Ursula Le Guin's "The Telling": Book Review

This was inspired by the suppression by the communists of the Taoists in China. Le Guin in her introduction to the 2017 Library of America edition of her collected Hainish works admits that her knowledge of this cultural obliteration came relatively recently. She fits this into her system, with an emissary from Terra, of Asian Indian origins, living in Vancouver. Terra is in tumult too; fanatics try to impose a one-god regime upon the disparate peoples in the tellingly named Sutty's multicultural land. She is sent as an anthropologist to Akan to investigate that world's parallel descent into control.

The control is exerted by a relentless hatred of the old. The peons are remade into "producer-consumers," and the state itself, influenced by the same fanatics earlier, seems to have learned their dark lessons well. Le Guin sharply depicts the soulless situation of the inhabitants who toil mirthlessly. Redolent of not only China under Mao or North Korea under its dictators, Akan is bleak. 

Sutty finds her mission to observe on behalf of the Ekumen, and to report back, compromised by a minder called by her The Monitor. Their fates will intersect as Sutty travels north from the megapolis into rural areas where she learns that not all of the old learning and forbidden ways have vanished. 

At this stage in her long career, Ursula Le Guin incorporated feminist themes and fluid sexuality into her characters. Sutty's lesbianism puts her further apart from those seeking complete domination over the private as well as public life. Technology has advanced, too, and the parallels to our age are there.

This story moves slowly. Especially at first, Le Guin channeled through her protagonist parcels out facts we need to know sparingly. But there is a fascination with the way that Akan plays off our Earth. Totalitarian dystopia in the name of progress, unity and conformity isn't only "science fiction." 

It also wraps up very suddenly. Sutty's summoning is brought about in a paragraph halfway, with seemingly no foreshadowing. This may reflect life's surprises, but it threw me off. The conclusion follows rapidly after some earnest negotiation. It's not a tidy ending, either. But it may be more real. (Amazon US 9/24/17) 

E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime": Book Review

No, I never saw the 1981 movie. And after sampling the author himself reading the audio version in a surprisingly perfunctory, even dull, manner, I opted for the book on a recent flight to New York. The story rushed past, and as I was using a Kindle, I had no idea that the novel would finish so rapidly. I felt I was halfway through when suddenly, the characters were all wrapped up and the ending loomed. Like the audio, it's itself perfunctory in places, and it felt as if E.L. Doctorow wanted it over.

Looking back forty-plus years, this 1975 novel feels a bit dated. Of course, it's an historical narrative dramatizing real life characters such as Evelyn Nesbit and Harry Thaw, Harry Houdini and Emma Goldman, J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford, and a bit of Sigmund Freud and Booker T. Washington in cameos. This is mixed with parallel stories of a Jewish immigrant and his daughter, and the "Younger Brother" of a scion of a flags and fireworks manufacturer in New Rochelle, NY. Yes, it's a bit of an easy target for Doctorow, and like the incorporation of the Coalhouse plot that sparks the action, these themes carry a counterculture air of disdain and dismissal for the American dream and its first takers.

The immigrant vs. Yankee, white vs. black, Irish vs. everyone else tensions permeate these pages. It reads well, but the sour authorial tone dampens enjoyment. Doctorow wants us to criticize the wealthy and while this may be an admirable sentiment then as now, the intrusive voice (which in other novels I do not mind necessarily) grates now and then. He keeps a distance between us and the characters, so the events feel more staged than organically motivated. as if to exemplify class struggle. This suits the 1902-1912 focus, but when towards the conclusion, other noteworthy struggles crowd in, the pace alters and one can sense Doctorow's manipulation and compression.

If he'd taken his time in the latter portions, it might have resembled the USA trilogy by John Dos Passos even more than it certainly does, especially in the Younger Brother's picaresque itinerary. Doctorow starts this part off inventively, but he then crams in more telling than showing, and the momentum weakens when it should have accelerated after the pivotal New York City showdown.

The mechanical nature of this storyline may result, as a 1998 piece in the Observer reminds readers, from Doctorow's debt to the novella Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist. While Doctorow nods to this source for Coalhouse Walker, it does tip his own reworking of this idea into melodrama, as this Observer critic noted. Like Dos Passos, the machinations of the characters wind up less engaging than the ideas and the milieu depicted, in the early part of last century. (Amazon US 5-30-17)

Lionel Shriver's "The Mandibles": Book Review

After nearly 130 reviews posted [on Amazon US, where this appeared 9/28/16], mine will not rehash much of the story. I like Lionel Shriver's little-known novel on the North of Ireland and while her take on obesity in Big Brother was less successful, I admire her willingness to immerse herself, whether the theme is snooker, bicycling, tennis, or a child who is a bit of a problem. So, as a fan of dystopias, I wondered how she'd handle the near-future economic meltdown of the Renunciation.

Turns out she puts enormous paragraphs in the mouths of not only the put-upon Georgetown professor of economics, but a teen prodigy. They wind up having to explain theory and practice of the "dismal science" to the family, which grows as hard times fall and never ebb in 2029. Shriver tackles the misanthropy and growing chaos well, if from the perspective of a hard-to-like matriarch of a privileged clan in Manhattan. True, pity is needed for those who as the prof notes have more than one pair of shoes, and to her credit, Shriver moves the family tale along rather briskly.

But as the professor lets on early, his pontifications are hard to let go of, and other characters speak like educated folks on paper, with almost no distinction. Only a burst of "black English" by one client of the protagonist of the first 3/4 of the novel seems to come from another class or reality. Still, seeing a New York streetscape where the homeless do include nuclear physicists in fact and not fantasy, and where the street people have their pick of Posturepedic mattresses discarded as the system breaks down and selfishness gives way to brutishness seems to confirm Hobbes.

She gets digs in. No more worries about lactose tolerance, or gender dysmorphia. Or, obesity, in the harsh reality that replaces coddling or comfort.

Oddly, in the last quarter of the book, from the view of a particularly annoying if prescient person, the presumed religious backlash to the surveillance of the resurgent US government is absent. Shriver succeeds as many writers have in showing us the New American Order, but she shrinks from the rural reaction, and her observation of the world outside NYC does not convince. As she divides her time between Brooklyn and London as a longtime ex-pat, perhaps she is too used to reading about her fellow 'Muricans rather than roaming beyond the chattering creative classes she likes to skewer. True, mango-wood side tables won't rouse much of a reaction vs. a 5 lb. bag of rice in 2029 where "dial 2 for English" is the new norm. Her predictions may come true--I fear that of the "cuboids" of dead trees once known as books may be hastened, despite her dire estimation of Amazon itself in this brave new world. Anyone having read Huxley's tale may find The Mandibles an echo, if another uneven message.

Alex Beam's "The Feud": Audiobook Review

Fame came to Nabokov with Lolita as it ebbed from Wilson after his brief notoriety for the then-racy Memoirs of Hecate County. The two "frenemies" wound up as such, Alex Beam reasons, when the wealthy Russian exile found his comfortable critical and financial perch far above that of the also privileged Wilson. The neediness the emigre expressed to the the literary lion, Beam concludes, had made Vladimir uneasy decades later, and Wilson's attempts to speak truth to the power that became enshrined in VN led EW to try to hold his ground, and lash out, but VN gave better than he got back.

The titular feud began as VN's massive translation-commentary on the supposedly, to Nabokov, untranslatable Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin appeared. Reviewing in the then-nascent NYRB, Wilson, an earnest devotee of Russian but a progressive who sided with the Soviets, rankled the refugee who recalled the Bolsheviks machine-gunning the ship young VN fled on. Not to mention that the Soviets did in his father. So, Beam steadily narrates (via Robert Pullar's at-first hesitant, than warming up to wit in over five hours that felt due to their detail much longer) the trajectory that lifted up VN and drove down EW, after many years of erudite friendship and intellectual banter and support

That support wavered, Beam shows, well before the Onegin fracas that consumed many of the literati of the mid-1960s. EW had little patience for the likes of Lolita; VN. Beam avers, would have had as scant interest in Patriotic Gore, Wilson's in-depth study of the Civil War. Beam introduces each protagonist, documents their alliance, and then dissects their falling out. He keeps the pace lively in spite of dense material. He employs "kiss off" twice, "kooky," and "frenemy" alongside "booted" and "contumacious" and he enjoys the wit that his subjects naturally delighted in as they conducted what VN typically if obliquely given his prickly nature early on called a "friendly" exchange. And it's fun to imagine as some playful Nabokovians do if it was all a game, with VN writing letters to the NYRB and its ilk as EW and he as him, to mock such battles conducted in these journals. Even if it's fiction. 

(Amazon US 4/21/17) 

John Andrew Fredrick's "Your Caius Aquilla": Book Review

This musician-writer-professor revels in wit. His pair of The King of Good Intentions novels enlivened the indie-rock scene in Los Angeles in the 80s, while his band The Black Watch continues to make spirited and smart rock.(Start with his newest album released around the same time as this, The Gospel According to John.) For Your Caius Aquilla, John Andrew Fredrick plunges into an earlier era filled with corrupt politicians, windbag pundits, and callow military men determined on imperial domination: "We enslave the ones we don't like so they can have the privilege of living or loving Rome." So laments the titular protagonist, whose letters to his wife back home in the capital comprise the first half of this entertaining tale. Caius is fighting what his spouse Lora agrees are but "admittedly superfluous barbarians," and he itches to come home to his family and especially her.

The barrier to this reunion is the extended tour of duty, as there are always more miscreants to kill off. Battle scenes are conveyed with Rabelaisian verve and Joycean excess. It's told in a chatty, slangy prose that runs together. Think of Roman inscriptions carved without punctuation or breaks.

However, these headlong blocks of text go on for pages. They can overwhelm the reader. I recalled C.S. Lewis' advice in taking in poetry. Not to slow, but to keep pace, to hear the voice race forward.

Halfway in, Lora's responses begin to fill the tote bag back to the front, or so it seems. The twist I leave to you to find out, but this fiction does reveal in JAF a heretofore occluded display of his erotic energy. From this point on, the shift in tone and content spurs one to the conclusion. In the manner of clever narratives, the author keeps you turning the pages, wondering where Lora's candor will wend.

Along the headlong way, nods to Proust, Hamlet, Aristophanes, the Life of Brian, The Autumn of the Patriarch (at least for me in the refusal to indent), The Tin Drum, Goodfellas, The Smiths, and (not only for the tennis product placement) David Foster Wallace appear. So do the pleasantly antiquated terms such as roisterer, cove, and rodomontade, from the period the professor specializes in way back

It's fun to think of the couple's son Aurelius complaining about lessons with Cicero, too. "I don't want to have to be so logical all the time." This attitude also infuses these pages, And humor is welcome in these parlous (same as it ever was) times. I end with one of the many lively phrases JAF offers. For all the intended cliches ("just sayin'"), the originality (at least to me) of such as "an apple that looks like your great aunt after she's fallen asleep in the bath" linger as testament to JAF's inventive talent.

Yes, it ends suddenly. So did the first installment of "TKOGI." That makes me wonder if more is in the offing from Caius A. After all, it worked for Robert Graves' Claudius chronicles. (Amazon US 4-23-17. Book's website. And, author's website.)

David Foster Wallace's "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men": Audiobook Review

One blurb lauds the "hilarious" content herein. It's brief, compared to that bent on a harrowing evocation of the titular hideousness. On audio, there is talent applied diligently by a variety of youngish male actors. But this for four hours bogs down into a combination of raw (more ways than one) material for future dramatic monologues for auditions, and what feels, intentionally surely, the transcripts of a variety of depressed, bitter, lustful, wry, and/or erudite (as the author) case studies.

Halfway, #46 does reach an apex of ingenuity. The metaphorical and moral connections between Viktor Frankl's suffering endured that produced his Man's Search for Meaning and the assault perpetrated with a Jack Daniel's bottle on a teen victim ensure that no reader or listener will ever think of that Holocaust memoir-treatise the same from now on. Yet, as with the content overall, the ending's not surprising. These sound, as DFW intended I assume, as character studies of the dark side. But, as with a surfeit of crime fiction, true or imagined, the consumer may be weary too early.

There's an exhaustive determination to record betrayals, rapes, defecation, disgust, hatred, ennui, resentment, and doomed power-plays, and manipulation, in sex and other exchanges turned violent. It's surely what you see is what you get, but this is not a series of themes I care to return to. David Foster Wallace possesses insight, verisimilitude, and intelligence. But the degree to which he forces himself and then us to listen to these revelations batters you down. "His eyes were holes in the world" is how one woman sums up her attacker, tellingly for these blunt themes. (Amazon US 4-17-17)

Herman Melville's "Redburn": Audiobook Review

"A leisurely if perplexing voyage "
What did you like best about Redburn? What did you like least?
I liked the hints of the themes Melville would elaborate in Moby Dick. The start was promising, if heavily "based on a true story" and I presume heavily autobiographical. The Famine emigrants in Liverpool and at sea gain some attention, perhaps notable in fiction of this mid-19th c. era. But I disliked the "Harry" diversion and the latter part of the story weakened the plot. It reminded me of how Huck Finn also falls apart after a strong start, a few decades later.

If you’ve listened to books by Herman Melville before, how does this one compare?
I have not heard any (yet).

What aspect of Kirby Heyborne’s performance would you have changed?
I liked Kirby Heyborne dramatizing David Mitchell's own "heavily autobiographical" coming-of-age Black Swan Green. So I purchased this on that strength. But Kirby H. mispronounces hillocks, shillelagh, Lothario, Hecate, indefatigable, and over and over tarpaulin, to name but a few words he surely should have known, or checked. My [three-star] rating reflects this shortcoming.

Was Redburn worth the listening time?
It unfolds more slowly than any other audiobook I can recall outside of, say, the dense Thomas Sowell treatise on Marxism. Not unpleasant, and I fell asleep (with the timer) many nights as I listened to segments. Melville does put you at sea with him vividly. Despite the clunky plot, this is mostly worthwhile. I assume it's not the highest-ranked among his canon.

Any additional comments?
It's a strain to hear the perorations to Carlo the Italian organ-grinder boy (yes, that's him) as well as the paeans to the "girlish figure" of the narrator's pal and bosom (?) buddy Harry. Their relationship and his backstory are occluded, but scholars now must have devoted feverish scrutiny to what Melville's alluding to. But the novel "goes south" and never returns. (Audible US 3-18-17)

John Irving's "A Prayer for Owen Meany": Audiobook Review

"The crack of the bat"

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

As the novel is so long, I found it more background than foreground for much of the duration. John Irving likes spinning a yarn, yet this could have been edited and streamlined.

Would you recommend A Prayer for Owen Meany to your friends? Why or why not?

Probably not. It's a considerable investment of time for a plot that while delving into character, does not keep a momentum that demands you stop listening. It does not bore, but it can drone. The lack of necessary action and much digression slows the pace down.

What does Joe Barrett bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

I liked his folksy touch. Not only for the New England setting, but for the sky-pilot awkwardness of the Rev. Dudley Wiggin and the rapid-fire snark of Major Rowe. I wished the novel had given Joe Barrett more of a range to work with, as he shows talent in this genre.

Did A Prayer for Owen Meany inspire you to do anything?

Not really. Perhaps reflect again on the folly of Vietnam. It did not convince me of the central moral lesson about Owen's intervention and his calling. But Irving sure tried.

Any additional comments?

The "strangulated falsetto" of Owen is demanding for the speaker and the listener. I admired technically Barrett's ability to switch in and out of it so adroitly. And it will stick with you! (Audible 11/2/16)

George Saunders' "Lincoln in the Bardo": Audiobook Review

"The American Book of the Dead"

If you could sum up Lincoln in the Bardo in three words, what would they be?

Disorienting. Deceptive. Daunting.

Who was your favorite character and why?

I liked the Reverend. While his role is less distinctive than the twinned main tellers, he takes longer to be noticed. But, halfway on, his appearance and the reason for it become evident. This displays nimbly Saunders' skill at delaying information until it's truly needed in fiction.

Have you listened to any of the narrators' other performances before? How does this one compare?

As so many narrate this (166), I can only refer to the main two tellers, Nick Offerman and David Sedaris. The hearty, but measured, turns of the former and the soft, sibilant delivery of the latter grace this collection of voices well, and they are particularly remarkable for their tone.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

Many, especially Ch. 37. The beauty of the language may sound cliched, but the manner in which Saunders conjures up the poignant and the perverse makes for quite the combination.

Any additional comments?

I'd read the novel first. Hearing this without some preparation may discourage the faint of heart explorer of one of the most complex narrations ever attempted by a major modern writer. Considering the dreck that wins awards and shoves aside works of merit like this on the shelves, the recent attention earned by George Saunders is an encouraging harbinger. (Audible US 3/6/17)

Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities": Audiobook Review

Overall

Performance

Story

"You turn into a cipher"

Would you listen to The Bonfire of the Vanities again? Why?

Probably not, but I liked Joe Barrett's reading. It enlivened a book I read when it came out, thirty years ago. But I don't need to visit this story a third time.

Would you recommend The Bonfire of the Vanities to your friends? Why or why not?

For a period piece, a morality tale pre-Internet and social media, it remains a valuable dramatization of the pressure of what the 'flak catchers' Tom Wolfe profiled endured two decades later in the Bronx. This time, it's the legal profession, not the (other) bureaucrats.

What does Joe Barrett bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Having enjoyed his reading of John Irving's "A Prayer for Owen Meany," Barrett here can show off his range of voices and accents as he has many more characters to work with. While the "haw haw haws" on Wolfe's page still grate to the ear here, the verve and pathos Joe Barrett brings to the protagonist, Sherman McCoy, deepens the novel and message.

If you could rename The Bonfire of the Vanities, what would you call it?

"Pin the WASP to the wall"--a phrase used by Sherman's persecutors

Any additional comments?

Ch, 22, a descent from the Dickensian satire into Dantean depths, is harrowing and very well told. One of the longer chapters, but the book generally moves along well. Despite dinner party chat in real time, and those Tom Wolfe elaborations of sartorial and decorative detail. (Audible US 3/5/17)

John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces": Audiobook Review

 

""Oh my God!""

Where does A Confederacy of Dunces rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Up there more for the energy of the plot and the depth of characters and the skill of the telling than Barrett Whitener's performance. I grew to like it, but it has its challenges.

What did you like best about this story?

The twisted relationship with correspondent "The Minx", as well as the "Oh my God!" bursts regularly from our bloated protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly at every outrage he witnesses.

Which character – as performed by Barrett Whitener – was your favorite?

George, the prissy foil who turns confidante to Ignatius in a skillfully paced conversation that shows off the talent of John Kennedy Toole. Toole builds up both interlocutors so that the naivete of one and the conniving of the other get switched and jumbled as well as run parallel. JKT handles the tone of each of his lowlife participants deftly, from New Orleans.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

Hotdogs and Pigtails

Any additional comments?

Burma Jones is not easy to convey "live"; Whitener began the novel sounding in the omniscient narrator's voice as far too neutral and robotic. The women are shown with varying degrees of success, and the registers of different N.O.L.A. dialects and timbres is no easy task to keep moving here. The plot does go into a lot of side stories, building slowly, but the value of "A Confederacy of Dunces" rests in the care JKT takes to portray each figure. (Audible US 2/16/17)

George Saunders' "Lincoln in the Bardo": Book Review

Abraham Lincoln's eleven-year-old son Willie died in February 1862. The grieving President visited the boy's crypt in Georgetown's cemetery several times. Out of this setting of a "white stone house," George Saunders constructs his first novel. Adapting the Tibetan concept of the afterlife perceived as the transitional state of the misleading bardo, he populates his other-worldly realm with 166 voices.

Drawing from the narrative accounts in contemporary newspapers, oral accounts, and narrative histories, Saunders incorporates his research into his fiction. In an appropriately numbered 108 chapters, his tellers from the bardo alternate rapidly and fitfully. Interspersed separately are snippets from the reports of journalists, witnesses, and scholars. It makes a dizzying experience for a reader. 

Gradually, one gets used to the format. Two inhabitants of the next realm, the voluble tale-teller Roger Bevins III, and his calming companion Hans Vollman, dominate. They guide us into this strange world. Preparing us for the arrival of Willie, they also enable us to understand the novelty of Abraham's entry into this space out of time. For the father dares to touch the "sick-form" of his boy. 

The significance of this gesture resonates. Such loving appears rare in this situation. Delusions abound, and a few in the bardo succumb, to a fate uncertain to those who resist, but a state that hints at being less amenable than their current predicament. Saunders subtly reveals the set-up of this Buddhist-inspired but very Yankee take. In elegant or demotic prose, he captures the mid-19th century styles of speech, and he immerses his audience in the ways of expression during the Civil War. He also blends the perspectives of fallen soldiers, slaves, servants, and the lower classes, complicating the milieu to expand it far beyond the White House and its chroniclers, then and now. 

Within this "serendipitous mass co-habitation," the beings ponder why they are there. They agree on the fact that their entry into this enclosure has saddened their loved ones: "Our departure caused pain." Fate, time, destiny emerge as possible reasons. Another does, too, the question of "innate evil" within humans. Saunders places us among fellow inquirers. Even the President "could only stand and watch, eyes wide, having no power at all in this new-arrived and brutal realm." The Reverend Everly Thomas faces the ultimate question of all humanity once they have perished: "How did you live?"

The answers vary among those gathered. Some have been there a while, some recently transported. Suddenly, among them and throughout this story, a "familiar, yet always bonechilling, firesound associated with the matter-lightblooming phenomenon" reveals the departure of particular denizens.

Persisting as mystery to those left behind, and to us as readers, Saunders does not reveal the complete rationale for his situation within which he places his diverse men, women, and children. But an aside from Hans Vollmann suggests a struggle towards a truth. "Trap. Horrible trap. At one's birth it is sprung." In language reminiscent of James Joyce's inventive interior monologues, and contentious scenes recalling the graveyard bickering of fellow Irish novelist Máirtín Ó Cadhain's Cré na Cille (translated into two new versions, The Dirty Dust and Graveyard Clay, both from Yale U.P.), Lincoln in the Bardo fulfills the promise of Saunders' twisted, inventive, and compassionate short stories. 

In a helpful afterword, the author elaborates his conception of the next life here: "Our habits of thought just get supersized." For those who have wondered why George Saunders has taken so long to move from one type of story to another, he reasons that each "story is as long as it needs to be." He's moved this time from "making custom yurts" as if he was granted a "commission to build a mansion." In such typically quirky and aptly analogized phrasing, Saunders sustains his great talent. (Amazon US 11/30/16; NYJB 2/13/15 in different form.) 

Frank Norris' "McTeague": Audiobook Review

 

"Melodrama from old San Francisco"

What did you like best about McTeague (Dramatized)? What did you like least?

I liked the melodramatic flourishes of McTeague and his fellow rogues. The naturalism of Frank Norris a century-plus ago comes off very strong here, and the narrative feels very dated. That is its strength, as it captures the down and outs of S.F. well, but it's repetitious and heavy-handed.

Would you recommend McTeague (Dramatized) to your friends? Why or why not?

It's probably more entertaining to hear the novel dramatized by an enthusiastic cast. But you need patience, for at eleven-plus hours the plot goes on and on, wearing out its welcome.

Have you listened to any of the narrators’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

I liked the L.A. Theatre Works' "Babbitt," done in similar form by a cast of (as of the late 1980s) respected actors. Sinclair Lewis' was a bit more skilled at narrative than Frank Norris, but the social message type of novel both men favored is suitable for such radio ensembles.

Was McTeague (Dramatized) worth the listening time?

It was fun, as I chose it for a drive across the California desert. Let's just say it remains in The City for most of its running time, as I cannot give away any plot spoilers. It's a period piece I always meant to read, and hearing it kept me entertained despite repetitious prose.

Any additional comments?

Perhaps this was published as a serial? The novel keeps repeating the same phrases for certain characters, and passages verbatim or near it come again to remind readers of the action or the characters. Still, for all its moustache-twirling menace, it's a reminder of the harsher conditions endured by ordinary men and women in urban California, little romance at all! (Audible US 2/16/17)

"Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature": Book Review

While cross-cultural studies of the transmission and reception of Buddhism within historical and sociological contexts multiply, those examining literary aspects remain less common. These eleven essays examine American and British authors during the past century who have taken up Buddhist themes; some of them have taken refuge in Buddhism. Aimed at an academic audience, these entries generally remain accessible to a broad readership. This collection, despite its high price as sold by an academic press, may appeal to many inquirers intrigued by its wide coverage.

Introducing this book’s range, co-editor Lawrence Normand surveys the reception and adaptation of Buddhism in the West. He cites Donald S. Lopez and David McMahan. He supports their responses to the ways in which Buddhism has been reshaped for twentieth-century concerns. Lopez and McMahon have analyzed how meditation and modernism influence recent cultural trends. Normand notes more of an emphasis on the needs of the body. The contemporary insistence of concentrating on the breath focuses on the mental flow of images. This shift engages more than one of the authors investigated by Normand’s international colleagues.

Erin Louttit in “Reincarnation and Selfhood in Olive Schreiner’s The Buddhist Priest’s Wife and Undine” reminds readers that this South African writer, despite her late-Victorian period of production, looks forward in time. Both the story of the priest’s wife and Schreiner’s novella Undine humanize and normalize Buddhism. Death is blurred. The self survives the body in her post-Christian perspective. Schreiner considers and acknowledges possibilities of reincarnation.

 
Normand’s “Shangri-La and Buddhism in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon and W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s The Ascent of F6” contrasts two treatments of this earthly paradise. Thanks to its film adaptation, Hilton’s 1933 novel endures as certainly more popular than Auden and Isherwood’s ambitious if flawed drama. Incorporating historical crises and struggles of personal alienation, both channel the appeal of the late-Victorian romances which J. Jeffrey Franklin in The Lotus and the Lion (2008) investigated in imperial and colonial British literature. Hilton’s quest entices the reader as if possible; Auden and Isherwood’s satire demolishes the dream as futile. However, the limits of the duo’s Buddhist sources (including Alexandra David-Neél’s With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet) blunt the dramatic impact of their barbed points.

Via readings of D.T. Suzuki, Erin Lafford and Emma Mason take up another poet’s mid-century approach to Buddhist content. In “‘ears of my ears’: e. e. cummings’ Buddhist prosody,” the pair (sticking to that author’s conventionally unconventional spelling), looks at Cummings by way of Martin Heidegger. This philosopher’s challenge to the ego atomizes the sense of self. Similarly, Cummings’ poems, grounded in the breath’s rhythms, aspire not to human voice but to birdsong, in Lafford and Mason’s report on this poet’s craft. It rewards listening, meditation, and silence.

The center of this anthology finds many names repeating, as Cummings and Suzuki begin to sway other writers and thinkers. “Zen Buddhism as Radical Conviviality in the Works of Henry Miller, Kenneth Rexroth, and Thomas Merton” features three leading advocates during the period during and especially after WWII who begin to react against conformity. Manuel Yang applies Ivan Illich’s “radical conviviality” as akin to the “creative spontaneity and non-attachment” connecting these three countercultural creators. (p. 72) Promoting “spontaneous convergence,” the trio shares a commitment to a “non-action, non-institutional” form of “spiritual assonance,” their non-conformity appealing to dissidents. Yet, many then conformed.

They conformed as the Beats. The appeal of Buddhism for 1950s seekers rebounded off of two other poets based in the Bay Area during this restive postwar period. “Radical Occidentalism: The Zen Anarchism of Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen” offers James Patrick Brown’s analysis. He shows how the Beats adapted Suzuki’s teachings into a nascent counter-cultural milieu. Brown avers: “Suzuki translated Zen into an American idiom that hit some of the keynotes of American anarchism: a rejection of cultural conditioning, institutionalism, and traditionalism; an affirmation of individualism and radical self-reliance in the Thoreauvian vein; and a language of revolutionary aspiration.” (pp. 94-95) For more about these anarchist roots within American Transcendentalism, a translation of the Slovenian professor Ziga Vodovnik’s The Living Spirit of Revolt: The Infrapolitics of Anarchism (Berkeley CA: PM Press, 2013) is recommended.

Unsurprisingly, “Buddhism, Madness and Movement: Triangulating Jack Kerouac’s Belief System” follows. Any analysis of American Buddhist literature should include Kerouac. What has been less examined, as it lacks pop culture appeal, is his retreat back to boyhood Catholicism after his 1950s immersion into Buddhism. Bent Sørensen explains the breakdown of his “hybrid system of faith,” triggered by a 1960 visit to those whom Kerouac called the “Mexican Fellaheen” or poor peasants. (p. 106) He pivoted from a romanticized fatalism to “a complete lack of compassion” for those who refused to better their condition. Kerouac, fueled by drink, flirted with madness as his guilt persisted and his sense of sin returned. His characters by the 1960s often entered silence, before death. Kerouac accounted for their dire straits by resorting to Christian rationales “as a punishment for sin.” (p. 118) Like their author, his protagonists try to move on, but samsara catches up with them and thwarts their doomed quests to escape justice.

Another gloomy fiction from the early 1960s depicts this “cyclical nature of suffering.” (p. 136) “Biology, the Buddha and the Beasts: The Influence of Ernst Haeckel and Arthur Schopenhauer on Samuel Beckett’s How It Is” displays Andy Wimbush’s recovery of Haeckel’s A Visit to Ceylon (1882). Beckett mentions this author in his grim 1964 novel (translated from Comment C’est (1961). Both versions plunge into an unsparing reduction of existence through an agonizing series of reincarnations. These enable torture of lower life-forms by the Sinhalese, witnessed by Haeckel. While the natives do not kill beasts and creatures, the Sinhalese justify treating them badly. For, they reason, if they had not merited life in such debased versions, they would not be such. This application of Buddhist concepts to real-world dukkha sobers the reader.

A return to Isherwood, now living in a more congenial incarnation in Southern California, finds him thriving. In “‘That Other Ocean’: Buddhism, Vedanta, and The Perennial Philosophy in Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man,” Bidhan Roy shows how not only the author’s well-known immersion into Vedanta but his exposure to Buddhism and fellow British expatriate Aldous Huxley enters the 1964 novel, based on Isherwood’s own sojourn. Filtered through popular reinterpretations of Buddhism in vogue by then, Isherwood’s novel reveals his sympathy with Buddhism, contrasted with the arch satire he and Auden had deployed for The Ascent of F6.

For writers closer to our time, “Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior as Mahayana Meditation” finds Sarah Gardam examining Pure Land sutras and Mahāyāna emptiness doctrines. Gardam uses these to explicate Kingston’s Chinese “talk-story” in her 1986 memoir.

Elena Spandri’s “The Aesthetics of Compassion in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea” affirms another doctrine, that of the Middle Way, as a compliment to Murdoch’s philosophical career. This champions humanism rather than a Kantian or utilitarian ethics in her 1986 novel. A compassionate ethics wins out, in Spandri’s articulation of Murdoch’s plot and character choices.

The final entry tackles one more formidable topic, arguably more arcane than any philosophy. “Strange Entanglements: Buddhism and Quantum Theory in Contemporary Nonfiction” unravels the tangle of two popular if recondite genres. Anglo-American popularizations of physics and debates or attempts to reconcile debate between science and religion both, in Sean Miller’s energetic chapter, seek to posit parallels between physics formulae and Buddhist or Taoist descriptions of phenomena. Fritjof Capra, B. Alan Wallace, Matthieu Ricard, and Trinh Xuan Thuan typify decontextualized efforts. Miller doubts their truth-claims for dharma as science.

He finds futile their attempts to reconcile Sanskrit texts full of “imaginative parataxes.” (p. 205) Contemporary exegetes wind up at dead-ends. They wriggle in fudge factors and they refuse to admit their results, which tally only as logical incoherence. Miller pinpoints irony in the Vietnamese-born, American-educated astrophysicist Thuan’s deferral to the “ecclesiastical authority of a French-born Buddhist monk who resides in Nepal.” (p. 214) On the other hand, according to the French-language version of his eponymous website, Ricard earned a Ph.D. in cellular genetics in 1972, after which he entered monasticism.  Miller could have delved deeper into Ricard’s scientific training, as how much Ricard has kept up with his past field and that of astrophysics alongside his Tibetan adaptation and practice, granted, remains a relevant topic to debate. All the same, Miller relishes the chance to tackle a topic which diverges drastically in tone and approach from his predecessors, and this intriguing chapter deserves attention for that.

Miller concludes by summing up the current position of Buddhism in the West. “Stripped of its literary and cultural contingencies, in its mildest form, Buddhism becomes a form of self-help therapy contained by a consumerist market-logic, a happy face put on a liberal humanism purified of reductive materialism. And at its most stringent, Buddhism becomes a form of submission to a hierophantic theocracy, however benign.” (p. 213) This collection needed this voice calling out what some of these writers treated tended to sidestep or gloss over: the manner in which messages of Buddhism warp through our capitalist mindset into globalized commodity.
 

Normand in his introduction noted how pre-1945, the textual approach of T.S. Eliot and Hermann Hesse’s Buddhist “engagements” dominated Western reactions. (p. 15) But, neither Normand nor subsequent contributors elaborate sufficiently as to how these “engagements” entered texts during the last century. The earlier impact of Edwin Arnold’s bestselling life of the Buddha as The Light of Asia (1879), J. Jeffrey Franklin has begun to show, reverberated into the next century. This issue, likewise, does not earn any mention beyond Normand’s few references.

All the same, this book’s emphasis on the Beats, more than its scattered coverage of writers after the 1960s, should encourage more research by scholars. Additionally, Sean Miller’s divergent if necessary exploration of a dimension of Buddhism in non-fictional literature may encourage scholars to pursue the portrayals of Buddhism in other scientific and philosophical contexts, a subject needing as much if not more attention than, say, Kerouac’s appropriations of the dharma. For now, this anthology serves readers as a portal, opening up into a display of texts which have integrated Buddhist characters, settings, debates, and insights, gathered during the past century.

John Andrew Fredrick's "The King of Good Intentions II": Book Review

 
A fresh novel about the travails of a struggling musician on L.A.'s indie-rock fringe, this sequel to The King of Good Intentions continues the story of John and his jangle-pop band, The Weird Sisters. Likely at least semi-autobiographical, narrated after all by John with frequent asides to us, this takes up the tale on the 5th of April, 1994, the day Kurt Cobain died. While only Raleigh, the new drummer, feels bereft by this news as the band ends its West Coast tour in their woebegone van, John, and his fellow Sisters girlfriend Jenny and bassist Rob, convey their own emotions, as they contend with the usual litany of woes on a tiny record label's budget, and their dreary day jobs. It's similar to the late-career Spinal Tap playing puppet shows and pizza parlors, sans wigs or bombast.

They realise the long odds, for 'there are zillions of Nigel Tufnels out there, in Technicolor verisimilitude, readying their teapot tempests, viewing their at once shrunken and little self-important lives through metaphorical shrink wrap.' Frederick, who teaches college English while fronting for decades The Black Watch, connects commentary with comedy, erudition to emotion. He takes more chances in this second novel, too. Consider, in extended set-pieces of a dozen or twenty pages, the maximalist style and elevated diction which Alexander Theroux's books exemplify. 'Eudaemonic snowman', 'plethoric poses', 'untinctured marzipan', and 'orgulous orbit' speckle a ramble on musicians' follies. Dr Johnson and The Rambler, besides, earn name-checks, alongside Bloom and Hobbes, Hamlet and Macbeth, Plato and Chaucer, Karen Horney and Jean Renoir. Not your usual rocker's lament from the road. Ten pages on terrible tours entertain; so do those on a break-up, travails of record-label workers, and a diversion starting on L.A.'s woeful buses and ending in death.

Fredrick stumbles here, however, when cliches about Westside mini-moguls and riffs on a bigoted ex-pat posse of Brits in Santa Monica and a visit to randy Jewish doctor fall flat. 'Sony Bono' is a great typo, but too many others mar the prose's flow. All the same, for 450 pages, this roars along, in overdrive for the frenzied satire, downshifting for clever flirtation or existential lament. You feel the 'ass death' of sitting in the van, you smell the farts. In the middle of a Central California highway stop, the prose bursts into 'what atrocious colloquies one has to have in bands'. The Sisters contend with musical marginalisation, a post-Kurt grunge mood. Their miniscule fan base of twee chicks and twinkly critics remains so, and their psychedelic-fuzz, lyrically literate CD languishes undistributed.

But these, fans or not, delight. Bob Chalet of Bob Chalet Records, truculent publicist Sylvia Doum, Brit bar bore Barnacle Bob, Jen's father the whingeing Ogre, the fanzine scribe Flake with 'skin like the inside of a candy bar wrapper' move the story along, even if John in his frustration with the mechanics of fiction relegates plots to cemeteries. For this picaresque tale recalls its 18th-century predecessors, the London scribblers of the demi-monde. Fredrick integrates his academic training in this period with dissecting late 20th-century foibles, and his scholarly bent enriches this narrative.

The results, which begin and end in medias res (for this saga will turn a trilogy, we are told early on), capture John's tetchy voice, a winning if often whining one. It can be bright, as with romance, or dim, as when a nervous breakdown invokes 'The Waste Land, stripped of...nothing.' While admittedly 'long on material for jeremiads like this', it deftly conjures up Ulysses and The Great Gatsby as it ends. And with the promise of The Hollow Crown, we will welcome the conclusion of the Weird Sisters' spells.
(Slugger O'Toole with an additional paragraph; as is above to Amazon British + US 12-11-15)

William T. Vollmann's "The Dying Grass": Book Review

At about a page a mile, this epic doggedly charts the forced retreat of the Nez Perce during more than 1300 miles and seventy-five days in 1877. Under General Oliver Otis (or as his weary "Bluecoats" in "Indian Service" call him, "Uh-Oh") Howard, the U.S. Army pursued those members of the tribe who refused pacification and Christianization on the reservation. They reject the "thief treaty" and despise relegation to the "painted land." They vow to resist Cut Arm, as they call Howard, and his troops. In the fifth installment of his Seven Dreams series dramatizing encounters between native and settler peoples in North America, William T. Vollmann speaks in more than the narrative voice of his own witness, "William the Blind." After all, hundreds of characters populate his lively tale, alternating between Bluecoats, the People as they call themselves, and the Bostons, their name for the whites who settle, eliminating one nation for a larger, rapacious one. There is never enough land to share among them. The empire pushes westward, without pause.

Two soldiers reason it out. "They expect to roam wherever they please, living on buffalo and what not. That means nobody can farm there. It's got to be them or us." Their foe cannot remain there.

Vollmann in previous volumes in this series, which he started over a quarter-century ago, has explored crucial initial contacts in this transformation of the continent over more than a millennium. He began with the Norse and natives in today's Maritime Provinces. He followed with dramatizations of the clashes between the peoples of Virginia and John Smith's Jamestown colonists, between French Jesuits and the warring nations of Canada, and between the First Nations of the Arctic and those traders past and present, who exploit resources of the Far North. All incorporate meticulous research.

In each novel, he blends his own stance as "William the Blind" with diligent attention to the historical record. In The Dying Grass, he expands this archival fidelity deftly. Much of the dialogue and many of the thoughts attributed to his characters are integrated from a wide array of sources. Vollmann therefore makes our history as Americans come alive. You never feel when reading this Seven Dreams series that figures are propped up as talking mannequins. Vollmann masters his process: he makes his characters sound like us (if properly bound to their time, place, limitations, and idioms).

The manner this verisimilitude emerges in this latest volume deserves acclaim. Vollmann innovates. He pushes the space on the page. The deeper we get into a character's mind, the farther right we shift. Dialogue, free of quotation marks or any dashes, begins on the left. Interruptions external or internal drift, and then interior monologues or asides embed themselves further as the reader wanders towards the center of the book, the right margin. That margin is always unpredictable, for it falls down, near the gutter of the spine, until it stops and the reader returns to the left again, and more dialogue begins.

These conversations take us into the petty details on each side of the conflict. Soldiers bicker, boast, and bitch. Native women mock those who pursue them, and defend their men, for as Dreamers they unite around their tradition, and they defy those among them and beyond them who brandish the Bible, the "Book of Light" as the authority who replaces their "Wyakin" for guidance. Over it all, the purple mountains and pink sunsets continue, apart from those feuding and fighting far below. Vollmann draws us in to these conflicts, by masterfully drawn battle re-creations that show his talent for sudden action, a theme he has not been able to expand upon in many of past novels as he can here.

Homeric may be an overused adjective, but in the catalogs of warriors, soldiers, and their women, repeated in the solemn cadenced tone of the People or the dutifully diplomatic reports submitted by their persecutors, this term serves as a worthy comparison for this fictional account taken from factual inspiration. A bit shorter than Tolstoy's novel on war obliterating peace, The Dying Grass depicts how everyday people get swept up into tragedy, forced to choose sides as the enemy comes.

Although the fate of the Nez Perce under the man we know as Chief Joseph is a foregone conclusion, what is lesser known, and therefore animates tension, is the evasion some of the Nez Perce manage. They flee across the Medicine Line, as they call it, into the Old Woman's Country, that of Canada. But their enemy Sitting Bull has established his own redoubt already. Soon the Nez Perce must file back across the border. There they are rounded up and sent off to the Hot Land of Kansas. They sell themselves as chattel to the clutches of a white man, or their trinkets and photos to souvenir seekers.

Never romanticizing either side, Vollmann remains alert to the nuances of violence. The Bannocks who follow the Bluecoats, and later the Crows, also revenge themselves on the Nez Perce. They in turn, while innocent of the charges cast on them by the U.S. Government, may choose to murder innocent Bostons. Their pleas, no less than those of the People whose women and children may be roasted alive in the heat of battle or the coldness of calculation by Bluecoats, may find only cruel listeners. Mercies are shown to scattered enemies, but as in any war, these may be outnumbered by vengeance. Orders on both sides attempt but fail to prevent looting, desecration, and grave robbing.

These gaps between a relentless force who must have the natives' land, who must violate the terms of the treaty that gave that remnant to the Nez Perce, and who will not let their beleaguered people cross into Canada widen. On the other side, the Dreamers dwindle, and no home for them remains at all. They try to talk to the Bluecoats and the Bostons, but among both contenders, those out for profit and for land-grabbing take charge. The Nez Perce, outnumbered and facing their own tribal enemies now allied with the Government, can neither find rescue in the Montana wilderness nor Canadian camps. The mechanized nature of the Government, after the debacles of the Civil War, now rolls over any opposition within the ranks. Cut Arm and his Bluecoats serve a master back East, not their own will.

Vollmann fairly, as with Howard, shows the complexity of these negotiations. The General, who lost an arm in the "Secession" War, had run the Freedmen's Bureau for former slaves afterwards. His generosity founded the university that bears his surname, but his reputation as one too sympathetic to the blacks and then the Indians, in the eyes of many watching in Washington D.C., follows Howard. By the end, as the Nez Perce are shipped to the Northwest after their Indian Territory exile, they look in calico, drab colors, and shawls as colorless and bland as the freed slaves had to General Howard.

Depravity haunts many in Federal uniform. It also implicates some of those in the garb of the newcomer, and some of those who must don that garb. As converts under coercion, the Dreamers must accept the Book of Light, or be cast off to an even more dilapidated reservation with Chief Joseph, lest they contaminate their Americanized and Bible-toting former brethren. Disease, hunger, and heartbreak reduce the ranks of the defiant Dreamers. Nearly three-quarters of their reservation is soon sold as "surplus land" to Bostons. The children of the People, once Dreamers dwindle, are taught the ways of their conquerors at Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Vollmann notes as of twenty years ago how fewer than three dozen Nez Perce had kept any fluency in their old language.

Throughout, key interpreters such as Umatilla Jim and Ad Chapman are called on to intervene; the surrender speech attributed to Chief Joseph barely registers here, within the cross-chatter and interference between the victors and their vanquished. Lieutenant Wood, an intriguingly sympathetic listener to the plight of those whom he pursues, polishes up Joseph's words for pomp and posterity.

Out of faded tintypes, military memoirs, charts and news clippings, ethnographies and museum artifacts, Vollmann retells one of the most famous, and infamous, struggles between the invading and the indigenous peoples of the Old West. This demands concentration. After a couple of hundred pages, such is its sprawl, the reader learns to read as Vollmann wants. The tiny print represents the spirit of those who, overwhelmed by the spaces they seek to survive within and thrive wherein, try to speak, think, and dream, as they survive or succumb within its intricate, dense plot. This novel tests patience, but true to Vollmann's unrelenting craft, the author insists that every word he publishes deserves to be left as it is, defying editors or us. The Dying Grass resists satisfactory replication in this format, with our margins that corral and tame its inventive prose on a open-ended page. Like the unfenced West, his novel roams freely, evading control of the mechanical hand and conforming style.
(Amazon US 7-28-15; PopMatters 8-10-15)

Follow what leader?

As I've been covering discontents with our current social, political, educational, and economic systems, I range across the spectrum when finding material to comment upon and share here. What I was thinking as I scanned hundreds of entries at LibCom last night for some reading material was how often stolid prose and stodgy statements stood in for entertaining as well as instructive texts. On a forum about recommendations for working-class literature, one comrade's dictum stood out. "the novel is anti-working-class." Perfect. At least I learned about Arundhati Roy's novel, too. Some remembered such gems as James Plunkett's depiction of the great Dublin lockout and strikes, Strumpet City, as well as the usual (not to be diminished by that) Orwellian allegories, Marge Piercy's feminist futures, Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy on Martian terraforming, Jack London (whom at least lefties still read), John Dos Passos, and even the depressing Studs Lonigan. Like JDP and James T. Farrell, Victor Serge was cited (much more) but with a proviso as to the unsanctioned ideological drift (to a right-wing or Jeffersonian populism in the American duo or an insufficiently early denial of Stalinism in the Russian instance. Every committed cadre condemns everyone else as "sheeple."

I wound up only downloading the George Woodcock pamphlet from the depths of WWII, "The Tyranny of the Clock." It is exactly what you'd expect. Like a lot of protest prose, it charts the predicament we are in, challenges the status quo, and then leaves you mulling over... what's next?

So, I opened my FB feed to find the reliable Liam O'Rourke in his Irish Republican Education Forum adding a bit of levity. "The Marxist-Leninist Theory of Humor" is credited to McLaughlin, Tom. "The Marxist-Leninist Theory of Humor," Catalyst, no. 9, 1977, pp. 99-102. I cite two paragraphs to wit:

          Socialist Seriousness.

Under Socialism there will be no classes and consequently no class conflict. Humor will cease to reflect any objective reality and will wither away. Consequently, those who engage in humor after being admonished by Party members will be clearly identifiable as saboteurs. It will be necessary to root out these weeds from the collective farm of Socialism. However, such saboteurs may prove skillful in hiding themselves. It will thus prove necessary for skilled Party members to ferret them out by engaging in humorous dialogue. If, for instance, a suspected saboteur is found to be cognizant of the answers to riddles, or if he replies to the Party member's encouragement by telling jokes, then such a person must be subject to Revolutionary Justice. It is suggested that the death sentence would be appropriate. This should be administered while the criminal is heavily dosed with helium (laughing gas), so that his "laughing death" may prove a suitable object of horror and negative reinforcement to the broad masses of workers and peasants.

Humor will of course continue to be necessary in relations between socialist and imperialist countries as the class struggle continues on the international stage.

This article spoofs the dead hand of Marxian promulgation in similar terms. It made me smile. I presume despite his familiarity with Freirean anti-authoritarian schooling in New Mexico, the director and star of Billy Jack did not write this. I like that he shares the same name, all the same.

So did a post under it directing me to "Flakes Alive!" in The Baffler. DSA member Amber Frost (a name worth a chuckle at least to me) reports on the Left Forum, which evolved from a Socialist Scholars Conference that twice, in the '60s and '80s, flamed up and flared out. Similar combustibility erupted at this NYC gathering. Apparently anyone can pay their fee and get their slot on a panel (and I thought 15-20 minute conference papers were enough). So, 400 events and 1300 speakers result. 

Frost laments the "tankers" (the pro-Man of Steel gang), the truthers (9/11 is apparently a racist hoax against Muslims--whose racial component eludes me, as any reader of Malcolm X's epiphany on his flight to Mecca might agree), and the perpetually aggrieved "marginalistas." She confesses: "there is something truly dispiriting about not being able to distinguish self-identified radicals from the parodies of us imagined by the right wing." Hearing Middlemarch on endless audiobook, I heard the phrase "self-cherishing anxiety"--this sums up the eternal grievances of a conspiratorial mind.

Studying Peter Marshall's massive Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism last year, I was struck by how prescient parts (and not other parts that were pro-feudal and quietist) of the Tao were as to those of us who can't buckle under, and how despite perhaps placid surfaces, betray restlessness at injustice, top-down imposition of inequity, and relentless push for profits, not peace.

There's a lot of reinvention of anti-statist and anti-corporate strategies. But it reminds me of start-ups competing for the venture capitalist's nod in and on Silicon Valley. Lots of young folks burning out while the older, seasoned pros sit back, often tenured and satisfied rather than D.I.Y. and hungry. New generations arrive ready for action, and as cannon fodder for the alliances and collectives, they give freely of their energy until the struggle becomes too much to continue when children arrive and insurance must be paid. This is "impossiblism" as some radicals phrase it: the idea that prefigurative ways of living cannot be sustained now, and the mentality that capitalism forces dissenters to give in.

As I have stated last week, even the Bernie Sanders campaign, I fear, will only deliver a protest vote to Hillary after he has (temporarily and cynically for her) tapped her to lean a bit left of center to swing a few states. Where else will voters for a semi-, if co-opted, democratic socialist turn anyhow? Where can those of us nagging ourselves and you for a more just, equal, society turn, if not to leaders? That is the question and answer of anarchism. In a world where fending for ourselves with reliance on the kindness of supporters rather than strangers wrangles out small niches for survival, this possibility beckons. Weighed down by bills, taxes, responsibilities, how many can embrace it?

Syriza encounters immense difficulties as academics try to run Greece; the Greens regularly march on to little notice at the back of the progressive parade, and the bipartisan fat-cat network bloats and boasts. If Occupy was crushed by Democratic Party indifference, GOP mockery, and the security state collusion which both parties insist upon, what traction does an alternative challenge sustain? Over and over, it's lessons that repeat. Their repetition must speak to our idealism, and our naivete.

"Like a fifteen-year-old who’s recently discovered punk rock, the nouveau “Social Justice Warrior” crowd frequently presumes an undue sense of ownership over incredibly basic, nearly ancient ideas." Frost here may sympathize with me. Many act as if they invented some concept, and like academics or concertgoers at "festival seating" or us on airplanes, they fight over very small expanses of space.

Her whole essay is worth the time. Certainly as my recent train of thought continues, I concur with Terry Eagleton's weariness. In a 2012 interview with the Oxonian Review after Occupy and as Greece revolted against austerity, he noted the advantage of a downturn. "Not deserting politics but trying to add a depth to it, and also, in doing so, breaking with the holy trinity of class, race, and gender. Vital topics though they are, they’ve become such tram-lines on which the cultural left has been moving."

Frost also calls for momentum. She concludes by reminding us, however, that forums may not be it, or more fringe squabbles and academic blather. "It’s quite possible the left is at a pivotal moment in political history: these days, Americans actually like the sound of socialism, and the potential for building a new base is incredibly encouraging. But as much as we should be looking to expand, so, too, must we refine our project. The marginalistas distract, disrupt and deter future comrades. So it’s high time we get a little exclusive: tankies, truthers and tofu may supply a steady stream of battle-tested conference anecdotage, but they’re not going to move us any closer to building a better world."

"Reading Allen Ginsberg, Talking Civil Rights"

Award-Winning Teacher Fired for Reading an Allen Ginsberg Poem: so writes David Freedlander in the Daily Beast. As I have taught Ginsberg to a diverse cohort  in college and met with varying reactions of disgust, resignation, and acceptance, I wanted to share this article about this memorable lesson. "The poem the student discovered and brought in was 'Please Master,' an extremely graphic account of a homosexual encounter published by Allen Ginsberg in 1968 that begins: 'Please master can I touch your cheek / please master can I kneel at your feet / please master can I loosen your blue pants.'"As Freedlander places this in context of Game of Thrones and Fifty Shades of Grey, he also wonders if part of the crackdown is due to discomfort with the gay message, rather than the act itself.

The district ruled that David Olio, a nineteen-year veteran of the South Windsor CT system, showed “egregiously poor professional judgment,” by reading the poem aloud in the AP English class. Many of the students were 17 and 18 years old, some taking this course in conjunction with UConn for college credit. While this, as friends on FB have countered, does not excuse the fact that students had no choice but to listen to the poem, I wondered if the AP context mattered--I got the reply that it did not, and that this showed unwise judgment on Olio's behalf. What would you have done? Hurriedly suggest another poem might be discussed instead? Asked the class for feedback? Refused to talk about it? Those reactions in turn, given our tremulous times, ironically might have singled out Olio as intolerant. Well, one student had complained that he or she could not focus on a test in a another class the day after this poem had been discussed in the AP course. Three weeks later, Olio had to resign.

Freedlander avers: "to call Olio’s reading of the poem a mistake—a poem a student brought to class and asked to be read—is to say the reading of a work by one of the towering figures of 20th-century American poetry is out of bounds. 'Please Master' was written in 1968, just before the Democratic convention in Chicago would erupt in riots. Ginsberg had already been put on trial for obscenity in 1957 for his poem 'Howl,' which with its casual depiction of gay sex and drug use, and lines like 'The asshole is holy,' was considered far outside the bounds of what was considered good taste. A judge, however, ruled that the poem had 'redeeming social importance' and was unlikely to 'deprave or corrupt readers by exciting lascivious thoughts or arousing lustful desire.' I doubt, having taught "Howl," having shown the innovative (if widely panned) film adaptation, that Allen seduces anyone--at least on the page. His portrayal by James Franco may, but many of my students cringed.

Helen Vendler, one of the nation's leading poetry critics, wrote on Olio's behalf: “Given what students are already exposed to via TV and film, Ginsberg’s poem, which concerns a well-known form of abjection (whether heterosexual or homosexual) reveals nothing new.” Courtney King, a former student and now a planning commissioner, puts it more bluntly. "I mean, if there are parents in town who think their teenagers don’t know what a blow job is, they are sorely mistaken.” She sums it up: “In defense of this whole imbroglio, at least it got people in this town reading Ginsberg.”

My blog title comes from a lyrical fragment I heard back in high school. It was sung by a musician who had an early song banned by the BBC in the late 60's for the f-verb. Al Stewart's "Post WWII Blues" in appropriately Dylanesque homage, from his 1974 song-cycle Past, Present and Future, first exposed me to Christine Keeler, Nostradamus, Lord Grey's phrase about the lights going out in Europe as WWI rose, Warren Harding's middle name, and the Soviet tank battles on the steppes. It's much better than his hits that dominated easy-listening AOR in that decade, be assured. The image caption, expanded, cites Ginsberg: "To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province, your own consciousness." But not too provincial, Connecticut.

Hades and Proserpina

Six weeks ago, I commented in "Free Speech Can Be Scary" about "safe spaces" and the growing inability of certain college students to handle challenges to their worldview, identity, and psyche. Today, I found in my FB feed from an Irish colleague this. She shares my caution that particular elements may well set off sensitive responses, but that education for adults demands they take risks. Apparently, some at Columbia fear, again, the invasion of a student's mindset, based on tolerance and sensitivity.

An op-ed in the student paper summed up a young woman's reaction to scenes of rape in her assigned reading. These upset her, as "a survivor of sexual assault." The article explained how "Ovid’s 'Metamorphoses' is a fixture of Lit Hum, but like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom. These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background." Hades' rape of Proserpina, like many episodes in Ovid, is violent, but surely, many passages of beauty also linger.

I share the image of Bernini. If the mythological context is known by the viewer, violence may arise. If not, this might be taken as erotic bliss, foreplay and seduction captured in unforgettable marble. This tension, for me, might better enliven and enrich a classroom discussion or writing prompt, than a fearful rush to eliminate any depiction of nudity or sexuality from my syllabus or a student's view. As Scott Timberg sums this up in Salon: "Why start protecting students from Ovid in a TMZ world?"

To me, "like so many texts in the Western canon" is its own touchy trigger. How much of the humanities and social sciences can be taught and examined if we fear the content? Do we bowdlerize the readings, so as to censor offending passages? Twice when I showed one of many, I recall, "R-rated" features in my Literature and Film course, some Christian students asked to be excused. I was told by my supervisors that I had to grant them this, and I had to come up with an alternate assignment to meet their needs. Further, as another professor I knew had to do, disruptive content itself might be removed, unless the material had no substitute, or there was a way the course guidelines could be met without the specific example. Say, Huck Finn was assigned, but one might, say, replace it with a slave narrative, or an historical account that lacked the n-word trigger event.

Once I taught that novel to a predominantly black enrollment, at another college. As the Net was barely up, and as shortcuts were lacking for hard work, to their credit, they read it but lacked much enthusiasm. One woman loved the Grangerford episode, but for the sappy eulogies that Twain parodied. My gentle efforts to convince her that these were satire failed utterly. I am not sure if it was me, the content in American Literature (which I made very multicultural while also integrating the canon), or the fact they attended one course after another in a group, after work at Bell. Maybe they were tired of each other after so long. Perhaps I seemed elitist, even if I'm from a low-enough "income background" to have received Pell Grants. Among those "of color" of any tinge, the humanities, whittled from a Norton Anthology, must daunt many business and management majors.

That connects with my other posts about a decline of liberal arts. In a Twitter age, we lack attention for stamina. I was told by a dean that the average attention span of a student is 7 minutes, and that at least every 15-20 minutes, we need in the classroom to shuffle it and them about. Like kindergarten?
(Image: Hades and Proserpina, Bernini.)