Stonehenge Stuff & Solstice Thoughts

"What's with all the Stonehenge stuff these days?" So inquires a fellow Irish American who shares such predilections, but who wonders why so many book reviews in a row. I answered her on Facebook:

"it's a continuation of the Celtic Buddhist concepts and inventions that I've been researching the past year, and which I spoke about at Maynooth two months ago. I learned there listening to real neopagans who were also scholars that I needed to find out more about the contexts in Ireland and Celtic cultures which they worked in, to understand the eclecticism into which Buddhist converts were mixing and matching. Thus, my witchy pagan reading lately, which I've strung up as blog posts timed for the solstice, wouldn't you know?"

I'm sitting typing this in the sun, not even 2 p.m., as it already lengthens across me and the (mostly) black cat, Gary, who since my work laptop was partially resurrected, likes to keep me company and watch the screen. Yesterday we were also here as the rays basked us, and I thought about my research interests, and how they intersected with my personal ones. My wife noted last night-- as she prints out my blog entries if not book reviews (too arcane) to send off to a prisoner whom we hope to visit Christmas morning-- how my posts had not been non-academic for this current mailing. So, at least two readers have remarked, if obliquely, on this bent. I figured I'd ruminate.

An interlibrary loan, Michael Strimska's edited "Modern Paganism in World Cultures," finally came in nearly two months after I'd requested it. As I wrote about in a related Irish entry after the Maynooth one, at Loughcrew cairns, I'd been talking to Carole Cusack, a medievalist like me, who after her work on the Christianization of the Saxons in Germany became so disheartened that she gravitated into the study of paganism. This anthology she recommended to me, as I'd already done background reading into neopaganism. She'd published her book on the decline of the traditional ways under the assaults of missionaries, kings, and Teutonic Knights; it's listed by Strimska in the preface, so far what I've finished of his collection.

Insiders within these movements-- who are mostly professional and all academically trained scholars-- present case studies from America, the British Isles, and Europe. Here, Italians, Irish, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, a few in our U.S. military, English "Heathenry," and Icelandic & North American Asatru have all returned to, reinvented, and revived their ethnic and "natural"-- in both senses of the term-- traditional practices. This process for me from Celtic Reconstructionism I knew, but I was less aware of a renaissance other European nationalities, glossy profiles about pixieish Björk among her island's fellow elf-followers aside.

I'll be intrigued to find out more; Cusack praised its fine essay on Druidry, but only later did I discover it's written by another scholar with whom we'd shared information at that very conference that weekend, Jenny Butler of University College, Cork. She had given as a participant-researcher her perspective on Irish neopaganism, her dissertation topic. As I have commented before, the pairing of those who believe with those who analyze we are very familiar with from every variety of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism, but for lesser-known practices, those able to combine belief with detachment to survey their field may account for their modest profile even in scholarship to date. (Pre-eminent scholar Ronald Hutton tells of such denigration by his own colleagues in "Witches, Druids, and King Arthur"-- as reviewed by me in my previous blog post and on Amazon US.)

As I studied Strimska's introduction, discussing such misconceptions, my wife had the BBC World News on. A segment came on about the rise of British pagans, now up to 100,000 and rapidly increasing. A man with a hooded antler decoration stood among a circle of worshippers at yesterday's winter solstice. The broadcast took pains to be fair. (We noted in the same segment a house in Nazareth's excavation was labelled as when and where "Jesus is said to have lived"-- this careful qualification'd never be uttered in America.) Still, my decidedly liberal and tolerant (compared to me) wife snorted as the earnest, happy pagan family interviewed was shown on their suburban estate in Dorset. My fourteen-year-old son asked me then what were pagans. Are they satanists? I replied, looking up from my book, that they were not, but they were people looking for a nature-based religion that went back to pre-Christian practices and beliefs. Education comes slowly for us.

So far, as with witches and the controversy that I mentioned in chairing a panel discussion on goddess spirituality at NUI Maynooth, even basic terms become contentious. Like "queer," can a despised group reclaim the word that has denigrated them? Is neo-pagan a put-down or an honest admission of the lack of continuity most Western Europeans suffer when seeking to resurrect a heritage warped into "folklore" at best and obliterated most of the time by Western church and state over millennia?

Is it safe to declare one's self a pagan when this represents opposition to the ruling powers in global cultures, even in secular, scientific, or capitalist guises? Pagans, as Strimska carefully explains in his study, debate similar questions. I think of neopagans as a depth charge, feared by many who condemn or caricature the Other, diffused from our ghost tales and vampiric fantasies, full of forests and specters, rituals and spells. Certainly-- as my family even displayed reacting to their coverage on the most even-handed network an American at least might imagine, the BBC-- pagans remain misunderstood. I wonder how many of them I have met without knowing it, with so much ostracization, prejudice, and mockery aligned against them?

After a quarter-century teaching, I conjure up only one student that spoke up, a confident woman who was ten years ago about my age. Among an enormous class (over 50) for "Technology, Culture & Society," the course I give regularly, a liberal-arts token in the pile of technical and business chips credited for the gambler that this degree program will result in lucre and ease for those enrolled where I labor, a wild card indeed. She wore a small silver pentacle, a metal disk, around her neck, so I asked her later about it after I had noticed it while handing out the syllabus. She replied simply that she was a pagan. Her confidence and ease impressed me-- I wonder if she as so many poised and motivated students whom I teach was a veteran-- and I learned a bit more from her about pentangle and pentagram vs. pentacle, for good measure. My encounter with these insignia limited to heavy-metal logos and "Sir Gawain & the Grene Knyght," a rare chance for me to talk about a topic even remotely connected to my ever-receding, Ph.D. trained, once intense and now by professional duty fading, medievalist past.

That quiz I took a few months ago fixing me at a neat hundred percent both for Mahayana Buddhism (a tendency I read by a "Buddheo-pagan" that in his opinion urges "antidotes" for difficulties while Theravada "avoids" them, an interesting distinction; he said Tantric-Bo strains via Tibet then embraced and engaged these energies rather than eluding them, by magic and propitiation and control) and "Neo-Pagan" did cause me to reflect. Given my research and thinking the past nearly two years the first caused me less of a double-take than the second match-up. After all, I don't count myself as a tree-hugger. I am pale, resist the sun, and am a stay-at-homebody. While I admire the outdoors I prefer to encounter it in the shade, from inside, in a comfy chair and cup of tea-- much like my setting this moment.

But then I tuned in to my wavelength. I recalled from a teenaged study in my religion class where I found myself rooting more for the witch of Endor than the prophet Samuel; the temple women who served Astarte by spirit as sex rather than the grim priests who slaughtered those worshippers; the Druids who seemed to me far too compliant to give it over to humorless Patrick; the Lithuanians who I learned stood against the Christians until nearly 1400 as the last heathens in Western Europe: I found myself often even as a bookish lad on the side of these underdogs.

I return often in my mind to the lemon groves where I once played that now lie under the Foothill 210 Freeway, and now with my eye to the hills around me carved by gaunt stucco monstrosities. "Developer" to me? An occupation meriting relegation to the lowest circle of hell. New technology allows builders to prop up concrete where they could not before, the relentless push for big-box this and sprawl-fueled that which epitomizes my native overpopulated city. Open space translates as undeveloped land; construction must always push up our quarterly GDP. Progress-- while nods I give to laptops and dentistry and potable water and my doughty Volvo-- can sap my spirits.

Contemplating the continued shabbiness of the Northern legacy unravelling from the Fenian "physical-force tradition" that I've long studied in Irish republicanism; our foreign policy as revenge tangled via one-god dogma through a commander-in-chief however democratically elected; our politics; the systematic reduction of myself as a teacher and my students as learners into corporatized standardization learning platforms and pre-fab formats; the chain store mentality that erodes the little guys and gals; the media demands to spend more this holiday season despite blizzards and foreclosures. Ringing changes on my usual litany of how weary this society makes me.

Perhaps the interest I have in informed dissent, in principled individualism, in the soul's "alternatives" betrays only my romanticism, my hypocrisy as I churn this out on a keyboard and a wireless network's wonder, designed by such as those whom I prepare for that labor force, allow me to pose as if an ethical Luddite. In broadcasting this to you, I am reminded of Margot Adler's survey in her (yes, that review's in line next) "Drawing Down the Moon." Computer workers and data analysts disproportionately comprise a share of those involved in neopaganism. They would agree with what I tell those students in that very course-- the moral Luddite does not as mythic Ned Ludd burn down the factory mills simply out of mindless revolt.

A Luddite weighs the human costs against the machine's demands. That's what I try to do. I cannot give up this keyboard, and I certainly cannot unless Deep Springs College in Death Valley invites me to be one of their ranch-hand profs escape the long reach of the monitor that logs me in and time-stamps my daily required labor as I "deliver" rather more often than truly teach mass-produced course content to my students. Even the post-Thanksgiving shift away from birds in our house and rarely fish on the dish poses a new challenge for my family. But, I attempt as I wrestle with these forces not to "avoid" but as would a good Mahayana to "aspire" to rearrange my troubled soul and soothe my restless intellect. That is, to make out of my ever-shifting religious, spiritual, and mental landscape a place where I can make of not sense than create peace out of my surroundings.

Outside, the sun fell beneath the trees as it neared four o'clock. The brisk wind has stopped and the cat next to my chair looks out on the shadows. I can feel the prematurely twilit change on my hands in the temperature as I finish this. The knoll around our house means that darkness comes even sooner to this small neck of what once were not woods but weeds. But what are weeds unless classified by us? Left alone, a humble wildflower, a nameless bloom, a gnarled thicket. Last night, where the sun set, overhead a crescent moon tilted up as if to hold high above herself a bit of if not all the night sky.

(You know what Stonehenge looks like, and probably those in Druidic panoply. So, a found object, the assertion of the organic over the artificial. We see what we do by framing it, part of our ancient human quality to search for patterns all around us in the natural realm. Out of these we may make up stories and we may see gods. At one time, everyone in our family trees did this. They passed their patterns on: culture. They looked up and made shapes out of stars. We look at them long after the Greeks and Romans turned away from pagan ways. Yet, can we separate their perception of a Big Dipper from our random plot of celestial magnitudes? Have we evolved towards or away from this cognitive tendency today? If so, is this move away from narrative and metaphor towards dissection and measurement an advancement towards the triumph of reason, or a lurch away from ecological balance and awed humility? End of lecture: see Daniel Dennett's "Breaking the Spell" (reviewed by me on Amazon US & this blog a while back) for a rejoinder from the laboratory.

Photo via blogmate, "Bo" of a tree near his Cambridge dwelling, where seasons really do change. Behind the chicken-wire, sylvan mystery opens. This image may be a bit too Georgia O'Keefe after reflection, but I found myself drawn to it. And I never was one for Freud, by the by, so there.)

Ronald Hutton's "Witches, Druids & King Arthur": Book Review

These collected essays examine mainly pagans past and present. The title may be pitching an historian's scholarship more widely. For Hutton, the leading expounder of the discontinuity between modern and ancient paganism, such a wider audience may welcome his work.

The essays are uneven in length and scope, and at times some drag. I found my attention wandering on and off, but I admit far less interest in magic than witches, say, and more in Druids than the Renaissance, for example. But all chapters make thoughtful points, and Hutton phrases his judgments with tact and care. He delves into controversial subjects and dismantles falsity. The title and cover may evoke an occult or stereotyped overview of these subjects, but these are advanced essays, geared for the educated reader. Perhaps those less knowledgeable may finish these thoughtful pages with a greater respect for an historian's approach to mythmaking.

"How Myths are Made" takes on the British Isles. Kilts, atrocity tales from the English Civil War, native Irish resistance, or "traditional" Welsh dress, among many examples, can be shown to be fabricated rather than verifiable products from long ago. I found some of his discussion on Irish republicanism, the topic closest to my own studies, to be at times overstated and simplified. But he does resurrect a broad range of delightful anecdotes to elaborate his contentions. As in the faithful hound-legend of Beddgelert, how the Russians were supposed to have infiltrated English ports early in WWI, Margaret Mead's islanders, Melville's "Typee," or how 120 years seems to be the maximum length one can "trust" any orally transmitted memory.

The next two essays explore Arthurian lore-- first how recent academia treats the historicity of Arthur, and then how Glastonbury became a New Age center full of dubious dabblers. The fourth one looks at length into "the New Old Paganism" and seeks to find how monotheism began to supplant polytheism among non-Christians in later antiquity. "Paganism in the Lost Centuries" examines strands of ancient belief that may have become enshrined, so to speak, in the Christian-dominated culture. These two are both densely written studies. For more on this field, by an author whom Hutton barely touches upon, see Pierre Chuvin's "Chronicles of the Last Pagans." (Also reviewed by me on Amazon US and this blog.)

"A Modest Look at Ritual Nudity" tries to find if this practice, contrary to Hutton's earlier thinking that only Wiccans practiced it regularly as worship, and not any ancient cult, may have existed way back. The evidence of course may be suspect as often we only have detractors to track for such charges. Yet Hutton shows here as throughout his scholarship an appealing open-mindedness to sift through masses of difficult sources on touchy subjects to find what seems most likely true.

For Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Hutton returns to their familiar stories to find more pagan foundations than many Christian apologists do for their mythologies. Hutton argues that in the tension between their faith and their love of pagan tales and multiple gods, the two Inklings gained the power that marks their best work. Especially for Tolkien, Hutton reminds us that except for an "accident of publication" (231), the Middle Earth we know would have been preceded by the origin and creation myths of the gods later assembled after his death into "The Silmarillion," and if that work had been put out first, we'd likely read differently the rather understated mindset and populated mythos within "The Lord of the Rings."

In retrospect given two works on the ancient and modern Druids, published later this decade, Hutton's "The New Druidry" appears to be a warm-up for these books. He notes how 200 years of a "dream of syncretic universalism" for pagans in the wake of Romanticism appears to be waning. We see emerging in its place a more localized, land-based practice as becoming grounded by those reclaiming and reinventing "the old native religions." (249)

My favorite essay, "Living with Witchcraft," serves as a coda for his most famous study, "The Triumph of the Moon" (1999). This was the first serious history of modern British neopaganism. Hutton contrasts the patient reception it gained among current witches and pagans-- even as it revised their own origin myths often-- vs. the fears, contempt, and ridicule indulged in by many of his academic colleagues when they learned he studied witches and witchcraft. Even with tenure, he felt his career often at risk when engaging in sensitive research into what's a misunderstood, denigrated, and/or too overdramatized yet very under-explored topic.

Hutton reminds us, for some need so, of how past scholars fumbled their investigations into witchcraft. He shows how professors have toyed with their informants from the pagan community, and how cautiously he then had to tread to keep the confidences he established. His ethics and probity speak well for his difficulties, as he relates in compelling detail how controversial witches remain for the British audience. When learned clerics and esteemed dons scoff at the legitimacy of such research, one can only suppose how everyday folks regard witches and neo-pagans among them. Hutton represents the first sustained attempt to teach the public and the professoriate about the truth of modern witchcraft and its reasons for the same respect accorded other religious practices by today's neighbors.

By the way, the "nine million" supposedly executed in "Burning Times" for their "Old Religion" are shown an extrapolation of a 1793 figure of "9,442,994" from a unnamed local historian in the first chapter. (30) In this final section, Hutton shows how "Triumph of the Moon" sought a more sober revision of inflated discussion of witches past and present. (He estimates 40-50,000 probably died for witchcraft in Europe during Christian hegemony. [31]) (Posted to Amazon US 11-26-09)

Jeffrey Burton Russell's "Witchcraft in the Middle Ages": Book Review

An eminent historian of demonology and heresy relates these to this misunderstood and elusive phenomenon. Russell argues for the reality of witches. He shows how they "usually acted as they were supposed to act." That is, the fluidity of definitions applied by medieval clerics and then inquisitors pressured dissenters to adapt the terms by which they were marginalized, persecuted, and often executed.

He interprets historical, verifiable witchcraft along a continuum. Rejecting the extremes that nobody in the Middle Ages believed in witchcraft and that "weird phenomena are not only real, but supernatural, and proof that the Devil and his minions live," Russell plots the truth along three points. 1) "At least some people were deluded into believing themselves witches." 2) Old pagan cults, folklore, sorcery, and heresy entered into their beliefs and practices. 3) These "as described by the sources (mainly trial records) did exist to a substantial degree." (21)

Russell moves chronologically, if for me too rapidly over the biblical Hebrew references (these barely gain a mention). He establishes proof from primary sources. He estimates that 31% of the Inquisitorial charges were for sorcery, 23% for folklore traditions, 27% for heresy, and 19% for those added by theologians (such as the pact, the Devil's mark, worship of the Devil, the obscene kiss, the sabbat). (I wish he had charted this with geographical and topical data, as graphically this might have enhanced what can be a challenging amassing of material within a densely written text. It's a demanding, depressing, if valuable account.)

Any continuity between ancient and medieval traditions here, Russell insists, was not consciously controlled. Vague, fluctuating, and loosely defined at best, witchcraft drifted as popular and learned opinions shifted. Pagan remnants floated around what was considered witchcraft; Christian opposition shaped how those who resisted its power themselves regarded what they thought of and carried out as witches.

Contrary to common supposition, the Inquisitions (which began ca. 1225-50) did not constitute the only jurisdiction by which witches were summoned and condemned. In his subsequent "A History of Witchcraft" (also reviewed by me here and on Amazon US), Russell notes how the clerisy in some countries treated witches better than the secular forces. "The Inquisitors were taught what to look for, and they always found it, whether it existed or not." (159) Each confession under torture added to the supposed knowledge of what witchcraft was, and the people then were convinced all the more that the next person arrested should live up, or die down, to the "standard" of stereotypical behavior.

Understandably, immense difficulties remain for a medievalist culling the testimony to extract what witches "truly" then believed, as the Latin formulae were mis-translated into the vernacular to be told to the accused and then the admissions were twisted back at variance with the Latin, so a warped nature of the evidence permeates the entire account. This process I admit remained rather unclear to me, and I wish Russell had provided transcripts to explain this more slowly; the book is packed with argument and while not inaccessible, it can be dense and challenging-- he expects you to know what "endura" and "antinomianism" are beforehand, for instance. Throughout, adding to this terrible inversion in the cause of "truth," the torturers elicited from their doomed victims what both sides expected as "proof."

I wondered when starting this if I'd find out an insider's account of witchcraft that survived from the Middle Ages apart from the "testimony" coerced or concocted by tormentors. There seems none survived that we can find. Russell concludes that for both witches and those who hated them, their practice "was the result of fear, expressed in supernatural terms in a society that thought in supernatural terms, and repressed by a society that was intolerant of spiritual dissent." (289) He stresses how its magical and superstitious elements receded as the High Middle Ages determined to define witchcraft as the worst of all heresies. Alienation expressed itself among those marginalized, and as the Jews and heretics and rebels found, so did the witches. Feared by medieval Catholicism-- and its Reformed opponents who increased the body count on their own 16th-17th century "witch hunts"-- witches found themselves forced to define themselves by the shapeshifting terms of those who sought their annihilation.

Written in 1972, the analogies with anti-Communist or anti-imperialist crusades may have faded, but replace those with other terms and you can appreciate the relevance. King Philip IV of France demonstrates how deep cynicism curdled the whole apparatus of "justice." This scourge of the Templars, in 1303, forbade the Inquisition to deal with "sorcerers, usurers, and Jews." (171) Why? He wanted to profit from the confiscated wealth of these despised groups. Separation of church and state, indeed. (Posted to Amazon US 12-14-09)

Russell & Alexander's "A History of Witchcraft": Book Review

This chronologically covers the evolution of what societies perceive as witchcraft. People may deny it, but it's widespread, often with similar images and practices assumed in very diverse instances. Witches exist nearly everywhere if in equally varied forms, despite religious and political efforts to eradicate sorcery.

As with any Thames & Hudson publication, this 2007 work combines an intelligent, accessible, but scholarly introduction with lots of photos and drawings. The last two chapters added to the revision of the 1980 original version feature Brooks Alexander's neopagan coverage. What he and Russell emphasize, as the subtitle "sorcerers, heretics, and pagans" hints, is a triple definition of a "witch". (I did wonder as an aside why neither Russell's 1972 "Witchcraft in the Middle Ages"-- reviewed by me on this blog and Amazon US-- or this book explored the popular association of the term "witch" coming from the Old English for "bending or shaping.") Anthropologists place witchcraft within sorcery as "low magic" that influences natural phenomena to effect practical results desired. Historically, in Europe especially, devil worship has been supposed to be the domain of a witch. This happened far more often, in terms of persecution and murdering those so supposed to be witches, in the Renaissance and Reformation than in the Middle Ages. Whether or not this alleged diabolical contact was practiced, its functions were assumed by church and state to be "proven," and then nearly impossible to disprove. Russell presents many examples of 60,000 marginalized victims hanged or burned for heresy.

"The process is simple. A number of children die. The midwife is a lonely and unpopular widow. Blame for the deaths is fixed on her and expressed in supernatural terms. She must therefore be a witch. But it is well known that all witches fly out at night, make pacts with the Devil, and practise other forms of demonolatry. Questions about all this are put to her under torture, and in her agony and fear she confesses. The confession again reinforces the accepted image of the witch. Misfortunes are interpreted as evil deeds, evil deeds are seen as sorcery, sorcery is perceived as witchcraft, and another human being is tortured and killed." (84)

Russell tends to compress "the intellectual erosion of witchcraft" in the 17th-18th centuries but he does explain how people stopped believing in it once rational causes for the death of a cow of the illness of a child started to gain traction and helped undermine folk beliefs that blamed demons or spells for misfortune. For modern times, the resurgence of witchcraft, both authors remind the credulous, cannot be traced to a purported underground Old Religion. Jules Michelet, with his psuedo-Marxian concept of a deep-rooted agrarian resistance to Church and State, or Margaret Murray, with her deluded insistence that a Dianic cult survived from a "pre-Christian fertility religion that had once pervaded Europe," both are shown carefully to have based their once-influential theories on poor research and wishful thinking. Pagan practices may have survived into today's West, but not the world-view of ancient or folk paganism. That perspective, however, has been reconstructed and revamped, as Alexander reveals.

Contemporary neopaganism asserts its difference against Christian-based domination. It also defies a Western, secular, and rational mindset. Its identity's based in a "contagious excitement of cultural insurrection" as its "functional substitute for missionary zeal." (163) Animism-polytheism-pantheism; feminism; denial of sin; "spiritual reciprocity": Margot Adler's terms sum up its "religious attitude." (I've also reviewed Adler's "Drawing Down the Moon.")

For Alexander, witch hunts show a flaw in human nature: we project our fears of evil on others, we push them away from us, and we "punish them horribly." (193) It is no etymological accident that a witches' "sabbat" connects with the despised "synagogue" supposed to be an assembly of idolators. The fact many of those hunted were women today may account for the determination to reclaim, for many women and gays shunted aside from conventional religions and communities, in witchcraft a place to assert their subversive pride. The growth of both counterculturally based and pop-culture teen witches-- the latter fueled by a conjunction of the Net with Hollywood-- proves a challenge. In Berkeley, typically or atypically, Alexander notes how a witch brought together the traditional and "alternative" believers in an interfaith council as their bridge. How will witches manage to stand in opposition to the norm once they are accepted by ecumenical groups and invited into mainstream society as just another faith?

He closes by urging Neopaganism to be "tempered by critical thought." He finds its role one of elevating syncretic, intuitive approaches to wisdom alongside scientific, atheist, and academically arrogant forms of "physicist" thought. Its synthesis of a more nature-caring, feminist and queer-positive, and humbly reverential, non-punishing outlook he proposes for our millennial age as particularly encouraging. Russell and Alexander in this brief, well-written, and thoughtful survey of a controversial, often sensationalized, and generally misunderstood subject serve readers well in presenting an open-minded approach to the dangers of past discrimination and the present possibilities for future openness to one of the most ancient, yet one of the newest as reinvented, of all belief systems. (Posted to Amazon US 11-22-09)

Pierre Chuvin's "A Chronicle of the Last Pagans": Book Review

This French professor of Greek provides a poignant, scholarly, yet briskly told survey of the decline of paganism in late antiquity. Roughly the two centuries between Constantine (ca. 312) and Justinian span the erosion of the old beliefs and Roman-sponsored state cults. Those living then felt perhaps imperceptibly, most decades, the ebb of what seemed the "natural" faith, but around 392 onward, accelerating before the "fall of Rome" in 410, Christianity under such propagandizers as Augustine, backed by the empire, broke the back of the pagan resistance.

Chuvin shows this pivot-point at work. In Alexandria, the Serapeum may not be well-known today, but its fall after a 391 Milan edict prohibited sacrifices to the gods proved for Egyptian believers a catastrophe. Chuvin follows its demolishment, showing how "in the summer of 392 the god of the Nile inudated the Egyptian countryside as always and fertilized it with his silt, mindless of the sacrileges committed the year before. He did not send torrents of blood or create a hecatomb among the people. The presence of that glimmering ribbon of water must have caused more confusion than we can imagine among all those who, like Libanus, believed the prosperity of the empire depended on the accomplishment of the ancient rites." (68-9)

As this passage demonstrates, Chuvin even in B.A. Archer's translation comes across vividly. Other sections discussing the perpetuation of such (today unlikely) centers as Beirut and Gaza as pagan cities show just how long their histories have been as places of worship, cosmopolitan trade, and factional doggedness in the name of ideology. I did find the treatment of emperor Julian too hasty, and would have liked more about Hypatia-- Chuvin finds her not a martyr for paganism so much as a pagan put in a vulnerable position in sectarian riots turned deadly. The book can brush over the more famous characters but it does show you by a close reading of the historical evidence, mainly textual but sometimes archeological or topographical, the often incremental weakening of the pagan cults and the marginalization of believers as gradually they were prevented from serving in the palace or military.

The parallels to later medieval "court Jews" for influential pagan advisors later on are suggestive; men of action had to become men of learning as the Christians consolidated power in first the court and then the establishment. The learned were the last sometimes to give in, but under pressure, they did. Those in the countryside stereotyped even back then as "pagani" or "country-dwellers" by the urbanized Roman Christians (if not always the urbane Hellenes who also shared in non-Christian practices on the other side of the Empire) are not only those who became, in later usage "peasants." Chuvin reminds us: "Pagani or pagans are quite simply 'people of the place,' town or country, who preserved their local customs, whereas the alieni, the "people from elsewhere," were increasingly Christian."(8)

He does not condescend or exaggerate the last pagans, content to track where they appear in texts and what they did or, by their enemies, were alleged to do. It's a straightforward monograph, and may appeal more to academics than New Agers or those enamored with less-than-solid scholarship. For those, and for a general reader wanting a no-nonsense, yet sensitive, description of how Christians and pagans traded places, so to speak, in advantage and clout over two centuries, this is a good starting point for such an orientation. Yet, Chuvin early on warns: "As for the paganism of our contemporaries who style themselves 'new pagans,' this more often than not perverse form of romanticism has nothing to do with the faith of those who shared Julian's or Proclus' religious beliefs, nor with the ancient civic or imperial cults that such people dreamed of restoring." (6)

This is a sober telling of the fate of those who hang on to a belief that their contemporaries insist, and then enforce, as outmoded. I do wish we had more insight here into everyday people's customs and attitudes towards paganism. While I expect many sources have been destroyed and we rely more on the history as rewritten by the victors, Chuvin does appear to stick too closely to a few accounts that show his main points. If he had branched out more into popular religion and social history, I might have been more interested in parts of this somewhat unadorned tale.

I was reminded, although Chuvin keeps his scholarly circumspection, of the later imperial expansions and political upheavals that accompany the spread of religion and sectarian allegiance. It's unsettling to read in the Mediterranean and Middle East that so many ancestors of those vowing today in those places unswerving fidelity to one version of one God in the past worshipped many gods, rulers, and saw deities in rocks, trees, and stars. It's a lesson perhaps in how our beliefs are linked far more to who's in power than we realize.(Posted to Amazon US 11-18-09)

Tagann Ailín, aríst

Iarr muid a cur cuairt go hAilín le déanaí. Níl ábalta muid go luath mar go raibh contúirt na fhlíu muice ina príosún. Mar sin, d'fhán muid a dul arís.

Cinneadh muid ar h-am do ag feiceáil é inniu. Beidh sé an dara lá na Hanukkah. Rinne muid plean a leagan amach a tiomaint go Tehachapi Dé Domhnaigh seo.

Anois, chuala muid droch-sceál díotsa. Scríobh Ailín dúinn ní mbeidh seans nua a imeacht a buail leis seisean féin. Bíonn ráigh deilgneach ansin.

Caith áitritheoirí a mbíonn ar coraintín ansiúd. Is carcair níos mo; is príosún fuar ann. Tá aimsir is glasfuar i gCalifoirnea Thuas an tseactaine seo caite.

Tá dóchas againnsa go mbeidh ag rá leis Ailín gan mhoill. D'inis mo bhean a tí inné faoi tarlú ag fás leis bia níos bochtaigh. Bíonn gearrthachaí búiste stáit againn go leor i mbliana.

Bhí súim agam a foghlaim go bhfuil faoi an ábhar seo go leor. Tá ár Stat Órga ar an gcuid is fearr ar Stáit Aontaithe faoi ag caith chuig príosúin. Mar sin féin, tosaíonn Califoirnea a bheith air ar stáit is measa ag caitheamh chuig scoileannaí.

Gheobhaidh muid breith do bhéil féin ag imeacht le breacadh an lae i bhfad i aimsire. D'fheachfaimis go dtuga muid ár cairdeas uair eile. Ach, ní mbéidh ar aghaidh fósta, Dé Domhnaigh seo anseo.

Tugann muid ár bheannacht chuig Ailín agus cimí eile. B'fhéidir, beidh sé ag sneachta ann; tá feic go hannamh ann. Fanann siad in aice leis an diseart ard ar feadh an tréimshe seo na Hanukkah agus Nollaig agus grianstad geimhridh. Agus caithfidh cimí ag fanacht níos fada.

Waiting for Alan again.

We wanted to pay a visit to Alan lately. We were unable before since there was a danger of the swine flu in prison. Therefore, we waited to go again.

We arranged a time to see him today. It's the second day of Hannukkah. We made a plan to drive to Tehachapi this Sunday.

Now, we heard bad news from himself. Alan wrote to us that there will not be a new chance to meet with himself. There's an outbreak of chickenpox there.

The inmates must be under quarantine over there. The jail's very large; the prison's cold there. The weather's chillier in Southern California this past week.

We have hope to speak with Alan soon. My wife yesterday tells about happenings growing with worsening food in jails. Cuts in our state budget are many this year.

It was interesting for me to learn more about this matter. Our Golden State ranks among the best of the United States concerning spending for prisons. All the same, California ranks among the states worst in spending on schools.

We will get our wish to go off at the break of day in awhile. We should seek to be bringing to Alan our friendship once more. But, it will not be in person yet, this Sunday here.

We give our good wishes to Alan and the other prisoners up near the high desert. Perhaps it is snowing; it's a rare sight there. They stay there during this season of Christmas and Hanukkah and the solstice of winter. And they must wait longer.

Ghriangraf/Photo: Ag sneachta ina Ghleann na hAntalóp/Snowing in Antelope Valley.". 18 Nollaig/December 2008.

Henry McDonald's "Gunsmoke & Mirrors": Book Review

The blurb makes this book sound more like first-person interviews with IRA men. It's not that personal. See my review of his earlier memoir, "Colours," for a more intimate take on growing up among the Official IRA, the Marxist wing (aka Sticks, Stickies) as well as other Northern Irish cultural and political contexts.

As with that book, McDonald here moves rapidly over similar terrain, inevitably. The strength lies in comparisons and contrasts with current Islamist and Third World "liberation front" parallels alleged and asserted by forty years of Irish "freedom fighters." For McDonald, this belies the cant, the hyperbole, and the sheer falsehood of "dressing up defeat as victory." Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA, he insists, could have talked to the real "British presence," the Unionists, and settled their differences in the mid-'70s. Instead, their current leaders bullied any who sought by federalism or power-sharing what was decried as a "sop to loyalists"-- those on the ground kept fighting, killing, dying, and being locked up for their cause. Meanwhile, those now in charge of Sinn Féin were those who had been secretly moving towards compromise even as their public attitude remained "United Ireland" and nothing short of "Brits out."

The subtitle, "how Sinn Féin dressed up defeat as victory," sums up the argument. The chapters, as with "Colours," may confuse those less knowledgeable with the intricacies of the past fifty years, or a hundred, of Irish republican and Ulster British history, infighting, and politicking. On the siding of the British far-left with the more thuggish factions of "liberators" everywhere against the Evil Empires of America and Britain, McDonald, who has depicted in "Colours" his own youthful observations from behind the GDR as a Marxist activist, finds that "the common denominator here has always been the wish to see their own country defeated and humiliated alongside a perverse sense of siding with one group simply for the sake of being contrary to a given consensus." (46) Kim Il Sung and genocidal Serbs become glorious leaders against imperial tyranny. He also notes that some on the left think through realpolitik more soberly: "From Ireland they have learnt a valuable lesson: just because a movement which is principally nationalist and by its actions at least latently sectarian wraps itself up in the trendy garb of 'anti-imperialism', that doesn't necessarily make it progressive." (51)

The strength of this brisk book lies in such remarks. Those on the Irish struggle and its cessation, often, prove less clear and often too convoluted in their presentation, out of chronological order; the chapters seem often bursts of insight mixed with journalism blended into opinion, all jumbled. The legacy left by Adams' former comrade, the late Brendan ("the Dark") Hughes emerges most poignantly as a principled man who refused to back down from his own opposition to the duplicity that the current Sinn Féin leadership has pursued in its grab for power in the Northern statelet and the Southern state that it once vowed to smash, and replace. The use of arms to force Irish unity had been rejected by those in earlier stages of the IRA, and now, after 3,500 dead, those in the IRA did the same. Sounds admirable, but the problem was that those same IRA members and those in Sinn Féin refused, for so long, to reveal that they meant to give in, and they kept leading those under them into streets and prisons to do their dirty work, unable as the leaders were able to admit the contradictions of their deadly, radical chic, mindset.

Critiques by McDonald can hit their target. He's often efficiently cutting in citing Adams and Co. nowadays spouting what their earlier selves vowed never to utter. He's also wicked in juxtaposing pious nods to Fenian verities that the party keeps reciting to a dwindling band of believers that 2016 will somehow magically result in a united Republic. Yet, after a couple hundred rapidly written pages of this reportage, one wonders what the Irish north and south should do next, other than not voting SF. It's hard to say who'd welcome this book outside of dissident or opposing readers as suspicious of the Adams-McGuinness-Morrison triumvirate as many Irish voters, after all, have been. That is, for an international reader, this may not be the first book to pick up on the collapse of the Fenian physical-force tradition as Provoism marches alongside Paisleyism, in McDonald's wry formula.

Still, for the attention to the posturing long indulged in by progressives eager to ally dubiously undemocratic causes abroad with the Provos, this take, from one raised in the Officials' more pro-British, socialist, and working-class tradition (not one without its own contradictions, as McDonald notes) can be instructive. He parallels the Workers Party manifesto from 1982 with recent pronouncements by Adams to deadly effect, to show how what the Provos once shot people to death for proposing now becomes policy for those sharing power in Stormont and earning their salaries from the Crown's coffers. (Posted to Amazon US 11-11-09)

Sebastian Barry's "The Secret Scripture": Book Review

Continuing the fictional elaborations of his own family's facts, Barry tells of Irish repression movingly in this densely written but often poetic novel. Following "The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty," Roseanne Clear McNulty enters the saga around the same time, the Irish Civil War following partial independence in the early 1920s. After a tragic event in Sligo town during the internecine war brings unwarranted scorn upon her Presbyterian father, Roseanne must grow up isolated from defenders, increasingly compromised by the scrutiny of censorious Fr. Gaunt.

What transpires crosses over with the story of Eneas, and while the details will be left for you to learn, this narrative tells a rather familiar story of loss and yearning effectively, renewing by the beauty of its ruminative style a landscape harsh and barren, within the lives of men and women and especially those, like Roseanne, confined as was her mother to an asylum for her own attempts to break free of the constraints of early 20c Catholic-ruled Ireland.

Still, no story set here can be all bleak. She writes of her native city:

"A hot Irish day is such a miracle we become mad foreigners in a twinkle. The rain drives everything indoors and history with it. There is a lovely lack of anything on a hot day, and because our world in its inner truth is so wet, the surprised greens of the fields and hills seem to burn with a sort of bewilderment, a wonderment. The land looks lovely to itself, and the girls and boys along the strand are painted into the tawny yellows and the blues and the greens of the sea, also burning, burning. Or so it seemed to me. The whole town seemed to be there, everything suffering the same brushstrokes of the heat, everything joining and melding." (142)

Later, however, the madness with which daughter as mother is diagnosed with and confined by hints at deeper suffering. Her story intersperses with Dr. Grene who researches the case of this hundred-year-old inmate at Roscommon's asylum. Roseanne tells him: "I do remember terrible dark things, and loss, and noise, but it is like one of those terrible dark pictures that hang in churches, God knows why, because you cannot see a thing in them." The doctor tells her "that is a beautiful description of traumatic memory." (101)

The doctor, "the biggest agnostic in Ireland," struggles with his own loss, and seeks in Roseanne to solve her mystery, and perhaps his. "But we are never old to ourselves. That is because at the close of day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body." (177) He too seeks understanding of death and loss, as does Roseanne. Betrayals can be eased by desires to do right by others. "We like to characterise humanity as savage, lustful, and basic, but that is to make strangers of everyone. We are not wolves, but lambs astonished in the margins of the fields by sunlight and summer." (178)

I admit the betrayal that Dr. Grene confesses at this point appeared to me very minor and quite forgivable, but in the context of his great loss recollected, it may loom much larger in his guilty mind. Barry seeks to examine precisely this conflict between what we are accused of, by ourselves or others, and what can and should and must be forgiven and restored. In a time of cruelty for causes and utter suppression of desire, Roseanne represents a frail cry of flawed but innocent humanity.

One caveat: the depth with which Roseanne writes down her story in such rich prose does tend to blend too much with the doctor's own diary's moods, and Barry for both seems to fall into an overly rich, and rather too-studied, prose style that can slow the pace of the narrative dramatically. Some readers may like to linger in its shallows, but others may want the plot to quicken.

There aren't facile solutions for men and women caught in compromise in a century of clerical domination and political oppression. The wonder of Irish scenery conflicts with its terrors, and its inhabitants are caught within both splendid days and terrible nights. After decades, how much of what transpired can only be recreated partially by Dr. Grene. "The one thing that is fatal in the reading of impromptu history is a wrongful desire for accuracy. There is no such thing." (279)

(P.S. I have reviewed "The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty" and "A Long Long Way," a harrowing novel of WWI through an Irish soldier's eyes, on my blog, and on Amazon US where this review was posted 12-9-09)

Hitting the "Jackpot" at last

Maybe we're all guilty as parents and certainly as consumers. We decry the proliferation of junk yet we cram the parking lots as regularly as any urban dwellers. Or, my wife bless her does, for I rarely venture into such terrain, as my last post "Tagann Kareem/Waiting for Kareem" documented. (That being in bog-Irish and then hack-English may garner fewer readers than this one, not that that's saying much).

But I thought a lot about consumption of the modern and not Victorian strain while in my car for nearly three hours on a chilly weekend day. I sat in Atwater facing a train track. A local commuter train, a freight or two, and an Amtrak Surfliner passed. The site used to be make Franciscan Tile, but the factory had been abandoned long ago. An artisan craft not able to compete with cheap labor far off? Like a lot of L.A., the manufacturers left town. Unlike the trains, on which my father a bit and both my grandfathers worked long, the occupations many of us today do depend less on machines and products than data and numbers. More than ever, we city folks line up to buy in bulk, even if that freight comes a far longer way than the local factory, less often coming in by train perhaps.

The tire garage resounded with an electric drill and honks from it and those herded around the packed lot competed. The windows were a crack down in my old Volvo, but the cold increased and I shut them. I stayed writing that entry above, in Irish, with my standard array in a shopping bag of two dictionaries, a thesaurus, a booklet of conjugations, and a verb/preposition chart. I wrote about watching the crowds come and go, many coming out it seemed after a long time with one item only: a Costco pizza. Why anyone'd contend with holiday mobs, added by my younger son and those who waited for a chance to meet Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as advertised over at Best Buy, for a mass-produced calorie-laden (and I love pizza I admit if from a real restaurant) industrial cheese and meat and dough pre-fab construction flummoxed me.

After I wrote my Irish entry, which takes over an hour a week at least, there was no sign of said son. I thought of him in the chill and felt sorry for him. He queued up for a chance to meet a man he idolized. He insisted on not wearing his shirt over his UCLA t-shirt in honor of Kareem-- the standout of my own youth first for the Bruins and then the Lakers-- and I wished he'd been dressed more warmly. I wondered if he'd make his departure for the play he was in, and fretted as a father should. But, more about that emotion later.

The extended time in the parking lot, punctuated by tire hammering and train crossing, directly in front of the Costco, left me pondering of all books Margot Adler's "Drawing Down the Moon." As "Bo" commented from a neo-pagan thread on his blog, it's from a more innocent time. Her careful, insider's history of neo-paganism chronicles its attempts to invent an earth-based, natural, non-salvific religion today. It does seem from an utopian surge, dimly remembered as the Catholic school warned us 4th graders circa the first Earth Day that the Ecology flag was atheist and the peace symbol was not only deluded but satanic.

Another perspective came from Adler's lengthy closing chapter "Living on the Earth." She cites the countercultural era's "Akwesasne Notes" which covered the Native American movement, and then its need for a more spiritual and rooted perspective with which to replace the oppressive situations it resisted. Like Adler, who grew up atheist in Manhattan but yearning in her young love for the Greek gods for a wider vision, many activists from her hippie cohort felt that their political stance demanded a positive viewpoint that extended their ecological restoration into personal transformation.

Contemplating this, as many in her study who are Neo-Pagans do while living in the city, stuck in suburbia, chained to the crush of the ways of getting and spending, I felt a resonance in the thronged lot full of carts and cars, like mine, and my own complicity. Even if I had not come that day to buy, my hard-working wife for her small business and our home had to drive here a helluva lot more than me, and our house filled with Kirkland this and shrinkwrapped that. Certainly a lot of eight-packs of Garofalo pasta, by the way, in our cupboard. (I'm not complaining, at least about pasta.)

Well, the "Notes" excerpted by Adler traced the near-impossibility of romanticism. How to "regain the old ways"? An article showed a farmer whose cattle sicken from poisoning from a nearby Reynolds aluminum plant. The decline of his herd drives the farmer to work-- at the plant. And, he's thankful to get that job.

"How can you fight something that you work for?" Adler cites: "The monster gives you no choice. It pokes you in the eye at the same time that it fills your wallet and it destroys your garden and cattle at the same time that it offers you jobs." (qtd. 381, 2006 Penguin ed.)

I intended in my career not to work for a corporation but to teach. The necessity exacted by a dismal market for Ph.D's in English (at least of my orientation, complexion and expertise) meant that I have worked nearly the whole time since my degree at a for-profit (now called "market-driven") institution. I've commented often here about the challenges of such a predicament for a humanist in a career-designed, technical-business milieu.

The point today remains: I am not crafting missiles that kill (good thing given my lack of scientific know-how) nor gouging borrowers for interest rates. I'm not ripping people off with shoddy goods or sleeping off the gains of Third World sweatshops. But, I share complicity in the same system that fills the lot with cars, people, goods, and pizza from not a family-owned place but a corporation, a market-driven urbanized asphalt and train and truck and SUV fueled colossus. Our state totters on bankruptcy but immigration, as a glance at this store shows, fills our fragile land with more people than we can support, my two sons notwithstanding nor the fact their parents are a true rarity here as always, natives with a small "n." The parade of people passes from all over the world. We admire this diversity as its own wealth for the Golden State, but we fret about water, we gobble up land, and we bulldoze the hills where I live to cram in more McMansions and their stuccoed spawn.

Whether with only a pizza or two carts full of a lot of stuff, the patrons, many of whom were as well-upholstered as their cars, often hauled off their booty in a SUV. A big (aren't they all to those few of us in a small car?) one cut me off as I attempted to merge from a blind spot into a tight lane of departing traffic. From the passenger window, a young swain of the blonde driver in their black behometh then gleefully and lingeringly they flipped me off. He repeated the gesture as I passed him on the road. I wished him silently a #$(*^-ing Merry Christmas.

In that United Nations worth of humanity, I wondered a lot of less popular musings: our generous immigration policies of family reunification and chain migration that brings over a never-ending stream of relatives, the resulting additions to the ever-growing crush of people in SoCal, the amount of plastic and starch and fat and sugar carted out, and the demands on our planet as more and more people from all over came to America to share our good life. Or got wealthier off the sales of the stuff sent to Costco & Best Buy and stayed in India or China. And bought SUVs themselves.

Then I recalled what I'd learned from the L.A. Times over breakfast. Tim Rutten wrote: "Is it any wonder that over the last two decades, the annual share of California's total income garnered by the top 1% of the state's earners went from 13.8% to 25.2%? That means the most affluent 20% of our population now has an average yearly income nearly eight times that of the poorest fifth of the state."

In the same column, Rutten lamented the collapse of our collegiate system, even as its growth's brought on by skyrocketing and poorer populations needing degrees as a ticket out of their trap. This being left unsaid by Rutten. (The LAT reliably underplays any downside of such demographics even as it panders to its multicultural readership that so far tends to desert the paper in its dotage. It leaves the blame at the feet of a nameless villain, shadowed beyond traffic, sprawl, and decay.) While I struggle against the tide by teaching immigrant/working-class students Pandora's Box, this richest/poorest of 50 States can't balance its budget, either.

I told my family this capitalist factoid but as usual none listened. Who wants their morning ruined by contradictions ensnaring us all? The good life gets more fought over, like that thug and his girl in the giant black SUV pushing the little guy like me and my son out of the way. They then gloat over and over at their petty "prize."

By the way, as I wrote in the other entry, prizes do not come easily especially if free. If a store promotion's involved, as I'd gently warned my son days before, be sure to check the details of any largess they claim to offer you. But, either his ignorance or sheer manipulation meant house advantage in this gamble of our time. Fine print I'd suspected but that my son had no idea of loomed.

Wristbands had been distributed at 9 a.m. for the 1:30 p.m. Kareem appearance. We had gotten there at 12:45. He waited until nearly the 3:30 scheduled finish. The basketball giant arrived considerably and unfashionably late. Those without priority were told they could wait until the end to meet him, but then the superstar went away. My son walked back, forlorn, with a stock photo, unsigned, a camera with no shot, and our spirits both sank.

Still, I would have hope return later this dismal day. I teach regularly an essay to my aspiring technocrats by Bill Joy, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," about the genetics-robotics-nanotech threat that may make us extinct, or irrelevant at best or worst to the self-replicating technology that a few eggheads cannot wait to replace human inefficiency with. In it, Joy (co-founder of Sun Microsystems, pioneer of Java & Unix, doctoral dropout from the same school where Adler once protested, UC Berkeley) laments the opening of this Pandora's Box of doom.

Few in my classes, maybe 1:20, know enough to explain the rudiments of Pandora to their classmates when I ask. Whether born in a Cambodian refugee camp, a Bolivian hut, or a California ghetto, my students come in rarely with what used to pass for higher learning. I'm their slim bridge between the liberal arts and their machines.

I always figured Hope left in the box represented a positive virtue after the evils had been unleashed by a foolish girl's curiosity. But, on Liberal Rapture (see P.S. below), a comment left a few weeks ago chilled even pessimistic me. The cruellest aspect of the story, a woman noted, was that Hope was left-- to torment us that things might be better even after the evils proved the triumph of death, pestilence, famine, and woe. We cling to what our commonsense denies.

We look around the Atwater lot and see American abundance. The rest of the planet makes the items brought in by those trains. They want what we have, and we send them part of our money spent at Costco and BestBuy so they can work for the same jobs we used to have, before they were sent off by our bosses overseas. Now, we bolster our own decline in wealth by bargain hunting at the big-box store. Costco by the way is one of the very few chains to boast an increase, 6%, recently. (Wal-Mart no longer bothers to release its sales figures. As I tell my class, I am old enough to recall when that chain paraded "Made in the USA" as its slogan, unimaginably, a mere twenty-five years ago. I've never entered and will never enter one, however. Costco's at least a marginally better employer, so I'm told.)

We celebrate a blip in sales. We yearn for a Black Friday increase of an anemic half-a-percentage-point to attest to the recovery of an economy shattered by "market-driven" technocrats. We meanwhile struggle to keep our home, and read of the rush of Bank of America to pay off its bailout money from us taxpayers-- so BofA can return unconstrained in true capitalist laissez-faire style to court new CEO and more fat-cat technocrats. With more lavish salaries than TARP or Uncle Sam could permit. We have our morals after all. For a short time.

In this panorama of profits for few, spending by all, we see ourselves as numbers. Credited for how much we spend as consumers, not as people who wait in line for their role-models to appear. A return to simpler gains, not calculated on Wall Street, found a welcome recovery on our own domestic front later that night.

I had to go get a haircut first. I hit traffic both ways to Silverlake. Massive for a Saturday night. At the barber (if nobody calls them that anymore in the trendy neighborhood), amidst blaring Spanish-language diva videos to which the Latino staff all sang along con gusto, the co-owner told me that they helped raise $5000 for the L.A. Free Clinic across on Sunset Blvd. The salon's sponsoring a food drive for the shelter downtown near Christmas, the fourth year they and his restaurant and the dry cleaners nearby have done so. This cheered me and I thought my son might like to help out. (My wife who always knows more than I do told me later he has a prior charity engagement with another food drive for SOVA, the Jewish organization.)

So, I drove off into even thicker traffic happier about my fellow man. The congestion that tangled me, towards that same Costco & Best Buy, was for the city's lights display in Griffith Park each holiday season. It seems a waste of energy to Scrooge-like me. But, the freeways fill and the atmosphere pollutes as cars and especially SUVs full of the same families I saw in the parking lot (maybe the couple who cut me off?) cruise by displays arrayed in festive festoons. I was never much for Christmas even as a Catholic, and the holiday's never been me at my best. Still, I looked forward to seeing my sons in their bi-annual dramatic, or comedic, revels.

I arrived at the theater and sat between my wife and our friend Richard who dutifully attends every one of these often marathon performances twice yearly. I had not known anything, on purpose (I like to be surprised) about the fall SCTG show.

It turned out to be a morality lesson about the costs of selling your soul for power. My younger son, Niall, carried the leading role of a conniving religious type bent on blackmailing the city council of a small Nevada town to sell their casino to his church, who'd turn it into a bottling factory to undermine Sin City's northern outpost in the name of Family Values. My older son, Leo, delighted in his being a guffawing dad, full of bluster and bonhomie.

You can see them in the photo; younger in suit, older bowing low in green-black bowling shirt, at the conclusion to a play I enjoyed. The next night, my son won the award given the most effort by a performer, the same his brother earned for last spring's play. So, the award that had stood on our shelf the past few months-- it rotates among the homes of its young recipients-- will return again soon with another familiar surname on it. A true prize. No autograph, but the name of one of my sons under another's a true memento.

P.S. I had originally tried-- and failed due to glitches galore at Blogger.com lately-- to post a small kernel of what grew into a big shrub at the post on"Global Warming vs. Peak Oil" 12/5/09 on the heated blog, Liberal Rapture. But as that discussion on its comments turned with a visiting pundit who denies "climate change" into another debate on libertarianism and capitalism and science solving all the problems we proliferating humans can dish out, perhaps it's better to let my entry rest here relatively undisturbed.

Credit: Performers of "Jackpot." Photo via Facebook, by Broderick Miller, founder, and executive director of the plays by, the Silverlake Children's Theater Group.

Tagann Kareem

Ní maith liom ag dul go dtí h-ionad siopadóreachtaí. Níl dith agamsa ag dul go dtí lárionad a ceannaigh bronntanas ar feadh an tréimhse seo na Nollaig. Ach, bím ag scríobh seo agaibh nuair ag suí i mo ghluastain ina h-áit sin anois.

Cén fáth? Bhuel, bíonn dúil leis mo dara mac ag feiceáil Kareem Abdul-Jabbar go "Best Buy" inniu. Tagann Niall ag cur cuairt an imreoir cispheil ardmholta agus an-dearcnaitheach sin anseo. D'imir Kareem leis UCLA agus na Lakers i gCathair na hÁingeal leis na blianta fadaí nuair bhí mé óg. Tugann sé féin uaidh sínúithe go saor.

Níl a fhíos agam má bhailigh dream ag fáil seans ag buail leis Kareem. Ceannaíodh duine go leor Dé Sathairn seo ar chuma éigin. Ní bhíonn airgead spártha i mo theaglach le déanaí. Mar sin féin, bím ag breathnú gach duine ag ceannach ábhar go leor.

Go minic, rompaítear pizza amháin ó Costco. Fanachtar am fada istigh ag tabhairt ach aon rud sin go rialta. Roghfaínn mise féin ag togháil bialann Iodalach!

Ar ndóigh, feicim ach roinnt cheantar siopaí ag imeall lárionad margaidh. Ní fheiceann mé an limistear an mhargaidh go hiomlán. Níl mé ábalta imeacht in aice leis an siopa bhreige, mar shampla.

B'fhéidir, bíonn lá gnóthach ansiúd. Chuala mé ní bhíonn méad leis earraí a bhfuil díol maith orthu faoi deireanach go náisiúnta. Baintear sult as a bhfuil caitheamh ar phócaí níos folamha-- chomh Niall agus mé-- faoi láthair.

Ina dhiadh sin, ní bhfuair Niall a shíniú. Ní raibh sé ticéad speisealta aigesean féin. D'fhág muid ar chéile go mall. Bhí aimsir níos fuar.

Thiomáionn mé ina trachta trom. Thug fear bocht ag marcaíocht ina SUV mór dubh smalóg orainn. Chuir a chailín grá bac orm. Ní bhain muid taitneamhas tráthóna sin ansin.

Waiting for Kareem.

I don't like going off to a shopping center. I have no need myself to go to a supercenter to buy a gift during this Christmas season, But, I'm writing this to you all while sitting in my car at that place.

What's (the) reason? Well, there's a desire for my younger son to see Kareem Abdul-Jabbar at "Best Buy" today. Niall's waiting to pay a visit to that highly acclaimed and very prominent basketball player here. He played with UCLA and the Lakers in Los Angeles for long years when I was young. He himself's giving his autograph for free.

I don't know if a crowd gathered to get a chance to meet with Kareem. Lots of people buying this Saturday anyhow. There's not spare money in my family lately. All the same, I'm watching everyone buying stuff galore.

Often, some are buying only a pizza from Costco. Some wait a long time inside but for that one thing regularly. Choosing for myself I'd prefer an Italian restaurant!

Naturally, I see but a portion of the shopping area at the edge of the greater market location. I cannot view the whole area of the market. I am not able to go off near the toy store, for instance.

Perhaps, it's a busy day over there. I heard that there is not 'an increase in goods that command a sure sale' nationally. Some must take pleasure from emptier pockets-- like Niall and me-- at the moment.

Afterwards, Niall did not get his autograph. He did not have himself a special ticket. We left together slowly. The weather was colder.

I drove into heavy traffic sadly. A thuggish man riding in a big black SUV 'flipped us off'. His female companion cut me off. We did not take away happiness from that afternoon there.

Keeping kosher, being 'yosher'

No, I never heard of "yosher" either. If "glatt kosher"'s totally, well, kosher, than "yosher"'s "ethically straight." The Conservative Jewish movement's advanced a new seal of approval, based not on how an animal's ritually slaughtered, or if it's cloven-hooved or scaly-finned, but if social justice was followed in the working conditions under which the animal was killed. And, if living wages were paid those we (usually vastly under-)pay to do such grueling and unpleasant work.

Jay Michaelson in "The Forward" reminds me of my cyber-pal "Bo" at Cambridge; they both are true polymaths, and share a lot of interests and orientations. Michaelson's "The Polymath" is one column my wife and I turn to first, and we always admire M's ability to combine disparate topics elegantly and with erudition. I may envy his going off for months on end to his Himalayan retreat, as he's Buddhist too, but he does offer readers less enlightened as me a chance to enter his mindset.

In his Nov. 27, 2009 article "Magen Tzedek: Model of the Jewish Future or Show Without an Audience?" he discusses the impact, or lack of, for the Conservative movement's creation of a new seal of rabbinical approval. He doubts, as do I, that many in this now-declining middle ground between Orthodox and Reform will bother to follow the idealistic guidelines. But, he proposes that their truer target may be those outside Judaism.

Here's his logic. Ethical relevance may enliven progressive Jews as ritual observance has Orthodox ones. The latter always try harder, and are either castigated or celebrated by other Jews, and others perhaps (despite the prejudice, the scandals, the ancient libels) for their extra effort. More liberal Jews, frankly, as Michaelson notes, seem content not to fight as hard for their beliefs.

This shift from the letter of the law to the spirit may echo, I add, for a wider Christian or secularized audience, a more congenial approach that's congruent with the eco-kosher and earth-friendly campaigners who may choose the Magen Tzedek as a sort of Green Star (like a gold one?) for their food. He doubts that Conservative Jews will flock to buy such products, for the laity ignore most of their rabbinical regulations anyhow. Orthodox Jews will stick to their own "hescher" seals and Reform Jews rarely keep "kashrut" almost by definition. So, who's left? Non-Jews who care.

Michaelson cites how kosher's big business. A 15% growth rate annually and a $9 billion market. The same issue by the way-- in a paper that the past few years exposed the scandalous conditions at Postville, Iowa, with Rubashkin's "Aaron's Best," until the coverage dismantled the nation's largest kosher meatpackers-- has a front page headline: "Hasidic Village's Neighbors Have Slaughterhouse Blues" as an ultra-Orthodox sect tells less than the truth and plays loose with zoning in their rapidly expanding enclave into what was once semi-rural upstate New York. This, to me, also worsens the community and the ecology, compounding the immorality involved. People proliferate; resources shrink. The chickens processed in the 5,000 square-foot facility-- and the 26,000 one planned for cattle-- may emerge shrinkwrapped with a kosher seal, but the manner in which the structure was "approved" and licensed fail to convince me that ethically, truly honest and righteous procedures were followed in its construction.

The Orthodox, with high birthrates that turn bucolic dirt roads into thronged tracts, drive much of the kosher market, but so do, Michaelson tells us, 55% of the consumers who buy kosher not out of religious allegiance but because they believe it's healthier. While this, as the Postville exposé showed, is a half-truth, it does open up an avenue for expansion. Few Jews may take the trouble to support Magen Tzedek, but non-Jews might, if they seek out assurance of sustainably made products.

In this direction, as with other initiatives, Michaelson moves in a typically thoughtful fashion. He now ties together this thread into a bigger pattern. I quote his next paragraph in full:

In the coming century, sociologists tell us, Judaism will become less like an all-or-nothing proposition — ethnicity, identity, culture, nation and religion, all wrapped up in one — and more like one source of values, identity, spirituality and culture among many. We should get used to someone practicing Jewish dietary laws, Buddhist meditation and secular ethical values, whether that someone is born of a Jewish mother or not. Jewish culture and religion are going to survive not because of endogamy, but because they remain relevant to people of all ethnic and religious backgrounds who find them to be meaningful. Like it or not, the Kabbalah Centre, Matisyahu and the Magen Tzedek are the future of Judaism; they thrive not because the Jewish tribe maintains them, but because they appeal to a wide range of people.

Now, as one who fits into one of these sentences above tangentially neatly, I perked up. Like his column in a paper few in the larger culture may have even heard of-- at least in its English-language succession to the once-thriving Yiddish socialist daily that many greenhorns read in the Big Apple over a century ago, keeping its subscription a ritual even if they abandoned kosher when coming ashore-- Michaelson's voice may remain marginal. Yet, his reminder of how those on the side can push change glimmers elsewhere in this very same issue.

A grandson of a rabbi who came in 1908 to backwoods Vermont from the shetl concludes an article on Bennington's community of Jews: "Judaism doesn't always grow from the center. Sometimes it comes from the edges."

My wife watched raptly a BBC documentary by Hannah Rothschild, great-niece of Pannonica R., the "Jazz Baroness" who played muse to Thelonious Monk and other "cats" in a remarkably checkered career even by eccentric English mores, and in that issue, there's a piece on how she influenced, as a patron and inspiration, American jazz. "Nica" (named after not a butterfly as thought but a moth) left her husband and children to circle the bright lights of a trés-hip, but rebellious and segregated, culture in late '40s Manhattan.

I admit that even when studying Jane Austen as an undergrad I bristled at a gentry's amassing of lucre off the backs of the nameless proles. (However unfairly I expected that authoress to evince proto-Marxist tendencies.) So the doc's plaints about Poor Little Rich Girls trapped from realizing their full potential amidst batteries of gilded cutlery and ranks of liveried footmen failed to elicit my tears. Injustice and justice tangle here. Jews in Europe were made to enter financial trades since they were excluded from owning land, commanding the military, or profiting from most occupations. So, Rothschilds amassed immense fortune. Did that restore justice, or compound injustice? They and "court Jews" before them entered inevitable deals with devils in power.

If attenuated Judaism as it flowed into Nica's life's choices remained clouded in the film, her family's vast wealth failed to save her relatives from the death camps. Their holdings may have well brought terrible blame upon these victims of antisemitic laws that gave their ancestors no other choice but to become what the nations who killed them had caricatured and cartooned. Perhaps her post-war mission to spread the gospel of bop, and to succour its black evangelists, gave her a reason to use her own outsider status tripled-over (at least) for what she saw as justice?

That's what that Magen Tzedek means: a star of justice. It's what Jews and gentiles are commanded to pursue in Scripture. On a related note, I answered yesterday a prisoner whom my wife and I will visit for the second night of Hanukkah soon. He asked me about Judaism and wished he could find a correspondence course to teach him more. (We have sent in books but these are subject to the whim of the guards whether or not they reach him rather than be torn up and discarded for "security reasons.")

I wrote him how I figured Chabad might have spearheaded (if anyone) such outreach. But, knowing how much that faction's "visiting rabbi" makes off the few perfunctory visits he pays to the few practicing Jews in a vast, remote California high-desert penitentiary, and how he tended not to impress this prisoner in past encounters, I assured him I'd look into this myself. On the margins, he tries to connect to a faith in which he was not raised, but which today, in his condition, calls out to him as justice is both exacted upon him and rises within him as he tries to-- here's the other trendy phrase of Jews today-- "repair the world" with "tikkun olam." He occupies a small section of "olam" in his cell and the limited space where we'll visit him. I wonder how "kosher" any rabbi'd certify the conditions in which he is housed at a cost of $50,000 a year, mainly spent on guards and certainly not on him.

We warehouse the weaker and we look away. My sons after hearing Jonathan Safran Foer speak at their school about his new book, "Eating Animals," are now pushing aside even leftover turkey. We don't eat pork or shellfish, but we don't technically "keep kosher" for other meat in a way that'd please rigorously observant Jews. Still, we make an effort, and our kids do too. Not out of any fear of divine wrath, but as a discipline and a reminder of the consquences of our actions each day. That's all.

First me, then my wife, had gradually weaned ourselves off red meat the past couple of years. Fish and birds still fill our plates. As she was a vegetarian when we met I still feel guilty about my own insistence on seared slices and sizzling chops. I miss them now and then when I smell them, but no more or less than shrimp and bacon, once two foods I swore I'd never give up but then did-- quite easily.

Our two sons decided to give up beef very recently, after the talk by this author known best for his own encounter with the shetl and the aftermath of the camps, fictionalizing his own trip to Ukraine to search for his family's fate, in his novel "Everything is Illuminated." The connection of slaughter in camps and that of cattle turns a lot of Jews off. They find it justifiably in poor taste, no pun intended, to equate the fate of the six million with that of the millions of animals we herd and prod and cut and eat.

While I agree that the victimization rhetoric may be risky, I also note, as I care for my slowly dying half-poodle pal Fido, that in looking into an animal's eyes, we do face our own complicity. We keep some alive but munch on others. She does too, but we differ in that we can make choices that animals cannot, by our own dominion. Given the command to rule the earth-- to name and corral its creatures-- have we progressed deep down from the attitudes of Torah's Bronze Age? As I have tiresomely recounted on this blog, in such a primitive setting on the edge of Europe, a stroll away from dolmens raised up well before the pyramids, the meeting of my gaze with a sheep in a trailer trundling down a Donegal road confirmed my attempts to give up four-foots.

I heard at Thanksgiving my vegetarian guest gently remind another friend: "I eat nothing with a mother or a face." This person strives towards true mindfulness. When he shows by example, I tend to listen. He's working with a program to raise awareness among local farmworkers and their families about their own ties to the land, and to cultivate beyond the affluent and formally educated true responsibility. Too often, we find in Brooklyn or Berkeley a few lucky folks able to afford being true locavores and buy expensive fare at an organic farmer's market, while most of us go to the big-box, non-union chain, and others-- as the New York Times reported last Sunday-- join the burgeoning lines for food stamps. Across all these actions, agribusiness even for purists forces many to compromise. Our vegan neighbors grew their own little crops in their yard last summer, but I had no idea where it all went, as I watched chard seem to shrivel up under our relentless heat.

We all choose what to eat. The bonds that pull us to feast with one another amid our pets bridle between us and the flesh we devour, and this difficulty should make us all question this most daily and habitual of actions. We may pray over our dishes before we consume them, as priests did when they propitiated YHWH at the Temple, but in roasting a fatted calf or our stuffed turkey, we still realize, deep down, how we may risk taboo. We ask forgiveness to Our Father-- for we know what we do.

Find out more here: "Magen Tzedek". My wife did not read my blog entry as she wrote "Eat Love Die" this week-- it appeared a day later than mine-- but you'll agree that they do mesh nicely.

Sarah Waters' "Fingersmith": Book Review

Recommended to me, I enjoyed this. Gothic conventions: madhouse, double-crossing, inheritance, thievery, a gentleman's claims-- provide a solid foundation for an engrossing plot and convincing characters in 1862 London and environs.

This not being my usual genre, I lack familiarity with Waters' other fiction. But if this is any indication, she merits her awards. There's marvelous twinned descriptions of a scene that writers often overlook: how Victorian London gradually must have grown and how one coming from a rural destination would first espy its smoke and steeples who'd never seen it before from this prospect. The amount of description employed by Waters tends to be integrated well; there aren't the set-pieces many writers might have shown off with, but you see only what the two first-person narrators do, as they encounter it. This adds immediacy and the pace does not drag. The depictions of sex, albeit limited to one key night, from two points of view, and one view of death are delineated with skill; they remain vividly in your mind. The historical details are woven into the narrative deftly and the novel does not betray the "researched" quality that (much as I liked it) felt more prominent in Michel Faber's "The Crimson Petal and the White."

It's not possible to tell hardly anything about the story without divulging secrets. So, a few passages of Waters' prose will suffice to bring you into the mindset of her mid-Victorian two young women who tell their paired stories. Metaphors work subtly, and the women's words are chosen carefully. "I should never put her down as the motherly sort, myself; but servants grow sentimental over the swells they work for, like dogs grow fond of bullies. You take my word for it." (61)

"And yet, even wax limbs must yield at last, to the heat of the hands that lift and place them. There comes a night when, finally, I yield to hers." (260) Much later: "There are pictures behind his head, pinned to the wall in wax-paper wrappers: a girl on a swing, showing her legs; a girl in a boat, about to slip; a girl falling, falling from the breaking branch of a tree. . .I close my eyes." (351)

These excerpts capture the eerie, yet patiently detailed, tone of the novel. I do concur with a discussion on Amazon marked "Spoiler Alert," however. The motivation of that character was understated in that revelatory scene so that it could be perceived as too reticent. The motivations can be drawn out in context but as the critique at the discussion suggests this may escape a reader not keenly observant on reading between the lines. Likewise, there's a haunting mood for the concluding pages that resolves it all while leaving a subtle ambiguity, that suited the tone of the entire novel elegantly start to finish. Yet, this may remain elusive for those eager to account for every nuance.

One character, in a rare moment, makes this metafiction. "Terrible plots? Laughing villains? Stolen fortunes and girls made out to be mad? The stuff of lurid fiction! We have a name for your disease. We call it a hyper-aesthetic one. You have been encouraged to over-indulge yourself in literature, and have inflamed your organs of fancy." (394) This is a fine place to inflame your own fancy organs, in these pages. (Posted to Amazon US 12-1-09)

Does Facebook follow our society's ups & downs?

Here's a Facebook message verbatim (?) as posted.

☆ .•´ •´¨¨)) -:¦:- early ☆ ((¸¸.•´ ☆ nite nite ☆ -:¦:- ((¸ ¸.•´ ☆ sprinkles ☆ ☆ * ***fairy hugz****

Also, from same person same day:

"----- is really fed up with inconsiderate people!"

Here's another friend. A typical message verbatim from this former h.s. classmate (transferred out two years in, so perhaps that may account for his orthographic skills) turned entrepreneur. Luckily after an initial flurry of similar themes and grammar, he's diminished his appeals. He lives in Pacific Palisades now and poses by a very fancy car; I assume his FB profile tells truly about such conspicuous consumption.

TELECOM & BLUEBERRIES...or MAKE MINE A BLACKBERRY: Being approached about every opportunity has it's benefits 1) Opportunity to learn first hand about a company & it's products 2) Opportunity to compare ACN's Global Telecom Opp...ortunity to the theirs. Hands Down ACN's Comp Plan & Services WIN! Every network marketer has 2 things a Product & a phone. Funny how every opportunity needs the service ACN offers.

Yeah, funny. On a more humorous, if intentionally so note, around the same time, another friend twittered this: "No one should die because they like Irish music, & no one should go broke because they do it for a living. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day." This was in response to an attempt to go viral via this ubiquitous 9/4/09 message: "No one should die because they cannot afford health care and no one should go broke because they get sick. [If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.]"

That was in response to Obama's dickering with the insurance industry and "wellness provider" monoliths towering over any chance of decent medical plans. With controls on spending absent, I wonder indeed how the new system will be better than the horrendous one we already have, or do not. Not that the fundamental power to decide life-and-death issues is gone, only shifted, from the corporations alone to them in league with the government, over what they will and will not pay.

Trillions: no matter who pays, we pay. Over a fourth of all Medicare is paid for those in their final year of life. Having seen my father's final year end earlier this current year, I understand the emotional difficulties. This debate reminds us of our mortality, forces that no anointed leader can rescue us from. I do wonder if people will eat better, exercise more, and ease up on the obesity, heart disease, and diabetes that some say already account for 75% of health costs right now. These are often preventable, or reducible causes that are not givens, not inherited, not fated. And I fear much of what we do and what we will pay out for as taxpayers, as policy holders, comes after the fact, for those who haven't taken care of themselves. Does this sound too harsh? It seems the unspoken side of this dilemma.

We're a nation that loves quick fixes after overindulgence. Lose that flab after all that holiday stuffing. Most of my neighbors and fellow voters thought miracles would begin promptly a year ago. Given the $19 million our president raked in personally during his campaign from these same insurers, neither his dithering nor the rhetoric of his opposition surprises me, but apparently his inevitable compromise startles the 68 million who voted for a faith healer. The dependence of his wife's income on this healthcare industry makes me skeptical about their loyalties. But I digress.

Nearly a season later, FB posts by most concerned appear to have markedly decreased. Even the Blueberry businessman. Our economy despite boasts of Wall Street and Oval Office has not boosted fortunes of many of my peers. A few single or kid-free (or college-bound via their kid) folks continue to travel about and tell the rest of us their sights, yet others lament on Facebook their job prospects, health fears, and stressful routines. I wonder how the reduction in FB activity (I joined late, last February) can be graphed related to unemployment rates, fears of a stable future, and pressing demands that take precedence over breathless updates and those fun quizzes? (I do the latter but avoid the former; I set my preferences on FB to reveal little to all and use the system to keep in touch with individuals more than as a broadcast. My blog entries feed into it; otherwise I try to keep a lower profile.)

Although I have now gained over a hundred "Friends," I estimate 20%-25% of them actually post regularly, however loosely defined, on Facebook. (Will they skim this entry, once fed over there?) I read the other day that Twitter's already counted on the way out among hipsters. Don't get me started on one lovable but eccentric real-world friend who once in a while bursts on FB via cross-uploading cryptic packed accounts from Twitter of his day out on the town. Twitter also seems to be beloved by-- from my limited p-o-v, a few publishing types-- journalists and writers eager to promote their work, understandably if a bit confusingly. Still, in this day of outsourcing and freelancing, I cannot blame them for such transmedia. I've learned of great articles and even a few books this way.

Not every medium's so bustling today. My e-mail hardly has anybody sending me correspondence unrelated to work, and often's about as scant in terms of personal messages as my mailbox has been for perhaps years or decades now. As I eschew the phone unless no other option exists for any form of communication, maybe many more driven to socially network, those extroverted Type A chattering classes, now resort to forms of messaging that fly under my radar or beyond my narrow technological ken.

Still, being a stay-at-home sort happy to browse and surf, I can handle a vicarious life on the Net fine. I must interact enough in crowded cities and jammed classrooms to fulfill my supposedly evolved necessity for face-to-face human contact. Otherwise, at this distance, I balance peeping with discretion adroitly. So I hope.

Cartoon: Dave Coverly by way of blog "Dangerous Intersections"

Belliveau & O'Donnell's "In the Footsteps of Marco Polo": Book Review

The first to follow in his 13th c. footsteps, all 25,000 miles, two New York City explorers combine lovely photos with casual prose as they leave Venice, trek overland into China and back again. Avoiding airplanes, falling into the clutches of Afghan warlords, and enduring Canton's hellish train station, they recount their own share of adventurers.

What they find is how accurate "Marco Millions'" travelogue can be when tracing his route in desolate areas still largely the same as seven hundred years ago. I liked the Karakorum setting, with haunting open landscapes you can see in their photography and their simple scenes among the Mongols. How can you resist any narrative that crosses Taklamakan, the sandy wasteland you can get in but not out of by its name, followed by the Desert of Lop? On the Yunnan-Tibet Old Tea Horse Road, similar enchantment comes with the Naxi people, who now as then cap their teeth with their wealth, in gold. The pair realize that due to assimilation and globalization, the pressure of the Han Chinese majority on ethnic minorities (as they witness with the Uighirs and Tibetans) falls upon such peoples. "These are the last days that Polo's descriptions can be witnessed," they lament. (178)

Transience permeates this book, fittingly and poignantly. A Chinese professor in Xi'an paints a pagoda for years "and it's never the same. Every minute of every day the light changes and I see something different...but more importantly...it has helped me to realize that I am changing more than my subject. When I am gone it will remain." (177)

A Cochin refuses to let them take pictures of the synagogue in India on Jew Road; the spice trade that made his people ancient merchants there has died out, and the congregation withers. Until earlier last century, those "white Jews" took slaves, converting them as "black Jews"; on Shabbat the latter had to sit on the floor of the shul. Denis Belliveau, who tells the story, cringes inside thinking of the irony of Passover seders there, but as many times, if not all, he keeps silent for his host.

Other places, he and Fran O'Donnell, ex-Marine, speak out. They talk back to their churlish Chinese and Persian handlers, and they navigate more than one police state with aplomb. They have trouble getting through Afghanistan as warned, and also in entering Iran. "We used to pray in our homes and socialize in public," one student dares to tell them. "Now we pray in public and socialize at home." (268) Suspected as CIA spies often, the travellers meet their share of difficulty, just as Marco Polo's party.

"In Xanadu, we found no there was no stately pleasure dome, no lush gardens filled with game, no sumptuous concubines. There was only a windswept plain and the remnants of an outer brick wall that once encompassed the Great Khan's summer palace. Destroyed by the Ming so there would be no memory of the Yuan-- we stood there defying them, daring to remember." (166)

In Sumatra they view the same act done by our primitive ancestors. Hunters circle a felled beast, seeking its spirit's forgiveness. This may be the oldest ritual still alive today, in such remote fastnesses as found by the pair of adventurers. In Sri Lanka, at Adam's Peak, they see its shadow cast over forty miles of a verdant plain.

Among the Khotan dunes amidst a sandy sprawl the size of Germany, Denis comes upon "a shattered tree that had drifted these waves for eons." Halting his camel, he runs his hand over the softened grain of the wood. "Maybe a child climbed this tree thousands of years ago when it was alive," he muses. "Maybe a monk meditated under its leaves when it stood in the courtyard of a Buddhist monastery of perhaps a mad Tibetan marauder was put to death and hung from his limbs." Their host, nicknamed "Grumpy" for his resemblance to a certain dwarf, "barked for his boys to start hacking at the bleached trunk, and I reflected on the tree's final demise. Tonight it would heat my bed and cook my food, completing its journey as it helped me on mine." (125)

It's easy to see how such stories endure on such a trail, and how new ones emerge. Overall, this book leaves, as Marco's did, half the tale out, I suppose. This can lead to slight confusion, as the maps as endpapers fail to show the direct routes taken, and there was in the Persian episode as they narrate some alteration of plans, and why this itinerary is not drawn on the maps appears an oversight that needed correcting. Also, I tended to lose track of how long it took them to get from place to place over two years, and I would have liked a detailed chronology on their map to keep up with their pace as it ebbed and flowed.

However, the photos are splendid and the chatty presentation, with easily read type and shaded font for the excerpts-- rather few, so I suppose Marco Polo did tell his fair share of tall tales to fill out his book-- from the original account give modern armchair travelers a thoughtful way to gain instruction from the trail here. As before, tolerance and hospitality, rudeness and danger, violence and threat fill the pages of another Westerners' journey to the Far East and all points in between. (Posted to Amazon US 10-7-09)