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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Customer Comments
GDuperreault has commented on (32) products
Reenchantment of the World
by
Morris Berman
GDuperreault
, October 23, 2014
This is a book that changed how I perceived and understood the society within which we live. Berman argues that the ascendency of Newtonian science was an evolution of the monotheistic, patriarchal and misogynist organization that Christianity had become. That misogyny and intolerance for the feminine and the ‘soft’ arts linked to it are tangibly expressed not only in our brutality towards women, but in our wanton disregard for the earth and in the vague but palpable fear of the unknown and uncertainty. The book is broken into two parts. The first is how civilizing man chose to control its environment, shun and despise disorder, and disenchant life and man’s place in it. That disenchantment is the result of an ascendency of the clean and beautiful ideas and ideals the mind can create, such as in mathematics and their equations used to square the world, over the chthonic messiness of the real earth and physical body. The second half is comprised of Berman’s suggested means of ‘reenchanting’ the world. Citing the the works of scientists, those often on the fringes of proper science because they are critical of the absolute truth of current scientific ideology, his argument is basically that until we respect and love the real body, our mind-full ideology will continue to treat it with contempt. Seems obvious, on hindsight, but why is it many in our scientific community continue to promulgate the denial of man’s effect on the environment and the continued exploitation of the earth? I thoroughly enjoyed Berman’s antithetical biography of Newton as a megalomaniac who believed that he was the second coming of Christ while having actively destroyed his rival mathematician Liebniz. And Berman points out that, despite the officially accepted history of Newton as a saint, if not God, of science, Newton was not without his critics. The poet and social critic William "Blake tried to show the blindness of this [Newton’s] orientation to nature; and nowhere did he say it better than in his verse letter to Thomas Butts (1802): Now I fourfold vision see, And a fourfold vision is given to me; ‘Tis fourfold in my supreme delight And threefold in soft Beulah’s night And twofold always. May God us keep From single vision & Newton’s sleep!" (129-30)
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The Good Guy
by
Dean Koontz
GDuperreault
, August 04, 2013
I have adopted a policy of not reading giant American bestselling authors, but I read this one to honour a friend's twenty-first birthday because she rates Koontz as one of her favourite writers. This is an easy summer read with a fun, nicely drawn sociopathic killer with connections to a secret government organization. It has the strong, silent, modest hero, rising to the challenge of unbeatable odds. It has an equally strong female who is not a victim of the attempt to kill her. I was delighted by how much this book echoed my own youthful favourites, in particular Dead Cert by Dick Francis. Now that I am a bit older, it would seem that the stoicism and survival of the characters was what appealed to me and now appeals to my friend. It was a very pleasant surprise that reading The Good Guy brought back youthful memories and feelings. There is a but, however. Stop reading if you don't want to read me disclosing in some detail the ending. It ended very badly, enough to take it from a five star book, to four. When I told Al of my reaction, she agreed with me. And added 'Koontz writes bad endings. Usually.' Actually, it was so bad that I found myself 'needing' to extemporaneously re-write it for Koontz. I have included that below my review. What could have been so bad? After surviving against all odds, in what had been generally very strong writing, the protagonist suffers through a deus ex machina as bad as any I've read in at least ten years or more. He talks to the President of the USA, who cleans house of the evil secret security organizations. Really? Not only does this assume the president doesn't know about it, which is, although possible, somewhat improbable. But then, if he doesn't, how would he be able to so quickly effect such a housecleaning? And if he did know about them, how would he clean house? They would be an accepted part of managing a free democracy, and he would have little ability to change that. Yes, The Good Guy had a very bad ending, indeed. Too bad, as it hurt an otherwise very entertaining read. Now here is the rewritten ending. In February, nine months after Tim killed Linda's would-be murderer, six months after his meeting with the president, Michael McCready's house burnt to the ground. What remains were left were tentatively identified as those of McCready, and the initial survey indicated it was an accident. But Tim didn't learn that for several days after the fact. The day before McCready died, Tim's sophisticated and expertly hidden security surveillance system disclosed someone's presence where no one was supposed to be. Without flinching with the pain of this betrayal, Tim texted Linda with their pre-determined code-word. Without seeking each other, they exited their home via two divergent underground paths. Each picked up the stowed survival kits that had been carefully prepared. Before hurrying to meet her, Tim texted Pete another code word one of the disposable cell phones in the survival kit. He left it and his regular cell phone behind after removing their batteries. Several hours later, Tim was looking at Linda looking at him. For the first time he thought he saw a touch of fear in her eyes. 'We're not dead yet,' was all he said. It was enough.
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Mothers Of Maya Diip
by
Suniti Namjoshi
GDuperreault
, August 04, 2013
A donkey, the colour blue but female, is surprised at being privileged to receive from its matriarch a request to be guests of India's only true matriarchy. She brings as her guest a poet friend who is a sort of militant anti-patriarchy lesbian because the matriarchy is famous for being poetical. Oh frabjous day, callooh callay! It is with great excitement and a feeling of honour that they go and, after a cordial welcome, are befriended by another matriarchal 'foreigner' who had fled the evil of the patriarchies some years earlier. To be in a place where not only women are honoured, but poetry is too! And, above all, where males do not exist meaningfully in the community meant, obviously, that this is going to be utopia. Or is it? The two protagonists discover the brutal truth. The males, called 'pretty boys' are kept in horrific conditions until their semen can be milked from them as stud animals when they reach puberty. The honour and reward the pretty boys receive for giving the gift of life is their being returned to the earth goddess before their obnoxious puberty could be allowed to create social disorder, decay, depravity and dystopia. And so the satire starts. And it started well! But in the end Suniti Namjoshi's novel The Mothers of Maya Diip ended far too late in this short book to keep it from moving from an interesting satire into a clunking, plodding, heavy-handed parody that collapses like an undercooked angel food cake. After an initial optimism that this would be both funny and a real social commentary/criticism, I found I became disenchanted at the flatness of the characters. They all sounded pretty much the same and the narrator's observation felt like a drone. 'Good try,' I thought, 'but not quite.' And up until the final two thirds of the text I thought Mothers was still a positive read. Alas! In a modern example of a hurried deus ex machina, Namjoshi fell into complete creative collapse and bad writing. Perhaps even very bad writing. The collapse begins with the unbelievable rescue of the foreign matriarchal heretic from prison by self aware male robot soldiers who call their helicopter 'mother' and badly embody every machismo stereotype Namjoshi could cram in. Am I asking too much of a satire that it not be too heavy-handed? Perhaps, but now consider: the helicopter conveniently crashes into the ocean close enough to land to allow the protagonists to escape but have the robots 'drown.' The rationale? The robot's' mother proved to be bad at maintaining herself, despite having had the wherewithal and ability to create the self-aware robots in the first place. The penultimate section, that of the gallants, suffered from what I can only describe as a circumscribed creativity. That the 'pretty boys' who managed to somehow not die and somehow managed to get to an island where they were allowed by another renegade matriarch to grow up without responsibilities and who would choose suicide before taking them on was just too much for my limited brain to accept. Not even in what I had hoped would be a satire. Perhaps if the writing had felt less like this was a slap dash tack-on, a hurried-up my book's deadline is due jumble, I would have accepted it. I have accepted very bizarre things, but the writing was just way too weak to sustain my credibility to accept the satirical nature of this part of plot. And the final wrap up, which was to see the 'proper' matriarchy restored after its early overthrow by the matriarch's daughter, displayed to me that Namjoshi was in this effort an empty critic: she poked fun at matriarchy, and poked fun at the feminazies' version of patriarchy, but when it came to an alternative, which is how the book closes, she proffered nothing but the restoration of an autocracy, but this time by someone who didn't want the position. Sigh! I hesitate to suggest that I would have liked this better if Namjoshi hadn't tried suggesting a solution to the problem of patriarchy, but it may have helped. At the beginning I loved that this was poking fun at how easily feminist political ideology can fall into patriarchal practices, and I so wanted to like this book. But it fell from a five star beginning and premise, all the way down to just two stars, meaning, in this case, read only as a curiosity or perhaps as inspiration to create your own satire.
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Invisible Cities
by
Italo Calvino
GDuperreault
, August 04, 2013
This book is impossible to review. It isn't prose, it isn't poetry, it isn't history, it isn't a novel, it isn't a narrative. I festooned this small book with yellow sticky notes of the interesting bits, of the beautiful bits, of the energizing bits. It is imagination. This is imagination on a multiplicity of levels and layers. Imagine, if you can, Marco Polo and Genghis Khan talking about Polo's travel experiences. Then imagine Polo describing the wonders of the things he's seen. Then imagine that Polo has imagined more cities than he's seen, filled them with magical constructs, and eccentric citizenry, architecture, social mores. It is, perhaps, most like a travel journal, or log, but like none you could have imagined. Polo, or perhaps Khan's biographers, have catalogued these "invisible cities" as belonging to distinct classifications. Memory Desire Signs Thin . . . and several more. Then comes a short description of the city that purports to provide the rationale for the city having been classified as it was. These descriptions are collected into sets, separated by the narrator's observation of the meeting and conversations between Khan and Polo. The writing is brilliant. Calvino's imagination appears to be unbounded and endless. From one of the festooning stickies, picked randomly: ". . . But with all this, I would not be telling you the city's true essence; for while the description of Anastasia awakens desires one at a time only to force you to stifle them, when you are in the heart of Anastasia one morning your desires waken all at once and surround you. The city appears to you as a whole where no desire is lost and all of which you are a part, and since it enjoys everything you do not enjoy, you can do nothing but inhabit this desire and be content. Such is the power, sometimes called malignant, sometimes benign, that Anastasia, the treacherous city, possesses; if for eight hours a day you work as a cutter of agate, onyx, chrysoprase, your labour which gives form to desire takes from desire its form, and you believe you are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave" (from Cities and Desire 2). And from one the Khan/Polo ruminations: ". . . As time went by, words began to replace objects and gestures in Marco's tales: first exclamations, isolated nouns, dry verbs, then phrases, rarified and leafy discourses, metaphors and tropes. The foreigner had learned to speak the emperor's language or the emperor to understand the language of the foreigner. But you would have said communication between them was less happy than in the past: to be sure, words were more useful than objects and gestures in listing the most important things of every province and city -- monuments, markets, costumes, fauna and flora -- and yet when Polo began to talk about how life must be in those places, day after day, evening after evening, words failed him, and little by little, he went back to relying on gestures, grimaces, glances" (from after Trading Cities 1). This is a startling and amazing read.
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Fisher King & The Handless Maiden
by
Robert A Johnson
GDuperreault
, April 28, 2013
When I first read this I thought is was an extremely important book. It brought interesting ideas to and clarified the angst I was seeing in my own and my wife's psychological struggles. However, the last time I read it, I found it to be more like an introduction to the Jungian perspective on male/ female psychology. So, if you are new to Jung and Jung's ideas, a solid 5 stars. However, if you are familiar with Jung, this will be down a little from that, but is still a worth while read.
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Bonfire of the Vanities
by
Tom Wolfe
GDuperreault
, December 26, 2012
This was one of the few books I've read because of the chit chat around it. The movie, which I felt had potential but which I thought was ultimately a directorial failure, was the final element that brought me to pick this book up. I was curious at how the movie failed and needed to read the book to see if my impression that it was a directorial failure was accurate or not. My reading that book did not answer that question with any certainty because BotV has become one of the touch stone books marking me as an outsider to the society within which I live. Its award winning popularity is a complete mystery to me. Poorly written, it has uninteresting characters and characterization espousing a heavy handed superficial morality -- sort of. My few observations of Wolfe in book interviews did not in any way dissuade me that he is an overrated wind-bag, filled with ego and hubris and little of what I would consider critical intelligence. It struck me that he was an apologist for American hegemony both domestic and foreign. So, with that in mind it was with surprise and even fascination that I read a Tom Wolfe encomium of American domestic practices under Reagan get severely castigated by Noam Chomsky. In his satirically way, Chomsky basically puts Wolfe's social commentary into the ranks of the rantings of a delusional apologist for the greed-based policies that successfully impoverished the majority to the benefit of the very few. So, in a perversion of a 'proper' book review, here is a taste of Chomsky chastising Tom Wolfe -- note, I hadn't even heard of Chomsky before reading BotV: ... What the [economic] "paradox" [in 1992 of a 'Weak Economy but Strong Profits'] entails for the general population is demonstrated by numerous studies of income distribution, real wages, poverty, hunger, infant mortality, and other social indices. A study released by the Economic Policy Institute on Labor Day, 1992, fleshed out the details of what people know from their experience: after a decade of Reaganism, "most Americans are working longer hours for lower wages and considerably less security," and "the vast majority" are "in many ways worse off" than in the late 1970s. From 1987, real wages have declined even for the college educated. "Poverty rates were high by historic standards," and "those in poverty in 1989 were significantly poorer than the poor in 1979." The poverty rate rose further in 1991, the Census Bureau reported. A congressional report released a few days later estimates that hunger has grown by 50 percent since the mid-1980s to some 30 million people. Other studies show that one of eight children under 12 suffers from hunger, a problem that reappeared in 1982 after having been overcome by government programs from the 1960s. Two researchers report that in New York, the proportion of children raised in poverty more than doubled to 40 percent, while nationwide, "the number of hungry American children grew by 26 percent" as aid for the poor shrank during "the booming 1980s "... one of the great golden moments that humanity has ever experienced," a spokesman for the culture of cruelty proclaimed (Tom Wolfe Boston Globe February 1990). The impact is brought out forcefully in more narrowly-focused studies; for example, at the Boston City Hospital, where researchers found that "the number of malnourished, low-weight children jumped dramatically following the coldest winter months," when parents had to face the agonizing choice between heat or food. At the hospital's clinic for malnourished children, more were treated in the first nine months of 1992 than in all of 1991; the wait for care reached two months, compelling the staff to "resort to triage." Some suffer from Third World levels of malnutrition and require hospitalization, victims of "the social and financial calamities that have befallen families" and the "massive retrenchment in social service programs" (Boston Globe September 8, 25, 1992). By the side of a road, men hold signs that read "Will Work for Food," a sight that recalls the darkest days of the Great Depression. (Year 501: The Conquest Continues p280-1). I am being a little mean here, I fully acknowledge. But in the few Wolfe interviews I saw, I found myself becoming angry that a bad writer was being heralded as a visionary and truth seeker to be paraded by the media in their campaign to mis-represent the extent of income polarity and impoverishment that is the direct result of American policies that are benefiting very few, but doing so to a staggering degree(less)
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Stanley Park
by
Timothy Taylor
GDuperreault
, December 26, 2012
Chef and struggling restaurant owner Jeremy Papier has a dream. He wants his restaurant to bring the hyper-industrialized, homogenized, world back to its roots: food, specifically, that which is grown locally. And so he gets his dream when, through struggling to find his own family's roots, he begins to cook the wildlife of Vancouver's Stanley Park: the squirrels, starlings, ducks, geese, raccoons. His first park repast was with his father. They dined on the duck that his father had caught. Eventually Jeremy began to feed a collective of the homeless living in the park. His father, 'The Professor,' is a social anthropologist who, in doing this project, his last, has gone back to finish where he began his career. He is exploring his own and the city's roots by choosing to live amongst the homeless who reside beneath the forest's canopy, hidden from the city's eyes that are too busy to see them. He is exploring what it is that are the ties, the roots, that bind people to homelessness. During the course of the book, this sub-theme comments that, in some ways, these people are more closely connected to their environment, more alive if you will, than the grasping many who have big houses, but spend most of their time feeling alienated and disconnected from their lives. But the protagonist is Jeremy, and his dream falls apart when his self-destructive impulse purchase of a $3000 knife cuts the final threads of his credit card kiting. With creditors hounding him, he turns to the international coffee czar to save him and his dream. But a czar doesn't live the dreams of others, and in an elegance only a wealthy thug can envisage, he steals Jeremy's dream and twists it into an ungrounded international smorgasbord. What would any creative and daring Chef do to see his dream survive beneath the tyranny of the condescension of wealth? And so Taylor writes a complex and elegant fugue that explores the roots of family and food. This is an engaging delightful and complex read. I highly recommend it.
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On Jung: Updated Edition
by
Anthony Stevens
GDuperreault
, December 08, 2012
Jung is a tightly written, comprehensive yet short overview of Jung's ideas and biography. Stevens managed to connect how Jung's biography influenced the development of his ideas and how influential those ideas have been. Stevens' survey of Jung's relationship with Freud is interesting and balanced, as is his refutation of the anti-semitism charges that have floated around Jung since before the second world war. Now after all that praise, I would suggest that Jung is a book without a really strong audience. The book is detailed enough and I suspect generally as accurate as a 3rd party biography can be. But that is its biggest problem. I suspect that many people completely unfamiliar with Jung's writings are likely to come away from this book with an exaggerated understanding of the power and range of Jung's ideas and influence and decide to not read anything else. They will not understand that the reason people read Jung is to begin the journey of self-understanding, what Jung called individuation. On the other hand, those who are significantly familiar with Jung will not find too much new here. It remains simply a summary and review, albeit a very good one. It does have some nice quotable bits for those interested in quips or sound bites. But what moved this book from just a solid four to five stars was something Stevens observed I had until reading it here thought that I had uniquely noticed. Thank god I am not the only one to have spotted the remarkable similarity between Noam Chomsky's linguistic theories and Jung's conceptualization of the collective unconscious and archetypes (p37). Now, it is possible that other Jungian commentators I have previously read made this connection too, but at a time in my life before I was familiar with Chomsky's linguistic ideas. But I do not remember even one such reference, and definitely haven't seen one since then. Nor have I seen anyone from the Chomsky side making the connection. (For those curious about this, a good overview of Chomsky's linguistics is Justin Leiber's Noam Chomsky: A Philosophic Overview.) And in it was my first publication of my perception of the strong equivalent between Jung's collective unconscious and Chomsky's Deep Structure and Universal Grammar. (No, the writers of the Wikipedia do not make a similar claim.)
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Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow The Rediscovered Diary of Opal Whiteley
by
Opal Stanl Whiteley, Benjamin Hoff
GDuperreault
, December 08, 2012
I bought this book on-line. It was delivered to work and, as is her habit, when my friend BV saw it asked 'May I read that please?' She is endlessly fascinated by the books I bring to work, and has read many from my library. And since I was at the time busy reading Debt: The First 5,000 Years, I said 'Okay.' She couldn't put it down, and proceeded to read it twice, back-to-back. It has gone to near the top of her all time favourite books list and BV has read a lot of books. And, likewise TSCWRWG is now jostling for position in my top 50 books. Hoff's description of finding the lost book in the first place resonated with me because he has described how it is that I have found many of the books that have been most important to me in my life: a serendipity and the a feeling that I can 'hear' them calling out to me to be read. And likewise, I to a small extent with this one. Hoff has created a book of strong contrasts and clashing ambivalent emotions. So strong that they make this a hard book to describe. It begins with his short biography of Whitelely, which is really more a vindication of having been libelled and dismissed as a fraud than a biography. In doing his research Hoff came to understand that Whitelely had been willfully destroyed by a malevolent press. Hoff's brief account left me feeling enraged by what is to me an example of a bloodlust and scapegoating by a mob of journalists that collectively decided to suspend their professional and social responsibility in order to demonstrate that they have the power to destroy the life of someone who somehow magically embodied the magical spirit of the earth and life. The near religious zealotry of the defamation against this life-spirit reminded me of something I read in News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness edited by American poet Robert Bly. Both William Blake and Novalis very clearly saw that a key aspect to the empiricist's "truth" was the arbitrary and hypocritical denial of the sensual part of the empirical world. That the empiricists were able to "rationally" assert this denial of life is only marginally less astounding than their being successful in doing it! This was why both Blake and Novalis stressed the sensual in their works -- they knew what the empiricists were unconscious of, which is that they had arbitrary accepted Christian notions of the earth and female as vile and devoid of life. Robert Bly cites a blunt, but typical, example of the roots of that empiricism being anchored in conventional Christian Mythology: The French Priest Bossuet, writing at about the same time as Descartes, expressed in this passage one of the more prevalent Christian attitudes towards nature: May the earth be cursed, may the earth be cursed, a thousand times be cursed because from it that heavy fog and those black vapours continually rise that ascend from the dark passions and hide heaven and its light from us and draw down the lightening of God's justice against the corruption of the human race. [Bly continues:] This attitude was acceptable to the Church Fathers and to developing capitalism. When we deny there is consciousness in nature, we also deny consciousness to the worlds we find by going through nature (News of the Universe 9). It is no wonder that Blake wrote "The Eternal Female groand! it was heard all over the world" or that Novalis wrote "They [the shallow men] have no idea that it is [the Numinous Night] who subtly embraces the breasts of the young girl, and turns her darkened cave into the Garden of Delight, and have no clue that you are the one ... opening the world of delight ... at the edge of the old stories..." (News of the Universe 49). Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Novalis' Hymns to the Night are celebrations of all that the empiricists manage to deny in their sensual world, namely the sensual, the feminine, sexuality and the unconscious. That science is puritanical in its structure and actions can be linked straight back to the widespread acceptance of Newton's single vision which is firmly grounded in his Puritan beliefs (from an English Seminar Spring 1999). Whiteley's diary is one of the most spiritual sensual examples of the written word I have ever come across, and I can't help but think that her voice was the voice of capital 'L' Life that an industrialized, greed-biased anti-life society found threatening and needed to crush. And the connection to Blake is, on reflection, quite astounding beyond it coming to me as an out and out surprise. Blake extolled the spirituality of the physical, too. And in deceptively simple writing. I have seen other reviewers who waffle on Hoff's vindication, perhaps falling back on the 'there's two sides to every story' rationale. But Hoff's attention to detail, combined with my having become more fully aware of the social malevolence of the press, has convinced me of the evil done to Whitelely, and that it was willfully done by an agenda-ed press with the desire to hurt. However, once you dive into Whiteley childhood writing, the charm, the elegance, the detail, the love Whitelely has for nature is astounding. Life is more alive with her writing than I have ever experienced before. And even the word love, which has become overused in our age of Hallmark greeting cards and texting, may not describe the feeling so much as rapture: Whitely was enraptured by nature. Here's a link to couple of pages from the beginning of Chapter 21: Cathedral Service in the Barn; a Lamb for Opal, and a Lily for Peter Paul Reubens. I suspect it will be either something you will love or hate.
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Cities & the Wealth of Nations Principles of Economic Life
by
Jane Jacobs
GDuperreault
, October 11, 2012
This is an extremely important book for anyone concerned that current economic practices are failing society. With clear and well researched arguments, Jacobs looks at the decay of the once great American cities as the natural product of current economic practice, specifically the common currency. I read this before the formation of the Euro, and I said to myself when it did form 'this will be the perfect petridish to see if the argument holds true.' Actually, I was a bit bolder, and wrote in a journal that I anticipate the decline and even bankruptcy of the less economically efficient societies. And, with a few years there were rumblings, and now, of course, Greece, Spain, et al. I was also bemused to see Britain stay out of the Euro, with the speculation as to why. Was it because they subscribed to her theory and were self-aware enough to recognize that they were less efficient than Germany and would go into decline? Or was it because they were simply being iconoclastic and have by accident helped to protect themselves from going into an even more accelerated decline? I suspect that latter, because at the time all the economic pundits decried their actions as those of obstreperousness and stupidity. And excellent written, interesting, and proven argument about some of the most egregious fallacies of current economic thought and practice.
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Gilgamesh
by
Anonymous, Mason
GDuperreault
, August 21, 2012
I first read Gilgamesh about 20 years ago -- not this translation -- because it was referred to as an important psychological text by mythologist Joseph Campbell and poet and social critic Robert Bly. I confess to having been very disappointed in it at the time. However, my expectations were very high because of the recommendations. And, as it turns out, I lacked the understanding to appreciate the text, because at the time I simply did not get it. Well, let that be a lesson. Now, older, I have grown into being able to appreciate the subtlety and psychological sophistication that Campbell and Bly (and others) were alluding to. Amusingly, I seem to be on a binge of seeing in the creative things around me endless manifestations of Zen's The Ten Ox Herding Songs, A.K.A. The Ten Bulls. I am being a little loose here, because Gilgamesh's journey doesn't exactly follow the Songs, but it is metaphorically very close, which is that the path to spiritual enlightenment requires getting one's feet dirty in the mucky waters of the physical universe. Here are a couple of passages I flagged. I like them because I find them evocative and stimulating, but I am not sure what they mean. They are talking to something in my unconscious, or perhaps archetypally. This means, to me, it is something I have yet to learn. I think compassion is our God's pure act Which burns forever, And be it in Heaven or in Hell Doesn't matter for me; because Hell is the everlasting gift Of His presence to the lonely heart who is longing Amidst perishing phantoms and doesn't care To find immortality If not in the pure loneliness of the Holy One, This loneliness which He enjoys forever Inside and outside of His creation. It is enough for one who loves To find his Only One singled in Himself. And this is the cup of immortality! (p74-5.) And: I did not come out [because of my parents' sexual desire] like you, Said Utnapishtim; I was the choice of others (p75).
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Gone Girl
by
Gillian Flynn
GDuperreault
, August 05, 2012
Gone Girl (GG) was a rare, for me, almost-read book. Rare, not because I didn't really finish it, but rare because I began reading it because of a review. A few months ago, I seem to vaguely remember, I read a review of GG that caught my interest. I've long since forgotten the review, or even where I read it but I suspect it was from Powell's Books' 'Daily Dose.' At that time I reserved the book from the NWPL. I received notice of it being my turn to read it just three weeks ago. Because of the long wait I asked the representative at the checkout 'Excuse me, how many people are on hold behind me?' 'Forty-four,' she said. 'I guess my hoping to renew it is pretty much not going to happen, then?' 'Nope.' And the copy I got was obviously unsullied new, so the library has purchased several if not many copies to keep up with demand. And so I was hoping against my experience that a popular book would be, for a change, one also liked by me. But alas, GG has re-confirmed that I am not a part of the mainstream of popular culture's consumption of fiction. (Okay, there are exceptions, such as Michael Ondaatje. But then, I imagine he sells less than a tenth of the books of a Stephen King, Jackie Collins, or Len Deighton, so even he is not really mainstream.) GG was sharply written, meaning Flynn wrote clear well constructed sentences that painted the scene very well. And the scenery is very pretty. However, it had a kind of cleverness that struck me as being glib. Or maybe it was kind of unnecessarily mean in a way that David Letterman's humour always strikes me. And like his jokes, Flynn's writing lacked vitality, and I cannot at this time clearly pinpoint why. I have been wrestling in my mind with this review for several days. And I keep drifting to the idea that GG lacked depth of human understanding. Flynn was trying to show psychological sophistication, but her writing did not get much deeper into the people than their skin. This may reflect her background as an entertainment magazine writer or, perhaps Flynn having accepted, either consciously or unconsciously, the philosophical belief that the expression of human psychology is delimited by personal experience instead of what a person is able to imagine. The next bit will be a bit of a spoiler, so don't read anymore if my negative review is proof enough that GG is indeed a worth while read for you. The marriage, under stress from failed expectations and the financial and emotional dynamics of unemployment, is celebrating an anniversary. The wife, as has been customary, sets up a treasure hunt that the husband is to solve clue-by-clue to a great surprise and celebration. That the husband has failed every previous one miserably in the past drives him to spend much of the anniversary with his best friend and business partner --" they own a bar --" his sister. He gets the dreaded call: OMG, the wife appears to have been kidnapped on their anniversary, but has managed to leave behind the first clue. And, OMG, it looks like the husband did it. I just sighed a great big sigh as I wrote that, despite sighing through my initial realization while reading it that this was of course staged, and that the set-up was deliberate to bring a spark back into the marriage. So, here is Flynn's first glib act: that we the readers are supposed to realize that it was staged so that she can twist the denouement. As I continued reading I kept hoping that the real twist would be that the kidnapping wasn't staged. But the husband's bland stupidity, despite been painted as a clever writer, left me struggling with ennui and the conviction that Flynn was setting us up for the staging. When I came to accept that I would not be finishing GG, I cheated and jumped to the end. I wanted to see how clever Flynn really was. And the so-called double twist I discovered was when I first thought 'Yup, glib and clever, but without anything revivifying.' Yes, it was indeed staged to make the husband look like the killer, but more importantly that staging was just so the wife could stage a murder she would be able to get away with, and which would save their failing marriage. And now I have returned it unfinished and disappointed. I had so wanted it to be better than it was. For a summer read, I do not recommend GG but would suggest perhaps Ondaatje's The Cat's Table which exceeded my expectations when I read it last year: Finished 2011.10.23.
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What Uncle Sam Really Wants
by
Noam Chomsky
GDuperreault
, July 22, 2012
This book is Chomsky at his most accessible. The publisher claims, on the back of the book, that "political books don't have to be boring." And this one certainly isn't boring because this publisher's need for brevity has forced Chomsky to the bare bones. His sarcasm and irony are very sharp, and his details far more concise than in his full length works. However, I do not actually recommend this book as an introduction to Chomsky's political writing because that brevity allows more easily for incredulity to become dismissive skepticism. What he writes is so far away from the official historical myths that we believe that after the fourth or fifth debunking claim he makes it becomes increasingly easy to become convinced that he is just some left-wing nut-job with a horribly over-active imagination who hates America. Yes, his claims are referenced in the back of the book. But they are not footnoted in the text, and that lapse more easily gives the cynic the mental elbow room to dismiss Chomksy's arguments and claims. In a curious irony, and an affirmation of Chomsky's frequent observation that concision is America's most effective and widely practiced form of censorship, this book's brevity also makes it very quotable.
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Introducing Chomsky A Graphic Guide
by
John C Maher
GDuperreault
, July 07, 2012
I purchased Chomsky for Beginners without much expectation, but as a Chomsky book to put into my library. I was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the exposition and thought that went into putting this excellent synopsis of Chomsky's ideas in linguists and their role in utterly transforming our understanding of human language. Even more than that, Maher and Chomsky include a range of contrary opinions and subsequent arguments that, although very concise, clearly illuminate the issues, thinking and controversies. The basic evisceration of the behaviourist model of language acquisition was well articulated throughout. But I like how he approached Skinner. The Refutation of Behaviourism In 1959, Chomsky composed a basic refutation of behaviourist psychology in this review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behaviour. According to Chomsky, children are not born tabula rasa. On the contrary, each child is genetically predisposed to structure how knowledge is acquired. "The phrase 'X is reinforced by Y' is being used as a cover term for X wants Y, X likes Y, X wishes Y were the case, etc. Invoking the term 'reinforcement' has no explanatory force, and any idea that this paraphrase introduces any new clarity or objectivity into the description of wishing, liking, etc., is a serious delusion." Skinner's account rejects all postulations of inner states and sees human behaviour as entirely a function of antecedent events. For Chomsky, this reduction of human behaviour to 'conditioned responses' contradicts the actual [and demonstrated] complexity and freedom of consciousness (43). I find the few quotations supplied to be on point and interesting. As a reader of fiction, even of so-called 'literature' I was bemused to read: Perhaps literature will forever give far deeper insight into 'the full human person' than any model of scientific inquiry can hope to do (9). The bulk (2/3) of the book covers linguistics. The balance of the book is Chomsky's political and media criticism. This was of less interest to me, that being where the bulk of my Chomsky reading has been. However with that exposure comes my ability to assess how well that section is put together. But more than that, the precise and clearly articulated criticisms of the media and socio-political thought in general was hugely informative and entertaining to read. For example, the contrast that Chomsky draws between 'enlightenment values' and how far our science and social perspicuity have fallen from them is delightful. For example: The American Paradox The United States proudly calls itself 'the leader of the Free World'. We know the US as a free and open society, more so in many ways than societies of Western Europe. And yet, Chomsky has criticized the US as blind to what it really is… 1. One of the most depoliticized nations in the industrial world 2. One of the most deeply indoctrinated societies in the industrial world 3. One of the most conformist intelligentsias in the industrial world. Q: IS THIS NOT A PARADOX? A: It only looks that way. The freer the society the more well-honed and sophisticated its system of thought control and the indoctrination. The ruling élite, clever, class-conscious, ever sure of domination, make sure of that (138-9). It is clear from the very first page that, unlike the one or two 'Dummy' books I've tried, the writers of Chomsky for Beginners, John Maher and Noam Chomsky, demonstrate deep respect for the readers' intelligence and ability to understand complex ideas. This at no time feels dumbed down. This book has been described as a good introduction to Chomsky's ideas, and it is. But far, far more importantly, this is a book that introduces one to the challenge of really thinking, even those who are, like me, familiar with Chomsky. And I loved that. Now, everything up to this point would have earned from me four stars. So why five? Because for the first time I read someone else make the connection between C.G. Jung and Chomsky's ideas of language and language acquisition. I was so excited to see this! (For my connection, see my review of Noam Chomsky: A Philosophic Review by Justin Leiber.) From Beginners Maher does not elaborate on the connection beyond a citation on the Collective Unconscious which he implies has a correspondence to Chomsky's concepts of Deep Structure and Universal Grammar. "One part of our biological make up is specifically dedicated to language. That is called our language faculty. UG is the initial state of that language faculty" (77). … Universal Grammar is that part of cognitive psychology (ultimately human biology) which seeks to determine the invariant principles of the language faculty and to determine as well the range of variation that those principles allow:" that is, the possible human languages (78). Now compare with Jung's idea of the collective unconscious and archetypes: The human psyche is composed of innate forms always present, giving direction and form to their actualization in images and action. The collective unconscious is universal: it is shared by everyone. "The autonomic contents of the unconscious or 'dominants' … are not inherited ideas but inherited possibilities, necessities even, of bringing to birth the ideas by which these dominants have been expressed, every region has its forms of speech, which can vary infinitely" (80-1).
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Deterring Democracy
by
Noam Chomsky
GDuperreault
, July 06, 2012
The end of the Cold War was greeted by the free world with a self congratulatory praise that echoed off the moon and back. And for the average person, the prospect for disarmament and some kind of 'real' peace had become a tangible reality. But the end of The Cold War gave to the American military industrial complex an opportunity and a problem. The opportunity was that without the USSR as a viable deterrent to American foreign aggression, America now had the opportunity to invade other countries at will. And the problem? The American public, having been fed a steady and successful propaganda about the role of the USSR evil and American benevolence during the Cold War, saw its end as an opportunity to give peace a chance. Thus, in a curious irony, the end of the Cold War threatened to expose to America that they had been misled about that war by their media that had acted in collusion with big business's management of 'their' government. In effect, Americans had been given an opportunity to discover that they had been manipulated by a pervasive and expansive propaganda into giving to their corporate masters their manufactured consent to propagate American hegemony disguised as defending freedom. It would have most likely been bad for business if the truth of American hegemony actually made it into prime time news. What could the manufacturers do to avoid such a catastrophe and how were America's hegemons going to be able to take advantage of their new freedom and expand in scale and scope their overt and covert invasions; and continue their practices of disrupting fledgling democracies without a solid enemy to justify the military spending in a time of peace? The answer: follow the same media farce as was practiced during the Cold War by the simple manufacture of 'properly' acceptable enemies with the proper implementation of the media supported propaganda. Thus was born, for example, the war on drugs, the farce of Grenada, Nicaragua, and Panama as serious threats to American sovereignty and safety. The media hypocrisy and outright lying around these wars, and the comparison Chomsky makes to Britain forcing China to buy opium, is chilling. He provides numbers to back up his argument, and citations from business leaders and NSC documents that, if they had been spoken by German SS officers in WWII, would have earned them post war convictions for crimes against humanity. Speaking of war crimes, it would appear that the USA was one of the biggest war criminals on the planet in the eighties, frequently using their UN veto power to overturn condemnation for their frequent invasions and unprovoked attacks on other countries for the explicit purpose of enriching big American business. News of these votes rarely made it into the news. Or, if they did, it was with complete fabrication as to the vote and what it really meant. Interestingly enough, this kind of behaviour was not new in the media's history of misrepresenting American foreign practices. For example, the non-reporting of the role America played in their support for and re-establishment into positions of capitalist influence many of the pre-war German industrialists that included convicted war criminals. Nor was America's support for pro-Nazi sympathizers in the brutal suppression of democracy in Greece following WWII that resulted in the torture and/or deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the establishment of a brutal dictatorship (p335, 342). DD is well written, and Chomsky's anger is tempered with a wry kind of humour at just how deluded and delusional the press is about their role in paving the way for American military brutality and unrelenting violation of the UN and the most basic tenets of respect for the rights of others. As always, the footnoting to the references is extensive. For me, the detailed and somewhat organic way Chomsky writes solidifies the connections between the way the American military functions as the arm of Big Business, and Big Business's function as the manager of the controlled understanding of America's 'generous' role as planetary policeman. That perhaps the planet's greatest violator of the basic tenets of human rights and democracy is lauded by its corporate media as the singular champion of those ideals is nothing short of an astonishing proof that delusion knows no bounds. The level of hypocrisy that the media relays or creates with a straight face cannot be described in a review without the reviewer being seen as a complete idiot.
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Introducing Chomsky
by
John Maher
GDuperreault
, June 16, 2012
I purchased Chomsky for Beginners without much expectation, but as a Chomsky book to put into my library. I was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the exposition and thought that went into putting this excellent synopsis of Chomsky's ideas in linguists and their role in utterly transforming our understanding of human language. Even more than that, Maher and Chomsky include a range of contrary opinions and subsequent arguments that, although very concise, clearly illuminate the issues, thinking and controversies. The basic evisceration of the behaviourist model of language acquisition was well articulated throughout. But I like how he approached Skinner. Quote: 'The Refutation of Behaviourism In 1959, Chomsky composed a basic refutation of behaviourist psychology in this review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behaviour. According to Chomsky, children are not born tabula rasa. On the contrary, each child is genetically predisposed to structure how knowledge is acquired. '"The phrase 'X is reinforced by Y' is being used as a cover term for X wants Y, X likes Y, X wishes Y were the case, etc. Invoking the term 'reinforcement' has no explanatory force, and any idea that this paraphrase introduces any new clarity or objectivity into the description of wishing, liking, etc., is a serious delusion." 'Skinner's account rejects all postulations of inner states and sees human behaviour as entirely a function of antecedent events. For Chomsky, this reduction of human behaviour to 'conditioned responses' contradicts the actual [and demonstrated] complexity and freedom of consciousness' (43). End quote. I find the few quotations supplied to be on point and interesting. As a reader of fiction, even of so-called 'literature' I was bemused to read: Quote: 'Perhaps literature will forever give far deeper insight into "the full human person" than any model of scientific inquiry can hope to do' (9). End quote. The bulk (2/3) of the book covers linguistics. The balance of the book is Chomsky's political and media criticism. This was of less interest to me, that being where the bulk of my Chomsky reading has been. However with that exposure comes my ability to assess how well that section is put together. But more than that, the precise and clearly articulated criticisms of the media and socio-political thought in general was hugely informative and entertaining to read. For example, the contrast that Chomsky draws between 'enlightenment values' and how far our science and social perspicuity have fallen from them is delightful. For example: Quote: 'The American Paradox The United States proudly calls itself 'the leader of the Free World'. We know the US as a free and open society, more so in many ways than societies of Western Europe. And yet, Chomsky has criticized the US as blind to what it really is… 1. One of the most depoliticized nations in the industrial world 2. One of the most deeply indoctrinated societies in the industrial world 3. One of the most conformist intelligentsias in the industrial world. Q: IS THIS NOT A PARADOX? A: It only looks that way. The freer the society the more well-honed and sophisticated its system of thought control and the indoctrination. The ruling élite, clever, class-conscious, ever sure of domination, make sure of that'(138-9). End quote. It is clear from the very first page that, unlike the one or two 'Dummy' books I've tried, the writers of Chomsky for Beginners, John Maher and Noam Chomsky, demonstrate deep respect for the readers' intelligence and ability to understand complex ideas. This at no time feels dumbed down. This book has been described as a good introduction to Chomsky's ideas, and it is. But far, far more importantly, this is a book that introduces one to the challenge of really thinking, even those who are, like me, familiar with Chomsky. And I loved that. Now, everything up to this point would have earned from me four stars. So why five? Because for the first time I read someone else make the connection between C.G. Jung and Chomsky's ideas of language and language acquisition. I was so excited to see this! (For my connection, see my review of Noam Chomsky: A Philosophic Review by Justin Leiber.) Maher does not elaborate on the connection beyond a citation on the Collective Unconscious which he implies has a correspondence to Chomsky's concepts of Deep Structure and Universal Grammar. Quote: 'One part of our biological make up is specifically dedicated to language. That is called our language faculty. UG is the initial state of that language faculty" (77). … Universal Grammar is that part of cognitive psychology (ultimately human biology) which seeks to determine the invariant principles of the language faculty and to determine as well the range of variation that those principles allow - - that is, the possible human languages' (78). End quote. Now compare with Jung's idea of the collective unconscious and archetypes: Quote: 'The human psyche is composed of innate forms always present, giving direction and form to their actualization in images and action. The collective unconscious is universal: it is shared by everyone. "The autonomic contents of the unconscious or 'dominants' … are not inherited ideas but inherited possibilities, necessities even, of bringing to birth the ideas by which these dominants have been expressed, every region has its forms of speech, which can vary infinitely"' (80-1). End quote.
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Jung On Synchronicity & The Paranormal
by
C Jung, Main
GDuperreault
, April 28, 2012
Jung On Synchronicity and the Paranormal (JoS&tP) is an important collection because it brings together in one short and well representative book, in Jung's own words, his interest in and experiences of the paranormal to a degree until now I'd read hints of but had never so plainly seen stated and elaborated. JoS&tP book goes far beyond what Jung included in his near-autobiographical, Memories, Dreams and Reflections. In MD&R there are included some paranormal activities, but my reading between its lines suggested to me that there was much more than was disclosed there. JoS&tP confirms that and then some. In this anthology Roderick Main has done something quite interesting: even as Jung discloses a personal encounter with a ghost and other paranormal activities, including seances, Main provides linkages to some of the more under-discussed implications of quantum mechanics as they may apply to possible theories of paranormal experiences. Jung was very interested in the modern theories of physics because he saw a tangible theoretical and/or philosophical link between them and what his experiences with and ideas about paranormal experiences were leading him to think and theorize about psychology and the paranormal. I particularly and thoroughly enjoyed the letters that were included, and not just because I love writing and reading 'heavy' philosophical letters too, but because Jung's informal writing is delightful to read. He relaxes his careful official persona, and expresses some of his unsupported speculations and ideas as to the nature of things inexplicable, such as the meaning of life, in ways always thoughtful, but frequently funny, too. His face-to-face encounter with a haf-faced ghost in a British farm house is particularly interesting because my reading of the encounter entangled it to me in one of the most interesting and quite frankly bizarre synchronicity-petites I have ever experienced. (See egajd.blogspot.ca if you are curious.) Despite this being about the 'airy fairy' concepts of synchronicity and ghosts, mediums and seances, Jung kept his writing and speculations and experiences 'real'. He doesn't leap to conclusions with his experiences, but allows them to challenge and question his pre-formulated beliefs about what may or may not be so-called reality. And in the process he challenges the validity of our ideological fixation on a rationalistic causal -- 'Descartian' science. Unlike much of western science, perhaps especially the behaviourists who dismiss as unreal that which falls outside the bounds that their theories delineate, Jung proves his stature as a real scientist by neither dismissing nor idealizing his paranormal experiences: they become simply a part of the chisel that Life provided him to chip away at our false ideas and thinking, even if it is stingy in providing additional clues. On reflection I am not sure what I expected to read before I began reading JoS&tP, but it turned out to be a far, far better read than I'd anticipated. Perhaps it was the inclusion of so many letters and extracts from letters, which I'd not read before except in tiny citations. Also, my prejudice regarding the word 'paranormal' lead me to anticipate something other than what Jung explored, which is a very scientific, coherent, and sound argument that our scientific foundation in causal biased rationalism is not just misguided, but inadequate to explain the full range of what happens within the so-called bounds of life. I highly recommend this book. This is a solid five stars. (egajdbooks.blogspot.ca)
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Reader
by
Bernhard Schlink
GDuperreault
, March 10, 2012
I enjoyed it, but it wasn't a great book. Good, and that's about it. The praises on the cover were at best overblown, at worst histrionic. (And it further confirmed my opinion that Oprah seems to like mostly good, but not truly great, books.) When I'd finished the read I set aside the book without any additional thought. But by accident I discovered that an e.friend was reading it, and she had exactly the same reaction. And then I remembered that the friend who'd lent The Reader to me, had had the exact same reaction: 'It was okay,' he'd said with a somewhat dismissive shrug and dragged out emphasis on 'okay.' And it was -- is -- okay. Reading it wasn't a waste my life, but didn't significantly affect it either. To my surprise, the movie was in some ways superior to the book. Note, I saw the movie first, and so that may engender bias. However, normally I enjoy books far more than the movie covers because moving pictures do not convey, usually, complexity of thought, personality or feeling as vibrantly as can well-written words. However, my hat's off to Kate Winslet and the team behind the movie, because it actually surpassed what the book was able to convey. My thought is that that is because the book, while good, isn't brilliant. I guess, after having my thoughts meander, what I am concluding is that The Reader is competent and that it does provokes some thought on the nature of duty and obligation and how they are as easily instruments of evil as they are of good. And the 'issue' of the sexual relationship between the older woman and the older boy was reasonably well written, as was its effect on his adult life. Reasonably well written, but it did not sing the body electric.
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Noam Chomsky A Philosophic Overview
by
Justin Leiber
GDuperreault
, March 04, 2012
This book is not for the faint of heart. Nor is it for those who have become ideologically fixated on empirical / behavioural science in the humanities. Not only is this a book for people interested in how language works, it is far more importantly a powerful book for those who have come to believe that much of what passes for science in the behaviour / humanistic fields has been plagued with a false science that has managed to turn empiricism into a mind numbing ideology. For many readers, NC:APO has the potential to be a transformational book in that it provides the solid analysis that supports making the leap from the flaccid so-called truths that behaviourism has provided us with to a resurgence of the scientific attitude of 18th & 19th century rationalism. That rationalism, unlike today's mask of rationalism, does not pretend that their philosophy can explain things beyond what it can. Chomsky's argument applies to other fields, such as economics and psychology. For example, the behaviourist B.F. Skinner's is mentioned several times in unflattering terms. (In the book of his interviews with Mitsou Ronat Language and Responsibility, he goes so far as to say, paraphrased, that as far as he knows behaviourism has contributed nothing of meaningful scientific value.) Empiricism, perhaps especially in fields like linguistics, economics and psychology, act as if all behaviours and characteristics of the human species and the individuals within it, can be explained by stimulus/response theories. The book begins with Leiber succinctly recapping the history of how Chomsky, with the ease of a knife cutting through water, revolutionized linguistics and proved irrevocably that empirical behaviourism is completely inadequate to explain not only the acquisition of language but also its comprehension. Leiber describes Chomsky's argument that, since the sentences of a language that can be created are infinite, that the behavioural linguistic practice of cataloguing them so as to fully describe a language is fruitless. Chomsky extends that argument by pointing out that most sentences that human's comprehend in their lives they will not have ever seen or heard before. He then convincingly argues that the rules of grammar allow for sentences to be constructed that are incomprehensible, whereas sentences are easily created that don't properly follow the rules of grammar but which can be perfectly comprehensible. All of these are extremely strong indictments of some of behaviourism's fundamental tenets of human understanding of language and understanding. Chomsky's pragmatic rationalism may be most pointedly observed when he describes the real world experience that children learn language before they know the so-called rules of grammar. That repeatedly observed behaviour, from a behavioural model of language acquisition, would ostensibly be unheard of. Chomsky also observes with pragmatic rationalism, that children's language acquisition is largely independent of the oftentimes horrible language usage and training that parents provide. He also suggests with pragmatic rationalism that one might even be able to argue that in extreme cases the acquisition of language skills would appear to be independent of any significant language training because the training skills or environment are so poor that that the child's language acquisition would seem to occur despite their language training behaviour. The final nail in the behaviourist's coffin, as it pertains to linguistics anyway, is that when the rationale of the behaviourists' practices were questioned vigorously, it was revealed that behavioural linguistic practices were largely preconfigured by the human behaviour and/or psychological bias and preconceptions of those formulating the 'science.' Rationalistically, as opposed to empirically, Chomsky posits that there is something in the human being that promotes language acquisition independent of race and strict behaviourism. He called it universal grammar. And this gave me one of the greatest of finds, discoveries, epiphanies, joys I have experienced from reading a book in long time: in exactly the same way, with a nearly identical conceptualization, Chomsky proposes a description of language that is nearly identical to the methods and rational behind Jung's formulation of the Collective Unconscious. YES! My intuitive prompt, from several years ago, that there was something similar in the philosophy of these two ostensibly disparate thinkers has been beautifully, elegantly, and delightfully affirmed. I wonder, is it just a coincidence that these two thinkers that I highly respect are both ignored or denigrated by our society's political and education leaders? This commonality is even more strongly affirmed with the idea of a 'deep structure,' which Chomsky posits provides the fundamentals of language. Its description reminds me of Jung's descriptions of the common imagery and symbolism of myth, dreams as an expression of the collective unconscious. And when the problem of how to constrain a universal grammar to create only meaningful sentences was discussed, I am again reminded of Jung's theories about the problem of constraining (not Jung's word) the symbols to being meaningful. A very amusing formulation of that problem is the anecdote attributed to Sigmund Freud: sometimes a cigar is only a cigar. This is a brilliant and very important book.
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Waiting for Godot
by
Samuel Beckett
GDuperreault
, December 12, 2011
I struggled to begin this review, so maybe I'll start by saying that this play is so good that as soon as I finished it the first time, I promptly re-reread it. [To see this review, complete with active links and images, Google 'egajdbooks waiting for godot'.] My struggle was between being too glib: "This is a brilliant metaphor for the condition our human condition has conditioned us to unconditionally accept" -- to being too dismissive, such as was expressed by a co-worker who, upon learning I was reading Godot, said "I watched it on TV. It was great! A great play about nothing." But despite an ostensible appearance that it is about nothing, nothing is further from the truth. WfG is definitely not about nothing. The metaphors are nearly endless, from the simple ones such as the too small boots pinching the feet -- constricted understanding hobbles psychological/emotional movement. Beckett even extends that to include putting on another's boots in the hopes of acquiring the ability to walk with less discomfort, metaphor for putting on another's ideas. I haven't gone onto the web to search for the likely endless reams of ideas this play has generated. Nor do I want to do a review of the play, as such. Instead I would like to briefly concentrate the character Lucky. [Note: I will discuss this role in some detail, so if you want to be surprised by Lucky in the play, do not read on before reading the play.] Lucky comes onto the stage with a noose around his neck carrying a collection of stuff. The end of the rope extends out of sight, off stage, making Pozzo, Lucky's master, initially invisible. (Is that the smallest of hints of Adam Smith's Invisible Glove?) Pozzo controls Lucky with the use of the noose, via jerks (Lucky has open sores from it), and with a whip and short, usually one word, commands such as the On! and Back! that introduce the pair. Later, Pozzo wants to put on display to Godot's waiters, Estragon and Vladimir, Lucky's intellectual prowess, his ability to think: ~~ POZZO: Stand back! (Vladimir and Estragon move away from Lucky. Pozzo jerks the rope. Lucky looks at Pozzo.) Think, pig! (Pause. Lucky begins to dance.) Stop! (Lucky stops.) Forward! (Lucky advances.) Stop! (Lucky stops.) Think! (Silence.) LUCKY: On the other hand with regard to-- ~~ [I blogged this section more extensively as part of a peculiar fushigi. Google "egajd Godot, Ballet, Pocket Watch & Alice".] This has particular resonance for me because of a recent employee motivational propaganda campaign I (and at least several thousands of others) were subjected to. It was comprised of a series of 3 or 4 posters and their electronic facsimile being festooned across the offices. The posters were comprised of two parts. The top half was a single word, a command: Sit, Stay, Say. The balance were terse reasons for obeying the command, for the first two, and what to say for the last one. Less specifically, the extended thinking that Lucky expresses is, of course, a perfect metaphor for what passes for thinking through the news media and many official journals: a huge pile of impressive sounding phrases that at best hide the truth but at worst promulgate false truths and ideology. And all co-mingled with a curious obsession about sports. [I wonder if Beckett was influenced by some of George Orwell's pointed criticism of the media and much intellectual thought, such as he delineated in Homage to Catalonia? Wikipedia does not reference such a connection.] But why does Lucky stay with the physically and verbally abusive Pozzo? He is, ostensibly, a free man. Pozzo even ascribes to him freedom. Well, the answer is an interesting one, and reminds me of the current batch of presidential candidates who blame the poor for being poor because if they didn't want to be poor they could work themselves out of it. Here's Pozzo's reasoning for Lucky's enslavement to him: ~~ POZZO: Ah! Why couldn't you say so before? Why he doesn't make himself comfortable? Let's try and get this clear. Has he not the right to? Certainly he has. It follows that he doesn't want to. There's reasoning for you. And why doesn't he want to? (Pause.) Gentlemen, the reason is this. VLADIMIR: (to Estragon). Make a note of this. POZZO: He wants to impress me, so that I'll keep him. ESTRAGON: What? POZZO: Perhaps I haven't got it quite right. He wants to mollify me, so that I'll give up the idea of parting with him. No, that's not exactly it either. VLADIMIR: You want to get rid of him? POZZO: He wants to cod me, but he won't. VLADIMIR: You want to get rid of him? POZZO: He imagines that when I see how well he carries I'll be tempted to keep him on in that capacity. ESTRAGON: You've had enough of him? POZZO: In reality he carries like a pig. It's not his job. VLADIMIR: You want to get rid of him? POZZO: He imagines that when I see him indefatigable I'll regret my decision. Such is his miserable scheme. As though I were short of slaves! (All three look at Lucky.) Atlas, son of Jupiter! (Silence.) Well, that's that, I think. Anything else? (Vaporizer.) VLADIMIR: You want to get rid of him? POZZO: Remark that I might just as well have been in his shoes and he in mine. If chance had not willed otherwise. To each one his due. VLADIMIR: You waagerrim? POZZO: I beg your pardon? VLADIMIR: You want to get rid of him? POZZO: I do. But instead of driving him away as I might have done, I mean instead of simply kicking him out on his arse, in the goodness of my heart I am bringing him to the fair, where I hope to get a good price for him. The truth is you can't drive such creatures away. The best thing would be to kill them. (Lucky weeps.) ESTRAGON: He's crying! POZZO: Old dogs have more dignity. (He proffers his handkerchief to Estragon.) Comfort him, since you pity him. (Estragon hesitates.) Come on. (Estragon takes the handkerchief.) Wipe away his tears, he'll feel less forsaken. (Estragon hesitates.) VLADIMIR: Here, give it to me, I'll do it. (Estragon refuses to give the handkerchief.) (Childish gestures.) POZZO: Make haste, before he stops. (Estragon approaches Lucky and makes to wipe his eyes. Lucky kicks him violently in the shins. Estragon drops the handkerchief, recoils, staggers about the stage howling with pain.) Hanky! (Lucky puts down bag and basket, picks up handkerchief and gives it to Pozzo, goes back to his place, picks up bag and basket.) ESTRAGON: Oh the swine! (He pulls up the leg of his trousers.) He's crippled me! POZZO: I told you he didn't like strangers. ~~ Interesting. Lucky has enslaved himself in order to appease his master, to be liked enough to be seen as worthy by Pozzo. So why did Lucky kick Estragon in the shins? As I have been thinking about this, it struck me that Lucky's behaviour corresponds exactly with those who have fully submitted to their lot in life. My first realization of this tickled out from Noam Chomsky's reference to the 'benevolence' expressed by industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie to 'his' workers in 1896: These are the fruits of the fierce corporate campaign undertaken as soon as American workers finally won the right to organize in the mid-1930s, after long years of bitter struggle and violent repression unmatched in the industrial world. Perhaps we may even return to the days when the admired philanthropist Andrew Carnegie could preach the virtues of "honest, industrious, self-denying poverty" to the victims of the great depression of 1896, shortly after he had brutally crushed the steel workers union at Homestead, while announcing that the defeated workers had sent him a wire saying, "Kind master, tell us what you wish us to do and we will do it for you." It was because he knew "how sweet and happy and pure the home of honest poverty is" that Carnegie sympathized with the rich, he explained, meanwhile sharing their grim fate in his lavishly appointed mansions fn37 (37. Sexton, Patricia Cayo. The War on Labor and the Left Westview 1991, p83f.) So a well-ordered society should run, according to the "vile maxim of the masters." (Year 501: The Conquest Continues, pg56-7). Eventually, the people brutalized recognize the futility of fighting it, and so beat anyone who might offer them hope as being trouble makers or a threat to the status quo. Social critic and comic Bill Maher makes frequent reference to the American labourer who descries as a kind of evil the benefits European workers get in terms of time off, health, paternal benefits, etc. instead of struggling to achieve them for themselves. Similarly, in the movie Guess Who's Coming for Dinner the parents actively dissuade the interracial couple because there would be trouble for the couple and their parents, too. Freedom roped off with fear. Lucky is Estragon and Vladimir. Lucky is enslaved to Pozzo by choice -- more specifically having chosen willingly or not to accept the lack of choice -- not the rope. Estragon and Vladimir are enslaved to the hope of Godot providing them their direction in life. The metaphors are obvious: we make our choices to remain as we are, whether we are societally successful or not, by accepting the situation we find ourselves in by submitting to choices others have made for us, then hoping that abandoning our Selves to those seen or unseen others will bring us succour. The challenge, here, is twofold. The courage to see things exactly as they are within ourselves and in the society, and the wisdom to know what can and cannot be changed. I have no idea how either of these things are done. This play is endlessly rich in meaning. I would now like to see it, and to produce an amateur production of it -- or perhaps a reading. Hmmmm.
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Man & His Symbols
by
Carl Jung
GDuperreault
, December 02, 2011
A fascinating book EDITED by Carl Jung, who contributed the first chapter/essay, 'Approaching the Unconscious'. This was, in fact, Jung's last work before his death, written and edited with the explicit purpose of being accessible to the well read non-professional. He excellent describes the difference between symbols and signs, and why symbols are important. This book succeeds in expanding one's understanding of psychology, mythology, history, art, science, and human potential. This is an important book for anyone interested in exploring the meaning of being human. The many illustrations do an excellent job of reinforcing the legitimacy of the ideas presented. The other contributors are: Joseph L. Henderson - 'Ancient Myths and Modern Man'; Marie-Louise von Franz - 'The Process of Individuation' and 'Science and the Unconscious'; Aniela Jaffé - 'Symbolism in the Visual Arts'; Jolande Jacobi -'Symbolism in an Individual Analysis'.
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Nature Of Personal Reality
by
Jane Roberts
GDuperreault
, November 27, 2011
This is (was?) the single most important book in my life because it came to me when I was a teenager and gave me the idea of the possibility of becoming alive. It is filled with odd sounding exercises that, when done, confirm the veracity of the 'far out' ideas presented by Seth. Once read, the ideas here changed forever and for the better, how I perceived, and how I was able to perceive, and live life.
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Three Plays The Dock Brief I Spy What Sh
by
John Mortimer
GDuperreault
, November 26, 2011
The two other plays included are I Spy and What Shall We Tell Caroline? I stumbled into this book of three plays while looking for something else. I was both excited and surprised to learn that the author of the excellent Rumpole of the Bailey series and books had also written plays. I came to these comedies with very high expectations, and so it is unlikely anything would have met them. However, these plays were far less than I thought they'd be. I have given them three stars instead of the two I was tempted to confer in order to compensate for dishonourably possessing those unrealistic expectations. Sadly the best writing came in the introduction Mortimer wrote: "Comedy is, to my mind," writes John Mortimer, "the only thing worth writing in this despairing age, providing it is comedy which is truly on the side of the lonely, the neglected and unsuccessful.... In all plays, as in any sort of writing, what seems to me important is the moment of recognition: the small time when you realize, sitting in a theatre, with a shock of excitement and unease, that you are watching yourself."I've been wrestling with what it was about the plays that didn't engage me and it comes down to believability and sympathy. I didn't believe the situations, especially for The Dock Brief and What Shall We Tell Caroline? And I found the writing within the prescribed situations to have humour but lacked what ever it is in writing that takes completely unbelievable characters and makes them believably human. I was unable to empathize with them. Finally it struck me that the characters, male and female, all had a very similar voice. At least that was I how I interpreted my reaction/feeling about what I'd read. But when I re-read that, that wasn't really the case. What gave me that impression was a common feeling of flippant irreverence in the characters language. I suspect that seeing a production with competent actors would largely eliminate this 'problem,' but as I read it came across monotone. In 1961 Lewis Funke in his New York Times review of What Shall We Tell Caroline? and The Dock Brief closed his mostly negative review with "The Dock Brief has been done with reported success in other cities abroad. It would be interesting to know how that was accomplished." Perhaps my reaction is simply a measure of my getting older. I have become jaded because in my real life experience I have certainly seen incompetent boob-heads successfully rise into positions of real authority and power. And since truth is stranger than fiction, and with my now living this kind of boob-head truth, its written portrayal is stuck competing against that unbelievable truth. Anyway, a very easy and marginally fun read. I did see flashes here and there of what was to come from Mortimer with Rumpole of the Bailey, and 'she who must be obeyed.' To see my blog of this review with images and three extended extractions from two of the plays, go to egajdbooks.blogspot.com and look for it.
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Cats Table
by
Michael Ondaatje
GDuperreault
, November 08, 2011
Michael Ondaatje is one of the true masters of English poetry in prose. But when I learned that The Cat's Table was in the style of a memoir, I was slightly disappointed because, with some exceptions, I have not been fond of memoirs as such. However I felt curious and expectant that he would convert me. He did. He exceeded expectation because he managed, again, to convince me while reading his latest book that the one in my hands is my new Ondaatje favourite. And to describe it as a memoir is an accurate description, but only in the same way that to say the sky is blue is accurate: it misses the complexity of the experience. The arc of the story is a memoir of a pre-pubescent boy sent to England on a ship with scant adult supervision. Some critics I've read found that to be a stumbling point, but my childhood spent with scant adult supervision for extended periods of time is eerily echoed in how Michael interacts with the adult social marginals he and his new found friends are assigned to sit with at the cat's table, which is, I learned in this book, that one table in a public space that no one wants to be seated at. Thus he is lumped in with the ship's other dining room undesirables and comes to learn that what does not glitter may very well yield gold and beyond that the even more valuable stuff of a lived life. In the Q&A portion of the reading I attended, Ondaatje insisted that the book is not a memoir. He claims that, even though he did take a ship from Columbo to England as a child the age of the protagonist, Michael, he has little if even any memory of it. Ondaatje avers that his unremembered childhood trip sparked an idea for a story, that evolved as it was written, with unexpected characters moving downstage into significance that he had not imagined. Regardless memoir or fiction, Ondaatje's writing here is as beautiful as anything he has written. Beyond the sheer beauty of the writing Ondaatje seamlessly moves through the story using various voices. He has captured with perfection what I remember as the feelings of childhood wonder and acceptance of the process of being alive through Michael's eyes. Things simply are: the trip, the people, the intense life changing friendship that lasted for only 21 days. But Ondaatje also brings to the telling the reflectiveness of an adult considering a particular childhood passage. And he does this with a grace and lightness of touch that manages to keep the child's feeling of life's magic fully alive. And then he plays the omniscient writer's role to elaborate the background of two of the characters. And Ondaatje brings to fruition a mystery that is introduced, invisibly, quite early, that becomes a mystery well into the book, and closes with human simplicity and gentle, quiet satisfaction. All seamlessly. A breathtakingly beautiful and fulfilling read. To see this review with extended citations, egajdbooks.blogspot.com and look for 'The Cat's Cradle.
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Luck
by
Joan Barfoot
GDuperreault
, September 11, 2011
Barfoot likes to play with how the obvious in people can be so wrong. And she does this very well, again, in Luck, where she adds the ambivalence of luck, especially that of perceived luck, both good and bad. The stage upon which Barfoot's characters explore luck is in the extended quasi-family dynamics of three disparate women living together who find their relatively impersonal work-based relationship instantly and confusingly personalized by the sudden death of Nora's middle-aged husband. I thoroughly enjoyed how Barfoot introduces Nora with an early morning scream at her discovery that the husband she had laid down with the night before has become in their sleep a corpse. She is a successful mixed media graphic artist and Barfoot's nuance and detail make her very interesting. But as day one of the post-mortem evolves Barfoot quietly and slowly expands the depths and complexity of the other two characters to the point that Nora eventually becomes the least interesting of the three characters. The story is told primarily through Nora, but the other two get to tell their tales too until they are all fully fleshed out. Sophie, the personal assistant who was traumatized by the failure of her good intentions to change or even ameliorate evil in the world and is in hiding inside Nora's household from that and her own do-gooder hypocrisy. There is Beth, the beautiful and pliable model who appears to the other two as an oddly vain and empty-minded ex-beauty queen with nothing of interest to offer them except to be the butt of their condescension and feigned tolerance for her compulsive need to push on them her complex health teas and other infusions. The exploration of luck begins with how each of them have felt lucky: Nora for having found Phil and Beth and Sophie; Sophie for having found Phil and Nora; and Beth for having been found by Nora. But it is an ambivalent sort of luck because it has trapped them all in a pattern of relative unchanging -- " I was going to write, "comfort" but that's not quite right. Undemanding familiarity, perhaps, because their interpersonal demands are not of family, not of work mates, not of school mates. Oddly, they relate to each other from the strict requirements of their own self-interests which have been unthreatened by the others' own sell pre-occupations. And with the ostensible bad luck of Phil dying young all that changes. The barriers of self-interest are breached in ways that are unexpected to all women and disorienting, The exploration is at times delightful and sad. Barfoot is unafraid to present characters who are seriously flawed and undoubtedly unlikable, but with such sympathy that I cared to see how each of them survived. The characters are complex enough that their interpersonal and psychological devolutions are not predictable. And the ending is a very pleasant surprise of character development. So, with all that, and even though I thoroughly enjoyed the book I am still hesitant to give this five stars because it didn't quite blow me away. So… ☆☆☆☆ out of ☆☆☆☆☆. For the curious I have extended the discussion on my blog with a couple of citations @ egajdbooks.blogspot.com.
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Manufacturing Consent The Political Economy of the Mass Media
by
Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman
GDuperreault
, September 02, 2011
It's been many weeks, now, since I finished Manufacturing and started this review. In that time I have been wrestling with how to verbalize the feelings that this book has evoked. Sadly, the best description I can give is that it is easily and by far the most disturbing book I have ever read. Writing and re-writing that sentence, with its rather flaccid sentiment took me three days. My brain seems to have been hit hard with the breadth and depth of my state sanctioned and media promulgated ignorance and disinformation. But it has been stunned into gibber-jabber at economic actions that can only be called evil but have been either ignored or sanitized by our media. I am disappointed and surprised that my having read eight of Chomsky's 150+ books a total of 13 times before tackling Manufacturing did not prepare me against being overwhelmed by the calm, incisive, and persuasive descriptions of both the immeasurable brutality of American foreign policy and the vile complicity of the press. Yes, I knew it was bad. I had come to that conclusion on my own long before I discovered NC. When I began reading Manufacturing I proceeded with the naïve thought that I'd flag those bits that resonated with me in order to blog at least some of them. And at first that is exactly what did: many of the early pages are purpled with stickies, and it was at that time that it was with excitement, perhaps even zeal, that I blogged those two oh so perfect citations. [@ egajdbooks.blogspot.com] But I flagged fewer and fewer pages because I began to realize that what I was reading could not be effectively snipped into even longish quotations. The book is only properly read as a wholeness because every piece of writing supports Herman's and Chomsky's arguments: removing words here and there weakened them because isolated they seem too unbelievable. Before this book I actually thought I understood Chomsky when he's commented that the modern media's need for concision is an extremely effective tool to delimit argument and promote ignorance within the acceptable and the delimited known. And I now understand why he has such vehemence whenever he refutes anyone trying in anyway to mollify in even the tiniest degree the evil that is America's actions in South Vietnam before, during, and especially after, the invasion. Reading Manufacturing created an epiphany in me. I feel I have been ripped from the flawed world that I thought I had some understanding of and dropped into the fetid mire of an alternative universe. In response to a comment I made about Manufacturing a co-worker stated the trope about the important role the media played in shortening the Vietnam War. His particular point was of the brutal war photography of a famous photographer (whose name I've now forgotten) who achieved much acclaim for the brutal photographs he took. I found myself unable to even open my mouth to contradict him his belief about the media's role in ending that war. How could I begin to re-articulate the entire text of Manufacturing, which would be the minimum required to exorcise that mystification? It would require both an acceptance of the scale of America's Machiavellian brutality that is all but unimaginable and that that brutality was not only knowingly condoned but significantly abetted by just about all of the news journals and their expert commentators and propagandizing editing and editorializing. Actually, reading just Manufacturing would likely not be enough, because without additional awareness outside of it and Chomsky MC is probably unbelievable despite the hundreds of references and extended citations from everyone from Kissenger to President Carter. The scale of the deliberate and utter ruthless annihilation of democracy in Vietnam and Cambodia for the direct and clearly delineated and articulated, but unreported, purposes of American world hegemony is incredulous and sickening. And Vietnam cannot be dismissed as a reporting gaff because the improper reporting of American hegemony continued in South and Latin America. Perhaps most tellingly with how the media reported the rape, murder and mutilation of nine American church women who had left America to provide aide to those being killed by American backed, trained and financed henchmen. As I mentioned, I was originally going to site lots of things. But after many weeks of struggle, I've decided to focus on why I've used the words 'evil' and 'sickening' to describe the government of America's behaviour in Vietnam and the media's complicity. To set that up, here's an excerpt that perhaps gives a hint of the scale of America's destruction of South Vietnam while they were reportedly 'saving' it: [It is very long - for those interested you can read it @ Extended Citations.] … I don't know why, but the deliberate kicking of the Vietnamese by America's political elite, after their country had been utterly destroyed by American armaments, chemicals, and the use of Rome plows, struck me as far more evil than the decision to destroy them was in the first place. The emotional turmoil that this has evoked in me is still rumbling around my system. I am not sure how, but something changed in me, and I'm at a kind of loss about how to bring that change into my official and proper and comfortable life. [Note: my blog - egajdbooks.blogspot.com - of this review contains hyper links to the footnotes, and where possible, to sources and resources available on the web.]
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Lazy Mans Guide to Enlightenment
by
Thaddeus Golas
GDuperreault
, September 25, 2010
I have an ambivalent reaction to this book. It gave me no new understanding, but I like that Golas has aligned himself with Chuang Tzu and like Taoists who argue against straining and struggling to take actions or achieve understanding. It is likely at a more challenging level to spiritual than an introduction, but unnecessary for people who I have been struggling with the spiritual meanings of life. I quite like his blunt way of stating the obvious truths we delude ourselves into not seeing. As such I keep thinking that it deserves more than 3 stars, but I cannot bring myself to move my rating to 4. Perhaps my concern about it is that like many spiritual guides, it emphasizes the role of mind and attitude in achieving so-called enlightenment at the expense of respecting one's somatic reality, and perhaps well-being. As a society we are completely beholden to products of the mind, be it agri-business's justified land, water and animal abuse, the poisoning of our food products with -icides or business practices with Harvard Business Schooled flow-charted MBA-itis. For my additional thoughts, visit egajdbooks.blogspot.com
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Helpless
by
Barbara Gowdy
GDuperreault
, September 06, 2010
This is a disturbing book, one that once begun kept me turning the pages. It is very typically Gowdy, meaning that the protagonist is someone amoral who has been humanized. And that is what marks Gowdy apart from the good writer — the ability to bring to her readers a feeling of understanding, and even some empathy, for a completely unsympathetic character. It seems anti-social to think and feel that a child abductor could be human, and not just a caricature of evil. But this is the power of Gowdy's writing. Gowdy commented that the story she wanted to explore with Helpless was the anguish of a parent whose child disappears. And on the surface the disturbing part of this book is of a mother's horror of a child being abducted by a person or persons unknown. But somehow that story did not dominate the novel. Perhaps, during the writing, the writer's challenge of the abductor's motivation and humanity took over because that part becomes the central driving element of the novel. And what makes the book as disturbing, psychologically, as it is — and it is very disturbing — is the manner of Gowdy's portrayal of the kidnapper. In her hands the human proceeded along an insane course of action within the bounds of fully justified logic and sound reasoning. There is a disturbing, unsettling empathy that is generated by this character as he proceeds along his path not as an insane evil creature, but as a frail human who has successfully denied to himself the nature of his nature. His self-delusion allows him to perfectly rationalize his actions; within his scope of self denied understanding his motivations are truly honourable and in this psychology he echos our own failings of self understanding, honesty and/or awareness. Not that many of us have stalked and kidnapped children! But where have we, for example, not fallen victim to own self denials, to our own delusions about our motivations or sense of social propriety? Who here on the planet has not rationalized and justified small selfish behaviours as being for some kind of altruistic 'best'? Where have we chosen to live a lie because it served an end which was made to look generous but served our ego's need? When have we mislead someone around us to support us, or manipulated someone to collaborate with us to assuage our feeling of doing something amoral? And how often are we unaware of why it is we do the things we do, ignorant of what motivates us? [... for my extended review, visit my blog egajdbooks.blogspot.com]
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Beauty & Sadness
by
Yasunari Kawabata
GDuperreault
, August 29, 2010
When I bought this book, second hand but 'new,' I ignored the little alarms that warned me to keep my money in my pocket. I had spent too much time looking for my usual dreck in my local used bookstore, and had made myself late — books before life! As I'm in the process of leaving the store I see atop an 'in-box' near the cash register Beauty and Sadness. I decided that the author being Japanese out-weighed my caution against him being a Nobel prize winner. I allowed my visual aesthetic to tumble me into an infatuation with the Japanese print without reading the publication details. And so it came to pass that I impulsively bought a Japanese version of Henry James because I was in a hurry. Henry James! I had rather throw sand in my eyes than read HJ! But, there I was. I spent my time reading this book wondering at whether or not it was the translator or the author who had effected the dull thud of short sentences filled with ominous meaning spoken by automatons repetitively about slowly rotating chairs, or obis, or paintings over and over again, repetitively. The different characters all spoke in the same manner, with the same cadence, and the same heavy handed overtures to misplaced meaningfulness in a meaningless life. There were several times when I had to re-read the dialogue in order to keep straight who was speaking because the sentences all sounded as if they were spoken by the same person. And the passions expressed were done in such dead voices that the finale was almost funny in its obviousness. Now that I'm older, it strikes me that James' characters tend to sound emotionally like overly melodramatic teenagers, housed, supposedly, in the bodies of adults with the adults' life experiences but twisted by their youthful fixation on nirvanic virginal sex, unrequited puppy love, and a cloyingly repugnant narcissistic infantilism. And this is exactly what Yasunari Kawabata and/or his translator gave us with Beauty and Sadness. Why did I finish reading it, then? Well, in short, because I foolishly fell back into my own version of infantilism, to a time when I took pride in my having finished reading every book I started, regardless whether or not I enjoyed it. Michener's The Source humbled me in that regard, and with his writing sparked my nascent understanding that reading bad writing is a narcissistic waste of life. Life is short; read the good books first! (Okay, okay, what is a good book is hard objectively to define!) And so why did I finish reading Beauty and Sadness? Because I belong to some weird web-based book club, and I wanted to put another book into my 'read' file; and because I wanted to write a review of it that I could put up into the ether-sphere. Oh! And because the book is very short, with relatively large font, and is festooned with lots of white space. And when I write this review I get to stuff it on other web sites, at least one which offers a chance at winning some money for books. If you like Henry James, you'll probably like this. If you find youthful melodrama played out by so-called adults with emotionless sensitivity trite and trying, give this book a pass. Moral of the story? When buying books, do not ignore the small inner intuitive warnings lest your book buy's haste has bought you waste.
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The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest
by
Stieg Larsson and Reg Keeland
GDuperreault
, August 24, 2010
I finished The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest in two days. Although TGWKTHN is separated out as book three in the millennium trilogy, it is more accurate that this is the balance of book two, The Girl Who Played with Fire. I was unable to put this down, hence the five stars, despite two or three slight detail failures, some of which others have enunciated in their reviews. Larson gave himself a serious writing challenge by having his action hero bedridden for much of the book, but manages to make it work, hence it getting five stars despite the number of times coffee drinking is enumerated. (Do Swedes drink as much coffee as written?) The manner in which Salander is lured/pushed into becoming a social being is beautifully written, hence five stars, despite a bit of waffling in the characterization of Blomkvist's partner and boss, Berger. The sub-plot of sexual harassment seems to have been hurried, and came across a bit clumsy, but the quality of the courtroom writing was top notch, and I enjoyed the character of Blomkvist's sister, hence five stars. Reading the three books in six days was a delightful way to enjoy six days of my summer vacation, and so despite it not quite being perfect, it still gets ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆.
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Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
by
Stieg Larsson
GDuperreault
, August 20, 2010
I was surprised at how good this book is. I am always skeptical of NY Times', or other bestseller lists, and consequently this is the first I have purchased on such a list in many, many years. I came to read this via a little fushigi about it. Anyway, all the elements of this book as a work of fiction work: complexity of the story and completeness of the details to make it credible; sophistication and humanity of the characters make it engaging; quality of the writing in terms of pacing, clarity, and elegance makes it delectable; relevance to the real world makes it substantive. And okay, it has some great blood and guts and sex scenes, too, but for the most part they lack any feeling of being gratuitous. Finally, the David and Goliath elements always get me rooting for the underdog and TGWTDT has two underdogs that balance and complement each other — the anti-social punk Lisbeth Salander and the socially conscious reporter Mikael Blomkvist. Besides falling in love with Salander, what surprised me most about the book, and what is likely a significant part of its being more than just a best selling crime fiction novel, is that Larson makes three powerful and real indictments on the global society. The first is that there is still, at a very fundamental psychological level, an anti-female, even misogynist, underbelly. The second is that capitalism has run amok and the corporate foxes are now not just guarding the hen houses but owning them too. And the third is that the corporate media is egregiously failing to safeguard democracy from the consequences of corporate greed business ethics. The book is in not 'preachy,' but more a matter-of-fact but exhilarating exploration of these realities through the experiences of Salander and Blomkvist. As an example of the last two ideas is the big banks' recent ethical and associated financial failures and the inadequacy of the media's reportage before and after the scam was exposed — The Millennium Trilogy was written before the crash happened. As to the first, as a resident of metropolitan Vancouver, I recently watched a police representative apologize for the police's failure to apprehend more quickly a serial killer of about 50 prostitutes over ten or more years because these women were in effect disposable in being unimportant in their and the society's eyes. Great read. My first binge read in more than fifteen years.
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Book of Chuang Tzu
by
Chuang Tzu, Martin Palmer
GDuperreault
, August 12, 2010
A generally excellent translation. It has caught what I imagine was Chuang Tzu's sense of barbed play with philosophical stuffiness. I would have liked to have had a bit more of the historical information around some of the philosophers and rulers Chuang Tzu praises or pillories.
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