Tag: Religion

FROM BISHOP SPONG TO LIGHTHOUSES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • John Shelby Spong: Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes. Or, as the paperback cover also proclaims, “Freeing Jesus from 2,000 years of misunderstanding.” Here the then-Episcopal Bishop of Newark, New Jersey, advances scholarship that argues the Synoptic gospels and Book of Acts were intended to be read aloud in the synagogue and early church as parallel texts to the day’s Pentateuch (Torah) portion. Rather than being accurate biography or history, then, he contends that they were essentially a midrash voicing something of the intensity of the early “followers of the Way,” theologically but not factually true. Crucial to his rational is an awareness of the major Hebrew holidays of the time, and placing the Christian teachings within them – that is, also within a lunar calendar. Thus, instead of a chronological history of Jesus’ working with the disciples over a three-year period, or more, the Synoptic texts compress their presentation into a one-year framework. In the final sections of the book he deconstructs the Nativity and the Resurrection, as well as many of the teachings attributed to Jesus, yet leaves a strong case that what was being demanded was an experience of the Spirit/Holy Spirit, rather than Jesus.
  • Patricia Lynn Reilly: A God Who Looks Like Me: Discovering a Woman-Affirming Spirituality. Essentially a self-help workbook for women to work through, either individually or in “circles of support,” this 1995 publication is now a generation old and no doubt surpassed by more comprehensive volumes. It does included reference to El Shaddai as “breast” even though it’s often translated in its other meaning, “high places.” She also includes a list of alternative images to use in place of masculine terms, including Womb of Compassion, Nurturer, Seeker of the Lost, Source of All Life, Faithful Mother, Shekhinah, Healer, Sophia, Queen of Heaven, Gathering Mother Hen, and so on. She makes a strong case for the negative outlook on female functions, including birth, as unclean, and curiously the lack of an infant rite equal to circumcision. She also makes a claim for the decreased value of woman as they age. I like her suggestion to record reactions to her exercises using one’s non-dominant hand, and wonder if this might help me get deeper into my own repressed layers.
  • Harold Loukes: Friends and Their Children. This 1958 British publication comes from another era as it attempts to steer a third way between those parents who would insist on a dogmatic training for their children and those who would offer them none. He does follow the cycle through infancy, the first years at school, adolescence, and so on. I wonder if any of it would have helped, back when.
  • Eugene Ehrlich and David H. Scott: Mene, Mene, Tekel: A lively lexicon of words and phrases from the Bible. Despite William Safire’s praises in the New York Times, I find little reason to continue keeping it on my bookshelves, not when I have Strong’s concordance.
  • Jessamyn West: Except for Me and Thee. A charming novel of a Midwestern Quaker couple and their family roughly covering the years 1810-1875. Some of it I would question against the cultural history, but for the most part, I think she gets it right. In some ways, it dovetails in nicely with MFK Fisher’s outsider look at small-town California Friends only decades later.
  • Sarah C. Gleason: Kindly Lights: A History of the Lighthouses of Southern New England. While my focus is on the lighthouses of New Hampshire, Maine, and Cape Cod, this volume goes far beyond its Southern New England catalog. Gleason provides a detailed history of the origins of the American lighthouse system, including a timeless examination of the true costs of a bureaucracy that for too long concentrated on a lowest-bidder mentality.
  • Jared Diamond: Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality. Despite the title, this is a rather pedestrian dynamic based on the need for childcare within the tribe.

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FROM TRUE LEVELLERS TO WHITTIER, CALIFORNIA

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • David Boulton: Gerrard Winstanley and the republic of heaven. This all-too-brief overview of the legendary leader of the True Levellers (Diggers) focuses on his four years of publication, 1648-52, which are coincidentally the early years of Quaker history for which we lack original writings. Boulton makes a compelling case for Winstanley’s early impact on the emerging Quaker movement, his subsequent divergence from it, and an eventual reunion. Tantalizing in its possible reconsideration of the origins of thought and practice in the resulting Society of Friends.
  • Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Cost of Discipleship. An unrelenting, passionate argument first published in 1937 of Christian faith rooted in the Incarnated Word, and giving up all to follow the call of Christ. Seen through the ensuing events of the Nazi regime and World War II, the martyrdom becomes all too inevitable. From our own perches, however, a still startling set of demands emerges, one that often stands in contrast to the Light/Logos faith I see emerging from the same chapter of John.
  • Paul Buckley, ed.: Dear Friend: Letters & Essays of Elias Hicks. These pieces, taken from the last quarter-century of Hicks’ life and ministry, give us the clearest existing insights into his theological perspectives as they led into and through the controversies that now go by his name. To the surprise, no doubt, of many, his writings are thoroughly immersed in Scripture, citations that now demand footnotes, which Buckley provides. Perhaps the one nuance Hicks applies to the traditional Quaker understanding of the Light is his equating it with the Spirit of Truth as well as Reason. Still, he grounds both of these in personal spiritual experience, rather than outward teaching. A welcome addition to our understanding of the evolution of the Society of Friends, pro and con.
  • MFK Fisher: Among Friends. The acclaimed author of food classics grew up among the non-Quaker minority in the Orthodox (Gurneyite) enclave of Whittier, California. In this memoir of a childhood before and during the First World War, she repeatedly touches on the inconspicuous prejudices of the small-town Friends, as well as her own family’s quirky social (and asocial) reactions and adaptations. An insightful counterbalance to other volumes that have examined the matter of living “behind a protective hedge” and the ensuing Quaker cultures that emerged.

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FROM THE CROSS TO CHINESE CHARACTERS, WITH LADY CHATTERLY ALONG THE WAY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Richard John Neuhus: Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus From the Cross. A beautifully designed volume laced with some tender pastoral memories, the line of argument ultimately collapses for me under the weight of the Augustinian tradition and its emphasis on Paul (or more likely pseudo-Paul) rather than Jesus himself. Despite all of the subtle contortions, I don’t see God getting off the hook here.
  • D.H. (David Herbert) Lawrence: Lady Chatterley’s Lover: What a marvelous bit of storytelling! I love the way he’s free to tell, with just enough show to make it compelling. Some marvelous dialect here, too. As for the scandal, he was pushing the envelope of conventionality. All of the anti-social diatribe, however, reminds me too much of Micki. How curious!
  • D.H. Lawrence: Women in Love, Sons and Lovers, Short Stories. A tedium sets in quickly with these, especially as one sees them as studies for the later Chatterley. So much of the dialogue awaits action, which proves tepid when it arrives.
  • Friends General Conference, Religious Education Committee: Opening Doors to Quaker Worship. Some interesting exercises for deepening an understanding of Friends Meeting, some for adults. One to pass along.
  • Walden Bello: Visions of a Warless World. A survey of world religions regarding war, including the dual strands in the Judeo-Christian stream in which God originates as a war deity and is transformed along the way. But I find the broader vision missing – just how, for instance, do we channel the innate aggression in human nature?
  • Ernest Fenolosa, edited by Ezra Pound: The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. What fun to revisit this piece from much earlier in my career!

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FROM GOD TO CINCINNATI

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Karen Armstrong: A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. A stunning a provocative overview. One I will be returning to repeatedly. Its examination of early Islam, especially, opens entirely unexpected perspectives to my awareness. The distinction between the Trinity of Western Christianity and of Orthodoxy is quite helpful in my emerging argument of Logos/Light.
  • G.I. Gurdjieff: Meetings With Remarkable Men; P.D. Ouspensky: The Fourth Way: A Lucid Explanation of the Practical Side of G.I. Gurdjieff’s Teachings. Two that will be leaving my collection. The meetings aren’t all that remarkable – for the most part, mostly travel journeys, actually, or an autobiography – in quite meandering, wordy prose. I could easily come up with nine more remarkable individuals from my own sojourns – and not exclusively male, like his. The Ouspensky turns out to be equally convoluted Q&A accounts of speculation. The wordiness (and vast ego) leave me unmoved.
  • David Meltzer: Hero/Lil and Six. After Armstrong’s explanation of Kabbalah and its growth, I returned to these two poetry collections and find them quite rich and energizing. Hero, however, comes across as more of a villain (and a deadly trickster, at his best) than does Lilith. Some great leaping within the individual works, including (to my surprise) the prose-poems in Six that actually work for me.
  • Robert Lawrence Smith: A Quaker Book of Wisdom: Life Lessons in Simplicity, Service, and Common Sense. A former headmaster of Sidwell Friends School reflects on the lessons he learned growing up in Philadelphia Quaker culture and the ways it played out over the ensuing years.
  • Stephen Mitchell: Parables and Portraits. An enjoyable read of original poems and prose poems based in large part on Biblical figures and their stories as well as others ranging from Manjushri and Huang-po to Vermeer and Freud.
  • Three poetry chapbook competition winners – Carolyn Page, Barn Flight; Linda Lee Harper, Buckeye; and Gary Myers, Lifetime Possessions. Page, a native of Rochester, presents some disturbingly violent insights into Swamp Yankee and then redneck (in North Carolina) life; the poems are essentially flat, prosaic, a single read tells you everything. Harper, with her stories of a childhood in Cincinnati, has a little more edge; still, I’m left wondering how rare my upbringing was, since I’ve found no hints of childhood sexual abuse. The last four poems in Myers’ volume break free from the pack and enter into a dreamlike state – the first pieces, in fact, that have stirred my admiration (how I wish he’d been able to sustain this for the entire book!).

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FROM POETRY WINNERS TO MIRACLES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Poetry book competition winners, mostly. Mary Biddinger, Prairie Fever (Steel Toe); Chuck Carlisle, A Broken Escalator Still Isn’t the Stairs (Concrete Wolf); Mark Conway, Any Holy City (Silverfish); Becky Gould Gibson, Need-Fire (Bright Hill); Michelle Gillett, The Green Cottage (Ledge); Noah Eli Gordon, Acoustic Experience (Pavement Saw); Jason Irwin, Watering the Dead (Pavement Saw); Joshua Kryah, Glean (Nightboat); Rachael Lyon, The Normal Heart and How It Works (White Eagle Coffee Store); Dawn Lundy Martin, Discipline (Nightboat); Rusty Morrison, The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story (Ahsanta); Heather Aimee O’Neill, Memory Future (Gold Line); Simon Ortiz, From Sand Creek (Arizona); Pitt Poetry Series, New and Selected 2012; Liz Robbins, Play Button (Cider Press Review); Jonathan Thirkield, The Waker’s Corridor (Louisiana State); Cider Press Review, Vol. 12; Slipstream, No. 31.  By and large, how dreadful – even meaningless or worse, false – I find these hermetic works of creative writing MFAs, often incestuously selected by associate professors of creative writing or literature. Far from finding anything I might wish I had written, I’m instead left grasping at straws for anything I might even admire – even a single line or stanza seems elusive. On top of it, the pervasive anti-Christian invective in many seems to amplify the shallowness of much of any thought running through these – often, there’s only a vague link to the title. And all of these similes!  Admittedly, many of these are gorgeously produced – their covers, especially. So what I’m keeping, this round: Need-Fire, with its impeccable scholarship of early Christianity in England and its lovely reconstruction of early English verse; Glean, with its lacy evocations. Ortiz remains in a class by himself.
  • Albert Goldbarth: Heaven and Earth. Wonderful collection (poems).
  • Poetry, December 2011-April 2012. Catching up! Some good work by Dan Beachy-Quick, Dick Allen, and Linda Kunhardt (December), varied responses to prayer and faith (“One Whole Voice,” February), Marina Tsvetaeva plus Kabbalah-influenced work (March).
  • American Poetry Review, March-April 2012. No keepers, apart from an essay on metaphor.
  • George Fox: Book of Miracles. A reconstruction of pastoral work by Fox, with extensive introduction looking at the expectation of miracles and providences at the time.
  • Evelyn Underhill: Abba. A close gloss on the Lord’s Prayer and its radical implications.

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FROM SYMBOLS TO MAKING A DIFFERENCE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Mary Douglas: Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. This is one volume that has perplexed and confounded me ever since I picked it up in 1983 in Dupont Circle. Part of my difficulty is in her compression of symbol and ritual, and another part in her use of African tribal anthropology to illustrate some theory. What I take away from this is that there are conventions in any society that enhance or facilitate actions that benefit both the individuals and the collectivity. When the experiences of individuals are paramount, there is little way of expressing them across the collectivity; when the collectivity is paramount, the individual may be crushed. Divide this individual/collectivity plane by another she calls grid/group and you get what I see in the collectivity as the faith community (group) or the totalitarian/bureaucratic regime (grid). Here, in the grid, the empowered individual may be the elite leader who moves people as pawns, while in the group, the individual may be … the mystic? If I interpret her right, groups may form at the fringe of society, while grids instead become the majority or norm. Whew!
  • David Burnie: Light. An Eyewitness Science illustrated book, this one gives me a clearer concept of scientific thought on light itself. Apart from a timeline of discoveries from the time the Quaker movement emerged up to the present, the bits leave me wondering just what I might incorporate into the idea of metaphor … and how.
  • A. Monroe Aurand Jr.: Early Life of the Pennsylvania Germans. Pamphlet.
  • Plain magazine. Nine issues Rachel received on Cushing Street. Lovely periodical that would likely have been better as a blog, if only they weren’t so neo-Luddite! Yes, I remain fond of hot type and all. The Barnesville connection made the issues especially pertinent to me as I reflect on the moves that landed me here.
  • Charles E. Fager: A Man Who Made a Difference: The Life of David H. Scull. This biography of a 20th century Friend made an interesting counterpoint to the Plain strand, although perhaps just as economically distant from the modern mainstream. Scull was able to do much of his far-reaching work within socially conscious organizations because of the freedom his small company gave him, thanks in part to his equally committed business partner. But that road, demonstrated by the cusp of the computer revolution in printing, Scull’s business, has changed everything. What are the alternatives for young Friends today?
  • E.F. Schumacher: Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Like Muddling Toward Frugality (above), this classic is both dated and visionary. The devastation of globalization – on American wages, for starters – and the emergence of the Internet throw many of his strategies into disarray, yet the underpinning arguments of wrong focus and limited resources remain intriguing and relevant.

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FROM THICH NHAT HANH TO AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 6 Comments

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Thich Nhat Hanh: Buddha Mind, Buddha Body and Call Me by My True Name. The first, subtitled “Walking Toward Enlightenment,” lays out classic Buddhist teaching regarding human thought processes – something with interesting parallels to what I’m considering in the Quaker experience – as well as some good passages on seeds that may be applicable to my examination of the metaphor of The Seed. The collected poems, however, strike me as amateurish – first drafts, apparently all from single-day attempts – rather than deeply profound. Both volumes, all the same, treasured gifts.
  • Russell Banks: The Darling. A tale of a Weatherman member who goes underground and then flees to Africa, where she becomes the wife of a Liberian civil minister before getting caught up in the civil wars that bring the tyrant Charles Taylor to power. Masterful plotting, moving across past and present, and a range of meticulous reporting that includes not just politics and history but also ethnology and, especially, chimpanzee survival issues. Having read two Banks’ novels, now, I now move him to my list of favorites. But how many of his 22 or more volumes do I tackle?
  • Augustine of Hippo: City of God. Revisiting this political science course assignment, I am surprised how little I remember of his argument but am also impressed by my previous underlining and comments. Even so, a few of his points remained in my mind, especially the part about faith standing apart from rewards (even though Augustine eventually presses the heavenly rewards argument). His criticism of the pagans is solid and his argument that a society and government failing to uphold justice are no commonwealth at all – that is, are invalid. But he falls into the trap of predestination and despite his claims to the contrary, cannot support his claims we are free to do good. This time around, I see his extensive framing of a theology based on Original Sin of Eve as a faulty, and see no need for so many pages examining faithful and fallen angels, at least in terms of a polity. His statements about serving victorious forces, seeing their victory as God’s providence, and about just war are quite troublesome, while his descriptions of the City of God are logically thin – unsupported claims, essentially. Crucially for me is his error is linking the Word to Jesus alone: “the only begotten Word of God” – this, despite his close examination earlier of the schools of philosophy following from Pythagoras and Plato. I see this, ultimately, as a formulation of Catholic Orthodoxy far more than as any political blueprint.

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DISCOVERING JONATHAN LETHEM AND NICHOLSON BAKER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Looking back, I was surprised to find that somewhere along the line, I’d stopped making entries in my Books Read list. Curiously, this was a period in which I discovered two writers who leaped to the top of my favorite living novelists esteem, Jonathan Lethem and Nicholson Baker, two incredibly versatile writers who (fortunately) cannot be pigeonholed. Since this span of reading includes about a dozen of their volumes (half of them from the public library), I won’t try to summarize the works – they deserve long entries on their own – but I will note that The Everlasting Story of Nory opens with something I’d long argued for fiction: for the first 50 pages, there is seemingly no conflict at play, which somehow heightens the tension all the more. And I love the way Baker can handle a sentence of 250 to 300 words, a rarity in our era. Lethem, meanwhile, can construct a fat novel – and how – with insight, imagination, and flair.

These encounters – joined with Andre Dubus and Russell Banks – came as a relief after a stretch in which I wasn’t finding anybody in the current scene who was moving me the way, say, Kerouac, Kesey, or Vonnegut had back when I was in college. (Or even Brautigan, right after.) What a relief! And maybe, as I would hope, my standards have risen.

This period also includes discovering my most detested contemporary novelist, who will go unnamed. Tossing a string of senselessly murdered bodies in our direction does nothing to raise my sense of humanity. Quite the opposite. And with his professions of religious faith, I find no excuse for such nihilism. Nory, by contrast, delivers on all counts.

I also read Ernest Hebert’s Live Free or Die and Spoonwood, with their requisite New Hampshire perspectives. (His work is anchored in the distinctive Monadnock region of the Granite State.)

Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, with its portrayals of the Plymouth Brethren in England, also led to the father’s marvelous illustrations of tide pool life, something I’m now pursuing every summer.

Kay Davis Coltrane’s Centre Friends: The Legacy of the Meeting on the Hill is a fat, thoroughly illustrated history of the Quaker congregation my Hodgson ancestors helped settle in North Carolina in the 1750s. Wonderful work.

Also, I reread Julian Barnes’ Proust’s Parrot and Proust’s Madame Bovary, and Tuesday’s With Morey.

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FROM MOTHERS IN FLIGHT TO THE GREAT HEREAFTER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 7 Comments

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Rosie Jackson: Mothers Who Leave. Published in 1994, this consideration of British and American mothers attempts to balance the predominant view that mothers who leave their children in a divorce are somehow abnormal, morally deficient, irresponsible, or self-centered. Drawn more from literature and pop culture (especially Hollywood) than from social science research.
  • Dawn Powell: The Wicked Pavilion. World War II-era novel set on a star-crossed romance that keeps returning to a “musty” French restaurant in Manhattan. New Yorker-flavored style, with a good dose of dry humor. Also, her novel, The Golden Spur, set in and around a Greenwich Village tavern.
  • Thomas P. Slaughter: The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of Abolition. Not read closely, but rather as a quick overview. Am not impressed with the author’s interpretation of Quaker faith as such, especially in its origins, but his focus, understanding, and specialty are naturally on Woolman per se.
  • Sarah Dunant:  The Birth of Venus, A historical novel set in Florence at the end of the Medici reign and during the time of the fundamentalist monk Savonarola, at the end of the 1400s. An interesting counterpoint of papal opposition within the Catholic church in Italy a few years before Luther and Calvin to the north. Told from the point of view of a woman who is married off to a homosexual. Wikipedia confirms the prevalence of homosexuality in Florence and the destructiveness of the Bonfire of the Vanities, and explains that the widespread outbreak of pox, otherwise known as the French Pox, was syphilis.
  • Charles Olson: Selected Writings. A revisit to essays and poems, especially those related to Gloucester. Olson’s debt to Pound is quite obvious, though I find little memorable here. Still, a palate-cleanser. Curiously, his MAXIMUS poems are a blend of prose poems and lyrical.
  • The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 2 (1934-1939 (unfinished on my return to the office). Apparently, I read part of this long ago, though I remember nothing. This time, I’m fascinated by her working with Otto Rank and her descriptions of his personality. Of course, much of the masculine/feminine debate is very dated. I would very much like to hear from the other sides of her subjects, since she is so confident in her opinions.
  • Quaker Life, March/April 2009. Wonderful issue focusing on Friends and Their Pastors, including a piece by me.
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald:  The Great Gatsby. An enjoyable read, obvious if one considers the longevity of the work. But also quite flawed, first in overall structure, and second in some erratic shift in point of view: some scenes are elaborately described even though there was no way for the first-person narrator to have knowledge of them, much less detailed dialogue. In the end, I have little interior sense of any of the characters, apart from their gyrations in regard to wealth – including the narrator, and am left with little sympathy for them or their condition. I can understand the initial attraction of the big lavish parties, but that quickly becomes a screen for the underlying vacuity.
  • Henry Miller: Nexus (The Rosy Crucifixion). Not really a novel, this work is more a series of confessions and speculations. The subjects and style are something I once would have perceived as profound and worthy of pursuit, though they now strike me more as pretentious, confused babbling. The Christmas section, however, starting on page 72 is a refreshing alternative to the usual happy-happy sort of holiday memories one is usually served. This, like the Nin, is another example of writers and other artists living in the poverty of a self-proclaimed higher existence of Their Art; in this case, aspiring to The Novel.
  • Vanity Fair, April 2009. Issue devoted to the Vanishing American Dream, hedge fund collapses, Bernie Madoff’s victims, and so on. Not one of the most compelling collections, despite its timeliness.
  • Stack of Columbia Journalism Review issues, 2007-2008. Sherry’s gift to my reading pile … but all the pieces on the changing field and the desperation afloat left no encouragement. In addition, so much simply felt dated, even at a year’s remove.
  • Henry Miller: Tropic of Cancer. Along with Joyce, puts Kerouac in perspective. Alas.
  • Andre Dubus, Finding a Girl in America and Selected Stories. A master.
  • Russell Banks, The Sweet Hereafter. Yes, another master.

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FROM A PAPER DOLL TO BALLS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Robert B. Parker: Paper Doll. By quoting Emerson and placing the scene of the crime “right in Louisburg Square” in Boston’s Beacon Hill, both on Page 2, Parker had my full attention. A delightful read, and fast – despite my usual distaste for genre writing of any kind. A fine tonic after Moore’s laborious scaffolding, especially.
  • James P. Carse: The Religious Case Against Belief. A perplexing argument that belief relates to belief systems that actually inhibit the sense of wonder that is at the heart of religion. He sees religion more as long-term culture, each one filled with varied and evolving responses. In addition, open-ended poetry is at the heart of religion, unlike belief, which has answers even before any question is raised. His discussion on Page 65 leads me to the Forbidden Fruit as the first law. The freedom to violate it leads us to trial-and-error knowledge. Without that opening, we would have a static – rather than dynamic – state of existence. The New Adam, in effect, would be returned to a state of wonder and awe, rather than a confining “belief system.” The full freedom of relationship, in other words, rather than subservience.
  • Michael Ray Taylor: Cave Passages: Roaming the Underground Wilderness. An obvious companion to The Mole People and my Southern Indiana experiences. Makes me realize that no matter how fascinated I am by karst formations perceived from above ground, I have no desire for the cold, clammy, and downright wet – and often claustrophobic, jagged, and muddy – conditions underground.
  • Wilmer A. Cooper: Growing Up Plain: The Journey of a Public Friend. Rooted in places and people I’ve known, this account provides a candid dimension of the difficulties placed upon children growing up in Ohio Wilburite families in the years when the one-room schoolhouses were being closed down. A good counterpoint to the rosier versions told by William Taber. One bonus is in the appendices, which include John Brady’s history and two OYM Disciplines.
  • Stephen D. Edington: The Beat Face of God: The Beat Generation Writers as Spirit Guides. Here a Unitarian minister in Nashua really stretches to make his all-too-shallow case. Not only does he repeat himself, but he seems to be ignorant of many key incidents in the lives of these players. Apart from Snyder and Whalen, and perhaps activists like Ferlinghetti, hedonism could be seen to be the operating principle, rather than religious quest.
  • Lester C. Thurow: The Zero Sum Society. Another critique of conventional economics, this one was first published in 1980, which leaves it in a curious situation. Since it is addressed to a series of political stalemates preventing long-term economic reform, much of his analysis feels dated, especially the concerns about inflation or income security. (These days, we’re looking at the possibility of real deflation and negotiated pay cuts.) On the other hand, the failure to solve these problems back then have led us, in part, into the disastrous situation the Obama Administration is now facing. He sees energy reform as the central problem. Thurow’s argument, of course, is the question of which segment of society will most bear the brunt (and the economic costs) of any change.
  • Richard Adams: Watership Down. The British rabbit novel I was supposed to read my senior year of college. So rabbits talk? And one of their favorite sayings is that a cloud doesn’t like to be alone? Disturbing.
  • Patricia Foster, ed.:  Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul. In contrast to Minding the Light, this collection puts the focus on the corporeal – perhaps quite fitting for someone recovering from surgery! Actually, a remarkable collection. I can’t imagine men writing about our bodies and our varied struggles with them – including issues of being overweight or skinny, illness (especially cancer), or aging.
  • Nanci Kincaid: Balls. A fast-moving 396-page novel from the viewpoint of the women in the shadows of football, especially Dixie, who becomes the wife of Mac, the central coach in the story. Humorous and quite disturbing as it looks at the disintegration of marriage and the male obsession with success.

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