BTRIPP'S BOOKS

Not quite connecting ...

2009-12-19T21:36:14Z

This is yet another dollar store find … which is, for a change, not that much of a surprise. The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures is a follow-up to a documentary series that author Louis Theroux shot for the BBC in the '90s. As those of you “following along at home” may have noticed, there is a definite trend of documentary-related books ending up at the dollar store not too long after their publication (this had its American release in 2007), and the current volume certainly seems to fall in line with that pattern!

In this case, however, the disconnect is fairly easy to nail down … the theme of this book is the author following up with ten of his previous documentary subjects, a decade or so past when he had first tracked their “weird” lives, and if one hasn't seen those programs, one is coming to this book totally cold, and dependent on the author to set up the “why” of these folks being featured. Now, the “weird” of the title is probably not the best descriptor for the people involved. They are participants in various “non-mainstream” Amercian Subcultures, but aren't particularly remarkable in and of themselves. Theroux uses individuals within these contexts as a window onto the particular industry/movement/profession but really spends most of the book reflecting on his reactions as an “outsider” (although he is of dual UK/US citizenship and has lived extensively in the States).

His premise here is that he might be able, in follow-up visits without a camera/production crew, get “closer” to his former documentary subjects, and so find deeper insights into their “subcultures”. So, he ends up moving to Las Vegas, buying a car, and seeing who he can track down. In most cases, he is forced to concentrate more on peripheral individuals who may or may not know the original subjects, and not so much on those folks, who in a number of these proved to be somewhat elusive.

Each chapter is devoted to one of these “weird” people … first a fellow who had been very big in “UFO circles” when Theroux was shooting his program, but who had “disappeared” from that scene; the author eventually tracks him down, but the bulk of this deals with other UFO enthusiasts, with a brief visit with the original subject at the end … next there's a young guy who had been a budding porn star at the time of the BBC series, but who had also moved on, and was very hard to find; again, much connecting with folks in the industry, followed by a brief visit with the subject in his new “normal” life … then there's the one “celebrity” of the bunch, Ike Turner, who Theroux had an abortive attempt at a documentary of a tour previously; this encounter likewise falls apart, leaving the author musing on issues of trust and control … next was a story about a fellow who had followed Colonel Bo Gritz up into the mountains of Idaho, only to not have the apocalypse they were anticipating come to pass and slowly fade into less dramatic lifestyles … this was followed by a swing through Nevada's legal brothel industry, in search of a particular “working girl” that he'd featured previously; not surprisingly, she was also very hard to track down, so this chapter deals with a lot of other people in that milieu with a brief denouement of contact … his next subject was an Aryan Nations member, back when that group was news, but it wasn't by the time the author got around to writing the book, and the guy had lost most of his “oddness” … in an strange (and perhaps cynical given how it plays to the preceding subject's views of minorities) juxtaposition, he follows this up with a visit to Mississippi and a small-time pimp/rapper that had featured in one of his TV segments, here he has better access but far less contact being no more able to fit into the subject's world than had the author hailed from Alpha Centauri … which could well be where his next subject wished to be, as he was a survivor of the Heaven's Gate cult, who had been given permission to leave before their mass suicide; here too, much of the chapter is spent with other former members, but it does provide a very interesting look into a somewhat unique situation … it's then back to Las Vegas for the next subject, a sleazy “millionaire seminar” scammer, Theroux's access to the subject was very limited, so this again deals mainly with “victims” of the scam, some still quite devoted to the program … finally, he's back in neo-Nazi land, tracking down the girls (and their mom) of the hate-rock band “Prussian Blue” (you may have seen pics on the web of the cute blonde twins in their “Hitler smiley face” t-shirts), resulting in the author trying to probe the kids' devotion to their Mother's (and grandparents') political/racial stance, to the irritation/frustration of all involved.

While, as “slice of life” features, these are all interesting enough on their own, yet without the connection to the preceding documentaries to cause one to particularly care about the subjects, it's a pretty weak set of stories, more the sort of things that might be “filler” in a magazine that the core of a book.

As I noted, I got The Call of the Weird (in hard cover) from the dollar store, however it does appear to still be in print in a paperback edition ... just in case you were anxious to run out and find a copy. The Amazon new/used guys have "like new" copies for two bucks (plus shipping), so you might consider that if you can't find a dollar store copy. Again, this was a mildly engaging collection of stories, but you'd either have to have been a fan of the BBC documentaries to really be into this enough to pay retail!

We're doomed ...

2009-12-14T03:11:58Z

This is another book that I got from the LibraryThing "Early Reviewer" program, which matches up books provided by publishers with L.T. users who have requested review copies, and whose libraries (via the mysterious workings of "The Algorithm") provide a "best fit" for the title in question. I have, unfortunately, been in and out of the job search so much, that I guess I have more "looking for work" books that most, so ended up getting Ron McGowan's How to Find Work in the 21st Century from the October availabilities.

I have to say, I did not like this book. Unlike, say, Conor Cunneen's, there is no cheerleading, no sense that if you focus on the job hunt, and do certain things, it will turn out OK. Nope. This has the emotional delicacy of Alan Rickman's Severus Snape putting an over-reaching student "back in his place", and reading it has a bit of the feel of being berated and belittled by the author. This is, however, not to say that this is not a very useful book, only that one needs to approach it "steeled" against the onslaught.

Much of the discomfort the book inspires arises from the author's stance that the "traditional job" is, essentially, dead and that everybody needs to get used to scraping for what funds they may be able to eke out from a constantly fluctuating mix of contracting/temporary/freelance gigs. At one point, discussing "young people" coming into this dire new world, he evens says:

They may also want the material benefits that come from having a permanent job: a house, a nice car, and a comfortable lifestyle.

They may want these things? Who doesn't want these things? Obviously, the implication is that these are no longer options ... no house, no "nice" car, no "comfortable" lifestyle. The emotional imagery take-away is of all of North America (the author is Canadian) living in a "Mad Max"-style dumpster-diving economy!

Needless to say, I don't think this is the authors specific intent, but he does paint a very depressing picture of a world where there are nearly no "real jobs" and everybody is having to scramble 24/7 for whatever projects they can find. Now, a lot of "speculative" books I read are based on similar dire forecasts, and so I'm used to taking a scenario like this on its own terms. Given the underlying "doomed economy" message, the practical parts of the book are quite focused and helpful. Again, this is delivered with all the sympathy of Snape, but the book is organized in various sections: "How The Workplace Has Changed" which discusses the author's views of the economy and the job market, "What Exactly Do You Have To Offer" (go ahead, hear that in Rickman's voice) which rather coldly has you pick apart whatever skill sets you might have believed you possessed to find what could be "marketable" in the new economy, "How To Market Yourself" which gives a reasonably detailed "action plan" (however unsentimentally presented) to find those bits and pieces of work (one can, perhaps, generalize this to a "job search", but it's clear that the author thinks that's a "sucker bet" at this point), and "Getting Started" which maps out what one should be doing to "find work". The next portion of the book addresses college students, and teachers of grade- and highschool students (not that the Teachers Unions would ever let ANY of these "reforms" be implemented in the U.S., especially the "co-op education" he suggests which sound a bit like apprenticeships from colonial times!), with versions of the material in the previous chapters aimed at these audiences' skill levels. Finally, there is "Managing Your Career", with more doom-and-gloom about how most Baby Boomers and following generational groups are totally screwed.

Again, if you accept the author's dystopian premises, all this makes perfect sense and fits into a reasonably congruent whole, complete with forms, templates, quizzes, etc. (which are conveniently assembled on an included CD-ROM). He certainly provides a lot of good advice, such as this gem from his "networking" discussion:

... avoid typical networking events that are continually being promoted by amateurs and others with a vested interest in attracting uninformed but well-meaning employment seekers.

... which is about as straight-forward as you can get on the idea of how useful a room full of desperate unemployed people are likely to be for each other!

There are, however, not a few "mixed messages" in the book ... these two snippets stood out (as they were pretty much directly across from each other on facing pages) as an example of this:

Be realistic in your expecations of finding work on the Internet. Richard Bolles ... suggests that the average person has only a 2 percent chance of finding work on the Internet.

The Internet is increasingly becoming the media of choice for companies looking to hire people and for people who are looking for work.

... uh, if it's the "media of choice" that's a pretty sorry state if it's only providing a 2% success rate!

To get a sense of the "tone" of the book, here's how the future the author envisions is presented in the section for kids:

Coming to terms with bad news doesn't come easily to us but it's in our own self-interest to face up to the reality of what is going on in the economy. Like it or not, we must face the fact that for years some governments, a significant portion of industry, and the public have been living beyond their means and now we have to pay the price for that. We've become a society that seems to be incapable of facing up to the harsh reality that good times don't last forever and that going through tough times is a part of the natural cycle of life and the economy. Losing your job or your home or your savings is very hard to deal with but deal with it we must just as our ancestors had to in their time. Nobody knows how long the economic downturn will last or how deep it will be but there are some changes we can make now to get us back on track.

I don't know about you but reading that makes me want to move out to the boonies and stock up on food, fuel, and firearms rather than trying to figure out the best way to, hat-in-hand, look for piecework from whatever companies aren't bankrupt!

I want to reiterate that the practical advice/instructions given in the book are top notch and I've found many things (such as his suggestions for "brochures", which is a "marketing concept" for my own job search which I'd started on, but needed more honing of the concept) which I'm able to apply myself. The caveats being that this is not a "friendly" book and it is ultimately based on a very bleak view of the future.

It appears that, despite being part of the "Early Reviewer" program, How to Find Work in the 21st Century has been around for a bit, as this is noted as being the "fifth edition" (although the initial date in the publishing info seems to only be 2008). If you're a job seeker in "tender" emotional condition, this might not be the best book for you, but if you're looking at going for an alternative career path, outside the "traditional job" this would be a nearly indispensable guidebook for what you need to do to get yourself ready for a nice piece of business in the Thunderdome.

Well, that's the third of three of these ...

2009-12-10T23:34:05Z

So, this is the third of the three George Carlin books I picked up recently. Having read all three (I believe the fourth was posthumous) I'm pretty firmly of the opinion that Carlin is best preserved in video rather than on the page. While his wit and curiosity come through on paper, it's dimmed by the lack of vocal delivery and stagecraft which made his act so impactful. When Will Jesus Bring The Pork Chops? is much like his second book, Napalm & Silly Putty in structure, with longer thematic sections being intermittently broken up by short bits. I'm not much of a "video guy", but the weakness of these collections has made me seriously consider picking up some of his video releases, as there's just enough here to remind one of his genius, but it's like a supermodel in a parka ... the best parts just aren't on display!

Frankly, I had hoped from the title that this was going to be a significant broadside at organized religion, but (while there is this content, but no more so than in his previous books), this was not the case. I still am not sure where the title comes from, if it's a reference from a bit in the book, it certainly snuck past me, and I've not been able to place it in any other context. I would have been much happier with this if the majority of the material ran along the lines of this gem:

These anti-war demonstrators are really unimpressive people. They're against war? How groundbreaking: what a courageous stand. Listen, angry asshole, pick something difficult. Like religion. Why don't you get out on the street and start marching around against religion – something that's really harmful to mankind. War is simply nature's way or doing things; of keeping down the count. Religion is the problem. Get rid of religion and you've done the planet a favor. So how about getting out there next weekend and marching around with a sign that says HO HO HO! RELIGION MUST GO! Come on, protesters, show some balls.

Of course, I like that because it slams both the Left and the Fundies all in one go ... and if the book were all that way, it would be an "instant classic" in my library and high on the list of my favorite books! Considering what a counter-cultural icon he was, it's very amusing to find him poking the "liberal cause" morons with sharp sticks. There was this brief jab that sums up the mental insufficiency of the "do-gooder" dingbats:

A lot of the people who worry about the safety of nuclear plants don't bother using their seat belts.

... obviously pointing out that those sort of people aren't particularly good at math! I assume that it goes without saying that Carlin wasn't coming from the other camp either, but going for a place of free thought that was willing to say that the Emperors (and their lackeys) of both the left and right rarely had any clothes. This snippet is a great example:

I don't like ass kissers, flag wavers or team players. I like people who buck the system. I often warn kids: “Somewhere along the way, someone is going to tell you, 'There is no “I” in team.' What you should tell them is, 'Maybe not. But there is an “I” in independence, individuality and integrity.'”

As was the case with the earlier volumes, When Will Jesus Bring The Pork Chops? is still in print, and so should be available at your local brick-and-mortar book vendor ... Amazon has it a full cover price (!), so if you're looking for a new copy, you might do better in meatspace, however, "like new" copies can be had from the new/used guys for as little as a penny (four bucks with shipping), so that would certainly be my recommendation were you wanting to pick up copy of this!

Better ...

2009-12-06T14:04:10Z

So, as I noted previously, I'm in the midst of reading three of George Carlin's books. I had certain “issues” with his previous one, Brain Droppings, and, in reading this, I'm guessing that many of my complaints about it were also eventually raised by others (perhaps his publisher), as this second book Napalm & Silly Putty is far more “literary” and less “this is my stage show” than its predecessor. There were far fewer places in this where the material felt like it “needed” his timing and mugging to make it work.

One thing that I found surprising was that various bits from the previous book found their way in here. Of course, I'm hitting all three of these books in succession, so am far more likely to notice than the vast majority of folks reading them, and (barring some obsessive-compulsive filing/indexing system to keep track) it's certainly understandable how repeats could sneak in, given there being as many as 8 bits per page in a 250+ page collection. Anyway, these were not all over the place, but there were a half a dozen to a dozen that “jumped off the page” while reading this.

With the change of focus, I felt the book was far more amusing than its predecessor, with many well-constructed “riffs” on various topics … one about “maniacs and crazy people” especially caught my fancy, with this particular chunk seeming worth sharing:

... you can't put them all away. You have to keep some of them around just for the entertainment. Like the guy who tells you the King of Sweden is using his gallbladder as a radio transmitter to send anti-Semitic lesbian meat loaf recipes to Marvin Hamlisch. A guy like that, you want to give him his own radio show.

That's still recognizably Carlin, but less a stage riff and more, a “story”.

The book is also somewhat more systematically organized with blocks of related subject matter pulled together (“Cars And Driving”, “Dog Moments”, etc.), and the one- or two-liners grouped in “Short Takes” sections every 10-20 pages (and differentiated with a slight grey screen in the background). This also makes the book stand more as a “book”.

Like the previous title, I picked this up from the Amazon new/used guys for a penny (plus shipping), but it does still seem to be in print … frankly, I'm amazed that Amazon is charging full cover (and that's above twenty bucks each, the three Carlin books I got would have come in just under $75 if I hadn't gone with the new/used guys!) for these, but I'm sure there are folks out there who really get into this. Don't get me wrong, I'd been a fan of Carlin's, but I'd been a fan of his act, and the books, while bringing the content don't do so with the sell (voice inflection, rubber-faced mugging, etc.) which brought home the absurdities he was commenting on. While Napalm & Silly Putty is better than its predecessor, I'm glad I was able to get it for just four bucks!

What a bummer!

2009-11-23T03:24:36Z

A few weeks back, somebody commenting on one of the posts in my main journal strongly encouraged my reading some George Carlin. Since I've been "coached" to consider the serendipitous for the job search and much associated with it, I decided to take up the suggestion and order in three of Carlin's books. All I can say after reading Brain Droppings is that I'm glad i got them from Amazon's new/used vendors.

As regular readers of this space know, I've been spending a lot of time pumping my brain full of Intention, Positivity, Attraction and other Secret-esqe philosophies. In fact, one book (the classic The Science of Getting Rich, which I'm still quite enthusiastic about) counsels one to "not read any other philosophies" while working towards wealth. Well, this collection of Carlin's musings is just about as "anti" all that as is humanly possible. An earlier edition of myself would have found that quite amusing (heck, there's a section in here, "Rules To Live By", which almost point-for-point goes down the list of things that "the Secret people" focus on, and presents a cynical and extremely negative version of them) in its complete "dark mirroring" of the "fluff bunny" movement. How'd he know? This book came out in 1997, so was penned nearly a decade before Byrne's book (you don't suppose she read this and was inspired to counter it?).

Frankly, I was unprepared for this to be any sort of a "challenging read", expecting to just blow through it and the others in a spare few hours. Instead, it was a grind, and surprisingly unfunny. While Carlin's work is certainly cerebral, picking apart language, looking at unacknowledged aspects of society, etc., I think it loses a lot when distilled down to simple text. Much of the punch to Carlin's humor is in the verbal delivery, and he's most effective when he can "mug along" with the jokes. Without the audio and video, the material here is at best "wry", but frequently giving the impression of "trying too hard" to get to some semblance of a punch line. I probably chuckled 2-3 times over the entire 258-page book (contrast that to the recent Kinky Friedman book which had me LOL'ing every few pages).

The tone here, separate from Carlin's stagecraft, is uniformly bitter, hostile, non-constructively confrontational, fatalistic, and mean-spirited. Reading through the book was akin to having to take a long Greyhound bus ride stuck in a seat next to the most cantankerous, negative, and opinionated person you know. In the introduction to his second book, Carlin notes that this one did better than he'd anticipated. I'm surprised as well ... but it must have been as a new product by a cultural icon rather than on the strength of what's on the page. I used to joke that my poetry collections were written for those "too happy" people out there, Brain Droppings comes across as being intended as a "cure" for those suffering from a surfeit of positivity. Needless to say, I'm very confused as to WHY the person (not a regular commentator in my journal) suggested that I read George Carlin's books ... I'm beginning to suspect that it was intended to sabotage whatever progress I've made "towards the light"!

As one might expect from the above, I am not recommending this, unless one wants to have it for a "historical" or "pop cultural" perspective. If one does feel a need to get a copy, I would recommend not spending the $27.95 that Amazon wants for a new copy, but pick up a "like new" copy for 1¢ (well, $4 with the $3.99 shipping, that's what I paid) from the used vendors!

Would be nice ...

2009-11-08T18:29:16Z

A few weeks back I'd attended a Social Media Club "MeetUp" that featured Mark Victor Hansen and Robert G. Allen. I was pretty excited about this, as these guys are "keynote" caliber speakers, and it was cool to have them in a much smaller room. It soon became clear that the reason that we had them available was that the were out on a whirlwind tour flogging their new book (and offering a heck of a deal on "extra stuff" if you bought a copy that night). Well, when I started looking into the new book's info, it became clear that it was sort of a "Volume 2" to their previous book The One Minute Millionaire: The Enlightened Way to Wealth, so I figured it would make sense for me to get this (via Amazon's used vendors, of course) and read it first.

Now, as regular readers of this space will no doubt recall, I have been out of work for quite a long time, and have been trying to find something that will bring in money. As such, I was well-primed for Hansen & Allen's spiel. However, I think a couple of caveats need to be put forth from the start. This book came out in 2002. The economy in 2002 was apples-to-oranges to the economy of 2009. I, frankly, believe that a lot of what was "sage advice" in 2002 is more of a "recipe for disaster" in 2009, especially in their favored Real Estate pathway ... this is likely why they've come out with the new book! This is, of course, not to say that the book is worthless at this point, I'm sure that the general structure and approach they detail is still quite valid, only that the specifics have changed with the economic times.

The other caveat I have is that this book (and its follow-up) are strangely formatted, which has the potential to derail the information flow. The right hand pages are a "novella" about a young lady encountering a millionaire "master mind" group, becoming the protégé of one of these, and forming her own group to achieve a very difficult task (I will leave the details out for those of you who loathe "spoilers") in a very short period of time ... specifically, needing to come up with a million dollars of cash within three months (starting with nothing). The left hand pages are the "manual", as it were, which gives the reader the basic course in the Hansen/Allen "system". The authors suggest approaching this however you want, reading one first and then the other, or working through them in tandem. I opted for the latter approach, which ended up with a lot of "jumping around" as sections of the story rarely ended on pages facing sections of the manual! Also, the story has (every now and again) what look like foot/endnote superscipts which refer to pages in the manual ... however, this seems to be a bit haphazard, at least in terms of how I went through the book. Back in my publishing days, I did a book that was half&half like this, combining a thriller novella with an NLP training manual, but in that case we did the fiction first and had the manual being essentially a lengthy appendix on how the protagonist had been trained. In the case of The One Minute Millionaire I think the most effective approach would be to read the manual first to get a grounding in the concepts, then read through the story, at which point the various back-references to the manual would make more sense!

Hansen and Allen had set themselves a "goal" of creating a million "Enlightened Millionaires" with their books, courses, seminars, etc., and there is a smattering of their "philosophy" behind this. Again, rather than just put it out here (that would sort of be a "non-fiction spoiler", wouldn't it), I'll just say that it puts the rest of the stuff into a context that keeps bits and pieces that might be seen, on their own, as "heading off into left field" corralled into a largely coherent approach.

The section headings for the "manual" part will give you a sense of how the book goes about its task: Leverage, Mentors, Teams, Networks, Infinite Networks, Skills and Tools, Systems, Real Estate, Business. Again, Real Estate in 2009 ain't what it was in 2002 ... and, their other "wow" approach, The Internet, is far more crowded these days than back then, and a lot of what they suggest as techniques here would face a huge challenge "competing for eyeballs" in the current Web. However, as noted, the "broad strokes" here I believe still hold true, their "Enlightened Millionaire" philosophy is strong, and they do legitimately seem to be trying to drag the willing among us into the "millionaire club".

Of course, due to the caveats above, I can't give this a "wholehearted" recommendation, but I certainly found the book of value, and especially if you're planning on picking up the new book (Cash In A Flash), you'll want to check this out first. As I mentioned, I got this on Amazon via the new/used vendors, and paid three bucks (before shipping) for my copy ... you, however, at the moment have the ability to snag "Like New" copies for as little as a penny, as I see there are several available there for considerably less than I paid. So, if you think that spending four bucks (1¢ + $3.99 s/h) for some primo "visionary business coaching" is worth it to you, I'd say jump on this today.

Quite a good read ...

2009-10-28T19:47:53Z

This is another "dollar store find" that falls into the "how did that get there?" category ... it's scarcely three years old, and is quite an engaging read, yet it's already "remaindered". My best guess is that Timothy Dobbins' Stepping Up: Make Decisions that Matter "fell between the cracks", category-wise, as it was published by the "business" side of Harper-Collins, but it reads much more like a "self-development" book. If this was being marketed to the "business management" sector, I can see why it might have failed to the extent that they'd drop it, which is unfortunate, as this is quite a perceptive and useful book ... too bad they didn't "change gears" and point it at the "newage" market!

The author is an interesting figure in that he started out as an Episcopalian priest (which he still is, on the side) who evolved into a business coach/consultant. These roots are notable throughout, as much of his approach has the "pastoral counseling" vibe, although generally dealing with business-centered situations. He begins the book with a look at how people search for meaning in the face of emptiness, which is a very worthwhile essay in its own right. I especially appreciated how he clarified the roles of spirituality and religion:

Spirituality is about the human spirit and soul; how each of us individually and collectively become conscious of ourselves and our unique roles in the universe. It's an expression of our values and beliefs. Religion, on the other hand, is a particular system of faith and belief with its own set of rules and practices.

... this in a discussion of how spirituality "belongs not only in places of worship, but in the workplace ... (being) central to our full humanity". This is a well focused point, and one that is egregiously lacking in our culture as a whole (although there are far too many people desiring to bring their religious biases into the workplace). His concept of "stepping up" is doing the "right thing" as far as our personal (spiritual) authenticity is concerned, and the book is an examination of why, most of the time, people opt for other strategies.

Dobbins defines these other strategies as: "Standing Still", "Stepping Aside", "Stepping Back", and "Stepping on Someone Else", each getting its own chapter filled with stories of people he's encountered and how they manifested these, contrasted with those who actually "stepped up". Here are the "thumbnail" definitions for these:

Standing Still: Standing still is the default option for almost all of us. To stand still is to let something happen without taking any action. Things might work out, or they might not, but in either case your action is inaction.

Stepping Aside: If standing still is ignoring your responsibility, stepping aside can be an abdication. It's taking yourself out of the game, giving up, waving a white flag, and telling someone else to take your place.

Stepping Back: We step back to block others from moving forward. Often workplace stepping back takes place in team or group projects. Consciously or unconsciously you block the team or group from moving in a direction that may not meet your own needs.

Stepping on Someone Else: Business is almost always portrayed as a zero-sum game ... (but) I don't believe it's true of most of the interactions between individuals ... just because your company's goal is to take market share away from your competitors, that doesn't mean your personal goal needs to be to take responsibilities and power away from your coworkers.

And, finally, Stepping Up: ... (W)e almost always know what the right thing to do is in any given situation ... the answer is almost always there, somewhere inside ... in most situations we have a general sense of what should be done, or what needs to be done ... if you give yourself a chance, you'll know what you need to do to step up.

The author takes on each of these, with examples both from his own immediate surroundings (and actions), and those more "generally" presented (although he does indicate that the stories all represent actual situations). While nothing here is particularly "earth shattering", it does give plenty of places to consider one's own behavior, and how to manage these various "strategies" when they are manifesting around one in the work environment (and, of course, elsewhere).

Again, I was happy to have encountered Stepping Up, and would recommend it to anybody. The tone, for me, was "just right" between not being "preachy" and not being "consultant-y", and the structure of the information made for very effective delivery. As noted, this seems to be only available in the "aftermarket", so if you can't find it at your local dollar store, you can snag copies from the Amazon new/used vendors of "like new" books for as little as 1¢ (plus, of course, the $3.99 shipping). It's a very useful little volume, and I do hope the author manages to find a new publisher for it, as it really doesn't deserve its present fate!

Well ...

2009-10-28T07:42:03Z

As anyone who regularly follows this space will tell you, I don't have exactly "popular" reading habits, and somewhere around half the time over on LibraryThing, I'll be the only person reviewing a particular book, and one of only a handful having a copy. Needless to say, in the case of Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner's Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, this is not the case (with over 12,000 copies logged in there, it's the 70th "most popular book", and it's been reviewed nearly 250 times). While this doesn't "cross the line" over into Fiction (for the past several years I have read only non-fiction), it has that "well, what do you say about a book that so many people have already read?" vibe about it, which I find oddly unsettling when looking at doing a review. On top of that, a follow-up edition ("Superfreakonomics" ... insert your own Rick James reference here) just came out, so there's buzz about on the subject, making my adding to the verbiage seem somewhat superfluous.

I ended up reading Freakonomics by a bit more direct route than is typical of my recent acquisitions ... at the open session of this summer's Ad:Tech conference here in Chicago, the noted "chief innovation officer" for the Publicis Group, Rishad Tobaccowala, strongly recommended that if one hadn't read the book, one should make a point of doing so. In my recent job search, I have become quite "coachable" when it comes to suggestions from the leading lights in the fields where I'd like to be working, so I promptly put in an order with Amazon for a copy.

For those of you not familiar with the book, it is a collaboration of a noted economist, Levitt, and a former NY Times editor, Dubner. The book arose from Levitt's application of economic theory to various societal issues, with frequently unsettling results (the "central idea" of the book is rendered: "if morality represents how people would like to world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work"). This starts out fairly straight-forwardly, with an analysis that helped filter out "cheating" teachers in the Chicago Public School system, and then mirroring this with a look at how Japanese Sumo wrestling appears to be "fixed". The book would have been a much dryer read, however, if it had stayed in a strictly numerical zone like that, but it soon shifts into a more general range, looking at how the Ku Klux Klan was battled by opponents who focused on airing its secrets, and how, without the aura of those secrets, the organization lost much of its appeal, and comparing this with the reality of real estate agents using their "secrets" to frequently make deals that are not in the full interest of their clients.

The middle sections of the book are the most controversial, first looking at inner-city drug dealing as a business, which the authors end up considering not much different, structurally, than a fast-food chain, or other highly stratified corporate entity, as a way of answering the question "why do drug dealers still live with their moms?" (short answer: the average gang member typically clears less than minimum wage while the "obscene profits" concentrate at the top of the organization). Most notable, of course, is the section on why, contrary to all forecasts in the 80's and 90's, did crime suddenly drop. The analysis here points not to "new policing strategies", not to the economic boom of the era, but to the effects of Roe vs. Wade ... that substantial chunks of what would have been a whole generation of criminals were aborted in the inner cities, and rather than "coming of age" as a predicted wave of street thugs, appeared as a major gap in the numbers. Needless to say, this was a horrific concept to both the Religious Right and the Lenient Left, and gave the authors their biggest notoriety.

The last sections deal primarily with parenting, with many "counter-intuitive" revelations about what is and what isn't important in raising kids, at least as the numbers indicate. I must admit that I had some firmly-held opinions challenged here regarding the value of certain things we worked hard to put in place for our kids. This then moves back into controversial areas with a look at naming patterns, and how black kids end up with names which are likely to stigmatize them (in terms of moving into mainstream society), as well as to long-term patterns of name use.

What I believe that Mr. Tobaccowala was getting at in so strongly recommending this book is to be in a place where one questions "the conventional wisdom" and looks beyond the surface appearances of societal features. Certainly (despite "the numbers" presented here), much in Freakonomics can be taken with a grain of salt, but it is something of a light being shone into areas not specifically considered previously.

As one might expect, this is widely available, and would no doubt be in stock at your local brick-and-mortar book vendor; however, Amazon has it at almost half (42% discount) off of cover, which is quite a deal (and on a par with the available used copies), so that's likely your best bet, if this is something that you've "been meaning to get around to reading".

Pentagrams and Golden Sections again ...

2009-10-25T02:06:16Z

I know what regular readers of this space are going to say: “Brendan, why do you keep reading those books if you never really 'get' them?” Point taken. Of course, I'm a sucker for a “good deal” and I found Nicholas R. Mann's The Sacred Geometry of Washington D.C.: The Integrity And Power of the Original Design on a 75%-off clearance table at B&N a couple of months ago, and it looked interesting, was only two bucks, and so I picked it up.

Frankly, I was expecting this to be far more “woo-woo” that it was, following in the footsteps of the Dan Brown fellow-travelers (like several titles that have appeared here previously). On one hand, I was relieved to find that this was not really the case, however, on the other, when the author starts doing Henry Lincoln style “sacred geometry” tracing (see the doozy copied here) of complex patterns over maps, it really does help having some mystery, conspiracy, or Big Secrets to entice the reader to play along.

In this case, Mann runs the narrative closer to a history, with side-trips into philosophy (and not in the “mystery” zone), focusing on Major Pierre Charles L'Enfant, the French associate of George Washington who had been tasked with designing the new capitol city. There is a recurring question as to whether the Masons were involved (or, I suppose, to what extent Masonic philosophy was involved, being that Washington and many of the other leading lights of the day were very visible high-ranking Masons), but it's not about that.

The book looks at various influences “in play” at the time, from myths and legends current regarding the Native American tribes that had been in the area, to the emerging mythos of the U.S., and old-form European traditions. L'Enfant was from French aristocracy, his family being artists associated with the royal house (he'd even grown up at Versailles, the design of which seemed to have a not-inconsequential effect on his plans for DC), providing him with both a solid knowledge of European artistic and architectural systems, but also a less-than-democratic attitude (he seemed to regard Washington as his “royal patron”) which eventually ran him afoul of Jefferson and other elements in the social weave of the day.

The downside of not having much of “a mystery” involved is that the book is, frankly, more boring that something that's purporting to lead up to a “big secret” (as disappointing as some of those sorts of books may end up). The author spends a substantial part of the text trying to re-create the “plan” that laid behind the eventual lay-out of Washington DC, talking about “golden section” relationships, “vesica piscis” orientations, phis, pis, and lots and lots of pentagrams (and a good part of it trying to explain why things didn't lay out “exactly” to these geometries). As I've noted before, I'd be far more impressed in one of these situations if five substantial geographic locations (buildings, monuments, squares, etc.) precisely showed up on the five points of a pentagram, but somehow it's always 3-4 points “suggesting” an alignment, but no solid proof for the entire form. Admittedly, the alignments in DC do appear to be very clearly aligned to these sorts of geometries, but the whole still suffers from “woulda coulda shoulda” assumptions of “intent”.

One thing I found somewhat surprising (and, obviously, not in a good way) was how many blatant typos found their way onto the printed page here … there were several instances where a “1790's” date was rendered a “1970's” date (!) and other places where subordinate clauses were pointlessly repeated (indicating a cut-and-paste that hadn't been cleaned up). Having been an editor and a publisher, this sort of thing makes me wonder how much attention was given this project!

SPOILER ALERT! (for those folks on LibraryThing.com who are always whining about reviews that “spoil” the read) … in the final analysis, Mann feels that L'Enfant's design was very much his own creation, based on his background in the arts and architecture of Europe, and the mathematics that are implicit in the design of the city are more “classical” than the “mystical” systems that would have likely been expressed had the plan been “Masonic” (he contrasts this with the Washington Monument, which has geometries of a far more Masonic sort).

Again The Sacred Geometry of Washington D.C. is an interesting book, and can be appreciated as a history of the efforts of a notable contributor towards the definition of the USA, but almost hampered by the whole “let's draw pentagrams on the map!” aspects. Despite my getting this on "clearance", it's still available from bn.com ... although (as is often the case for B&N published books) only available in the "aftermarket" via Amazon. If you find this sort of geometric symbology fascinating, by all means pick this up; if you're interested in post-revolutionary history, you'll likely find this reasonably engaging; but if you're looking for Deep Dark Secrets worthy of a Nicolas Cage adventure, I think you'll be disappointed in this book ... as always, YMMV, but with a cover price of $7.95 for a hardcover, you won't be out much getting it.

What to say ...

2009-10-17T05:59:14Z

Books like this remind me that there still is a role for publishers in the world of anyone-can-make-one print-on-demand book services. Back when I was running Eschaton Books, I had a few manuscripts come in "typeset" like this (or, actually, much worse, at least this isn't in a dozen different display faces!), with authors attached who were incredulous that you didn't think it looked wonderful (think "MySpace" vs. "LinkedIn").

Anyway, there's a story here. Last week I was giving a presentation to an agency on Second Life, which I'd been up working on for nearly 3 days straight, and following this, I figured I'd give myself some "me time" in a Starbucks in the neighborhood. I was reading the previously-reviewed book, and this odd fellow came by and seemed to want to talk about it. This was Dr. Richard Talsky, who is a guy with a lot of plans and a modus operandi which seems to focus on cornering the unsuspecting in the assorted coffee houses in which he holds court. Now, being that I'm "between jobs" and many of his "plans" involve the sort of skill sets that I am currently not using, I thought "oh, great!" and ended up getting sucked into spending a vast lot of time sitting in assorted Starbucks over the next couple of days (and setting up a whole array of Social Media sites for him). Unfortunately it appears that his main source of income at the moment is selling copies of 50 Ways to Thrive, Putting the Sizzle Back Into Your Life: A New Look at the Possibilities for Human Beings to coffee shop customers, and most of the other plans seem to hinge on finding the right people who can make them magically appear (in full disclosure, I'm very likely going to be re-doing the layout of this book for him, whether he opts to use it or not). I'm still holding out a slight hope that he is able to move forward on some of these, as they could provide quite an interesting source of possible income for me it they did attain some degree of reality (see his site for some details).

As one would guess ... this is a collection of various "methods" and/or approaches to "thriving", some based in familiar newagey territory, some running off into a world primarily occupied by Dr. Talsky. Content-wise (as opposed to the lay-out) it's no worse than many similar books out there, and it certainly looks at some different aspects that are not typically followed. I think it would be greatly improved by re-structuring, as in its current format it doesn't track particularly well, but the content, put in a more accessible form, might be worth what he's asking for it.

Anyway, I've noticed this new concept of "thriving" popping up in various contexts, so Dr. Talsky may be onto something here. His background started in art and advertising before becoming a chiropractor and practicing that for a quarter century. Again, many of his stories beg to be taken with many grains of salt, but he insists that he achieved rather remarkable results applying various of these insights to his business.

Although set up as 50 discreet elements, most of them function as part of a whole, so I'm not going to even try listing them here (they are, however, listed here) ... while some are "common sense" or familiar "attraction/intent" modalities, they seem to work better as a whole than extracted. The current book is brief (under 100 pages) and claustrophobic (the edit I'm going to give it will expand that out a good deal), and has a rather steep $15.00 cover price ... although I got mine "in trade" for buying him a sandwich.

Now, you don't have to start haunting the various Starbucks on the near north side of Chicago to get a copy, the current version was published through Amazon's service, so is available on-line through them. Although one of the "plans" is to get this out into a much wider distribution, I don't believe that it's either in any bookstores, nor available through them at the moment ... although you can also get an earlier version through LuLu. It's an interesting book, but certainly not everybody's "cup of tea".

Archaeological evidence of ...?

2009-10-17T05:04:37Z

This was another dollar store find from a while back. I'd previously read James Tabor's The Jesus Dynasty, and initially thought that this was directly connected to that, but while Tabor's work is referred to here (and both books do appear to be based on the same archaeological discoveries), The Jesus Family Tomb: The Discovery, the Investigation, and the Evidence That Could Change History is off in its own area. This is probably the third book that I've picked up at the dollar store that was the story of putting together a documentary ... must be some sort of trend ... and the authors of this, Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino, have been involved in many documentaries and other film projects (including Titanic, which led to James Cameron doing the Foreword).

For those not familiar with the back-story, in 1980 a tomb was uncovered in the suburbs of Jerusalem in a construction project. This dated to the first century CE, a brief period in time when the "fashion" was using rock-cut tombs for temporary burial, followed by collecting the deceased's bones into an "ossuary" box. The "ossuary age" lasted not much more than a century, not coming into acceptable practice until just prior to New Testament times, and being wiped out (along with Jerusalem) in 70CE. In this "family tomb" there were several ossuaries, with names inscribed on them which matched names in "Jesus' family" including his own.

Now, long-time readers of this space will recall that I am a bit of an "antitheist" and have serious doubts of the veracity of anything Biblical, but this could possibly be the first actual real-live archaeological evidence that the Jesus of the Bible was a historical figure and not just some (ala Allegro) meta-myth. The crux, if you will, of the argument here is in a statistical analysis of the names found in this tomb, along with some DNA analysis. Now, I don't want to give away all the details, but the tomb had appeared to have been sealed for a very long time, and had filled up with a silt that had preserved bits of organic matter. Some very interesting tests were done on these. The main "identifying factor", though, was in the matrix of names.

The book goes into a lot of "guesstimating" here ... the population of Jerusalem at that time, the frequency of the various names in the population, and the juxtaposition of the names as found in the tomb ... put through various mathematical contortions to determine the probability that these particular names would be found in this grouping at that time and not be "the holy family". The final count is something like 600 to 1 that this is, indeed the "family tomb" of those people, including the famed Jesus. Interestingly, one of the ossuaries was inscribed with the name of a Mary who had an additional name, not "Magdalene", but an earlier version "Mariamne" used to note that Mary which shows up in the apocrypha's Acts of Philip. One ossuary, which was charted in situ when the archaeologists opened the tomb, managed to disappear between the site and the museum ... and it would appear that this was the "James Ossuary" which found its way into a somewhat shady collector's hands near the same time. They note that had this name been added to the others, the odds would have improved markedly.

One of the most interesting parts of this whole story is how much this stuff just "swept under the rug" ... needless to say, there are those for whom the bones of a historical Jesus would be a major spanner in the whole "God" thing on the Christian side ... and from the Israeli side of things the whole Judeo-Christian period (the pre-Pauline Christianity, "Church of James" or Ebionites) seems to be an inconvenience. There is even evidence that a Franciscan monk had found (at a site called Dominus Flevit) the ossuary of St. Peter, an embarrassment to the Catholics who have spent centuries digging under the Vatican to find his tomb! None of these groups are particularly enthused about connecting the dots presented by the archaeological evidence, and would just as well have it fade to obscurity.

Despite The Jesus Family Tomb being a "dollar store find" for me, it appears to be still available, at least via Amazon ... however, their new/used guys have "very good" copies for as little as a penny, with "like new" coming in at about 40¢ (plus the $3.99 shipping, of course). I would heartily recommend this book to most, with the one slight caveat that I have some questions about the math (more that I don't quite understand it, rather than I don't "buy it"), and much of the argument that this is what it appears to be hangs on those probability numbers. Again, this is the most convincing archaeology that I've seen pointing to the historical reality of that guy, so even "thumpers" should find this of interest!

A mixed bag ...

2009-10-12T00:32:38Z

Pretty much every year we go to the Newberry Library Book Fair, a neighborhood tradition (nice to have the Newberry in the neighborhood!) that's been running for 25 years now. Recently, we've been just doing Sunday, which is the half-price day, and by then they're pretty picked over. I do seem to get some good finds … this year including Beyond Ego: Transpersonal Dimensions in Psychology, a wide-ranging anthology edited by Roger N. Walsh, M.D., Ph.D, and Frances Vaughan, Ph.D.

I probably picked this up on the strength of the list of 16 contributors noted on the back cover, several of which, Fritjof Capra, Ken Wilber, Stanislav Grof, Charles Tart, Abraham Maslow, Ram Dass, and Jack Kornfield, I was reasonably familiar with. The book is, however, sort of one of those that tries to be two things at once, it is in parts very academic, while in others fairly “popular”, swinging between extremes in the nature of the sections. The cause of this is in the fairly wide reach of the book, which looks at everything from traditional psychology to Eastern meditation practices, and from LSD research into how the “transpersonal” could come to effect fields such as Education and Social Sciences. It's divided into six main sections, “Wider Vision: New Paradigms For Old”, “The Nature of Consciousness”, “Psychological Well-Being: East and West”, “Meditation: Doorway to the Transpersonal”, “Transpersonal Psychotherapy”, and “Ripples of Change: Implications for Other Disciplines”, with 2-8 papers contributing to the discussion in each.

It would appear that, except for the editors' own contributions, the majority of the other pieces were reprinted or excerpted from previous publications. There were some interesting notes, however, which referred to papers within the volume, but that might simply be an editorial decision to point to the material at hand rather than to its source. Needless to say, an accumulation of diverse voices in widely divergent contexts leads to a highly uneven tone, and the “reading experience” was likewise a bit of a rollercoaster, shifting between analytical and experiential tones.

Over-all, this collection is “interesting”, but I suspect that it will be more or less interesting depending on what the reader brings to the table. Here are a couple of samples from the book which illustrate how variable the text gets:

Simple forgetting and lack of threshold response constitutes the subliminal submergent-unconscious. Dynamic or forceful forgetting, however, is repression proper, Freud's great discovery. The repressed submergent-unconscious is that aspect of the ground-unconscious which, upon emerging and picking up the surface structures, is then forcefully repressed or returned to unconsciousness due to an incompatibility with conscious structures.

- - -

The path to freedom is through detachment from your old habits of ego. Slowly you will arrive at a new and more profound integration of your experiences in a more evolved structure of the universe. That is, you will flow beyond the boundaries of your ego until ultimately you merge into the universe. At that point you have gone beyond ego. Until then you must break through old structures, develop broader structures, break through those, and develop still broader structures.

While the over-all book is fascinating, it's not exactly a great read. There is a whole lot of information and perspective in here, so is valuable as something (to echo Truman Capote on writing) "to have read", but it's unlikely to show up on anybody's top-10 favorite books! Beyond Ego is out of print (it came out in 1980) but is still available used. The Amazon guys have it for as little as 14¢ for a "good" copy, and under five bucks for "like new" (with, of course, the $3.99 shipping charge on top of that). If this is something that is in your "intellectual sweet spot", I'd certainly recommend it ... but if various sorts of psychology (traditional, Eastern, meditative, LSD, etc.) doesn't do much for you, I'd say skip it without much regrets. Again, it's got fascinating material in it, but it's a bit of a slog in parts.

Loved it, but a buck was about right ...

2009-10-11T22:29:58Z

I had a good "dollar store day" yesterday, picking up $102.75 worth of books for $5 ... one of which was this little gem. I was surprised that The Wife was unaware of who Kinky Friedman is, as I had been at least peripherally (I've never been drawn to much exposure to country music) aware of him since the 70's. If you're similarly unfamiliar with Kinky, he's a long-time "satirical" country musician (Kinky Friedman & the Texas Jewboys), an author of a couple of dozen mystery novels and various volumes of social commentary, a columnist for Texas Monthly, and recently a (serious) candidate for the Governorship of Texas. He's close with Bill Clinton, George Bush and Jesse Ventura ... and is pretty much a legend in the right circles.

Anyway, Cowboy Logic: The Wit and Wisdom of Kinky Friedman (and Some of His Friends) is a collection of brief aphorisms from the Cowboy perspective, collected over a number of years. Crediting thirty or so friends, from Willie Nelson to Don Imus (who also contributed the dust jacket photo of Friedman), and from "Captain Midnight" to the aforementioned Gov. Ventura, he is probably most indebted to the classic "cowboy humor" illustrations of Ace Reid, several dozen of which appear throughout the book. Only in a rare handful of cases does he identify what bon mot came from which source, but this is explained in this snippet from the introduction:

This book was fun to put together, ought to be fun to read, and hopefully, will be a financial pleasure. It may seem deceptively simple, but I consider it to be one of the greatest literary achievements of my career. This is because is represents a lifetime of stealing other people's lines. That being as it may, I am proud to point out that nothing in this book has been borrowed. Even I would not sink that low.

Now, I'm not much of a laugh-out-loud kind of guy, but this collection had me guffawing and irritating the family by reading them various bits, so I did quite enjoy the half an hour or so it took me to swing through this. Which is my one caveat here: there's not much meat on these papery bones. Sure, Sufi teacher Idries Shah can get away with a 200-page book that's got a 2-page introduction and all otherwise blank pages (for $25) as a "teaching exercise", and avant-garde artist John Cage can be celebrated for 4′33″ ... but somehow the $17.95 coverprice of this seems pretty steep for what is certainly under an hour of reading (albeit highly amusing reading). There are only one or two observations like the following on each page, padded out with the previously noted "cowboy cartoons":

Courtesty is owed. Respect is earned. Love is given.
-
A happy childhood
is the worst possible preparation for life.
-
I believe musicians can run this state better than politicians.
We just won't get a lot done in the mornings.
-
A lot of folks died in the Bible,
but a hell of a lot more died because of it.
-
Man's ability to delude himself is infinite.
-
If you hear a Texan exclaim, "Hey, y'all, watch this!",
stay out of his way. These are likely the last words he will every say.
-
The art of writing fiction
is to sail as dangerously close to the truth as possible
without sinking the ship.
-
Talent is its own reward.
If you have it, don't expect anything else.
-
One good aspect of being mediocre
is that you're always at the top of your game.

Again, this is not to say I didn't very much enjoy the book ... it's just that I suspect that it got into the "dollar store market" because it's a GREAT read for a buck, but would be an inner struggle (unless one was personally interested in supporting Friedman's political campaigns) at cover price.

If you can't find Cowboy Logic at your local dollar emporium (it does seem to have been dumped into the aftermarket, appearing to be officially out-of-print after just over 3 years since its release), it can be had via the Amazon new/used guys for as little as 37¢ used or under $3 new (with, of course, the $3.99 shipping charge added on). I'd say if you stumble over this "out there" for cheap, do pick it up, as it's a fun read, but take into consideration that it's a brief read if your paying much more than I did!

About "what is" ...

2009-10-04T14:21:40Z

I am somewhat bemused that just a day or so back, a reader of my regular journal (from whence these book reviews ultimately emerge) suggested this volume as something that I should read. He was pointing me to an on-line version (that I had, frankly, downloaded and printed out a few months back, being that most books composed a couple of millennia ago are well out of copyright and these days “out there” for the taking), however I had picked up a copy of the Dover Thrift Editions printing of Epictetus' Enchiridion in the meanwhile (I needed another $2.50 to get to Amazon's free shipping level, as usual for these books) ... but one has to figure that the confluence of these various factors may well indicate that this was something advisable to inject into my mental stream at this point!

Epictetus was a Stoic philosopher who was born in the first century C.E., a student of Musonius Rufus, and teacher to Arrianus, who was responsible for collecting together his master's lecture notes into the Enchiridion, or “Manual”, as a distillation of Epictetus' teachings. For those not familiar with the Stoics, here's a bit from the book's introduction on this philosophy:

In the Stoic view, our capacity to be happy is completely dependent on ourselves – how we treat ourselves, how we relate to others, and how we react to events in general. Events are good or bad only in terms of our reaction to them. We must not try to predict or control what happens, but merely to accept events with equanimity.

It would appear from the biographical info that survives about Epictetus that he certainly had a lot of opportunity to practice these approaches, having been born in Phrygia a cripple, he ended up as a youth a slave in Rome, but managed to become a freeman, and be apprenticed to a philosopher of note.

The format here is a large number of relatively small blocks of text, the largest being about a page in length, the smallest, a single line. The Enchiridion proper just takes up 52 of these, with the rest of the book being “fragments” which have footnotes pointing to the opinions of various scholars as to the authenticity or provenance of many of the other 178. This is not a particularly hopeful philosophy, but it is not morbid either. The focus is on “what is” and getting one's perspective in a place where that is sufficient. Here are a few samplings:

Of things some are in our power, and others are not. In our power are opinion, movement toward a thing, desire, aversion (turning from a thing); and in a word, whatever are our own acts: not in our power are the body, property, reputation, offices (magisterial power), and in a word, whatever are not our own acts. ... (E-I)

Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life. (E-VIII)

It is not poverty which produces sorrow, but desire; nor does wealth release from fear, but reason (the power of reasoning). If then you acquire the power of reasoning, you will neither desire wealth nor complain of poverty. (F-XXV)

It is better by assenting to truth to conquer opinion, than by assenting to opinion to be conquered by truth. (F-XXXVIII)

As noted, assorted versions of Epictetus' Enchiridion are available on the web, but I'm not sure if this particular one (with the "fragments") is out there (the ones I looked at didn't have that). Of course, you can get the hard-copy version with both parts from Amazon for a whopping $2.50 ... a perfect add-on for those times when you're just a bit short of the $25 free-shipping level!

Kallisti!

2009-10-04T12:54:18Z

So … a week or so back there was this book fair … and Daughter #1 and I made it there for the last hour, they were pretty much picked over, but I found this little gem (the only one I got). Needless to say, I'd read on-line versions of Principia Discordia before, but I'd never had an actual copy of the book. I see that there are numerous versions of this available out there, but this particular edition is the 1991 one from IllumiNet Press, which I believe contains the original graphics from the various hand-made volumes generated by Kerry Thornley (aka Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst) back in the 1960's.

For those who don't immediately recognize it, the Principia Discordia is the “founding document” of the generally-credited-as-satirical religion of Dicordianism, which worships the Greek Goddess of Discord, Eris. This volume is 1/3rd very interesting introduction (which I'm not sure is in other editions) and 2/3rds the main document. According to the introduction, Thornley and Gregory Hill (aka Malaclypse The Younger, credited as author), “in 1958 or 1959 in a bowling alley in Friendly Hills or maybe Santa Fe Springs, California”, had an experience with Eris, which resulted in Her taking up residence in Thornley's pineal gland, thus generating all this fascinating text.

The edition at hand is (once out of the introduction) quite graphic, in a “pasted-on-a-lamppost broadsheet by unstable persons” kind of way, with each of the “canonical” 75 pages numbered with a numbering stamp (as 00075, etc) and generally tarted up with assorted random rubberstamps and purloined clipart. The official title is “Principia Discordia, or How I Found Goddess and What I Did To Her When I Found Her – Wherein is Explained Absolutely Everything Worth Knowing About Absolutely Anything”, this being “The Magnum Opiate” of Malaclypse the Younger. The text meanders through various conspiracies, cosmologies, psychologies, and assorted theories about, well, absolutely anything, spinning out a strange (if somewhat incoherent) web of all things Erisian. The most familiar element here may be the symbol, “The Sacred Chao” which is a Yin-Yang symbol on its side with Eris' golden apple (inscribed with “Kallisti”) on one side and a pentagon (symbolizing order) on the other, expressing how order breeds chaos and out of chaos … well, there are theories.

For something so odd, Discordianism has had quite an effect in the culture. It claims The Church of Sub-Genius (of Bob Dobbs fame) as a sister religion, with Discordianism providing credentials as a “Pope” and Sub-Genius providing credentials as a “Tsar”, with other obvious similarities. Because the Bavarian Illuminati “are totally infiltrated” into the Discordian ranks, Thornley also claims the cult of Eris to have been the inspiration for Wilson & Shea's Illuminatus Trilogy, and subsequent memetic ripples through the cultural unconsciousness. Of course Discordianism had its own inspirations, such as the strange figure of Emperor Norton, whose exploits get a certain amount of attention in the book (perhaps as a figure of "Discordian governance"?), but it would be impolite to the Goddess to imply that all this material did not emanate from her specific beneficence.

As noted, this copy of the Principia Discordia is a long-gone and out-of-print edition (although copies are available via Amazon's new/used vendors, some with ridiculously high price tags), but other, more recent, versions do seem to be available, although if you're looking for the 60's graphics, it appears that you're going to have to go with used. On-line versions (such as http://www.principiadiscordia.com/) are similar, but most seem to have been re-set in computer faces (or to HTML text), and so have lost a good deal of the retro charm.

Willing to try ...

2009-09-20T02:37:13Z

I got this as a “throw-in” to get an Amazon order over $25 and into the free shipping zone … little did I know how remarkable I'd find it. Originally written by Wallace D. Wattles in 1909, The New Science of Getting Rich was one of the books that inspired Rhonda Byrne to develop The Secret and so spark the current “intention” industry. The version here (the dust jacket inserts a “new” in the title, although it doesn't appear anywhere else in the book) is from 2007 and is “edited” by Ruth L. Miller. I'm assuming (there is virtually no introductory or contextifying material aside from what's on the dust jacket) that this contribution was re-writing the book for the first section. You see, this version of The Science of Getting Rich features the text twice ... first in a “modernized” version, then in its original form.

Frankly, there isn't a whole lot of difference between the two … reading the latter, original, version I expected to see a substantially different work, but this is hardly the case. Sure, “steel barons” and “plutocrats” are replaced with the likes of Fund Managers, etc., and some of the “technological” references (railroads, radio, etc.) are updated, but over-all the text is so similar that had the fact of one being updated with current cultural material not been pointed out, it could well have passed barely noticed. The most telling difference is that in the “new” version, each chapter has a summary specific to it … which, I fear, was likely necessitated by the decline in educational preparedness in the century separating the two renditions! Of course, this does indicate that the book is rather short … about 100 pages for each version … but it also provides an impetus to re-read the text immediately, something that I, in my obsessive literary voraciousness, would be somewhat unlikely to do. However, this book might very well have caused me to re-read it (the author encourages one to just read this book until one's goals are attained), because it is rather extraordinary.

As regular followers of this space have no doubt observed, I have read a great deal of assorted metaphysical material from a wide array of traditions and sources, and have, over the past few years, added in quite a bit of the “intention/attraction” genre. As I read through this I was amazed to find close parallels to teachings originating in contexts as varied as Q'ero Shamanic practices, theories such as Sheldrake's “morphogenetic” fields, assorted cosmological models of advanced physics, and numerous pantheistic religious forms.

It could be argued that this is a “pantheistic” screed, as the core element to the underlying theory is that there is a “Formless Living Substance” which underlies and provides the material for the Universe, and that this substance is intelligent and manifests as “a great Living Presence, always moving inherently towards more life and fuller functioning”. This is pretty much the only premise that one need accept to find the “science” of the book plausible, and even convincing (although there are some functional corollaries regarding formation of materials, such as gold, which I suspect need to be framed as coming from a more naïve scientific age).

Wattles walks the reader through various scenarios, and coaches for behaviors/mindsets which exhibit “a Certain Way” to approach things. In the original there is a “credo” built up section by section which is then repeated several times. To understand the book, this is key, so rather than discussing how he arrives at this, I'll simply present it here:

There is a thinking stuff from which all things are made and which, in its original state, permeates, penetrates, and fills the interspaces of the universe.

A thought, in this substance, produces the thing that is imaged by the thought.

Man can form things in his thought and, by impressing his thought upon formless substance, can cause the thing he thinks about to be created.

In order to do this, man must pass from the competitive to the creative mind; he must form a clear mental picture of the things he wants and do, with faith and purpose, all that can be done each day, doing each separate thing in an efficient manner.

And, of course, the Universe is constantly attempting to produce abundance, like vines covering every surface they can for further growth, so being rich, being able (to borrow an ad line from the U.S. Army) to be all that you can be (physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually) is the ultimate goal for the human being.

Needless to say, on its surface, this is hardly an onerous course of action in the pursuit of wealth, although the mental focus involved is quite a challenge. One has to reverse multitudinous “habitual patterns” of thought and behavior, always focusing on the idea that the Universe is busy manifesting the things that one wants. This dovetails well with Ekhart Tolle's “now” work, as following Tolle's approach it is easier to duck past some of the emotional stressors. It's also useful to keep in mind some of the amazing research that Lynn McTaggert has reported on which show the interplay of the mind and intention with real-world results.

Perhaps this synchs better with me than many of the other intention books because there are so many “threads” from my reading involved, but I am quite enthusiastic about The New Science of Getting Rich, and would recommend it to everybody. As noted above, I got this as a "throw-in" as, at the time when I ordered it, Amazon had this for a mere $4.60 per copy, but I was disappointed to find (when checking there today) that the the price had jumped up to very near cover (disabusing me of plans of ordering several copies this evening to hand out to friends & family). The book is very reasonably priced, however ($11.95 cover), and the new/used guys have "new" copies priced (even with shipping) at less than half of that, and you may be able to find deals on this (it does appear to be a "cut out" at this point) in your local brick-and-mortar book vendor. Again, this is pretty much the best "intention" book that I've encountered, so suggest you grab a copy!

Quite a treat ...

2009-09-13T00:11:33Z

I was amazed to find that Faubion Bowers' The Classic Tradition of Haiku was such a recent (1996) book. So many of the Dover Thrift Editions are re-prints of books long out of copyright, and I had assumed when ordering it that this would be some 19th Century exploartion of this Japanese poetic style. I have a deep admiration and appreciation of Dover's commitment to producing this very inexpensive line of books, and am particularly so in the case of a book newly produced for the "Thrift" (the cover price of this being a mere $3) edition.

I was also not expecting much in terms of "instruction" from this volume, figuring that it would simply be a collection of assorted Haiku, perhaps with some basic chronological identifiers, but not much more than the translated poems. I was very pleased to find that Bowers' book goes far beyond that. The book is arranged chronologically, featuring 48 poets whose works span from 1488 to as late as 1902. Each has a brief biographical notation in a footnote, as well as years of birth and death. Every page (having 2-4 Haiku) features clarifying footnotes as well, putting various imagry and forms in context for the reader.

For those unfamiliar with the format of Haiku, it is typically a 3-line poem having 5, 7, and 5 syllables per line, although a variant has a 2-line coda following. One of the stylistic standards of the form is to have some connection with nature and some word involved that relates to the seasons (which is apparantly a linguistic feature in Japanese much the way "gender" attributions make the Romance languages so confusing to native English speakers). Another attractive feature of this anthology is that each poem is presented in transliterated Japanese, so that one can get a sense of how they actually sound. In fact, most of the translaters here have gone for "sense" rather than "format", so few (if any) of the English versions maintain the 5-7-5 structure.

Speaking of translators, the work of 45 experts is included here, ranging from the Editor's own contributions to those of Allen Ginsburg, with about 3/4 of the translations being culled from other works, and 1/4 apparently done specifically for this volume. Additionally, some of the more famous Haiku are presented with 2-3 versions by different hands.

Here are a few examples:

Matsuo Bashō - (1644-1694)
shirageshi ni / hane mogu chō no / katami kana
For the white poppy
the butterfly breaks off its wing
as a keepsake
tr: Makoto Ueda

Mukai Kyorai - (1651-1704)
hototogisu / naku ya hibari no / jūmonji
The cuckoo sings
at right angles
to the lark
tr: Burton Watson

Kaga no Chiyo - (1703-1775)
wakakusa ya / kirema kirema ni / mizu no iro
green grass -
between, between the blades
the color of water
tr: Patricia Donegan & Yoshie Ishibashi

Tagami Kikusha-ni - (1753-1826)
tama ni ge ni / mokutō ya tada / michi no tsuki
In spirit and in truth
silent prayer ... just
the moon on the road
tr: William J. Higginson

Masaoka Shiki - (1867-1902)
ki o tsumite / yo no ake yasuki / komado kana
the tree cut,
dawn breaks early
at my little window
tr: Janine Beichman

Although brief, this little book is both beautiful and informative, from the editor's introductory essay through the multitudinous notes. I particularly enjoyed exercising my “menu Japanese” to read the poems out loud before reading the translations, as this gave at least a vague approximation of how these originally were meant to be.

This is in print, but (as is the case frequently with the Dover Thrift Editions) you are unlikely to find them at your local brick&mortar book vendor, as there's little room for a profitable mark-up. Once again, however, this is an ideal “throw in” for an Amazon order, to bump something up to the promised land of free shipping. Highly recommended!

Help for the job hunt ...

2009-09-11T21:23:36Z

I have had the pleasure of making Conor Cunneen's acquaintance over the past few years, although I would have preferred the situations being different than my having been in repeated job searches. A few years back I'd reviewed his Why Ireland Never Invaded America, and the current book, SHEIFGAB the World: 8 Building Blocks to Successful Job Transition is something of a follow-up to that, featuring the same main character, the Irish business consultant Finbarr Kozlowski (the surname arising from his grandmother having "married a Scotsman" ... don't ask).

Finbarr claims that "SHEIFGAB" is an Irish word for "Do It" or "Make It Happen" (eventually admitting that it's only an Irish word in that it's a word made up by an Irishman), but it's actually the acronym created by the 8 "building blocks" of Cunneen's system:

Structure
Help
Environment
Improve
Family
Goals
Attitude
Behavior

Now, I have (unfortunately) been exposed to many job-search speakers over the past decade, and Conor Cunneen presents the most integrated system for dealing with this deeply unsettling life situation. Rather than approach the challenge of "being in transition" from a "details" approach (there's nothing here about how to research job leads, how to tweak your resume, etc.), SHEIFGAB is a "lifestyle" approach that addresses assorted aspects of the job-seeker's new situation.

The book is presented as a series of workshops that Finbarr is giving for a group of "NIGEPs" ... another acronym, this time for Non-Income Generating Employed Person, "banning" (as counter-productive) the term "unemployed", as when one is in the job search one is conducting the Most Important Job, so one is "employed" in that ... with each of the 8 topics being the subject of a session. One of the key messages, which resurfaces frequently through the book, is how common the transition experience is, and how many very successful people had significant "rough spots" on their way to the top. By using the scenario of a workshop with various attending members, Cunneen is able to reflect the assorted component messages off a spectrum of personality types, enabling most readers to identify with specific reactions. Obviously, he's given this presentation to enough groups that he's been able to sort out the most likely stumbling blocks and gives Finbarr approaches for countering these.

SHEIFGAB can really be broken into two parts, SHEIF, which is pretty much focused on the job seeker, and GAB which seems to be a more general approach that Cunneen also presents to other audiences. As one would guess from the list above, the system starts with Structuring one's approach to the job search. Keeping schedules, being on time for networking events, planning out one's time as though one were working at the Job Search, all these are elements without which it's hard to put any sort of organized effort together. Then there's Help, and this isn't just "reaching out" to friends and associates, it's also the job seeker helping others (volunteering, etc.), which provides emotional strength in trying times. Next there's Environment, which is pretty much the one part of the system where I fall down, as Finbarr/Conor suggests a nice tidy work space, and getting out of the house to bookstores, coffee houses, etc. to not "do the same thing in the same way at the same time in the same place" (I, personally, would have to drag a printer with me over to Barnes & Noble, so have not figured out a good way of working that; and my work spaces have always been chaotic!). This is followed by Improve ... this isn't simply the "go learn new skills" sort of advice, but a push for feeding in positive messages (taking out motivational tapes from the library, etc.) as well as working diligently to improve one's interviewing presence. Finally, in this section there's Family, which deals with the reality of having the usually out-of-the-house breadwinner in the house and, well, not winning bread. In this Cunneen presents an interesting concept, that of "taking others' parking spaces", where the job seeker might well be creating a great deal of stress by being around but "not doing anything" in the house (trash, shopping, cleaning, cooking, etc.), or by hogging time on a computer system that others might be used to having at their disposal.

The second part of this starts with Goals, which includes such obscure items as B-HAGs, S-HAGs, and NAGs. I'll leave the first couple of those to you to figure out (hint: the "G" is, not surprisingly, for "goals"), but will let you in on the NAG being a "Networking Accountability Group", which will, when established between one and some of one's NIGEP associates, nag one (in essence, taking the role of a Boss) if one isn't being accountable! This section also deals a lot with other networking strategies, some audacious, some just good ideas. Next there's Attitude, much of which plays off the example of Viktor Frankl, with methods to keep one's head in a productive space. This also parlays into a second "A", of ageism, which gets countered with a lot of Rock Star examples and a list of action points on how to make age relatively irrelevant, with a section on using Social Media (that new-fangled stuff all the kids are into) also tucked in here. Finally, there's Behavior/Brand, where one's behavior helps to establish one's brand (Cunneen's "brand promise" for his speaking biz is "E4 - Energize, Educate, Entertain & Easy to work with") and one's "brand" is what differentiates one in the eyes of potential employers.

Anyway, I highly recommend SHEIFGAB the World to those in transition, or as a gift to present to those you know who are in transition. It's very reasonably priced, and if you order directly from Conor Cunneen's site, Irishman Speaks, he's got a special discount offer "to buy you a Guinness" (or maybe just pick up the shipping). It is available via Amazon as well, although I'm not sure about brick-and-mortar locations at this point (this is so "hot off the presses" that there's an anecdote about Michael Jackson's funeral in it!). Again, having this book is like having Cunneen and his SHEIFGAB system at one's disposal for a week (or more) instead of just a couple of hours, so it is quite the value to anyone "between jobs"!

Some other place ...

2009-09-06T15:03:39Z

I've been a fan of the Baigent/Leigh/Lincoln books for quite a while, although, as various spin-offs and other books have come out, it would appear that the Priory of Zion thing is either the world's most convoluted and well-hidden conspiracy or just smoke being blown to cover other, perhaps more mundane, conspiracies (see this). After a couple of books, the "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" trio broke off into other groupings and projects, but Henry Lincoln (whose vacation read led to the all this verbiage, as noted in "The Holy Place") seems to have stayed relatively close to the subject. He also seems to be the main guy focused on tracing out geometric patterns over the landscape and obsessing on the math involved. We get more of this in The Templars' Secret Island: The Knights, The Priest, and The Treasure, a book co-authored with Danish documentary filmmaker Erling Haagensen, who lives on the title's island.

Most of this book is centered on the Danish island on Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, which appears to have had a long history as a "sacred space" (over a thousand megalithic standing stones are spread around this relatively small island, and these are fairly rare in Scandinavia), and there are fifteen stone churches that date from around 1200ce, including four unusual "round" churches. Lincoln and his associates here spend a great deal of effort trying to chart out relationships between these various constructions, ending up with some extremely complicated geometry.

Now, I'm willing to admit that maybe I just "don't get" the obsession on these lines, angles, and repeated geometries, but it seems to me that the more convoluted the form gets, the more likely it is that somebody is trying to find some line that goes through something! This especially comes to mind when there are convenient omissions of buildings (at least two of the Bornholm churches don't make it into these graphs), and equally convenient inclusions of otherwise unremarkable locations, made special only in being at some point of intersecting lines, or being the center point for some form, or being the apex of an angle (heck, point C/111 here is several miles offshore with no solid object to anchor it!). Again, this may simply be a personal failing on my part (I have had many friends over the years who found this sort of mathematical game riveting), with my inability to work up enthusiasm for these "revelations" arising from my relatively "untutored" state for this sort of number play. Or not.

I will admit (ceding the author the benefit of the doubt on his numbers/measurements, here benefiting by a detailed charting of the island by the Danish government) that some of the "precision" involved is quite striking, assuming that one accepts the base premise that structure one is on this circle, and that structure two is on that line that intersects with something else and that structure three is on a facing of another shape within that circle, etc. Needless to say, I'd be MUCH more impressed if these structures were laid out even in an equilateral triangle, or square on the island, to the level of precision of distance and angle that's being proposed here ... but including one structure on each corner point. That would be something that I could look at and "get"!

One would think, then, that this book would be a profoundly disappointing read when ("spoiler" alert!) one finds that the "treasure" of Bornholm is this geometry/mathematics. Yep, the old "encoding knowledge for the ages in stone" trick. Lincoln argues reasonably convincingly that this is what the whole 10th-12th Century Bornholm thing was about. However, what saves the book (for me, at least) is the bits and pieces of background information regarding the Templars, and the tradition of "Swedish Freemasonry". I was unaware that the Baltic countries such as Estonia had remained strongly Pagan and were "inconvenient" to the Holy Roman Empire as they formed a choke point to trade ... the Templars were called in to aid in a long battle with these tribes. Also, there are threads here that the Templars had a "special relationship" with Swedish/Scandinavian secret groups which resulted in a surviving undercurrent beyond the 1312ce dissolution of the order by Rome. Obviously, the Templars (whose "round" church design is evident here) were very involved in the region, and it is interesting to contemplate how that influence came (as has been rumored in many other books) to shape the Masonic orders. There are also some additional interesting bits regarding the Templar Knights in Jerusalem, and some of the events in Southern France, with the Merovingians, etc., and recent research showing so-far-unexplored "subterranean chambers" existing under many of the discussed structures. Oh, one "geometric" thing of interest here ... Bornholm and Rennes-le-Chateau are "exactly" the same distance from Jerusalem, at an angle which suggests the point of a pentagram.

Anyway ... the version I have of The Templars' Secret Island is the Barnes & Nobel printing, which I got on clearance at the store (so I'm guessing it's out of print), but is still available on their web site. Deeply discounted copies can be found via Amazon's new/used vendors as well. Again, there is enough peripheral stuff in this book to make it well worth reading for somebody with as much of this material in one's library as I have, and I'm sure it would be fascinating to the "math game" inclined, and it's an interesting from a "Scandinavian history" level, but it just wasn't really "my cup of tea" (although I'm looking forward to further reading based on some of that "peripheral stuff"!) at this point ... however, as Dennis Miller would put it, "your mileage may vary"!

Oddly disappointing ...

2009-09-05T11:28:35Z

I've been familiar with Rupert Sheldrake's work for quite a while now, since having been introduced to his concepts of "morphic resonance" twenty years or so ago. I was really looking forward to reading his The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature, expecting it to be filled with the sorts of gripping concepts that fill some of his other books. Unfortunately, this (for me, at least) did not seem to be the case.

Rather than charging off into new directions, the focus of this book seems to be trying to fit in "morphic resonance/fields" within the context of evolutionary science, and, as such, spends most of its time framing elements of the latter, and then over-laying "morphic" elements to explain various particulars. Now, this is not to say that this isn't fascinating in places, but (again, for me) the book really dragged while waiting for "the good parts". Perhaps most interesting here was a look at how genetic sequencing should not have the data depth to be able to achieve what standard gene theory would have it do as far as replicating systems, and proposing a "field of habit" (much like Waddington's "Chreodes") that would guide development along established paths, something along the lines of how Roman carriages' wheel bases (by way of creating defined ruts in well-traveled roads) eventually determined railway gauges, which were a limiting factor in various parts of our space program.

If you're not familiar with Sheldrake's work, he's the "hundredth monkey" guy ... who suggested that once a novel behavior, achievement, or synthesis, has been actualized (in the case of the monkeys, it had to do with washing sand off of fruit, and when a sufficient number of monkeys in one region picked up this habit, it quickly spread to similar monkeys in geographically isolated areas), it becomes easier to repeat (another example is the synthesis of new forms of crystals in the lab, once a crystal has been successfully developed in one place, it becomes vastly easier to create elsewhere). Sheldrake popularized the concept of the "morphic field" which would carry the impression of these "forms" which would then be available to steer further similar situations towards similar ends. Of course, there is no hard evidence of how/where these fields might exist (and Sheldrake admits this), but he has reasonably convincing arguments that they have at least a fair likelihood of being there. For an example of "how this would work", think of the classic grade-school science experiment with a bar magnet, a sheet of paper, and iron filings. We can't see the lines of magnetic force from the magnet, until we sprinkle the filings on the paper above the magnet. Sheldrake would have it that Morphic Fields work similarly to drive behavior and evolution, even if we can't identify the "bar magnet" of their force.

Of course, Morphic Fields could go a long way to explaining the similar development of assorted marsupials related to the placental animals filling extremely similar niches elsewhere, as one example. Sheldrake also spends a lot of time looking at previous philosophical approaches to the issues at hand, and tries to fit in his theories within these contexts as well. Additionally, throughout the book he has suggested experiments that could be performed to test various aspects of the theory, as well as reporting on ones that could suggest its activity. One among these involved taking a well-loved Japanese nursery rhyme, along with two similarly-constructed rhymes, one that made sense, and one that was just random words. The one known to generations of Japanese children was best recalled by the mono-lingual American test subjects 62% half an hour after a session where all three were repeatedly recited (one would expect a 33% rate).

Anyway, I'm sure that other readers would likely find this of more interest than I did. It's got a lot of good stuff in it, but it's aim seems to be putting Sheldrake's theories into certain contexts, and in this effort a whole lot of (to me) less interesting stuff gets covered. The Presence of the Past does appear to still be in print, so you should be able to find it at your local brick-and-mortar book vendor, but Amazon has it at a third off and their new/used vendors have "new" copies for just a few bucks. If you're a "life sciences" fan this would likely be a much better read for you than it was for me!

Great book ...

2009-08-23T13:36:48Z

This is another book that I got through LibraryThing's "Early Reviewer" program ... but it's the first time that I've gotten what is a classic "ARC" (advance review copy), which is for some reason amusing the heck out of me. Usually I've seen pretty much "bookstore ready" copies, but this is obviously an "in progress" project ... so I'm showing you what the book's going to look like and what the copy I got looks like here. There are various quirky things that I'm not used to seeing (all the page numbers on the Contents page are "000", waiting final edits!), but I guess we're not supposed to talk about those sorts of details.

Anyway, Mitch Horowitz' Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation is a great book. I've been very disappointed, generally speaking, with what I've seen from ER program over at LibraryThing (but, as the old saw goes: whaddya want for nuthin'?), and it's very pleasant to have a book come in from them that I'm extremely enthusiastic about. There's a particular type of book which serves as a jumping-off place for a whole spectrum of other reading, and this is one of those ... not only was it chock-full of information that I didn't know, in the course of reading it there were references to a good dozen other books that I'm now wanting to dig into.

The author here is a seasoned veteran of the publishing industry, and is widely known via articles and interview in the new age press, but this is his first book. I actually started reading this with the "about the author" and "acknowledgment" sections, and was wondering just how the book would read when he says "An author stands on the shoulders of his editors." before naming four editors that worked with him on this project (not counting the author himself!), and was pleased to find that this did not noticeably lead to a "written by committee" feel ... although there were a handful of "industry snarks" peppered in the text.

Occult America is pretty much set up as a chronological account (although things do jump around a bit as it goes topic-to-topic), starting with some of the earliest settlers coming over to America in the 1690's and running up through Edgar Cayce. I was somewhat surprised that the book sort of "faded out" at the end, with not much of the '80s, '90s, or current decade's manifestations, but figured that the author was dealing more with "history" and some of the more recent organizations/movements are likely still "in flux" too much to add them to the things covered here. Frankly, the book is less about "the Occult" than it is something of a genealogy of the New Age movement. While Aleister Crowley gets mentioned, he's a peripheral figure (and I don't believe that, other than Regardie, any of his followers ... Parsons, etc. ... even get name-checked), I also don't recall Gurdjieff (or the "4th Way") making it into the book, or popularized Sufism (outside of the fez-wearing crowd), and while there's a reference to Zen, the actual (as opposed to the Theosophical myth) Tibetan Vajrayana flowering here goes unnoticed. The focus of the book is very much on the "mainstream eccentric" (and generally Christian-based) traditions, from the Spiritualists in upstate New York to the likes of B.O.T.A. and AMORC and the various other "mail order" mystical traditions, weaving back and forth into Theosophy, Masonry, etc., often with political connections.

What is amazing is how long a lot of "The Laws of Attraction" / "The Secret" sort of stuff has been kicking around ... I've only recently delved into this particular end of the metaphysical universe, and was surprised to find that it's both been "done" to such a great extent and somewhat discouraged to find that its roots are less than esoteric (unless, of course, this material did appear via some "ascended master's" over-night crayon scribblings!) and more flim-flam than I would have preferred to think.

Again, I found this a riveting read, with bits and pieces of information that I wanted to rush right over to Amazon to check out, and I would certainly recommend it to anybody with an interest in "this sort of thing" (which I, needless to say, have). However, as a reading experience, the caveats above lead to a vague feeling of disappointment. While not asking it to be encyclopedic in its scope, it leaves out quite a lot in what seems to be an effort to focus on individuals (some having only transitory impact) who had influence in this area, and the "fading out" aspect makes it feel "unfinished" (unless, of course, the ARC that I was sent is prior to a final edit that would add material to give the narrative some closure). While I had been "generally aware" of several of the people/movements outlined in Occult America, the overall perception that this material "came out of the 60's" certainly gets eradicated and a far wider context is put in place, however, as noted, this does appear to be more a survey of the roots of the "New Age" movement than the "occult influences on America" that the title would suggest!

As this has not been officially released yet (the on-sale date is 9/15), I don't have any "money saving" suggestions other than that Amazon has pre-orders available at a 34% discount. I've already enthusiastically recommended this to several friends, and despite the points covered above, would encourage anybody interested in the subject to pick this up as a reference and jumping-off point for further research!

Peer amid?

2009-08-09T13:23:18Z

This is another one of those "older books" ... another, in fact, that I picked up at the Newberry Library Book Fair a couple of weekends back. I note that it's "old" (and it's not all that old, having come out in 1974), because I recognize several things in here which are no longer the case due to research in the intervening 35 years, and I understand that there is also more stuff in here which is "dated" that I'm not familiar enough with to comment on.

That being said, The Riddle of the Pyramids is a very interesting book. Written by a physicist, Kurt Mendelssohn (who had studied with Planck, Schrödinger, and Einstein in Germany and ended up in England after fleeing the Nazis), this spends 80% of its length looking at the pyramids of Egypt. The author claims to have somewhat "accidentally" come to writing the book, having made a connection between the dynamics of various landslides (in Wales) with the condition of "the collapsed pyramid" at Meidum. Fascinated by his perception (of the physics involved in the Meidum pyramid's collapse), he goes on to look at the entire period of pyramid construction.

The first half of the book pretty much looks at the construction of pyramids, from Mastabas, to the first "step" pyramids (which were essentially "stacking up" mastaba-type structures) to the evolution of the "true pyramid", and the eventual decline in pyramid building. The Meidum pyramid was built in three phases, a small step pyramid, a larger step pyramid, and eventually what would have been a "true" pyramid ... except that it (according to Mendelssohn) collapsed during construction of the third phase. The author looks at construction techniques, types of internal buttressing, the physics of materials under pressure, and then takes his conclusions from the specifics and expands to more general hypotheses.

One very interesting suggestion he makes is that the Egyptians did not actually know pi, even though the pyramids involve ratios that express that concept. He posits a "rolled cubit" measurement ... where height was determined by a linear measure (a hanging rope), but length was measured using a wheel with a diameter of a Royal Cubit, the tracing of the circumference creating a measure that inherently expressed pi, but all the Egyptian engineers needed to do was create ratios involving both measures. A 4:1 ratio resulted in the "true pyramid" angle of 51° 52', while a 3:1 ratio resulted in 43½°, the angle of the top of the "bent pyramid" and the "red pyramid"! Mendelssohn suggests that construction on the "bent" pyramid was well under way when Meidum collapsed, and that the angle was changed to the lower figure to avoid the same thing happening there. It was only when the ancient Egyptians figured out the material issues (those huge blocks of well-cut stone used at Giza), that they were able to successfully build the taller form.

The realization that there could well have been overlapping construction projects (Meidum and "bent") brings him to looking at the dynastic timelines, and finding that there are, during this particular period (as he was dating the construction by, there certainly is a lot of argument in this area that he simply side-steps), considerably more pyramids than Pharaohs to bury in them, and the construction projects seem to be on-going despite who was wearing the crown. This brings Mendelssohn to considering the logistics of building these monuments. Again, he side-steps the "technical" debate about how, specifically, the pyramids were made and (in true physicist fashion) simply breaks the problem down into how much "work" an individual human can do (in terms of, say, dragging a sled with a large stone on it), how much mass is involved in a given edifice, and figuring how many men over how many days it would take to get the blocks from the quarry and onto the pyramid (and then add on support, oversight, and technical staff estimated to be needed for that number of workers). He ends up with some charts which show how difficult it would be to "gear up" for one of these projects, but how reasonably easy it would be to maintain this on-going use of the population (for about 3 months a year, while the Nile was in flood and there was no agricultural work to be done), shifting resources between construction sites.

This then leads the author to another hypothesis. Looking at the uncertainty of the pyramids being specific burial sites, the on-going nature of the building process, he asks "what were they for", and instead of coming up with some Sitchin-like scenario, he posits the pyramid building phase was a significant cultural shift, creating what we know today as "the state". Rather than having an unorganized web of small village structures, loosely controlled by a "divine" king who happened to have enough of an army to extract tribute and a certain degree of loyalty, there was now a structure which brought all these various minor entities into a common concern, over-seen by a organizational caste, working on a project that spanned many generations. He posits that the end of the "pyramid era" came when the tribal nature of Egyptian society had pretty much been erased by generations of "working for the state" on these huge construction projects ... once the societal goal was achieved, the "tool" for achieving that (building the pyramids) was no longer needed.

The book then takes a bit of a side-trip off to look at Mesoamerican pyramid building, and some general thoughts on how these sorts of huge "public works" projects become the defining elements of "the state". Ultimately he suggests that the "nation-state" which evolved from these various cultures (and has been humanity's primary organizational template for the past 5,000 years or so) has reached "in the nuclear era" (remember this was being written in 1974) a level of unsuitability that needs to be supplanted by a more global model, and asks what could be "our pyramids" that would erase the nation-state the way the Egyptians erased (or substantially supplanted) the village millennia ago. He suggests a unified space program which would focus vast resources over a long period of time on a project that might not have any true utility but could organizationally change the cultural template.

Anyway, The Riddle of the Pyramids is out of print, so if you're interested in checking it out, you'll have to go through the used guys ... "very good" copies can be had for under a buck, and a couple of them have "new" copies for as little as $7.50 (plus shipping, of course). If you've read a lot of archaeology/Egyptology (as I have) this provides a thought-provoking "outside look" at the pyramid era which strips away all the religion (well, the book does deal with the issue, but more on an "organizational" level) and tries to specifically look at the function. Very interesting.

What should I be when I grow up?

2009-08-08T13:53:12Z

As those of you who are following along with my main journal know, I am presently, in the charming euphemism, "between jobs", and am spending the bulk of my time trying to find the "next opportunity" out there (lovely economy for it). So, I have been dusting off some job search books that I had lying around from my last time through the ranks of the painfully unemployed, and Carol Eikleberry's The Career Guide for Creative and Unconventional People is one of these.

As one would deduce from the title, this is a book primarily aimed at "Artistic" folks, as defined by John Holland's theory of personality types. The first part of the book deals with finding one's "Holland code" and defining that. When I first picked up this a couple of years back, that's as far as I'd gotten, and used Eikleberry's rough estimation quiz to determine my code. This time I went off to the government's "O*Net" site which offers all the "official" tools and took both the "Interest Profiler" and inter-related "Work Importance Locator". The former determines your scores in terms of the categories "Realistic", "Investigative", "Artistic", "Social", "Enterprising", and "Conventional", while the latter ranks what you want to get out of work in terms of "Achievement", "Independence", "Recognition", "Working Conditions", "Relationships", and "Support". Eikleberry only deals with the former here, and, while from her quizzes I looked like an "AIR" (Artistic, Investigative, Realistic ... which pretty much leaves you with "Architect"), the O*Net tests put me pretty solidly as just an IA, scoring a 25/30 for "Investigative", 18/30 for "Artistic", with the next highest being just a 3 (and with 2 categories at zero). Now, lest one think that I was running off and getting "external feedback", the author encourages readers to use these services, and has many recommended on her http://creativecareers.com web site as well.

Once the reader has determined their "Holland Code", the book spends a while putting the "Artistic" personality into context, discussing how creativity can be expressed in various areas, discussing historical cases (such as Wallace Stevens and T.S. Elliot who both had "suit" jobs by day but produced significant literature in their free time), and the challenges and opportunities of having this sort of mind-set.

The middle section of the book deals with practicalities of searching out one's career path, from various general options ("run a small business", "teach in your field", etc.) to a whole collection of functional behaviors ("create a career notebook", "develop a relationship with a mentor", "resist perfectionism", "give yourself time", etc.)

The last third of the book is the weakest, however, as it's simply a long list of possible occupations, grouped into the authors' broad "Career Trails" of "Ideas", "Ideas and People", and "Ideas and Thing", which are then subdivided into categories such as "Writers", "Negotiators", "Performers", "Finishers", etc. Each of the hundreds of individual careers briefly sketched out under these is given a 3-letter "Holland Code", but because the list is sorted from the "broad strokes" down, there's no way (short of going through each) to search out one's specific code matches (note: if one does the O*Net instruments, the results in their analysis tools are sorted by code, making it much easier to get a sense of "where one fits").

I was amused to find that nearly everything that I've ever done professionally, and most of the things that I had planned and/or considered doing, were right in my profile categories. Admittedly, this time around, my score being Investigative/Artistic/??? left things a bit open-ended, as the third factor was pretty much not a factor.

Overall, however, The Career Guide for Creative and Unconventional People was a bit of a disappointment from my perspective. This could well be useful for somebody in highschool, wondering what to do with their life, or in college, trying to figure out a career that wouldn't "crush their soul", but there was little in here which spoke to me at my stage of life (unless I was suddenly able to "Get A Grant Or Find A Patron"), as I've already been down many of the roads suggested. I would certainly recommend that anybody picking this up follow the authors suggestions of using some of the other tools presented (such as the resources on the O*Net site), which gives a depth to the assessments not possible with just what's in these pages.

This 3rd Edition of the book is still in print, which will set you back $10-15.00 ... but previous versions are also available through the new/used vendors at Amazon, with "very good" copies going for as little as a penny and "new" copies at just shy of five bucks. Again, this is one of those books where "it depends" on where you are in life to how useful it would be to you. If you're looking at making a major change into an "Artistic" (or, generally "Creative") career path, there might be some very useful things in here for you, but if you've spent a quarter century doing stuff that's already in the book, not so much.

Long, long time ago ...

2009-08-04T21:13:31Z

There was a time, some 30-odd years ago, when I was thinking that I was going to be an Archaeologist. "Stuff happened" and this did not come to pass, but I was fascinated with the dawn of Civilization, and especially with the Indus Valley cities like Mohenjo-Daro. So, I was quite pleased when I found (at the Newberry Library's Book Fair a week or so back) a copy of Sir Mortimer Wheeler's Civilizations of the Indus Valley and Beyond. As it has been quite a while since I specifically dealt with any of this, I'm not sure if the Indus Valley has yielded up more data since this came out (my interest in the area was flowering in the late '70s), but this is a 1972 re-print of the 1966 edition, so there's been nearly a half-century in which significant work could have been produced, and the combination of that time with my own detachment from the subject leaves me in a place where (without doing a bunch of additional research) I really can't say whether Wheeler's material is "current" or long surpassed. However, as I see (thanks Wikipedia!) that archaeological work was halted in the area in 1965 (I suppose that the Pakistanis share the Taliban's hatred of any pre-Islamic cultural artifacts), most of what's in here is what's out there.

This book is quite extensively illustrated (in a mid-60's way), which lets one "armchair travel" to these sites. What is fascinating about the Indus Valley civilization is that it pretty much just appeared about 2,600 BCE with a whole series of cities (one, Harappa has given its name to the culture as "Harappan", but the city itself was the victim of "pragmatic looters", the workers on the railway opted to use the bricks of Harappa as a base for the rails rather than make their own!) along the Indus. These do not appear to have "evolved" in the sense that a city like Paris or London built up from it's smaller predecessors, but arrived fully-grown, with a sophisticated grid system of streets, grain storage facilities, and (most remarkably) an advanced sanitation system of toilets, sewers, and drainage. Needless to say, city planning, advanced engineering, specialized architecture needs to come from somewhere and the lack of evident antecedents to the Indus Valley culture is one of the great mysteries (I had a theory, but it plays more to the writing of John Anthony West than to "standard" archaeology).

The book is, however, only partially about this culture, and it looks at surrounding areas, and then runs the timeline up through the Greek and Persian phases. Wheeler seems to tip-toe around the "Aryan invasion", not being willing to assign specific archaeological finds to this event, but he does note that some rather grisly discoveries (massacred bodies left as they fell) may well be a result of that historical influx, as some of the cities seem to correspond to places mentioned in the (Aryan) Rigveda. There is a bit of a gap between the decline of the Harappan culture (the theory seems to be that there was a seismic event sometime around 1900 BCE which caused significant re-channeling of the rivers and a substantial change in the local climate which led to this downfall) and the arrival of the Aryan tribes, but the fall of the former may well have opened the door for the latter, and residual populations may have still been in the remnants of the great cities by that time.

Remarkably, for a book this old (which is out of print) there are "very good" copies available of Civilizations of the Indus Valley and Beyond via the new/used vendors, for as little as $3.58 (plus shipping). Of course, you might find a copy like I did (on the half-off day at the Newberry), but if you're interested in the subject, this is a very nice, and remarkably readable introduction. As a side note, the copy I got had an "ex libris" stamp in it from a Researcher down at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, which makes me wonder how it ended up at the Book Fair (a lot of their books come from the estates of the recently deceased, and the previous owner, according to the Oriental Institute's web site, seems to be quite extant). Anyway ... if you don't know a lot about Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, and find the subject of interest, you may want to track down a copy of this book!

The other ...

2009-08-03T05:40:24Z

This is the other book by Prakash (although going by his "real name" here) that I got the other day. Every now and again I hit one of these "meditational" books and realize that my reading habits and the book's structure are just going to be in conflict. I plow through books, and some really ought to be read in dribs and drabs. This one, for instance, is comprised of about 140 "lessons" which would likely be best approached by reading one in the morning or at night and rolling it around in one's head for a day before moving on to the next one. Unfortunately, the structure here meant that it was just a "quick read" for me, with many of the subtleties involved in the individual chapters (most a single page or less) no doubt blurring as I sped by.

Kevin Edwards' The Master: Parables For Enlightenment is certainly easier to find than his "Almost Home" book, being on LibraryThing.com, and available (if only via the new/used guys) on Amazon, and one wonders "what the story is" on the different situations on the two books. Like the other, there is a good deal of quality material here, but in a somewhat odd format. This is set up a bit like a collection of wisdom stories from a "Master", although the situations (and gender) of "The Master" keeps changing. While not all the sections specifically conform to it, each is, generally speaking, comprised of a title, a paragraph-long "parable", some brief statement related to the story, and then a quote from some notable source. I don't know why, specifically, but the tone here reminds me of Thich Nhat Hanh's writings. Anyway, here's an excerpt that I (for some reason) found particularly clarifiying:

The Movers

* After making every conceivable effort to move the odd-shaped desk through the doorway, the movers decided to take it apart. Within seconds, they dismantled the desk and carried it through with ease.

As a skilled mover takes apart furniture to
move freely through the doorway, a wise man
dismantles beliefs to pass easily through life.

* * * *

Every time you make sense out of reality,
you bump into something that destroys the sense you made.
Antony De Mello

Now, obviously, this one doesn't have "The Master" figuring into the story line (even as narrator), but this is the way most of these play out, with story-saying-quote being the pattern of most of these. The quotes come mainly (about 1/3rd of them) from The Bible, but the rest range from Hafiz to Eleanor Roosevelt, and from the Buddha to Voltaire.

Again, this would probably prove the most valuable to one if one was taking it nice and slowly and "savoring" the small readings here on a daily basis. Obviously, the form of the structure is intended to give the reader several "angles" on a particular problem, which then allows a certain triangulation on the "truth" involved. As noted in my previous review, this Kevin Edwards "Prakash" fellow seems to have a lot of knowing at his command, but I'm still somewhat questioning what he's specifically about. His writing has a delightful and effortless eclecticism about it, but I do find his "Dominican roots" (his main credential seems to have been from the "Angelicum" in Rome, which turns out to be a "Pontifical University" connected to the Vatican!) somewhat troubling. His "Enter The New" program appears to be based, however, in Vedanta concepts, and he certainly is well versed in various forms of Buddhist thought as well, so I'm suspecting that he's not a "closet inquisitioner" (but, then again, "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!").

While The Master can be found via the "usual channels", your best bet might be via Edward's website, http://iamprakash.com ... which also has more info on his other projects. I always feel somewhat churlish to be pointing readers off to "cheaper" sources of the books I review here when I've been given them by the author, but the Amazon "aftermarket" guys do have new copies of this for a very reasonable price (and Amazon proper does not seem to be specifically carrying it, even though bn.com does have it available). As noted, I wish I had more of a "dossier" on place the author's coming from, but I've been impressed with his vision, and would certainly recommend his books if you're looking for something a bit more meaty than simply "inspirational" in a metaphysical read.