Demographics + DNA

The Jarnsaxa Scale  was devised by a heathen practitioner who goes by Jarnsaxa Thorskona, a while back. She explains at the link that she devised this to differentiate between 1-6 a rough continuum or division between those who affiliated with Ásatrú. As I've been exploring the claims and contexts of this and other native European as well as Celtic Reconstructionist movements, I am posting the link to bring back the scale, which its creator admits she tried to erase during a time of separation from her spiritual path, and since more than one search engine's results, I found, attested to the dead content a seeker might encounter now.

"Rags" at this blog under "Divisions, Intensified" notes that the scale is not perfect, of course. For "many people (including the scale's creator) find that they fit somewhere in between numbers on the scale, showing further how complex the issue really is. However, in general the scale is a fairly balanced way of gauging where a person fits in the endless discussion of ancestry." You can scan too a summation of the folkish-universalist/adoptivist debate there, for FAQ reference.

Suffice to say I've set this down as notes of my own reflective study lately. This folkish controversy--if inevitably you want to label it as such in a year where "whiteness" sparks campaign clickbait--makes me wonder how applicable its adherents see it in Celtic cultures. For as the Paganachd CR site's authors explain, the construct of Celt is that of linguistics and not bloodlines. This to my admittedly general understanding differs from the importance on pedigree that tribal membership, whether among Native Americans or Ásatrúar, looms as fundamentally crucial to who gets to stay and who has to go, when ceremonies and rituals begin.

I think back to my visit to Taos Pueblo. Parts of the settlement were blocked off with signs and sawhorses for sacred purposes. I doubt any of us visiting felt excluded or discriminated against as a result. Their Blue Lake origins demand protection, after a century-plus battle to preserve a sanctuary. Sarah Merfeld explains: "Due to the persistence of the Pueblo and all who assisted in their campaign, the native people are now able to enjoy their sanctuary in privacy. The area is currently accessible only to the Taos Pueblo and outsiders are not allowed entrance. This secrecy and stick ban of any non-Pueblo members is certainly a reaction to the abusive treatment the Pueblo have received."

Therefore, I understand the analogy. Folkish rituals celebrate and commemorate ties to the ancestral roots of one's kin. They can also put up a protective barrier, a palisade, against the intruder or gawker. It's not popular now to extend this right of tribal inclusion to those of European descent, but as Stephen McNallen asks in a 2014 interview, why is one group alone not allowed to assert this claim? We live in a multicultural society, but as tensions reveal this election year, this inquiry skirts taboo.

And, logically although I have yet to find anyone arguing this at length at least on the net, that may be why the CR band opens up admission to all fellow-travelers called to that path, opposed to McNallen's AFA  indicating in its declaration their cautious approach, higher on that Jarnsaxa Scale. The proto-Celts formed a looser conglomeration; the Nordics a tighter troop committed to the core? Certainly the local stress on "where are your family from" connects, say, Iceland and Ireland. I regard these indigenous ideas as fascinating. In a nation where "demographics" stirs us into a tossed salad, it's wise to resist the "we're all mutts" resignation cutting us off from our inherited wisdom tradition. Yet I can contemplate this counter-reaction, to invite others to share our legacy, if they're sincere in it.

The argument folkish folks make is that in us, we gravitate towards our accustomed ways of affinity. The monotheistic elimination of such ties being very recent, compared to millennia among one's own. A few feel the urge to connect, as re-ligio or re-binding denotes, with this attenuated or severed flow. It may be inexplicable, and to me as intellectually uncertain as AFA's "metagenetics" claim that I doubt any biologist would accept any more than he or she would the Jungian archetype, but that tug back to recover what has been demolished persists in me, too. I recall cheering on the Druids, not St. Patrick, as I read the chronicles of my native land, and its surrounding islands, struggling for identity.

We all face forces of assimilation. Capitulated, my pre-Catholic family, and many more, 1600 years ago. What happens when the language is lost is more recent, just a century past, for my mother's father's household on the East Mayo border. Scars can be inside one's soul; trauma passed down to us to nurse. Recognizing the losses of a common tongue, a shared outlook, a cherished mindset need not expose us to charges of romanticizing a harsh existence under feudal lords and rapacious clergy. Deeply rooted, as when we hear the pipes or taste a whiskey, there persists a moment of recognition.

Yes, that does complicate it, too. If Ásatrúar argue for common bonds of the Northern peoples, this is more ancient than the Celtic-Roman-Norman-Viking-Saxon-Pict mishmash that divided up the North Atlantic Archipelago during the ages of invasion and destruction of the old heathen ways. Celts, too, I suggest, might have been more open to a less restrictive idea of unity, given the mythic nine waves of invaders, Fir Bolg and Tuatha De Danaan, Formorians and Milesians and All That. Who gets accepted as Irish simply means who lives there after a while. And a roll call of rebels and Fenians lists surnames de Valera, Pearse, Kent, Gonne, Plunkett, Tone, and Colbert, no O/Mc clans these.

Judaism is not a missionary faith, but converts after screening and preparation can prove their bona fides. Zoroastrianism, on the other hand, forbids conversion and risks dying out among the Parsees in India, let alone its persecuted homeland of Iran. DNA as I have mused before suggests intriguing results. My 93% score indicates a definite "Celtic"(sic) haplotype marking me as Irish as Paddy's pig.

But it's that 6% Central Asian, perhaps going back to 25,000 years ago and more, and maybe with bits of Neanderthal and Denisovan strains, that also makes me wonder. And that 1% East Asian tint. In shamans and in divination, in spirit-searches and transmigrations of all kinds, my family tree stretches back to ice and fur, incantations and inspirations I strain to glimpse, part of my own quest.

(Photo: Éamon de Valera, President of the Irish Republic, made an honorary chief of the Ojibwe-Chippewa people, 1919. Find out how and why at: "The Irish Revolution and Native America")

John Neeleman's "Logos": Book Review

Extrapolating the accounts of the Jewish War by Josephus with what we know of Saul-turned-Paul, the tension between his mission to the Gentiles with the Hebrew-centered Christian cult of James, the brother of Jesus, the ministry of the man born as Yeshua himself, and the influences of Philo of Alexandria, the Sicarii rebels against Rome, and the Essenes, as well as imperial machinations, this novel takes on a complicated situation. Perhaps gleaning hints how a pre-synoptic ur-gospel [called Q if not here but by German critics 160 years ago] came to be imagined and composed, John Neeleman presents his reconstruction in a sprawling tale. He makes a clever case for his bold theory of origins.

Jacob ben Aaron rises up in the higher ranks of those centered around Temple ritual in Jerusalem. Starting around the year we know as 46 when he was born, this focuses on the great revolt which for a time drove back the Romans who sought to crush Palestinian resistance. Frustrated by Hebrew intransigence, the rulers who collaborate with Rome make a convincing argument for capitulation, so as to keep a limited form of autonomy. But radicals take the lead and spark insurgency, hating Rome. Jacob learns to carry this revenge himself after sufferings hit home. To avoid spoilers, let's say that he is affected deeply and, caught up in the revolt, he survives partially driven by his own desire to fight back. He wanders from the fallen Temple around Roman territory. This allows Neeleman to introduce him and us to the teachings of the Essenes, the thoughts of the Persian Magi, the ideas of the desert Ishmaelites, and the philosophy of the Hellenized Hebrews who studied in Alexandria. All these, with a hint of Egyptian myth, build upon Jacob's childhood preparation in the Torah and the classics alike.

Neelemen cleverly creates a protagonist eager for knowledge of both great systems, sacred and profane, Greek and Hebrew, and by taking them in, he can integrate them, while remaining somewhat doubtful about the power of his traditional beliefs. At one low point, the theodicy he challenges "all seemed contradictory and an extended rationalization for failure." The "same formula," as he is told by one mentor of many, repeats the story of a nobleman anointed before being cast into the wilderness, only to overcome deprivation to be revealed "as the savior of humankind and the bearer of a word and bringer of a new and better age." This realization enables him to be open to syncretic patterns, as Jacob watches the Christian sect grow, and witnesses when Rome tries to come to terms with this restive message of liberation from outmoded ways. Jacob is well-placed to take advantage. 

"Logos is order. Logos is balance, measure for measure. Wisdom is understanding the Logos." Jacob hears this translated from lofty concepts to clever realpolitik by one well placed to put this into effect. The demand is that while "the will to power, desire, money, sex" may all be "stigmatized" as passions unbecoming the new world order, the fulfillment will entice many into the embrace of "good news."

Neelemen lines up many personages, and while their conversations as in such accounts may imitate the didacticism and erudite tone of the classic and ancient tellers in his own prose, this stately pace does blend with the feel of an antiquated chronicle. The expository content, as many doctrines, disputes, and dissidents have their lengthy say--often with citing Scripture as readily as does Jacob the epics--slows modern expectations. But judiciously dramatized battle scenes, frank but honest sexual encounters, and a determination to endure make Jacob's journeys worthwhile, especially after he must leave his hometown of Jerusalem. This mixes a coming-of-age saga with an novel of ideas, too. To sum up, if you wish an expansive but thoughtful examination of how Christianity might have evolved in its earliest days, as one man in the flesh became the creator of the word as Logos, it's here.
(Amazon US 3-10-15)

Joshua Dubler's "Down in the Chapel": Book Review

While academic articles have scrutinized the range of religious observance behind bars, and while popular culture capitalizing on this milieu treats these activities with passing or prurient interest, few in-depth treatments aimed at a wider audience have appeared. Adapting his Princeton dissertation, a professor of religion at the University of Rochester, Joshua Dubler, guides readers through a prison week in early 2006. He uses a week's chronology to intersperse summaries from ethnography and sociology on prison religion, mingling these with a year of sacred and profane discussions among those who gravitate towards one prison chapel, which can be a bleak or comforting "cellular edifice". Combining scholarly distance with first-hand reports as a participant-observer, he introduces us to 15 chapel workers chosen from a general population of 3,500, their five chaplains, and a pair of officers enlisted to keep order in this quiet corner of Pennsylvania's Graterford State Correctional Institution.

The inmates reflect the racial and ethnic demographics of this prison, thirty-odd miles northwest of Philadelphia. About a quarter of those locked up there identify as Muslim, often drawn from the same South Philly neighborhoods which claim the allegiance of inmates at Graterford, about two-thirds of whom are African-American. Trusting those who they knew outside before they all wound up on the inside, many stick together to attend a particular service among the Islamic options. Three include Warith Deen as the successor to the disbanded Nation of Islam, the Nation of Islam itself as revived under Louis Farrakhan, or an enduring manifestation of earlier Islam in black America, the Moorish Science Temple. Dubler explores this trio; he elaborates how tensions in this prison had once worsened between factions of black Muslim observance. These sparked resentment among staff and politicians who suppressed what they perceived as subversion in a more permissive atmosphere. In a 1995 crackdown on drugs and smuggling, tough-on-crime authorities gained control over Graterford.

Dubler "as a Jew and a pluralist" sides with these expressions of black identity. As a counter to the "expansionist universalism" of Sunni Muslims, fervent Catholics, or fundamentalist Protestants, he admits his soft spot for a "living genealogy of black religion". This heritage, however, seems increasingly an urban African-American legacy within a globalizing community, open to religious competition. Reverend Keita is a Bible-based Protestant from Sierra Leone; the prison imam is from Nigeria. This pair ministering to Philly-loyal inmates stands out, as immigrants into black America.

Today, many African-American Muslims opt for an increasingly appealing take on fundamentalism, imported from the Salafi sect in Saudi Arabia. The selection of that imam from Africa may reflect a wish among supervisors to inculcate a more traditional, less politically charged, style of supervision through conducting services and monitoring inmate activity. Whatever the denomination, Dubler reveals the tensions chaplains share. They soon are "burned" by the appeals and scams of inmates conniving to use their phones or computers (rare instances of such devices accessible at Graterford, at least legally), so chaplains can "burn out", caught between the strategies of staff who use chaplains for surveillance and the scams of inmates who seek to manipulate those assigned to care for them.

Nevertheless, a "palliative" quality of religion, in one common explanation for its ubiquity (which Dubler diminishes as he does any neat formula to shrink down human experience to theory), sedates. At least according to the conventional wisdom, which justifies a widespread practice of prisoner faith. As the liberal Lutheran, Reverend Baumgartner (some names are changed in this narrative), avers, the jaded staff regards chaplains as "as affable opiate peddlers", in Dubler's memorable phrase.

This book peppers such phrases into its style. Prisoner Teddy and Officer Watkins debate the truth of the Bible, as Dubler judges them "nothing if not readers of outrageous confidence". He then segues into a rundown of the Second Great Awakening nearly two hundred years ago. As a Muslim, Sayyid may deny evolution and assert God's control, but "his claims to lockjaw epistemological modesty are belied by his exuberance". A Jewish inmate, the rabbi's clerk, enters: "Fastidious in his appearance, with pressed browns, sculpted hair, shadowless cheeks, and, in summer, the uniformly bronze hue of an intentional tan, Brian carries himself with the harried air of a corporate professional." Neshawn rises during a Nation of Islam gathering to talk about an incident "on the block"; his "appetite for unpolished provocation" hints to Dubler of "a mind run amok". Such vivid details humanize those Dubler introduces, and they enliven the gist of a book which can wander off into professorial prose.

This tone, drifting between character studies and theoretical rumination (nearly thirty pages of dense footnotes attest to the origins of this project), creates frequent shifts. Dubler as an Ivy League-trained professor incorporates ten theses, in self-aware, suggestive language, which highlight his attempts at applying theory to the situations he studies. This can disconcert, for the range of this study is vast and despite lots of documentation, he can assume his reader is as smart as he is as to certain allusions or scholars. However, he alters this density by varying narrative voices to highlight his own predicament, listening to those on the inside, but always knowing he possesses the freedom denied his informants and confidants. He stays cautious of the staff and cameras watching his moves.

He reports in long conversations the tensions of the body and the spirit, the restless minds and the stifled desires. These he dramatizes, from inmates, chaplains, and guards. (I wondered how often he took notes, took liberties with dialogue, and/or if he transcribed tapes but I cannot ascertain--except for one mention of him transcribing a brief sermon--the precise methods by which he recalls so much, given this hefty expansion of his dissertation.) He blends academic discussions with hip-hop lyrics, trash talk, debates, and his hyper-aware sensibility. After all, he does not fit into this regimentation.

Raised well-off in Manhattan, he reveals how he descends from "agnostic observant Jews" who don't believe in God anymore but who take comfort in belonging to a set of values, a community, and a family. This key insight emerges late on, for it's not until Friday of the dramatized week when we hear it, by way of Dubler at Shabbat service. He then opens up, badgered by Brian, to account for his own Jewish identity, and the merits of his dissertation. How can this one prison stand for millions incarcerated? How can a single study account for unprecedented religious variety among inmates?

Dubler accepts the narrow limits of his project on practical grounds, but he rejects expansion of his observations to create a heady, sweeping statement about religious life in all American prisons. He admits its small scope. He strives to follow academic convention in methodology. Yet, he rejects rigidity as to theory. Earlier, he dismisses both the "bad man" trope where those incarcerated use religion as part of a con and the "poor man" stance where those convicted turn to religion as solace: humbled, beaten down, or too weak to react in other than a pitiful submission to life's hardships.

Investigating the marked "do-or-die certitude" habitually if not totally asserted by most of the six Muslims, four Protestants, two Catholics, as well as the one atheist who works in the chapel, Dubler notes the necessity for prisoners to adapt such a stubborn line of defense for survival. It's rare to hear irony when they proclaim their beliefs, for Graterford like any prison is a place "where men tend to bind themselves to the masts of their convictions and tenaciously hold on to those revolutionary moments in time when they first become what they continue to resolutely become". This subtle phrasing typifies Dubler's preference for a flexible expression of religion, rooted in his preference for postmodern lack of resolution and his professed tendency to act out, rather than mull over, ideas. He suspects those locked into a warped, defensive pose, who cannot flex or bend to save themselves.

Among his Jewish fellows, Dubler lets down his academic guard. He has opposed the liberal Protestant position which courts have adopted. This criterion aligns the sincerity of what is professed "interiorly" with what is indicative of truth through an exterior manifestation. This limits the expression of a sanctioned faith to a denomination demanding a material representation of belief. Dubler resists any judgement which promotes religion by a particular legal or academic label. He responds to Brian's challenge: "As I see it, rather than in the discreetly mapped forest, it is in the territorial mess of trees and shrubs, undergrowth and earth, where the stuff of religion takes place."

In such a thicket, he orients himself, given a wavering reaction towards his ancestral Judaism. Rejecting facile scholarly definitions, Dubler affirms that religion is a convivial activity, but it need not be profession of a creed or a ritual enacted as in scripture. It can be what is joyfully, intuitively shared. He equates religion with eating and drinking at a meal "with one's friends, with one's people".

Among others, too, he seeks to understand varieties of religious experience. At a Spanish-language revival service, he wonders if the preacher's fulminations against "the Jews" are meant symbolically, practically, or personally. He sits gingerly on the frozen ground as part of a Native American circle. He follows Father Gorski to the death row block. He talks with a Catholic inmate applying Franciscan principles of restorative justice to ease relations with the family of his victim. Dubler attends what he confesses to be a dispiriting Mass on a dreary Saturday night. The surge of emotional relief he feels, he and the priest confide when they leave prison confines for the parking lot, testifies to the pressures built up within the forbidding place they both choose to work at, but from which they both can walk away each night. This freedom divides those who care for these inmates from those inmates. Still, as the book nears its conclusion and the year reaches its end, Dubler lets readers glimpse his growing sadness at departure. He assures those he has spoken to he will treat them fairly.

Within Graterford, neither jailhouse terrorists radicalized by Islam nor crazed prophets railing at the their carceral confines materialize. Dubler concedes long-term prisoners learn to endure as ascetics rather than revolutionaries during harsh sentences. "Not system shatterers, today's religious prisoners are, in their own quiet and righteous way--much like the majority of us--system sustainers." Demonstrating devotion to a system, even in its "messy and putatively noncoercive assemblage of music, altar patter, and Bible readings", the "anticlerical, antiliturgical" Protestant Sunday service led by Reverend Baumgartner rouses gratitude at God's call. Joy sustains its appeal into the rest of the congregants' week. Certainly, Dubler enjoys it much more than the Catholic Mass the previous night.

This book educates with references to Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, and Feuerbach, along with casual nods to The Wire, Dungeons and Dragons, and pro football. Dubler diligently navigates between his privileged status as an academic and his trusted role as an interviewer in an unpredictable environment. He may never shake off his own protective garb, that scholarly, liberal, idealistic mindset which drives him to spend a year at Graterford for his doctoral fieldwork, but he lets down his guard long enough to learn lessons from a formidable cadre of teachers and mentors on the inside.
(Edited for Amazon US 8-1-14; PopMatters 8-11-14. See also Karl Woolf at NYJB, same day.)

William T. Vollmann's "The Atlas": Book Review

For newcomers, this provides a 1996 odds and ends analogy to a musician's compilation of b-sides, demos, cuts that did not fit an LP, or alternate takes on familiar songs. For instance, "The Butterfly Stories" appeared as a novel, but a section here repeats that same narrator's search for Vanna in Thailand. The scenes do not perhaps add a lot to what the novel depicted, so like a compilation not of greatest hits but of assorted miscellany the artist wants to share, this may please fans more than those meeting Vollmann for the first time. Yet, if a reader wants to learn about his signature concerns, whether trying to wrangle for liability with a rental car agent in Sarajevo after the author had been wounded and his two friends killed, rescuing a mosquito-ravaged woman from the side of a Canadian road, or elucidating a familiar theme of loneliness--an empty diner reflected in a spoon in one vignette as the protagonist sitting in a corner musters up the courage to ask out the waitress--this assortment surveys a sampling of insights. 

This works best when it allows Vollmann to roam, as the title indicates, away from his Asian and San Franciscan haunts to those of a cold Toronto, or among the Inuit. A portion here called "The Rifles" reprises that novel's doomed Reepah, or places other books of his (to date at least, given his prolific output) have not wandered into, such as Mauritius, Switzerland, and among the Australian aborigines. As in his recent "Last Stories and Other Stories," we get Mexican magic realism infusing "The Hill of Gold." As with his Asian journeys, we get an elusive object of desire, followed in the surreal search for a coin with a hole by the mortal narrator entangled with a mysterious "The Angel of Prisons." 

A few sample passages express the prose at its peak. "In hitchhiking as in so many other departments, the surest way not to get something is to need it." Loneliness permeates so much of these stories. "As the mathematician C.H. Hinton wrote: '. . . we are accustomed to find in nature infinite series, and do not feel obliged to pass on a belief in the ultimate limits to which they seem to point." Yet Buddhism speaks to a few here who seek, and a longing for meaning impels quests. "Her life was like some cold wide shallow pond rushing straight at her with fan-shaped waves, the wind picking up now, not yet strong enough to throw more than foam in her face." Among the Inuit, destiny looms. "Living means leaving, going on trying not to hear the screams." That speaks for itself, as does the title "Disappointed by the Wind." In such terrain, bleakness compels Vollmann's characters to break the ice, to try to grasp some sense of surety and comfort, even if the melt "tasted like burned desolation." 

I also liked the drug trip that reveals near Big Bend, CA a search for God which nonetheless finds that presence following the narrator like the sun behind one's back all day, never quite entering him. Instead, the "Traveller's Epitaph" here confesses "I fear death." That presence hovers over many of the figures here; unsafe sex with Thai prostitutes takes one character into a forbidding fate, while all over the sprawling centerpiece "The Atlas" with dozens of locales traversed, we find one of Vollmann's most erotic passages, a relative rarity, in his account of a narrator smitten by a married lover who will die of leukemia. The poignant emotion the author allows us to fully feel, for me, succeeds to display better the impacts Vollmann can deliver, freer from the restrictions of city streets. 
(Amazon US 7-20-14)

Edmund Gosse's "Father and Son": Book Review

In 1907, this "study of two temperaments" dramatized religious convention opposed to rational modernism. Edmund's father, Philip Henry Gosse, ran a Plymouth Brethren household. His wife died of cancer, and the son movingly documents her own demise, drawing from her diary, and enriched by his own recollections. After she dies, at twilight, he seeks his father's embrace: "I used to turn my face up to his, patiently and wonderingly, while the large, unwilling tears gathered in the corners of his eyelids." While the severity of his parents' attitudes has been challenged by scholars of Edmund's dramatic and eloquent narrative, the power of the clash of tradition and innovation at intimate levels during the mid-nineteenth century's encounter with Darwin's revolutionary theory can be felt.

As a naturalist, Philip tried to reconcile the new doctrine, arguing in the book "Omphalos" that as Adam added a navel thanks to God's intervention, so His plan allowed for fossils embedded to look as if a more antiquated cosmos had been intended from the beginning. Philip thought his argument would reconcile atheists and believers, but he was shattered when his book met with dismissal and was ignored. He popularized the Devon tide pools, and Edmund recalls with bittersweet detail the wonders that the shores once held undisturbed in his youth--until his father's studies and illustrations convinced many others to visit the beaches, and to ruin the fragile ecosystem irreparably.

Therefore, in its environmental as well as creationist themes, you can see the relevance a century later of this account. He describes the Victorian conventional mindset well. "People would, for instance, go on living over a cess-pool. working themselves up in an agony to discover how they had incurred the displeasure of the Lord, but never moving away." He also engagingly portrays the shift to an "extreme" Puritan and fundamentalist sensibility as he and his father--soon with a stepmother--live in a hamlet in Devonshire. There, away from the city, the foibles of trust in those deemed upright and righteous turns sad, or subtly satirical. A spinning top or a plum pudding, the word "Carmine" all loom large in the young child's mind, and can terrorize as deviations from the approved mentality.

While he's precociously allowed to be baptized before adulthood after being grilled by the elders, he finds the "mechanical address" and empty language of his prayers a telling revelation. Like a pot that surrounds an already growing plant, he feels as if he's trapped, and tries to grow up around the suppressing weight of the pattern imposed. He grows apart from the faith of his father, and in the final section breaks away as a maturing man from Philip. "The incidents of human life upon the road to glory were less than nothing to him," a man of belief.

Seeking a truer criterion of "moral justice" than that of the Christian Judge, Edmund refuses to sanction an Almighty who would condemn millions for "a purely intellectual error of comprehension." So, individualism, the ability to think for himself, takes control. He refuses to compromise, and no truce, he concludes, could have been acceptable between son and father. (Read  via Project Gutenberg for the Kindle. Amazon US 11-9-12.)

Michael J. McRae's "The Siege of Shangri-La": Book Review

This preceded Ian Baker's 2004 first-person account (see my Oct. 2005 review)  "The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place", but I did not know about McRae's work until I stumbled across it, the lone Himalayan-themed title in my local urban library. McRae provides a deftly drawn depiction of Baker, and his colleagues and rivals. In the 1990s, they seek in what becomes an unseemly fashion to rush to be the first to "discover" (as opposed to more correctly "document, as Baker wishes) the last five-mile gap with its "hidden falls" of the Tsongpo Gorge that will flow into the mighty Brahmaputra river.

McRae, as a National Geographic editor, does not play favorites in his telling of the quest, even if his magazine sponsored one of two competing, as it turned out, teams. Furthermore, the Chinese massed to rush into the competition, and the conclusion shows them eager to exploit the prospect of a national park for eco-tourism and all the natural and cultural destruction in the name of profit that designation entails.

This account, preceded by an equally worthy narrative of how earlier British explorers had struggled to penetrate this blank spot on their maps, emphasizes in pithier and more naturally detached form than does Baker's longer book the research he and his partner Hamid Sardar conducted of Pemako's "inner and outer geography." For, these scholars and Buddhist practitioners reasoned that "the canyon's crumpled topography concealed a sacred landscape visible only to those of adequate spiritual preparation, and that the path to this holy realm of peace and plenty would lead them, as Baker explains, 'beyond geography.'" (87)

While they experienced in their quest a "creative regression" as they gave up fighting the elements, more skeptical adventurers, in the pursuit of "canyoneering" that McRae conveys vividly, shrugged and saw the purported "beyul" or entrance into a sacred hidden realm as merely a "hydrologic event." McRae notes how the same terrain might enchant one adept but leave another, more secular, nonplussed. This "Shangri-La" may be more a product of clever marketing than tangible grasping.

Those who enter must be pure of intent and possess sufficient merit, for "all others will find only empty mountains, blinding storms, landslides, floods, and perhaps even death." (50) The predecessors Bailey, Kingdon-Ward and Lord Cawdor, among others, struggled mightily and repeatedly to find the waterfalls that nested unseen but sensed and rumored within the gorge. McRae compares this stretch to "scaling the pleats of some giant accordion, then rappelling down the other side, only to begin again." (35)

I will not reveal what the author himself finds when he travels to the region near the millennium. Part of the appeal of this accessible, detailed, but also open-ended account lies in the dogged physical exertion those determined to enter this elusive gap expend. Another part, which expands as the narrative continues, delves into heir mental and spiritual motivations, or lack of such. One wonders if any of the modern tourists who may soon flock here will possess the necessary insight that the Tibetans taught was a prerequisite to understand this domain. The wild will be tamed, dammed, and damned, perhaps, but a hint remains that even when destruction dominates the world, a portal to a better land will persist here, maybe within the waterfall, to beckon those able to discern its presence.

McRae in his sobering study of what's driven men and women for nearly a century into this remote and difficult landscape leaves the reader only wanting more. This short book took quite a while to read, and I slowed as it demanded a different frame of mind as the expected travel narrative hinted at more profound concepts. I wish he provided more photos, and that his map was even more detailed, but perhaps he intends to leave part of the sketch open to interpretation, on more than one level. (Amazon US 11-16-12)

Noah Levine's "Dharma Punx": Book Review

A dropout at fifteen, and by nearly thirty, a grown-up, Noah Levine shares his troubled journey. The son of a prominent American Buddhist teacher, Noah was raised in Taos and Santa Cruz, two not-exactly hardscrabble countercultural enclaves. Still, he seems to have spent little time with his father and stepmother, and early on became alienated from his mother and stepfather, turning to drugs by the age of ten or so, and then integrating hardcore (and then Straight Edge) punk and skating, tagging and panhandling, stealing and crack, into his lifestyle spent on the streets. He rails for much of his upbringing against hippie idealism and spiritual messages, but as the title indicates, he manages to survive stints in juvenile hall, twelve-step programs, and among many rebels in the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years who wind up in prison and/or dead.

He tells the story with lots of did-this, done-that detail for the first half of his narrative. He tends to fill pages with who he hung out with and what happened next which may be interesting if you were there with him, or were listening to his anecdotes now and then, but after a few chapters of similar-sounding mishaps, travels, parties, girlfriends, and concerts, it blurs as much for a reader as it must have for Noah back then. I sympathized with his torment, but it played like a long episode of MTV's "Behind the Music"--by a fan.

Halfway, the narrative lightens and widens. A solo camping trip to Big Basin park to see the redwoods he loved sounds predictable. But, the emotion invested in his sight of a deer, and the feelings evoked, demonstrate movingly, in his entrapment in temptations, how estranged from nature he has become.

His share of his mother's inheritance must have stood him in good stead, for he travels a long time across the US and all over Asia. To his credit, earlier (as with "My Name is Earl," I thought), he repays those he ripped off and makes amends to those he cheated, and he does put his fairly-earned income from medical and social work to good use, going off for stays to Hindu ashrams and Buddhist shrines, as well as a Sufi encounter. He follows his parents' model of acting as if he had a year to live, and he lives it up, and down, on his travels.

At Bodhgaya, where the Buddha sat under the bodhi tree, Levine seeks his own "intention to awaken in this lifetime" and to overcome his fears and mistakes and loneliness by "a victory over suffering." (161) Such self-surrender contrasts with his ornery past, and restless present, disdain as a punk for those who have chosen to play along with the system. Slowly, he realizes his own complicity with such a stable system, grateful for the safety it allows him as an American, compared to the assaults on the senses and body that much of India inflicts.

On his second trip to Bodhgaya, to see the Dalai Lama, he realizes his inconsistencies. "The day before I had taken a vow to be compassionate and there I was threatening some crazy Indian man with a stick. The absurdity of it made me laugh. I was very far from becoming a bodhisattva but at least I was trying." (205)

He tells of his on-again-off-again relationship with a girl named Lola, and of his gradual acceptance of their life that must be spent apart. He struggles with his desires, and despite his vegan, hardcore, purifying blend of dharma and punk ethos, he finds the practice as difficult as ever. But, he channels his rage and revolutionary idealism into a positive energy. "I had found the solution to my once-hopeless situation and lack of faith had been replaced by a verified understanding of the path to freedom from suffering. I knew that the path led upstream, against the current, and was the most rebellious thing I had ever done." (217)

As that last sentence of his shows, he can be a writer who struggles with a more fluent style, but the rawness, despite a typo or gaffe now and then, does reflect an honest account that surely has wide appeal for his audience, those who have come of age alongside him, and not the hippies of their parents' (or by now, grandparents') era. Levine can merge the discontent of punk with the First Noble Truth of Buddhism. By the end of his tale, he's finished college and started grad school in a program combining psychotherapy with spirituality, and he's serving the kinds of people he grew up with in Santa Cruz, with a Mind Body Awareness prison ministry, a safe-sex outreach program, and AIDS education.

He contemplates the funeral of one of his best friends, one who saw him both shoot up and meditate, and Levine resolves to keep doing better. He notes how few punks break through their anger at consumerism and conformity to get to "the causes and conditions of the suffering and falsehoods." (230) In dharma, personal freedom and a solution to the wrongs that fill society, he reckons, come together in his deeper, mature understanding. While this will not teach you much about what the Buddha taught, it's a nudge in the right direction. It's a rough ride over two decades, and the feeling that his father and his renowned colleagues intervene more than once to bail him out does persist. Still, the Buddha himself lived as a pampered prince before he saw the reality outside the palace gate.  The rich as well as the poor need guidance, the suburbanites along with those in the slums. Therefore, especially for younger readers turned off by musings from his father's generation, Noah's energetic, if rambling, memoir should prove a wake-up call.

P.S. The title may promise more dharma, but it gives you more punx. Here, Levine appends an overview of his father's meditation practice based on breathing but you'll need his 2007 "Against the Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries" (see my review) as "a navigational chart" for that inner journey that returns to helping others along their own path. His 2011 book, "The Heart of the Revolution" shares his take on the Buddhist teachings of forgiveness, compassion, and kindness. For comparison, along the Zen path and amidst American hardcore punk and Japanese monster-movie culture, the similar memoirs and studies by Brad Warner (all four recently reviewed by me), are recommended. Like Levine, Warner mixes his own (sometimes repetitious, but entertainingly self-deprecating) punk saga into the Buddhist quest; unlike Levine, he's more insistent and more explanatory about how you can and should accept the regimen of Zen as a path to dharma. (Posted to Lunch.com 3-14-11 & Amazon US 3-11-11, the latter an attempt at balance among severely bipolarized reviewers; I've since reviewed his third installment, sign of his growing if delayed maturity: "The Heart of the Revolution" in 2011 for NYJB.)

Elizabeth Cunningham's "Red-Robed Priestess": Book Review

Imagine Mary Magdalen was born a Celt, foster-daughter of a hero who then rapes her. She then falls in love with a certain gifted foreign exchange student who comes to (what is now) Wales from Palestine. She rescues him from sacrifice by the Druids, so they must flee back to Israel. They will create a daughter, together. There he will meet his fate with --and apart from-- her. Meanwhile, her first-born daughter, taken from her by the Druids, a “misbegotten child of a misbegotten child,” grows up to lead a native rebellion against the Romanization of Britain.

After a career roaming the Levantine, where not only Jesus but Paul of Tarsus embraced her with various consequences, this red-robed priestess, born Maeve Ruadh, Mary the Red, sails from Gaul across the Channel. Her hair now faded to grey, at sixty she returns to the land of Britain where she was raised, to seek out her first-born daughter, rebel queen Boudica. During an uprising in Britain a generation after the Crucifixion, Maeve will witness through her shape-shifting self the fate of her homeland and the decisions made by both her headstrong daughters.

This ambitious novel completes Elizabeth Cunningham’s lively series, The Maeve Chronicles. As a first-time reader of Maeve’s adventures, I found the start of this complicated saga slower going. Still, Ms. Cunningham integrates the past gossip and guises of her appealingly flawed, wittily droll heroine deftly. The author blends what can be known from the historical record—as with the three earlier installments—into a winning mixture of fantasy, romance, epic, and meditation upon the struggle between Christian notions of peace and pagan insistence upon power, and how these principles themselves warp and mutate and shrivel as the cause of the Celtic Britons clashes with that of the Roman (or Romanized) imperial settlers.

Without taking herself or her creation of unpredictable, seductive Maeve too seriously, Ms. Cunningham manages to extend the relevance of this novel beyond a mash-up tale of “Magdalene returns to the Druids”. Her pace rarely pauses to allow us to catch up, but Maeve can shift via dream states conveniently across Britain if necessary, a helpful narrative device that compresses the defeat of the Druids on the Isle of Mon (today’s Anglesey off the northern Welsh coast) with the rebellion of Boudica that burned down London and two other Romanized cities before the Celts were crushed by the Roman forces. The predestined nature of the true part of this tale, therefore, requires skill in keeping the reader involved in a doomed epic. It is a testament to Ms. Cunningham’s ability that she can keep the plot moving rapidly while insisting upon depth given to the magical and mundane characters from history and myth who hurry across these busy pages.

Maeve, telling us her tale, muses early on about her relationship with the Roman commander. She recalls how both of them “kept straying into each other’s story, as if some incoherent dream insisted on inhabiting waking hours.” The chronicle, colloquially rendered in modern-day English, succeeds in avoiding the mustiness of many alternate histories. Maeve addresses herself to our time as well as hers, and this allows Ms. Cunningham to connect her predicament with that of anyone forced to take the side of those who murder or those who will die.

Tangled into the machinations of Celts and Romans, directed by the come-and-go voice of Jesus and the messages from earlier chronicles in this series now and then, Maeve struggles to make the right decisions, as her daughters must confront the presence of their mother in unexpected circumstances, and as she must admit uncomfortable revelations about her own background and her own long absence from the lives of her two girls.

“I sighed. Once again, the choice. Suddenly I was tired of spinning tales, spinning the truth, tired of spinning. They say deceit weaves a tangled web. But fabrication is an art form. The truth is the raw, and often unappealing, material.”

Maeve’s admission compels her to alter allegiances, and to test her loyalties. Ms. Cunningham presents a fair-minded portrayal of both sides in this British conflict, and this is enriched by Maeve’s own understanding of the lessons left for her by Jesus. “What does it mean to love your enemy on the eve of battle? Do you spare your enemy even though he won’t spare you? Do you kill him, because he will kill you? Which is worse, death or murder?”

The tragic resolution of this dramatic showdown comes after hints of stories perhaps nearly as ancient, the roots of King Lear and Hamlet, as well as plenty of Celtic divination and Druidic debate. Ms. Cunningham notes how she had to return, a final time, to allow her heroine the chance to return to her homeland, to settle the last story which Maeve’s long life had created. This final episode in The Maeve Chronicles, for all its carefully recreated battle and bloodshed, lingers in the mind equally as long for its introspection and revelation. This offers a welcome examination of the ties of love and the conflicts of loyalty on the intimate as well as epic levels. (Featured at the New York Journal of Books 11-15-11; Author's website.)

Jose Saramago's "Cain": Book Review

Sentences collapse; commas convey rapid, wry, ironic dialogue. Paragraphs expand into rushes of anger, bewilderment, frustration, and revenge. Cain’s life, one that will not end as God does not let him come to harm as an ironic judgment for the killing of his brother, Abel, upends the Old Testament through furious prose, ideological passion, and desiccated places. These themes inspired his 1991 revisionist effort, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ  (see my review). The author, a longtime anarcho-communist and outspoken atheist, left Portugal for Spain after the publication of this Gospel revision angered the Catholic Church. He died a few years later, at 88. This shorter, equally enigmatic 2009 tale, the final one from this Nobel laureate, arrives via Margaret Jull Costa’s fluid translation from Portuguese. 

In both novels, a distant, bemused narrator speaks omnisciently about God and his faulty handiwork. Saramago’s Jesus confronted his divine infusion and his messianic mission with doubt and hesitation, and that novel explored largely the “hidden years” in Nazareth and the desert before Christ’s public ministry. There, the author chose to blend critiques of belief with considerable insight into the comforts of faith, and the humanity shared by such fully drawn characters as Mary Magdalene, whose steady and sexual presence for Jesus eased the demands of a vindictive, crafty, and parochial father-figure. 

Cain’s story, by comparison, bursts free from its biblical origins, but Saramago hastens, in two or three pages, to recount the killing of Abel, and the punishment of God, who leaves a black mark on Cain’s forehead as a sign that he is not to be killed by other people, already roaming the plains outside of Eden. Cain holds his own against his Creator, whom he blames for refusing Cain’s own good-natured sacrifice of vegetables rather than Abel’s cattle, and whom Cain holds partially responsible for looking on rather than preventing the first murder. Cain assures his maker that “if I were god, I would repeat every day Blessed are those who choose sedition because theirs is the kingdom of the earth.” 

Later in this exchange, the narrator edges in: “Poor abel, deceived by god. The lord had made some very bad choices when it came to inaugurating the garden of eden, in this particular game of roulette everyone had lost, in this target practice for the blind no none had scored.”

Saramago, as these excerpts show, employs his characteristic use of capitalization, as in Blindness, to refer only to the start of a quote. Unlike Gospel, which used capitalization of proper nouns, and periods to set off dialogue even if paragraphs subsumed it, here only commas set off one speaker from the other. Capitalization starts a sentence, but that sentence may be very long, interspersing dialogue and narrative with internal capitalization inserted to mark a switch in speaker, but without quotation marks or often clear attribution except in context. This rapid, challenging, but “consciously” appropriate style conveys the flow of thoughts in the mind as much as in conversation, as the narrator and the protagonist shift and blur in their perspectives nimbly, if demanding attention by any reader. 

This prose commands the reader by its own subversion of Scripture, as form matches content. Both seek to overthrow traditional models, and to replace them with imaginative ones. Saramago’s humanism and his championship of the underdog and the rebel remain prominent. He resists authority, and he defends sexual liberation and communal love of family, partner, and neighbor. Cain’s brave acceptance of Lilith as not only Noah’s wife but Cain’s mate provides the most vivid scenes, just as his earlier allegory had enriched the character of Mary Magdalene, similarly maligned by other believers and tellers. 

Later, as Cain must leave Lilith to wander as his curse, he intervenes in other events from the book of Genesis. The narrator accounts for this loose itinerary in time and space as Cain moves through “alternate presents.” These, as Cain stumbles first upon the sacrifice of Isaac demanded of Abraham by God, recall themes in Gospel, as God commands the ritual slaughter of those closest to the protagonist. 

“What are you doing, you wretch, killing your own son, burning him, it’s the same old story, it starts with a lamb and ends with the murder of the very person you should love most, But the lord made me do it, said Abraham, struggling, Keep still, or I’ll be the one who does the killing, untie that boy at once and beg his forgiveness, Who are you, My name is cain, I’m the angel who saved Isaac’s life.” 

This conversation reveals how Saramago can extract the core of the story. He polishes it, in prose that forces a reader to look at it differently, as Cain inserts himself into the biblical narrative and wedges himself into these patriarchal stories to undermine their presumptions and prejudices. 

They lack, however, some of the resonance in terms of character and description afforded biblical scenes in the earlier novel. Some appear to incorporate the words of Genesis among the narration, and however lofty or direct this familiar, resonant paraphrase, this can edge into summation or recapitulation instead of a fresh take on events so recognizable to many readers of this novel. Many episodes are compressed into this dense tale. At times this becomes a hasty if memorable tour whisking us past Babel, Sodom, and Jericho under the siege of Joshua trying to halt the sun. We hear but do not feel as we might the depth of Job’s predicament after his first family has been killed and his second one is expected to appease his discomfort and ease his sorrow.  

Still, a brief reunion with Lilith offers a welcome return to Saramago’s skillful use of a female figure to enhance the possibilities of amorous and emotional rewards, and she adds commonsense. Sodom, she learns, has been leveled by divine fire, not only the perverse men but the innocent women they spurned and their blameless children. Cain tells her: “Anyway, the innocent are now accustomed to paying for the sinners, The lord seems to have a very strange idea of justice, Yes, the idea of someone who hasn’t the slightest notion of what human justice might be”. Lilith pointedly notes that Cain killed his brother; he admits that God is still the one whom Cain, as a selfish man, holds more responsible as a person fated to carry out what he does in an eternal chain of cause and effect that no human can ultimately control.

This may seem to beg the question, but the Big Questions are not answered, nor can they be, Saramago seems to say, here anymore than in Gospel. Unlike that story, ending on the Cross at Golgotha, Cain’s tale diverges into a clever and more open-ended direction. Saramago as the tale reaches its conclusion offers unexpected tension, as Cain finds himself, logically according to God’s life sentence as if in a divine oversight, on Noah’s ark. The climax and ending to this tale, truly novel, I leave for you to learn.

(Featured at New York Journal of Books 10-4-11)

Jose Saramago's "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ": Book Review

Reminiscent of the raw, magical, harsh parts of Mark's Gospel, this novel imagines the son of man, Jesus born of Joseph as he finds himself taken over by Christ, born of God the Father. Jesus hesitates to call himself God's Son, but a demon recognizes him, and his divine cover's blown, or revealed, to his followers. Saramago inverts the traditional accounts so we don't see the public ministry commence until sixty percent of the narrative has shown us the journey to Bethlehem, the "hidden years" in Nazareth, the death of Joseph on a cross by mistake during a Jewish uprising against the Romans, and the desert temptations powerfully conveyed as more understandable and less theatrical.

The lamb of God takes on great poignancy in its appearance, and "resigned to his virtue," the young Jesus ponders the voice of God heard as he submits to the divine commands to die as His Son so God can establish power over the whole world, to make all men love Him, rather than just the Jewish people. This forces Jesus into a compromise with his human side, and his tender relationship in the full sense of the word with a marvelously rendered Mary Magdalene deepens this accessible, modest, and slowly miracle-working figure as one we can recognize as one of us even as his transformation of fish and bread, waves and the possessed, angers fishermen and swineherders and causes ordinary folks to wonder who Jesus really is.

Sentences in Saramago's characteristic style, as in "Blindness" and his last work, related to this as a biblical take on God's demands and human reactions, "Cain," [see my blog review] prefer a headlong rush over paragraphed neatness. He forces you to get carried into his flow, and dialogue is subsumed within the long paragraphs that demand, therefore, careful attention.

This is a thoughtfully composed narrative, rich in detail. Saramago's narrator is omniscient, knows of Portugal, and comments wryly on what God chooses to remember and what He forgets about this world and its creatures. Over it all, "the indifference of emptiness" soars. Not even the narrator has it all figured out, about man's destiny and fate. In Palestine, on the edge of and in the desert, nature waits, remote from the living beings God claims to care for.

Brutality and poverty dominate the lives of the fishers and herders, the servants and beggars who populate the little villages, while the Temple rises in Jerusalem in a vividly rendered contrast of mercantile activity and priestly slaughter for the birds and animals killed for God. Jesus reacts to this as a compassionate boy, but his resistance to the system falters, and in a wonderful scene where he, Pastor the clever, skewed, devilish desert companion, and God Himself sit in a mist on the sea and discuss the big questions, Saramago demonstrates his ability to make such timeless concerns fresh.

Passages also leap out of Giovanni Pontiero's translation that arrest one's gaze. Jesus and Pastor debate back and forth in the compressed style rendered by Saramago: "Like my sheep I have no god. But sheep, at least, produce lambs for altars of the Lord. And I can assure you that their mothers would howl like wolves if they knew. Jesus turned pale and could think of no reply."

The story starts with the crucifixion and the beginning is a bit shaky, as it's hard to get pulled in to the story from a distancing narrative tone. But as the familiar tale goes back, it gains depth. Mary's bitterness at her son's reaction to her own supposed connivance in the slaughter of the holy innocents (this makes some sense in context of Jesus' knowledge secondhand, but gets teased out gradually), the debate in the Temple with the elders, the death of Joseph and the departure of Jesus for the desert, the way he finds out about what happened when Herod struck down the babies in Bethlehem, and his reaction to this haunting scene that drives him deeper into self-awareness--are all imagined intelligently,

You read this with an inverted sense of the gospel inspirations. Here, the previous stages to Jesus' ministry gain center stage, and his public life becomes almost secondary to his own struggle to comprehend his salvific role. A challenging representation of a sensitive and searching man who finds God speaking to him. claiming to infuse him with His own force, and ordering him to follow His will, this is accessible to anyone curious about a fresh perspective on Jesus from a very human perspective. However, if appropriately for a human telling, the book ends rather hastily and suddenly on the Cross, as if Saramago wanted to finally stop his imagination from weaving more out of the evangelical stories and the midrashic legends that may have inspired this depiction of the sacrifice of Jesus from a memorable, but ultimately enigmatic, compliance.  (Posted to Amazon US 8-16-11)

Penn Jillette's "God, No!": Book Review

Inspired or goaded by Glenn Beck’s request that Jillette (the garrulous, skeptical, subversive half of magic duo Penn and Teller) “entertain the idea of an atheist Ten Commandments,” he does simply that. Of course, being the talkative partner, as anyone familiar with his shows on stage or television knows, Penn provides lots of anecdotes, barbs, and trash-talk. As a family man and committed defender of commonsense over belief, he adds a thoughtful, and even touching, admission of how perhaps “The Penn Suggestions” might translate into a secular version of life, albeit one penned by a ranting, roaring “libertarian atheist”.

He insists—even when refusing to affirm the existence of man-made global warming—that the declaration “I don’t know”, remains a more honest response than turning to an answer drawn from a faith. However, science remains his foundation for what he confirms as true; if religion vanished tomorrow, it would be replaced, but not by the same belief system. Science, by contrast, would be eventually created all over again, Penn reasons, more or less as we know it.  His chapters, logically ten, enumerate through loosely (if often so loose as to evade immediate recognition) linked episodes from Penn’s encounters and experiences, illustrating how each of the Ten Commandments can be replaced by a secular suggestion.

First, respect for “human intelligence, creativity, and love” emerge as ideals to counter “Thou shalt have no other gods before me”. The generosity of Siegfried and Roy, despite Penn’s jibes, and the evasions of David Blaine, represent magician peers who stand or fall on stage by their performances and their conviction.

“King of the Ex-Jews” takes a long detour that brings a Hasidic man via Penn’s chat after a show into an admission of atheism, and then an invitation by Penn and his crew for “Moishe” to dine on traif non-kosher fare, at the Rio in Vegas (which gets a lot of plugs in this narrative). Penn tells “Moishe”‘s secular journey with insight as well as raunchiness.  He acknowledges the existential distance this ex-Hasid must travel from his family and friends, who stayed “behind with his imaginary friend” in Brooklyn while he braved the loss of his god, and of his community, to stand up for not his own happiness, but for the pursuit of his inner truth.

The second chapter swerves into a celebration of humanity, and how it delights in companionship above things or ideas. Idols are taken down, and by the examples of his unbelieving mother and his sister’s lesbian Pastor Shirley (a long story), and of “Auto-Tune, tattoos, and big fake tits”, the joy of camaraderie and the exultation of the body’s alterations over the limits of nature illustrate Penn’s interpretation of human goodness.

Instead of not taking the Lord’s name in vain, oaths give way to self-accountability. Penn wryly tells how evangelical Christians took his video blog encouragement of proselytizing for rationalism in the “marketplace of ideas”, as if he were condoning preaching the Word. He’s as generous in his credit to those who took his message in its context, as he’s belittling of those who distorted it. Still, he recognizes that he cares for those “bugnutty freaky whack jobs” who come up after shows to tell him they are praying for him. All the same, Penn insists that faith wastes time, holds up the potential progress of science and love, and gives aid to “dangerous extremism”.

He launches into a long tale about being the model with Teller for gray suits in a GQ shoot, an example of his skill at self-deprecation, given his heft and girth, even if the link to non-idolatry appears less obvious, unless it’s about not making yourself into an idol.

This segues into his disdain for the wishy-washy agnostic, even if Penn agrees that admitting one’s uncertainty remains the best one can do in a wonderfully vast universe. He denies that atheists are arrogant, and he counters: “It’s not arrogant to say that you can’t figure out the answers to the universe with your internal faith.” He affirms the love of friends and family as enough for a human being, not the desperation of those who invent invisible figures to call to—who after all make our favorite football team lose.

However, the Sabbath rest, as it is such defined, remains a sensible option, as time to reflect and relax. Penn’s idea of such may be not yours, as he launched into “learning to fly, strip, and vomit on a 727” that induces both crushing gravity and weightless moments for him and, of all people, guitarist Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top. A visit along with another straight man to a gay bathhouse in 1981 San Francisco is told with wit and verve, and his attempts to have sex while scuba diving follow in unpredictable spirit. He appends the Penthouse Forum letter he wrote about the rendezvous, which I suppose proves not all such letters are invented.

At the halfway point, honoring one’s parents earns powerful elucidation. He tells with compassion and hard-earned maturity, for once, of the life and deaths of his older sister, his father, and his mother. He revamps a chapter about atheist parenting that veers predictably into his trademark snarkiness. Yet, he makes cogent points: “Reality exists outside of humans. Religion does not.” He warns how “the bad guys” need to cheat. “Government force, propaganda, and hype are the tools you desperately need when you’re wrong. Truth abides.” He concludes: “Truth doesn’t live in the closet.” He figures, besides, that atheist families have more time on Sundays to laugh and dance together.

This merges into a section denouncing Santa Claus, with practical advice on how to lie to children without hiding them from the truth, and that our time as a family together is cruelly limited. Atheism, he tells, comforted him when his parents and sister died, for he knew that their pain had ended, and that their ends were not part of a cruel god’s “plan”. He integrates the story of his parents’ respective slowdowns and deaths carefully, and this wide-ranging, well-told chapter shows Penn’s reflective side alongside his usual bluffing and boasting.

The sixth chapter, about protecting and respecting human life, wobbles. His defense of libertarianism demands its own book, frankly. Penn needed more space to explore his notions from Max Weber “that the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force.” Penn resists the power wielded by the majority over the minority, even in the pursuit of good, but this complicated idea merits more than a few paragraphs. The chapter skips across some other non-conformist thinkers and doers, and veers into an anti-TSA (Transport Security Administration) rant.

On the matter of theft, Penn returns to his fellow magicians, this time his aging nemesis The Amazing Kreskin, and then a surprising defense of Nixon who, despite being the ideological opposite of Penn, reveals Nixon’s knack even as he prepared to resign in telling jokes, in revealing the basic class underneath his personal tragedy. As with Penn’s family, here he shows his ability to let down his carny patter and reveals in his admiration for what some folks can come up with while under pressure.

Lying, discussed in the ninth chapter, also earns a mixed array of examples. Seth MacFarlane of Family Guy earns a section, but it left me baffled about its placement here; “Would This Seem Crazy if You Read It in a Book” sounds in fact, crazy; a shaggy-dog tale about an encounter with a sexy “whack-job” that turns in on itself. Penn’s refusal to agree that global warming exists without proof (or what he deems as lack of proof) may appear odd, given his sustained defense of science, but his ingrained skepticism accounts for his inconsistent consistency. He sums up that he is no expert, and he should not be held accountable for his honest admission that he cannot be totally correct.

Finally, coveting the neighbor’s such-and-such and so-and-so finds a clever translation: “Don’t waste too much time wishing, hoping, and being envious; it’ll make you bugnutty. (Man oh man, that MILF at my child’s school sure looks hot, but I have work to do.)” This prepares us for his admiration of Bruce Springsteen and the far-from-titillating saga of his ex-girlfriend Heather, her lesbian roommate, their bathroom in “the college-student-like full of hate apartment,” his naked body, and a hair-dryer. He tells this with aplomb.

The book concludes with two short vignettes, perhaps to help ease our mental images after that previous anecdote. Marty Allen and Steve Rossi, once stars, are seen by Penn and Teller. By now, the former duo are long-faded, while the magicians headline in the same Atlantic City. Penn relates his partner’s acceptance of what will happen to them, as they follow the show business arc someday, back to the humbler settings they left behind.

Penn’s afterword asserts atheism against religious terror. I write this review as the tenth anniversary of 9/11 nears; Penn revises some conventional Western wisdom to remind readers how faith itself is the common enemy, not Islam or god or any people. He reaffirms love and respect of every person, but he calls on us to “hate and destroy all faith”. As with the critiques of authors he mentions, such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens, the tack Penn takes spreads to condemn all faiths rather than just one.

He figures that only atheists can speak out against religious terrorism, for they stand apart from belief in what cannot be proven. I suppose, in Penn’s reasoning, climate change will be or will not be proven as due to the direct causes set in motion and accelerated by humans. Faith, by contrast, can never be proven. Therefore, “safety in doubt” counters the dangers perpetrated by those celebrating beliefs as foundations for morality, and as justifications for policy.

Penn dashes about and harangues plenty in this brisk book, and it is likely few readers will come to this impassioned, ornery, profane screed without knowing its larger-than-life author’s persona. It may frustrate those looking for the calmer rebuttals of Harris, Dawkins, or Hitchens, Yet, for a presumably less patient if equally skeptical audience, God, No!: Signs You May Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales entertains and educates, in a brash, nagging, braying tone that remains Penn’s irascible shtick.

But at its contemplative moments, this narrative incorporates Penn’s humanist pride in one’s own accomplishments, free of divine intervention or religious subservience. Penn reminds the reader of love, family, art, time, and “an impossible universe full of awe and wonder. We have an infinite number of questions we can work on. We have all the glory that is real and is us. We must stop glorifying faith.” Of course, after this he uses a common vulgarism as an imperative, followed one final time by the word “faith”. It’s that kind of rational argument, after all.

(8-30-11 to Amazon US in slightly altered form, already preceded by twenty-seven reviews, but mine's more in-depth. Published on 8-29-11 at PopMatters as above.)

"Vladimir Nabokov: Novels 1955-62": Review

Listening to Jeremy Irons' perfect audiobook rendering of the perfect novel "Lolita" recently reminded me of the original work, so I went back to it and I welcomed the screenplay paired here for pleasure; I also re-read "Pnin" and "Pale Fire," which overlap obliquely. It'd been thirty years since I enjoyed those three novels, and like Humbert Humbert, Charles Kinbote, and Pnin himself, I'm about the same age-bracket as their creator was when he conjured up these erudite, erratic, and eccentric characters who in turn, of course, play off of himself, however much he may have denied it from his own niche in East Coast academia in postwar America.


"Lolita" as a novel I found rare: it needed not a word replaced; every adjective was necessary, each verb crafted, every sentence chiseled. My comments would be superfluous, but in the Library of America edition, Brian Boyd's notes pale before those in the annotated edition by Alfred Appel, whose version I recommend. If you lack not only fluent French but Russian, not to mention reams of insight into the worlds of art, butterflies, popular culture of the time, and wordplay that anyone less brilliant than Nabokov would not catch, Appel's edition supplants Boyd. Boyd drew upon Appel's notes and as his biographer, Boyd adds a few tidbits among those Appel did not in his reticence to expose certain facts gleaned from interviews with Nabokov a few decades ago. However, as with the rest of this handsome to hold LofA edition, Boyd's notes tend, as in many LofA commentaries, to skimp, perhaps due to pressure to keep the books easy to hold.


The sadness of "Lolita" lingers, with its beauty. The screenplay Nabokov first wrote for Stanley Kubrick was seven hours long, but from the shorter, if never produced conflation of two versions here, I would have liked to read whatever Nabokov created as he sought to transfer the gist of the novel into an entertaining, deft story for the screen. It's a great counterpart to the novel, best read after the printed text, naturally.


Pnin, who finds himself trying to get by at a college after the war, joins other Russian expatriates at a summer gathering. He laments a "'typical American college student' who does not know geography, is immune to noise, and thinks education is but a means to get a remunerative job." (387) Some things never change. 

Later at that gathering, Pnin learns of the death in the Nazi camps of a woman he had loved, and he goes out to walk "under the solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in quick succession, attended to the destinies of the quick." (395) But this reverie's snapped by the mosquitoes. Nabokov in these tales does not allow his haunted, thoughtful fellows to wander in the ether long.

A professor chats with another; they look up at the stars. "I suspect it is really a fluorescent corpse, and we are inside it." (417) Metaphorical images arrest one's attention in these often everyday tales, as characters jolt themselves out of themselves to look at a world that does not synchronize with their internal (dis)orientation. 


Two academics dominate "Pale Fire"; Pnin gets a mention from one professor who mistakes Kinbote for him. Kinbote's commentary satirizes scholarly obsession, as this titular poem by John Shade gets wrenched by Kinbote, an emigre from Zembla with a complicated past, into Kinbote's own tale, even as he notes that he has "no desire to twist and batter an unambiguous apparatus criticus into the monstrous semblance of a novel." (495) 

The odd delight of this challenging story lies in watching Kinbote's obsession take over his task. He does not appear to realize how far Shade's content lies from Kinbote's imagined reality, so details pile up. "But a commentator's obligations cannot be shirked, however dull the information he must collect and convey." (556) He loses his grip on what he set out to do: "Anybody having access to a good library could, no doubt, easily trace that story to its source and find the name of the lady; but such humdrum potterings are beneath true scholarship." (624)

Kinbote leaps into raptures, deriding Shade's seemingly secularized temperament. Nature herself is rightfully chided as "the grand cheat," who "puts into us" lust "to inveigle us into propagation." (621) Kinbote praises the "Divine Embrace," and "the warm bath of physical dissolution, the universal unknown engulfing the miniscule unknown that had been the only real part of one's temporary personality." (599) Even if Nabokov satirizes such faith, this is a marvelously written passage. Man's life, as Kinbote sensibly for once notes, may be that "human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece." (636)


These works show Nabokov at his best. I cited a few more off-beat sections to show the sometimes overlooked two works that nestle next to "Lolita." These four inclusions are highly recommended, and one only wonders, as Nabokov disingenuously confesses, how his English-language efforts compare to his native Russian ones, for he learned English as a baby, and he appears far more fluent than Pnin! As often in these works, the teller of a tale cannot always be trusted, or does not share omniscience.
(Amazon US 8-27-11; see here 185 "Lolita"-related covers)

Eleanor Henderson's "Ten Thousand Saints": Book Review

This novel's advance copy comes filled with breathless "in-house praise" and a back cover full of promotional strategies across media. This energetic campaign may reflect the edgy mood of the setting, the straight-edge hardcore punk scene of 1988. The novel nears its end during the Tompkins Square Park anti-gentrification riot in Mayor Koch's Manhattan. Its immersion in the streets and back alleys of New York City attests to the confidence that Eleanor Henderson brings to her debut novel. Over four-hundred pages, it follows the convoluted year in the relationships between teenager Jude Keffy-Horn and his father's girlfriend's daughter, and the complications that she, Eliza, escalates once she finds herself in an all-too familiar female predicament.

The story shuttles between small-city Lintonburg (~Burlington), Vermont, and NYC's Alphabet City. I did not find either locale as intricately evoked as I'd expected, although the places gain sufficient elaboration. Neither did I find Henderson's prose, an indirect narration that subtly filters the characters' perspectives (if sometimes too subtly, as the tone often blurs as the controlling narrator tends to dominate), as particularly quotable or dazzling. Her tone stays modest, generally cleansed of ego.

Its teenaged and young adult characters assert individuality against a system that has co-opted its idealistic elders. Still, they too shave their heads, get "X" tattoos on their hands, and shut out or beat down those who don't conform to their non-conforming credo, tunes, and tribal rituals. This moral novel's more traditional than its sordid or exotic settings may make it seem.

The author's aiming here to instead focus on characterization of a half-dozen or so late-hippie-era pot-addled parents who found themselves deserted by and deserting their children. Some of them, as here, grow up to embrace, if for a time, the austerity of a celibate, vegan, and Hare Krishna-core punk ethos as an alternative. These straight-edge seekers  value loyalty, purity, and idealism. The trouble solved by eschewing stimulants leads to its own dangers, kids being kids. Revenge and payback prove natural temptations for young people seeking to join up "true 'til death".

Henderson charts the tensions between youthful ambitions and profane temptations, and the gang-like element that coheres around the Green Mountain Boys which Jude sings with for me was a clever theme to explore. This was the reason I chose to read this book, but as it went along, the sounds themselves and the squalor of the spartan lifestyle lived in vans and on tour albeit told well recedes as the difficulty of keeping one's self upright and honest becomes the larger message.

As with the Hindu elements that initially color the ideology that attracts the straight-edge recruits, the hardcore scene recedes often as the backdrop rather than the primary theme. While Jude becomes the singer of his own band, you rarely witness him on stage. However, the rigors of an ascetic life on the road and in the van gain gritty detail, gleaned from Henderson's research into the 1980s rock underground scene.

The novel hones in on family ties unraveling, attenuating, and reconnecting as exes reunite and bicker and spar. These settled or unsettled parents contend to keep their offspring apart or estranged from their current partners--potential or actual surrogate parents--as well as the progenitors' former partners. Henderson follows every combination and permutation of such couplings and sunderings. While this leads to a somewhat schematic playing out of every possibility as to who will or will not take in the wandering children, this activity does allow her to keep the plot convoluted enough to propel it over so many pages, and overall, she manages to keep the character-rich story sustained.

Without revealing the consequences of such hard-won truths learned by adoptees, strays, divorcees, and stepfamilies, suffice to say that Henderson's earnest exploration of hippies and punks moves along smartly. The climactic scenes set around Alphabet City and Tompkins Square felt rather hurried, but this may reflect the characters' own weariness with fighting the system as the yuppies move in, the straight-edge scene stagnates, and AIDS infiltrates this puritanical counterculture.

I found the novel at times intriguing for an aspect that some readers may find challenging. Henderson prefers to delay exposition of certain plot pivots until a few pages after one character begins to divulge the twist. She is to be commended for this daring, but this may put off as many readers as it may win over. However, the book's largely free of the MFA-style of showy prose and self-aggrandizing displays of irony or sentiment that many of her peers attempt to sell as fiction these days. At the heart of this sprawling tale is an elaboration of counter-cultural but still persistent, however tattooed, stoned, and amplified, family values, defiantly rallied in the last year of Reagan's rule.

(Featured at Pop Matters 7-28-11; posted in shorter and earlier form to Amazon US 7-3-11)

Leanne McCormick's "Regulating Sexuality": Book Review

As with many academic studies, the contents are narrower than the title and subtitle suggest. Leanne McCormick adapts her doctoral thesis which delved into archives to explore how women’s sexuality was regulated by the authorities between the 1900s and the 1960s. Much of her research focuses upon the two great wars and the interwar period, when the Northern Irish province was exposed to British and then American influences—and troops. 

Despite difficulties that persist in accessing such sensitive material, McCormick shows how “notions of female purity” matched common expectations, North and South, Catholic and Protestant, “of a Christian Ireland with higher moral standards of behaviour than its more secular English neighbour.” This theme persists throughout the twentieth century.

Chapter One commences with a look at Belfast workhouse records. Even if these documents are slanted toward women who could not evade “persecution or public labelling,” these records explain how women were regarded as prostitutes by themselves or by others. Their perception as criminal and as sinful crosses denominational lines. Catholics are overrepresented as in many low-wage, less-skilled occupations in Belfast; often women were transient, with illegitimate children, alcohol, lack of work adding to their social ostracism. 

Those who sought to rescue “fallen women,” as in the refuges and reformatories staffed by The Salvation Army, the Church of Ireland, Presbyterians, and Catholic sisterhoods—along with the Church’s Magdalen asylums, tended to promote their charges as “seduced and abandoned” rather than as prostitutes. Few, in fact, were guilty of “solicitation.” This appeal enhanced the homes’ fundraising, as if they were shown to be victims of male predators, their plight could be portrayed as salvation from their predicament. These inmates, contrary to some misperceptions that persist today, were not, McCormick finds in Chapter Two, usually interned for life. The women tended to leave, or to come and go, of their own accord after a period of residence. Many went in and out of various homes over the years. 

World War One accelerated the need for care, as more women were left “pregnant and alone” as their impregnators headed off for enlistment, while many mothers-to-be endured what was classified as “seduction under the promise of marriage.” Other women in homes were “feebleminded,” or prone to drink, with a similar lack of support as with prostitutes, and as dependent upon rehabilitation and succor. 

“Moral prevention work with girls,” the title of Chapter Three, continues the search to find how Northern Irish society tried to stop seduction and impregnation outside of married bounds. Girl Guides and other predominantly Protestant groups attempted to protect and promote purity by leisure-time diversions. This section looks also at the “White Slave Trade,” sex education, and the social disruption caused by the Great War as women formed a professional police patrol while men were mobilized. Ice-cream parlors, “khaki fever,” and “disedifying fashions” all represented for some watchdogs moral dangers as women entered the workforce, mingled more with men, and entered temptation. 

Both the First and Second World Wars brought the danger, via troops sent to Northern Ireland in preparation for European dispatch, of VD. Chapter Four treats its outbreaks and cures. Its prevention aroused opposition early on; posting directions for treatment clinics in public urinals was long banned. However, by 1934, a film dramatizing the effects on a married man of a “one-night stand” was seen by 24,000 in Belfast. It was reviewed in three of the city’s papers—catering to the Protestant readers, at least. Catholic campaigns for “moral purity” demanded no such coverage. But, with World War Two, the influx of troops into the province forced London’s government to publicize awareness of VD to safeguard military readiness for deployment. During the previous war, women who outside of marriage engaged in intercourse were castigated as “amateur” prostitutes. The interwar years reinforced the notion that wayward women, not wanton men, must be controlled, regulated, and reformed. 

This attitude led, as Chapter Five reveals in a sprightlier manner, to the punch line that gives this section its title. A local joke (also recorded in a related book reviewed {NYJB}here last year by me, Diarmaid Ferriter’s Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland) asked if one had heard of “the new utility knickers.” “One Yank and they’re off!” 

As many as 120,000 American soldiers were stationed in Northern Ireland during the Second World War. This exceeded a tenth of what was then the local population. Hollywood’s cinematic allure had preceded the Yank G.I., and his goods for a rationed, deprived economy led along with the swaggering strut of many soldiers an appeal that lured the local girls. The first marriage occurred two months after the first troops arrived. The local lads could not compete; many married, while other women traded their favors for chocolates, chat, and companionship often at the local pub. This led to conflicts with the residents, the local men, and with the clerics and authorities trying to police such “off-licensed” situations. 

The final chapter returns to a sobering subject still controversial today. In both jurisdictions of Ireland, abortion remains illegal. McCormick holds that “strenuous cross-community opposition” accounts for this status quo. But, clinics for birth control have struggled early on, since 1936 in Belfast (if only for a few years staying open), to offer alternatives. McCormick concludes that a strong “pro-life” tradition in the North has been asserted and sustained by both Catholic and Protestant communities, for once united. This agreement persists, against what its proponents regard as a secular mentality by feminists and radicals, to import from England a non-Irish way of thinking and acting into the island. While this subject itself has received more attention than can be given in this brief book, it reminds readers of this study of the continuing relevance of such issues as McCormack examines in this accessible, straightforward summation. 

The book provides an academically oriented but clearly conveyed analysis of what earlier decades in the past century have judged right and wrong about Northern Irish women and their sexual behavior. As Professor Ferriter in his own massive, and valuable, account referenced above in passing tended to pass over what made the Northern experiences of sexuality within a sectarian society similar or different from that in the Catholic-dominated Free State and Irish Republic, Dr. McCormick’s publication may offer future students of sexuality in its Irish expressions needed guidance in comparing and contrasting Northern attitudes. As she does not cite Ferriter’s more lively social history (it appeared the same year as hers in Britain, 2009), placing the two narratives side-by-side opens up valuable contexts for subsequent research and reflection on this unfailingly fascinating topic. (Featured at New York Journal of Books; title published April 2011 in the US.)