Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow": Book Review

There's a thousand-plus Amazon reviews, stacks of articles, and shelves of commentaries. What can I add? Unlike most readers, I worked backward before forward into this novel. I'd read "The Crying of Lot 49" in grad school and "Vineland" on my own, but felt incapable of handling "Gravity's Rainbow." Earlier this year, I finished "Against the Day" after months of grappling with its ambiguities and terrible beauties, and then took on the pleasant if as paranoid "Inherent Vice" and next "V." (I reviewed dutifully if tardily these three recently.)

So, I entered "GR" with a past-future perspective on Pynchon's fiction. (I still need "Mason & Dixon" and "Slow Learner," I admit, to finish my quest.) Like "V.", this takes us into German South-West Africa's horrors after WWI. As with "AtD," we follow Central Asian and ice-bound oddities around this same revolutionary period. We get sea-creatures and even a glimpse of the L.A. freeways that "Inherent Vice" follows. And, "Vineland" may get but a nod to a throwaway song lyric name-checking Humboldt County, but as with all of Pynchon, an open-ended, unresolved conspiracy perpetrated by an infernal, alien, yet human-entangled System serves to suppress a Counterforce that traps its rebellion within the same lusts for power and wealth that oppress and motivate and fuel evil machinations of our rulers.

You care about some characters in this WWII epic, and others flit by like cartoons. Horrors add up, as few escape the carnage. Dozens of pages drift pass, data amass into heaps of crushing information, and then, suddenly, illumination flickers and tenderness may beckon--before the plot trundles on over nearly eight-hundred densely packed pages.

Tyrone Slothrop's frenetic quickies, his search for the rocket launch pad in what was Nazi Germany, his own New England family's story gets submerged into this monstrous "sado-anarchist" narrative. That's the whole point. "Those like Slothrop, with the greatest interest in discovering the whole truth, were thrown back on dreams, psychic flashes, omens, cryptographies, drug-epistemologies, all dancing on a ground of terror, contradiction, absurdity." (592; Penguin ed.)

The novel's as off-on as any of his. Acclaimed as his best, I'd counter that "AtD" brings more needed humor into the mix, and keeps by its prose variety and global action a better balance between speculation and entertainment, exciting pursuits and recondite discussions. Taking a backwards leap from his later works to "GR," I'd argue that Pynchon extends the promise of the mysterious "V." here, but that he continued to mature as a writer over the next three dozen years that culminated in "AtD" and the calmer, if as altered, states of "IV." Nobody claiming familiarity with (post-)modern fiction ignores "GR." It rises to the same peaks as his other fiction can, but there's a lot of rocket-talk that remains stalled on the launch pad; ascents of its best passages alternate with lengthy languid waiting periods down at a duller Mission Control. This feature distinguishes all his works, and it's what you must accept.

Here's a dozen of my favorite passages.

Pynchon shows us a London evening as "the light from the street lamps comes in through philodendron stalks and fingered leaves arrested in a grasp at the last straining away of sunset, falls a tranquil yellow across the cut-steel buckles at her insteps and streaks on along the flanks and down the tall heels of her patent shoes, so polished as to seem of no color at all past such mild citrus light where it touches them, and they refuse it, as if it were a masochist’s kiss." (151)

He weighs in on the war, and Why We Fight.

"Everybody you don’t suspect is in on this, everybody but you: the chaplain, the doctor, your mother hoping to hang that Gold Star, the vapid soprano last night on the Home Service programme, let’s not forget Mr. Noel Coward so stylish and cute about death and the afterlife, packing them into the Duchess for the fourth year running, the lads in Hollywood telling us how grand it all is over here, how much fun, Walt Disney causing Dumbo the elephant to clutch to that feather like how many carcasses under the snow tonight among the white-painted tanks, how many hands each frozen around a Miraculous Medal, lucky piece of worn bone, half-dollar with the grinning sun peering up under Liberty’s wispy gown, clutching, dumb, when the 88 fell—-what do you think, it’s a children’s story? There aren’t any. The children are away dreaming, but the Empire has no place for dreams and it’s Adults Only in here tonight, here in this refuge with the lamps burning deep, in pre-Cambrian exhalation, savory as food cooking, heavy as soot. And 60 miles up the rockets hanging the measureless instant over the black North Sea before the fall, ever faster, to orange heat, Christmas star, in helpless plunge to Earth. Lower in the sky the flying bombs are out too, roaring like the Adversary, seeking whom they may devour. It’s a long walk home tonight." (155)

The transcendent infuses the technical, a characteristic touch Pynchon adds to his fiction, sparingly and often deftly.

"In his electro-mysticism, the triode was as basic as the cross in Christianity. Think of the ego, the self that suffers a personal history bound to time, as the grid. The deeper and true Self is the flow between cathode and plate. The constant, pure flow. Signals—sense-data, feelings, memories relocating—are put onto the grid, and modulate the flow. We live lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now negative. Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero." (410)

As usual, Pynchon articulates the dangers that lurk within such complex networks of unseen energy, as well as visible control, over us.

"Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, “The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,” is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that “productivity” and “earnings” keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—-most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . . though he’s amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker[....]"(419)

Slothrop as any inquirer into such systems finds himself confused at what will be, a carryover from "V.", Mondaugon's Law: "“Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar “At” considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you’re having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even—-as Slothrop now—-what you’re doing here, at the base of this colossal curved embankment. . . ." (517)

Hints of ego-loss, of a "sado-anarchist" strangeness emanating from enigmatic lights and transmitted mystery, permeates this odd tale. There's as always a battle between forces of good and evil, and we live in the smoke of the gray global area.

"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted . . . secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology . . . by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, “Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake,” but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more. . . .The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms—-it was only staged to look that way—but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite . . ."(529-30).

Insert war here. Later in this exchange, Technology defends itself against deification, blaming the human compulsion. The narrator then intervenes: "We have to look for power sources here, and distribution networks we were never taught, routes of power our teachers never imagined, or were encouraged to avoid . . . we have to find meters whose scales are unknown in the world, draw our own schematics, getting feedback, making connections, reducing the error, trying to learn the real function . . . zeroing in on what incalculable plot?" (530) Advice for anyone tackling the equations and sums that Pynchon proposes.

A young German girl takes Slothrop home after the war; he learns of her father's disappearance after resisting the Reich in '42. His stance anticipates the anarchism and humanism of "AtD" as it "touches Slothrop’s own Puritan hopes for the Word, the Word made printer’s ink, dwelling along with antibodies and iron-bound breath in a good man’s blood, though the World for him be always the World on Monday, with its cold cutting edge, slicing away every poor illusion of comfort the bourgeois takes for real. . . did he run off leaflets against his country’s insanity? was he busted, beaten, killed?" (581)

A cameo by one Jesuit, Father Rapier, reminds me of "V." with Father Fairing, and the priest warns of what postwar "unity" will do to us, all linked by technology that impels domination and imposes submission. "Devil’s Advocate’s what the shingle sez, yes inside is a Jesuit here to act in that capacity, here to preach, like his colleague Teilhard de Chardin, against return. Here to say that critical mass cannot be ignored. Once the technical means of control have reached a certain size, a certain degree of being connected one to another, the chances for freedom are over for good. The word has ceased to have meaning." (548) I think of this medium that you and I share to read my thoughts, collected from a book, broadcast here. But under corporate sponsorship, under curious interdiction, as footnoted far below.

A Soviet Marxist debates the ghost of a German engineer:

"“The basic problem,” he proposes, “has always been getting other people to die for you. What’s worth enough for a man to give up his life? That’s where religion had the edge, for centuries. Religion was always about death. It was used not as an opiate so much as a technique—it got people to die for one particular set of beliefs about death. Perverse, natürlich, but who are you to judge? It was a good pitch while it worked. But ever since it became impossible to die for death, we have had a secular version—yours. Die to help History grow to its predestined shape. Die knowing your act will bring a good end a bit closer. Revolutionary suicide, fine. But look: if History’s changes are inevitable, why not not die? Vaslav? If it’s going to happen anyway, what does it matter?” (715)

Such exchanges float up and away, and the story never allows much room for their points to sink or swim amid the insistent tidal wave of words. This can frustrate a reader, but it does prove the need for close attention, for you never know in the narrative when such insights will invade, before they fade again into dense darkness of thousands of surrounding sentences.

Resistance seems futile, however, to verbal or ideological assaults against fragile resisters.

"Well, if the Counterforce knew better what those categories concealed, they might be in a better position to disarm, de-penis and dismantle the Man. But they don’t. Actually they do, but they don’t admit it. Sad but true. They are as schizoid, as double-minded in the massive presence of money, as any of the rest of us, and that’s the hard fact. The Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his corporate emblem is a white albatross, each local rep has a cover known as the Ego, and their mission in this world is Bad Shit. We do know what’s going on, and we let it go on. As long as we can see them, stare at them, those massively moneyed, once in a while. As long as they allow us a glimpse, however rarely. We need that. And how they know it—how often, under what conditions. . . ." (727)

Finally, the story's arc falls as does the rocket's trajectory that arches over this novel. You find, as in "Inherent Vice," that the conspiracy's rigged against you and anyone else who tries to pursue the mystery too far. "Gravity rules all the way out into the cold sphere, there is always the danger of falling." (737) The war ends and we all know who wins, but the true enemies in this novel appear as hidden as those in the rest of Pynchon's strange, encyclopedic, manic, affectionate, and perplexing pages.

P.S. In appropriately eerie fashion, I found this site once and luckily bookmarked it, for it never appeared again despite four searches on four different engines, with a test-phrase to summon from this vast text, "Tracy watering in frustration." Gravity's Rainbow.pdf

P.P.S. In shorter form, of course, this was posted to Amazon US & Lunch.com 9-10-10.

James Hynes' "Kings of Infinite Space": Book Review

This novelist likes tales of downscale academics, overeducated drones downsized to cubicles. "The Lecturer's Tale" ended with a Grand Guignol collapse rivaling the fall of the House of Usher; "Publish & Perish" gathered a trilogy of cautionary stories about the perils of the tenure-tracked, and "Next" (see my review) most recently extends his purview into his favorite protagonist, another laid-low Ph.D. in English Lit doomed to redundancy.

Hynes as a Michigan-born resident of Austin, Texas, carries considerable bile for his adopted state. East Texas, here Lamar, comes off even worse. Hynes captures the relentless heat, the accents, the cuisine, the soulless sprawl and municipal torpor. For Paul Trilby, he enters a temp realm working for the government, and seems to continue his downward spiral.

"This is the circle of hell reserved for Kitty Drowners and Failed Academics, an eternity of meaningless work in an empty office in an eternal twilight." (130) The plot drags him into this underworld, above the acoustic tiles and below the florescent lights, the hums of hard drives and the tyranny of a pair of wonderfully caricatured bosses. Rick speaks in clichéd malapropisms: "No use crying over burnt bridges." Olivia's a "steel magnolia" former cheerleader full of honey-toned bile and dyed-blonde malice.

As with his send-up of Gaia Markets (=Whole Foods) in "Next," Hynes likes to skewer corporate targets. This time it's a rousing chapter set at Headlights (=Hooters) which manages to incorporate the snobbery of Paul (ex-husband of a gender theorist no less) with the sociobiological explanations of how men must now compete not "for women" but "against women" in the workplace. Hynes adroitly makes this scene both comic and smart, making fun of the men who mouth it even as he integrates ideas that invigorate the plot.

As with his earlier fiction, Hynes chafes against the confinement of his smart, if nebbishy, anti-heroes in their predicaments. Karaoke night is the least of his punishments. As the novel builds up, the "Norton Anthology," subversively re-editing textbooks to please both San Francisco and Dallas constituencies, John Wayne, SUV's, and barbecue-- this being Texas-- all merit attention.

Still, Paul's beset by time-clocking idiots, bound as he is in the nutshell of cubicle hell. He lives at what he calls Angry Loner Motel amidst figures resembling the Snopes of Faulkner infamy. His ex-wife's drowned cat resurrects to haunt his television, as only feline-themed programs are aired on it. His girlfriend-- and Hynes again provides us with a strong, appealing, sensitive and sassy female lover-antagonist-comrade in Callie-- shakes him out of self-pity, if fitfully and sporadically. She even makes Oklahoma sound better than Texas.

"'Aw, honey,' he said, 'I'm an intellectual. I have to think about everything.'" sums up a familiar protagonist. As in "Next," and "Lecturer's Tale," he departs from the academic-corporate satire in the last fifty or so pages. He seeks a more action-oriented, over-the-top ending once again.

This draws on underworld journeys and pulls this novel into the fantastic. It recalls H.G. Wells, whom Paul's been reading at work, and I'm not sure if it entirely works. The return to normalcy as seen via certain co-workers appears too neatly inserted into the mess. Hynes favors pulling out all the stops and having his novels near their end swirl into whatever he churns up.

Arguably, Hynes has prepared us gradually for its Wellesian revelations. Hynes chafes at genre conventions and like his protagonists, knows his literary tropes well enough to manipulate them-- if maybe too relentlessly-- into mash-ups. It's an enjoyable diversion into the subversive for audiences who feel exploited, underpaid, and far too educated for their daily routine. (Posted to Amazon 6-14-10)

Christopher Caldwell's "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe": Book Review

Better cuisine, exotic wares: Europeans often rationalize benefits of Third World immigration. What of the cultural and political costs of supplanting the continent's heritage with a religious community determined to triumph over a decadent, pacifist, and cowed West? Caldwell balances the gains and losses of current migration into the former heartlands of Christianity, now secularized and surrendered to millions who will not assimilate, but who plan to dominate.

This is a fair-minded 2009 survey. Labor to work cheaply in a Europe with declining birth-rates comes from the south and southeast, "which historically have been Europe's enemies, its overlords, or its underlings." (24) European liberals bet that the tensions built up over centuries "on both sides, have disappeared, or can be made to disappear. This is probably not a wise wager." Caldwell examines two problems: assimilation of immigrants, and difficulties with Islam. He avoids "euphemism and the kind of preemptive groveling" that many who address these issues employ, but he also strives for calm study and honest investigation of this charged matter.

The reason it's charged? Europeans seem paralyzed by post-war liberalism. Although they never have been given a chance to decide, their leaders have promised to act on a Holocaust-induced guilt, to allow Muslims and Africans into their countries at astonishingly high rates. Many game the deal; Spain cannot ask for proof of where its asylum seekers from Africa come from and so many pretend they're from a war-torn nation, and then manipulate European generosity so as to enter Spain and then gain EU rights in other nations. If one EU nation is weak, the rest will also suffer from such largess, and the drawbacks increase. Europeans seem to lack the will to resist this influx, fearful of being called racists by their leaders and their media.

Credulity of the host nations plays into the duplicity many immigrant leaders of these entrenched migrant communities take advantage of. Caldwell excels, if in too brief a fashion given his insights, into how the side of immigration-- the cuisine, the service industry, the shops catering to a mixed clientele-- that most Europeans benignly see is not that of the no-go zones hostile to Europeans. A compliant clerk or smiling waiter does not speak for millions within housing projects and an underground economy who rarely mingle within a debauched West that they step away from.

Contrary to expectations, second and third generations resist adapting their host countries' standards. They seek spouses from "uncontaminated" families back home, and endless chain migration, at birth and at marriage, keeps the European-based immigrant communities freshly stocked with those who enjoy the welfare state's subsidies but who refuse to learn its language, adapt its customs, or respect its traditions.

Fearful of criticism, Europeans under their leaders-- who seem to play into this demographic shift as the votes often go their way as immigrants wish to keep getting benefits-- lack a countervoice without being called racists and fascists. Meanwhile, the relentless push in many cities of the North transforms them into Muslim and African enclaves. Ethnic colonies emerge, with religious law, institutions imported, and mosques. Sharia law is transferred to the European entities as the conquest of the new lands for the old religion is sought.

Liberals may scoff at such shifts, but Caldwell's statistics prove that the tilt in birthrates towards non-European majorities in many cities is near. Travel and communication allow these colonies far closer ties, daily and easily strengthened, than was the case for the far smaller immigrant enclaves established before jets, the Net, and telecommunications. Religion becomes a badge of identity, and as more immigrants move into Europe, there's less pressure which outnumbered Europeans can manage to exert to promote their culture rather than acquiesce to the Muslim standards transferred en masse to millions in London, Paris, Marseilles, Brussels, or Madrid.

Integration works with managed migration, and Caldwell finds this the U.S. contrast; Europe lacks a strong belief in its own Judeo-Christian legacy, and its liberalism weakens its own ability to inculcate its own traditions when most Europeans scoff at God and many citizens grow detached from their own cultural heritage. While the trust in the superiority of European standards erodes due to multicultural ideologies that become the political slogans and educational curricula, sexual mores are different.

Europeans give up freedom of speech when it hurts Muslim sensibilities; they deny their own languages or beliefs when faced with imported varieties, and they easily fall into rote denunciations of extremism whenever anybody calls attention to the undemocratic nature of such massive immigration and settlement when so few voters ever had a chance to weigh in on these post-war policies. Caldwell reasons that chain migration undermines European integration, and the vast numbers of those not wanting to assimilate present dangers to EU standards of tolerance, liberalism, and secularism.

For, the Islamic influx wishes to further peace-- but on its own terms. These expect accommodation by the host nation to the immigrant community, but never, it seems, the other way around. The wish for a better Third World life now can be found in Europe: the same marriage patterns, the same limits on women's freedom, the same fundamentalist rhetoric, the same separation of believers from infidels. Hymen restorative surgery has been paid for by the National Health in Britain; payments for polygamous wives have been determined at 33.33 pounds monthly. These policies show how the host nation gives in to the practices of those importing standards opposed to those of the dominant-- at least for now-- society. And, many coming to these nations wish them to adapt to Islam, not to adjust to a (post-)Christian West.

Caldwell writes clearly. A few cliches entered, and the scope of his study made for a couple of places where more attention to the nuances might have strengthened his arguments. For example, U.S. racial tension vs. anti-immigrant reactions needed clarification. And, he closes his chapter on sexuality with a provocative thought that Islamic mores might be more in tune with post-Christian than Christian attitudes. European sexuality favors male prerogatives, advanced against Christian outlooks, he muses. The liberal reactions resemble more Islamic ones, he concludes, but this quick comparison deserved more elaboration.

Regarding Jews in Europe, Caldwell makes an intriguing analogy. Euro-Islam's claims for establishment resemble Israel's "land for peace" negotiations with the Arabs. "The Western side gives up something (land) that is concrete, quantifiable, and irrevocable, once given. In exchange, the Muslim side gives up something (peace) that is vague, subjective, and revocable by a change in mood." (284) Europe's faced with altering its institutions. It must accept Islam in hopes a less-radical faction will "be less ill-disposed toward it."

He nimbly shows how post-Holocaust decisions meant for a few worthy refugees again get gamed. "If the Muslims were the new Jews, apparently, then the Jews were the new Nazis." (266) Great numbers of African immigrants learn the niceties of the law via TV so as to manipulate asylum in Spain for their own gain. Once in, they can move throughout the EU as citizens while detached from Europeans. They choose their own identity, one that flourishes in enclaves from the home country moved into the continental heartland. Once there, many will resist integration even as they draw on the economic and social entitlements from a generously governed EU.

Adding to this resistance, what Europeans hear about Islam may often differ from what is preached within the community in Arabic or native languages. As a "total social phenomenon" akin to Communism, it can be flexible, appealing to an intellectual's love of its elaborate world-view, or "by an illiterate kid with a baseball bat as a battle cry." (282) The prevarication peddled by many Islamic representatives such as Tariq Ramadan to the mainstream media complicates the ignorance most Westerners share. Caldwell sums up this ideologue's p-o-v: "Only when Europe's ways are understood as Islam's will Muslims obey them." (298)

"Informational assymmetry" as in how much more a poor African migrant seeking asylum knows about EU law than a Spaniard knows about "taqqiya" (the practice of dissimulation in defending the faith) sums up how imbalanced the competition may be for who will triumph in this new struggle for faith. (P.S. I've also reviewed Bernard-Henri Levy's "Left in a Dark Time" and Oriana Fallaci's "The Rage & the Pride," related books on this topic.) [Posted to Amazon US 6-11-10]

Carn Ghórta Mór

Bás a fháil den ghórta mór duine Éireannach go leor. Chuir mé cuairt an leacht i ómós orthu. Chuaigh mé go dtí Nua-Eabhrac an deireadh tseachtain seo caite, agus ar feadh lá chéad go iomhlan ansin, shiúl mé ansiúd.

Coinníonn leacht ag imeall im bPairc Cathair Bhataire i Manhattan iseal i gcuimhne an Gorta Mór na hÉireann. Bhí é an Drochshaol go cinnte. Cuirim achainí faoi bhráid "an gorta a bhuail Éire ón mbliain 1845 ar aghaidh agus a mharaigh is a ruaig as an tír cupla milliún Éireannach" de réir Vicipéid as Gaeilge.

Cheap Brian Tolle é. Deanamh sé ó aolchloch. Is leachtán cloch cósulacht créthulach adhlactha anallód.

Thug an ailtire seo na clocha briste le Contae Mhaigh Eo go raibh ag dulta i léig ina bhfothracha ann. Ath-thóg siad na baillte folamh sin ar an mullach os cionn an bealach siúil a fhágail suas. Tá baile ó Ceathreamhadh di Dhubhagain soir na hÁth Tí an Mheasaigh. Bhí an teach bunaithe na chlann Slack na céile fir na Tolle fadó. 

Chuir siad gort leath-acra a chur faoi fásra sa thir dhúchais suas ansin. D'oscail sé ina samraidh 2002. Tá áit dhá bloc siar go díreach ó suíomh ar Lár Trádáil Dhomhan. Tá tú ábalta feicéail ar an láithaireach ath-tógála sin ina grianghraf le Roger Shepherd go socair suas anseo. 


Eolas:
Vicipéid (as Béarla) le Leacht Ghórta Mór Éireannach ag imeall im bParc Cathair Bhataire i Manhattan iseal.
Ghrianghrafaí súil i Nua-Eabhrac
Ghrianghrafaí níos mó le Weblicist ó Manhattan
Tá aiste le Roberta Smith ina Amannaí Nua-Eabhrac faoi tiomhnú ina dhiadh 9/11.
Leabhrán & learscáil.
Tá aiste-ghriangraf le Roger Shepherd ó Teist Ailtireacht

Irish Hunger Memorial

Many Irish people were taken by death in the great famine. I paid a visit to the memorial-stone in homage to them. I went to New York this past weekend, and during my first full day there, I walked over there.

This monument for the Irish Hunger Memorial near Battery City Park in lower Manhattan commemorates the Great Hunger of Ireland. It was the "bad time" surely. It memorializes "the famine that hit Ireland from the year 1845 on and killed across the land a couple million of the Irish" according to Irish-language Wikipedia.

Brian Tolle designed it. It was made from limestone. It's a grave-stone site resembling a passage tomb in ancient times. 

This architect took the broken stones from County Mayo gone to ruin there. They rebuilt those empty walls on the top above the passage way as entrance below. The house is from Carradoogan to the east of Attymass. It was the family home of the Slack clan of Tolle's life-partner long ago. 


They planted the half-acre field with native flora up there. It was opened in the summer of 2002. The place is two blocks straight westward from the site of the World Trade Center. You're able to look at that re-building site in the photograph by Roger Shepherd easily, above here. 

Information:
Wikipedia for the Irish Hunger Memorial near Battery City Park, lower Manhattan.
New York City Walk Photos.               
More photos by Weblicist of Manhattan
Roberta Smith 2002 New York Times article on post-9/11 dedication.
Brochure & map.
Architectural Record photo-essay by Roger Shepherd.


Scríobh mé seo/I wrote this 12ú/th Aibreal/April 2011. Grianghraf le/Photo by Roger Shepherd.

David Jones' "Friars' Tales": Book Review

Chaucer's conniving Pardoner and crafty friars may linger longer in memory, but real-life counterparts of those who preached sermons and promoted indulgences have long been relegated to manuscripts. The last quarter-century has produced more accessible, if still pricy and academic, studies of how sermons worked to convince their audiences, and how clerics organized their contents. Jones, with an affordable, accessible small volume, offers today's audience a chance to read what their ancestors may have heard eight centuries ago.


He annotates brisk, fluid translations of the two earliest known British Isles collections of exempla, illustrative stories that preachers used to grab the attention of their congregants. Relentlessly moral, these hard-sell tales also allow us to glimpse what sustained a listener--who likely had little to no literacy if a layperson--as to what beliefs and attitudes of popular culture survived in towns and on farms away from the quill-penned parchment. These two collections originated in the late thirteenth century. An edition of the first, the Latin anthology Liber Exemplorum, was edited by A.G. Little in 1908; it was organized by an English Franciscan friar, who later worked in Ireland, trained in Paris alongside his famous confrere Roger Bacon.

Unfortunately, the 213 exempla contained in this Franciscan manuscript represent probably just over half of what was intended-- we only have the first volume that ends with "M" in alphabetical order of its thematic contents. (The original survives in one copy, now at Durham Cathedral.) Still, the value of this anthology remains, for an eighth of the stories can be found in no other source that we know of. This friar adds useful asides to his fellow friars, commanded to spread the Word with careful words, as the lively stories interspersed might offend or scandalize or tempt the laity-- for clerics, more candor is allowed them as insiders into the difficulties within the cloister. 

Viewing what captured the ears of audiences in medieval Ireland and Britain reminds us of what techniques endure in rhetoric and advertising today. Listeners constantly are assured by names, places, and "I heard this from so-and-so who witnessed it in the presence of this-and-that..." of the veracity of the miracles, sins, visions, and dangers which assailed the deluded, the vain, and the unwary. Sermons are meant to convince the Catholic of the efficacy of the sacraments, the mechanisms of hell and purgatory, indulgences, and Masses that constituted late-medieval Church teaching, and to stimulate constant repentance. Countless miscreants delay confession in these vignettes only to choke, writhe, and collapse before a priest can be found to shrive them. 

Therefore, the impression of urgency upon the listener to act now, a mainstay of salesmanship, endures. The friars charged with evangelizing the everyday folks who flocked to their sermons were enjoined to do so by the necessity of this task to save souls, and the practicality of continuing an intricate economy which sustained their own Orders and their own upkeep. Their listeners had to attend Mass, but they also might come upon friars as they held forth at festivals, markets, and frequent feast days. Throughout the Franciscan's collection, reminders to the clergy are given on how to modify, emphasize, or rework a story so as to stick in the minds of their impressionable audiences. Jones in his introduction notes how these sermons "indicate what preachers thought a congregation might find plausible, and they therefore constitute an important source for the mentalités of the past." 

Scholar Alan E. Bernstein is quoted by Jones as to how exempla demonstrate a "clerical calculation of popular concerns," and how preachers had to keep their credibility about the most astonishing reports shared. The Franciscan author notes more than once his own presence at the recital of amazing stories, or vouches for them as seen or heard or endured by others. By such referrals to authority, appeals to truth prove convincing.


For instance, one example elaborating the impact of prayer comes from the very village where his own father lives, he relates. A clerk named John tramped out in the middle of the night to visit his concubine. (The friar knows them both.) As the errant clerk sneaked out to his lover's neighboring village, a large dog loomed. The dog whirls around and challenges him in English: "Give me your sword!" The clerk refuses, gripping the weapon while defying his adversary, replying "still more fiercely in English, 'You lie, by the death of Christ!'" The articulate enemy is shown then to be the devil in canine disguise. But the beast disappears instantly to attest to the power of prayer--even when by a sinner Christ's name is invoked. 



The accompanying collection now in the British Library, by a Dominican friar based likely at Cambridge, fills its contents with similar tales. Even if Jones eschews comment on the differences in tone or emphases between the two manuscripts as literature, the latter anthology to me appears slightly more elevated in style, if equally dense in everyday name-date-fact stolidly arrayed to prove that the fantastic contents are not fevered fiction.


Jones selects fifty-two of its 315 stories. These are less helpfully arranged than the Franciscan edition, which itself by contrast reveals valuable insight into the nature of how such material could be packaged for users. The Dominican does not intersperse advice about the adaptation of the stories but lets them follow one another without comment or headings. About forty percent of its contents expound upon dogmatic matters, and the rest treat of sins and vices. 


One example, the last exemplum included, tells of a Norwich bailiff--a profession proverbially treated along with lawyers as avaricious, rapacious, and cruel. It conveys this slight shift in style. The "still hard-hearted bailiff" dies, and his son asks how he fares above, or below. His father replies: "The Son of God denied me and took me up most harshly and placed me at the centre of His wheel, where the axle of a cart or wagon is always turning, where there is never any rest but always toil and travail while the cart is drawn by animals." The careful phrasing, the extended syntax, and the humiliating nature of the haughty bailiff's punishment all illustrate the use of a typical image and inclusion of dialogue to drive home the moral of a typical tale. 


This book, intended for seminars on medieval religion and popular culture, may benefit also any reader eager to find out more about how men and women once may have conceived their world and the next world. Jones in his introduction explains the contexts for sermonizing and for the imperative upon priests to educate the unlettered and the common folk as well as their fellow clergy, depending on the adaptation of the contents. Finally, an up-to-date bibliography allows scholars to learn still more about the wide range of themes and applications employed by those who incorporated sermons and stories into their own efforts to save souls.
(Posted to New York Journal of Books 5-11-11.)

James Blish's "Doctor Mirabilis": Book Review

Along with Helen Waddell's "Peter Abelard," this novel recreates the struggle for individual conscience against clerical conformity marvelously and movingly. It is not easy; more difficult than Waddell if as ambitious as the previous [Amazon US] reviewer's nod to "The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco in its intellectual range and intricate themes. As a "trained medievalist" myself I found Blish's research impressively integrated into his evocation of the times when Roger Bacon fought the political and ecclesiastical powers to advance experimental science, and the need for the forces of reason to assert themselves, however hesitantly due to the lack of scientific progress, during the thirteenth century. [Blish was renowned for science fiction eminence, but this 1971 novel deserves its place in his pantheon. I like the pulp paperback subtitle!]

As Blish tells in his preface, he captures the syntax and flavor of Middle English in passages where characters would have reverted to it rather than the French of court and diplomat, or the Latin of friars and scholars. The earlier chapters can take, therefore, a while to sink in as you adjust your mind to a different dialect, a different mode of expression. But this then allows you deeper immersion into the mentalities of the characters, often taken from real life chronicles, in an era where friars and inquisitors, kings and barons, heirs and bishops, all contended for the prizes that Church and State contended to control.

Blish expands the little we may know of Bacon's personal story and mixes in the ideas of his era. He captures what Paris and Oxford must have felt like as the universities grew larger and less tolerant. This makes a nice companion with Waddell for the scene since Abelard, and with Eco for the twist on the controversies that while shelved under philosophy or theology now back then drew partisans and protesters to take sides as vehemently as would Marxists or neo-cons in our own time.

Roger outwits his temporal masters, and he learns how to practice disguise. He inquires into alchemy and takes on Thomistic doctrines in the name of greater fidelity to innovation, even as he must rein in his own tendencies under an Order and Papacy who fear schism and heresy, as well it seems as any independence of thought. You find yourself eager to see who wins the Parisian disputation of Roger with Albertus Magnus, you watch as the chained mastiff at a decaying castle snarls as Roger talks with a forlorn noblewoman, you witness the interrogation of radicals by those in charge. You enter the prison cell where dissident friars seeking the apocalyptic reforms and Holy Poverty are jailed, and you are there, somehow, at this dogged English Franciscan's last moments.

For all its challenges, this book proved a valuable testimony to Blish's ability to make us care about the plight of an inquirer whose name now, if barely recalled, is shrouded in magic and hearsay. Blish separates what may well have happened, and he brings us as close to the what-if reality as we can come. Highly recommended for the undaunted reader willing to rise up to a level demanding attention and rewarding concentration. (Posted to Amazon US without brackets, 7-11-10)

Ben Howard's "Entering Zen": Book Review

Fixing a sewer pipe, buying paint, wielding a chainsaw, riding a motorcycle, and changing a diaper: Zen moments can arrive anytime. Poet and critic Ben Howard shows us, in seventy-five essays about a thousand words each, how to learn to perceive the passing moment as the immediate entry into deeper awareness. He eschews sentimentality, avoids bromides, and shares compassion. 

While never drifting into cliches or gliding into the ether, Howard's commonsense, steady, and alert gaze at what he sees from the vantage point of a retired professor of English in upstate New York reveals the insights he has gleaned from decades of "just sitting"-- and from moving about his neighborhood and writing for his small-town paper what he sees that can help readers learn more about Zen, and perhaps to take up some of its practices for themselves. With this collection, what first appeared in the local paper and on his "One Time, One Meeting" blog can be consulted easily, and returned to frequently for inspiration and stimulation. 


I first found out about his essays via a web search for images of a fountain pen to accompany a blog entry of my own. His piece, on how a fountain pen's disassembly taught one about the Heart Sutra teaching that "form and emptiness" define each other, stuck with me, as a lover of pens (mine was canary while his was plum, the same Sailor brand as it happened) and as someone starting to learn about Zen when I happened upon the website. Since then, for over two years, I've followed these pieces as they've appeared every other week. 


In each, he opens with an observation, on Alex Rodriguez, a poem by Jane Hirshfield or Seamus Heaney or Basho, the classified ads that nestle near the column itself in its first incarnation, a heard fragment of conversation, a scene from the news, or getting smacked by a Delaware wave, among dozens of possibilities in these pages. Then, he moves from its lesson to a parallel in Zen. He may cite a venerable Japanese teaching-- he is a longtime student in the Rinzai Zen tradition-- or a contemporary master. One citation that stuck? Charlotte Joko Beck's admonition to "give up hope," for a Zen practitioner does not sit or act in hopes of a goal, in search of equanimity let alone enlightenment. He or she takes up the discipline for its own sake.


Howard possesses empathy, and unlike some Zen expounders he does not berate or chide the reader for a lack of gumption. Instead, many of his pieces end by suggesting, more gently, to the reader to take up a simple meditation exercise and to try it out for a month or two to see if it makes a difference. This aligns for me with the Buddha's instruction to not accept any teaching unless it jibes with one's own understanding and makes sense for one's own outlook. 

In "Back to School," he tries to sum up Zen's reminder to shake us free from habit. Or, as Hirshfield defines it in seven words he cites of hers: "everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention." Howard explains: "To cultivate direct, intuitive perception is the real work of the Zen practitioner." He warns of too much book-learning without practical experience to temper words with action, or lack of action. "Practicing Zen is not a process of acquisition, nor is its aim the mastery of a body of knowledge. On the contrary, it is in large part a process of unlearning, of becoming aware of our layers of conditioning rather than adding another layer."


My favorite examples of Howard's guidance come from a few entries later in this collection, which begins the end of January 2008 and concludes two years later (but his blog continues at its usual rate of production since then). In "Children of the Sun," he takes up Irish poet Pearse Hutchinson's use of the Irish language to explore the meaning of the titular phrase in a poignant fashion. (I go on record that I favor but one of the two readings of a particular Gaelic phrase pondered therein, however!) 

"Pursuing the Real" tells how one Ginny Lou, an Aussie greyhound, took off from her track to pursue a real rabbit and not the mechanical one. This illustrates the steady nature of Zen, focused on the physical roots of our breathing self, from which we can never be sidetracked for long. "Leaning into the Curves" compares how to ride a motorcycle with how Pema Chodron advises to get unhooked from negativity. Finally, "Effortless Effort" neatly begins with the contemplation of an Aero Press coffee maker and segues into the President's reaction to the shootings in Tucson earlier this year. 


I have shared that last piece with my Technology, Culture & Society students; I have sent the helpful one on making green tea to my tea-drinking dharma friends; I have posted many more on Facebook or sent them to readers I sense may share my enthusiasm. Without any pretension, but with careful prose and a subtle poetic skill, Howard reminds me here of what I first encountered (years before) in his essays on Irish writing "The Pressed Melodeon" and more recently in his "Leaf, Sunlight, Asphalt" (2009; sample poem, info and part of my review here) verses: the calm, recollected power of tranquility amidst energy. 

(Posted to Amazon US & Lunch.com without these links, 5-23-11, I reviewed "Leaf" alongside Eamon Carr's complementary "The Origami Crow" in Estudios Irlandeses 5 [2009]). 

Eamonn Wall's "Writing the Irish West": Book Review

This Irish poet-critic teaches in St. Louis and frequently summers in Colorado. His continental crossings led him to connect writers from the West of Ireland with those of the American landscapes he visited. This book collects seven essays about seven authors from Ireland who explore on the page the scenes that resemble those of the plains and mountains--and the oceans missing from the interiors which their American counterparts generally inhabit. 

He starts with Tim Robinson, a Yorkshire-born, Cambridge-educated mathematician and visual artist turned literary cartographer of the Aran Islands, Connemara, and the Burren along Ireland's Atlantic coasts. Wall compares Robinson's "deepmap" with that drawn in William Least Heat-Moon's PrairyErth over a Kansas county. His careful maps and his intricate travel narratives continue to construct an intimate and exacting record that makes out of the lack of previous Irish mapping a strength. By "tracing" his paths inch-by-inch, Wall finds, Robinson shows how he continues the tradition of the oral place-name stories and verbal accounts left by previous walkers on this ancient terrain.

Gary Snyder's impact upon the Beats and the Buddhists they spawned has a long reverberation. Wall connects his retreat to an "island" on a ridge in the Sierra Nevada with the Ardilaun island redoubt where Richard Murphy resides off the Irish coast. Their common roots in ecological sensibilities enrich their poetry.

Mary O'Malley's poetry also comes from the coast, but further north, in the shrinking Irish-speaking communities of Connemara. Her County Galway home, in an area both depopulating as natives leave and repopulating as second-home owners and exurban city dwellers move in, straddles a bilingual region, where the Irish drifts across the English vernacular. Her poetry, infused by her feminist sensibilities, Wall argues, also enters a liminal realm, where the frontiers give way to less-fixed lines, about a people whose allegiances may lie closer to New York City than Dublin.

This western orientation characterizes the late John McGahern's novels. Considered, as Wall notes, perhaps the successor to Beckett and Joyce for his spare, searing fiction, McGahern's based more inland, but he connects with O'Malley's interest in the clash between imagination and reality. Wall quotes Larry McMurtry: "the romance of the West was always more potent than the truth". Owen Wister, Alice Munro, and Wallace Stegner enter Wall's chapter, as he links rural isolation and emotional resilience or its lack to the characters in McGahern's third collection of stories, 1985's High Ground. McGahern's sullen protagonists simmer and do a slow burn; some burst into rage, others come to terms with mortality, and a few even seek awkward grace.

London-born Martin McDonagh's "Dante Dodge City" mirrors Quentin Tarantino's mayhem and Sam Peckinpah's showdowns, as Wall forges bonds to Peckinpah's own influence, John Ford, son of Galway immigrants. Their cinematic sagas drew on mythic heroes allowed to kill. Peckinpah and McDonagh place their bloody battles just over the border, in Mexico or in the Irish West.

McDonagh, like Tarantino, appears an "anteater" in the way he sucks up popular culture, rock music, film and television predecessors into what appears to be not only horrifying but humorous scenarios of tragicomic chaos. He breaks down boundaries of taste and decorum. He claims to bring the energy of punk into his plays. However, Wall doubts that McDonagh for all his manufactured outrage is as original a force as he's hyped. Wall reminds us that Hollywood's visions--as witnessed by McDonagh's shift into film with his short Six Shooter and the full-length In Bruges--dominate the London-raised but Connemara-connected playwright's sensibilities, and that gore goes back to the Greeks. Since the Aran plays of Synge and the reveries of Yeats, the Irish from somewhere else have entered the West to caricature its unrepentant, unreformed natives.

Twice, Wall quotes Richard White's "nationally imagined" vs. "locally imagined" concepts of the West. Wall adds that, for such as McDonagh, the international distinction vs. the national one works for Ireland, as it did for White for America. The notion of a "simultaneously savage and beautiful" domain captivates ticket buyers for McDonagh's string of plays and for films.

For those outside this garish spotlight, such as Sean Lysaght, a more solid meaning rests in the modest flora rather than the more advanced, or regressive, fauna stalking McDonagh's Irish bogs and island rocks. Lysaght's 1991 poem cycle follows the example, eighty years before The Clare Island Survey, of pioneering naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger, who roamed the same landscape. The Irish language floats into the names for the plants and flowers, contemplated by Lysaght or catalogued by Praeger.

Finally, Moya Cannon's Galway-city residence does not keep her from poetry which captures the bioregional. Wall sets Northern English poet Kathleen Raine's verse next to Cannon's to find similar longings. And, circling back, he also finds connections to Gary Snyder's examples.

The first three essays originally appeared as journal articles. They demonstrate the shift in tone from his easygoing preface, as Wall assumes the role of scholar confidently. He takes on considerable challenges in simplifying Robinson's admirable but dauntingly elaborate explorations of Irish landscapes. Wall stretches to include travel writers and two fellow countrymen and contemporaries of Robinson, Colin Thubron and Bruce Chatwin. Wall's perspective widens, but its depths demand close attention in this very ambitious article. The erudite and lofty reach extended by Wall in his pieces on Robinson, Murphy, and O'Malley means that the reader must cling to some rather attenuated tendrils which curl far from their Irish-American grafted roots.

I would have liked more inclusion of Irish-language authors. As Wall argues, these indigenous interpreters remain far less known, inevitably. This volume could have assisted in guiding a wider audience to the plays of Antoine Ó Flatharta, the many local storytellers and singers distributed by Cló Iar-Chonnachta, or the lyrics of sean-nós (old-style unaccompanied) singers such as Caítlin Maude or Róisín Elsafty. He does cite the better known poets Maírtín Ó Diréain, Cathal Ó Searcaigh, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, if largely in passing. Wall's admission of decayed fluency in Irish itself attests to the costs as well as the benefits of a long time abroad. 

Although pitched at an academic audience, readers familiar or not with these writers may wish to learn more. Wall integrates eco-critical foundations. He avoids theoretical jargon or literary theory-mongering. While stuffed with references and sprinkled with citations, he deploys his learning lightly, considering the usual contributions by most professors to criticism today. Professor Wall succeeds in directing attention to an innovative, cross-cultural field of earth-based, multidisciplinary research. (Lunch.com 5-21-11 & Amazon US: 5-11-11; Posted 5-10-2011 to PopMatters)

William McGowan's "Only Man Is Vile": Book Review

This 1992 account on "the Tragedy of Sri Lanka" lives up (or down) to its title. Grim and dispiriting, nevertheless this American journalist seeks the truth about what, in 1988, already had been India's Vietnam, "in which the world's fourth-largest army was neutralized by a group of teenagers in sarongs and rubber slippers." (307)

Garbed in tiger-stripes, singer M.I.A.'s defended her father's role in the Tamil insurgency, comprised of such a determined cadre. Yet McGowan fills his book with atrocities done by "freedom fighters," against the Indian troops brought in as "peacekeepers" in the civil war fought between Tamils allied to 55 million mainland Indians and a resurgent Sinhalese nation determined to defend this Buddhist heartland against intrusive India. Buddhists confronted with the regime's role in sectarian chauvinism and ethnic cleansing need to admit that the aggression that the Sinhalese campaign by legal and illegal means to defeat the Tamil guerrillas (which took nearly two decades after this book appeared to occur) shows the debased condition-- when ideology cynically detaches from mercy-- of a cherished, yet here degraded, faith. When Buddhism's made a badge of identity and not a force for goodness, it's ugly.

McGowan explores both sides. The Indians caught in the middle, sympathizing with the Tamils often even as they are charged to punish them. The Sinhalese majority for McGowan's an object lesson in betrayal of their Buddhist legacy. On their island, they believe they are the truest heirs to Buddha; they also act as if the Tamils are a fifth column for Indian imperialism. The Sinhalese take over the independent nation as a "majority with an inferiority complex." (112)

Sinhala leaders punish dissent. Secular critics fear death, while schools bow to government dictates. Rather than nonviolent compassion, under post-colonial affirmative action the perils of multiculturalist favoritism emerge: race-normed college admissions, jingoistic curricula, linguistic promotions, and ethnic entitlements. Such "ideas shaped by a romantic infatuation with the idea of distinct cultural identities based on invidious scholarship and demagoguery" (8) display the downsides of identity-based political power and ethnically unethical social reform.

The results can be tedious, lots of names and factions and interviews that seem perfunctory, or insufficient. The book wanders about and sections appear to float untethered to any other chapter. The single map is ridiculously illegible as if photocopied from an Indian atlas.

Earliest colonists devastated native traditions but this got barely an aside in one sentence. I wanted to know the author of a biography of the late-Victorian reformer Dharmapala, but no name was given. The Jayanthi revival in 1956 that sparked the Buddhist resurgence seems under-analyzed. Photos would have been helpful. There's an index but no sources cited.

Many sections may be of more value to historians than casual readers such as myself. Yet, McGowan strives in his time there-- confronted by stonewalling from cowed intellectuals, feared by terrified peasants, under fire, amidst censorship, within rot and inertia-- to show us what he did manage to find. "There was a lot of construction going on almost everywhere, but it was hard to tell which things were being built and which things were falling apart. Everything seemed to slope" (17)

In battle, the fear hits him more than the weary natives. "The sounds of helicopters and shelling in the distance were no more threatening than locusts on a town green in Iowa." (75) As he tries to interview Tigers and the Indians they fight, you feel his terror-- the sense that life comes cheap heightens. Yet, "I found myself going out of peer pressure, an underrated force in the secret history of war correspondence." (83) After an attack in Colombo: "In the middle of a spreading bo tree near the police station was what I thought was an arm or a child's leg." (85)

The Tamils come off no better. The Tigers set off land mines near civilian settlements. The Indian forces or Sri Lankan troops will mount reprisals. As for those caught in the middle? "Better that they were killed, Father," a Jesuit priest is told by a Tiger. "More propaganda for us." (234) Tigers and Sri Lankan soldiers stage a firefight at a Sunday market in Batti. At the morgue, McGowan watches as the civilian casualties get displayed. "One grief-stricken woman was bent over her dead husband, with her fingers delicately placed in his ear, as if in love-making." (248)

The "National Ideology" evolving out of "national feeling" translated into Sinhala as "race consciousness" proves sobering. The JVP terrorizes Sinhalese unwilling to back terrorism and chauvinism as patriotism. I've read a lot about Northern Irish parallels to this insular trap. It shared the emphasis on shibboleths; in names used for people and places and causes; the tangle of political parties and militias; occupation troops from a nearby superpower siding with the paramilitaries they share an ethnic identity with: these contexts add up.

Similarly, it's insightful on the support exacted from those near the crossfire, even if they seek safety. As for grassroots backing of the Tigers: "Like Buddhists in the south who abhorred the slaughter of animals but heartily partook of what the butcher was selling, many Tamils disdained the intimidation and violence of the LTTE but would accept the rewards that violence brought them." na(325)

Finally, in the later chapters, McGowan tries to reconcile his early romanticism about Sri Lanka as a Buddhist paradise or tropical retreat with his harrowing experiences. He befriends "Mr. Crab," a teenaged beggar crippled by polio. Together, they try to climb Sri Pala, Adam's Peak, and through this curious representative of one figure transcending sectarian, conventional divisions, McGowan seeks to explore the loss of Buddhist tolerance and Western complicity. It makes for a thoughtful coda to a story needing the human touch, the moment of recovery, after so much pain. (Posted to Amazon US 5-17-10)

Richard Bernstein's "Ultimate Journey": Book Review

Can we find ourselves on the road? Or, does travel increase longing for home, loneliness, isolation? An experienced "China expert," New York-based journalist Bernstein subtitles his narrative: "Retracing the Path of an Ancient Buddhist Monk Who Crossed Asia in Search of Enlightenment." But what he finds is less fulsome than many who go East from the West.

"The Buddha's actual birthplace is marked by an uninteresting stone shrine surrounded by fields buzzing with locusts. Nearby is a fetid pond where the baby was washed by his mother. Nobody was around except for a volunteer guide who tried hard but didn't speak English. I was feeling the onset of an intestinal pestilence." (205) It's 112 F/45 C. He's tired and a long way from NYC.

Published in 2001, this account comes while he traveled through the PRC in the wake of the Belgrade bombing by U.S. forces of the Chinese embassy, which arouses animosity among many who scrutinize him at the start of his seven-thousand mile journey. He follows Hsuan Tsang's 629 A.D. trail that took sixteen years. Restless, at 55 Bernstein, childless and never married, starts with his Chinese emigrant girlfriend from Xian onto the Road of Great Events into Central Asia towards India. Yet, he does not make a pilgrimage out of curiosity about Buddhism's origins, which compelled Hsuan Tsang, but out of restlessness, to leave routine before it is too late.

"A great part of travel, especially to places where you don't know anybody, consists of fatigue and lumpy mattresses and touts who cheat you and dinner by yourself in rooms full of people who are dining together. The Chinese have a saying: The wise man is he who can hear the dogs barking in the next village but has no desire to go there. Perhaps this is the same idea as Blaise Pascal's celebrated penséé about all human evil coming from man's inability to sit quietly in a room." (9)

This report lacks a lot of purple prose; Bernstein avoids description often and the results of his journey, particularly the Central Asian stretches, surprisingly prove mundane. I was surprised he found so little of interest for long passages on his trip. He goes off instead on tangents about his youth and the lack of depth in Hsuan Tsang's own often self-effacing chronicle makes a telling comparison between today's self-absorbed trekkers and ancient stoic seekers. But, Bernstein's ideas even if sporadically engaging do enrich the telling, uneven as it may be. I'd advise sticking with it, as the text's energy picks up once he enters the Indian subcontinent.

He can sum up culture clashes well. "There are countries where the cars stop for people and where the people stop for cars." (20) Americans "are uncomfortable seeing others labor physically while we are at ease," contrasted to post-colonial societies such as England, India, and China.

Religion for him as a secularized skeptic does not matter as much as identification with his people, and exploring the philosophical paradoxes of the Yogacara school that engrossed Hsuan Tsang. "The issue for a Christian or Jew is only secondarily: is it true? Primarily it is: what does God demand of me?" While in Hinduism and Buddhism, it's not so much "belief in a Supreme Being" in its manifestations as it is "the true nature of reality, the reality that lies behind appearances and whose apprehension will enable the devotee to escape the grip of earthly attachment and experience a higher happiness." (273)

On his adventure, Bernstein's interest appears to enliven as perhaps like Hsuan Tsang he enters India. This section's the most compelling, as Bernstein follows his predecessor into the heart of the Buddhist paradox: "that if all is illusion, then nothing can be known". (224) He's read about Buddhism but his stubbornness regarding its basic teachings about impermanence and not clinging to concepts appears almost willfully obstinate. He may never solve this famous crux, but he admits at least at last that letting go and being honest with one's own character proves a reliable path. He vows to return to his life with the woman who will be his fiancée and to settle down after a life of roaming Asia and reporting about it in Manhattan.

Bernstein intersperses his own upbringing as a Jewish boy born to immigrants on a Connecticut chicken farm with his struggles to figure out his place in a rootless upbringing. He gains subtle insights. In an orphanage in Amritsar, he takes photos (none are included strangely and the volume lacks illustrations) of the boys, but of one who's blind: "I left my camera in the bag where it belonged. To photograph him would be to announce that I could see what he couldn't-- himself." (195)

The search with Zhongmei-- and his departure from her when he must alone go past the Chinese borders-- to find his own identity impels his outward quest. It's often a slow and routine slog rather than a thrilling adventure. It may not please those used to travel tales full of colorful characters and wry mishaps, but as with Hsuan Tsang's example (however dimly pursued) the diligence Bernstein applies on and off makes this a thoughtful-- if stumbling and erratic-- journey. (Posted to Amazon 5-9-10)

U Dhammaloka: the first Irish Buddhist monk?

I drove out to UC Riverside yesterday to hear a professor in from Cork talk about perhaps the first Irish Buddhist monk. At least the first one we know of--who took the robes in Burma-- fighting Christian incursions, and defending dharma after his ordination appointing himself "the Bishop of Rangoon." His real name may or not be known. His birth and death, to date, remain speculative. He's a predecessor, combative if genuine, of more refined and less cantankerous Western converts. His appearance, suddenly in 1900, and his fading out by 1914, makes up a rather Zelig-like hobo boho character in Asia, where he covered considerable territory. He garnered fervent press-- some generated by alter ego/ nom de plume "Captain Daylight." He's a character worth getting to know, if we can know him.

The 2011 issue of Contemporary Buddhism featured Brian Bocking's article alongside scholars Thomas Tweed, Alicia Turner, and Laurence Cox(see an earlier version of his initial research)  See a YouTube video by Prof. Bocking; he and his colleagues hosted a UC Cork Dhammaloka Day conference Feb. 19th 2011.] It highlights their research on U Dhammaloka (?1856 - ?1914).

"A migrant worker from Dublin, Dhammaloka was an autodidact, atheist and temperance campaigner who became known throughout colonial Asia as an implacable critic of Christian missionaries and a tireless transnational organiser of Asian Buddhists from Burma to Japan and from Singapore to Siam."

Pursuing rumors of Hibernians on the prototypical hippie trail a century before the Beatles and the Maharishi, independently Turner in Canada and Cox at Maynooth learned of this Irish emigre who in late Victorian times changed his name, having "gone native" in whatever passed as a predecessor for Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac's "dharma bums" fifty years later, roaming Goa, Kathmandu, or Benares as third-gen hippies today. Bocking caught a reference to UD, contacted the other two scholars, and the result became their founding of "Dhammaloka Studies."

I've been interested in this Irish-global spin too, by my own investigation into "the invention of the concept of 'Celtic Buddhism'" in the new edition of New Religious Movements in Ireland co-edited by Laurence Cox. He and Maria Griffin contributed a fine essay on the history of Irish Buddhism, which will blossom into his book; another on Dhammaloka (his name means "Light of the World") is also in the works by the trio. This late-Victorian/Edwardian anti-colonial, freethinking counterculture leaves long traces in what Thomas Tweed, expert on American Buddhism, calls "vernacular intellectualism" which leaves fewer books behind but echoes so many chats and campfires simmering from a vibrant oral culture, a streetwise autodidactic tradition, and maybe a bit of Irish anticlerical, anti-nomian, rabble-rousing.

The talk by Prof. Bocking proved worthwhile for my sixty-mile excursion (one way, at least). It also proved remarkably entertaining, for both professor and his elusive if emphatic (he used the powers of persuasion personally and in the press well as a predecessor of today's pundits on book tours and Twitter--I imagine him on Comedy Central) raconteur told tale tales enduring a hundred years on. PowerPoint danced as this scholar shared the joy and fascination of their pursuit of this globally slippery figure, who left behind a lot of press and a lot of mystery. That poster shows what may be the only photo-- so far-- of the man who may or not be Larry O'Rourke, William Colvin, or Lawrence Carroll, born maybe in Booterstown, Blackrock, Dublin.

Much more in terms of fact and still some possible fiction can be found in the CB journal, but suffice it to say even since its November 2010 appearance, data continue to be unearthed, or surmised, about this elusive, enigmatic, but formidable and somehow perhaps rather admirable, atheist, yet sincere and determined (if by any means necessary, bending the truth of who authored some of his many pamphlets from his Buddhist Tract Society-- attributed to him was a poetic hymn sung by Japanese Buddhists in San Francisco!) contrarian.

Sitting there on the third floor of the UCR Humanities building, overlooking a track field and biscuit-brown rocky hills out of a Western stage set, just before summer melts this Inland Empire outpost into searing smog, I welcomed the chance to be among a dozen intellectual types, however briefly. My 120-mile drive kept me "driven" to hear the results of Prof. Bocking and his colleagues. It reminded me of what I was trained for at another UC campus eighty-odd miles nearer the Pacific (if still not on it, damn it), and what inspires me to continue my own small steps in researching other aspects of Buddhism and the West, including Ireland but not excluding, say, punk rock and sobriety programs and other efflorecences as novel now as UD back then.


He claimed to work on a fruit-boat on the Sacramento River, the Acme, about the time of a great invention in the southern part of the Golden State. The naval orange was born in Riverside, a bit earlier than UD's appearance as "The Missionary (for Buddhism, against Christianity) of Burma"; the seedless fruit's cheerful appearance, so orange, I wonder might have been replicated in this monk's robes. The English came to Riverside and praised its salubrious climate as a resort. A century later, it's shorthand for once exurban, now suburban sprawl and dreary weather. I welcomed the glimpse from the freeway east of San Antonio winery, the last of its kind too (founded three years after UD's disappearance from the historical record), if under the powerpoles (I've been told by my parents upon sighting these that this was the first word I ever said) next to the freeway junction. I'll make my way out of the way to patronize it the next rare time out there; I pass their downtown L.A. branch, which survived Prohibition, a few miles away from my home on my commute.


Crossing UCR for another, less familiar commute as I had to then head off to work, I found a windfall. Still, despite the sprawling postwar campus, its agricultural origins as a study station for horticulture remains as experimental groves surround the southern edge of UCR., the last remnant of what once was the world's center for this sweet orb. Near the Barn, an old theatre converted that reminded me of my beloved childhood Claremont's final days as a citrus producer, a few handsome trees flourished among cement paths. On the ground, a perfect globe in color, two leaves still attached, fresh. I picked it up and carried it back to my florescent-lit cubby at my far more humble campus, before I had to teach nights, sixty miles away the other direction in rush-hour traffic. There, I enjoyed the best orange I ever tasted.

Pósadh ach níl dhá sochraid?

Fhreastail mé pósadh agus dhá chomthíonol cuimhne faoi deireanach. Bhí pósadh gharneacht na mbean cheile agam ar feadh mhean an mhí hAibreal ann. Ansin, chuaigh mé ar an maidín Lá Bealtaine go cnocadoireacht i gcuimhne an scribhneoir áituilta Jack Smith; chruinnigh mé ina thráthnóna sin ar trasna an cathair céanna ina seirbhis Giúdach i omos na mathair chara a fuair bás go tobann í. 

Lhabhairt mo bhean cheile ar son beirt phósadh, Marlene agus Caoimhin. Is amhlaigh, fheidmithe sisean ag seirbhis ina halla in aice leis an lámh leis an cathair lár. Bhain sult as ár teaghlach a feicéail Marlene níos sona.


Dhá tseachtaine seo chugainn, shiúil Léna agus mé suas an mullach Sléibhe Washington leis feadain bheag. Lhean bailiú an slí féin na Jack Smith nuair ag síúlta ag imeall an bótharín agus bealachaí i gceantar air. Fhás an lá is te go tapaidh ach bhí maith liom an radharc ar thuaidh go halainn na sliabhraon Naomh Gabriel mór leis bricin de sneachta ar barr beann shléibhe Naomh Antoine agus slisnín an tAigéan Ciúin ansíud siar fiú.
  
Go luath, caith muid ag dul go raibh a sochraid duine an iarnoin sin. D'eag sí gan rabhadh, gan fógra. Líon  slua an sionagóg.  

Ní raibh faire go cruinnithe, mar sin féin. Déarfaí "tórramh" de réir Giúdachas ach níl focal féin as beasa agus bealaí Eirinn. Ní bhfuair "seirbhis i gcuimhne" i mo foclóir. 

Ceapaim faoi difríocht a idir-dhealú a dheanamh idir dhá traidisiúin. Tagann an muintir na chorp ina Eirinn agus fanann drong go ceann tamaill eile. Ar ndóigh, níor fhán cuideachta Giúdacht i láthair chorp níos mo an lá. Adhlacaim é go díreach agus ní thaispéanfaidh é, go fírinne.

  
"Ar dheis Dé go raibh siad."


A wedding and not two funerals?


I attended a wedding and two memorial gatherings recently. There was the wedding of a grandniece of my wife during the middle of April. Then, I went on May Day morning hill-walking in commemoration of the local writer Jack Smith; I gathered that afternoon across the same city in a Jewish service in honor of the mother of a friend whom death took suddenly. 

My wife said good words for the married couple, Marlene and Kevin.  In fact, she herself officiated at the service in a hall near on hand to the heart of the city.  Our family took pleasure to see Marlene so happy. 

Two weeks after, Layne and I walked up the summit of Mount Washington with a small troop. The band followed the same way of Jack Smith when he hiked around the lanes and trails in his district. The day grew quite warm rapidly but the beautiful northerly view pleased me of the great San Gabriel Mountain range with a speck of snow on the peak of Mount San Antonio and the tiny slice of Pacific Ocean even far off westward.

Soon after, we had to go to attend a funeral for a person that afternoon. She died without warning, without notice. A crowd filled the synagogue. 


There was not a wake exactly, all the same.  Somebody may say a "wake" on account of Judaism but there is not the same word for the manners and customs of Ireland. I did not find "memorial service in my dictionary. 

I think this difference distinguishes the two traditions.  The mourners come in Ireland and a crowd stays for a while after. Of course, the Jewish congregation does not wait by the side of a body more than a day. It's buried straightaway and it's not displayed, certainly.

"May their souls rest with God." (Grianghraf/photo: le/by Laura Randall: Slí Jack Smith/Trail.)

Christopher Newfield's "The Unmaking of the Public University": Book Review

Has the American right-wing conspired to take down state universities? Does a “multiracial, worker-inclusive majority” benefiting from higher education that is funded by taxpayers threaten conservative politicians and corporate managers? The author of Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class, a University of California, Santa Barbara, professor of English, argues that the past 25 years of advances by a “college-educated economic majority” threaten the establishment. Christopher Newfield, who came up through California’s once-vibrant university system to achieve tenure at one of its respected campuses, reports from his own research with faculty committees on a “roundabout weapon” which the reactionary culture warriors bent on taking down the “mass middle class” have brandished to disenfranchise a restive, assertive, and diverse majority.

This lengthy study follows Newfield’s Ivy and Industry as a history of what happens when humanists meet industrial (and now post-industrial) knowledge managers and technocrats. As markets and profits demanded increasing attention in the ‘80s, the humanities faltered. Business schools, defense grants, marketing opportunities—spurred by shifts from factories to information—asserted their power over universities. These turned “privatized knowledge factories” as public funding dipped. For Newfield’s argument, this shift represents an oblique strategy by the Right to undermine a class-based, earnest, insurgent cadre determined to replace “traditional business values” with an alliance of students turned managers and leaders, schooled in the civil rights movement and anti-authoritarian attitudes.

Part One, “The Meaning of a Majoritarian Society”, analyzes this challenge. “Inventing PC: The War on Equality” presents the conflict of “political correctness” in the late 20th century “culture wars”. Those angered at diversity are determined to resegregate student bodies along class and racial lines—which recalls the stratifications of earlier decades. We now see “Market Substitutes for General Development” studies, industry-collegiate links, donor reliance, and the weakening of English departments. Funding favored technological fields as public money and political support declined for the radicalized liberal arts and social sciences. Finally, “The New War—and After” brings the transfer of power into the past decade, when what Newfield interprets as “poor data poorly interpreted” exaggerated the post-9/11 dangers of “subversive faculty” and assumed radical bias.

Allow my autobiographical digression. I’m also a Dodger fan from Newfield’s generation and hometown; I’m from a blue-collar family that our state’s postwar UC Master Plan was meant to assist as I pursued my own higher education at a “public Ivy” campus with a world-renowned reputation. I attended a sister campus to Newfield’s UCSB, down the coast at UCLA in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. I taught six years (the limit) at UCLA as a teaching assistant, and then in Los Angeles public schools, as I finished my doctorate in English literature. I have taught since then at a non-public (but “minimally selective”) institution serving mainly immigrant and first-generation Southern Californian students from largely non-traditional backgrounds, albeit often older than a typical UC undergraduate. My students represent a pragmatic cohort often less academically prepared but arguably more career-focused than some UC liberal-arts majors.

Chapter 9 of Part III, “English’s Market Retreat”, scrutinizes the literary and cultural study (LCS) field. Newfield and I attended graduate school during the post-1970 collapse of lifelong job opportunities for English PhDs. As jobs increased for non-tenure track applicants like me, jobs decreased for tenure hires like him. English departments responded to this “contingent” or adjunct (and less often, full-time without tenure) trend in a hesitant manner. Humanists denounced the labor shift; then they adapted it.

The Modern Language Association (MLA) failed to offer practical reforms.  A 2001-2001 MLA analysis of the LCS job market defended “oversupply” as the norm. Fatalism, the public’s growing sense that the humanities lacked utility, and demands for required composition rather than LCS courses all weakened humanists, who tended to resist commercialism. They resented downsizing, while budgets shifted expenses through a reliance on teaching assistants and “visiting” rather than full-time (and tenured) faculty—who tended to resent teaching composition or language-learning classes to lower-level students or even undergraduates, as such tedium distracted them from rarified research, I may add.

Critics of austerity succumbed to market forces. Peter Drucker’s “knowledge management” innovations applied tough entrepreneurial theory to those bearing “intellectual capital”. This set of principles clashed with those employed increasingly by humanists to justify their reaction to such political blocs, erected to suppress dissent. However, Foucault and Lacan provide fewer principles to assist English professors charged with meeting expenses. Newfield examines this lack of a strong defense as weak offense, but his dry chapter, which might have benefited from campus accounts from those who were there to balance his reliance on “subtle and conflicted formulations”, fails to dramatize the transition over these 35 years, as enacted by thousands of my fellow students and professors.

Elsewhere, he provides a valuable resource in compiling data, inevitably dry but carefully collected, that document how the humanities and social sciences must beg for money that they generated, which is used by universities for engineers or medicine. Drama and music departments decay while MBA programs may enjoy gleaming facilities. While his account passes over the lot of those assigned or resigned to attend such venues, this book appears aimed at administrators of—rather than everyday users of—such spaces.

Newfield, as expected, questions the lack of what he regards as racial diversity in many departments, which he sees as skewed as those for “underrepresented” populations at many public universities. He shows, if too broadly and rapidly, how integration does not always follow demographic change. Economic restratification may solidify after social change. The frenzy for admissions, funds, and research grants increases. Newfield asserts this as a “professional-middle class self-defense”, but I would question his view that this “self-defense” while “apparently color-blind and supportive of diversity” is targeted intentionally against the “racialized masses”.

There may be think-tanks and corporate entities engaged in shadowy subversion; the Koch brothers come to mind (this study first appeared in hardcover in 2008 before they were exposed as funding Tea Party and climate-change denial “grassroots” movements).  Yet on an everyday level, labeling this as a “decentralized and complex campaign to discredit” those progressives challenging business and political elites appears more sensible than to label this a coordinated assault against “racialized masses”—those who aspire to UC admissions appear to me as diverse as Los Angeles itself.

The Price of Admission

Newfield subtitles his account as a “forty-year assault on the middle class”; this amorphous entity itself is more and more a “multiracial” one, comprising immigrants from hundreds of nations and their increasingly intermarried and blended families. The class stratification of this global, entrepreneurial elite, as it settles in the US and seeks inclusion within (or parallels to) admissions programs designed for historically disadvantaged American groups, complicates Newfield’s colleagues’ delineations. Also, the rapid increase in tutors, intensive and pricy SAT preparation, and counselors-for-hire gaming the entry process (as often as neo-con reactionaries) challenges Newfield’s model.


As an observer of the admissions frenzy (and a now a parent of two teens) I suggest that this escalating competition is driven by a corporate-funded tutorial industry—and a desire to attain an affordable, respected degree. In an increasingly multicultural state, most residents outside the affluent or those courted for rare talents face this “brute selectivity”.  Newfield relegates most of his few mentions of Asian American students, who far outnumber at UC their parity in the state population, to a couple of footnotes; he also does not include Indian or Middle Eastern American students in his study.  More consideration of how such “minority” but often markedly “overrepresented” populations effect his findings might have enriched their relevance, for many students seeking technical and business degrees come from these backgrounds, which throw off his assumptions based on a rear-guard action by managers from a conspiratorial “white” cabal. They certainly prove to be capitalists, but they draw from allies worldwide, often with degrees earned here.

Furthermore, the affirmative action programs in which I taught at UCLA in the late ‘80s often enrolled those from upper-middle class suburbs, rather than those from inner-city or rural high schools from where few students entered the UC system, and from which far fewer graduated. A few Asians qualified based on the national origin of their families; most were denied this “bridge program” as based on university-mandated categories relating to “race” more than class. Today, perhaps more than a quarter-century ago, the majority of those applying to UC, I’m guessing, come from weaker-income families. These parents suffer job instability, often regardless of what “ethnicity” or combinations thereof they checked off on an application.

Newfield criticizes the lack of parity as to faculty and diversity. Meritocracy and equality contend. He admits that integration succeeds better at more selective schools. He notes how less elite workplaces integrated as whites “retreat upmarket”, yet he overlooks how those ambitious or motivated students from among non-white populations also follow this migration to more lucrative careers.  At my less prestigious institution, I observe how far more students from “non-traditional” backgrounds seek careers in business, high-tech, management, or in the professions. They rarely enter an unstable, underpaid, overworked occupation reliant on adjunct classes and multiple campuses, amidst “the declining status and working conditions of large sections of college teaching”. 

Regardless of the complexion or gender of those behind the lectern or in the seats, the public university system relies upon quality. Newfield warns of Michigan’s “privatization” and reliance on philanthropy as a harbinger of what happens (as the UC system now proposes) when out-of-state (or international) students paying higher tuition gain a greater share of admissions. When global markets and not state access determine who enters a flagship institution, its reputation as a state-wide system established for local advancement may concomitantly decline.

This message reminds us, as taxpayers, parents, neighbors, colleagues, and coworkers of those enrolled and graduated from the land-grant and state-funded universities, of their importance. If professors questioned the complicity of the US corporate system in angering those who attacked on 9/11, then, after all, these professors were doing their job: to encourage criticism, and to foment debate. Newfield applauds the professoriate for its resistance to revenge, flag-waving, and jingoism. “They refused right judgment and clear action. Or to put another way, they taught.”  Unpopular opinions wilt when unprotected at work, at home, off campus; this makes their shelter on campus all the more urgent.

All the same (here Newfield argues against a former UCLA classmate of mine), I think that he downplays the liberal tendency in the humanities and social sciences to dominate a department by hiring and promotion and course content. What Stanley Fish calls “impaired liberalism” emerges as a challenge to the academic freedom afforded students as well as professors. That is, pressure persists within classrooms for those with less power to accept the positions advocated by those with tenure, who enjoy a protection denied, suppressed, or less likely to be appealed to by the term-paper or dissertation writer, the T.A., the adjunct.

Taxpayers must fund the universities which may and which should question our own ways of making a living, of conducting wars, of denying climate change. Yet I see no contradiction in demanding accountability from institutions founded to serve those from my state, paid for by those of us from our state. Those of us outside the public universities must assure their perpetuation—-for all who seek to learn and to assert facts as distinguished from opinions and cant. This may be a more nuanced position than Newfield and his colleagues may understand. I sympathize as do many humanists with liberal concepts, yet my own eclectic thinking compels me to question arguments arrayed by my peers, students, colleagues, and mentors. That too is part of the higher education I earned in part at UCLA.

Certainly Newfield’s call for remedies restoring the liberal arts and social sciences to their once-respected ranks should be heard. It may be idealistic by definition, but as an interested bystander in the professoriate’s less exalted echelon, I concur that this makes it no less necessary. The problem embeds itself in the institution, funded by a government with whom it often argues.

Universities can’t be capitalist. They need to balance their books, but they need to teach from books, and produce more books, that challenge profit as the price of everything and the value of nothing. Teaching, Newfield concludes, remains “labor-intensive, craft-based creation” which is noncapitalist. “Since capitalism will continue to insist on bottom-line measures of their output, universities will at those times need to be frankly noncapitalist”.  We should be able to afford this ideal of a lively campus, not so much as an ivory tower, but as an open arena for battles even against us, who pay for admission. (PopMatters featured at RePrint: 5-6-11.)