft to her own realization of human frailty under pressure.

This narrative intersperses her own efforts to find personal balance with her prison stories. Halfway into her career, she discovers the concept pioneered by psychologist James Gilligan of "restorative justice." This seeks to make prisoners take responsibility for their actions, past and present, and to make amends to their victims so as to prepare to return to the community. 90% of prisoners will get out. Most do so after nine months served for violent crimes; the "throw away the key" model while filling new prisons to over double their capacity may please law-and-order voters, but it fails to rehabilitate these men and women who've damaged themselves (90% are addicts) as well as others inside and outside their cells. 70% of prisoners return to prison; 90% have never had a legal job; 75% read at a fifth-grade level and the same percentage lack high school diplomas.

Schwartz makes no excuses for those she serves. She's weary of hearing inmates demand their constitutional right to watch "Jerry Springer" who never admit any remorse for those they've harmed. She wants prisoners to accept that they made bad choices that landed them inside, and to start to reverse their patterns of blaming everyone but themselves for their inability to turn themselves around. Her mediation does place her often at odds with the guards, and she has to argue back to earn their respect. She falls in love with a female deputy warden and her battles at their home deepen her insight into the tensions that guards face as well as their charges. (See my reviews of Michael J. Santos' "Inside" for the prisoner's p-o-v and Ted Conover's "Newjack" for a correctional officer.)

She emphasizes for her own RSVP program the need for inmates to overcome their own "fatal peril," the violent moment many who share the "male role belief system" have when allowing their shame to get the better of their judgment. This deep shame triggers them to lash out violently when they feel "disrespected." By conducting workshops that confront the male prisoners with victims of crime (particularly poignant is Jean O'Hara, a grandmother of a baby killed along with her daughter by a drug-desperate addict robbing their home), RSVP and "Manalive" programs try to get the prisoners to settle down and look inside themselves to learn to control their reactions. Instead of calling on their "inner hit man to reassert control," Schwartz and her colleagues try to defuse this spark that sets off unstable men over and over.

Does the program work? Schwartz admits some inmates return, but at least it is for drug-related offenses far more often than violent ones, so this may be progress. The problems of "three-strikes laws", the outrage understandably raised by parolees who commit heinous crimes, and the "war on drugs" raise complex issues no one program can solve. Still, and Schwartz does not shirk the program's shortcomings, it has improved lives. She reminds us that the RSVP aims are not new; but "biblical" as they seek to make the wrongdoer accountable for his actions, and to repair the harm caused to his victims and the community that he lives in and to which he will return.

The book moves very rapidly, and can be read in a couple of sittings. I would have liked, given what she admits as "San Francisco cliches," to have known as a California taxpayer why a female inmate has an hour in her daily schedule for "acupuncture." As you might expect from the City by the Bay, yoga, meditation, and peer counselling augment the educational offerings as reforms at the "program facility." Classes are mandated for all inmates at her County jail branch 7, run by an ex-con who did time for murder before becoming its superintendent. Such novelties provide an intriguing counterpart to the usual state institution where little correction occurs and much coercion, and both guards and inmates welcome the change. Perhaps by this book, such steps towards true rehabilitation will become more common for the other three million incarcerated in America today. (Posted to Amazon US & this blog 9-14-09)

Mullen & Munson's "The Smell of the Continent": Book Review

Cheap flights to cheap rooms in Spain, global English, guidebooks, tour guides, packaged itineraries: thank or blame Victorians. Between 1814-1914, modern tourism bloomed. Their complaints about no "meat breakfasts," bad tea, extortion, and locals unable to speak the lingua non-franca sound as familar to today's European visitor.

Richard Mullen & Robert Munson, historians with Oxford doctorates, assemble three decades of index card research turned 115 computer files, gleaned as they prepared "just under" a hundred documentaries for the BBC. Such diligence shows here packed into every page. I admit I skimmed sections, as their relentless press of immense primary research-- the narrative is jammed with quotes from diaries, novels, published and unpublished correspondence, and first-hand journalism-- does at a long sitting threaten to overwhelm the casual inquirer. Still, for those seriously eager to follow intrepid and/or annoyed British to what they called the "lions" of the capitals and the sights soon marketed to millions, this is the place to begin your armchair excursion.

Travellers early on distinguished themselves from mere tourists. Groups rallied by Thomas Cook and his rival firm Henry Gaze could afford to go where only aristocrats on a "Grand Tour" could prior to Waterloo. Individuals, meanwhile, tended towards condescension of their national neighbors scurrying to Europe-- and the latter wrote travel books often sneering at their lumpen or hapless fellow citizens abroad. John Ruskin, always lofty, did accurately observe "the poor modern slaves and simpletons who let themselves be dragged like cattle. . . through the countries they imagine themselves visiting." (qtd. 197) Mullen & Munson find his reaction typifies that of British travellers: they dislike their countrymen on holiday, and they tend to find that travel was always better before the crowds came, when adventurers preceded the mobs, and the journeyer was of "better quality" than the yobs today.

One example both rich and middle-class British in Naples might have shared was gaping at the local yokels. There a popular pastime was to feed the beggars pasta, a novelty: "watching the lazzaroni swallow as much of the long strands of 'macaroni' as possible without stopping." (262-3) The English crowds gawked at Catholic ceremonies, trying to convert the natives in the pews. They committed every faux-pas with their men attired in the "country fashion" of loud checked suits when packed for overseas adventure. Their women, distinguished too by their garish dress or tawdry fabrics, were jeered at by the French as haughty hatted red-haired dainties; their men were disdained as instantly recognizable florid-faced arrogant boors.

Chapters progress through the creation of holiday packages, the English stereotypes, the "lions" of the cities every tourist had to see; the rise of the guidebook; the hassles of passports and Channel crossings; the weariness of transport and lodging; the fear of luggage being mislaid; the reaction to the lack of sanitation; the culinary fare; the reactions to exchanging money, dealing with Catholics, and handling or fumbling the local lingo; the communications with those back home; and a brief coda on pre-WWI forays. Period illustrations from illustrated magazines offer excellent support for the mishaps related in the text.

The book closes with a survey of how much we on our own vacations might find remains from those who preceded us to tourist traps and must-see attractions nearly two centuries before. The signs may now be in German and Japanese as well as English. But by these markers of multilingualism, currency exchanges, clutched maps and phrase books (the latter topic's barely mentioned here), we see the earnest efforts of those who literally paved the way for hordes today that we mock and that we join. (Posted to Amazon US and this blog 9-13-09)

Dhá scannán, dhá sós

Bím gnóthach le déanaí. Muintim go leor. Scríobhím trí léirmheasannái ag cur amach in h-irisí fósta.

Chaith mé ag scríobh alt is faide amuigh faoi deireanach ormsa: cúig focail déag. Caithim ag úllmhu go luath dhá cur in aithne faoi Deireadh Fómhair. Caithfidh mé ag déanamh aiste eile faoi an ábhar sin freisin: ach naoi céad focail amháin.

Mar sin féin, rinne dhá sós leis dhá oíche amuigh ag bhaile. bhreatnaigh mé ar feadh an seachtaine seo caite dhá scannán leis mo theaghlach. Ní fhaca mé "Adventureland" nó "The Seven-Year Itch" riamh. Is maith liom scannán eile le Billy Wilder agus Marilyn Monroe, ar ndóigh.

Ar scor ar bith, níor mheas mé go raibh an scannan seo chomh maith le "Some Like It Hot." Cheap mé go raibh "Seven-Year" ro-gheáitse. Thosaigh an scannan sin chomh cuma amharclainne.

Bhí "Adventureland" sin go brea, ach go raibh cuma liomsa féin. D'inis sé scéal eile ag cumadóireacht a bunnú ar saol scéalaí go raibh séisean féin óg. Ar chuma ar bith, chuala muid amhráin níos lú a mbeadh tóir air sna mean-hochtóidí aríst.

Two films, two breaks.

I'm busy lately. I teach a lot. I'm writing three critiques to put out in journals also.

I had to be writing the longest article ever recently for me: 15,000 words. I must be preparing soon two presentations for October. I will have to create another essay about that material soon: but nine thousand words only.

All the same, I got two breaks for two nights off at home. I watched during the past week two films with my family. I did not see "Adventureland" or "The Seven-Year Itch" before. I like another film with Billy Wilder and Marilyn Monroe.

However, I did not reckon that this film was as good as "Some Like It Hot." I think that "Seven-Year" was too stagy. That film started as a theatrical undertaking.

"Adventureland" was fine, but it was no big deal for me. Another story told by narrating based on the life of the storyteller when he was young. At any rate, we heard terrible pop songs from the mid-'80s again.

David Comfort's "The Rock & Roll Book of the Dead": Book Review

Seven flights with Icarus? This narrative investigates the last days of "The Seven," four of whom died at 27. All shared broken families, talent, hubris, and a fascination with displaying genius through mania.

While their stories already've been told, Comfort aims to chart a steady course between hagiography and exposé. He aims for an explanation of how each one went down the drain, and why they chose this direction. Neither saintly or sordid in its presentation, while all of the stars do wallow in excess admittedly, their childlike attraction to repairing their own broken homes and early estrangement with money, chemicals, sex, chattels and power does exert its own fascination for the rest of us. Living as celebrities, they retreated into isolation. They all wearied of the pressure to reconcile their talent with "the toxicity of fame," the demands to continue innovation in their music while somehow keeping it familiar, to churn out the old hits. "They died for their music as surely as they had lived for it"(4).

Comfort begins with Jimi Hendrix, whose long list of female conquests may have sucked him into doom; Monika Dannemann and his fearsomely conniving manager, Mike Jeffery, may have conspired to do Jimi in when he did not capitulate to their wishes. As in any tale based on secondary evidence and post-facto testimony, Comfort's own scenario may not convince all skeptics, but forensically he raises salient questions that remain about the way Jimi's body was found and those who may well have plotted to end his life so they could cash in on his estate.

After a segue exploring how "The Seven" shared childhoods shattered by parental estrangement, Janis Joplin's story unfolds, more straightforwardly than her one-time lover Jimi's. Comfort captures her appeal to all the loud, blowsy, frumpy women who saw in her a figure many men slept with, but then derided the morning after. He tells her famous return to her ten-year high school reunion with verve and imagines her own last hour in her hotel, all alone. This chapter blends into a follow-up study of the chemicals that seemed to constantly alter the states of "The Seven"; five would die alone after indulging, in their own vomit and blood and stench. Five dropped acid. All but Elvis consumed illegal drugs-- the King was different only in that, a law unto himself, "Nixon deputized him as a federal narcotics agent." Elvis loved reading the "Physician's Desk Reference."

Presley's familiar story of the road to excess that leads to the palace of Graceland gains needed energy by Comfort's regaling us with how Elvis and The Guys womanized and gluttonized, and with bits such as his brief flirtation with becoming a monk in the Self-Realization Fellowship, we get a side of the man not often seen. It's a sad tale, as with the previous chapter. Jim Morrison's eros-thanatos struggle killed him. Comfort gives him credit for his intellectual influence and mystical idealism even as he tells us evenly how Jim self-destructed willfully and heedlessly. Marianne Faithfull, frequent observer of those "dancing with Mr. D," said of a mutual friend posthumously: "Had he lived, he might have turned into a human being." (143) This epitaph arguably speaks for all the major and some among the many minor players in this saga of life at the top.

The next interlude examines how manic obsessions consumed each star. For Lennon, Comfort opines: "if Paul made the Beatles popular, John made them profound." (206) John's pain at being the misunderstood, unappreciated "real talent" doomed him to be as he admitted a "f[---]ing egomaniac," but Comfort locates in Lennon's ambition a lifelong frustration with complacency and conformity. Yoko Ono's own influence has been well documented, but as throughout this compendium, Comfort skillfully combines in his rendering of "the pornographic priestess" his research from a wide variety of biographies. Yoko emerges as what John called "me in drag."

Often wryly phrased (even if I cannot quote some gems here) with apposite citations and damning quotes about and from such as the obsessive couple in their "mind games," this remains an efficiently told, steadily paced study of the destructive factors that eroded the pedestals mounted by "The Seven." (One aside: the book's back cover promises "dozens of rare photos," but only sixteen b/w grace its single insert. The book does have footnotes, a bibliography, and index and is without any typographical errors, a welcome example for a genre often woefully under-edited.)

Comfort shifts into a novelistic mode briefly when reconstructing Janis and John's last hours, but this works well to vary the tone and he works as far as I can tell from the record. Comfort dutifully attends to rumors of conspiracies and mysteries that have been advanced. He fairly interprets the gossip, forensic reports, and secondhand coverage and firsthand reports about the death-driven motivations and fatal situations for all Seven.

The loss that Lennon represented moves into a section touching on spiritual yearnings as varied as Elvis and the SRF, Lennon's responses to Christ, Hendrix's Cherokee background, Morrison's Celtic and occult interests, Kurt Cobain's punk disbelief, and Jerry Garcia's non-theism. I agree when Comfort sets Morrison, Hendrix, Garcia, and Lennon closer to "a nondogmatic Buddhist or existentialist point-of-view" that sees death as not a closed door but "merely a change or dissolution of form." (241)

For Cobain, the facts concluding what's been supposed his suicide fail to convince many. His ambivalent sexuality, troubled childhood, artistic fixations, and urge to shock could be shared by Lennon, his role model of sorts, while Morrison, Jimi, and Joplin provided case studies for him in earlier outré behavior by those courting fame by notoriety. Kurt's more of a second-generation rebel, a janitor, a scatophile and an olfactorily driven layabout. Heroin after he signed a record deal with Nirvana enabled him to rise-- or fall-- to the levels of his predecessors. Courtney Love, whose father had early managed the Grateful Dead, by her ballsiness drove Kurt to try to match her own wallows growing up within rock music's sleazier side. "Just call me Yoko Love," his wife said. (264) She became fed up with what she saw as Kurt's hypocrisy against being a corporate sellout once his band made #1. Nirvana's fourth album her husband wanted to entitle: "I Hate Myself and Want to Die."

Certainly, as perhaps with Jimi's death, the circumstances seem to point to outside involvement in Cobain's end. As noted by Comfort, Nick Broomfield's 1998 documentary "Kurt & Courtney" unearthed possible leads. Comfort relates inconsistencies and what appears collusion to gain control over his estate involving the unfaithful Love, from whom Kurt had been seeking divorce. Hedged in by lawsuits and intimidation, those who may know the truth about Cobain's death may not be able to tell what they saw or heard.

"Love" in another guise moves the Seven along as they depend on lovers and family to sustain them and protect them from manipulators of their fame and income. The six men all needed women around them. Janis, bisexual like some of the Six, repeated her one-time lover Jimi's often ruthless abandonment of past supporters once she enjoyed success. Four wives married Jerry Garcia, but he left three after they cared for him; the fourth complained she could not get enough of his money out of him. He cried.

Garcia's, despite a 1986 coma, by then a CEO of "California's thirty-ninth largest corporation," the Grateful Dead. (302) Like Elvis, his road downhill may have been longer than those who died in the hippie era; unlike Elvis, Garcia became a bloated embodiment of that era's idealism turned commodification. Like Elvis and Hendrix a military veteran more or less, Garcia was old enough to be a Cold War draftee. Perhaps more than those two singers, Jerry earlier on encountered as he and a friend drove at "death charades" the real thing, when his friend died at the scene of the crash in which Garcia was flown through the windshield. "The death of the ego" inspired his band's folkloric name, and their rise in countercultural, lysergic San Francisco needs no repeating as they sought "a suicide in music" by relentless touring with most of the band on LSD.

After "twenty-five years of burnout," as Garcia sneered, he could not keep up the demands of touring, marketing, and performing. He was fickle with the women who nursed him; alimony, his fourth wife's spending, and child support ate up his income. He seemed unable to reconcile the cash cow he'd become with the band's utopian roots, and perhaps inside the greed that swirled around him in his entourage hastened his fatal heart attack while in rehab from the damage done his body.

Comfort concludes with the Seven's peers who survived. Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Keith Richards, and famously Mick Jagger, however, endured. Harrison, Comfort reflects, knew too that the Beatles rivalled Jesus for popularity. Yet, Harrison "rejected this, knowing that becoming a god in the minds of others or in one's own is a fatal condition." (336) Early death, as the Seven all found, represented not the triumph of talent and ambition, but the loss of humanity, as those who raced after fame found in its attainment their own lack of character. (Posted to Amazon US 9-11/09.) Author's website: "Rock & Roll Book of the Dead"

Perry Garfinkel's "Buddha or Bust": Book Review

Travelling in Buddha's footsteps, Garfinkel pursues "engaged" followers who apply dharma to heal the world. Parleying a 5,000-word "National Geographic" commission into a brisk report, if perhaps too rapid for those less familiar with Buddhism today.

Such speed, for instance, early on raises questions. Going east from America, Garfinkel reaches not the Buddha's Indian birthplace first to start his account, but a Zen Peacemakers retreat held at Auschwitz. From a New Jersey family with Polish Jewish roots, Garfinkel as expected brings baggage to this experience. Yet, he mentions offhand the fact that retreatants stay at the contested Carmelite convent's dorm adjoining the camp; he also seems to underplay the question of making a more universalist statement out of the Shoah at its ground zero impact.

Kaddish is recited and the names of a few of the six million recited, but summing this up with the fact that Garfinkel could 1) get angry and spread revenge; 2) hide and avoid the truth; 3) accept its inexplicablity and align it with a Buddhist refusal to comprehend some things appears only to postpone this immensely difficult question's resolution, for evil was done for explicable reasons, not out of some mysterium tremendum. He sums up that out of this "incomprehensible" encounter how he can choose rather to "feel more alive," but this option for acceptance failed to satisfy me-- yet the Shoah for many observers remains a topic that cannot be resolved in words.

The next chapter recovers with a very well-told look at Buddha's life and teachings. I have read a few of these, but Garfinkel shared fresh bits. I did not know that Siddhartha on leaving his sleeping wife and child in one version did not tiptoe away after a parting glance one night, but in an alternate telling, awakened his wife to make love with her one last time before tiptoeing away. I'm not sure which action was more or less worthy; Garfinkel notes how Buddhist feminists may be troubled by this anecdote still, and it's always troubled me too.

Garfinkel shares an echo of such tension caused by renunciation of the world and family when the reforming King Ashoka's wife, fearing her husband's born-again devotion to the Buddha, destroyed the branch planted by the king from the original Bodhi tree. The author holds as a follower that "ripples of change," as Ashoka showed in India, happen by individual initiative with engaged Buddhists rather than relying on political or social transformation to affect change for the better.

The chapter from the longest continuing Buddhist nation, Sri Lanka, does disappoint a bit, perhaps overshadowed by the Sinhalese majority's war with the Tamil Hindu minority that complicates simple equations of Buddhists with peace; in Thailand as well, there's a sense of gloom at corruption and squalor. A moment of insight comes, however, when while watching a monk practice his meditation for a few minutes, Garfinkel blurts out from his heart: "take me there"-- not the mountain behind the monk's cell so much as the place within his soul.

In Bangkok and Hong Kong, the East-West exchange of mutual influences for engaged globalized Buddhism enter our mediated age. An Indian businessmen harried by communicating with New York bosses a whole work day away by e-mail reminds Garfinkel of the tensions of staying in touch 24/7 as one's way of making a living. He clarifies that while the East has been allied with being and the West with doing, in the emerging, commodified Buddhist network across electronic and business lines, therapies and meditation labs, teachers and students criss-crossing, that such facile demarcations are blurring.

In China and Japan, the challenges of retailing Buddhist tradition to tourists and natives alike seem to dispirit Garfinkel. The Dalai Lama's cousin, by an amazing side trip near the border of Tibet, parrots Communist harmony and freedom of religion to Garfinkel, who records these words to play at an interview with the Dalai Lama in exile. As with many jaded journalists, Garfinkel reports that his meeting with the Dalai Lama seemed to spark energy within the most cautious and world-weary interviewer.

Back in America, a visit to Naropa U. in Colorado and a look at how Buddhism gets packaged move as expected, tidily but a bit drearily. Garfinkel intersperses his own understandings of his Buddhist-Jewish-secular outlook too sparingly. He may as a journalist want to subsume his own life within his travels, but his discussion of how suddenly while talking with a Zen priest his own belief in God blinked out needs more than a paragraph or so of elaboration.

He's on, of course, to a profound difference between Buddhism and conventional religions as belief-based systems by definition. He holds that belief in God propels suffering, the self-vs.-non-self, me-not-me dichotomy that separates us from everything and everybody else. God, Garfinkel posits, is not something or someone else, and Buddhism places the awesome responsibility for undoing the damage done upon ourselves alone. He advances the Zen "don't know mind" similarly when tackling the Shoah at Auschwitz earlier on, but there persisted for me in this narrative a sidling away from how he was taking on the question of human correction of evils, after all at the heart of an socially engaged Buddhism.

In closing, his own traveller's tale has many exciting moments and involving stories, but it also shares a middle-aged tiredness with its author. He takes up his life's challenge and seeks answers in a method that refuses pat answers for eternal verities that other faiths promise. Nevertheless, this may prove after all, then, a more honest story than I expected, a lesson in the "bust" on the way looking for a "Buddha." (Posted 9-10-09 to Amazon US and my blog.)

Arthur Marwick's "The Sixties": Book Review

People changed, not the system. Extremism enriched culture, Marxism disappointed realists. Dreamers believed in Mao and music to remake the world, but personal changes failed to sustain lasting economic or political shifts in power. This sums up the thesis from a founding professor of history at The Open University since '69: ideally placed to comment on this decade, in fact spanning 1958-74.

This enormous book, published in '98, hides within its heft, its reams of data, its dutiful reporting much wisdom, many archival gems, and innovative research. Marwick favors primary texts in Britain, the U.S., France, and Italy, and these transcend expectations. "Room at the Top" and "This Sporting Life" gain in-depth analysis and comparison of text to film to illustrate the evolving mores in Britain as consumer frivolity eroded postwar frugality. Memphis State U's paper "Tiger Rag" documents student reactions to desegregation. A French Communist magazine aimed at youth (of both sexes) has its reviews of early Beatles pop records compared to those of Catholic competitors in the press (one for each gender). Diaries show how political change affected not only the young but their parents. An widowed Italian mother, who in mid-'68 picks up caramel wrappers after her radicalized son entertains boorishly his privileged comrades, over the next eighteen months starts to read the Communist Manifesto and to investigate this feminism that the boy's girlfriend carries on about.

Liberalization on the personal level, as goods cheapened and wages rose, allows sexual and philosophical transformation, but Marwick stresses how the mooted "working-class awareness" distinguishes itself from "consciousness" contrary to Marxian pieties. The latter condition carries the expectation that such proles and students must be "in constant struggle against the middle class in order to overthrow it," while most working class people were content to contemplate their distinctions, rather than to work to abolish them. Theorists failed to challenge Marx's 19th. c. "epochal pattern of history" that expected a false dialectic. Marwick argues: "There was never any possibility of a revolution; there wae never any possibility of a 'counter-culture' replacing 'bourgeois' culture." (10)

Trite analyses by Roland Barthes stating the obvious while overlooking the context; catch-phrases and slogans trickling down to a wider, idealistic, and often naive activist audience; impractical solutions for deeply rooted injustice: the Sixties promised more than its participants could deliver, and they lacked guidance on how the already dated concepts of class struggle could truly solve global inequality. This conflation of Marx with (post-)structuralism and social construction of roles never questioned this "lousy history" (290) any more than biologists denied Darwin. On this groundless trust in "the Marxisant fallacy," Marwick finds "there is no more evidence for the existence of 'the dialectic' than there is for the existence of 'the Holy Ghost'." (12)

Confronted with such a wealth of detail, what emerges are such spirited moments of contention, and the archival eye for the telling remark. Much of this does read at times as if a write-up of the scholar's notes, but he's able, when accounting in one long paragraph for the success of the Beatles, for instance, to use the example to stand for the whole. Their eclectic, experimental, and extremist mood, in lyrics and in music that for its variety always sounded "like the Beatles," best characterized the decade's "expressive mode."

Even the fabled Paris uprisings in '68 showed that while stylistic and aesthetic exuberance counted for a lot of evident change, that our world's power structures were too embedded to be easily overturned by Western protesters in scarves and jeans. "In the end France was not that different, since the whole theory that revolution ought to take place was simply false. Everybody piled in with their particular fads and philosophies, then just left it to happen. A badly typed statement from the 'Children's Cell of the Revolutionary Communist (Trotskyist) Party' declared that children were part of the struggle." (614) The stylistic assembly of statement, observation, and supporting fact delivered with deadpan "dispassionate analysis" (20; his term for being an "atheist" towards glib jargon and tired theory I welcomed) shows the tone of this social-political history.

This study shines in such moments amidst the perhaps inevitable amassing of evidence that may overwhelm. As a Californian, I did catch a few slips betraying the author's British base. He repeats the familiar claim that black casualties in Vietnam were "grossly disproportionate" but gives no statistics. (535) (In fact, 10.6% of enlisted men were black, 12.5% of those killed; this compares to blacks of military age being 13.5% of the U.S. population at that time.) James "Chancy" was not killed as a Freedom Rider, but "Chaney" was. There is no "County of Oakland," Alameda County encompassing the city of Oakland within county limits. The San Francisco Giants, cited by "Ebony" here, boasted not Willie "McCorey" but "McCovey." The L.A. riots in "Watts 1993" were in 1992. And, while no native would call it "the Big Sur" using an article, it may be technically correct to locate this beauty spot "north-west" of Los Angeles. Yet it's two-thirds up the coast nearer San Francisco, its more fitting geographical neighbor and a better culturally aligned designation.

I read this straight through, but others may wish to dip in and roam about the chapters, thematically arranged along a chronological framework from '58-63 as the foundation for a cultural revolution, the "High Sixties" from '64-'69, and the coming down into the early seventies, ending the postwar affluence boom in '74. Marwick, like his decade, perhaps shines best in the British New Wave and then in the upheavals of '68; the last stretch of the book's anticlimactic even as gay rights, antiwar demonstrations, feminism, and environmental causes at last start to work smaller, often less dramatic, but still astonishing and longer lasting feats of eroding the power base. He closes his chapter on '68 pondering how the student protests could be chronicled, for such events are important to sort out, whereas "it is much easier to pontificate about 'hidden structures', since nobody can possibly tell whether you are right or wrong". (675)

He finds the protesters show the idealism and bravery inherent in the decade's uprisings; they also show "the folly of their obedience to the great Marxisant fallacy; the absurd faith that there was a promised land ready-- given sufficient protest, sufficient violence, sufficient unconventionality, sufficient vulgarity-- for the taking." Yet, Marwick, who was there, or close by, humanizes his critique. "I do not mock the protesters; I salute them, recognizing that they never had a hope of success in their revolutionary aspirations. I do mock commentators since, who, looking for the revolution decreed in the Marxist scriptures, have gone and on picking over their failure, missing the real cultural revolution." (Published to Amazon in the U.S. and Britain 8-25-09)

Hard Labor, Labor Day, Labor's end

To "pay it forward," as I posted on yesterday, here's three recipients. I moan about my job, but with the 'actual' unemployment rate at 2:5, I'll aim for compassion today. I'm reading on my treadmill, where perversely I try to peruse uplifting if lighter (in content and heft) material, Perry Garfinkel's "Buddha or Bust." This book explores "engaged" socially activist Buddhism as it spreads worldwide.

His appendix lists many worthy sites. (That "Splendeed.com" site via "Liberal Rapture" to my wife's entry "Brown Bag" to mine may inspire unmediated charity meanwhile. And/or satire given earnest do-gooders.) As I trod this morning, off from teaching, I used the time I'd have spent getting ready for work on this rare holiday to put my usual simmering discontent at my fate earning my keep by the sweat of my brow to better post-lapsarian use. I wondered about my wife's ESL class assignment, in which she'd assign her charges to write their own obituary. I came across a mention of a writer yesterday who after doing this same task, left her husband and children and career. Not advice I'd hope to spark usually.

But I did contemplate, at my funeral, who I'd ask any mourners (if they showed; by the time we all die I reckon like my father-in-law we'll have a memorial service but no graveside finale. Our spawn'll toss our ashes into a favorite realm. For Al, his daughter and I surreptitiously emptied half a baggie into the skies from Seattle's Space Needle; the other half from Port Angeles' tiny wharf across Puget Sound where he grew up in the Depression. For me, perhaps half for the redwoods above Santa Cruz and half to my ancestral farm in Co. Roscommon; my birth-mother asked me already for hers to be at midnight so as to avoid angry farmers relegated to the ancient dolmen burial site at Poulnabrone-- pool of sorrows-- on her beloved Burren shore of Co. Clare) to donate to my designated causes in lieu of flowers (which make me sneeze). Maybe I should take that Facebook Quiz that predicts how & when I'll die. But, I'm already riddled by pagan and papish superstition as it is; that familial farmhouse adjoins a Celtic Iron Age "fairy fort" or primitive fortification in which the fearsome and not fey Good People not so benevolent are said to lurk. If you scoff, finish Eddie Lenihan's "Meeting the Other Crowd" and then get back to me.

I chose three causes from Garfinkel's list. Catholics lapsed or not; Jews the same; it being California, mix-and-match or decline-to-states: for this small crowd as I contemplate them celebrating after my demise, an activist trio appealing to all.

1) Not only Catholics, whose predecessors' fated "Faith of Our Fathers" we sing about "cursed by dungeon, fire, and sword," might resign themselves, given my own purgatorial skeptical self's fate, to supporting "Prison Dharma Network." I appended this site to an entry, "Justice Denied," on Death Row San Quentin prisoner Jarvis Jay Masters. This Buddhist prison ministry explains its mission on its site:

Prison Dharma Network (PDN) was founded in 1989 by Fleet Maull, a federal prisoner then serving a 14-year sentence for drug trafficking. Since its founding, PDN's Books Behind Bars program has provided books on meditation and contemplative spirituality to over 25,000 prisoners in over 900 prisons around the world.

We have connected hundreds of prisoners with dharma mentors. Our network now includes over 75 member organizations and prison dharma groups of various faiths and over 2,500 individual members and supporters, many of whom are active prison dharma volunteers.

PDN also provides integral transformative justice trainings for prison dharma volunteers and prison staff. We are leading the way in criminal justice innovation with our new Path of FreedomTM program—a mindfulness-based, cognitive behavioral approach to rehabilitation and personal transformation for incarcerated youth and adults.

2) Jewish friends and family may find Bernie Glassman's "Zen Peacekeepers" particularly intriguing. Rodger Kamenetz' "The Jew in the Lotus" (reviewed by me on Amazon US and this blog not long ago) tells more about Roshi Bernie's work in down-and-out Yonkers. Their site informs us how:

Bernie created the Zen Peacemakers in 1980 to embody this commitment [to "engaged Buddhism"} in a global network that integrates Zen practice, social service, and interfaith work to bring the experience of wholeness and interdependence into the context of daily life. Zen Peacemakers practice socially engaged Buddhism to transform individuals and communities, and have responded to some of the most difficult problems of our time - poverty, AIDS, homelessness, and a lack of skills necessary for employment.

What characterizes the socially engaged practices of Zen Peacemakers is how they extend Dharma from the meditation hall to the worlds of business, social service, conflict resolution, and environmental stewardship. This work has engendered new models of practice, especially to address the needs of individuals and communities in disadvantaged areas. The Zen Peacemakers' way illuminates all life as a boundless meditation hall.

I add, as Garfinkel encounters in understated response in his travels, that the Peacemakers host "Bearing Witness" retreats-- at Auschwitz.

3) The International Campaign for Tibet at "Save Tibet.org" unfortunately may need less introduction given the decimation of over one-sixth of the native Tibetans in another genocide to which Buddhists and everybody else may respond to as pure moral imperative. Whatever your faith or its lack, this should be one committment a righteous person can make. I don't idealize the Tibetans, but I do lament their post-Shoah fate at the hands of a fawning international capitulation to anything Beijing demands, a destructive trade policy that favors Chinese trade above human rights, and a relentless campaign of persecution and death.

The International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) works to promote human rights and democratic freedoms for the people of Tibet. ICT does the following:

Monitors and reports on human rights, environmental and socio economic conditions in Tibet;
Advocates for Tibetans imprisoned for their political or religious beliefs;
Works with governments to develop policies and programs to help Tibetans;
Secures humanitarian and development assistance for Tibetans;
Mobilizes individuals and the international community to take action on behalf of Tibetans; and
Promotes self-determination for the Tibetan people through negotiations between the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama.
Founded in 1988, ICT is a tax-exempt, non-profit organization with offices in Washington, Amsterdam, Berlin and Brussels and field offices in Dharamsala and Kathmandu.

Hard Labor? Well, as a diligent teacher-- twenty-five years on since I began around this week my English 3 Frosh Comp class at Haines Hall 148, UCLA-- however restive now with my fate this worker's holiday-- one that from my employer comes once in that blue moon, and I am working away on my half-online, half-onsite courses every day I assure them as they monitor me more often than do you-- I tried to tie together today's lesson. Labor camps: no holidays. Punished in prison, starved in lagers, driven as slaves: Irish, Jewish, and Tibetan, they all remind us of the fate of those for whom wages, ease, and freedom remain lost ideals, incarcerated and tortured and murdered for no other reason, for there can be no good reason. Locked up and left to die for who they are.

On a lighter note, random play on my computer as I end my thoughts on my end conjures up my favorite Pogues LP the eerily if aptly titled "If I Should Fall From Grace With God" with this celebration from "Rocky Road to Dublin":

There was half a million people there
Of all denominations
The Catholic, the Protestant, the Jew, the Presbyterian
Yet there was no animosity
No matter what persuasion
But fáilte hospitality
Inducing fresh acquaintance

P.S. I always liked this differentiation of "Protestant" from "Presbyterian," reminding me of my Latino evangelical students who separate "Christian" from "Catholic." Photo of a Zen Peacemakers' "Bearing Witness" retreatant by Peter Cunningham: "Auschwitz-Birkenau. Peacemaker Circle."

"Liberal Rapture" website

John Smart publishes this spirited political site. If you like Obama, it'll tick you off more than tickle your fancies. As Hillary Clinton's campaign losses mounted, this leftist blog (started earlier this decade) critiqued Obama. As the election neared, directed by a friend who shared my unease about Obama's cult of personality, I discovered LR.

I began reading LR and four similar sites as November 4th neared, but only LR I chose to link to from my blog and it's the only one I kept up with post-Election Day. I thank LR for linking back to me, once I'd survived a few rounds in its comments ring. My review of Bernard-Henry Lévy's "Left in Dark Times" appears there today as a guest contribution. (If on a slow news day.) I await LR readers' comments, and your own here on my blog. But, play nice.

John takes Sunday off for a well-earned Sabbath rest. I'm amazed how he manages to fill LR daily with such an array of posts on popular culture, politics, and ideas. Even if he cheers for USC rather than UCLA: see, I disagree after all. I often do not agree with all LR proposes, but I support the chance to entertain alternative viewpoints. We resist tired red-state/ blue-state, elephant-donkey configurations; I changed my affiliation to "Decline to State" a year ago.

LR's resident denier of global warming who defends untrammeled capitalism may annoy me mightily, but he's balanced by cooler heads, so to speak. John tells me that he can get hits in the thousands daily; as with most sites, only a fraction of readers comment. LR offers a wide array of videos and-- as this photo shows-- welcome humor. Something many of those who sneer at this site seem to lack. Barbed satire I admit as one of my preferences and failings both. Growing up with a house full of it, all of it aimed at me. And, inheriting another house with the same, and same big target.

So, leaving inner-city classrooms and dinner-table raillery, I donned my asbestos mask and dived into the comments boxes after a while. To be hammered by far fiercer ideologues than teacher-calmed, "let's hear from all sides" me, dulled by twenty-five years this autumn of letting everyone, no matter how dull-witted or orthographically challenged, have their say. I find myself able to entertain any opinion and play any role in discussion. Not sure if this displays intellectual facility or a professional erosion of my moral foundations.

It's a contentious forum. My wife, an Obama supporter along with nearly everyone I know in L.A. (John also is from here, which adds to my interest as he often features local photos and contexts), has never shied away from debate. She and I bicker a lot about the president five weeks younger than me. My skittering views have been called outré by her rightly, no pun intended, but I'm as unpredictable as when a quiz way back put my grab-bag of ideologies nearest to Ralph Nader-- and Pat Buchanan, a tag-team few of my fellow Americans cheer for in polling booths. Ecological isolationist?

Still, my wife wrote with patient insight about "Liberal Rapture" in her latest blog entry "Brown Bag." I delight in encountering, for better and worse, my own self-- elevated and deflated as regularly on her pages as in domesticity. It's a strange sensation to find yourself portrayed to others in this medium, a supporting player preening on her small stage rather starring in my own vast interior pageant.

While for her, LR dispenses vitriol more than opium-- as opposed to other Obama sites-- she concurs that even it may occasionally strive for tolerance and empathy. She didn't read the comments appended to the LR entry announcing a new "pay it forward and tell us if your good deed intended worked or not" site "Splendeed," but when she did, after writing her piece, she and I, along with LR's host, were both taken aback at certain naysayers. Skeptics made my own snarliness purr pussycattish by comparison.

Thanks to this medium and our freedoms, we enter this bustling marketplace of ideas. Comments remain up unless harmful, our shared right of expression to agree and disagree. At least here if not always out there, we can overthrow paraded idols.

I can no longer link to the original post for "Splendeed," as LR posts seem to have now a shelf-life akin to fruit flies. However, I'd add that one can be humanist, progressive, and caring without kowtowing to the Powers That Be. I did get slammed for similar claims on FB the other day for daring to question-- for the first time there-- "the man behind the curtain." Ponder this generous reaction to my diplomatic caution, from an Obama supporter and spokesman for his kinder, gentler constituency: "Only someone who was completely detached from reality could think that. Complete and utter lunacy."

I reckon I'd be rejecting anyone in the Oval Office. Only once has my presidential candidate won, in '92, and note that I did not vote to re-elect him. A Man from (a hamlet called) Hope. Hope and Change to me are not hype but hard-won individual challenges. Reducing them to hipster two-toned posters and bumper-sticker "We Did It. We Won" post-victory gloating resembles Pharisaical parading. I prefer light shining slyly when we let it out from under the bushel basket in private, humbly.

Gnarled in me is a distrust of being told what to do. As I grew up, I no longer could bow to a messiah. We live in "exile in a vale of tears," as this blog's motto overshadows my entries. "Put not your trust in princes, in man in whom there's no salvation. On the day his spirit departs he turns to dust. On that day his plans die." Lacking biblical command, me being raised Catholic, but even I can recall Psalm 146 from high school Mass. And, from such instruction, I know we are charged to repair the broken, lift up the fallen, and ease the weary. My hard-headed response to most liberal calls for compassion unsettles me, and I find myself equally resenting libertarian ideals of benevolent free markets, not to mention despising conservative demands for personal frugality amidst corporate capital gain.

I guess I'll never fit in, a habitual dissenter to whatever the Wizard promises. Strange how once November 5th arrives the robocalls go dead, the posters slip, and the earnest appeals to heartland values and rainbow coalitions vanish utterly from public view. We're treated like an easy lay, a cheap date, and we deserve our cads.

In a "Lunchtime" follow-up (also cited I find by my wife), John W. Smart adds, in his customary fashion, two telling enumerations:

3. Good Deed: I'm a little thrown by the reaction here to Splendeed. I like the pay it forward aspect. Is there something wrong with "pay it forward"? Haven't made my meal for a homeless person yet but I will this week. I am grateful for the suggestion....Should I be cynical about this? Frankly, doing 1 good deed - or 2 or 3 or 16 - in your personal sphere is a direct counterpoint to all that Hope and Change bullshit from the Obots...Without the element of star fuckery 75% of the "liberals" in America would be M.I.A.

Interesting thing on the site today - a few people have recounted their experience doing it....fascinating.

4. Quote: According to the Sutras, evil deeds result in hardships and good deeds result in blessings.

Bodhidharma

Photo: A wonderful snap via LR, always unpredictable in its wares, even to the predictably nattering nabobs of negativity among us. I admit disappointment when my wife opined it was Photoshopped. Make of the image what you will as metaphor. I remain naive despite my cynicism, a word derived after all from Greek for "dog"; cf. Indo-European cognate "chú"=Irish "hound/ warrior."

Peter Ackroyd's "Thames": Book Review

My great-grandfather was found drowned "in mysterious circumstances" a century ago in this river named for "dark-grey ooze." A Land League agitator from Ireland, he met with Londoners before his demise. This sort of mystery attracted me to Ackroyd's riparian "biography." Equally dismal and dreamy in its descriptions, Ackroyd rambles as he did in his "London" (also reviewed by me), but the effect here alternates between delight and dreariness.

He writes well, often. Crossing London Bridge, he sees it as a songline or dreamline reminding us of Australian aborigines, a synecdoche for the great city. "For a brief passage the vehicles and the people are brought into relation with the push and flow of the sea. The wind and the dust, the noise of the traffic and the cry of the gulls, are brought together." (133) In past London: "It might seem to the observer that life for the majority of riverside people was the sum of a dark house and a dark street but, where a thousand such houses are found together, there can breathe a spirit of adventure and of wonder." (181)

One drop of Thames is drunk by eight people, he somehow estimates, before it flows into the ocean. The width of the river mid-City is about a third of what it once was; nobody has been recorded to have survived a swim in fleeing pursuers across its City stretch, so dark, oozing, and unpredictable its cold depths. Its pastoral sounds make the author wonder if these are all that connect our experience of it with its ancient flow, perhaps 55 million years ago.

Suicides draw towards it as much as holidaymakers. "Tacitus relates that the Saxons, long before they colonised Britain, were prone to drowning their enemies in the river as sacrifices to the god Nerthus." (370) Its stretches contain filth, rot, pollution, and decay as well as regattas, day-trippers, and anglers. In it we see our reflection not so much mirrored as altered into a portrayal part "Wind in the Willows," part "Heart of Darkness."

However, as previous reviewers have noted, the effect as with "London" over hundreds of densely factual, or divergently lyrical passages may be one of languor. "Water is the mistress of flowing language, of language without interruption or surcease." (335) The spell of the river soothes Ackroyd as he labors to catalogue its wonders. Those of us far from its banks may or may not be enchanted by such a mass of information. This will aid historians needing a compendium of all data about the river, but it may, despite and because of Ackroyd's assemblage of detail, daunt casual inquirers. (Posted to Amazon US 9-5-2009)

P.S. I add that Stanley Spencer of Cookham, (link to his gallery here) one of my favorite painters, is featured, albeit far too sparingly for me, in this handsomely illustrated work. But, "Baptism" imagining typically John the B. dunking J.C. amidst swimming-trunked languidly arranged torsos of Jazz Age sunbathers is not the example I'd've chosen. My blog features a detail from his "The Bridge" as its first image; a far better selection.

"Sinead's Hand": Marriage Equality in Ireland video

The Irish Campaign for Marriage Equality did what anti-Prop. 8 forces could not in my home state. They humanized gay marriage rights. In a 1:45 video clip. I've already seen it posted on one blog and Facebook today; it's over 60,000 hits on YouTube. "Sinead's Hand"

My initial confusion was that the title evokes the one woman in Ireland whose name stands for a fluid sexuality: Sinéad O'Connor. When I saw this video promoted, I figured she was blathering on about her bisexuality. Nothing against her. Still, the choice of this common Irish name does strike me ambiguously. Intentionally selected?

We hope to be returning next month up North to celebrate our two dear friends who married in the window of opportunity last autumn the month before Prop. 8--restricting again marriages to those Californians of the opposite sexes-- was narrowly but decisively passed. I could not attend then their hitching at the Justice of the Peace complete with a childcare booklet as I had to work, but I do look forward to my journey to their little cabin, now tastefully expanded in Mission Craft style that attests to its century-old status in the woods, as always. They are our sons' role models and our own too. Even if their dogs misbehave more than those at home. And even if at least one's still a Deadhead.

One grew up full of shame at his sexuality; although his Christianity differed from my childhood version, I share the memory of torment over my body and my lack of power to express what I longed to hold to complete myself. Today, we still face in our legal codes this atavistic fear of embraces, this perennial Iron Age-codified fear of pollution. Why do we keep demanding that the state meddle in what's been long the role of the clergy? In our secular age with most of us living in sin and not needing blood tests, this withholding of decent recognition of love and commitment curdles me.

Perhaps open marriage, as my spouse has written about as fittingly given her prison fixation and our domestic wedlock in forged bonds of matrimony as a "Life Sentence" will be the next frontier? We wonder if re-defining lifelong relationships as beyond the clasp of only one couple will signal another change in the near future, as maturity enables people confidently in love to extend bounds for intimacy rather than be confined by boundaries of property. How will families be changed by-- no longer ESL mistakes-- "his husband" and "my mothers"; spouses referring to "her wife" and "their lover"? The fact that my wife confesses knowing people in her close circle of friends who allow for such freedom makes me wonder about another bedroom closet whose doors may be slowly opening.

By such nudges, Irish and American mores evolve despite the cold grip of a clerisy whose passing raises both nostalgia and relief in me. We hear a lot more over there rather than even here among the chattering NPR-organic classes about "partners" in an Ireland that but two decades ago when we met was far more Catholic than it is today. Now, same-sex marriage nears acceptance there before it may here, when divorce was but made legal barely a decade back. In truth, as slavery, pillories, and child labor vanished, so may such denominational prejudice and ignorant churlishness. My son not yet fourteen posts a "joke" quiz yesterday on his Facebook that announces to all his favorite position: doggy style. I eschew comment.

Miscegnation now's but a stumper for spelling bees. I hear women can even drive in most countries now, or talk back to husbands without fear of being hit by a man's stick wider than a toothbrush twig. Which reminds me of an Irish-language term for penis, "slat fhearga" or "angry [or "virile" I admit more closely] stick." But I dangerously digress into telling word-associations as any analyst may aver; Freud sighed that Irish were the only race immune to brandishments of the talking cure.

Is maith liom ag cloisteáil mír leis scannánín seo as Gaeilge fós. Maith agaibh, fír agus mna na h-Éireann. Tá súil againn go mbeadh ag bualaidh amarách ansiúd. Measaim go mbeidh bua nua eile ina dhiadh sin anseo chomh maith.
(Literally in my bog-Gaelic: It pleases me to hear a bit of this little film in Irish too. Good for you all, men and women of Ireland. We have an expectation that there may be a victory in the future over there. I reckon that it'll be another new triumph soon here as well.)

I rith an téarma deacair

Bím ro-gnóthach i gceann ag obair le déanaí. Caithim ag muintir trí céimeannái na rangannaí in éineacht ina h-aon seomra ina h-aon h-uair go tobann. Éiríonn an gnó seo tuirseach ormsa.

Tá sé ro-dhéacair ag muintir trí riantaí bhun-Bhéarla ar bun láitreach ceithre h-uaire, faoi dhó sa tseachtaine ar oíche. Ar ndóigh, tá mhic leinn i dteannta ar dtosach. Níl siad ábalta léamh go leor; níl siad scríobh go leor fós.

Thosaigh me ag cruinniú na leabhair agus ábhair Dé Luain seo caite ar feadh cúig h-uaire. Rinne mé ceartuithe go leor leis ábhair cleachtaí mícheartaí ag tughtha orm ag an scoil. Lheas mé úr-ranntaí go leor freisin mise féin.

Fuair mé Dé Máirt seo caite ní raibh ag glactha an ceartuithe sin ag maor comhairthe. Chaith ag muintir leis ábhair staidéir mícheartaí sin tar éis. I ndiadh gach ní, dheisigh mé na trí rangannaíar ar feadh cúig h-uaire níos mo go luath an lá sin.

Dhúisigh mé gach oíche ar feadh an seachtaine seo leis imní. Bím imní orm faoi oibre. Chuaigh mé ag ollscoil inné ag obair aríst. Thóg mé ábhair nua agus sean leis cúig h-uaire go díreach.

Muintim dhá cúrsa eile fósta. Tiomáiním ag oibre cúig míle agus caoga anonn agus anall go colaiste ceithre laethanta leis amannaí fadaí lá agus oíche anois. Mar sin, ní bhíonn mé ábalta ag cur chomh poist go leor go minic idir in dá linn anseo.

Idir an dá am, chonaic an fiaclóir. Déanaím machnamh síocháin neamhbhuan i gcathair ag cur ina sheasamh aige. Dhóigh spéir ar feadh coicís é ag imeall im bPasadena. Tá fadhbannaí agam go bhfuil bídeach leoga.

In a difficult term.

I'm too busy working lately. I must be suddenly teaching three levels of remedial classes together in one room at one time. "This duty raises up weariness in me."

It's very difficult to start teaching three tracks of beginning English at once, four hours twice weekly at night. Of course, these are students in difficulty at the start. They are not able to read well; they are not able to write well also.

I began gathering books and materials last Monday during five hours. I made many corrections to incorrect exercise materials given to me by the school. I amended many original sections myself also.

I found last Tuesday that these changes were not accepted by a computer supervisor. I must be teaching with incorrect curriculum materials after all. Despite everything, I had repaired the three classes during five more hours earlier that day.

I have awakened every night during this week with anxiety. There's (habitually) worry for me concerning work. I went to university yesterday working again. I built new materials and old another five hours straight.

I drive to work five-and-fifty miles to and from college four days weekly for long times night and day now. I teach two other classes too. I will not be (usually) able to put up as many posts often in the meantime here.

Meanwhile, I see the dentist. I contemplate fleeting peace in his upended chair. The sky burns a fortnight around his office in Pasadena. My big problems are small indeed.

Faigh an roinnt seo nuair ag lorg an íomhá leis "tuirseach" agus "tíne" ag cur leis an aiste seo: Dúirt Irimia faoi Bablóine fógairt atá ag cur leis an ábhar seo ina tithe mór agus sléibhte tirim is cionn gCathair na hÁingeal inniu: "Is mar seo a deir Tiarna na Slua: 'Leagfar go talamh ballaí leathana na Bablóine, agus loiscfear le tíne a geataí arda. Is saothar in aisce mar sin saothar na gciníocha is an tíne is déireadh do thiaráil na náisiún'." / I found this section when looking for an image with "weariness" and "fire" to put up on this entry: Jeremiah said to Babylon a message which is applicable to the topic in great mansions and dry mountains way above Los Angeles today: "Thus saith the Lord of Hosts: The broad walls of Babylon shall be utterly broken, and her high gates shall be burned with fire; and the people shall labour in vain, and the folk in the fire, and they shall be weary." (KJV; Jeremiah 51:58).

Ghriangraf le/ Photo by: Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times / August 31, 2009. "La Crescenta." Ceanntideal/ caption: "Roger Daniels, a La Crescenta resident since 1964, watches a backfire from the edge of his roof."

Mark Collins' "Stateless": My "Epona" Book Review

Here's my new book review, of Mark Collins' 2007 novel: "Mark Collins' 'Stateless': 'Eveline' Revised?". Fleeing Stalinist oppression after the defeat of the 1956 Hungarian rebellion, a few hundred refugees find themselves not in Austria but, on the impulsive offer and equally rapid acceptance of asylum elsewhere, in Ireland.

Thinking they will soon be able to emigrate to Britain, Canada, or the U.S., they begin to resent their stay at a converted soldiers' camp outside Limerick. The Irish government expected grateful Catholic workers happy to have fled Communist tyranny; their Irish neighbors wonder where jobs will come from as they themselves face emigration; the meddling Church and State functionaries along with the U.N. and union representatives appear only to worsen the Cold War standoff.

Read my review and find out more. Collins' novel, like all of the fiction from Irish-based Pillar Press, recalls the original "Ulysses" with a handsome Aegean blue with white type on its cover. (See "the author's website" for more details.) My review article's in the Hungarian-based "Epona: A Journal of Celtic Studies," based now at the University of Pannonia under Dr. Emilia Szaffner. The issue was delayed, but it's the 2008-2 issue, the fourth published and the second one last year= Epona 4 (2008-2): 1-3. Link to the, sorry, Union Jack in the top corner of the home page if you get the Magyar version of the electronic journal!

P.S. I also published a review earlier in the same journal: "Rooted in the Body, Hidden in the Ground: Searching Beyond the Celt," which examines John Waddell's "Foundation Myths" on the evolution of Irish archaeology alongside Stephen Oppenheimer's DNA-language study, "Origins of the British." See its published pdf.file: Epona 2(2007): 1-6. "Rooted in the Body".