Ursula Le Guin "Hainish Novels + Stories": Book Review

These Hainish fictions aren't a cycle. Rather "a convenience" than "a conception." So Ursula Le Guin introduces this deluxe edition from Library of America in typically forthright, pithy, and sly terms.

Daughter of a groundbreaking anthropologist who taught at Berkeley and Columbia, Ursula Le Guin pioneered the meticulous investigation of her imagined societies within the popular genre of speculative storytelling. She began writing as a child during the Depression. Beginning in 1966, her contributions began in the Ace Doubles, SF pulp. Editors and fans recognized her skill. Although her sophisticated interplanetary system took a while to form, and even if its inconsistencies bother nitpicking critics, Le Guin avers this genesis gave her freedom to shift between stories and novels. She learned the difference between "willful suspension of disbelief" and merely "faking" it when invention stirred. (Her Hainish books need not be read in order, she has assured readers before.)

Part of Le Guin's innovation came through the "ansible," a device enabling instant communication across the universe. This became a standard tool throughout the science fiction cosmos. Her other innovation in the 1960s, she notes, has received less attention from a wider audience. The Left Hand of Darkness won both the Hugo and Nebula prizes, but it faced backlash, from pedants and from feminists. Le Guin's decision to use a fixed "he" for her people lacking a fixed gender--it alternates in the month--leads to her reiteration fifty years on. Despite many recent changes in social perception of gender differences, "we still have no accepted ungendered pronoun in narrative." Demurring from the term "prequel" for her story "The Day Before the Revolution" preceding her anarchist utopia novel The Dispossessed, "word-hound" Le Guin returns to her central verbal concern. "What matters most about a word is that it says what we need a word for. (That's why it matters that we lack a singular pronoun signifying non-male/female, inclusive, or undetermined gender. We need that pronoun."

This anthology's first volume gathers the first five Hainish novels. In a brief review, only a glimpse at the many realms Le Guin presents can suffice. Roncannon's World turns out for the Hainish ethnographer Roncannon an orb which will bear his name. (Hain's a planet resembling our own as the original homeland of humanity; the handsome endpapers in volume two make its earth-tones of continents heighten this suggestion, but it is not equivalent to Le Guin's Terra: an example of Le Guin's off-kilter approach to world-building.) Some telepathy occurs, but this wound up so overwhelming a condition for her menagerie of bio-forms that their creator edged away from it as a must as she expanded her fictional forays. Roncannon blends SF with fantasy. Its episodes entertain.

But eagle-eyed readers of venerable tropes may not be entirely convinced. There's a lot of humanoids evolving here on a smallish globe, so how they remain dispersed and sustaining may stem from Le Guin's anthropological curiosity more than a command of her developing talent in constructing plot.

Two more shortish novels follow. Planet of Exile as the title tells finds human colonists stranded on a hostile Werel. The arrival of attenuated seasons will become a factor in her present and future Hainish terrains: when winter comes, it stays for 15 years, and the "hilfs" arrive during this cold snap. These nomads call the humans "farborns." They both face savage hordes and snow-ghouls. One wonders if George R.R. Martin's vast audience knows of this 1966 predecessor, pitched again at the Ace crowd.

The following year, City of Illusions presents one raised by forest dwellers, but not born one of them. His quest across a ravaged earthscape and a dystopia full of occluded psychics also includes talking animals. Who can and cannot take life provides the complex theme, further taking on brainwashing.

The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974) attain canonical status. Many will be most familiar with these dense novels. They deepen the SF genre. They will demand attention; they will reward reflection. This volume adds an "original" version of the experimental core of what became Left's alternating genders on Gethen. "Winter's King" sparked Le Guin's curiosity. What if "the king was pregnant" popped up in a tale? Both tales investigate how warfare equates with "predominantly a male behavior," If some people reverted to being female with an overwhelming sex drive for a few days a month, while others were male, how might this play out for an Ice Age planet a.k.a. Winter? Furthermore, Le Guin addresses how language, power plays, and relationships evolve.

The last work in the first volume, The Dispossessed may not have lasted as long in curricula and on reading lists as its gender-driven counterpart. It emerges from Le Guin's weariness with the Vietnam War, and her Cold War affinity for Peter Kropotkin and Paul Goodman's non-violence. Pairing this via her youthful exposure to Lao Tzu, Le Guin incorporates the Tao into a study of no-coerced-order.

For it has to recognize anarchy's discontents. Determined to leave his anarcho-syndicalist home on Anarres, physicist Shevek travels to a patriarchal society on Urras. Class war, religious dissension, and the grip of the in-group naturally mesh with Le Guin's intellectual interests. While less read now than Left, this novel of ideas also remains less popular than certain pulps penned by Ayn Rand. But Rand cannot match Le Guin's U.S.-of-A.-like A-Io for its ambiguous appeal as the Yang to the Yin of Urras. Capitalism gets its comeuppance, but so does socialism. Despite dense discussion, it's far more vivid than any Rand. For one "cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution." How one's possessive power gets mired in habit dramatizes--admittedly too tediously for readers craving more drama--its theories and its morality, as a thought-experiment.

As her fiction sweeps up allegory, her story arcs sometimes twine; but not neatly or necessarily. Her motivations push reflection arguably more than action. She leaves one pondering, despite what can be ponderous to those weary of nuance. Her erudite character studies and linguistic riffs predominate.

Le Guin's Hainish elaborations continue into the mostly shorter pieces of the second volume. The novella The Word for World Is Forest has always struck me as a protest against the defoliation of Vietnam. It may align more with the Earth Day sentiments of the early Seventies, but either way, the revolt of those on Athshe against the invading Terrans bent on taking its resources to sustain their own depleted earth has remained topical. Le Guin acknowledges this sad truth in her appended 1976 introduction for Word. She relates how her own "fantasy" at that time that a Philippine tribe called the Senoi stood for a "dream culture" akin to her imagined one for her indigenous resisters. While these claims were largely debunked among anthropologists, Le Guin reasons that for her threatened world, the use of its scientific data may diminish accordingly as its "speculative element" compensates.

Hainish stories overlap in characters and ideas now and then among the seven compiled here. Her faster-than-light communication device the ansible excited her fellow scribes. By 1990, Le Guin took up a possibility akin to Madeleine L'Engle's "wrinkle in time." Le Guin was "allured by the notion of transilience, the transfer of a physical body from one point in space-time to another without interval."

Christening it "churtening," she allows that those who pull it off in her fiction are never sure how they did it, or if they can do it again. "In this it much resembles life." Her 1994 collection A Fisherman of the Inland Sea weaves influences from a Japanese folktale with Hain-adjacent love stories. She attempted in this decade "to learn how to write as a woman." Her latest brainstorm, the "sedorutu," sets on the world named O an institutionalization of hetero- and homosexual relationships "in an intricate four-part arrangement laden with infinite emotional possibilities--a seductive prospect to a storyteller." Her "gender-bending" produces stories enriched by her own decision to speak out not only on behalf of women, but all who are loners and introverts. In an era bent on overpopulation, "unlimited growth," and "mindless exploitation," Ursula Le Guin retreats. She considers the misfit.

Her final entries twist more categories. Dark-skinned people enslave light-skinned ones. The emerging "story suite" becomes Four Ways to Forgiveness. Meanwhile, Le Guin learns of the destruction of "religious Taoism" during the regime of "aggressive secular fundamentalism" in China.

The Telling (2000) closes this volume. Le Guin sees around her in her own homeland the rise of similar "divisive, exclusive," and dogmatic instigators of hatred perverting "the energy of every major creed." This concluding novel depicts "the secular persecution of an ancient, pacific, non-theistic religion on another world." Those responsible, tellingly, originate among "a violent monotheistic sect on Earth." No matter what ignites the dynamic fusion of thought and action in her Hainish fictions, Ursula Le Guin generates provocative and intelligent considerations of complex forces. A tribute to her craft, these elegant volumes combine into a welcome set for loners, introverts, and the rest of us.
(Combined volumes: Amazon US 9/5/17. Vol. 1  and  Vol. 2 ) PopMatters as Ursula Le Guin's Science Fiction Stories about Class, War, Religious Dissension and More  9/14/17)

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)

"V for Vendetta": Audiobook Review

"The inch of integrity"

Would you consider the audio edition of V for Vendetta to be better than the print version?

You need to read the graphic novel first. Then the film, Then this. All 3 merit respect. They all adapt their chosen medium well. While anyone will turn to the Alan Moore-David Lloyd ur-text, I approve of all three versions as worthy. They elaborate the story for each format.

What did you like best about this story?

Steve Moore's novelization allows you to "see" in the mind's eye images that compliment the original source written by (here uncredited by his request) Alan Moore and the cinematic adaptation of the Wachowksy Brothers' script.Themes are deepened at nine hours that the film could not suggest, and I was pleased how intelligently composed was the novelization. It can stand on its own as a deserving representative of the source. It's smart and it's moving. Anarchism at its best. 

Which scene was your favorite?

Evie's enlightenment. No spoilers, but Simon Vance delivers this tale with deft and subtle readings of the dramatized text. He's the perfect "British" voice to convey irony and emotion.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

I found, listening to this the week of the Westminster Bridge attack in London near the very Parliament of this narrative, eerie similarities. And the way a demagogue exploits the fears of a populace, naturally, is not only akin to the way totalitarian and fascist regimes operate. The 20th chapter delves into the rise of the ruling class well in this dystopia, and it remains both prescient and wise. It takes a side, but it is fair to the opponents even as it condemns. It is a sophisticated morality tale, and it is not the facile depiction of an avenger, but a careful study of opposition, and the price it costs more than one key character, dramatically.

Any additional comments?

The storyline takes care to not glorify any deaths or sufferings. Not an easy feat. There is no exploitative violence or sabotage, The Guy Fawkes echoes resonate. And we see how V's message inspires not only the expected dissidents, but others who are surprised to hear it. (Audible US 3/25/17) 

"The freedom to be left alone"

Reminded by my friend who found a typically endless rant by this addled pantheist during research at the Huntington, I pulled my copy of Porius: A Novel of the Dark Ages off my shelf and picked up somewhere near the two-hundred page mark I'd left off a while back. For this meandering narrative takes eight days in late October, the year 499, and stretches it into a reading experience demanding weeks, at least. John Cowper Powys remains as Morine Krissdottir's Descents of Memory (2008, reviewed by me) attests a difficult, elusive figure to grasp and not always an appealing one to like.

I suppose I was one of the few who checked that bio out of the library never having read the subject. I'd see at the old Bodhi Tree used bookstore on Melrose a big paperback of his earlier A Glastonbury Romance but the silly names within (a deal-breaker for me with Dickens as well as nearly all fantasy save that of the one linguist who knew of what he invented, J.R.R. Tolkien) discouraged me from it. (I have since learned that JCP changed names to protect himself against lawsuits by real Glastonburians.) The Grail and the Arthurian corpus never excited me in grad school, although I did like Excalibur. John Boorman considered filming this novel, fittingly. And, come to think of it, I did not mind Malory's realms at all. But I atavistically favor the Celt and the pagan, the resisters to Saxon rule and Catholic imposition, more than I do magic-kal conjuring, dodgy cant, fiery horses or swords.

At least in my fiction. But finding two years ago David Goodway's Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow (2006; reviewed by me) revealed what Krissdottir's study had not: the promise of Portius as a hold-all for a lot of my own pet pursuits. Anti-statist/ anti-capitalist libertarianism, Celtic lore, British origins, Welsh resistance, and Joycean immersion. Goodway had I think found some key connections. He compared what Kevin Birmingham has more recently credited as Joyce's "philosophical anarchism" to Powys' retreat from any political fray (which caused differences with his friend Emma Goldman). He assumed that inevitably that freer outlook would prevail--but not for a very long time.

And as for liberation, so far in my return to the 1951 tome, the restoration of a new Golden Age surfaced. The freedom to be left alone, Myrddin Wyllt surmises, is to be desired. No priests, no emperors, no governors, no druids even. This "pagan" yearning, as with Powys and so now, may be quixotic. Where would I be without a dentist (even if my plan fails to cover my teeth; don't get me started on my "vision plan;" Cal Grants and scholarships to cover college, or the ability to stay afloat post-"recession" if not for some nanny state)? Few of us grew up in the comfort afforded the gentrified class of Powys, a vicar's son and a Cantabrigian. Most of us coddled in this world, 1616 years after Merlin, need help to live, not in the glade, but in a toxic megapolis that consumes our soul.

Still, this odd fictional volume, standing by the voluminous epics of Glastonbury and its less-heralded successor Owen Glendower which I've ordered and half keep asking myself why, poses a nagging question that left-libertarians, cranks such as JCP, and misfits like me keep pursuing. Why are some of us born discontented by the system we labor for and live under? Given many of this contingent are soft intellectuals like me rather than hardy folk of the soil like I presume my drizzly Connacht kin, what realistic chance do we have of proclaiming any self-sufficiency when surrounded as JCP was not, of his privileged choosing, once he claimed to inherit his Welsh corner and make himself its returned ruler? I suppose this "lordship" was not entirely in jest. We all bear our own inconsistencies.

Therefore, I will press on. After all, Powys' notion however unverifiable of an "ichthyosaurus-brain" recoverable by concentration as a proto-Jungian mind-memory, a collective guide and individual vision, appeals to me in a VR-sort of literary way (not sure about a real one). Lawrence Millman in The Atlantic admits: "One doesn't read Powys so much as enlist in him." Of Porius (and he wrote in 2000): "it is, I think, Powys's masterpiece. It calls to mind novels as diverse as One Hundred Years of Solitude, Finnegans Wake, and Alice in Wonderland. At times it reads like an extended study of what Powys called 'the three incomprehensibles': sex, religion, and nature. At other times it reads like a magical mystery extravaganza." That promise will keep me plodding along, as Millman in his Arctic.

P.S. Amber Paulen blogged back in '08 about this novel: "It gives me great pleasure not to be finished yet." I wonder how long it took her? Andrea Thompson, in for her a mercifully allotted "briefly noted" slot in The New Yorker, reminds us that over five hundred pages were cut from the original, restored in this 2007 edition. (He preferred little editing, and less as he aged, which can bedevil the most patient of his cult following.) Margaret Drabble (whose surname JCP could have used) begins her review in The Guardian: "The realm of John Cowper Powys is dangerous. The reader may wander for years in this parallel universe, entrapped and bewitched, and never reach its end. There is always another book to discover, another work to reread. Like Tolkien, Powys has invented another country, densely peopled, thickly forested, mountainous, erudite, strangely self-sufficient. This country is less visited than Tolkien's, but it is as compelling, and it has more air." In an undated online entry of what I assume is the original text, Kirkus Reviews sums it up: "Among those who enjoyed the author's previous novels in this historical sequence, there may be some who will find themselves at home in the midst of the tangled beliefs and superstitions of the Persians, the Romans, the Greeks, and the Druids with which these early Welshmen spiced their Christianity. But others will find the obscurities of both diction and dogma almost impenetrable." For the willing bold few, seek ye here .

Alex Ogg's "Dead Kennedys: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables: The Early Years": Book Review

Intended as liner notes for the 25th anniversary of this punk album, Alex Ogg's project had to wait five more years for what turns into a longer book on a thirty-eight minute 1980 LP. Legal disputes over songwriting credits, added to the protracted resentment between singer Jello Biafra and his bandmates, notably guitarist East Bay Ray and bassist Klaus Flouride, tested the patience of the author and the Dead Kennedys, past and present. This story, told efficiently by a veteran chronicler of punk, reveals that the American underground in the late 1970s could match the best of the British punks when it came to political commentary paired with feisty music. Furthermore, unlike so many righteous punks before and after the DKs, this San Francisco outfit retained its sense of humor. However, as an Angeleno, growing up a near-contemporary of the band, I challenge Ogg's claim that this was the peak of proto-hardcore. To me, the band's debut resembled the blur and buzz of the Germs' first LP. I'll admit that unlike that short-lived L.A. band, the DKs outlasted Reagan's first term. Ogg as the subtitle shows narrates the start of it all, but he stops very soon after the album's release and their first tour.

How the DKs scaled the summits of the American independent label punk scene so rapidly, Ogg reminds readers, can be credited to their discipline. More on the intellectual influences informing the band members might have answered the question of how they managed so quickly to create two classic singles, "California Über Alles" and "Holiday in Cambodia". Within this milieu, few dared to roam beyond a few "provocative" topics. Most punk bands preached against racism, some against sexism, many against conformity, as expected for spiky non-conformists to conform.

Biafra, raised in Boulder, Colorado, and apparently embittered at delivering pizzas to smug lefty college kids his own age (he dropped out of an equivalent institution early on, the University of California, Santa Cruz, tellingly), decided to widen his target range. He spoke for an overlooked echo-boomer generation, coming of age during Watergate, too young to be hippies, but who had to listen to those not much older ramble on over and over about how great it was then and how dismal it all turned out by 1980, as youth woke up from years of Carter's malaise on the morning after, snuggled or smothered by Reagan's revived or reviled "values".

Although now a balding, gray statesman in cahoots with the state's prison guard union, cutting deals with corporate sponsors, while managing in his return to rule to convey a pale-Green image in keeping with his earlier gubernatorial reign, Jerry Brown for the late 1970s represented to this band a "Zen fascism". Risible though this seems to this Californian critic in retrospect if not to Ogg, who takes this (semi-)seriously from the mouth of Jello, this song roused "the suede denim secret police" who were bent on arresting "your uncool niece". Evoking Nazi imagery if spinning the shock value trafficked in such regalia by certain punk colleagues, "Come quietly to the camp/ You'd look nice as a drawstring lamp" conveys its own uneasy message. Biafra's message, within the jerky anthem's campy medium, either strengthens or weakens its lyrical conceits. The song lives on, covered often.

Its follow-up, "Holiday in Cambodia", has garnered fewer cover versions and parodies. It's a darker song, as its Pol Pot theme dramatizes, and it's more disturbing. It castigates those smug Boulder or Berkeley collegians, those who curry favor with bosses, those who pretend solidarity with the masses. It contrasts this mindset with what would happen when the self-proclaimed progressives of the West go East: "Well you'll work harder with a gun in your back/ For a bowl of rice a day/ Slave for soldiers till you starve/ Then your head is skewered on a stake." Ogg skirts extended exegesis of these two songs, assuming that readers as listeners probably know them well, but he does take pains to, in true rock journalist fashion, tell us about the vintage tube microphones used to capture this song's roar.

Without the churning, Echoplexed, surf-tinged guitar of East Bay Ray, Klaus's doom-laden bass, and drummer Ted's bashing backing, these songs, for all their lyrical baiting, would not have succeeded. Ogg credits Jello's voice as a "human theramin" and attributes a Kabuki-like ranting and wailing for impact. Many listeners to the band, myself included, have found Biafra's self-consciously theatrical delivery trying, but in live shows as on record, the DK's sought to stand out from punk yammering.

Boosted by Geza X's production of "Holiday", these singles remain arguably the band's best vinyl moments. Geza X (member of the L.A. band the Bags, on production he crafted early releases from Black Flag, Weirdos, and the Germs, as well as San Francisco's Avengers) labored to make this song wail, so it's a shame that Jello's wish for him to produce their first album was rejected by the rest of the band. To me, this decision dulls the sonic power of Fresh Fruit, and it feels muffled as a result.

Recorded for $10,000, the album appeared in 1980 on the British indie label Cherry Red. Ogg reminds readers that between the Dickies signed by A+M in 1978 and Husker Du by Warner Brothers in 1985 (and by then, they were not really part of this scene anymore), no American underground band had been issued on a major label. The DKs started Alternative Tentacles to issue their records.

Distributors IRS had balked, due to a distant Kennedy acquaintance, from releasing the album, for the barbed band name (amazingly or inevitably, preceded by a Cleveland band who then declined to go on with the same moniker) led to many double-takes and dead-on-arrival rejections by the record industry. Tracks included hints of musical influences as diverse as Duane Eddy's guitar, Buddy Holly's vocals, MC5's slogans, and Sparks' lyrics, attesting to the band's affection for their childhood idols. It ends with a throwaway cover of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman's "Viva Las Vegas", made famous by Elvis Presley. True to the LP's prickly, brooding, snarling vibe--part Travis Bickle, part Mothers of Invention--the production was credited by the band to the friendlier of engineer Oliver DiCicco's two cats, Norm. Neither Lester Bangs nor Robert Christgau welcomed the record; the latter critic disdained its "Tiny Tim vibrato". Biafra sneers throughout the entire record, true, but this "sustains" Ray's guitar tremelo; it suits the frenetic delivery Jello Biafra adopts for his stage persona.

The original band was already splintering during the making of the record, with second guitarist and oddball even by DK standards 6025 soon departed. A new drummer stepped in--later to claim some of those songwriting royalties which have earned the ire of Jello vs. Klaus and Ray, one learns if in diplomatic fashion via the long-suffering journalist Ogg who patiently hears each side out as they argue. This underlying subplot, still rankling these early band mates today, provides a telling coda to the ambitions of many in the punk era to make a career out of their passion, vs. the compromises the original lineup fended off in their attempt to remain independent of corporate tentacles and truisms.

"Yakety Yak" compiles quotes about the band and album by celebrities in and beyond the rock scene. A closing chapter by Ogg's co-author of The Art of Punk, Russ Bestley (reviewed by me 22 October 2012), titled "Grafical Anarchy" shows how collaborator Winston Smith (who legally changed his name to that Orwellian protagonist) conspired with Biafra to create collages inspired by Situationists.

The LP cover never got the reproduction Judith Calson's San Francisco Chronicle photo deserved. This was taken during the "White Night Riots" following the short sentence handed down to Dan White after his "Twinkie Defense" for the shooting of Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone in 1979. The front cover shows three police cars on fire; the back cover shot of a hokey music combo led to lawsuits by one of its members, so this image was defaced or replaced on later pressings. This pattern would repeat during the band's career, although Ogg avoids much mention of more litigation.

The political subtext of the band gains some attention by Ogg, but how the members gelled to create these singles and the album from a perspective tinted by their predecessors from the 1950s and 1960s whom other punks might have disdained needed more elaboration. Bestley gives a nod to this crucial continuity as context links what the San Franciscans were doing, with jarring détournement (literally "re-routing): cut-up montages from ads, photos, and pamphlets arranged to shake the viewer up. Smith's Fallout Magazine helped rally recruits to the DK cause, but its contents and range do not earn the coverage that could have explained how printed texts and posters widened the band's DIY appeal. Certainly AT's mail order reach, and diligent product placement in indie record stores, accounted for the international audience the band garnered early on, into their heyday, and up to today. Given Bestley and Ogg's knowledge of these multimedia within political punk, more coverage was needed.

Jamie Reid for the Sex Pistols and Gee Vaucher for the English anarchist collective Crass served as counterparts in this guerrilla art form of collage as cultural critique. This packaging boosted the Dead Kennedys' impact. The band and Smith wrapped its records in striking artwork and album inserts. Among punks today, their red-and-black logo endures, but Ogg and Bestley glide past how those two symbolic colors might or might not stand for the band's principled assertion of anarchy. The band's commitment to radical politics as well as pranks and poses needed more elaboration.

Yet, as Biafra (an eventual Green Party presidential campaigner, he came in fourth in a nine-way race for S.F. mayor in the fall of 1979 to replace Moscone) reminds Ogg, Jello mused on what the DK's might achieve: "imagine if Crass was funny". The DKs were. Whether this ensured their success or failure, you are left to ponder, given the eclectic evidence Alex Ogg, Bestley, Smith, and photographer Ruby Ray present for our inspection. (6-13-14 to PopMatters + edited to Amazon US)

"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.

Adam Roberts' "Salt": Book Review

 

I wanted a smart parable about anarchism and I have already read Ursula Le Guin's "The Dispossessed." Adam Robert's debut novel from 2000 came up in my search and it sounded intriguing. Obvious predecessors are Le Guin, and as he acknowledges, Nabokov's wonderful "Bend Sinister" (which personally I enjoyed more than this novel or Le Guin's work, as an aside).

But Roberts opens with a powerful evocation, with religious as well as chemical references, about the powers of salt, and how sodium brings humans closer to heaven in its ubiquity, and towards hell through chlorine. This recalls many SF descriptions of hostile battle and unforgiving terrain, as well as the gloom accompanying conflicts.

Analogies flourish in this narrative, and Roberts alternates the hierarchies of the Senaan society, one of those who have colonized the planet Salt, with another tribe, as it were, a nation of Alsists who have Magyar names and an anarchic way of life, where "to have love" in its brief manifestation sexually is about the only thing that can be possessed, according to their rigid refusal of any claim to ownership of anything. Roberts introduces Barlei and Petja as spokesmen for the two clashing nations. Zealotry fuels the Bible-based civilization of Senaan, sort of a combination of Zionist remaking of a desert into a garden, and a Spartan regime bent on military triumph and fierce patriotism and class divisions.

Neither the Alsists nor the Senaans come off as very appealing. I liked Petja proclaiming how his rivals have internalized the law, so they cannot function outside of their own mental construction and practical prison. One's sympathies may be with Alsists in the beginning, but that protagonist on behalf of his side shows his folly, understandably if predictably, when escorting in rather ambiguous fashion the stranded representative, Rhoda Titus, from the Senaan's hostile camp. War ensues and violence consumes both nations. The course of the novel plays out depressingly.

The decision of Roberts to shift to a third narrator to close this stern debate shifts the balance, and while this appears to open up another sequel, it leaves the reader a bit let down. The absence of humor, unless unintentional, in the Alsists' stolid refusal to compromise, played off the Senaan elevation of duty and order and conformity, drags down both cultures to similarly grim levels. While this is Roberts' intent, it makes "Salt" bitter. (Amazon US 1-12-16)

End-2015 Thoughts

I gather here five snippets from the past few days. They sum up, somehow, this past year's drama and calm. A year of wonder, seeing Mount Rushmore again, seeing Ireland in places I'd never been there as well as ones I returned to visiting friends. One too that took me to Italy, at last, with delight. After a year that found me frenetically working online and onsite, divided between two centers and lots of traffic. Inner challenges as I tried to balance a growing despair in the world's direction and my own need to "chase after what others think of me" as I was counseled. A year that found me facing my idealism about the slim hope of overcoming the doom that appears to loom larger over our planet. Even a left-libertarian, as I found I am best aligned, resents much of the passive-aggressive cant of the left. I witness the smugness of those who turn inward away from injustice, and the annoyance of those in the media who manipulate it to proclaim themselves endless victims of the slightest slight. Part of me has faith in my fellow men and women. Part of me wants to flee the city for a hermitage.
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Donald Miller of USC notes: “Fundamentally, the old Christian cosmology – God sending a son to redeem the world; a God who is all-powerful and yet seemingly impotent in the face of mass violence – simply doesn’t work for many educated young adults. The idea of being ‘spiritual but not religious” oversimplifies people’s understanding of spirituality, but it also signals the possibility that the human spirit quests for something deeper than a latest technological gadget.” 

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In 1920, Alexander Berkman reflects on his visit to Lenin in The Bolshevik Myth. "What is a fanatic but a man whose faith is impregnable to doubt? It is the faith that moves mountains, the faith that accomplishes. Revolutions are not made by Hamlets. The traditional 'great' man, the 'big personality' of current conception, may give to the world new thoughts, noble vision, inspiration. But the man that 'sees every side' cannot lead, cannot control. He is too conscious of the fallibility of all theories, even of thought itself, to be a fighter in any cause.
Lenin is a fighter --- revolutionary leaders must be such. In this sense Lenin is great --- in his oneness with himself, in his single-mindedness; in his psychic positiveness that is as self-sacrificial as it is ruthless to others, in the full assurance that only his plan can save mankind."
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Pankaj Mishra interviews the Dalai Lama. "The 'world picture,' as he saw it, was bleak. People all over the world were killing in the name of their religions. Even Buddhists in Burma were tormenting Rohingya Muslims. This was why he had turned away from organized religion, engaged with quantum physics and started to emphasize the secular values of compassion. It was no longer feasible, he said, to construct an ethical existence on the basis of traditional religion in multicultural societies."

Then "he added that all religious institutions, including the Dalai Lama, developed in feudal circumstances. Corrupted by hierarchical systems, they began to discriminate between men and women; they came to be compromised by such cultural spinoffs as Sharia law and the caste system. But, he said, ‘time change; they have to change. Therefore, Dalai Lama institution, I proudly, voluntarily, ended.'’’ 
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Emma Goldman compares Marriage and Love: "Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere. In freedom it gives itself unreservedly, abundantly, completely. All the laws on the statutes, all the courts in the universe, cannot tear it from the soil, once love has taken root.”

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John O'Donohue remarks in Eternal Echoes: "As we journey onwards in life, more and more spaces within us fill with absence. We begin to have more and more friends among the dead. Every person suffers the absence of their past. It is utterly astonishing how the force and fiber of each day unravel into the vacant air of yesterday. You look behind you and you see nothing of your days here. Our vanished days increase our experience of absence. Yet our past does not deconstruct as if it never was. Memory is the place where our vanished days secretly gather. Memory rescues experience from total disappearance. The kingdom of memory is full of the ruins of presence. It is astonishing how faithful experience actually is; how it never vanishes completely. Experience leaves deep traces in us. It is surprising that years after something has happened to you the needle of thought can hit some groove in the mind and the music of a long vanished event can rise in your soul as fresh and vital as the evening it happened." [Morrigan (c) 2005 by Emily Carding-Allen; Celtic goddess of the phantom and or the great, ruling over and with battle, strife, sovereignty.]