Lodro Rinzler's "Walk Like a Buddha": Book Review

What would Buddha do at a rave? Would he post on Facebook? How might he deal with the morning after regarding his partner of the night before? Given the Tripitaka fails to enlighten us, a contemporary, hip, teacher tries. He's schooled in Buddhism as entering the everyday world of many growing up and confronting how their practice may not jibe with the rest of their surroundings.

As a second-generation Buddhist, brought up with Chogyam Trungpa's Shambhala teachings, Lodro Rinzler follows up his lively and snarky  "The Buddha Walks Into a Bar" (reviewed 12-24-11) with a version of "Dear Buddha" responses to questions via his blog. This shows the coming of age: he assumes Buddhism already within his readers, so he blends practical advice (e.g., about "right drinking" or horrible bosses, annoying ex's, partying, gossip, and the hookup scene) with a casually phrased, vernacular set of takes on how to interpret traditional Buddhist precepts.

Rinzler continues the style of his first book: so, unlike many published by Shambhala or counterparts, there's four-letter words and slang and references aplenty to what millennials might regard as pressing concerns more than those of the earlier counterculture. I find, as one born between the flower children and the branded wired era, his reactions to equanimity in a world that expects us only to rush, bicker, contend, and grapple refreshing. I realize his feverish combination of wit, pop culture nods, his bow-tied attire, his sense of East Coast "alternative" enclave making an entitled living, his expectation we may be eager to pursue the temptations of a frenzied, and commodified society as he may be, and his unflagging support for the current White House administration which arises from his all-out campaigning for it the last two cycles might put off a few while its casual tone attracts many.

Still, for the patient reader, and that is what appeals, for those in an uncertain job market, who labor away at less "creative" workspaces, who wonder the point of a 24/7 online presence, Rinzler tries to offer a voice not heard too much even in today's Buddhist circles. Similarly for the similar audience of Noah Levine's The Heart of the Revolution (2011), the tonglen meditation of generating compassion and engagement with a wounded earth and its inhabitants arises as one immediate way to ease suffering. Also, Rinzler's frequent reminder of the danger of shenpa, excessive attachment, helps to let readers let go of what so much around us insists we hold on to. This can be rooting for a team beyond reason (the Red Sox certainly do apply, alas, as he shows), or a fixation on any person, idea, or situation when Buddhist emphasis on surrendering such adhesion needs to be paramount.

Changing for the better one's community, he urges, can invite us to look at wherever we are. "Be it a boardroom, a bar, a biker gang, or even a strip club," one can enter that situation with an aim to "being fully there and being of service to others." He counsels to "take the action that causes the least amount of suffering" as a kind of Occam's Razor (my analogy) to come closest to "the nature of the Buddha's words" in tricky encounters or choices. He urges that the "more you can drop the idea of what you need to be happy, the happier you will be. The more you can relax into supporting movements that you believe are being of benefit to others, the more you will find you have energy and openness to offer to these movements." But, before rushing out to change everyone else, Rinzler suggests care for one's own intentions and one's own abilities. "This process begins at home."

So, while I know critics who castigate Rinzler for too complacent a nature to reconcile himself with the unjust system we labor in, or who dismiss his version of dharma teaching as too glib, a reader coming to this book with more open-mindedness may come away with some reward. While Rinzler will not likely include an answer to a query from his blog exactly what you need for your problem, he may reveal insight into how a more thoughtful, less selfish, and more long-range reflection can assist your own growth, your freer nature ready to handle difficulties more flexibly, and your self-understanding of how getting too tangled in what comes and goes fades next to what's necessary. (Amazon US 10-16-13)

Steve Hagen's "Buddhism Is Not What You Think": Book Review

"This is not a feel-good book about how to become more spiritual." So starts the prologue. While these lessons for those used to inspirational or comforting takes on Zen may unsettle, if you've read its predecessor, "Buddhism Plain and Simple", this sustains Hagen's no-nonsense tone. Many on Amazon appear to have been unsettled by his detached, analytical stance. Yet, it's common to others; consider similarly phrased versions by Stephen Batchelor (for counterculture's veterans) or Noah Levine and Brad Warner (for the post-punk era's seekers), or Glenn Wallis (for intellectuals aligning the arc of Buddhism with theoretical speculation).

Like many guides following up an initial success (compare Levine and Warner), this bogs down somewhat from going over what's been covered already--and from a sequel that might have been shorter.. Organized loosely in three sections, it tries to replicate the mind's entry into dharma (it's not for beginners--try its predecessor.) It starts with "Muddy Water," as Hagen argues against any reality that's permanent. He constantly returns to "just that" as the heart of Zen: the immersion in now. He repeats how confusion grounds itself in an elusive reality. This should be familiar for readers of more basic Buddhist treatments; it runs the risk of repetition.

But many Zen books do this. It can cut through illusion, as when Hagen cites Rinzai on freedom: "There are Zen students in chains when they go to a teacher, and the teacher adds another chain. The students are delighted, unable to discern one thing from another. This is called a guest looking at a guest." (qtd. 88)

The dharma itself's self-referential, and Hagen demonstrates how it must "ultimately erase itself" (130) as the left hand erases what the right hand writes on a chalkboard. It's difficult to read over a couple of hundred pages on this (even with large font and a small book format), without pausing and reflecting.

"Pure Mind" shifts to the mental freedom and spiritual confrontation of letting go of any clinging.
The gist eludes articulation, but nonetheless, here we are reading Hagen's words, for how else can we learn? "Dharma teaching is not about what cannot be put into words, what cannot be grasped, what cannot be conceptualized--but what can only be pointed out, can only be directly seen." (165) Words, often in Zen primers, may exhaust what non-verbal contemplation may reveal. And, in such books, authors tend to hammer home the same points, with different taps, over and over. Some may get it. Some may give up.

"Purely Mind" stresses "seeing" in a non-conceptual manner the impermanent. Mental constructions need to be dismantled: time, space, extension, and duration. "These--and all the material world--derive from consciousness, which ladles out time and space from a timeless, spaceless sea." (242) Great scene, but how does this fit? He elides over how the subject-object division within consciousness is created by consciousness itself; this book skims across weighty subjects without pausing to dig deeper into these assertions. He nods to Nagarjuna's argument that "There's only flux."

True, Ch's. 41-2 edge into quantum physics but this merits a whole book, not a few pages. The idea of a two-dimensional space and time projected rising up (or down!) as a third dimension as on an elevator into conscious awareness on pp. 236-7 is fascinating, but this needs more time and space to unfold to do justice to Hagen's affirmation or denial. The "transactional interpretation of quantum physics" (240) as collapsing the universe's size as time runs back and forth and therefore eliminating its intrinsic duration deserves elaboration. Earlier, he makes a memorable analogy of a bodhisattva to a pedestrian--one is there and then is not--but again, this metaphor passes by too rapidly.

A careful look at the acknowledgements shows what no earlier reviewers have noted: 16/43 of "Buddhism Is Not What You Think" is nearly all adapted from in Hagen's Dharma Field newsletter. Therefore, its ability to delve deeply into topics is dispersed, compared to his topically oriented first book. However, the brevity forces Hagen to teach in a compressed method akin to a Zen instructor. Over and over, he simply repeats to "just see," to stop looking around as if perpetuating ignorance. (Amazon US 3-21-13)

Stephen Prothero's "The White Buddhist": Book Review

Henry Steel Olcott's impact may be better known in Sri Lanka than his native America. It's astonishing that religious scholar Stephen Prothero's Harvard dissertation, transformed into a very smooth style atypical of such origins, is the first critical book-length examination of Olcott's impact. As he notes in the preface to this paperback 2011 edition of his 1996 work, Prothero argues for Olcott as less a Buddhist pioneer firebrand than a restless, driven, dissatisfied freethinker--to a point.

Prothero's thesis dominates: Olcott in becoming the first Westerner to accept Buddhism publicly in modern times (1870) could not shake off his liberal Protestant reform of Ceylon's natives. He wanted to replace the ritual-bound Asian version with one oriented closer to Protestant bias: for a founder's "primitivist" message, based on the scriptures closest to the original intent. Prothero distinguishes this from "the tradition of the Buddhists." (69) Olcott invented "a Buddhist lexicon informed by a Protestant grammar and spoken with a theosophical accent." This creolization, Prothero explains, kept Olcott's habitual upbringing aligned with the same underlying Protestant tendency that prevents moderns-- anymore than Theosophists or Harvard Divinity School students-- from fulfilling a reductive admission that all religions are ultimately one and the same.

Differences persist, and origins betray efforts of adults to leave behind their childhood beliefs. Even Theosophy became refashioned by Olcott; he revamped it (once he had failed to shake up some of its more gullible adherents sufficiently) to make it look less like "scientific spiritualism" in its mid-19c manifestation and more like "Asian wisdom-religion." As his biographer demonstrates from reading Olcott's propaganda and the responses of Asians (pro or con), he knew little about the faith he chose to preach. Yet he came to Ceylon determined to branch out from the formidable sway of his companion Madame Blavatsky and this began to separate his own catechetical missionizing from the effusions he had shared from Theosophy. He could not escape the deeper language of Christianity in formulating his doctrines, as he promoted his Buddhist lexicon to the Sinhalese.

Prothero attended Harvard in the company of two other influential scholars of Western responses to Buddhism. He nods to one, Thomas Tweed, who argues that a framework shifts the convert away from previous views to those of Buddhism, but he departs from his classmate, showing how Olcott failed to overcome his cognitive basis in his Puritan and Protestant past--he excoriated Christianity yet he spoke elsewhere with pride of his Puritan origins and he could not come up with a structural framework other than Protestantism to build up his counter-appeal to revive his invention of a back-to-basics version of Asian Buddhism. Still, many Sinhalese welcomed Olcott, understandably flattered by his decision to live among them and to adapt their religion, to counter Christianization. He wanted to free Buddhism from monks, and to revive its appeal on a scriptural, not ritual, basis.

Perhaps inevitably, trying to weaken some Eastern stereotypes, Olcott wound up perpetuating others. He championed Buddhism as a moral philosophy and he disliked the idolatrous perversions of a true doctrine--in this, his influence from Protestant and Theosophical sources speaks for itself. He never shook off Theosophy as his primary outlook. Prothero shows how Olcott's defense of Blavatsky (despite her wearying demands) and his habitual reduction by his "textualist" bias a compulsion that impelled him to treat as if a "sacred canopy" the belief systems of not only Buddhism but Zoroastrianism, Islam, and Hinduism as if recoverable by him--if only ritual was abandoned and the primary, earliest scriptures from the founders were restored. He linked "the essence of a religion to the inner meaning of its scriptures," (144); this "Orientalist" and "academic assumption" marked him as an American liberal Protestant no matter how far he tried to flee its formative impact upon his approach.

Prothero concludes with a judicious summary of the strengths and weaknesses of his diligent subject. This study avoids jargon and Prothero as in his later work shows his command of a learned, yet accessible and convincing ability to speak to a wider audience. Like his classmates Richard Hughes Seager and Thomas Tweed, Stephen Prothero emerged as a leading scholar of Western Buddhism in this work. However, unlike his friends he chose to edge back into Protestantism in the American ethos as his subsequent focus. And, Olcott never could leave that ethos behind. As his critic sees it, he chose Buddhism as the farthest field from his Christian background, but he never could reject his Theosophical outlook as its replacement, nor could he overturn his Protestant mentality.

He leaves us to ponder Olcott's legacy. He opened this study with his admission of a "hermeneutics of suspicion" at either conservative or liberal pieties which champion a diminishing of religious diversity in the name of zeal or tolerance or equality. "This book is informed, therefore, by a fundamental mistrust of schemes, however well-intentioned, that begin by judging all religious traditions to be true and end by determining that something is gained when the dizzying diversity of religious beliefs and practices is reduced, however imaginatively, to one core tradition." (x) He returns to this challenge of the core and the simplifying of religious expression by Olcott and his ilk, the lesson learned by we who read this. "It may be inevitable that individuals are going to capitalize on the ambiguity that lies at the core of all world religions by bending the texts and rituals of those traditions in their own peculiar direction--by conforming the lexicon of those religions to their own grammar and by speaking the resulting creole language in their own particular accent." (181)

(P.S. For comparison, I reviewed Prothero's "Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know" (8/31/11) and his intriguing compilation of our nation's "core texts" from our "de facto public canon" assembled into an "American Talmud," offering speeches, songs, stories, and sayings to spark discussion and debate as primary "books": "American Bible: How Our Words Unite, Divide, and Define a Nation" [(5/29/12]) This review slightly altered to Amazon US 6-8-13. Author's website.

Andrew Schelling's "The Wisdom Anthology of Contemporary North American Buddhist Poetry": Review

The contributions of the Beats (see the complimentary collection Big Sky Mind ed. by Carole Tonkinson a decade earlier) to Buddhist culture continue to gain documentation. Naropa Institute professor (and former chair of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics) Andrew Schelling lists those who follow the pioneers. He explains in his preface that he encounters in many contemporary poets here a more casual diction "as though one reasonable person were conversing intimately to another."  He compares this style to that of ancient Chinese verses that reminded listeners of  "gnawing on withered wood'": the results tend towards a calm, unhurried approach. While some poets strive for levity, straining to shake one awake, to shout, to beckon, to entertain, most settle down to ponder and ruminate, as this context would lend itself to further, of course.

Schelling shifts attention to thirty living poets; a few Beat veterans (Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Joanne Kyger, Michael McClure, and the exception, the late mentor of many, Philip Whalen) feature here. The alphabetical order ensures that the new and the old share pages; this directs a reader to surrender expectations, to find fresh names. Still, Gary Snyder stands out as one who conveys vividly the power of nature and the presence of people, in suburbanized or remaining rural landscapes of California, through the eyes of those of us who burrow into both locales.

The first selection in his section, "Breasts" snaps to attention with a vivid image:
". . .So we celebrate breasts
We all love to kiss them
            --they’re like philosophers!
Who hold back the bitter in mind
To let the more tasty
Wisdom slip through
            for the little ones.
            who can’t take the poison so young. . ." (excerpt qtd. 300)

Shin Yu Pai's "Office Feng Shui" evokes the artificial nature (literally) of transplanting Eastern sensibilities into Western space. She uses a prose-poem block to force the meaning into a package, imitating the pressure exerted by expectations of conformity, suitably limiting form into content. As Schelling notes in his introduction, the energy of those schooled by heritage as well as initiation into the Asian contexts infuses many of these poems, and represents a wider basis for future progress among Americans (despite the subtitle, Canadians aren't much to be found, but one Chilean exile is.)

Similarly, if with a looser, more typically modernist line, the more fragmented approach of other poets, younger ones influenced (as are their forebears) by the Beats and the far older Asian writers continues. Hoa Nguyen's sensibility filters a broader heritage, one shared by her counterparts in this anthology, but rarely achieved as well, and as succinctly, as here, in one Schelling justifiably singles out in his introduction. [Roll in Your Skull Gone Green]

"Roll in your skull gone green
like a mossy cog that wings
Sing the good times
You seem a tiny wrecked thing to me
something sacred           where time has gone
old and green       Norse
hymns bringing dawn" (qtd. 195)

Dale Pendell's rambling but engaging prose exegesis on "Amrita" explores entheogens and argues back and forth the benefits or drawbacks of stimulants compared to meditation practices taught by traditional Buddhists. This entry broadens the intellectual value of this collection, and perhaps a follow-up volume with more essays on such topics might be a fitting venture for Wisdom Publications. This one, appended with a helpfully annotated bibliography, guides the seeker to the few previous anthologies and to key works by many contributors, and venerable Asian and Western predecessors. Schelling emphasizes translations, and he includes prose studies as well as verse.

Whether the top thirty playlist that comprises most of this volume soothes the audience today or lulls it to sleep depends on your sensibility. This fills a need, but does it peer far enough outside itself? The imprimatur of the small press, the adepts who leave home whether in Asia or Brooklyn to find their way to the Bay Area, and a zendo there (or sometimes a Santa Fe/ Boulder Tibetan teacher) imprints itself heavily on those whom Schelling knows and who print and support and mingle together.

While this editor (and contributor himself) is well-placed to assemble this anthology on these merits, the results favor M.F.A. earners, grant wranglers, the footloose but somewhat secure students able to enter monasteries for awhile or devote themselves to intense practice. This may be expected, for who else would be sought out, visible enough, to be chosen for inclusion? A necessary beginning, but where are the rebels? Maybe it's a tautology.

However, for most folks, who rarely read poetry, who must make a living by means other than poetry, one wonders--when perusing the biographical bylines before each writer--where the rest of America is when it comes to Buddhism, the creative arts, and those not in the zendo in the usual Western (American: moving to if not staying in the Bay Area appears nearly a prerequisite for admission) settings. Outliers appear rarely in these circles. Are there better entries unsolicited, from those trapped in a cubicle 9-5, who struggle with laundry and carpools, commutes and cable t.v. options?

Maybe they lack tutelage to write worthy poems. Maybe they need workshops, retreats, and contacts. I did not find enough of my own experience in nearly four hundred pages of verses draped down, crammed tight, floating and measured, but that may be, poet-practitioners may correct me, the fault of my own lack of insight compared to theirs. I hope I'm humble enough despite my critique to acknowledge this lesson, even as I try to examine from a curious but distant perspective this volume. (Amazon US 8-29-12)

"You Are Not Here": Book Review

Compared to its predecessor, "Nixon Under the Bodhi Tree," this 2006 anthology blends little-known with established names in the Buddhist realm in the West. Its editor, Keith Kachtick, provided his strong opening chapter from his novel, "Hungry Ghost" to the collection of "Nixon" edited by Kate Wheeler, and Kachtick returns the favor with room for her long story, "Ringworm." It's not the only one among the twenty entries to feel semi-autobiographical (at least), but it works as one of the best, as it evokes Burma through a Western nun's eyes---feeding a sick kitten--before one of many military crackdowns.

Other promising tales skirt Buddhist themes rather than, as the weaker ones do, take them literally or ploddingly. The stories which touch on the ideas and concepts instead of placing characters into obviously Buddhist settings appear to better capture the spirit of exploration and an open-ended approach suiting the uncertainty of many seekers. For instance, Dan Sigmond's "Humans" in the first Zen Mission to the Apes, Jake Lorfing's spare natural parable "Distant Mountains," and arguably (I remain uncertain) Pico Iyer's "Abandon" which does not mention any dharma explicitly somehow may belong.

Some names in this collection obviously were shoo-ins for their marquee draw, but they tended to disappoint. I liked Anne Donovan's "Buddha Da" for its outsider's view, and her subsequent novel (as with Kachtick's) developed the initial premise effectively. Andrew Foster Altschul's "You Are Not Here" in San Francisco, Jess Row's "For You" in Hong Kong, and Anh Chi Pham's "Mandala" in wartime Saigon capture their edgy, jittery places effectively, to give moods and perspectives that suit their restless themes. A sense of unease, fittingly for a Buddhist collection, succeeds more than the stories that come from the insiders already established from within the Buddhist community, I hazard.

Sean Hoade's "Samsara Suite" more literally applies this condition, but its sadness and scope encompasses its theme poignantly. The best line out of the whole book comes from another unsettled narrator, Samantha Shoech's "The Good People of Lake George." The narrator, at the end of an affair, challenges wearily the previous generation of complacent, purportedly practicing boomers who all think they live the way of the Eightfold Path. Celeste asks her hosts at their vacation rental: "How are you supposed to be good if nothing is bad?" "'Your problem is vocabulary,' her father says. 'Good and bad are not particularly helpful words.'" (67)

Words here may help to solve such predicaments, at least for careful readers. This is a fitting counterpart to "Hungry Ghost" and "Buddha Da," and while the MFA-small magazine tone of the anthology dominates for better or not depending on your predilection for such character studies and set pieces, it's a sensible follow-up to "Nixon." If a third volume appears, all the same, I hope it shakes up sensibilities more than soothes them, as many of these inclusions do too well. (Amazon US 6-15-12)

In Search of Buddhist Fiction

Daydreaming as a college instructor with limited courses assigned over and over teaches me "what goes around comes around." Faced with a Lazy Susan rotation and a steam-table of mandated texts and modules, I yearn to explore ideas not only on my own as in my reading but within a circle of students, given my avocation.

Lately, two ideas while sitting in my bathtub. Given where I live, I'm not sure Irish or Irish American fiction's the easier L.A. sell. Kicking around an idea for an imaginary course in option two, much as I suspect airy dabblers or self-realized adepts in these haunts who might sign up for Buddhist Fiction, here's a partial reading list. I'd begin with a grounding, if via a suitably for me restless and sly selection: Glenn Wallis' deceptively titled "Basic Teachings of the Buddha". Its phenomenological gloss enhances its maturity and depth. Perhaps for comparison to our Western mentality, I'd next contemplate "Life of Milarepa" newly in Penguin classics, but did its Tibetan author intend it as fiction, or fact? Easier is the first, if stolid, novel written in English by a Bhutanese woman, Kunzang Choden's "The Circle of Karma" even though it reveals in the put-upon protagonist's exile in Sikkim and India its forced or willed encounters with greater impacts outside a Buddhist heartland, as she toils to build roads in.

After that, I fingered three novels as front runners. For historical context and mythic jumpstart, I'd start off with "The Dharma Bums" although I prefer the retrospectively cautionary tale within Jack Kerouac's massive messy notebooks as "Some of the Dharma". Not sure what to fill the shelf space between the Beats and those of us who've grown up after Beatlemania and the Maharishi. That generated earnest proclamations and aimless if inevitable babble-baby steps, but it may secure surely some "terton": a "terma" text tucked away as raw ore if not a "wish-fulfilling gem" for rediscovery.

As a pertinent detour, in college I found the opening chapter of John Nichols' 1981 (the novel slid downhill after) "The Nirvana Blues" a potent distillation of the Sixties' blooming bouquet and blowsy aftertaste for New Mexico's New Age. But, for those of us too young to remember much ("Sgt. Pepper" appeared the month that I finished first grade), how has Buddhism entered post-hippie or post-boomer, Gen-X fiction? Krishna-core via straight-edge punk inspired Eleanor Henderson's "Ten Thousand Saints", but my archival glances haven't led to a treasure-text Buddhist equivalent in fiction to Brad Warner's "hardcore Zen" or Noah Levine's "dharma punx". For those of us reared in less starry-eyed times, as a child during Aquarian dawn, I'd precede a pair of mainstream, millennial novels about folks entering middle age in what Wallis labels as "unease" compelling them to yearn for meaning-- Keith Kachtick's "Hungry Ghost" and Anne Donovan's "Buddha Da" --with titles where excerpts from these appeared, the short story collections "Nixon Under the Bodhi Tree", and "You Are Not Here and Other Works of Buddhist Fiction".

Speaking of this term, I then searched online to find a couple of helpful resources. I wanted to find a later 20th century work worth seeking out. First, via the suitably eclectic Unitarian Universalist website, Kimberly French's "Guide to Buddhist Fiction" (2010) provides all of the above--except Kerouac! So does the more scholarly project of a Canadian doctoral candidate.

Kimberly Beek's "Buddhist Fiction Blog"(2011-) goes deeper, reminding me of my own attempts via WorldCat to find such obscurities as Elsie Sze's "The Heart of the Buddha" in my own research on accounts of Bhutan. The outlier Xinran's PRC-friendly, Chinese bestselling view of liberated Tibet, "Sky Burial" shows the reach of Beek's investigation, beyond the expected Hesse. While I favor the late Joachim Neugroschel's skillful translation of "Siddhartha" as opposed to predecessors (check out his version of Sade's "Philosophy of the Bedroom" as an friskier adventure into palatial or carceral, half-mad erotica), I find Hesse's evocation too familiar via teens wanting a "short book" for a report. I have my hunches about why that German master titled it (obliquely, coyly, wisely?) the way he did.

For a book that will never be chosen for brevity unless by hapless teens who may then switch to the film for comparative if not cinematic concision, I note both Kimberlies feature David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas."" I had wanted to read this years before the movie, and having failed for better or worse to lure my family to see it in the theater (we did choose with my paternal lobbying "On the Road" rather than "Zero Dark Thirty" for the 2012 birthdate of the Prince of Peace), and while I still know nearly nothing about it, a densely esoteric po-mo subtext encourages me, I had to hunt it down. It was checked out everywhere post-flick even if that tanked at the box office: I did enjoy it. At least it found a wider audience. From the library, John Burdett's wobbly but whirlwind mystery thriller "The Godfather of Kathmandu"  reminded me of Victor Pelevin's Russian box-layered tales to unlock. The Warchovskys might be suited for optioning Pelevin, from the sample that concluded "Nixon"'s entries that I'd admired. Suited for a mash-up as "The Master and Margarita" meet Neo.

Promisingly or dangerously, another far-out pick for the literati, from New Directions, appears on Beek's sidebar. Severo Sarduy's Maitreya (1978) suggests RuPaul's after-party preference for dharma bums. Not sure when I'll up for a tranny take on multiple rebirths, but seeing I've name dropped the Marquis, alluded to the Wachowskis, and touched on Pelevin, a logical progression or transgression. I think Lana's own transition--and she and Andy being raised as their Wiki entry notes by an "ex-Catholic turned Shamanist" mother--directs their own engagement intellectually and spiritually with visions they've channeled into film. The Wiki also credits Hindu texts with a key formative role.

Leads me to wonder about film tie-ins: "The Matrix," "Enter the Void," as well as "Cloud Atlas"? Ruminations after my own doctoral work a decade "in purgatory" spin me off another direction: "Jacob's Ladder," "The Truman Show," "Groundhog Day," "Fight Club," "Memento," and...? I confess avoiding any explications of such films as to relevance so as not to spoil my own quest. That'd be another exciting course to design and direct, combined with lively texts. Out of such musings, I recreate my own Nalanda, my own imaginary locale for entering the inner via the outer medium. I note a Wiki "Films about Buddhism" reveals no titles that look to have escaped the East.

Perusing Beek's list, I welcomed memories from some books from the exotic East via Western eyes which I've enjoyed: Kim Stanley Robinson's alternative history (what if the Black Plague had nearly wiped out Europe, so Christians did not conquer much of the globe?) "The Years of Rice and Salt", Roger Zelazny's phantasmagorical, "altered states" utterly-1967, Hindu (less so Buddhist) clash of the mega-titans as "Lord of Light", Rudyard Kipling's mostly calmer if rather tangential "Kim". (I've started J. Jeffrey Franklin's study of Buddhist reception in 19c Britain, which argues how "Kim" and other texts, factual as well as fictional, represented a "cultural counter-invasion" to Victorian verities.)

However, that trio--and others she includes--may touch more lightly on Buddhism than other influences. Western Buddhist fiction, placing themes within more mundane settings, appears to look within and sometimes pause at rather than plumb its subtler currents. Much as I liked the appropriate second-person voice dominating Keith Kachtick's "Hungry Ghost", that plot felt as if it yearned to loom as a Manhattan-to-Morocco thriller on the big screen. More placidly, Anne Donovan's "Buddha Da" nestles a Glaswegian house painter's shift towards practice within domesticated settings, but it falters in sustaining its tripled narrative perspective and its momentum. Translated into English last year, Bruno Portier's "This Flawless Place Between" unevenly balances the exotic Himalayan and the everyday urban encounters; it boldly depicts the (so-called) Tibetan Book of the Dead come to "life."

Two collections of short stories, one excerpting the first chapter of Kachtick's novel, the other Donovan's first, span the gap between their quotidian orientation and the more vivid or daring fiction that challenges perceptions and plunges the reader into more of the disorientation of Portier, if not quite Zelazny. It's disappointing that speculative fiction at least to my limited gaze has not produced newer imaginative applications of Buddhist thought, but these may lurk under New Age, fantasy, or inspirational categories, which I don't drift among. Blame my skepticism, and my impatience with what nears self-published uplift. That's why for all its colonial insistence, I preferred the energetic  mindset of Kipling, to my surprise. However, that gives way as Franklin follows, to more manifestations of globalization. Turn to two nets of tales plucked from big fish and small fry, grilled on the page to spice, savor, or taste. My appetite tends to roam and wander more than settle down.

Compared to its 2004 predecessor, "Nixon Under the Bodhi Tree",  "You Are Not Here and Other Works of Buddhist Fiction" 2006 anthology blends more little-known with established names in the Buddhist realm in the West. Its editor, Keith Kachtick, provided his strong opening chapter from his novel, "Hungry Ghost" to the collection of "Nixon" edited by Kate Wheeler, and Kachtick returns the favor with room for her long story, "Ringworm." It's not the only one among volume two's twenty entries to feel semi-autobiographical (at least), but it works as one of the best, as it evokes Burma through a Western nun's eyes---feeding a sick kitten--before one of many military crackdowns.

Many stories, or vignettes, in both collections failed to rouse me to stand up and cheer. Some contributors obviously were included for "marquee draw" from the American Buddhist pantheon of name brands. I do betray my own detachment along with my ongoing interest. I liked some authors lesser known but more ambitious or subversive. What do I want? Fiction as friction, afflicting the comfortable, as the Buddha's message meant to wake us up. The links to both anthologies reviewed reveal who roused me more. Any reader has his or her own reaction. My serpentine, spiraling nature regarding belief tangles me. I squirm with "unease" if pigeonholed. I try to elide denominational bias in my real-world "Contemporary Religions" (as I prepare to teach it again online tomorrow), which does attract the credulous, denying, or dogmatic, along with earnest pilgrims or ornery iconoclasts.

As for these titles, any uncredited links above to all but the unread "Maitreya" (my own reminder), take you to my Amazon reviews for in-depth critiques, and as another guide for online seekers. If you have suggestions for my imaginary course, let me know. Maybe it can reincarnate somehow as real.

Ultraculture.org: "Keep Calm and Enter the Void": Image credit.

Ag cur cuairt Cookham

Chuaigh Léna agus mé ar an traein go Paddington i Londain go dtí an baile Cookham ag imeall an abhainn Thames Dé Sathairn. Iarr muid a fheiceáil an áit a raibh cónái Stanley Spencer ar feadh ar shaol (1891-1959). Ar ndóigh, d'imigh sé go An Domhan Mór, cosúil le fír eile an oiread sin ansin.

Chónaic muid múrmhaisithe móra ag Teach Somerset an lá roimh inné. Mar sin, tá na pictiúr agus líníochtaí ina Dánlann Stanley Spencer níos mó faoi shaol laethúil. Ach, scrúdaigh Spencer an radharc Críostaí triu amharc mistiúl agus umhal, ina tstraide na Cookham féin leis a comharsanaí.

Is féidir leat a fheicéail go leor faoi Cookham ar líne. D'fhoglaim mé go raibh áit an-sean agus ro-stairiúl. Ciallaíon an t-ainm ar siúl "cwch-ium," mar sé "áit báid" i Chéilteach arsa.

Shiúl muid ag timpeall: go siopa tae, go Cora Olney, an eaglais meánaioseach, go bhruach na habainn Thames, An Póna agus móinteach, agus an stáisiún traenach. Thóg Spencer an traen laethúil ag a hocht go Londain a fhreastail An Scoil Slade agus d'fhill sé in am don tae. Bhí mac léinn gan íoc ansin, gan amhras.

Chaill muid an traen, ach bhí maith linn an baile. Gan fírinne, ba mhaith liom a fanacht ansin ar feadh tréimhse níos faide. Mar sin féin, bíonn straidbhaile dara is saibhre sa Bhreatain.

Visiting Cookham. 

Layne and I went by train from Paddington in London to the town of Cookham along the river Thames on Saturday. We wanted to see the place Stanley Spencer lived during his life (1891-1959). However, he went off to the Great War, as so many men of his time then.

We saw the great murals at Somerset House the day before yesterday. Therefore, the paintings and drawings in the Stanley Spencer Gallery are more about daily life. But, Spencer perceived a Christian view through a mystical and humble perspective, in the streets of Cookham itself with his neighbors.

You can see more about Cookham on line. I learned that it is a very old and quite historical place. The place name means "cwch-ium," that is "place of boats" in ancient Celtic.

We walked around: to the tea-shop, to Olney Weir, the medieval church, the banks of the river Thames, The Pound and moor, and the train station. Spencer took the train daily at eight to London to attend the Slade School and he returned in time for tea. He was an outstanding student there, without a doubt.

We missed the train, but we liked the town. Truly, I would like to stay there for a longer time. All the same, it's the second richest village in Britain.

(Píctiúr: Móintéan na Cookham/Cookham Moor, 1937)

Pam Gems' "Stanley": Book Review

This dramatic presentation of the English artist Stanley Spencer (1891-1957) published in 1996 premiered with Anthony Sher in the title role, and it must have been rewarding to watch. (It won a Tony nomination in 1997.) For, in the written form here I review, Gems places Spencer within the tumult of his very tangled relationships with his wife Hilda and his lesbian lover (a long story, thus this play) Patricia and her partner Dorothy. Add his teacher Henry (Tonks), his contemporary Augustus (John), and his agent Dudley (Tooth) among a few others and you learn about the career and personality of quite a figure, a standout even by village characters of this island.

While resisting strenuously the eccentric label, with his canvas toted around his beloved Cookham in a pram, his horned-rimmed circular frames, and his bowl haircut, Spencer courted comparisons. His spiritually intricate, erotically charged, and/or boldly distorted visionary paintings invited acclaim or notoriety. Gems incorporates a lot of biographical material with enough skill, for a short play, not to feel like it's a history lesson. Still, having finished Kenneth Pople's big biography before reading this play, I was glad I had learned about the painter beforehand, for the speed with which much of the expository dialogue flies by demands attention (the one caution I'd share with fellow readers of this rather than viewers or students of Spencer), and perhaps on stage some relationships were clearer.

"I love being in a room and emanating 'Stanley' qualities, throwing out nice bits of me for people to pick up..." (38) So he complains to Hilda, who resists his ministrations and begins to retreat from him while Patricia, back in the village, gloms on to Stanley. Smitten, he buys her extravagances, painting landscapes to pay his way and hers rather than his own personal visions.

In Gems' dramatization, which seems to accord with what is known, Patricia leads him on. Even after he divorces Hilda, leaves his daughters, and marries Patricia, she pushes him off and in turn eggs him on. She assures him that "I'll get them for you...you shall have women, as many women as you want..." (45) While more of a procurer here than in real life perhaps, her connivance does dominate.

Henry, as Stanley later dithers while Hilda declines his return and Patricia wears him out as she retreats from him while still milking him, chastises Stanley: "You court simplicity like a dog after a b[---]ch." (66) His oddity fails to win him as many admirers around him as his fame might bring him. He tries to paint more explicit paintings of both women in his life, but his reputation appears tainted.

In the end, Patricia too divorces him even as she rushes to claim the title of Lady when Sir Stanley is knighted. Hilda goes crazy and then dies (nicely portayed in the latter state by Gems' stage direction). Patricia puts him down: "Everything you paint is deformed...lunatic...all gazing at the world with imbecile stares...Me decked out in all the finery you forced upon me..." (79) She proves sour stuff.

By contrast, the penultimate scenes rescue this downbeat tone with Dorothy, who had also labored long as a painter in Patricia's shadow; their paintings were shown only under the latter's name. Dorothy tells a journalist after the knighthood how "there is a sort of unique human clumsiness about his work--it is deliberate, of course. He paints people trapped, as it were, in their own flesh, pinned down to this earth, and yet they seek to soar and he makes that seem very possible." (85)

Stanley has the last word. In his apotheosis, still madly writing away to Hilda as he had long after their divorce and her death, he insists on the rightness of his righteousness. "God blessed me with a great talent and a great love. Now I'm alone to get on with the work. Sorrow and sadness is not me." (88) He remains the best judge of his work. He looks down at his canvas: "Beautifully done." Packing up, off he goes with his pram, down the streets of Cookham, to his home, amidst his lifelong home.
(Amazon US 1-25-14)

Kenneth Pople's "Stanley Spencer: A Biography": Book Review

With the attention given the First World War a century later, a look back at one of its greatest if most unpredictable artists, Stanley Spencer, rewards renewed examination. Published in 1991 on the centenary of his birth, drawing on interviews with his two daughters, family and friends, and the Tate Gallery archived writings, Spencer in his first in-depth biography emerges not as the subject of dull critique, but of respect through a diligent effort by Kenneth Pople to let the artist's words speak for themselves. They channel Spencer's interior struggle, evoked and expressed by slow craft or long difficulty. 

While very congenial towards Spencer, Pople provides a skilled interpretation of the rational and genesis for what can often be initially baffling or perplexing art. Painstaking in his observations, he charts Spencer's professional and personal growth in chronological chapters documenting his self-awareness which emerges on canvas, as he sketched and painted from an early age. Pople pauses to offer "suggestions as to their emotional origins" of his art, supported by Spencer's mostly unpublished writings, supplemented by testimony of those who knew him. The sympathy between biographer and subject proves powerful.

Although a readable five-hundred-plus-pages, detail may overwhelm those seeking a précis. Pople doggedly pursues his subject, but rarely distances himself from him. Duncan Robinson's overview rewards readers with enough illustrations and descriptions to begin. After Kitty Hauser's and Fiona MacCarthy's respective monographs, if preceding Pam Gems' pithy play, the still-curious may plunge into Pople for immersion into the steady or turbulent flow between the life and the works. Keith Bell catalogued a necessary survey of hundreds of Spencer's works, but inevitably despite the heft of Bell's contribution, individual paintings cannot all earn the scrutiny that this prolific artist merits.

Therefore, Pople's effort aligns the places and faces of Spencer's beloved village with their spiritual equivalents. As he put it, he walked around Cookham as if he saw heaven. Not that he strolled in heaven, but that he compared what he envisioned there with what he witnessed daily around him. A subtle but necessary distinction, for as Pople explains, Spencer's works attempted to record his own ecstasies, or terrors. "The places are not meant as symbolic or universal. They have no meaning outside of his experience of them. He presumes we all have such places in our memories which evoke similar feelings for us, and that we are able to recognize those that he shows in his painting are but signposts to personal feeling. It is that feeling which he is trying to capture and to universalize." (26) 

He treasured sensory elements of those he knew and settings he passed. Minutes or years later, his prodigious memory, sharp ear, and photographic eye could reproduce the scene or moment he wanted on paper or as a painting. The results may or may not match Cookham, but they usually emanate from it. Pople distinguishes the "observed" landscapes (often considerably sharper in technical execution, if removed of people) or portraits, by which Spencer made a living, from the "visionary" paintings he claims to have preferred, those conflating preternatural events into Cookham's domain. 

The process, Pople extrapolates from Spencer's accounts and art, depends on what that artist called "memory-feeling" as his imagined experiences became transfigured into the biblical inspirations he then interpreted. For instance, "The Centurion's Servant" (1913-14) halts in freeze-frame, as we see the before and the after of a miracle juxtaposed. Pople avers that Spencer sought to release his own delights or confusions (here he prepares that work as war and his call to duty looms) by setting down scenes which "redeem some bewilderments". (64) By shifting his own catharsis onto a biblical event or spiritual backdrop, he purged himself of confusion by a vivid creation as his, and our, memento.
  
"Christ Carrying the Cross" (1920) illustrates the maturation of his vision. Chastened by the Great War, back in Cookham he puts Christ on a village street, as workmen pass with their own ladders held aloft in a similar pose to that of the titular figure. All are doing their job, as Spencer observed. Villagers go about their duties, too, and few notice Christ's action. Neighbors who do stretch their necks out from the upper sills of an adjoining house. "The lace curtains blown out by the draught from the open windows on that sultry summer day have been transformed into wings. The onlookers in their silent commiseration have taken on the protectiveness of angels." (90) Neatly if suggestively, the painting's English residents pass by or peer out as if on sunny spring streets of ancient Jerusalem. 

In many of Spencer's works, if ignorant of his title to alert, a spectator may puzzle over a canvas without understanding who the main figure is, as so often a bustling, oddly elongated, or foreshortened depiction of a crowd challenges a facile comprehension of the theme. Instead, a viewer roams about his visionary work by eye, and becomes swept along in the crowd or gathering. Thus, the viewer shares Spencer's perspective, however skewed or off-kilter. Through such an unsettling immersion, an early twentieth-century modernist obsession with meticulous detail mixes with earlier depictions, drawn from Giotto as much as Gauguin, suggesting how faith then or indifference now contend within a contemporary participant, who examines Spencer and encounters his ambiguity. 

Off to war, Spencer followed three of his brothers. He did his job. Small of stature and not allowed into the fighting ranks until mass slaughter had eased entry requirements, he labored as a hospital orderly and with the ambulance corps in Salonika and Macedonia, followed by parched months in the trenches in 1918, Spencer toughed it out, with detachment from the humiliation he suffered and commitment to outlast his tormenters, until malaria sent him home. Only then did he learn, about six weeks before armistice, one brother had died. Spencer's mystical beliefs appear to have altered given the shocks he encountered during his enlistment. Commissioned as a war artist but with little to show for it, Spencer recorded more memorably he routines he followed in a series of post-war murals at the privately endowed Sandham Memorial Chapel, built for his display. He chose not to commemorate the battles but the behind-the-lines chores. He chose in the vast Resurrection painting at Sandham to depict a dramatic scene. Christ is rising, from beneath a heap of plain white crosses, pulled off of Him by soldiers, from both sides, who all climb out from tombs and trenches. This spectacle stretches to the horizon, as crosses pile up and, nightmare over and heaven at hand, bodies shake graves free.

His other great painting of the 1920s shares the theme of resurrection. Placing its imminence in the Cookham churchyard, this also features repetition. But whereas the Sandham murals portray duties as a human necessity, the 1926 Cookham Resurrection duplicates figures of Spencer and his villagers, with a significant addition. Not until his thirties did he experience sexual fulfillment, and his delayed marriage in 1925 to Hilda Carline fueled his belated integration of the erotic and the ethereal which had hovered in his paintings recently and restlessly. The joy of a humanistic scene of revelation, where his early sketches as Pople includes of an austere God give way to the embraces of a triumphant Hilda cradling their firstborn daughter testify to the invigorated perspective of the roused and redeemed male artist. Pople notes, however, how the idealized Hilda in the many archetypes her husband rushed her into, in person and in paint, early on complicated the messier reality of marriage. 

Pople draws deeply upon Spencer's writings, while he cautions that at times "a hurt overcoloured Stanley's reflections" (187). That is, he sharpened slights or smoothed out memories to fit his own recollections, which in turn filtered into his paintings. These grew in his mind into a whole, even if for practical reasons he had to sell of some of their renderings, while as with the Resurrection series he returned to themes again, or as in his larger murals spun off details as their own paintings to market. The totality of his work from the later 1920s on combines the real and the imaginary, the fabled and the factual, inextricably. In ink and by brush, Cookham, his friends, and his lovers recur.

When Patricia Preece entered his life, at first casually as a near-neighbor returned (in 1927 with her companion Dorothy Hepworth) to a place she had known in childhood, her erotic and emotional appeal for Stanley grew. Both she and her partner (Dorothy denied after Patricia's death any "physical relationship"; Patricia called her a "sister") painted; Patricia when seeking patronage or display of her art subsumed Dorothy's art under her own name. Placed as she was, Patricia manipulated a besotted Spencer to gain finery and dress herself in the manner she saw fit, as his reputation brought him a steady income, by requests for landscapes which kept him distracted from his visionary work. Eager for him to earn more, Patricia urged him to produce still lifes and landscapes steadily, instead. Pople estimates that Spencer spent about $60,000 in today's currency attending to her whims during this unstable period when, married to Hilda, he contemplated a ménage à trois. This led to complications.

Class tension between the humbly-born Spencer and genteel Preece has been exaggerated perhaps by some biographers, but the disparity of their perspectives arose early on. Pople cites her 1932 diary: "Now that he has decided to live here, I wish we had not chosen to come, for he is such a nuisance to us, and so jealous and quarrelsome unless one is continually praising his painting." (283) His compulsive energy increased. Pople propounds that for Spencer, Hilda remained his God-image while Patricia became his Cookham-image. He channeled these impulses into his art and his relationships, to join erotic with spiritual searches towards a fulfilled identity, his fundamental quest in the 1930s.

Hilda and he both painted Patricia; Spencer's wife (who "had heard it all before" as Preece recorded at the onset of finding herself the recipient of Spencer's conversation, evidently a constant chatter) found herself playing uneasy go-between. The going deepened, or detoured as Preece maneuvered it, by Preece's ambiguous-or-not relationship with Hepworth. Enticed, Spencer let his fancies loose. 

Pople explains that Spencer longed to break free of what he phrased as the "prison-wall-tapping" keeping people apart. His visionary series (e.g., "Love on the Moor," "Love Among the Nations," "Adoration of Old Men," "Sunflower and Dog Worship") reveled in unbounded lovemaking. His biographer explains the tumult. "He was in the strict sense of the adjective a 'pure' artist--one who in wonder interpreted the mystery of his own experience." Instead of asking our empathy or sympathy, Spencer forces us in the roiling and rotund depictions of freed bodies caught up in passion to accept the awesome miracle of life. In nudes, he painted Patricia unflinchingly as he would along her dimpled, mottled flesh the perspective, in his simile, as if an ant crawled over it. He stared down skin.

For good reason, Pople titles part six of this biography "The Marital Disasters: 1936-1939". Spencer acted boldly under Patricia's spell. He signed over his home to her, to fund her lifestyle. Unable to cope, Hilda and their two daughters left that home, and she filed for divorce. During the aftermath, Patricia continued to influence Stanley. Pople phrases this muddle as clearly as anyone might: "By an astute balancing act, she could arrange affairs to benefit her materially while freeing her from the sexual obligations of marriage, for which Hilda would be available." (361) Assuming marriage to Patricia would be but a "legal formality", Spencer married Patricia as soon as the law permitted. 

The triple arrangement proved stillborn. He importuned his patrons; neither wife wanted him.  Doubling his feminine inspirations for art, he included Elsie, his Cookham maid, and Daphne, a generous friend. Another war drafted Spencer as a commissioned artist. He illustrated Port Glasgow shipyard. He envisioned typically a larger platform for his murals than even that war's duration could fulfill. Meanwhile, he tried to woo faltering Hilda. A devout Christian Scientist, her views never jibed with Stanley's eclecticism. As Patricia pithily put it when Hilda was institutionalized: "God talked to her. It is just that he talked a little more inconveniently than usual." (432) 

He painted two more resurrections, as the end of the war found here a touching depiction in joyful reunions, and in one, a portrayal of Hilda as needing support getting up after her own return from the dead, it seems. In Glasgow, he had met what Pople calls the "last of his major handholders", Charlotte. A married psychiatrist, a German émigré who had studied with Jung, she found Stanley a congenial sort given his mystical bent. After the war, he tried to keep all of his women content, as they came and went in his bachelor life then. He divorced Patricia on grounds of non-consummation, and while he continued to pine for female companionship, unstinting devotion to his art took precedence over his desires. He pursued Hilda, but slowly he convinced himself at last of the futility. 

After her death in 1950, the last nine years of Spencer's life found him feted. For a measure of how far he had progressed, yet how closely he had kept his focus, compare his 1914 self-portrait that graces the cover with the one near its closing pages, painted a few months before he died in 1959. He fixes his eyes upon himself, and he records his features in a direct, composed, and confident manner. 

He continued to work on enormous canvases, leaving as with his last giant epic, "Christ Preaching at the Cookham Regatta" some of the best unfinished. While Pople regards the posture of Jesus as encouraging His listeners, on seeing this depiction for myself recently at the Stanley Spencer Gallery in the converted Methodist chapel in Cookham, I regarded the pose as frightening, as if the Redeemer cowed the little ones, unable to resist His imposing posture or power. Ambiguity accompanies any interpretation of Spencer. Pople, despite his patience, attests to the difficulty of reconciling the underlying philosophy the artist formulated in his heap of largely unexamined and verbose letters and journals with the art itself to full satisfaction. "So personal are the associations that is impossible to follow him with his own degree of excitement into such territories of the imagination." (485)
 
All the same, this biography stands as the best introduction so far to these territories. Like Dante, Spencer fused a visionary element illuminated by a startling faith, a political critique, a disgust with contemporary cant, and a daring use of analogy. He made it all recognizable by fresh analogies and surprising juxtapositions of people at their best and worst. Spencer tolerated little opposition and his prickly ethics, and his own long battles with conformity, led to his insistence upon integrity. Pople interviewed many who were still alive and their memories of Spencer, along with careful archival research from him and many of his colleagues and teachers and friends, establishes this as essential. 
(Amazon US 2-1-14; Author's website)

Fiona MacCarthy's "Stanley Spencer: An English Vision": Book Review

Having admired Fiona MacCarthy's biographies of bold English artists Eric Gill and William Morris, I anticipated that this shorter overview from a 1997 exhibition of 64 works might reveal insights on a third artist who challenged convention. Fiona McCarthy in sixty pages takes advantage of the larger format to offer an overview which rejects the soft-focus approach even as it accepts that his rounded figures and walled-in "childhood containments" express well Spencer's favorite adjective: "cosy."

As a counterpoint, early on she asserts: "Stanley Spencer looked like a village eccentric. He was not one. There was nothing of the amateur or dilettante in him. His spiritual and personal struggles were in some sense as painful as Van Gogh's." (5) Tough-minded and not as sentimental as may be surmised, Spencer wrote of inflicting "spiritual rape" on everything he strove as an artist to absorb, and that estimation fits him well. "The most impressive of his paintings have the innate gravity that comes from deeply absorbed experience."

She focuses on his earlier career, and the English vision for her appears to be grounded, after his return to Cookham after the Great War and his marriage unravelled, in a plunge from youthful wonder into mature willfulness. McCarthy labels rightly the predicament which found him playing off the resentment Hilda and the calculation of Patricia "alternating tragedy and farce." (42) Out of it, by the early 1930s, his energies seemed to have been warped. Cookham represented to him less the utopia of his late-Victorian formation and more a melange of an existentialist self-affirmation and a pantheistic blood-lust. "Spencer's creative urges seem to feed on emotional and sexual agitation."

MacCarthy, therefore, delves into this period to explore the candor he evoked in his nudes of Patricia, anticipating in their unrelenting exposure of the sagging and dimpled flesh the eye of Lucien Freud. She documents his time "out in the wilderness" after estrangement from Patricia follows a failed reconciliation with the increasingly despondent Hilda. Presaging as well the tragic figures of Francis Bacon, the paintings of Christ in his own wilderness doubt play off their creator's own 1939 solitude.

Of his later career, MacCarthy judges a drop-off in results, whether the Port Glasgow shipbuilding murals which constituted his contribution to the WWII effort (and she notes how he was one of the very few who painted in both wars on behalf of the Crown in an official capacity), or his portraits and landscapes which by the 1950s constituted much of his way to make a living while he contemplated the "Church House, his temple of eroticism" to all the women he had loved.

About the woman who enticed him the most, in her absence more than her presence, in the long run perhaps, MacCarthy calls it "obsessive. Perhaps it was the only means that Spencer had of recognising their tragic incompatability and his own considerable cruelty to Hilda, recycling her so wonderfully in his mind." (57) He could not stop writing to her from beyond her grave, nor could he end the return he made to her embrace in his sketches and drawings for the ambitious chapel of love.

The 64 reproductions feature as captions some passages gleaned from the three million words of his notes and letters at the Tate Gallery Archive. While the editorial constraints may have compressed MacCarthy's insights into a shorter narrative than ideal (it ends suddenly and parts of his life are not expanded), it provides a thoughtful, brief balance to Duncan Robinson's one-volume large-format introduction, Kitty Hauser's monograph, and a transition to Keith Bell's hefty catalogue of Spencer's oeuvre. (All have been also reviewed by me as has this on Amazon US 12-21-13.)

Kitty Hauser's "Stanley Spencer": Book Review

While a few titles about this iconoclastic English painter introduce him in a short span, Hauser's book combines a convincing thesis with her combination of well-chosen illustrations and incisive, accessible text in this 2001 monograph. She packs a lot in eighty pages, and she places Stanley Spencer firmly within his Cookham village contexts. Neither romanticizing nor distorting his very rooted quality in his native place, Kitty Hauser strives to connect him to his time, his social connections, and his personal experiences during the first half of the twentieth century, more or less.

Of his penchant for integrating the miraculous and the mundane in Cookham, so that Christ, for instance, might blend in with Spencer's neighbors on the high street, so much one may not be able to distinguish Him from them, Hauser emphasizes how subject and purpose joined in Spencer's work from an early age. Even though he appeared when his contemporaries pioneered modernism, Spencer took its elements to blend oddly or juxtapose dramatically with natural and domestic settings. In this "secret topography of Cookham," where railings reveal and cordon off and where skewed angles and foreshortened perspectives reveal angels and curtains as nearly indistinguishable, concealment nestles alongside revelation. From Spencer's walks, his memories stored up from childhood abundantly fertile images, as he took the scenes around him and the figures he passed to populate his canvases.

Hauser shows how in his early biblical paintings "the sacred is perceived in our very midst, as if we might come across the birth of Christ on a walk in the country, or bump into a character from the Old Testament on our way to the shops; as if miracles go on all the time, unregarded, behind the high walls of gardens." (37) The idyll Spencer enjoyed between his stint at the Slade School ending in 1912 and his war service commencing in 1915 appears to have been his happiest time. All he did was wander the village and paint, living at his family's home with no other responsibilities.

The war, of course, changed him, and he returned to Cookham unsettled. Furthermore, after the age of thirty or so, he finally found intimacy with his first wife, Hilda Carline and then the strange obsession with the woman who became his second wife, Patricia Preece. Hauser documents how the latter woman strove to get out of the diligent artist whatever she could in terms of money or frocks, and the subsequent convolutions (as dramatized by Pam Gems in her 1996 play "Stanley), show another aspect in which the transcendental, through sexual obsession and delight and confusion, rubbed up against the quotidian. As Hauser relates in another tie-in, to Spencer's WWI memorial panels at Sandham depicting not battle or slaughter but petty chores of orderlies and a "painter's trick" by which heaven and earth interpenetrate in the unrecognized, uncelebrated duties that consume so much of our lives, the similar blur of insight glimpsed in sex or contemplation of the body, as Spencer's nudes of Patricia unsparingly display, show Spencer's refusal to separate the fleshy tones of his palette from the spiritual suggestions of his themes, enmeshed in the bible, his household routines and/or his neighborhood observations. For, these often conflated into a single expression.

Therefore, his work, where a saint may pop up on the high street and where a house may harbor an evangelical surprise or a naked shock evades the usual modernist rejection of narrative content for formal values. Hauser places Spencer in his material realm, and she concludes that his paintings "are an attempt to demonstrate the double life of things; in a sense they are lessons in seeing." (75)  But this took its toll. What he viewed around him pleased him far more than his lovers could, and he drew contentment from his beloved Cookham best by revisiting it on his canvasses, in his sketches, and in his compulsive letters to the woman he divorced but could never abandon, Hilda, which continued (up to a hundred pages in one example) after she suffered mental illness and then died.

Taking this into account, seeing the costs of Spencer's talent and the impact it had on those around him, Hauser cautions any who would promote him only as a "visionary prophet of love," (76) for only when situating Spencer in his birthplace (where he spent two-thirds of his life) can we understand "the very material contexts that fed him as an artist, the human muddle of bodged relationships, thwarted desires, egotism and social aspirations as well as marsh-meadow visions, religious feeling and domestic bliss." Taking the sordid with the sacramental, the earthy with the ethereal, as Spencer himself for all his failings and pride strove to do, appears the best answer to how we should approach the man in terms of his abundant and sometimes astonishing artistic legacy. (See also Fiona MacCarthy's book with a similar scope and focus. 12-21-13 to Amazon US)

Duncan Robinson's "Stanley Spencer": Book Review

The 1990 printing updates the 1979 version, subtitled "Visions of a Berkshire village"; Duncan Robinson draws upon fellow scholars to offer a valuable introduction in a brisk text to this influential and controversial English painter. Over 100 illustrations provide a look at his work (and sometimes his contemporaries) but some of the monochrome photos are nearly thumbnail. Better are the fifty depictions in color of his neo-Primitive paintings.

Spencer may seem to some one-of-a-kind and to others very much of his early 20c training. Everyone from Giotto to D.H. Lawrence, Burne-Jones to Wyndham Lewis, Gauguin to the Cubists, can be drawn upon for relevant connection, as well as closer contemporaries such as Eric Gill and poets and painters who fought alongside Spencer in the formative experience of the Great War. Robinson notes, however too briefly, Spencer's decision for his art not to emphasize brutality but the redemptive powers of the trenches and hospitals provides a logical extension of his service in the ambulance brigade. His paintings as a form of immersion allow the same odd mixtures of perspective and detail that enliven his village paintings. Both take everyday elements and blend them with the mystical and surreal, creating a dreamlike sensation of the palpable crossing over with the ethereal, obliquely.

The text moves quickly, and the digressions to others in his generation and his predecessors help to place Spencer more in his time than out of it as romantics might have it. The text seems to dip into his life and then draw back from it, but this may be an editorial imposition due to the short length of the text compared to the pictorial content in 128 pages. Robinson's expertise in British art allows him to go back and forth from the contexts intellectually and personally that Spencer navigated in his eccentric life with the greater forces that war and making a living necessitated. While more here on his religious attitude might explain more, the ambiguity of his very distinctive angle on the intersection of local with universal endures.

From his beloved Berkshire village of Cookham, he drew the innovative combination of the everyday faces he knew well in natural and man-made settings. He included his friends, wives, and neighbors into portraits, landscapes, and the religiously bold or even sexually charged imagery. While he had to depict war again, twenty-odd years later, he again chose to use his memorable poses, settings, and elongated or foreshortened figures to commemorate not destruction but energy. You can see in the results here Spencer's love for humanity.

As Robinson reminds us, the pressures of the time made Spencer no less determined to make his individual mark on artistic society. In what he dismissed unjustly as "potboilers" for hire we see him apply no less a fine brush and a careful eye to landscapes and portraits executed, even as he labored on vast canvases full of resurrections and frolic. He gained fame and a knighthood before his death, which barely finds mention herein, which may be somewhat appropriate for a man who tried to bring the joy of salvation down to English earth. (Amazon US 12-11-13 or in Britain, 11-12-13!)

Ag dul go Londain aríst, cuid a trí

Chuaigh muid trí músaeim Dé hAoine. Is maith Léna agus mé ealaine Breataine. Mar sin, iarr muid ag dul beirt is fearr i Londain.

Measaim go bhfuil an Tate Bhreatain is é mó fearr liom. D'fhóghlaim go raibh na deilbh le Jacob Epstein ar am seo. Chónaic mé "Tír gan fír" an deilbh cuimhneachain brúidiúl ó An Cogadh Mór le Charles Sargeant Jagger.

Sheoladh muid suas an Thames ar an bhád farontóireachta chuig Tate Nua-Aoiseach drámatúil. Nílím ábalta fháil ach seomra amháin a cur cuairt, faoi póstaeir propaganda Sóivéadach, áfach ann. Bhí suim agam níos mo i Músaem na Londain na nDugaí.

Tá Na Dugthailte áit plódaithe anois, an-iomhlán leis saibhreas óga agus trádála airgeadais. Ach, ní raibh siad mar mealltach nuair d'oibre na daoine bochta ann ar feadh na gcéadta ann.  B'fhéidir, tháinig mo shinste a obair i bPoplar ansin nó a fanacht anseo.

Thúg muid an traein go Canary Wharf go dtí dinnéar Indiach Theas ag Quilon in aice leis na Chlos na hAlba agus Pálás Buckingham. Ní raibh easca a fháil an bialann ann. Mar sin féin, bhí bia an-blasta againn ansin.

To London again, part three.

We went to three museums on Friday. Layne and I like British art. Therefore, we went to a pair of the best in London.

I think that the Tate Britain is the best. I learned this time about sculptures by Jacob Epstein. I saw "No Man's Land", a brutal memorial plaque of the Great War by Charles Sargeant Jagger.

We sailed up the Thames on a ferry boat to the dramatic Tate Modern. I was not able to find but a single room to visit, about Soviet propaganda posters. I had more interest in the London Museum of the Docklands.

The Docklands is a crowded place now, very full of young wealth and financial trade. But, it was not so glamorous when the poor worked there for many centuries. Perhaps, my ancestors came to work in Poplar there or to leave from here.

We took the train from Canary Wharf to a South Indian dinner at Quilon near Scotland Yard and Buckingham Palace. It was not easy to find the restaurant there. All the same it was a very tasty meal for us there. (Grianghraf/Photo: Thames)

Laurent Binet's "HHhH": Book Review

This novel's curious title derives from the German initials of the phrase "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich." That is, Reinhard(t), Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, #2 man in the Nazi ranks, and "the Butcher of Prague." While Laurent Binet's topic may be very well-known among students of Middle European history, the Czech lands, and of WWII, the heroism shown by Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, one Slovak, one Czech, to fight for their nation against tyranny deserves retelling.

As with two recent, massive novels  influences this French author credits, Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones (which he disparages as "Houellebecq does Nazis") and William T. Vollmann's Europe Central, HHhH takes on a modern perspective, plunging a reader into the German mindset and the frenzy of the era, seasoned with a retrospective judgement upon the morality abused or rescued in WWII.

The difference? Binet chooses never to immerse himself into fiction. Most of these three-hundred quickly told pages (a fraction of Littell or Vollmann) treat the subject and how it defies the reversion to fantasy or imagination. That becomes Binet's obsession. Inspired by his two Czechoslovak figures, sent to England to train for their suicide mission behind enemy lines, Binet prefers to examine the historical record and to fill in the gaps, with some dialogue and invented scenes, but only when he cannot make the facts fit his tale. Fewer times, therefore, than expected, we learn how subsequent testimony by survivors accounts for both Nazi and enemy reactions, and from these, juxtaposed with Binet's reading and reactions, the novel slowly accrues.

Operation Anthropoid, as the English termed it with the Czechoslovak resistance, itself decimated under Heydrich, draws us into the antagonist. "It's as if a Dr. Frankenstein novelist had mixed up the greatest monsters of literature to create a new and terrifying monster." (99) Worse, for he kills not on paper but in person and through his minions.

How Binet conveys this may annoy some readers. He makes it personal, and mixes up his "visions with the known facts. It's just how it is." (105) But then, on the same page, he backtracks, and he admits his mistakes as he researches his storyline. He knows "fiction does not respect anything," but he also know that the drama inherent in his subject causes him to imagine what cannot be verified.

Real people are "both greater and more flawed than any fictional character." The chapters #250 + #251 prove gripping, even though--or because--I had visited the crypt in question and seen the place commemorated today in Prague. The climax shows courage amidst absurdity. "I think the world is ridiculous, moving, and cruel. The same is true for this book: the story is cruel, the protagonists are moving, and I am ridiculous. But I am in Prague." (320) In that city of a hundred towers, the power of the predicament that seven Resistance fighters choose in 1942 remains resonant, and poignant. Amazon US 9-25-13

Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being": Book Review

I could not recall if I had read this years ago when or before the film. Given my son's interest in both novel and adaptation, I found my wife's own copy and dove in. I realized I had not read it, but recognized early on the significance of Sabina's bowler hat, the 1988 film's icon; the pleasure of the 1984 book as in the successful cinematic version lies in how such symbols and tropes revolve and swirl over time. An intrusive narrator adds far more insights than could a film, however, gleaned from a cultural heritage, as well as such predecessors in the art of storytelling as Stendhal, Sophocles, and Tolstoy.

It's therefore a novel of ideas as well as a love triangle (at least, around Tomas; adding Franz to Tereza and F's wife Marie-Claude we extend the dimensions, let alone Tomas' unnamed hundreds of lovers). One could quote hundreds of passages. Aphoristic, the prose lingers. If you want to see infinity, the teller tells us, close your eyes. Distance between one's life and one's feelings dominates its characters as they struggle to make sense out of the Czech occupation by the Soviets after the failed 1968 demonstrations. The uprising occupies less space than one may anticipate: the aftermath, as Tomas finds in a gripping sequence, brings down many intellectuals, as doctors turn window washers. Still, that affords him more time for seduction.

Unsettled by her inability to conform, Tereza also bristles. In Paris a year or two (note the ambiguity as she reflects on it) after the occupation, she resents the supposition of her French friends that she'd join the local protests against the Soviets. "She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never make them understand." (100)

Sabina aspires to live in truth, but wonders how: "lying neither to ourselves nor to others" she considers "was possible only away from the public; the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntary make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies." (112-3) Sabina hates novels that give away the secrets of intimacy; Kundera deepens suspense and builds momentum by state pressure to expose loyalties.

Tereza--in what may seem hyperbole to us as with the French, but to those within a police state riddled with informers, compounded by casual conversations leading to coercion and compromise in the name of Communist conformity, may not seem a literary conceit--cringes. A tableau on Prague's Petrin Hill haunts her. Her mother resembles a wailing jailer. "Almost from childhood, she knew that a concentration camp was nothing exceptional or startling but something very basic, a given into which we are born and from which we can escape only through the greatest of efforts." (137)

All three major characters attempt this liberation. Tereza interrogates herself with the types of questions about her self within her body or without it that a child might raise. "Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence." (137) Michael Henry Heim's translation shows the clarity of this expression, even as Kundera's non-chronology evades neat order.

Yet the Middle European setting reveals some control over one's mindset no matter who's in charge. The "premeditated quality" of European beauty grounds its inhabitants within "an aesthetic intention and a long-range plan." (101) By contrast, New York City represents a later stage of "beauty by mistake," not intended but a lesser expression before beauty itself perishes from this earth. 

In this grayer time, cemeteries provide peace for Sabina. A reclamation by the urban of a vanished rural presence hovers. In the secular, a deeper longing persists. Kundera evokes an older sense of interior awe within primitive people early on: one must have once marveled at the unseen, before Tomas and his colleagues invaded the body's interior. Heartbeats invisible, a soul lurked within the cage of one's own ribs, and duality turned into identity. Now, "the face is nothing but an instrument panel registering all the bodily mechanisms: digestion, sight, hearing, respiration, thought." (40)

Speaking of the differences between outer and inner, the tensions during part six, "The Great March," address the trouble when the "brotherhood of man" beloved by liberals worldwide forces conformity. Stalin's son, Parmenides' division between heaviness and lightness, Nietzsche's Turin Horse. baby Moses in the bulrushes, Descartes, Plato's Symposium, Adam's naming of the animals: allusions multiply. Kundera seeks to align his novel, with its sprawling approach (we learn in an aside, fifty pages from its end, the fate of two of the protagonists, and the time continues to leap ahead of the events we thought it would remain discussing), to the Western intellectual tradition. This can get messy, as the narrator himself would agree.

Still, the sixth section as it follows Franz into a mercy mission (with media coverage and celebrities) to let medical aid enter Communist Cambodia rouses Kundera to integrate a discussion of kitsch. This pings off of one on excrement, but his point is that glossing over the human with all its flaws leads to emotional falsity. "In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme." (252)

It's a "folding screen set up to curtain off death," and the "true function" of kitsch forces upon the viewer a tyranny of giving in to unearned feelings, tired re-creations of easy sentiment. Kundera compares Sabina's explanation of her paintings earlier to Tereza: "on the surface, an intelligible lie, underneath, the unintelligible truth showing through."

In some situations, people may be "condemned to playact. Their struggle with mute power (the mute power across the river, a police transmogrified into mute microphones in the wall) is the struggle of a theater company that has attacked an army." Franz like Tereza distances himself from the posturing, yet like Tomas, he is haunted if he does not do something against the forces of oppression. (268)

Political kitsch, for Kundera's characters, threatens, whether labelled from the left or on the right. "Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion." (278) Yet, somehow Kundera's seventh section, "Karenin's Smile" in a powerful sequence conveying the decline of Tomas and Tereza's beloved dog, evokes not kitsch but earned emotion. I doubt if anyone who has loved a pet can read this easily.

While the conclusion (which without spoilers shows how the film adaptation differed) did not fully sustain the impact I had expected, the conjuration of the ideal attempted of the pastoral idyll within the Czech lands' occupation sharpens the contrasts Kundera favors between cities the country dwellers cannot wait to move to and the predicament of the intellectuals in internal exile who depart Prague for such places as their last defense against the kitsch and the compromises of its regimes.

Image:  Daisies (Sedmikrasky). Directed by Věra Chytilová. This fits the time and mood perfectly. (7-9-13 to Amazon US)