My third book in the Against the Odds picture book series about girls/women around the world doing things against the odds." So some girls in rural InMy third book in the Against the Odds picture book series about girls/women around the world doing things against the odds." So some girls in rural Indonesia are studying Quran, wearing hijab, and they discover Metallica through their teacher, who also used to play in a metal band. The teacher supports them, even as they may face "radical Islamist" criticism.
As with the Wrestling Cholitas of Brazil and the Mermaids (synchronized swimmers) of Jamaica, I like knowing these folks exist, doing what they do. There's a kind of exoticizing in all of it that troubles me a bit, written for American audiences in mind, and as with the other stories, we don't get to really know any of the principal actors in these stories. It again feels somewhat abstract. Some of it is political, because there is resistance to what they do, and they are in danger, but still, I'd like to hear their actual voices. The author went to Indonesia, but couldn't actually get back to the area where they lived, so she relied on talking to the teacher and other musicians there. Still, Metallica in Hijab in Indonesia, why not? Cool. ...more
Tender little buddy read with my friend George, for reasons I can't quite recall at the moment, but maybe something to do with the times we are livingTender little buddy read with my friend George, for reasons I can't quite recall at the moment, but maybe something to do with the times we are living in?...more
“I know, though, that we'd have to come from a better family to be able to bury our childhood - we'd have to lie under a layer of earth ourselves, but“I know, though, that we'd have to come from a better family to be able to bury our childhood - we'd have to lie under a layer of earth ourselves, but the time isn't ripe for that yet.”
How can I write about this book? The Discomfort of Evening by Dutch author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld was awarded the International Man Booker Prize for 2020 and I see many very bright and thoughtful people here could either not finish the book or ended up so disturbed by it that they one-starred it. Being Dutch-American, I’d been feeling I should read more Dutch books, and here was one that was supposedly good. And I agreed, but not without putting it down a few times and despite a nightmare or two. But that was the author’s intent, to capture the horrors of trauma. Hey, a book for our times. So this won’t exactly be a review, but I’ll say I, too, was deeply disturbed by the book even as I was completely taken in by the ten-year-old girl narrator. There’s much lyrical writing and many starkly painful descriptions of death, sexual acts, animal cruelty.
What’s it about? The story is told by Jas, who loses her brother after she prays for him to die rather than her rabbit. And then the whole family, living on a dairy farm, steeped in the Dutch Reformed Church, falls apart in grief and madness--Mom stops eating and openly admits she wants to die; Dad shuts down and goes into his own madness even as he also loses his cattle to disease, and the three remaining kids are left to fend for themselves, rudderless. The spectre of a noose is present throughout.
There’s a lot of disturbing vulnerable or vicious coming-of-age books--I’ve read Foster and The Ice Palace recently; there’s Lord of the Flies--that defy the often commonplace understanding that youth is about innocence and adulthood about corruption. That’s part of this book, for sure, that the horrors of the world can shape you--break you--even at the earliest ages. The children in Lydia Millet’s The Children’s Bible--for the most part good kids-- are left to raise themselves. The kids in Rinjeveld’s book are mostly not handling things well, but why do they have to be? They’re in trauma, and they’re kids.
But it’s something else, too. I’m Dutch-American, as I said. My grandparents on both my mother’s and father’s sides--Schaafsmas and Kuypers--came over to the US in the late nineteenth century; both families lived in the Groningen area. The Schaafsmas were sheep farmers for generations. My mother’s family, coopers, barrel-makers, cask-makers-- had in its lineage the Dutch theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper, aligned with John Calvin. Both of my parents' families settled in Dutch western Michigan--the Holland and Grand Rapids area. They spoke Dutch and never taught us; they also spoke Frisian with each other at times.
I knew (a little, maybe wrongly) that a lot of Dutch families came to the US because of religious oppression. Many were extremists. The Reformed Church featured in this book is one with which I am familiar, though the dark madness Rijneveld depicts I never personally knew. My family is/was largely sane and loving. But I knew of the Protestant Reformed Church, where kids dressed in clothes without bright colors, no tv or radio, no Sunday work or play; my family's version is called the Christian Reformed Church--I also couldn’t play outside and we couldn’t watch TV on Sunday, either--my parents went to church three days on Sunday, one service all in Dutch; I was required to go twice on Sunday. I was forced by my family and church to make public Profession of Faith and the elders urged me to renounce all worldly pursuits, including the watching of films and contemporary music and dancing. I refused. But my religion banned dancing; we did, anyway; we could these events "foot functions."
I really do not know if this is true but we had heard, growing up, that there were more churches per square mile in the Zeeland area of Michigan, near Holland, than any other place in the country, but also more venereal disease and teenage pregnancy. Repression. I and my friends snorted with dark laughter when we heard this in the early seventies.
The Dutch Reformed Church shapes much of the horror of this book. It provides the basic grim background, and is foregrounded many times when Dad quotes from The Bible--"The Authorized Version." It begins with the death of a brother but the religious extremism provides no comfort, only further horror. Is it fair to Dutch Christians? Everything the mad Dad quotes from the Bible to threaten his children I know. But this Dad is crazed in a way I have never met.
“I’ve discovered that there are two ways of losing your belief: some people lose God when they find themselves; some people lose God when they lose themselves.”
In my church as I grew up--steeped in a Calvinist first principle of Original Sin as a way of understanding all the bad in the world--I heard much more about sin than love, much more about Hell than Heaven. My church was one of the most conservative in western Michigan, though my family was happy, not brutal or cruel. In this book the parents are just lost, and thus the kids are.
Jas has deft and lyrical observations, but she is spinning in her grief and her own madness:
“I nod and think about the teacher who said I’d go far with my empathy and boundless imagination, but in time I’d have to find words for it because otherwise everything and everybody stays inside you. And one day, just like the black stockings which my classmates sometimes tease me about wearing because we’re Reformists – even though I never wear black stockings – I will crumple in on myself until I can only see darkness, eternal darkness.”
“I don’t want to feel any sadness, I want action; something to pierce my days, like bursting a blister with a pin so that the pressure is eased.”
“Later I sometimes thought that this was when the emptiness began. . .”
At one point Jas decides to never take off her coat:
“Nobody knows my heart. It's hidden deep inside my coat, my skin, my ribs. My heart was important for nine months inside my mother's belly, but once I left the belly, everyone stopped caring whether it beat enough times per hour. No one worries when it stops or begins to beat fast, telling me there must be something wrong.”
I left the Dutch Reformed Church that I saw in my experience--though I had friends who had much better and more uplifting and loving experiences--was dark and repressive and joyless. I think that this is a book about loss, grief, madness, framed by the darkness of a religion that provides no relief, no succor, no healing balm, no joy. What happens in the book as the family descends into madness is very disturbing though also is filled with amazing observations and lyrical language, too. It’s horrible and heart-breaking and at the same time kind of amazingly depicted at times. I am quite sure it is too graphic for many people and I understand that and warn you.
“We find ourselves in loss and we are who we are – vulnerable beings, like stripped starling chicks that fall naked from their nests and hope they’ll be picked up again.”...more
So, Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Gautama Buddha, the Enlightened One, decide to take a "gap year" from being spiritual leaders and move into this So, Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Gautama Buddha, the Enlightened One, decide to take a "gap year" from being spiritual leaders and move into this apartment in the Tokyo suburbs. I had heard about this manga series, which I find began in 2006, was approached about English translation in 2010 and turned down as the Japanese publishers thought it might offend Western audiences. But the popularity kept growing and I think around 2016 it began to be translated, and in 2019 a first volume became available.
It's hard to see how it is it could truly offend anyone, as it is not harshly critical of religion. It's more of a satirical commentary on contemporary pop culture, in which the two roommates fully engage in in all its superficial fun: Blogging, watching shows online, buying flashy stuff no one needs, and occasionally making light commentary on it all. It's pretty funny and in a way, thoughtful, though it's not deep or harsh, ever. It's fun! The two guys are kinda goofy and having a good time. ...more
“My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong a“My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.”
Tara Westover’a anguished story is about growing up in the mountains of Idaho in a fundamentalist Mormon/survivalist family led by a father convinced that the socialist government in every respect was evil. As a family they prepared for “The Days of Abomination” and saw the opposition as The Illuminati. They lived pretty much “off the grid” for a long time—birthing at home (Tara’s mom is a midwife and herbalist; her Dad ran a junkyard). For most of Tara's youth, they had no birth certificates, no social security numbers, went to no doctors, had no contact with any media, and had no public schooling at all.
In the mountains she was defined largely by her father and brother, Sean, who were verbally and physically abusive, and throughout she painfully struggles with how to honor her father and his narrow, paranoid version of the world as she later learned everything about the world that was largely denied her.
“I believed then--and part of me will always believe--that my father's words ought to be my own.”
This was a well-written, gripping story, and I typically don't read these kinds of stories but it was highly reviewed and much awarded so I thought I would try it and am glad I did. But it was also really uncomfortable to read. It weighed on me as I read it. I thought of largely discredited memoirs and wondered if this would become one of those, as her story is hard to fathom--both the horrific parts and the successful parts--her trauma and escape are almost unbelievable. She also has what she describes as a nervous breakdown at one point as her family thought she was evil and dangerous for not following her father’s dictates to live in the home and (dangerously) work for him as a scrapper. Her father is crazy and her brother Sean is crazy-violent, threatening to kill her, and no one (publically, at least) agrees with her side of the story. A nightmare. And though she escaped this world, she never is entirely happy, as she loses her family—such as it is—in the process.
In her view, her mother, forced to become an unlicensed midwife by her husband, was a tower of womanly strength, devoted to her bipolar, authoritarian husband. The family had to bow to his will, paralyzed by his delusions, or leave, and she eventually left. One trigger for Westover’s father, as it was for many survivalists then, was a paranoid interpretation of the Ruby Ridge “killing” of Randy Weaver, another survivalist. Early on, Dad interpreted the Holy Bible as telling him that, for instance, milk was sinful and they only used molasses and honey thereafter. He was crazy in so many ways, and only Tara had the strength to finally tell the truth about him and her brother. Everyone else in her family bowed down to him.
But Westover, almost unbelievably—I had to finally google her to make sure she really was who she says she was!—not only graduated from BYU, but went on to graduate with a PhD in History from Cambridge, becoming truly “educated” about herself, her family, and the world. At Cambridge a Dr. Kerry attempts to cure her of her imposter syndrome, recognizing her special talents and writer and thinker.
“This is a magical place,” I said. “Everything shines here.” “You must stop yourself from thinking like that,” Dr. Kerry said, his voice raised. “You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lighting—but that is the illusion. And it always was.”
I was raised in the ultra-conservative (Dutch) Christian Reformed Church. Growing up, I went to church twice every Sunday—my parents had gone to church three times on Sundays, one service in Dutch—was not allowed to play catch or swim or ride a bicycle on Sunday as I grew up. When I was required to go to classes to study the Heidelberg Catechism with Rev. Jerome Julian, I skipped the classes but was ultimately forced to go tutorials at his house. When I met with the deacons and elders to see if I was worthy to make Profession of Faith, I was upbraided for refusing to commit to never see a film again. From the time I was in middle school, I thad taken notes questioning the sin-soaked sermons I was forced to listen to. But when the time came I did go to Calvin College, my church's college, that I loved in the Vietnam War years, when I was in theater and wrote fiction and played music and studied English, and even taught subsequently in western Michigan parochial schools but in a matter of years I left The Church forever. As I listened to this book I thought of people in my community who were not allowed to wear brightly colored clothes, who had no televisions, which we now associate with fundamentalist religious views of all stripes. I was a working class kid who was the only one in my family to graduate college, leaving my tradition as she did. I was lucky to avoid the worst of my tradition, but I thought of it sometimes as I read this book, and I thought of the contemporary American landscape, too.
This book resonates with our present time in the US where white supremacism, separatism, nationalism, survivalism, fundamentalism, sexism, and mental derangement seem to be ascendant. It seems like a witch's brew of all of the above were keys to understanding Tara’s family. She grew up ignorant about sexual matters, uneducated about them, but she believed her brother was probably right in calling her a “whore” because she put on make-up—at 15 she didn’t even know what sexual intercourse was and got a pregnancy test! The contrast was the university, where, in her first class she only had heard of the name—Shakespeare, never had read a word from him, but had to drop it because it was a senior level course. She learned from a roommate that the reason she failed the midterm in Art History is that she had to actually read the textbook. She had never been in school of any kind! In the university she learned of the Holocaust and slavery, really for the first time; she learned of bipolar disorder, paranoid schizophrenia, she learned of antibiotics and went to a doctor for the first time, she accepted a student grant from the government (!), all socialist acts her family knew the university and the government would corrupt her with. That she keeps going home where she has been threatened and hurt and lied to resonates with familiar abuse scenarios. But ultimately she finds the courage to go on with her new life and not back to her old one.
“You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them,” she says now. “You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.”
There are anguished and transcendent moments in this book, moments that made me weep, such as this one, that occurred when her mother, through an email —for a time, though not permanently—acknowledged that she had not adequately protected her daughter:
“There was a pause, then more words appeared—words I hadn’t known I needed to hear, but once I saw them, I realized I’d been searching my whole life for them. You were my child. I should have protected you. I lived a lifetime in the moment I read those lines, a life that was not the one I had actually lived. I became a different person, who remembered a different childhood. I didn’t understand the magic of those words then, and I don’t understand it now. I know only this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she’d been, she became that mother for the first time.”
“The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she [her mother] would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self. You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education.”
This book disturbed my dreams, and though I am glad to be done with being haunted by it, I am also glad to have read it for its insights. This is precisely the point of Educated, that she becomes properly educated, after having been “educated” very narrowly and falsely. It is also very much in one sense a kind of typical growing up story, in that she finds a way to define herself on her own terms rather than the terms given to her my her parents, or religion, or society.
“We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell.”
Tara Westover, no longer a Mormon, singing a Mormon hymn:
A meme I saw on Facebook screamed that science is a matter of fact and not belief. This was in response to current fundamentalist views that depict clA meme I saw on Facebook screamed that science is a matter of fact and not belief. This was in response to current fundamentalist views that depict climate science as political, as speculative, as belief, in spite of the nearly unanimous view of the scientific community. I thought of this as I began reading this book, the art for which I gave a casual opinion to the author about a year or so ago. He asked me to read and sent me a copy, and here’s a short review.
This is a dream project of Tommaso Todesca, who wrote this out of the love of a book he read a few years ago, Science and Faith: The Patience of a Dialogue by Alfio Brugulia and Giuseppe Savagnone (2010), the project of lifelong friends, one a philosopher, the other a physicist. Todesca considered translating this story, but then thought he would prefer to convey his sense of what is most valuable about it though a graphic novel.
The basic story conveys a conversation between the two friends, who fancifully meet a range of ghosts, thinkers--Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Charles Darwin, Pierre De Chardin, Isaac Newton, Richard Dawkins and St. Thomas Aquinas, among others—across history who weigh in on the subject of faith and science. Todesca wants us to be open to a conversation about the relationship between them, as Brugilia and Savagnone’s book accomplished for him. He wants us to stop thinking in either/or categories about the subject; for instance, if you believe in God you can’t believe in science, or if you are a scientist, you can’t be religious. He wants us to stop being so close-minded, as he sees Dawkins and the host of “new atheists” of recent decades.
The title signals this as a scholarly work, with a title as unfortunately uninviting as Science and Faith (except, I suppose, those specifically interested in this topic, such as scholars who would ordinarily not seek out graphic novels on this topic), but it is far from stuffy, actually. The two men and the thinkers they encounter along the way are as warmly engaging enough to imagine a general audience might like this story. Most people in the world do practice some religion, after all. And it is a topic that is part of long and continuing international debates and popular books from atheists to religious thinkers to scientists of various stripes. One thing Todesca achieves here is to introduce us to thinking of great thinkers over time, to encourage us to dig deeper into their works as he—inspired by Brugulia and Savagnone—has done.
The illustration work of Alexandra Fastovets is good, inventive and interesting, and is very much a centrally inviting dimension of this project. The depiction of historical figures as ever-present ghosts and the time travel/fantasy elements make this a fine collaboration, a good and pretty lively introduction to the topic in graphic novel form. As it turns out, science, though taken up with the provable, may co-exist with the world of belief....more
The sequence of seasons naturally pushes forward, Suddenly I am startled by the ending of the year. Lifting my eyes I catch sight of the winter crows, CaThe sequence of seasons naturally pushes forward, Suddenly I am startled by the ending of the year. Lifting my eyes I catch sight of the winter crows, Calling mournfully as if wanting to complain. The sunlight is cold rather than gentle, Spreading over the four corners like a cloud. A cold wind blows fitfully in from the north, Its sad whistling filling courtyards and houses. Head raised, I gaze in the direction of Spring, But Spring pays no attention to me at all. Time a galloping colt glimpsed through a crack, The tap [of Death] at the door has its predestined time. How should I not know, one who has left the world, And for whom floating clouds are already familiar? In the garden there grows a rosary-plum tree: Whose sworn friendship makes it possible to endure. —Chan Master Jingnuo
Haiyin. We know very little about Haiyin, apart from the fact that she appears to have lived during the last part of the Tang dynasty and was associated with the Ciguang Convent in what is today Sichuan Province. Hers is the only poem attributed to a Buddhist nun (there are quite a few by Buddhist monks) among the over fifty thousand poems written by some two thousand poets included in the voluminous compendium of Tang poetry, The Complete Poetry of the Tang Dynasty.
The color of the water merges with that of the sky, The sound of the wind adds to that of the waves. The traveler’s thoughts of home are painful, The old fisherman’s dream-self is startled. Lifting his oars, the clouds get there before him, When his boat moves, the moon follows along. Although I’ve done reciting the lines of my poem, I can still see the hills extending in both directions.
Plum Blossom Nun. Little is known about this poet, but the poem is widely anthologized now.
The entire day I searched for spring but spring I could not find, In my straw sandals I tramped among the mountain peak clouds. Home again, smiling, I finger a sprig of fragrant plum blossom; Spring was right here on these branches in all of its glory!
This is an amazing collection edited and crafted by Beata Grant, a look into women Buddhist poets, long and still neglected. I read a bit of it each day for the last month, in the morning, as a kind of prayer or spiritual guide. Reading the poems and reading what Grant is able to find about the poets as individual writers is its own form of meditation, in solitude.
I will not give a detailed review of this wonderful book, but instead encourage you to read the incredible review of Rat de bibliothèque, who includes, as he often does, his reading of the book and in particular the poetry through stunning paintings with which he is familiar. A gift to us, his creative reviews!
“The world breaks everyone and afterwards, many are strong in the broken places.” –Hemingway (and this is the book’s epigram)
“This [Chicago] was a cit“The world breaks everyone and afterwards, many are strong in the broken places.” –Hemingway (and this is the book’s epigram)
“This [Chicago] was a city that beat inside me like blood.”-Wendy
(There might be a spoiler or two in here. I’ll try not to give too much away.) The author came to my YA class today; I know her and am a fan, but I also genuinely liked this book a lot. Jessie’s a former student in my teacher education program, and has been a high school English teacher for ten years. Her first book, The Carnival at Bray, which I loved, is set in Chicago and Bray, Ireland in the grunge rock nineties, and is a Printz Honor book. Neighborhood Girls is set only in Chicago, in a Catholic girls school in the Jefferson Park neighborhood on the north side, featuring Honors student Wendy Boychuck, who was named by her father after the Wendy in Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” The difficulty, which we learn about fairly early on, is that Wendy’s Dad, a former cop, is no longer living with the family; he’s in prison for his involvement in a torture case that echoes actual real events here.
Wendy seems like a canvas on which everyone adds their own paint. She’s not really that distinctive in her own right for much of the book, but after all, she is persona non grata, the daughter of a rogue cop. At one point one of her father’s victim’s daughter and a couple of guys beat her up, so she makes a decision to kind of leave her old life behind, make herself anew, choosing to leave her smart girl friends such as Alexis, and align herself with the mean popular girls in her small school, such as Kenzie, as a kind of protective mechanism. This aspect of the book feels to me fairly typical YA, about the need to make good and ethical choices. And Wendy, pretty passive, makes the wrong choices through a great majority of the book. She’s just us, she’s a normal girl faced with huge moral dilemmas about who and what she will align herself. As she says, “I’m not into anything. I mean, I’m into my schoolwork. Getting good grades. Getting a scholarship and getting the hell out of Chicago.” In order to truly grow up, Wendy (like Peter Pan’s Wendy) must be her own person, think and feel for herself, and Do the Right Thing, though: “The right thing is always the hardest thing.”
The thing that sings in the book for me is what sings in Bray, the great and distinctive writing of Foley that makes Chicago come alive. And it’s ultimately a kind of spiritual book, maybe even a Catholic one, though not super religious. I just read another Catholic one, The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene, which depicts a flawed priest who is forced to strip off the vestments of his material and religious life, to take on the cloak of humility, in order to get to the core of important spiritual values. This book is like that. Wendy, who uses popularity and a group of mean girls as her shield, must find another shield, her own moral commitments, signified by a tattoo of Our Lady of Lourdes, an image of which was also painted by her mother and is hung just above her locker. In this way Wendy aligns herself with her family and the aspects of religious tradition that make sense to her spiritually. Though she also aligns herself with her new age, Millennium Park Chicago-area Aunt Kathy, who hunts ghosts in old Chicago places. She’s painting herself anew using her own distinctive colors; not her Mom or Dad or anyone else.
There’s a range of belief here: the painting of Our Lady is known to have wept, after the death of a couple of Kathy’s friends, which is either a miracle or the runoff from a leaky air conditioner, you choose. What are your talismans, where are the emblems of your commitments? Her Dad, in prison, learns to paint. Aunt Kathy takes Wendy to the Chicago Art Institute. Alexis is a classical violinist. What kind of art will Wendy align herself with? Thanks to a boy, Tino, who becomes a love interest, who sports two tattoos, one of Michael Jordan, the other of Shakespeare, it increasingly becomes literature, and especially a book Tino gives her, Chicagoan Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, a romance that features a young (and pretty superficial) guy who changes profoundly when he falls in love.
Neighborhood Girls features lots of references to literature I appreciated: Pride and Prejudice, Othello, (Chicago’s) Native Son. Judas, Iago, figure in. I also laughed aloud several times, especially at the references to bodies, and the sometimes edgy language. I loved it as a Chicago book—“jagoff” is a Chicago word I learned when I moved here—and I love it that it features A Farewell to Arms, one of my favorite books. I like the fact that most of the characters speak like real people. I like the fact that it is a book about morality, religion, spirituality, a contemplation about the nature of belief, superstition, and even miracles—“Kissing is a miracle”—and redemption. I like the feel of the school in the book from teacher Foley. I like that activist nun Sister Dorothy and the teacher I see in the author Foley.
I like all the fun (and serious thought) she has with weeping paintings, which is a long Chicago tradition:
This book does not focus on race, but it would be a good book to read in conjunction with The Hate U Give, which I also just read with my YA class and reviewed, and which also features a kind of suburban-urban class struggle with moral choices....more
A comics biography by scholar about John Chapman, a nineteenth-century icon more familiarly known as Johnny Appleseed. Hundreds of children's books m A comics biography by scholar about John Chapman, a nineteenth-century icon more familiarly known as Johnny Appleseed. Hundreds of children's books memorialized him throughout the twentieth-century and who knows whether he is still known to kids today. But this is not a book for kids, it's a biography of Chapman that I bought because I am a fan of Noah Van Sciver, who illustrated the book. And maybe, too, because the blurb makes it clear it his story provides a kind of alternative model to the violent tale of westward expansion that whites actually took place. And because Johnny Appleseed (JA) was part of a nineteenth-century environmental movement about living in harmony with nature.
JA was known for spreading (and selling) appleseeds everywhere as he walked steadily west. He was also a pacifist, an advocate for non-violence, for living in harmony with Native Americans. Too much time in this book perhaps is spent on his associations with religions such as Swedenborgianism, spiritualism, and beliefs that were common in the nineteenth century and influenced folks such as Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman. JA himself influenced a lot of these folks, including early environmentalist John Muir, and as Buhle makes maybe too tediously clear, everyone from the Beats to hippies to the even contemporary environmentalists. And road advocates like Kerouac, or walking/wandering advocates.
The book is not really a comics biography but more of an illustrated biography with too many words and too many ideas, could have been more focused, but for the reasons above I still enjoyed parts of it quite a bit....more
At a glance I was puzzled by the low rating of this book and what I see as people not getting the joke at the heart of it. The Hernandez brothers--JaiAt a glance I was puzzled by the low rating of this book and what I see as people not getting the joke at the heart of it. The Hernandez brothers--Jaime and Gilbert--love fifties and sixties pulpy, trashy sci-fi-fantasy, noir, B-movies, and not sleek and sophisticated stuff, so they have a series of comics versions of the B movies Fritz starred in, the very "trash" they love and laugh at. And most people respond: Ugh, such bad writing! What is going on with those guys?! But have we lost all sense of what B movies (Reefer Madness, The Night of the Living Dead, and so on) and "midnight movies" were all about? So bad that's it good?
Garden of Flesh is a retelling of the Book of Genesis as a Tijuana Bible, which these guys would have been familiar with growing up, cheap/nasty/funny/quickly done, eight pages.
Fantagraphics does a funny production: Small and short as Tijuana Bibles would be, with an embossed (fake) leather cover as if it were a cherished family Bible. And it is clearly marked: For Adults Only, because the version of Genesis Hernandez jokingly relates here is one as if by and for smirking juveniles, one that is almost exclusively focused on explicit sexual acts, missing any spiritual or religious meanings intended by the original text. Hilarious, if you see it that way, but very possibly offensive if you only pick it up to skim through it. So this is a parody, not porn. Still, maybe it's not the kind of joke you would enjoy, involving graphic depictions of Adam and Eve and their descendants having sex, maybe it sounds like Beavis and Butthead depicting the Bible as only the "begattings," and in a way maybe it's not far from that, so you are hereby forewarned, but it made me smile. Los Bros remember comics and youth as rebellion. ...more
I read this because my friend Jenn said she was reading it. Last year I read Anna Karenina (which I loved) and decades ago I had read War and Peace anI read this because my friend Jenn said she was reading it. Last year I read Anna Karenina (which I loved) and decades ago I had read War and Peace and some of his terrific stories such as "The Death of Ivan Ilych", but I had never read this piece. I think of myself as an agnostic, brought up in a conservative Dutch Calvinist religion, and once taught Bible in a Christian school, so I am familiar with and have read theology and am always exploring spiritual issues in my reading, one way or the other.
That said, I was not blown away by this book. I felt I knew some of it through my own experience. The book is called a "confession" because it is a story of the spiritual struggles, in his fifties, that led him to the brink of suicide. So the first half of the book is dark and challenging. Spoiler alert: he does not commit suicide, of course--he says he was not "courageous" enough to go through with it--but instead comes to a fresher vision of faith he can embrace, one that is simpler, more connected to the lower classes he over time came to admire (and you can see that in Anna Karenina), a simple faith he sees reflected in the farmers and serfs. In contrast, he denounces the upper classes he came from (and still was technically part of as a pretty wealthy landowner) and the followers of the religion in which he was raised, Russian Orthodoxy, because of what he sees as their cynicism, consumerism, and hypocrisy.
The text is simple, straightforward, and very short, especially for Tolstoy. This is a small book format for a pretty short essay which is more like a letter to the members of his religious "circle" and fellow upper class people. He denounces them and romanticizes the lower classes. I guess the pattern for the essays owes something to Augustine's Confessions: I was a terrible and lost sinner, I committed all the sins you can think of, and now I know better. He does confess a few specific sins in the first half of the book.
Tolstoy as he got older got more devout, and more entrenched in his own kind of orthodoxy, maybe, with simpler, more Buddhist leanings, more existentialist than typically Christian approaches. Out of these views he wrote his last novel Resurrection, which I recall being pretty didactic. I liked Anna Karenina, the last of his books that represents real complexity and doubt and struggle. This "Confession" makes it clear that he has now "arrived" at some truths. I prefer the doubting Tolstoy, and his contemporary also doubting Fyodor Dostoevsky's anguished spiritual exploration, The Brothers Karamazov. But Confession helped Tolstoy gain thousands of followers, all the way to his death, who saw him as a spiritual leader, so it is seen as kind of a spiritual classic. And Tolstoy, it should come as no surprise, is a great writer, so that in itself is a pleasure....more
I feel a little worn out by this book, a book that is essentially a woman trying to talk her sister out of committing suicide. That’s the heart of theI feel a little worn out by this book, a book that is essentially a woman trying to talk her sister out of committing suicide. That’s the heart of the whole book, and we are completely unsurprised by what happens. My friend K told me I had to read this book but didn’t say why. As I read I saw that multiple characters commit suicide--a family affair, as it sometimes can be--and as he knew I was working on a research project about using literature to speak to issues of suicide in schools and have been reading into this area lately.
Then, K knew I grew up in western Michigan, raised in the deeply conservative Dutch Reformed Church, and this is a book situated in the author Miriam Toews’ hometown of Steinbach, Manitoba, and at a glance to Wikipedia, the book draws heavily on her life there in a more liberal family (as mine was) living in the oppressively conservative Mennonite community there. Many of the key events in the book happened in her life. I see Toews also wrote a book about her father's psych struggles.
So K knew my religious background and that made sense for her to suggest I read it. She also knew I had read an equally devastating indictment of a conservative religious community by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, The Discomfort of Evening, though Toews’s book is narrated by a sister who jokes a lot, and there is no joking in Rijneveld’s book. The joking both does and doesn't help me, actually. I mean sometimes it makes me smile in sympathy, but over time it tired me out.
The novel’s title comes from a poem that Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote to Charles Lamb in 1794, describing his unflagging grief:
I too a sister had, an only sister —She loved me dearly, and I doted on her! To her I pour’d forth all my puny sorrows.
Sorrows is a pretty straightforward account of a terrible sequence of events, several deaths that her family endures. So it's devastatingly sad, unrelenting. It’s the story of a sister who has lived a somewhat messed-up life as a writer, twice divorced, and so on, who talks throughout in various hospitals to her brilliant pianist sister. The book is also directed as a letter to her sister. Since i guessed pretty much what would happen, I felt that, while it was well-written and pretty engaging, it was also oppressively long in its inevitable sadness.
At best, it is a kind of family survivor story, a love letter to a sister and, in the end, a love letter to her mother, who almost comically is meant to rescue the story from the depths of despair with her spunky goofy antics, her un-bitter survivalism. So this could have been just my problem, but I was resentful for some of my reading at Toews putting me through her straightforward, uncomplicated all-too-familiar (to me, anyway) story, but if you have a family history of suicide and depression, this could be the book for you, as it describes all the anger, despair, love, rage at the psychiatric and religious communities who are no help, and so on. The narrator is engaging and passionate, for sure. This is probably a four star book for most readers, but I thought it was three stars for me.
In spite of the tone of this review for me I will read soon Women Talking and see that film, as devastating as I know it will be. But I also read Bolano's 2066 and some books about the disappearance/murders of indigenous women in the US and Canada, so I think it is an important subject, too. The hatred of women by some men in this world is horrific. So I know, can it be a better read for me than Puny Sorrows?! We'll see. But it is not the topic that wore me out so much as the unsurprising nature of it all, not as original or as engaging as a book such as Rijneveld's. This was my first Toews book and I request recommendations on what of her earlier work you especially like. ...more
It was an interesting experience for me to read this book, since I have by now not been a member of a church since I was 28 and I am now near 63. AgnoIt was an interesting experience for me to read this book, since I have by now not been a member of a church since I was 28 and I am now near 63. Agnostic is how I identify my “religious faith” on Facebook. Depending on whom it is I talk with, I can teeter in different directions. The church I was raised to attend is the (Dutch) Christian Reformed Church, and my pastor was widely seen as the most conservative preacher in the Grand Rapids (MI) area. Every year I lived in my parents' house (yes, one only for 21 years) I was expected to attend two church services each Sunday, and until I figured how to escape some Sunday evening services with my friend Darrell to Russ’s Restaurant, I did so.
I was a pretty sensitive and inquisitive kid who—in part influenced by the various social upheavals of the sixties—began to Question Authority (that very bumper sticker), and by 15 (1968, almost Woodstock!) questioned my conservative, Total Depravity-based Calvinist upbringing by writing questions and concerns on my church bulletins (of which I still have several dozens). I began to “rebel,” though I still attended a tiny Christian College, and began my career as an English teacher in western Michigan Christian high schools, hoping to steer as many of my idealistic young students to follow me in Questioning the nature of True Religion, or, increasingly, just trying to help them figure out spirituality in part through reading and writing.
I married “into the faith” at 21 (!) but by the time I was 28 I had left the church, all traditions associated with it, lost my marriage and my teaching job, and spun a bit out of control for several years. I became the black sheep of my family for reasons I’ll keep private here, but suffice to say that Losing My Religion and the conditions under which I left my marriage severely challenged my family’s support for me. I left the area and never went back. My family was not as conservative as my church was, but they were and still are devout Christians, and though we all love each other as family, I always have this prodigality, this breach, that stands in a way between us.
I encountered the writing of Christian Iowan writer Robinson in my spiraling period. I picked up Housekeeping, read the first page or three, was taken by the quality of the writing immediately—I was in Schuler Books in Grand Rapids, I can recall having the book in my hands—and put it firmly down. I was moving away from this tradition, this kind of writing, someone with roots in the very religious tradition I was leaving. But many, many years later, I picked it up again, and began to read her work seriously. I didn’t know initially whether she wrote novels or tracts, but I always was committed to serious novels, for complexity, toward Doubt, and still am. The anguished Dostoevsky, Graham Greene of The Power and the Glory, and J. M. Coetzee were my models for Serious Literature about spiritual issues.
So I first began reading Robinson with Housekeeping, a strange and wonderful exploration of what I might call madness, though Robinson would never call it that. It’s the story of women living apart at the edge of a small western town. She was writing about women who were different, not fully integrated into society, perhaps strange, even eccentric, but they had their own kind of spiritual strength. She helped me admire these women. The writing is gorgeous and the haunting beauty of it is almost breathtaking at times. It brought me in contact with emotional touchstones that I had been largely missing for decades.
I took some time off after that book but bought all her other books, knowing I would spend some good long time with them, and listen to this woman and see if she had something to say to me. I next read Gilead, which as a prodigal son was in part about a prodigal son, a man, gone twenty years, who returns to Gilead, Iowa to see his real father, Rev. John Boughton, and who also returns to yet another kind of father-figure for him, Rev. Ames, a neighbor. The year is 1956, which doesn’t figure in so much as a time in this book as it does in Home. The struggle about religious traditions, about what insights it might have to offer Jack is fascinating to me, and the story of this returning reprobate—like me?—captured me.
The psychoanalytical literary theorist Shoshana Felman once wrote that the stories that most captivate you are essentially your autobiography, they speak to you and for you, they essentially ARE your story. The story in Gilead is narrated as a letter by the 77 year old Ames to his own very young son, another dimension of this father-son story, and in some ways I felt he was speaking in a fatherly way to me as well as to his young son and his sort of symbolic son, Jack.
So when I learned that Home was the second in the Gilead trilogy, and uniquely, tells of the exact same time period as Gilead but from Rev. Boughton’s daughter Glory’s perspective about her own homecoming at 38, and that of her prodigal brother Jack's homecoming, too, focusing even more on this father-prodigal-son story, I was interested. Glory is the good girl younger sister of bad boy Jack, who after 20 years comes home, as I said. But why? If you like to have answers to questions like that as soon as possible, this is the wrong book for you, because Glory and Jack and their father, who is nearing death, speak very little to each other. They are very careful with each other. Jack ran off once, and he just might do it again. 1/3 of the book passes and they are still just feeling their way with each other, learning to talk with each other in a house where talk of feelings is scarce in that Midwestern way.
The central themes of the book are chiefly theological ones, not surprising in a prodigal son retelling: forgiveness, grace, redemption. I understand them in theological terms—I went to church, I know my Bible, even after all these years—but as an agnostic, I want to translate these concepts into psychological terms somehow, too. What might forgiveness feel like? Can I forgive myself for earlier screw-ups? I'm not expecting others to do so. Is there an analogue to the Christian notion of grace that isn’t just escapism? When I was in free-fall self-destruction for a time, my own father forgave me always; he knew I was screwing up, but he was always there for me, defended me, loved me. That I understand through the lens of this book as grace, as fatherly forgiveness. I experienced self-imposed exile from my family for many years, but it was my exile, not my family’s, not theirs. They never separated themselves from me. I just left and never really went home.
They didn’t excuse me for my wrongs, but they loved me, nevertheless. It’s what family does, at its best, and I hope as a father I am learning this, too. I am sure I caused them shame and anxiety and many sleeplessness nights, but I didn’t think about that so much for a long time. Both father figures Ames and Boughton have trouble communicating their feelings to Jack, but they are essentially all about grace. Jack never has to earn forgiveness. He just gets it from them. In reading this, I came to appreciate my conservative and devout family in a way I hadn’t for years. They had offered me grace and I had rejected that as a fiction, as fantasy, as Jack does in dealing with his family, as badly as he needs it.
My Aunt Florence, the prodigal daughter of my mother’s Dutch Calvinist family—a flapper, an artist, a nudist! And SHE had to go to church THREE times on Sundays, the middle service exclusively IN DUTCH!—once told me she never believed in Hell, and I loved her for that (hoping it was a fiction I might avoid). Jack, in this story, represents the inverse of my Aunt Flossie. Jack may be forgiven by his family, but he can’t forgive himself. He seems to only believe in Hell, in perdition, for all the ways he has sinned. Two times Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov is mentioned in this novel, someone who thought he might be able to rise above guilt, but who nevertheless torments himself with it, and this is an interesting way to think about Jack’s view of himself. He’s sorry, he gets the forgiveness he doesn’t seek or feel he deserves from his family, but he can’t forgive himself.
The number of times Jack says “I’m sorry” or the times he expresses regrets for his failings is almost maddening in this novel, but one has to hear it as a form of poetic repetition, a litany, a song of grief. The language is almost thoroughly musical throughout, subtle. And the restraint in this book is amazing. What do you say about people who are so eager not to hurt each other that they say nothing to each other? 1/3 of this book passes before we learn really important information about Jack’s and Glory’s lost decades, and this is a good thing, because when it happens that we hear some detail, it has a kind of electric effect (I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but trust Robinson).
Jack was always in trouble as a kid, and he left Gilead 20 years ago, without explanation, missed his mom’s funeral, everything. It’s not until the end, in a huge (for me) emotional finish, that we get a little better picture of what has gone on. Secrets! Glory and Jack keep secrets. Yes, we look mostly at Jack in the story, but we learn Glory has her own undisclosed history, which becomes slowly revealed. Are they reprobate? Maybe, in religious terms, but as we get to know them, that’s not how we see them, as bad people. But they are lost, and mostly lost to themselves. It’s Glory’s cooking that maybe takes a central place in mooring the scenes to family, to traditions, but she is in some ways as unmoored as Jack is.
It isn’t until well into the book that the old man is seen as having a position on racial politics of the time that separates himself from Jack (and us). We like the old man, we sympathize with his pain of separation from his wayward, missing son, and we admire his typically gracious treatment of Jack, but we also begin to see some of the wedges he has created. Other family members come in to the story, slowly, so we can see Rev. Boughton’s point about the importance of family. You can’t live with family, and you can’t live without it. And the same goes for the notion of home in this book. You can't go home again, and you can never leave.
This is a meditation on forgiveness and grace, and it is also a meditation on fathers and sons. I am a son of a now dead father who is with me in a sense every day, in my interactions with my own sons. I appreciated the scenes where Jack plays catch with Rev. Ames’s young son Robby, Jack having lost a baby daughter in his youth. Fatherhood is a key theme in the book. God the Father is part of this father theme, too, as one might expect, though I don’t see it as preachy or too religious.
Does this book sound a little too pious and conventional for you? Maybe it is. But I challenge you to check out one of Robinson’s books. This novel, as part of a four novel tale, would be a good place to start. Housekeeping doesn’t deal with religion at all, and its not in this series, so maybe that’s a better one for most of you. But what might you like about Gilead/Home? The characters, so carefully and lovingly etched, including the anguished Jack, smiling that awkward smile in his despair, prodding his own scars, the anguished Rev. Boughton, and his dutiful and equally anguished daughter, Glory. All of them are too often all too caught up in small town propriety, maybe, but then they break free from those strictures.
But it’s the language, each sentence powerfully constructed, and the storytelling, with its narrative symmetries throughout, that sets Robinson apart. Passionate symmetries, design echoing a larger design for the universe, perhaps. But if you think as a non-religious person that Jack is somehow diminished in any way by the Gilead faithful, or by Robinson herself, you are wrong. Robinson loves these people, and like Rev. Boughton of his son, maybe Robinson loves her Jack the very most. She understands him as much as she understands any of the characters in the book.
I was very moved by this book. We all have those skeletons, maybe. Unresolved issues. Maybe this is useful for getting at those. Was for me. And some of the scenes! The scene where Glory finds Jack in the barn later in the book is as anguished and powerful a scene as I have experienced in a novel lately. But then, I repeat, the book is about me as much as it is about Jack.
Lila, the title of the third book in the trilogy, is Rev. Ames’s young wife. She’s the least educated, the most intuitive, and she speaks insightfully and with common sense in the midst of all these smart, articulate readers of literature, theology, the Bible. The third book in the Gilead trilogy has Lila narrate. I'm so in....more
The conclusion of humanist Tezuka's manga Buddha saga, and it does not disappoint, with lots of dramatic and surprising turns (there's a lot Buddha haThe conclusion of humanist Tezuka's manga Buddha saga, and it does not disappoint, with lots of dramatic and surprising turns (there's a lot Buddha had to face in the last years, terrible tragedies that made him question his faith, for instance), but much enlightenment for the reader, finally. I've said a lot about previous volumes, so won't say much here, except maybe to remark that this particular religion is very stripped down to a few simple principles. Remember: all things are connected. Seems sort of relevant now, yes? Treat all living beings, treat the planet as you would want to be treated, with empathy, caring, love. Some thoughts on death/karma come up in this one… and humor, always, proves necessary in the context of such a serious subject; he never forgets that (and always is just crossing the line of manga silliness for me at times)... I like his meta-commentary through out the volumes, little moments where he talks of himself or manga... funny light touches... Great series of books, incredibly ambitious in its scope and artistic vision. Masterpiece....more
Half or more of this book focuses on Ananda and his bandit friend and his mute girlfriend. Ananda is possessed by Mara (Illusion), a demon, who wants Half or more of this book focuses on Ananda and his bandit friend and his mute girlfriend. Ananda is possessed by Mara (Illusion), a demon, who wants him to kill Buddha. Buddha is getting stronger, gaining disciples by in part performing miracles or just showing people how to live without desire as a solution to their problems. The first part, before Buddha shows up, goes on a bit too long, but when Buddha makes the scene things get interesting... Some reviewers find him a stereotypically boringly perfect god, and I get that, but his conquering the crocodiles and his Sermon at Elephant's Head Mountain (right, like the Sermon at the Mount of the Bible, only with a view toward greater self-lessness and unity with nature, also working wiht parables as Jesus did.... I felt it ended really strong and vibrant... Two volumes to go!...more
I have been waivering on this series, but here I begin to see its greatness unfolding. This is the best one yet, in my opinion. In this book SiddharthI have been waivering on this series, but here I begin to see its greatness unfolding. This is the best one yet, in my opinion. In this book Siddhartha is through his trials, and through much of his process of rejecting false paths to enlightenment. Not the Maciavellian rise to power (typified by Devadatta), not the caste system, not the violence of his friend Tatta, not the self-torture of the ascetics, who often bring on suffering and death. He did marry, he does love women, but in the end he goes a different way, one that focuses on love, on loving and communicating with nature, animals as equal beings/essences on the planet... feels like a timely approach we don't see in the same way in Judeo-Christian religions... He finds a way to heal that others might describe as saintly miracles, soul possession of the sick and needy, and his stature gains in the world. He doesn't love preaching/teaching but he is "called" to teach, and does, and in this book it is among deer and other animals in Deer Park... about being one with the universe, and being one and equal with al in nature...
This book still has some cartoony manga figures, but it is less cartoony, which suits me more.... Tezuka realizes that an eight volume tale of Buddhism needs entertainment, lots of sub-plots, and it IS manga, so it requires some cartoony figures, but they all serve in some way to reflect on the Buddha's path... though not in what I see as a didactic way... but its enticing in its draw to a spiritual life. Along the way he slips in these sort of authorial asides about the process of drawing this (for example, Tezuka found that too hard to keep drawing, so he drew this instead! or in a scene where the Buddha is literally sucking the poison out of his former girlfriend's (and currently, Tatta's wife's!) naked body, Tezuka writes in the corner of the panel, "What if the manga artist did not use words in a thought bubble to describe what is going on? What would you think is happening?" He has this sly humor that he slips in to his serious and dramatic story from time to time... But these are sort of trivial to mention; what is emerging here is the persuasive tale of a great spiritual leader, Siddhartha, become The Buddha, the Enlightened One... I like it a lot....more
I listened to an LA Theater Works production of this 1979 play, which I had seen twice in theaters, and I also saw the film version with Meg Tilly andI listened to an LA Theater Works production of this 1979 play, which I had seen twice in theaters, and I also saw the film version with Meg Tilly and Anne Bancroft, and I recommend you see it, one way or the other. Then-actor John Pielmeier was inspired to write the play based on an actual case that he followed in 1977.
The events of the play are compelling, and pretty sensational. A novice nun at a convent is found bleeding in her bed, with her dead baby in a wastebasket. Initially she has no recall of even being pregnant, she says; nor does she recall the birth. The set is almost bare; almost all of the play is a series of conversations between the three main actors: Agnes, a psychiatrist and the Mother Superior. Is she a victim? Is she a murderer? Is she a kind of abused saint?
Given what has happened in the worldwide Roman Catholic Church in the last few decades, the playwright may have changed the emphasis of the play, but this is a powerful drama that touches on Agnes's reclusive and abusive (home) upbringing and her continuing struggles. She's engagingly spiritual, if tormented.
Okay, none of the characters finally seem like they actually quite fit their assigned roles--if you are going to apply realism to an assessment of them it is unlikely Agnes would have even been admitted to the convent; the Mother Superior doesn't seem like she is the way I expect Mother Superiors to operate, and the psychiatrist would seem to be violate psychiatric standards for practice, especially with the hypnosis, but hey, this is still a great play, great dialogue and wrestling with spiritual issues, with three terrific roles for women. Really mesmerizing....more
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