"Humor Me: An Anthology of Funny Contemporary Writing": Book Review

Ian Frazier may be a better writer than editor. His "Lamentations from the Father" channels Yahweh circa Leviticus into an exasperated Dad: "Leave the cat alone, for what has the cat done, that you should so afflict it with tape? And hum not that humming in your nose as I read, nor stand between the light and the book. Indeed, you will drive me to madness. Nor forget what I said about the tape."

Frazier's entry ties for first place with what he calls "the funniest piece of the last ten years," Jack Handey's "What I'd Say to the Martians." His narrator, a captured human specimen, yammers pulp platitudes. "We are a warlike species, you claim, and you show me films of Earth battles to prove it. But I have seen all the films about twenty times. Get some new films or, so help me, if I ever get out of here I will empty my laser pistol into everyone I see, even pets."

Frazier and Handey top the list; that leaves 52 selections, including what's subtitled as "some old great stuff too." How amusing were the other entries? It depends on yes, your sense of humor.

This book is a scattershot assemblage of skilled veterans trying to get a rise out of us readers. The set-up of most contributors mimics a stand-up comedian: elaborate on a conceit for a few minutes, for a few sentences -- or for ten thousand words. Frazier alphabetically arranges contents by author. With no other organization, they swerve from deadpan to earnest, crude to subdued. Entries range from one sentence to 20 pages. They include solid excerpts from Jamaica Kincaid and David Mamet, neither of which I found amusing. I found two writers I do find amusing, David Sedaris and George Saunders. However, Sedaris' take on "A Plague of Tics" goes on too long. "Unlike the obsessive counting and touching, rocking was not a mandatory duty but a voluntary and highly pleasurable exercise." This starts off as many entries do, as a promising idea for humor. But, the novelty of a convulsive narrator, his eccentricities told at wearyingly detailed length, wears thin. Sedaris has written funnier pieces.

Similarly, Sanders' suburban surrealism has been pulled off much more adroitly, and poignantly, in his other stories. Saunders' "Adams" resembled a deadly Three Stooges episode, unsettling rather than entertaining. It ends: "And I began to wonk and wonk, and once they had fallen back, with Adams and his teenaged boy huddled over the littlest one, who had unfortunately flown relatively far due to a bit of a kick I had given her, I took out my lighter and fired up the bag, the bag of toxics, and made for the light at the top of the stairs, where I knew the door way, and the night was, and my freedom, and my home." Saunders mixes empathy with irony well, but this story felt awkwardly inserted into a collection promoted as light entertainment.

This unsteady tone within so many selections puzzled me. Larry Heinemann's "The Fragging" satirizes the Vietnam memoir, but it follows the genre so closely that it imitates it, rather than confronts it in a manner that forces us to see the intent of his satire. "The convulsion was sufficient to lift the upper part of McQuade's body clear of the bedding and blow the back of his head off to the eyes." Heinemann may be so deadpan in his stoic recital of mayhem that I missed the chuckles in his account. Why Frazier entered this into his anthology confused me. I missed even what might be supposed gallows humor.

Grace Paley mocks the prison memoir, but outside of a few wry asides to fellow feminists incarcerated for "the civil disobedience for which I was paying a small penalty," this fell flat. I suspected she mocked Thoreau's stance, but her tone stayed so subtle I strained to catch the fun that supposedly lurked in her stolid, detached prose. Many entries begin promisingly. Bruce McCall imagines Der Fuhrer as a lover of cows. Frank Gannon converts Mickey Mantle's autobiography into Attila the Hun's "as told to" motivational story. Veronica Geng tells of "La Cosa Noshtra," a Mob memoir about cannoli. Other authors address: static electricity, flipping houses for sale, tornadoes, antique stores, NYC tour buses, grand dames, being shot in the stomach, and a call line for queries about "La Bamba."

Talents such as Garrison Keillor, Bruce Jay Friedman, Steve Martin, Andy Borowitz, Michael O'Donoghue, and, oddly, Elizabeth Bishop provide respectable performances. Friedman adapts the earnest, affectionate voice of a fan wishing to give Sammy Davis, Jr. "a complete rest"; we nod at the fan's gushing babble as we hear ourselves in his awe of a celebrity, whom the fan wishes to host at a dinner party with "a mixed group over -- Italians, an Irish couple, some Jews, about twelve people tops." In Roy Blount, Jr.'s "Salute to John Wayne" the American penchant for male aggression and female seduction takes a clever turn. Somehow, clawing cats, sex, The Sands of Iwo Jima, and military machismo combine into a story that succeeds, as a quiet morality tale underneath its perplexing plot and gee-whiz dialogue. "'Nude women think it's easy to talk to a nude woman. It's not! It's so personal! And there's a woman present!"

"Gum" by Scott Gutterman in the style of Ken Burns imagines a PBS miniseries on what "soon filled the mouths of schoolboys and stumblebums, of pugilists and prostitutes from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon." Gutterman imagines Shelby Foote, Susan Sontag, Martin Scorsese, Fyvush Finkel, and Keanu Reeves lecturing us about the "resin of the sapodilla tree" which "was made to yield a chewable substance that could produce a kind of refreshment lasting all the livelong day." The piece makes its point, and then stops. It works.

Too many entries ramble on. Half a dozen random issues of the The New Yorker in its "Shouts and Murmurs" feature could compete against the bulk of Frazier's "bumper crop of humor from some of our funniest writers." I'm not sure if copyright, royalties, or distraction restricted what Frazier edited. If this "anthology of funny contemporary writing" stacks up as truly the best that could have been culled from the past thirty years, I'm not laughing as much as I'd hoped. Its "some great old stuff too," such as Mark Twain's scatological "1601," rests more among odds and ends rather than "bests of." I agreed with the "hearer" of Donald Barthelme's "Thailand": "I cannot believe I am sitting here listening to this demento carry on about eel curry." Or tattoo misspellings, inmate fashions, bad theater, mistaken identity, and five versions of war memoirs.

It's the kind of collection where Barthelme provides the punchline. If that's your idea of a good time, this may be your armchair companion. After all, it's for a good cause. Proceeds benefit 826 Seattle programs, "which provide free after-schools tutoring and writing workshops to students of all ages." So, buy it for a gift. Maybe your friend will get a bigger laugh out of it. (Posted in slightly edited form to Amazon US 5-24-10; "6-3-10 Main Review featured at PopMatters.com)

J.C. Hallman's "The Hospital for Bad Poets": Book Review

Taking its title from Nietzsche, this ambitious collection comes half from the exurbs, half from the innards. Hallman's debut fiction emerges as prickly and testy, as unsettling voices gasp out warped fables from the phantasmagorical tract homes of our dismal America. Unsparing and refusing to look away, Hallman forces his reader to gaze at darkness and illusion.

I admired both "The Devil is a Gentleman: Exploring America's Religious Fringe" and "The Chess Artist: Genius, Obsession, and the World's Oldest Game." The first applied William James' "The Varieties of Religious Experience" to Hallman's travels among practitioners of new religions invented during the past century. The second took him from seedy NYC chess clubs to far-eastern Europe's Mongolian outpost Kalmykia to Federal prisons in a quest to understand the hold of the game upon its masters. Hallman's stories expand his intellectual interests, and where popular culture blurs into social critique, as in "Ethan: A Love Story," he makes himself if not his readers at home.

These stories will disturb more than comfort. The first, "The Epiphenomenon," shows by its title the level at which Hallman sets his tone. Ironically-- and this quality as in much of what comes from those schooled in writer's workshops and creative classes as those taken and taught by this author will dominate these pages-- it's about an ordinary man, but one prodded and probed by a Kafkaesque Statistician and his Maestro. The narrator notes after his reception how "the soft charge of social routine conducted with strangers is the most rewarding form of intimacy the average man knows." (6)

It's a chilly story fitting its setting, and like others ("Manikin," "Dalrymple," "Savages," "The Jockey," "Utopia Road," and the title story) its detachment left me looking in at an exhibit akin to my hometown's "The Museum of Jurassic Technology," a calculated trompe l'oeil to fool the eye and puzzle the mind. I admit that many of these stories listed reminded me of Donald Barthelme, and they felt as if they could have appeared in 1966. Their studied distance may appeal to some readers, but they left me looking in at them. That being said, they nearly end at the right moment, always a sign of a writer's control.

"The History of Riddles," suiting the writer's two subjects previously published, has an earnest roofer pleading his odd case to his guests: "The riddle is an important part of social custom. It branches out in two directions-- mystic philosophy and recreation." (231) Here, Hallman likes having an everyday character articulate theories in an elevated diction that may bewilder or antagonize his hearers. Therefore, for me this story worked better. I have a feeling his encounters with religious zealots and chess fanatics may have tuned his ear for such conversations.

This clash of tonal registers enlivens my two favorite entries. "Carlson's Team" begins with a familiar observation heard in many a seminar. "In the beginning, television simulated reality. Now it's the other way around. I feel happiest when it seems I have made it to syndication, when the events in my life that used to occur weekly begin to run every day, early prime." This set-up unfolds a novel look into a man's relationship with his very pregnant wife and his company's basketball squad, but taking on the sitcom creator's perspective and jargon, once again sounding as if out of a classroom lecture: "The droll roll of suburban time is conveniently expressed by the temporal compression practiced in basic situation comedy construction." (97) Miscues and fumbles as well as attempts at poignancy, holding a beat, suggest that we've all been playing to the camera and our own cue cards.

His acknowledgments credit Lynn Margulis' "The Origin of Sex," and I will check out her book if the scenario it inspired for the fictional text "The Conjugal Cyst" does justice to its source. The tale "Autopoiesis for the Common Man" features the protagonist's trysts with two nurses, who flirt by quoting factoids about the genesis of sex within microbiological responses to environmental threats such as ultraviolet light. "Fungi hold the record for biotic potential, but some bacteria reproduce three times per hour. That's me flirting, you know," one tells him. (52)

Places gain perhaps less attention than people, but as a native of Southern California, I recognized another native's eye for this terrain, where "tiered lots the color of grocery bags" fill hillsides. "Everything had been brought here from somewhere else." (211) "The Fire" as the longest story here, however, left me again detached. Hallman captures the eerie scene. "The flames fluttered in the coming twilight, the silent surf of a distant beach. There was nothing in the way of trucks or men." (163) Still, the voice stays magisterial more than tender, and this reaction to threat characterizes much of the stoic, pitiless tone of many stories.

So, "Double Entendre" proved a relief. Hallman risks in this metafictional piece the possibility of breaking down post-modern barriers. "Erotic fiction is the chance to eroticize anything at all." (177) He does not exult so much as extend the opportunity. This essay-story roams a bath, a beach, a graveyard as three places for encounters. "Boy wants Girl; Girl not interested; Boy makes his move; they have sex; a truth is revealed; the sex goes on." (187)

This story, for all its experimental reach, shows Hallman's ability to touch the emotion, however objectified, and this gesture in a collection oriented around alienation represents a saving, if brief and still intellectualized, humane attempt to use narrative to comfort rather than chill his reader. These tales will not put you to sleep with uplifting messages, but they will leave you looking up in the dark, wondering how much your own life mirrors the farcical, satirical, and philosophical predicaments Hallman presents. There's a grimness and a toughness permeating this collection, and as formidable as the ideas may be, the glimpses of gentler, softer choices for its characters kept me reading on past his midnight scenes of real or symbolic graveyards, mausoleums, and suburban cities of the dead.

(Posted to Amazon US 4-26-10'; 4-30 to PopMatters.com via its Re:Print BookBlog. Photo: JCHallman.com.)

Seamus Heaney translates Robert Henryson's medieval Scots verse

A middle-aged man contemplates the aftermath of Chaucer's tragic Cresseid. Abandoned by Troilus after she dallied with Diomede, did she deserve the contempt with which she was treated in this tale from the Trojan war? Robert Henryson defends her, and his serious consideration attracts Heaney to revive from his "mid-Ulster" upbringing the speech rhythms shared with a "hidden Scotland" that he hears within this late fifteenth-century poem's elegant defense of a fallen woman, turned a leper.

Heaney, as with his translations of the medieval Irish tale of mad Sweeney and his version of "Beowulf," keeps his own direct, confident manner foremost. "Who's now to guide, accompany or stand by/Me, set at odds and made so odious/ To Diomede and noble Troilus?" is the translation of "Quha sall me gyde? Quha sall me convoy,/ Sen I fra Diomeid and nobill Troylus/ Am clene excludit, as abject odious?" (10-11) You can see here the balance of freedom and fidelity that characterizes Heaney's interpretation.

Henryson's also known for his versified fables, expanded into morality tales from Aesop and other written and oral sources. He combined the popular and learned cultures and is supposed to have been a schoolmaster. Heaney admires the Scots poet's range, similar to his own, and explains Henryson's modulation as an appealing reason for rendering his tales for a wider audience.

There's no notes beyond a few sentences setting the context for the fables, and the introduction I found suggestive rather than thorough; these remain minor shortcomings of this version. Yet Heaney points us to scholarly editions, as his emphasis here's on accessible, brisk, and sententious storylines that convey sympathy with human predicaments and moral quandries. "Hence the decision to translate the poems with rhyme and metre, to match as far as possible the rhetoric and the roguery of the originals, and in general 'keep the accent'." (xiv) These do demand to be heard aloud, and the origin of Heaney's notice of Henryson was "to translate some other narrative that could be performed by an actor" after his reading of "Beowulf." (xiii) While fewer than five thousand lines of Henryson exist, perhaps this collection of his verse will inspire such a recitation of it for us today. (Posted to Amazon US 12-13-09)

William Powers' "Hamlet's Blackberry": Book Review

How can we balance staying "in touch" without being overwhelmed by never being out of touch? Moving between the "alpha" of "less crowded, more focused" inner-directed concentration or "flow" in the moment, and the "omega" of being wired, linked, virtual, Powers surveys seven thinkers who dealt with their era's equivalents of "screens," our "connective digital devices" of the past two decades.

Plato writes down "Phaedrus," Socrates' orally delivered dialogue addressing the new technology of the scroll. This allowed distance from the physical speaker, and recollection that eased memory and boosted recall, paradoxically. Seneca called for "inner space" to deal with the resulting paperwork and information overload the Romans faced four hundred years later. His Stoic philosophy countered the noise that Seneca lived among. He proves an ancient predecessor of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's "flow" concept of being in the moment, immersed in one's craft. Powers ingeniously ties this to his own need for a jazz video enjoyed on You Tube free of Net distractions on or off that site, so he opts for the full-screen experience.

Gutenberg, I never knew, invented mass production first of mirrors. In the pilgrimage town of Aachen, tiny mirrors reflected images of the miraculous relics as they were hoisted before the crowds to gaze upon. Gutenberg then took the method of pressing sheets and made not glass but paper with movable type impressed. Books then could be manufactured cheaply. Reading turned away from a word being preached in public to a private activity silently enjoyed, inwardly.

This balance between public interaction and solitary enrichment, Powers stresses, can be found in Hamlet's "table of memory." These devices in Shakespeare’s time were portable like an iPhone or BlackBerry, but used for what the writer wanted to record. Powers compares these coated parchments, inscribed with a stylus and erasable with a sponge, to the Moleskine notebooks which inspire doodlers and scribblers today. This continuity of a traditional item into a changing realm represents "old tools" which well used can "fight overload" by helping us control the information that we slowly filter, the better to process.

Ben Franklin's "positive rituals" of temperate self-control that he kept track of, Powers suggests, resemble today's "no E-mail Fridays" a few workplaces follow. They show how people can take back their quiet time, and get more productive tasks done, freed from the distraction that online multitasking does to erode our concentration and diminish our effectiveness.

For Walden, Thoreau's experiment in simplicity anticipates a zone of quiet that can resist the "digital domiciles" that threaten us in future homes, walled in by screens. (I thought of Fahrenheit 451; oddly, Powers did not.) "Crowd Zones" could allow a plugged-in area, and "Walden Zones" could allow a refuge for contemplation in the same hi-tech house, he posits. Walden Pond, after all, was just over a mile from Concord town, and within sight of the railroad. Thoreau predicted that the telegraph would bring us news of "Princess Adelaide" with the "whooping cough," and as Powers shows, our supposed headlines every day show this having come to pass with breathless celebrity tweets.

Marshall McLuhan for all his convoluted prose reacted well to how the global village would surround us. Powers urges resistance, as did McLuhan, to the “Narcissus trance “ of “Gadget Lover. “ The "only way to cultivate a happy inner life is to spend time there," free of the seemingly innate craving for connectivity that the media and corporations and inventors wish us, of course, to satisfy, but it's a desire that can never be satiated, Powers reflects.

Better to disconnect, at least for an "Internet Sabbath." If we can "lower our inner thermostat," we can cool down our heated up demand for always being tapped in to our screens, as you and I are now as we share in our interest of Powers' book. This is a fast-paced book; I noted he shares the same easygoing accumulation of knowledge casually shared that made his wife Martha Sherrill's "The Buddha from Brooklyn" so enjoyable (reviewed: my blog entry). A few connections could have been tightened, as in the aside to Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" which appears long after the "Phaedrus" section where a parallel would have fit perfectly. Powers’ later chapters skirt the manner Facebook -- or for that matter PopMatters -- allows users to share information in the targeted ways among a small circle of friends which appear to meet his own needs for such a medium.

Subtitled "A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age," this does not call for renouncing these types of networks which we all benefit from. Still, Powers ends his brisk survey seeking a place inside where we can find retreat. He lives on Cape Cod, but his electronic leash can be as tight as any tying a Manhattanite to his or her half-dozen "screens." The only solution he has for escaping the constantly increased barrage of information we're tuned into? We have the power, Power reminds us, to turn it off for a while and recharge our soul. (Posted to Amazon US 5-29-10; submitted to PopMatters.com)

Cyber-friends, Online Fences, Factory Schools

I hate talking on a phone. I'm getting tendonitis from using this keyboard. My work requires I log on 24/7 to teach my "blended learning" classes and my classrooms now mean I diminish my own inventiveness to teach to a top-down mandated lesson plan in the cause of "course consistency."

I accessed my course evaluations for the first stint under this new regime. Many of my students noted their unhappiness with what a Marxian might have reminded us, in the age of chalk unless you had a hip prof sitting on the edge of a desk flipping a coin, of the "school as factory" or "banking" models. Those tenured radicals of my college years might now wax nostalgic (as some Russians long for Stalin) for blue book exams, lined-up chairs bolted to tiny desks (none for you left-handers), seating charts. Bells, yells, drills.

Compared to what now? "Student-centered" approaches of peer groups (blind leading blind, contra Fanon & Friere; my last class in "advanced composition" featured one student (who happened to be my age) out of thirty as sufficiently literate. Many enrolled entered-- and a few I fear left nearly as-- worse than the remedial ("developmental") students I'd taught two terms earlier; two were my students in both classes. Their progress proved to have been minimal in the intervening class and term not taken with me for "basic composition."

So, as I look at my charges, with smartphones and laptops, arrayed more and more out of my line of sight, hiding in front of computer stations instead of those tiny wraparound desks, if sitting in equally uncomfortable chairs, I wonder. About their literacy, their ability to concentrate, their own carpal tunnel syndromes, their tiny fonts on tiny screens they thumb. I imagine them hunched and squinting, after thirty or forty years of peering into backlit pools of images, staring at glowing flat monitors. Or whatever holographs they conjure up circa my estimated funeral.

Where I teach, they can choose only technical and business majors. We don't teach for the joy of learning, but for the skills corporations demand. We churn degrees out in our mass production line, accelerated eight-week courses marketed towards turnaround in three-odd years, a relentless pace that takes its toll. Grim jokes about the only way out of where we clock in (and are monitored on-line now more than ever thanks to such electronic "platforms" to "deliver" material to "customers") appear to be by heart attacks abound. We faculty, untenured, underpaid, recall the jobs we hoped (alongside thousands who compete for the adjunct "freeway flyer" jobs I too started with Ph.D. in hand), had aimed for, and in this market never got. We're told implicitly every day now for the past few years we're lucky not to have been fired. At-will employees, half of our full-time colleagues were laid off in '07.

It's a labor-intensive Fordist workplace. I may romanticize a truer campus as
"field" compared to my office park oxymoron, freeway adjacent, airport bordered. I envy despite their own publish-or-perish entrapment our colleagues with their thirty weeks of classes, research grants (I hope given their straitened budgets; we who must teach rather than write books need some of our former grad school classmates and mentors to produce scholarship for the rest of us highly trained but overdriven drones to at least glance at enviously), and support (I hope!) for the life of the mind and not only the use of the classroom as career generator. Ok, I romanticize.

I've taught there going on fifteen years this autumn. I've taught a total of twenty-six years this fall. So, in my 3/5 curriculum vitae "running my life" at my walled-in, windowed-absent or at least sealed, glass lined, campus-as-parking lot institution, what the future holds-- for me who never thought I'd wind up in such an edifice for my treadmill teaching-- lies in the hands of those who direct my classes, who design my curricula, who select my textbooks (or e-Books as paper ones begin to vanish), and who assign my course load of about fifteen courses a year.

I started on campus with Microsoft 3.1, those red-blue-green overlaid templates with F-commands (which still as my older students note come in very handy in a pinch). Amber and green-lit monitors were only beginning to fade before Mosaic's browser brought us the GUI and a Web we could see. Kennys bookstore in Ireland was one of the first on-line sites I visited; the Medieval consortium at NYU reminded me the year I finished my arcane dissertation that I was the last year, almost precisely, to not use the Internet, 500 index cards of bibliographical sources. No "works cited" or "reference list" filled with http:// -- or at least ftp://.

Now, self-taught except for programs my workplace told me to learn, I nudge my way intuitively, with a bit of asking around now and then, around the keyboard, the Net, the virtual sites I must report into and figure out or at least wander around. I spent yesterday afternoon logging in for my annual "performance review" dozens of numbers to be crunched for my supervisor, for that alone determines my being kept on this job. What I manage to publish, how I connect with students, the letters of recommendation I prepare, the chats I have with them and colleagues about what to read or what to watch-- that may be filtered through such data. Or obscured; we humanists can't quantify our skills. I don't know.

My supervisor skimmed my list of what qualified me as a "Subject Matter Expert." Our school sells itself, literally, on hands-on experience from its faculty. When you're a humanist with a Ph.D. in English Lit, the chances for such daily immersion outside of the assumption "all we do is mark up papers for grammar" (which I do; if doubtful of the effect, it justifies my "SME" existence even if the eggheads in Composition Studies wonder at its practicality) seem scarce. My supervisors increasingly gain doctorates granted from solely or largely on-line institutions. Those of us with "traditional" educations from research universities, where we had to battle in seminars with world-class minds, feel antiquated already. We're the last heirs of medieval and sheepskinned customs. I watched as my boss flicked past the "SME" page of my drafted "performance review." He hurried on to where more numbers needed entry.

What he brushed aside were my essays, my book reviews, my conference papers, my daily effort to keep involved in giving back via the Net. I try to sustain the life of my mind, to enrich academia despite my teaching load. His reaction crushed me.

I know I will keep on investigating what I'm trained to do and what I want to. Yet, I've had to list-- returned to me to redo in bullet points-- for the boss of his boss the "advantages" to my employer of me begging for funds to attend a conference. I suppose one advantage of no tenure is nobody can fathom what I write anyway at my school. As an habitual outlier in the realm of scholarship, my marginal place makes me feel more grateful than ever for you who read and follow me here.

While some of my hi-tech students take toll roads to exurban McMansions, most of them follow me into the trafficked freeways and buses and gridlock. Virginia Heffernan with typical astuteness in "The Death of the Open Web" compares the "teeming commercial city" of the Web to our congested, unplanned, noisy, dirty burgs, full of bullies, trolls, and rabble.

But a kind of virtual redlining is now under way. The Webtropolis is being stratified. Even if, like most people, you still surf the Web on a desktop or laptop, you will have noticed pay walls, invitation-only clubs, subscription programs, privacy settings and other ways of creating tiers of access. All these things make spaces feel “safe” — not only from viruses, instability, unwanted light and sound, unrequested porn, sponsored links and pop-up ads, but also from crude design, wayward and unregistered commenters and the eccentric ­voices and images that make the Web constantly surprising, challenging and enlightening.

That reminds me of my own casual or intense interactions, some with people I have known in person from first meeting on-line, some vice-versa. Among them what one calls "egotistical academics"! What began as "wayward and unregistered commenters" turned first mutually "eccentric voices" and a few became my pals. In Irish I saw a coinage, "cibearchara," cyber-friend. I like that.

Last week I sent a link to my "Shake Your Earthquake Maker" by e-mail to one of the bloggers I had credited in my entry. I thought this person-- same age as many of my students but far smarter and spirited, now headed off to start a non-virtual doctorate-- would respond if with a quick nod to my polite note of solidarity.

A week's passed. No reply will fill my inbox. I felt hurt, for when readers of my blog or Amazon reviews peek in to say hi, I always drop them a word of appreciation. I wondered if I was too sensitive, too unreasonable in expecting every electronically transmitted gesture to generate its own response. After all, we hold doors open in real life for people to pass through and often they walk by us without a glance. Maybe as in at the non-virtual threshold, a web passerby brushes past me-- a graying owlish pale bookworm, nothing to take notice of. (Cue: tiny violins.)

On the other hand, the bat mitzvah friend about whom I wrote (and my wife) sent us a thank-you card for her gift yesterday. In the mail. Handwritten. Neatly. I was impressed. She is my age, I admit; I'm already at the age I look back as much as ahead. Doors held open. Greetings however "phatically" exchanged even by aloof me. Etiquette. We used to call these "bread-and-butter notes." I mused again on a custom perhaps flung the way for most younger folks tapping away to Evite the arc of a floppy disk.

Still, I did feel boosted within this finger-pecking medium a few days later. Dan Schlitz, whom I'd met when we studied in Donegal, posted my latest Irish-language entry, "An Aistear sa lá" on Facebook to promote my fumblingly bilingual efforts. Visit his own "Irish Milwaukee"circle of learners such as far-flung ourselves. As with Gaeilge, so this blog, so walks= my workouts.

Meanwhile, the enigmatic Éabha Rose at "Words Undone ™" sent her own cheer after my recent excursus into "Celtic Buddhism". Her own blog's where you can view Bataille & Foucault, Graves & Nin vividly transmuted into a fin-de-siècle aesthetic decidedly refined. If for the discreet.

I thought again of other favorite blogs you can find at my links listed if you scroll down my blog's right margin. Ben Howard's calm reflections on the practice of Zen in upstate New York; "Vilges Suola" at "Lathophobic Aphasia" with his unerring ear for how English is mangled by his own students, who have the excuse some of mine lack of not being natives; "Bo" at Cambridge with his paired blogs, one open and one closed, teaching me so much about wit, erudition, and wisdom.

Tony Bailie's "Ecopunks" full of the latest Russian metafiction, Spanish verse, haiku, or inevitably the same obscure Irish novel or CD I just finished; John W. Smart and "Tamerlane" who fight the good fight politically; and the too-rarely updated "Harper Berry Hollow" from my dear friends Chris & Bob up north, full of their insights.

Thanks to all of you for your tacit or vocal support. I send you mine, dear readers and friendly followers. I live in a real city, where as Heffernan puts it: "Its public spaces are mobbed, and signs of urban decay abound in broken links and abandoned projects." Unlike my loved-hated native First-turned-Third World megapolis, I hope we can huddle against "the online equivalent of white flight."

I have no idea how my students, overburdened with families, work, commutes, afford such technological gentrification. I guess my priorities make me their professor, not their IT go-to guy. Still, in this tougher economy I and they face, not all of us can afford Heffernan's penchant for the latest gadget, the shiniest app. Nor, I hazard, do all of us wish to profit from and lock up every open, free space online.

Alan Guthrie's "Slammer": Book Review

Down the rabbit hole, prison style. Scottish guard, seven weeks on the job, finds himself trapped by a nightmarish chain of compromises. I can't reveal anything that'd spoil the plot of this psychologically complex thriller. It moves as rapidly as an action film, largely in dialogue that does not pander to noir cliché or police conventions.

Guthrie keeps upping the ante. The novel convincingly takes you through a logical cause-and-effect scenario for two hundred pages. Then, he drops you in the last fifty pages off the deep end. You're left to figure it out, with some hints. Still, the final section does hold many surprises.

Parts reminded me of a Beckett story turned into Hitchcock mystery. Existential dread contends with brutal menace. Characters are relatively few and the plot stays streamlined to maximize tension. It's a satisfyingly disturbing entertainment, one you may be glad not to be experiencing except on the page. (Posted to Amazon 9-26-09)

Stephen Mansfield's "The Search for God & Guinness": Book Review

How does beer express theology? How can brewers enhance goodness? What's moral about a corporation? An historian specializing in inspirational biographies and motivational works investigates Guinness, taking the example of Arthur G., whose signature graces every bottle, for his Christian self-help values inculcated for 250 years of the company.

Although Italian giant Diageo bought it out recently, Guinness with its harp symbol taken from Brian Boru's legendary instrument represents Irish pride. Less of its produced now in Dublin, contrary to lore, and although the water's not the Liffey but from the Wicklow mountains to the south, the associations with the island and city endure. This study, however, does not give as Mark Griffiths did a cultural overview in offbeat fashion, nor does it follow Bill Yenne's recent corporate history (published by Wiley). Mansfield brings his own admiration of Christian charity harnessing leaders to improve the lot of the poor and the laborer. It's a practical and philanthropic notion pioneered by Cadbury chocolate, Lever soap, and Guinness stout, even though the last named example for most people may be even far less known than the other two English counterparts.

Chapter 1 links Squanto's request for English beer, already his acquired taste, to the Pilgrims-- when they arrived to the medieval phrase "bridal ale" turned "bridal". He examines provocatively a theology of beer, from Sumerian and Egyptian times to medieval and Reformation leaders-- such as Luther and Wesley. Mansfield reminds us how it was very late, in the 19c temperance movement, before Protestantism became linked with abstinence. Before that, beer was a moderate indulgence, a necessary nutrient for young and old, and a healthful way to drink water after it had been safely boiled.

Dublin had in 1610 four thousand families but 1100 alehouses and 100 breweries and brewpubs. Everyone drank back then. As Chapters 2 and 3 show, Arthur Guinness later the next century came along to roast barley into a smooth, easily quaffed beverage. His sons followed his example, more or less, but transformed each generation the company into a larger one, as technology allowed production to increase and exports to soar along with profits. Many of these heirs grew wealthy, but many also channelled their privilege commendably back into helping the poor around the brewery.

The Guinness Trust funded their health. Education, welfare, and safety all became laudable priorities, in the view of Mansfield, who admires this example. Victorian devotion to craft, attention to detail for a job done right, and loyalty by bosses to workers and vice versa seem antiquated. Yet, Mansfield finds in the tale of this famous brewery dynasty many inspirational stories of missionaries, doctors, financiers, and benefactors who don't let their wealth go only to feathering their own soft nests.

It may be a bit hard to believe for us, used to sinister profiteers and uncaring employers. This short text focuses more on the past than the present; the corporate giant does seem to have today conquered the earnest reformer who once ran it. But, that tale's beyond the motivational direction of this tale. While I was not sure how the legacy of Guinness will fare under an Italian conglomerate aggressively marketing the Irishness of a product that to America comes from Canada these days despite the lore sold to us in the packaging, Mansfield does remind us that the historical maxims upheld by the family in their running of their business can guide us today, in his epilogue to a thoughtfully written, easily accessible, and briskly told family saga. (Posted to Amazon US 10-18-09)

An aistear sa lá

Bhuel, thiomaint Leon go dtí an diseart ard an lá eile. Iarr sé féin a cleachtadh ag scrudú. Mar sin, d'imigh muid ar turas ar an bóthar níos feadh chomh suas ansin.

Chuaigh muid ar dtuaisceart ar an bóthar mór tríd gCathair na hÁingeal ar dtús. Chuir sé tús maith ar an gnó. Shroic muid taobh an bhóthar níos ciúin an uair dar gcionn.

Chonaic muid bláthannaí leath bealaigh i gcoinne ansúid. Líon poipíní cluainte glas ag timpeall. Fuair muid lúipiní go socair ansin freisin ag imeall.

Mar sin féin, níor fanach bláthannaí léanaí níos fada. D'fhág muid dúiche fhiáin go tapaidh. I bhfaiteadh na súl, d'éirigh crainn na Iósua thart.

Go luath, tháinig muid go dtí an cathair Lanchain. D'ith ar bialann Indiach, "Draíocht Mhasala." D'aontaigh mo chlann go raibh suipéar níos blasta. Is bréa linnsa é, go cinnte.

Fhilleadh muid go cathair mór go sásta. Ar ndóigh, thiomaint mo bhean go ár bhaile anois. Léigh mé an leabhar nua faoi 'an éirí amach ar feadh Luan Cásca' le Fearghal Mag Fhearaigh sa idirlinn. Dhún an aístear sa lá go suaimhneas.

P.S. Bhí maith liom an radharc seo os cionn go leor nuair thiomáineadh sé triu. D'imiodh sé thart an luas. Tá sé in aice leis an sráidbhaile na Neenach i bPointí Triaracha. B'fhéidir, ar mbeadh go raibh ro-dhóchasach anois ag péinteailte suas ansin?

Grianghraf le Rutabegabunny@flickr.com: "Underrated".

A daytime journey.

Well, Leo drove to the high desert the other day. He himself wanted to practice for the exam. Therefore, he went off on an outing on the emptier road as up there.

We went northwards on the highway through Los Angeles at the beginning. It put a good start to the business. We reached the side road quieter an hour after.

We saw flowers halfway up the slopes. Poppies filled green meadows around. We found lupines calmly surrounding there too.

All the same, wildflowers did not last for very long. We left untamed country quickly. All of a sudden, Joshua trees rose up all about.

Soon, we came to the city of Lancaster. We ate at an Indian restaurant, "Masala Magic." My family agreed that it was a very tasty supper. We ourselves loved it, for sure.

We returned to the big city satisfied. Of course, my wife drove to our home now. I read a new book meanwhile about the Easter Rising by Fearghal McGarry. We closed the outing that day peacefully.

P.S. I liked this sight a lot as Leo had driven by. He sped past it. It's near the village of Neenach in Three Points. Perhaps, it'd be too optimistic now as painted up there?

Photo by Rutabegabunny@flickr.com: "Underrated".

Shake Your Earthquake Maker?

Do you blame disaster on miniskirts? Not as fashion police, but as divine retribution? Arrested development in our moral evolution, this rankles cleric Kazem Sadighi. He blames God's temblors on hotties who make us tremble: "Iranian cleric defends earthquake-promiscuity link".

It's easy to mock this childish cause & effect. I wonder how the trilobytes and dinosaurs sinned to merit their Creator's anger, in primordial chaos over eons of floods and tectonics. But when you consider (as I was raised) how many of us today carry within our own psyches this fear of divine retribution no matter our dramatic or subtle secularization after the often youthful formative fact, it's less amusing. Dissidents face death under Islamic theocracies.

Persecution's documented by Maryam Namazie. Her site "Iran Solidarity" depressingly fills the screen with evidence. For example, in response to Sadighi-- who waffled that in fact a just Allah held back rather than accelerated the pace of seismic revenge so as to lull humans into complacency in which they'd commit more sins and merit hellfire all the more severely once the ground did open and fire did fall-- read: "I would be executed in Iran if I did this." This pronouncement against sodomitical Cities of the Plain led to what "Blag Hag" Jen McCreight promoted: "Why Boobquake Failed: God's relationship with mankind is passive-aggressive and abusive".

My wife and I recently discussed French proposals to ban the burka. I agreed and she disagreed. I asserted its patriarchal imposition and reminded her that earliest Islam did not require veiling. I argued that women did not ask for this restriction, but that it had been imposed by a chauvinistic dictate. She countered that freed of the male demands, draped women could find respite from the constant expectations placed upon them-- similar to other religions and cultures that gave women, as it were, a break from the miniskirt, or at least the make-up, the leers, the pawing, the "attention." I think she likes the idea of a mandated big dress covering up perceived flaws. Many females may agree, I reckon! We agreed to disagree.

I've been mulling over what I regard as our capitulation in the name of tolerance to an increasingly intolerant mindset determined to make us conform to it. And one refusing to allow infidels or even reformers (can Islam permit any not fundamentalists and literalists to speak on its behalf?) a voice. While this oppression is far more severe in Europe due to its proximity and ties with the Middle East, I fear that church-state separations between public standards and private behavior will erode as liberal Westerners are trapped in a surrender to the radical ideologies and oppressive regulations that some Islamists, taking advantage of our "diversity" and laxity, campaign to establish in Europe's "advanced" nations.

Robert Ferrigno's trilogy, "Prayers of the Assassin," "Sins of the Assassin," and "Heart of the Assassin" speculates on how a fictional takeover of Islam might happen globally. In my review of "Heart," I noted its "convincing backstory that shows how not violent jihad alone, but gradual conversion by celebrities, a disgust with decayed Christianity and secular capitalism, globalization and our current economic downturn all could be logically seen, in deadly hindsight, as leading to a possible future not so improbable after all."

When I was under the dome depicted above and discussed below, I wondered if (as it reminded me of the Hagia Sophia), this Jewish monument would be remodeled as, in another half-century, a mosque. A strange thought amidst a ritual commemorating survival and continuity. Ferrigno's trilogy starts when a series of "dirty bomb" attacks across the West are blamed on Israel. After the service, my friend asked me my thoughts on Israel vs. Iran and the next nuclear showdown. Not so fictional.

I recall Emil Fackenheim's comment that the Holocaust happened when antisemites harnessed mass machinery. My friend mentioned earlier shares concerns with Islam allied to oppression. She became enmeshed in her own struggle for free speech when she and her husband edited"The Blanket", alone in Irish publications daring to show readers what the Danish cartoons criticizing the Prophet's atavistic violence looked like-- recommended Ferrigno to me. Last summer, I read (and reviewed here and on Amazon US) his novels. Not my usual genre, but I cannot resist a theologically-tinged thriller detailing a future dystopia. A few chapters based in my own hometown heightened its appeal (imagine Disneyland's ruined "attractions" as harboring Catholic prostitutes hiding from the morals police), in a post-nuked, fanatically patrolled America. I found Ferrigno's scenarios entertaining and disturbing; they conflated how Bible Belt and Islamist dogmatism might reign as sectarian death cults posed as if militant enemies.

What ticks me off in our earnestly "multicultural" groupthink? We lack the gumption to call out idiocy when draped in ideology, whether cruelly intolerant of beliefs or weakly capitulating to regimentation. Neo-atheists who diminish selfless believers spending their lives in the service of others, humbly and quietly. Faith-based efforts cloaked in hypocrisy. You don't need me to weigh in on clerical scandals.

But what rankles us who both respect religion's contributions and criticize its distortions are the lack of integrity so many institutions, once they codify and perpetuate beliefs, fall into. Today I read in the Jewish national paper "The Forward" about a Chabad-connected defense for Sholom Rabashkin, accused of violations for his kosher meatpacking plants in Iowa. Professor Samuel Heilman, an expert on ultra-Orthodoxy, explains the type of warped justification that can emerge when one lives within a distorted commitment to one's Law.“A man who is an observant Jew, who is a Hasid, who is a good Lubavitcher, can’t possibly be someone who breaks the law, because he lives by the law,” Heilman said.

I know Chabad does good works too. Yet they depend upon an us vs. them attitude, at least for those once taken into their confidences. As a veteran of Belfast's own divisive shibboleths, my Irish friend's husband and I have discussed more than once his contention. He reckons that a lot more good works might have (and have) been done with less collateral or direct damage-- by non-believers. That is, those who seek justice and spread mercy freed from such a tribal, inbred, intolerant accrual of merit largely for themselves first and Gentiles, non-haredi, goyim, Jews, Prods, Brits, Taigs, deviants, gays, sinners, heretics, infidels, heathens, witches, pagans, fill in the ever-expanding blanks.

I discussed this separation of good works from in-group solidarity last night with a friend; he wondered if in Reform Judaism the need for a personal God had nudged aside social activism this past generation. He figured that the Christian model of a loving friend as Deity filtered into what many Jewish seekers want for their post-post Holocaust guide.

My wife and I mused with him whether Jews who wanted to improve the world more likely did not show up at shul. We talked this over at a temple celebration under that great dome for a friend. Raised "a secular Jew," she grew up distrusting this personal God. Now, at my age, she celebrated her long-delayed bat mitzvah after years of resisting what she spoke of eloquently as her Creator's entry into her own life after an illness twelve years ago. As one who respects faith as well one who analyzes it, I acknowledge the comfort of tradition. We witnessed eight adults affirming their Jewish life before the congregants; one's an 89-year-old survivor.

Betty Cohen was barely older than-- would have been-- Anne Frank. And "would have been" says it all. Also from Amsterdam, she was deported to the same Dutch camp as Anne did; Betty hid two years in an attic with nineteen family members. Three returned from Auschwitz: her fiance who had been taken in the same raid on his hiding place in Hilversum also survived. Her daughter also became bat mitzvah alongside her. The Cohens came to L.A. after the war, and for fifty years were members of the splendid Wilshire Boulevard Temple, after other synagogues, unbelievably, had turned the Cohen family away for lack of ability to pay the dues.

During the long Shavuot service I looked at Hugo Ballin's murals. They circle from right of the sanctuary to the left, all the way around beneath the immense dome. Some of my earliest memories, I learned after I got home, were seeing his friezes and paintings. Earlier than I remember, for one's at my natal hospital. A few years later, I lived across the street from the Burbank DWP building and over the bridge from City Hall, while my childhood trips to Griffith Park Observatory, as I correctly guessed, showed me his other scientific frescoes that richly adorn another rounded dome.

The Warner brothers commissioned the ones at the Temple. Right to left in Hebrew fashion, from the Patriarchs to the pogroms, the story of the tribe unfolds over 320 gilded feet, seven feet high. It ends with the Torahs being taken from a burning shetl to a blue-tinged shore over the sea. The temple opened in 1929. I wondered if the murals were painted, and the series ended, while Anne and Betty were happy children back in the Old Country.

The Shavuot service was old-fashioned, for Reform, lots of organ music and choral singing. Celebrating the giving of the Torah to the Jews at Sinai, its melodies were more robust, less plaintive, than the ones I'd known. Cadences seemed Protestant; I admit no expertise on post-Reformation denominational liturgies! I realized how little I have been exposed to this grand style of worship, coming up and out of and away from a post-Vatican II stripped-down guitar Mass upbringing that never appealed much; I preferred my folk and rock music far apart from drab happy-face churchgoing.

After the ceremony, we spoke of our children and their own drift from Judaism after their b'nai mitzvot, We surmised that they may find their own way to meaning within our own complicated barrage of influences-- as we all had, even if still doubting. That is, we shift into some mature adjustment of our own heritage with our own predilections in a very different age from shetl and parish. I hope our children find happiness in their own search.

The Dalai Lama spoke at that Temple in 1999, where in a typical Angeleno cross-cultural gesture he addressed the American Buddhist Congress. Via Facebook (and obvious translation and editing, considering his limited English!), he observed today:

I believe an important distinction can be made between religion and spirituality. Religion I take to be concerned with faith in the claims to salvation of one faith tradition or another. Spirituality I take to be concerned with qualities of the human spirit, love and compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, a sense of responsibility, a sense of harmony, that bring happiness both to self and others.

I am not sure if the growing shift among many of my generation away from organizations to personally coherent melanges of practices and devotions will ease this tension between ecclesiastical monoliths and determined eclectics, but I do live in California, the historic heart of such syncretic searchers. Laughable or laudable, perhaps we are moving away from the grand structure to a humbler, less insistent interpretation.

We struggle to reconcile our spirits with our bodies, in the grooves worn down by millennia of our ancestral patterns of thought, behavior, and nurture. Betty Cohen's life ironically extended at the death camp as she was subjected to medical experiments by Dr. Mengele; she received more food and better shelter, if that ethical comfort can be imagined. Her fate reminds us-- and non-theists need to swear by this all the more-- that science devoid of morality, torn from culture, distorted by its own rationalizations, can bring down on us its own terrible fire from heaven.

We in an unstable city full of believers and doubters from every tribe gather under our domes. We fear earthquakes no matter how high we build our quake-reinforced towers. We may despite our skepticism learn to listen to my favorite line from Scripture, to the still small voice, heard after fire and rumble.

(Photo "Wilshire Boulevard Temple". Ballin's murals can be dimly seen; I could not find a decent reproduction of them on the web. Read my wife's take on the service at: "Choosing Choseness").

Dark Lord & Tattooed Goddess, ca. 5000 BCE

These figures startled me. I mistook them for modern art. They reminded me of strikingly cubist Cycladic flat idols, white marbled from 5500 years ago. "The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley 5000-3500 BCE" exhibits an eerie familiarity. Henry Moore, Jean Arp, and Constantin Brancusi's sculptures reminded 20c viewers of Neolithic or Early Bronze Age art, but the frenzy to unearth more of such figures from the Greek islands led to the destruction of their sites, just as tourists now erode the ecological health of these attractive if fragile retreats.

Brancusi, as a Romanian, might have liked this NYU exhibit (just ended) from his homeland that brings new finds that link our contemporary fascination with streamlined, oblique, evocative angular representations to ancient-- prehistoric in this case-- artifacts. Even gossip columnist Liz Smith covered it, a bit. Confirming another ancient paradigm-- chatty woman as oracular conduit. The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World captions female arguably better preserved even than Liz as its iconic representative, apropos, under the title "Did Women Rule?:

Female Figurine
Fired Clay
Cucuteni, Drăguşeni, 4050–3900 BC
Botoşani County Museum, Botoşani: 7558
Photo: Marius Amarie

Female figurines predominate in Old European material culture. They can be found represented individually as well as in large groups, and in contexts identified as domestic, ritual, religious, and funerary. The proliferation of female imagery throughout the fifth and fourth millennia BC has prompted some scholars to interpret Old European culture as a peaceful world where female-centered goddess worship prevailed. Males, according to this theory, played a largely secondary role in society. Some scholars, however, consider this argument idealized—in fact many villages were fortified, weapons were buried with men, and adult males had the richest graves in cemeteries.

Read more about this clay statue "in situ." See samples from the exhibition catalogue in the chapter "The Figurines of Old Europe". The term "Old Europe" comes from Marija Gimbutas ca. 1974. I glimpsed her once in her lab. I passed its open door as a UCLA grad student walking a florescent-lit institutional green corridor. This Lithuanian archeologist argued that a matriarchal culture flourished in Old Europe before the Iron Age brought sky-gods, male domination, and female suppression. Feminists understandably flocked to this theory as did pagans, but predictably, scholars since have challenged her model.

I obtained news of these images from a forwarded post by Irish pagans via "Celtic Buddhists." As I have noted two entries ago, my own research into the latter movement shows their wish to connect with this puzzling past. (Speaking of mystery, they linked Anu, the Indo-European mother deity, to Áine, but this as with Danu, as Mary Jones explains, may be linguistically a coincidence. Pagans debate this, so I invite clarification from at least three followers of my blog; comments welcome.)

Goddess of love, summer, wealth, and sovereignty Áine they commemorate at Bealtaine at Cnoc Áine, Knockainy in Co. Limerick the Celtic fire ceremony, When I stayed nearby, in Ballingarry, years ago, I looked up at that mountain myself. I wondered if pilgrims trekked up on festivals, and if its cairn and ring barrows survived on its gentle-- but rounded and prominent-- summit.

Such practitioners revive and revamp a more nurturing, nature-based, environmentally balanced and sexually receptive mindset. They seek a spiritual re-orientation to heal and direct those lost in our contemporary concrete cities. While my academic attempt to explain their invention and evolution of this ethos necessarily analyzes their efforts, their celebration of their appropriation and elaboration of our religious and rural heritages does attest to our own time's broken psyche, the urge to repair ourselves.

We may not know any more than fanciful Robert Graves the structural support or weakness for a reign of a White Goddess matriarchy. Archeologists, however, now can examine discoveries that romantic poets of the 1940s or fervent womyn's herstorians of the 70s could not know. The curator, David Anthony, of this ISAW exhibit's in fact a leading critic of Gimbutas' "Kurgan hypothesis" that claimed a warlike horse-dominated invasion bringing Indo-European "androcratic" elements westward that obliterated a "matristic" pacifist society.

From the shards we contemplate, we may learn what earlier antiquarians and autodidacts could not. For me, this figure brings power. But what that sunny side up/ down photo spread above does not show comes from this side view.



Her callipygian features certainly attract attention. I suppose this is what a fertility goddess, or perhaps an incentive to get yourself or somebody close to you pregnant, looks like. Before I settled down to write this, I found my teenaged son's bikini issue of "Sports Illustrated" while straightening up the house today.

For sober scholarship, I dutifully riffed through dozens of depictions of today's sun-burnished maternal idols for comparison. Tattoos might have hidden, maybe under bi- or monokinis or cupped palms, while proportions appear to have evened out slightly. Yet do we desire this shape, if more hourglass than bottom-heavy? A Facebook page boasts: "Curvy girls are sexier that skinny gals." A study of blind men found they too prefer the curvy classic waist-to-hip ratio that sighted men (and women?) label with their own commodified bias or male gaze-- if innate (so it seems, and not socially constructed as Foucault and feminists bicker?)-- preference for the childbearing, inviting, structural template that appears embedded in our hardwiring.


Here's the horned Dark Lord Donn. With some hesitation, I share one search result, from a "Hebrew-Celtic" connection blog entry trumpeting yet again, speaking of marginal autodidacts, the doughty British Israelite faction. Sticking to Indo-European verities, yes, in Irish, the cognate's for "donn'="dark" while we in English use "dun" as an archaic term for this shadowed shade. Locally as to this find, we get the names Danube, Don, Dneiper attesting to how primordially this term precedes cultural, military, political, religious, and linguistic upheaval within this region. Only after the fall of Communism could outside scholars enter the Lower Danube in Moldova, Bulgaria, and Romania to investigate, and I hope they share much more about these hierarchical farmers from a period still little understood.


"Don - Cucuteni, Romania (ca. 5200 BCE) orig. approx. 1 meter high, fired clay."

"Beckett, Buddhism & the Void": my article

"Beckett, Buddhism & the Void": Horizon Review 4(2010). "Always the big questions," that writer sighed. Posed in front of Niagara Falls, as close to the abyss as I dared, my squinting self introduces this reflection on not only the great Irish writer, but scattered allusions (if not his!) to dharma, as well as 'brane' theory and cosmological speculations that hearken back-- before even the Big Bang. I try to tackle one Big Question, if in three thousand words, as edited in the Arts Section by Dr. Mark A. Williams of Cambridge (now at Oxford) for this fine production helmed by Jane Holland.

There's a lot more to educate and entertain. Here's issue four's Table of Contents. Roam freely on this Horizon into literary and artistic realms of poetry, translations, short stories, interviews, reviews, and essays. In her introduction to this "little magazine" in the spirit of Cyril Connolly's effort, Holland concludes:

I intend Horizon to be like that thin steely line of the literal horizon, a place of new exchanges and opportunities, occupying both sides of the argument, an alluring view of the future, where one thing is always ending and another just beginning, where anything could happen — and definitely will.

I'd concur that this enterprise sustains that elegant, refined, slightly chilled or gently acerbic register of good-natured, grousingly erudite British-style criticism. Not clotted with theoretical jargon or tarred by score setting. Please visit Horizon Review yourself. I'm happy to be among such distinguished peers.

P.S. As adapted to that article, I've reviewed Paul Foster's Beckett & Zen. My 2005 chapter (In: "Beckett, Joyce, and the Art of the Negative," European Joyce Studies 16, ed. Colleen Jaurretche. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 109-24) on "Beckett's Purgatories" alluded therein can be linked to for $20 (royalties to not me, but publisher) via Ingenta or High Beam portals. Google Books previews/chops it. When I wrote this, I'd found its pdf online--I'll send it to you gratis--but no more when I checked in 2012 to update this footnote. You have to return and try, try again, fail, fail harder, as Beckett would phrase it. Somehow fitting, this repetition, this return to where we begin, and before it, and after.

Photo: Wild card image search result. Barbara Gosza's album titled "Beckett & Buddha." LastFM compares this Chicago-born singer-songwriter of Czech parentage "with plaintive but intense songs sung in a touchingly fragile luminous voice" to Rickie Lee Jones or Townes Van Zandt "whilst evoking a Germanic world-weary angst reminiscent of Marianne Faithfull." She reminds me of one of Kafka's lovers. Figured you'd rather look at her face than mine. Or the Void.

"The Gundestrup Cauldron & 'Celtic Buddhism'": my article

"The Gundestrup Cauldron & 'Celtic Buddhism'", has been published in Epona: E-Journal of Ancient & Modern Celtic Studies 5 (2009): 1-29. (PDF). For you with short attention spans, here's an "abstract". (Via the "journal's homepage", click a Union Jack first for English-language text.)

I'm happy to have contributed. I started my investigations nearly two years ago while re-reading Michel Houllebecq's combative novel of ideas "The Elementary Particles" (=my review). A chance reference tied the "Book of Kells" illumination of St Matthew to a "mandala". My curiosity whether any Celtic-Buddhist transmissions could be proven led to this survey of the evidence, or lack of, as opposed to the invention of influences.

In its supersized format my survey comprises this article. A second piece, revised and updated, (if half the 15,000 word length of the "Epona" article) has been submitted (a few days ago) for publication in selected papers revised and expanded from the proceedings of the "Alternative Spiritualities in Ireland" conference held last Samhain at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

The reason my "Epona" article's so lengthy? I wanted to delve as deeply as I could into a topic in the backwaters of exploration. Luckily, this peer-edited journal welcomed my research, for as Dr. Emilia Szaffner explains in her "editorial introduction" to the "Epona" project:

The journal is named after the Celtic horse goddess Epona, who was also an incarnation of fertility. The worship of Epona was widespread, especially in the 1st–3rd centuries CE inside and also outside the Roman Empire, for instance in Pannonia and Transylvania. Among the Celtic gods it was Epona whose cult lasted probably the longest in the Carpathian Basin.

Yeats mused that until the Battle of the Boyne, Ireland belonged to Asia; for the far-westbound Magyar coming from above the Caspian Sea, they stopped only at the Danube. Before they arrived, Pannonia halted at that wide river. I recall crossing the bridge north of Budapest to see right by the roadside Roman ruins-- their military camps did not cross that riparian frontier, home to the untamed barbarians. And among these, perhaps contacts no book extant can account for once happened. What beliefs shared, surmises entertained?

The title of my paper, with the Gundestrup Cauldron, symbolizes one connection, however far-fetched or conjectural. So, the congruent, complimentary Central European-Celtic-and perhaps Buddhist (as mavericks may meditate) route of cultural influences beckoned me down my own Road of Great Events. Maybe not a Silk one, but a pilgrimage I've enjoyed.

It's led to a lot more reading than I'd expected into Buddhism itself, far deeper than shows in my scholarship I confess. It's helped me pursue an endeavor that reminds me of how closely intertwined the personal and the academic paths can tangle when one loves what one does. I let go now-- of retyping of MLA punctuation vs. Harvard Style documentation, refusals of copyright permission for image use, or reduction of amassed research to meet word count and deadline.

Photo: Visit the "Gundestrup Cauldron" entry on Wikipedia; this displays Plate "A" with the horned figure said by some to be Cernunnos the Celtic horned god-- and a few to be an antlered shaman as "yogic adept" clutching a Hindu "naga" snake.

Ag tiomaint leis Leon

Thiomáinfaidh muid go dtí an diseart an tseachtaine deireadh seo chugainn. Tá dúil againn ag feiceáil blathannaí leanaí go h-úr. B'fhéidir, breathnoídh muid bláthannaí scéine agus crainn na Iósua go leor ansúid.

Silim go mbeidh Leon ag tiomaint ansin. Cad chuige? Tá sé mar gheall a cleachtadh air. Iarr Leon ag éirí leis an triail thiomána.

Tá dóchas againn go mbeidh Leon ag éirí sa scrúdú Dé Céardaoin seo. Is maith linn má éiroidh leis. Caithfidh sé go maith leis féin.

Nílim neamhchinnte i dtaobh an ama atá lena air. Ar ndóigh, beidh Leon go himníoch anois agus ansin. Insionn muid air go bhfuil rud atá le céill.

Tá muid imní orainn faoi, mar sin féin. Measaim go mbeadh Leon faoi chearthaigh. Tá sé le céill go raibh sé chomh seo.

Ba mhór an gar dá ag baint amach bua go luath leis Leon. Thabharfainn rud math ar cluainte órga a fheicéail leis Leon, Léna agus Niall. Tá seans chomh óige sé féin. Mar sin, ní bhíonn tréan buan fada.

Driving with Leo.

We will drive to the desert this weekend. There's our desire to view the fresh wildflowers. Perhaps, we will look at many wildflowers and Joshua trees out there.

I think that Leo will drive there. Why's that? It's an account of practice for him. Leo seeks to pass his driving test.

It's likely for us that Leo will succeed on the exam this Wednesday. We'd be pleased if he'd pass. He will do himself proud.

I'm uncertain regarding the future of his success. Of course, Leo will be fearful now and then. We tell him that this is natural.

We have anxiety ourselves about this, all the same. I reckon that Leon should be in a nervous state. It's natural that we may be like this.

It's to be wished that Leo gets the triumph soon. I'd give something to see golden meadows with Leo, Layne, and Niall. It's a chance like youth itself. That is, it's too good [=intense] to last long.

Grianghraf le/Photo by QT Luong: Poppies/Poipíní.

Emma Larkin's "Everything is Broken": Book Review

Viewers of "Burma VJ," and readers of her "Finding George Orwell in Burma," (see my review) will learn about what's happened in Burma under the twin forces of military suppression of the 2007 demonstrations and Cyclone Nargis of 2008. Half a million (official toll's 138,000) may have been swept or battered to death during a 10-12 hour storm. Larkin compares a before-after aerial view of the Irrawaddy delta: "as if a bucket of water has been sloshed across an ink drawing; the carefully-marked lines had been erased and the paper beneath was buckled and distorted." (7)

Later, talking to survivors, she sees a ID-sized photo, all that a husband has of his dead wife. "A water stain had spread across his wife's broad cheekbones and the black-and-white image was already beginning to fade." (163) Memories and rumors, legends of surviving by hanging onto a python or clutching a crocodile spread. Under the total censorship, where complaining can land you life in prison, where the leaders of a police state fear their people and often meet violent ends while in power, the absence of comfort permeates this narrative.

It's in three parts: the storm, when Larkin sneaked in on a tourist visa for a month but, like all foreigners and aid workers and journalists and even many Rangoon folks wanting to help the survivors, she was limited in what she could learn. The second part investigates the regime, its xenophobic reaction to foreign intrusion, its crushing of the 2007 protests led by monks and students (see "Burma VJ"), and its strategic if extravagant relocation of its capital to a remote plot in the center of the country, far from a port or outside contamination as it were. Obscene profiteering, black magic-haunted dictators, astrology as domestic policy: these rule this corrupt satrap.

Finally, she returns a year after the storm to find some relief getting to perhaps half the survivors, but under a cruel regime, little progress as model camps for the press are dismantled, refugees are forced back to their vanished homes, and trauma, as over and over the people rise up and look for help only to be crushed as history is rewritten and memories are all these impoverished citizens of a vast open-air prison state have to endure, or be driven mad by.

What do you do when liberation keeps failing? Larkin often juxtaposes the propaganda of "New Light of Myanmar," the only sanctioned press mouthpiece, with the facts she witnesses and records. "In this Never-Never Land of the regime's imagination, survivors of the storm suffered no trauma and felt no grief at having lost family members, jobs, and livelihoods. Relieved to be so warmly looked after by their benevolent leaders, they sat smiling obediently amid mountains of mama noodles and brightly-colored plastic buckets." (72)

It's frustrating to read this book, and I closed it sadly. It feels incomplete, but this cannot be faulted on the author, who labors to evade the military, bureaucracy, and undercover police and who writes under an assumed name. There's a haunted quality to this tale, and even more when even the experts she cites often go nameless. One thinks of an ancient land where nothing but panic, rumors and fear stalk the dark fields where Death walks.

Larkin despite her clandestine investigations in a nation she knows well even fails to uncover as much as she or we'd wish, given the oppressive situation. But it's as close as Westerners will come, given the failure (as in Tibet, I thought) of the "moral high ground" to overthrow the "guns and brute force" of "the other side." (121) We are taught that goodness and morality will win, but when the junta prevents ships from delivering supplies or doctors from entering for fear that the natives will learn that the outside world is more generous than their own tyrants, one does despair for the Myanmar nightmare that had replaced free Burma. (Posted to Amazon US 5-9-10 & PopMatters 5-11-10)

Thomas Pynchon's "Against the Day": Book Review

It's set a hundred years ago but not much has changed. "This big parade of modern inventions, all spirited march tunes, public going ooh and aah, but someplace lurking just out of sight is always some lawyer or accountant, beating that 2/4 like clockwork and runnin the show." (33)

Investigating Anarchists in Chicago, Lew's "down in the deadfalls where the desperate malcontents convened, fingerless slaughterhouse veterans, irregulars in the army of sorrow, prophesiers who had seen America as it might be in visions America's wardens could not tolerate." (51) This novel fills with unease, unrest, and privation.

Modern chemistry replaces alchemy as capitalism "really gets going," true, as Merle says. But, Webb suggests: "Maybe 'capitalism' decided it didn't need the old magic anymore." He goes on: "Why bother? Had their own magic, doin just fine, thanks, instead of turning lead into gold, they could take poor people's sweat and turn it into greenbacks, and save that lead for enforcement purposes." (79) This tale pits the haves vs. the have-nots, relentlessly; both appear trapped by their ideology.

After their Arctic expedition by balloon, each of the Chums of Chance gaze "at the enigmatic miniature he had purchased, representing a faraway disposition of rocks he would probably never get to see, and try to glimpse, even at this degree of indirectness, some expression of truth beyond the secular." (126) The yearning for a higher meaning permeates this panoramic, unsettling, recondite, and arcane narrative.

It's as if a brane slithered next to our world for a slightly alternate history, a counternarrative full of what science fiction and adventure tales might have imagined for early 20c readers of pulps, westerns, and Oriental mystery. "Let us imagine a lateral world, set only infinitesimally to the side of the one we think we know, in which just this has come to pass." (230). The era described, at the end of the Victorian reign, sounds not much different than what transpired, in its "grim realities." Aging and Death are resisted, within "this all-enveloping pantomime" enacted by twin professors Renfrew and Werfner, England and Hanover, temporal flow of Time against sinister Power half-glimpsed.

This malevolent tension between those who favor the spirit and those who triumph by the sword permeates this plot. As with Asia, where "two distinct versions" endure: "one an object of political struggle among the Powers of the Earth-- the other a timeless faith by whose terms all such earthly struggle is illusion. Those whose enduring object is power in this world are only too happy to use without remorse the others, whose aim of course is to transcend all question of power. Each regards the other as a pack of deluded fools." (249)

Into this standoff, time-traveling agents enter. Mr. Ace: "Glossy black eyes, presented as weapons in a duel. The gently damaged, irrevocably educated eyes we associate with the visiting dead. When he smiled, or attempted to, it was not reassuring." (415) The trespassers back from the future do not bring solace.

Neither can science, even theories of higher mathematics where more than one character seeks answers. "Vectorism, in which Kit had once thought he had glimpsed transcendence, a co-existing world of imaginaries, the 'spirit realm' that Yale legend Lee De Forest once imagined he was journeying through, had not shown Kit, after all, a way to escape the world governed by real numbers." (675)

Meaning may beckon earthier pilgrims too. Shambhala in Central Asia possibly exists; the quest for a terrestrial paradise consumes the next chapters that particularly engrossed me. The Pure Land sought by Buddhists, the rebirth by penance, the advent of The Compassionate, Tibetan tales of wisdom all flicker as if in a comforting mirage, or fevered vision. But transcendence passes and again, war and murder stalk the Balkans and Venetian shores closer to the heart of a Europe to be torn by hatred and profited from by Capital.

Yashmeen leaves an Austrian passage as "she gazed backward at iron convergences and receding signal-lamps. Outward and visible metaphor, she thought, for the complete ensemble of 'free choices' that define the course of a human life. A new switching point every few seconds, sometimes seen, sometimes traveled over invisibly and irrevocably. From on board the train one can stand and look back, and watch it all flowing away, shining, as if always meant to be." (811) A very Buddhist concept, amid the chaos to be unleashed by spies and soldiers around her and her companions.

Contrast with Cyprian's filtered thoughts, from "this bottom dead center of the European Question, this bad daydream toward which all had been converging, murderous as a locomotive running without lights or signals, unsettling as points thrown at the last minute, awakened from because of some noise out in the larger world, some doorbell or discontented animal, that might remain forever unidentified." (845)

Later, out in Mexico during its revolutionary melee, Frank hears a 'brujo' muse about the destruction wrought by progress. He wonders: "who at some point hadn't come to hate the railroad? It penetrated, it broke apart cities and wild herds and watersheds, it created economic panics and armies of jobless men and women, and generations of hard, bleak city-dwellers with no principles who ruled with unchecked power, it took away everything indiscriminately, to be sold, to be slaughtered, to be led beyond the reach of love." (930)

Every few pages, no matter the convoluted plot or the erudite references, passages such as this leap out of the prose. This makes this book such a powerful read, a novel of ideas, yes, but one where-- and I differ a bit from conventional criticism of the book here-- you do care about the impact of lofty schemes upon little people. The characters do flit and pass and I wish I had a scorecard to keep track. The aims of this famously difficult author (thanks for those Wiki-linked annotations) may be ambitious as before, but there is an outrage at inhumanity which makes this much more than a parody of styles, a catalogue of registers. The Albanians watch the intruders from the West: "what were they doing out here this late in history?" (948) We, like them, wonder. Caught up as they all are in a geopolitical, intellectual, puzzling game, we have no clue either.

The Tree of Diana, in film-crazed Hollywood, will then blossom, silver amalgamated with quicksilver under a lens, nitric acid added to animate it. For this element too is alive: "Has its own forks in the road, choices to make just like the rest of us." (1060) Convergences and coincidences in a book begun and ended with the Chums of Chance fill this narrative. Even the natural world shares the patterns grooved deep.

It's a human book, for all its superhuman scale. Yashmeen's love for Cyprian, his for a higher calling, the familial ties that try to resist the juggernauts of death machines driven by Capital: touches of intimacy soften the epic, relentless, global scale of this ambitious novel. As with an epic, the individual struggles to stand out in a starring role. The cast threatens here to exceed thousands.

Pynchon attempts to straddle three decades of planetary chaos while focusing on a dozen or so people caught up in the whirlwind. The pace lags, as when the crew of the "Inconvenience" floats over the Great War and the refugees in its aftermath as if far too detached from the human suffering. I failed to feel as if I was in Mexico during the Revolution, or lost in the Balkans or studio-birthed L.A. except for momentary passages. The little men and women do get crushed, after all, on the other hand, and this plays into the difficulty readers may have in reconciling their humanist expectations for the novel to the pitiless, yet fitfully compassionate movements of this grand scheme. This telescopes and then draws back, over and over.

Years pass in a paragraph as the Soviets rise and the Tsar falls yet another paragraph is given over to a debate about potato salad among Iowan transplants to L.A. That paragraph, however, took place a mile from my house. So, I attest in the local geography back then applicable, the author got all his left turns right and knows to his dubious credit as we natives may that rats do nest up in palm trees.

In the end, as we know from the Colorado mines and Haymarket and the L.A. Times bombing all attributed to Anarchist terror rather than plutocratic suppression, the "commonwealth of the oppressed" succumbed. Scarsdale Vibe imagines above Denver where the strikers are to be mown down or driven off what may not be so much prescient ten decades ago as predictable: "Where alien muckers and jackers went creeping after their miserable communistic dreams, the good lowland townsfolk will come up by the netful into these hills, clean, industrious, Christian, while we, gazing out over their little vacation bungalows, will dwell in top-dollar palazzos befitting our station, which their mortgage monies will be paying to build for us." (1001)

Was it worth the dozens of hours? Yes, uneven as it was, it would not let go of my imagination. I'll take its ups and downs over smoother paths worn down by more timorous novelists and predictable thinkers anytime.

(Posted to Amazon US; cross-posted to "Not the L.A. Times Book Review" 4/24/10. P.S. On the current Tea Party resistance to Big Government and not Big Business, see Tamerlane's "A Thin & Weak Brew"-- and my comment re: this novel and anarchism.)