Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts

Saturday, August 29, 2015

American Virgin: Going Down by Steven T Seagle


Rating: WORTHY!

In the collected volume two of this series, and after their wild African adventure, Adam and Cyndi return home. In this story arc, I quit thinking Cass was still alive, and started thinking two other things: that there was something odd about Mel, their mercenary guide, and that Cyndi and Adam were going to end up an item by the end of the series. I was right about one of those two, but it turned out to be a double-blind, so there were two revelations, the second of which didn't make a heck of a lot of sense.

It's in this arc that we learn that Cyndi is even more interesting than she's already proven herself to be. She has a dark past and two sadly stereotypical thugs catch up with her, but fortunately Mel is there to save the day. I have to say that the depiction of these two guys struck me as rather racist and turned me off this volume somewhat. Also it felt like the story tried to hard to be controversial, so I didn't like this volume as well as I liked the first.

The highlight of this volume for me was Adam humping his dead girlfriend's coffin in a scene that could have come straight from Clerks (The Missing Scene), as depicted in a graphic novel I favorably reviewed back in November 2014.

At the funeral, Adam is proposition by a red-headed girl who wants to lose her virginity to him. I don't get what it is with this artist's obsession with red-headed girls in this series. Almost every significant female Adam meets is a red head in the first two volumes, although I admit that they thin-out rather more in later volumes. Shortly after the graveyard encounter, he another one redhead - a news reporter who gives no indication that she's really a biological male, yet Adam somehow picks up on this and incorporates it into a speech he gives later. I didn't get this either. It felt like this particular arc was simply trying extra hard to incorporate every known gender queer permutation just for the sake of it, rather like my idiosyncratic (2AABCGHILOPQSTU) category does!

The story quickly moves to Australia as Mel informs Adam this is where the actual beheader of his fiancée now is. There, they meet Clauda, a lesbian lush, and her brother Deacon, who is gay. Given that they're on the clock for this "mission" it makes no sense that they're dawdling on the beach catching rays except, of course, that it gives the authors a chance to bring in two more gender queer "types". This is and example of what I meant about the story going out of its way.

Adam in increasingly having visions of a naked Cass who seems to be alternately telling him to move on and to remain faithful to her, which makes no sense at all. It makes even less sense for Adam to go "undercover" and a flaming queer, dressed outrageously, in order to make contact with the beheader they seek. Adam is of course photographed leaving the place and the photo makes news headlines. It felt like this ought to have gone somewhere in the next issue, but it never did, so again it felt like it was included for no other reason than to check off one more gender "type" from the list rather than to contribute to or to serve the story.

The first part of Mel's secret is outed: he has a bone to pick with the terrorists over a dead loved one, but this makes the story even less sensible because it begs the question as to why Mel hasn't already dealt with this himself. Why does he need Adam? There was a feeble attempt at an explanation, but it didn't hold water. It relied on Mel needing Adam to track down where these guys were, but all the tracking is done by Mel, so this weak explanation failed.

On the flight home, the plane carrying Adam and Cyndi skis off the runway - for no apparent reason - and drops into a swampy lagoon - hence this arc's title! This is where this arc ends. Despite a lot of issues, I still rate this positively. The artwork was less pleasant than the first volume and the script nowhere near as entertaining, but as part of Adam's sexual education, it did a passable job, so I consider it a worthy read as an integral part of this complete series.


Friday, August 28, 2015

American Virgin: Head by Steven T Seagle


Rating: WORTHY!

How strange to read a novel with the word 'virgin' in the title and discover that, for once, it's not a completely boring waste of my time! American Virgin is a series that looks at sex from the PoV of a Christian virginity pledger named Adam Chamberlain who is the unlikely spawn of two TV evangelists. He has a younger brother Kyle, and a sister Cyndi. How those two got such un-Biblical names is an unexplained mystery. Somewhat less of a mystery is that these two are as far from Kyle as it gets when it comes to liberal attitudes towards drugs (Kyle) and sex (Cyndi).

The entire series, before it was cancelled, follows five story arcs, and is a fast and easy read. The first collected volume is Head, and this is followed by Going Down, Wet, Around the World and finally, Sixty-Nine. I shall be reviewing at least the first four of these.

Kyle is kidnapped and subject to a lap-dance as part of his unexpected Bachelor party, but he escapes before anything untoward happens. Adam is saving himself for Cassandra, another pledger, who is evidently having a hard time refraining judged by his last phone conversation with her. The next he hears of Cass is on the news - she has evidently been kidnapped and beheaded by some rebel tribesmen. Adam loses it and flies to Africa with Cyndi pretty much accidentally in tow, to bring her body back, but all the time he's really looking for some payback. Not a very Christian outlook on life, is it?! Yes, thy have the "eye for an eye" Old Testament rule, but there is also the contradictory "turn the other cheek" New Testament rule, so what gives?! Sanity, probably.

I have to say right up front, that I didn't quite buy the claim that Cass is dead. There is a headless body of a white female, yes, but there's nothing else offered - such as fingerprints or DNA - to certify that this is indeed Cass's body. Admittedly it's not like headless white females commonly show up in Africa, but coupled with her suspicious comments on the phone to Adam earlier, I'm wondering if something else is going on here.

Adam's slow, slippery, seductive slide from his high horse to being an ass is a pleasure to watch. As the hypocrisy of the Biblical texts is highlighted starkly, Adam finds himself in possession of a men's "girlie" magazine, and exposed to an entirely different approach to life as he travels through various nations in Africa in search of the guy who killed his beloved.

I have to say that the number of African breasts on display here seems excessive to me. It makes the continent look like it's sooo last century. OTOH, Swaziland, a highly Christian nation, seems extraordinarily enlightened when it comes to topless women (that's not too be confused with beheaded women, BTW).

I liked this comic because although it went over the top somewhat, it did tell some important truths about the hypocrisy of religion. This is the third graphic novel I've read where Becky Cloonan did the art work (in this case the penciling), and she's batting 666 at this point. The work wasn't brilliant, but it was serviceable and the coloring was a fine job too. Your mileage may differ, but I consider this a worthy read.


Monday, June 29, 2015

Made with Love by Tricia Goyer and Sherri Gore


Title: Made with Love
Author: Tricia Goyer and Sherri Gore (no website found)
Publisher: Harvest House
Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
"she came buy" should be "she came by"p197
"flood ight" should be flood light" p205
"Lovina's lips sealed close" should be something like "Lovina's lips sealed closed" or "sealed shut' or better yet, just "sealed" period! p223
"her mixed emotions were clean on her face" should be "clear on her face" P223
"to tell they world" should be "to tell the world" p232
"so much to learn about each" should be "So much to learn about each other"
"swallowed down her emotion dared to look" arguably, emotion ought to be pluralized, but there definitely needs to be a comma between 'emotion' and 'dared' P243
"It help that your coworker is nice to look at too" should be "It helps..."
"A bolder grew in the pit of her stomach" should be "A boulder grew in the pit of her stomach"
"and would som day weigh them' should be "and would some day weigh them" p252
One recipe is missing a header
One recipe which has a header was missing the actual recipe

This is going to be a long review even by my standards, so brace ourself! This novel came to me as a review copy which isn't going to be released until August, yet the typescript I read was far from ready for prime time. There was a host (definitely not a heavenly host!) of issues with the copy I read. It has multiple spelling and grammatical errors, for one thing. I can see how some of these would slip by an inattentive reader, but any spell-checker would have caught, for example, the use of "flood ight" where it should have been 'flood light".

I don't see any excuse for putting out a review copy that hasn't at least had a 'one-more-time' spell-check run on it. I know that writers and publishers like to put out standard excuses for this - that the text is in flux and shouldn't be quoted, but how hard is it to run a spell check? Of course, that won't catch grammatical errors or real words used in the wrong place, such as "she came buy" where it should have read "she came by".

So the main problem with the technical reading of this particular novel was that it was sometimes hard to tell if something which read like an error to me was actually an error or if it was intentional. There was a lot of 'Amish speak' in the text. By this I don't mean German words tossed in such as 'ja' for 'yes' and 'wunderbar' for 'wonderful', and so on - although the odd thing there is that while 'ja' is used in place of 'Yes', 'nein' isn't used in place of 'No'! I found this strange. No, as far speaking goes for me, "It help to know" should be "It helps to know". The problem was that I couldn't be sure if this was an error or if it was intentional, meant to depict a mode of speech used by the Amish. I included it in my list of errata because I saw so many errors and I was therefore unwilling to give these the benefit of the doubt.

There was the occasional oddball sentence, too, such as this one on page 291: "Lovina cared for him. He knew she did. Now he just needed her to realize that for himself." It's that last sentence which doesn't make sense. Shouldn't he need her to realize that for herself?! But this book is all about male dominance. I can't get with any societal plan which puts half the population in the back seat, as this one does. The women are supposed to be modest and modestly dressed. The women are supposed to have their head covered with this "kapp" of theirs. The women are supposed to have their eyes down-cast and their hearts on marriage. The man is supposed to be the provider and master of the house. I don't subscribe to that, and this book was hard to read because of this kind of thing showing up every few pages.

Those issues aside, this wasn't too bad of a story as it started out, except that it had too much cliché, which surprised me given that this was set in an Amish community. I'm not a believer. I'm a born-again atheist, if you like. Like everyone else, I was an atheist when I was born right up until I got brain-washed by the Christian community, but the washing didn't take, and I became atheistic once again. Yes, I'm a dirty atheist! Everyone goes through that same process, but most of them do not regain their original skepticism and healthy rationality. Most of them adopt the religion into which they were born, without even giving it a thought.

Notwithstanding that background, this story actually sounded interesting to me, which I guess means the blurb did its job. The problem was that it turned out to be just like every other romance story out there! Take out the references to 'God' and the Amish portions of it and it was indistinguishable from scores of other romances. Leave in 'God' and even the Amish portions of it, and it was still indistinguishable from any other Christian romance. This saddened me because had it been your usual Christian romance, I never would have been interested in reading it. It was disappointing to find nothing new, original or different here.

The Amish community is an offshoot of the Mennonites. I've visited the Amana colonies in Iowa which a lot of people think are actually Amish, but in fact they're pietist. There are very many such splinter groups. I read once that there are some twenty thousand Christian sects, which just goes to show what a spectacular failure the Bible was in creating a community of like-minded worshipers!

Some of these splinter groups have a lot in common whilst others do not. I once went on a date with a Mennonite girl because of the very fact that her lifestyle interested me and she was an interesting person, but none of this makes me remotely an expert on this topic, which was why I thought it would be fun to read this. Not that you should take your education from fictional romances by any means, but it's still nice to learn what authors of various persuasions think and feel.

This story can be thought of as a cookbook with a free romance, or as a romance with free recipes. I haven't tried the recipes as of this writing, but some of them are seriously tempting. Bakery, specifically of pies, is at the heart of this story because it's the dream of the main character to open a pie shop. She believes it's her god's will that she open this shop! I'd have to seriously doubt that a creator of a universe, who evidently hasn't put in an appearance for at least two thousand years, really cares one way or the other about whether person A opens a pie shop or joins the circus, or whether team A wins or team B wins, but that's part of the premise here.

In this story, Lovina Miller lives with her Mem and Dat, and her four sisters, all of whom are single, and pretty if not beautiful. More on that score anon. Her dream is to open a pie shop in the little Florida Amish village to which her family has moved. It's amusingly named Pinecraft; amusingly because it sounds so much like Minecraft. Does Minecraft have an Amish mod? I doubt it, but you never know: there's a mod for pretty much everything!

This book is augmented with odds and ends like Lovina's list of things she needed to keep in mind, and Noah's Mem's skillet pear ginger pie, which is funny because someone is stealing pies, and it's probably not Lovina. The pie thefts never are resolved. It's also funny because in another novel I've been reading lately, pies are being stolen from the palace kitchen - by the princesses! Maybe they're stealing from here, too?!

Noah is obviously the guy who will become Lovina's love interest. This novel really isn't the remotest bit subtle. Noah is trying to find work for three boys who remind him of his own troublesome self when he was their age, but their reputation precedes them, and no one wants these boys around their property - except maybe Lovina who, it appears, might have finally managed to get her hands on a property she can turn into a pie shop.

For a book about faith, there was surprisingly little in evidence. For a people who base their lives on a book which dictates, 'judge not, lest ye be judged', there was a disturbing amount of judgment - of Noah and his troublesome teens in particular. Also for a community which follows a book which states, 'take no thought for tomorrow' there was a disturbing amount of capitalism going on! But no one ever made a case for religious belief being rational.

There was what amounts to an undercurrent of what might be very loosely thought of as "racism" or at best, part of that disturbing amount of judgment I mentioned. The Amish community considered all outsiders to be "Englischers", and this term was used often. It felt insulting. Believe it or not, there is actually a romance novel titled "The Amish and the Englischer". Englischer is meant not to describe English people, but anyone who isn't Amish/Mennonite. I know it's probably not intended in the way it felt to me, but it's still a case of "us" and "them" which is cultist, and which seems out of keeping with the purported Christian ideal of loving thy neighbor. It just struck me as odd and unnecessarily divisive.

This "us and them" mentality wasn't only exemplified just in the use of that word, either. At one point, a reporter comes to interview Lovina about her new pie shop. Now this reporter wasn't from the Amish newspaper The Budget but from a newspaper called the Sarasota Sun, but her attitude was weird, and unnecessarily combative.

She said something which I found extraordinarily blinkered and insulting: "It's stories like these our world need to hear. Stories to let people know that not every place is corrupt". Let's for a moment ignore the issue of poor grammar in that last sentence. This sentient strongly suggests that only the Amish (it's a great life in the Amish!) aren't corrupt, and everywhere else is a violent, criminal, low-life society, which is bigoted and insulting. Of course, there are people in the real world who are bigoted, so this in itself wasn't the problem, but was it necessary to put that insult into her speech? At the very least, it could have been worded more gently or less holier-than-thou.

This oddly blinkered view of life popped up throughout this story. For example there was one place where I read that food was a special part of Amish life, but this suggested that it isn't a special part of everyone's life, especially for gatherings, including church functions of other faiths. I found that very short-sighted to intimate that food has a special meaning to the Amish that no one else shares. It was this kind of thing that made me think that he author really needs to get out more - out of her confined community and see some of the world if she really thinks we're as bad as some of this writing suggests.

One of my pet peeves with writing is the obsessive compulsive use of the word 'beautiful' to describe a woman - and only the use of that word, like she has no other worthy qualities than deeper than skin, and this defines her and is her and is all she is or can ever hope to be. I object strongly to this and think it shameful that this is used and accepted in novels. It's especially shameful when used by a female author, and in this case even more so when used by a writer describing a community which is supposedly rooted in modesty and acceptance. I did a search for use of this term as applied to a woman's looks, and here's what I found:

  • Her beautiful face p52
  • A gentle confidence that made her beautiful p55
  • Unlike my beautiful sisters p93
  • Didn't she realize how beautiful she was? P179
  • You look beautiful p228
  • She'd never been told she was beautiful before p228
  • You are beautiful p229
  • Joy had a beautiful face p235
  • A beautiful young Amish woman p252
  • Knowing Noah found her beautiful p328

I think it's a disgrace to classify women like this. Yes, some women are beautiful - but the problem with that is that beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder, so what defines it - well everything and nothing, everyone and no one. I have no problem with someone who is in love thinking their partner is beautiful! That's a given, regardless of how others may view that person, but to routinely describe every young female as beautiful is not only unrealistic, it's insulting to the majority of women who look perfectly fine, but who are not routinely classed as beautiful. And its completely out of place in a novel of this nature.

Personally I think this needs to stop. There's no reason whatsoever to habitually describe women in novels as beautiful unless it has some marked bearing on the story or on what happens in the story, or on what happens to the woman specifically. Otherwise why mention it if not to make every-day, regular woman feel like they're ugly and really ought to try harder to look acceptable - i.e. beautiful?

This is a pogrom perpetrated by the fashion industry, and the make-up conglomerations, and the dietary product industries, all of which are intent upon forcefully declaring that women are useless tubs of ugly lard if they are not willowy, and magnificently beautiful, utterly hairless, and dressed to the tens (the nines is so five minutes ago dahlink). This destructive behavior needs to be starkly highlighted for what it is: an abuse of women, not bought into and supported. This abuse is far more pernicious and destructive than ever pornography could be.

'Pretty' was another issue tied directly to this one: when it wasn't how beautiful they were, it was how pretty they were:

  • Smiled at the pretty dark-haired Amish woman P20
  • How could someone forget such a pretty face P20
  • Lovina was a pretty girl P29
  • The pretty woman who'd been checking out the warehouse P49
  • The pretty woman smiled P54
  • Pretty lashes P54
  • She's pretty P83
  • God had sent someone pretty P84
  • It was as pretty a name as any he'd heard P84
  • More time with that pretty Amish lady P84
  • Not her pretty smile P84
  • The pretty Amish woman P136
  • You are so pretty like your sister P235
  • Lovina's pretty sisters P271

Moving on. One thing I have honestly never understood about these communities is the fact that many of them have hit the pause button on technology, right at the point where they left their original homeland, in Germany, for the most part, and never hit 'play' again, so they don't have electricity, and they drive around in buggies. They eschew car ownership but have no problem traveling in taxis and buses? To me this makes no sense. Why freeze it at that specific point? Not all of them do; some have moved on to electricity, but still perceive technology as evil. If they wish to freeze their technological lives, why not go back to two thousand years ago and adopt Hebrew dress and customs and technology - such as it was then? Why wait almost two thousand years before hitting pause?

No god decided this. It was decided by people like Menno Simons, and Jakob Ammann, and their successors, but they lived four hundred years ago, so why not freeze it at dress and customs of their age? As this story relates, some communities have moved on, but not completely on - so electricity is fine, and cell phones are fine, but digital cameras are not? Phones are cameras these days, so I don't get this distinction either. There is no logic or rationale to these choices! It's entirely arbitrary, yet no one questions it. If they do, they're not forgiven; they're shunned and ostracized! None of this makes sense to me and I was no wiser on this topic after reading this novel, either.

But I digress! The romance isn't all plain sailing, of course. Indeed, I was as surprised as I was disturbed to discover that this romance was exactly the same as all other romances. The couple meet, they don't believe they like each other, but are amazed that they do. At least one of them has a secret. Friends or parents object to the relationship. Somehow, no matter how many weeks they have, there is never time to discuss the secret. The secret is revealed at the end, and everything is happily ever after.

So what did this story have to offer that a gazillion other romances don't have? Quite literally nothing! The Amish setting was interesting, but it really didn't make an ounce of difference to the romance in the same way that God didn't make an ounce of difference to what happened. There were no miracles here, no revelations, no magical presences. It was just a love story and if the Amish part and the references to god were all removed, it would still have been the same love story.

Noah Yoder has a troubled past, yet in the three months in which Lovina and Noah work together on a daily basis to get the pie shop up and running, they seem utterly unable, even once, to find an hour to discuss what his sordid little secret is! I found that utterly unbelievable. When the secret comes out it's not Earth-shattering. What he did was awful, but it wasn't something that hasn't happened to scores upon scores of irresponsible teenagers. No one died. No one was hurt, and Noah worked hard to fix what he did. Case closed. it was really a non event - a non-mystery especially given the spoilers that had gone before.

There's also a huge spoiler when they talk about purchasing the property to turn into a pie shop and then they take out no insurance on it. I'm sorry but faith doesn't cut it. You need insurance, period. It made them look really stupid to make such a big investment without insuring it and it telegraphed loudly what was going to happen later. Worse than this, there are building codes - even the Amish and Mennonites have to adhere to building codes. Where were the fire alarms? Where were the sprinklers? I guess Noah didn't learn anything after all.

It's tempting to say that the worst part about this whole story is the precipitous rush to judgment and their colossal loss of faith, but that isn't it. The worst part is the Disney princess ending which spoiled the whole story for me.

I know that some stories in real life do have fairy-tale endings, but this one was so over the top that it was completely unrealistic. It was arrogant, too, that only people of faith can help each other. I cannot - in good faith! - recommend this novel. The basic premise was good, but this story doesn't get it done. If you want a good story about baking, watch the Will Ferrell - Maggie Gyllenhall movie Stranger than Fiction. That gets it done and is a fun movie.


Monday, June 22, 2015

Living Mindfully by Deborah Schoeberlain David


Title: Living Mindfully
Author: Deborah Schoeberlain David (no website found)
Publisher: Wisdom Publications
Rating: WARTY!

I'm always very wary of books where the author insists upon putting some academic string of letters after their name. Take a look at real books written by such people, and they never do this. Look at books by Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Stephen Jay Gould, Brian Greene, Steven Hawking, Steve Jones, and so on, and not a one of them does this. Not to comment upon this particular author, but just note in general, to beware of authors who do this.

This is the second in a pair of books I'm reviewing from Wisdom publications. The first tried to teach Buddhism in the light of the Star wars movie franchise and failed dismally. The second seemed initially much more practical in that the author is passing on what worked for her, but the questions I had as to whether what she's doing actually achieves anything, and even if it works for her will also work for you and me, remained woefully unanswered at the end.

She certainly seemed to have the right idea about how to dip your toes in the water and work up to full immersion from there. Her advice begins with taking a single breath, which seems innocuous and easy enough. She referred to this as a Mindful Breath and in what seemed to be a pattern here, offered three steps to heaven: breathe in, breathe out, pay attention to taking the breath. This technique is nothing new, and is definitely the approach taken by promoters of meditative breathing techniques, where paying attention to breathing and being focused on the breath as we take it in and exhale it, is always the rule.

Building on this, she added a new step or technique with each new chapter, which rather begged the question as to why we need such a large book for so simple a thing - if indeed it is that simple. The next step we were offered was called the Pause, whereby we focus attention on taking a single full breath, actually take the breath, and then return our focus to the task at hand, which in this case was reading this book. This is supposed to make us realize that out mind has a tendency to wander (as if we didn't know this!), and by consciously being attentive to the wandering, we can return our focus to the task at hand.

Frankly, this has never been a problem for me when I'm reading a book. I am all there all the time, and while my mind does go off at tangents on occasion, it's pretty much always as to how bad the book is or how good it is, or how can I leverage that idea into a story of my own and so on, so my mind is pretty much 100% on the novel 100% of the time. A non-fiction book is a different experience, and maintaining this focus when performing other pastimes, tasks, and chores is not always so easy.

Of course this isn't a guide on how to read books (there's already one out there, believe it or not!). It's about focusing our attention rather than letting our mind run riot as it usually does. This is an odd topic, because our brain is a multi-tasker. Were it not, we would certainly not be able to breathe, keep our heart pumping, drive to work, and keep an eye on the clock so we don't arrive late, as well as remember we have that package to drop into the first mailbox we see on our way.

So the real question here for most people, is not whether or not our mind is all over the place (it is, that's a given if you didn't know it already!), but what exactly the problem is with that, and what's to be gained by disciplining it in the way advocated by adherents of meditation and mindfulness. In this regard, this book fails dismally, because while the author repeatedly advises us as to what she had to gain in her particular circumstances, she failed for the rest of us to tell us anything that this would do except in the most vague and inutile terms imaginable.

One thing I can promise you is of value is good posture. There is an all-too-brief section on this which is related only to meditating, but good posture is vitally (and I use that word advisedly) important in all walks (and sits) of life. This doesn't mean you should start practicing walking around with a book on your head, but you should be aware of what evolution has done to us. The spine never was designed. Had it been, it would have been made from carbon fiber or something, instead of a salt of a brittle metal called calcium, stacked in donuts of rough bone around a delicate and tender central nervous system and padded only by flimsy cartilage!

Worse than that, it evolved for animals moving horizontally, and humans, who typically think they are better than any other living thing, decided to go vertical, which puts stresses on the spine for which it has never evolved. It's no wonder that back pain is such a pain. Your spine has your back, but only as long as you realize that it's operating out of its comfort zone and needs some pampering, especially when we sit and even more especially when we lift something heavy.

The progression towards meditation continues as we're advised that we can count mindfully. Mindful Counting means that we focus attention on counting full breaths as we take seven of them in and out. We observe what our attention is on, and refocus as necessary. After this we pretty much get mindful everything - feeling (parts one and two, no less!), listening, static sensation, stand with attention(!), dynamic sensation, sharing kindness, movement, and on and on. There was a veritable grocery list of mindful things, so much so that trying to keep track of all of them became a distraction from actually doing the thing!

I was intrigued by this author's anecdote about her teacher laughed at her and made an "astounding" point when she complained that her mind seemed to be on its way to greater chaos, not less, as she began practicing these techniques. He advised her that her mind wasn't becoming more chaotic, but that she was now noticing the chaos which already existed. I thought it poor teaching that her yogin or yogini had never thought to address this point during class!

I also felt it showed a marked lack of self-awareness that this student had never before realized how easily distracted and busy her mind actually was. Bad teacher, bad student! Has she never begun a conversation which has meandered through half-a-dozen topics in a very short time and then marveled at how adrift she and her fellow conversational participants were from where they started? It felt to me like the author had been so closed off to herself that what was astounding, startling, and revelatory to her would be nothing of the sort to most people with a modicum of self-awareness.

One thing to bear in mind is that this is a writer who is coming from a background of boredom and depression, and who therefore has a very different perspective than most people who fortunately are not clinically depressed and who hopefully have sufficient stimulation in their lives that they are not readily bored or lacking for something of value to do with their time. I found myself wondering frequently if such an author was indeed the best teacher of this topic, or if perhaps her message might have found more apt and fertile ground had it been sown on a more targeted audience.

When she went to a lama to discuss her depression instead of going to medical professional, I was disappointed. Fortunately this lama wasn't stupid and re-directed her to a qualified medical doctor. If you are depressed more than seems reasonable from everyday living, and especially if you're post-partum or have had a loss, do not seek out a lama! Find a medically qualified doctor who has time for you. If your doctor is doing you no good, find a new one.

Depression is something I am fortunate enough to never have suffered (not in a clinical sense anyway!). Boredom is something with which I am never afflicted because there is always something to do, something to think of, something to find wonder in, especially if you have children, or pets, or if you can get interested in a hobby, in art, in reading, in sports, in TV or movies, theater, or whatever. Boredom is never anything with which I have to contend, and mediation may not fix this problem for you, if this is something you find in your life. When you're engaged in something you love or with someone you love, your mind doesn't wander into the depths, and you don't get bored or depressed easily.

On this topic I had to take issue with this assertion by the author:

If you say "I am bored," you are literally defining your identity as boredom.

That's a horrible thing to tell a person. It's also a lie. You are neither literally defining nor metaphorically defining yourself as boredom, you're merely giving voice to a mental state which you're experiencing. While your entire collection of mental states is definitely you, one isolated mental state is not you and it's an awful thing to suggest otherwise.

I was a bit disturbed to read the section detailing where the author flew off to India to attend a conference on the role of contemplation in K-12 education (that's kindergarten to grade twelve - or primary school to graduation and hopefully heading off to college). It sure must be nice to be able to jet around the world to attend conferences! What I didn't get was why this author was all over the place on education instead of consulting more local - and/or more expert sources!

I mean, for example, there are lots of sources for how to best educate children. Why fly off the handle to India? Why not, if you want to find out how to direct attention, simply ask a magician or an illusionist, who are experts at this?! But more to the point, why ask about directing attention in the first place? Is it because we want them to learn to meditate, or we want them to simply learn? If the latter is the case, then why not seek examples from the best education systems such as Finland or South Korea? India is a very overcrowded and impoverished system which isn't known for being the best - far from it.

There is a chapter on mindful sex, which struck me as completely redundant! I know there are distractions during sex - if you're married and you have children, there's an obvious potential one! - and there can be other forms of distraction, like if you're not convinced that this was a good idea (in which case the answer should have been no, and still can be), or if your relationship is on the rocks (ditto), but aside from those obvious exceptions, I sincerely doubt that anyone isn't in the moment when it's happening. If you're not, then you probably have some sort of medical or relationship issue which ought to be addressed.

That was amusing but expected. What I was truly disappointed with was that even in the conclusion, we get no idea offered of what we've purportedly achieved or in what way this is supposed to change our lives, or at least deliver some sort of benefit! All we get is a recap of what we already read, and some advice about getting a real teacher to teach this because you can't really learn it from a book. What?!

When I began reading this, I felt like this one might actually have something to impart, but very quickly I came to see that it doesn't deliver any more than the other volume did. I thought that at least we might get some idea of what this is - ultimately - supposed to do for us that nothing else can do, and this was nowhere to be found.

In the final analysis, there was nothing on offer here that I cannot see a person getting from doing something else, such as taking up a martial art, or some sort of sport, or running a marathon, or pursuing some form of art, or writing a journal, or pursuing a hobby, taking your dog for a nice long walk, or for that matter, simply sitting out in the garden with a nice cup of tea and enjoying nature. Or even just falling in love! I can see if your mind is particularly troubled, then maybe there is something here for you, but I'd recommend seeking competent medical help first. As it is, I can't recommend this.


Saturday, June 20, 2015

The Dharma of Star Wars by Matthew Bortolin


Title: The Dharma of Star Wars
Author: Matthew Bortolin (no website found)
Publisher: Wisdom Publications
Rating: WARTY!

Errata:
Line gap between 'of' and 'misunderstanding' (p15)
"regiment" used where "regimen" was intended (p15)

After I'd done reading chapter two, I was done reading this book because it failed for me - and failed miserably. The last straw was the attempt to link Luke Skywalker's experience in the cave on Dagobah with our experience in everyday life on Earth. Yoda tells Luke that the only thing which is in the cave is what Luke takes with him, clearly implying that the only thing on Earth is what we all carry with us, and that just as Luke was responsible for his experience in seeing Vader (and contrary to what this book suggests, actually failing to realize that the dark side was in him too), so too are we all responsible for the suffering on Earth.

Now I concede that as a society overall, we all share responsibility for what that society does, good and bad, but there is no way in hell you are going to tell me that anything I could have personally done in my own life would have either caused or stopped that psycho from killing those people in the church this week.

That's not on me. It's not on any one person, and nothing any one person can do was going to stop that from happening - unless that one person had a gun and shot the guy before he could kill other people. That is one thing which would have prevented this (short of going back to that guy's childhood and taking charge of his upbringing), but this one thing is the very thing for which Luke is chided in this book: that taking his light saber (how is it even a saber? Lol!) with him somehow precipitated the appearance of the Vader/Luke hybrid! Or that while not intending to start trouble, being prepared for trouble was a mistake?! No. Being prepared is never a mistake.

Luke's experience had nothing to do with the weapon, and everything to do with Luke's own mindset, but changing his mindset would not have magically made Vader disappear from the galaxy and undone all his evil. That's what this author seems to fail to grasp. First and foremost, he is applying Buddhism to a purely fictional world, not to the real one. I haven't read all of this book, but nothing that I have read has demonstrated to me how applying the principles of Buddhism in your own life is going to change anything any more materially than simply doing what most of us do anyway - living a good, considerate, and decent life - is changing anything.

Yes, if all of us ran wild and had no respect for others, then the world would be a truly horrible place, but just because some of us choose to live a decent life - even if the majority of us did so, this will not cause the recalcitrant minority to quite hurting people or blowing up people, or shooting people, or driving like idiots, or being boorish, thoughtless, inconsiderate, and stupid. All we can do is deal with our own lives, and while what we do can indeed help keep a bad situation from escalating, what we do is not going to magically make the world a paradise. Even if everyone whole-heartedly embraced Buddhism, this would not stop volcanoes and earthquakes and floods and tornadoes from taking lives and bringing suffering into lives. The only preventative for that is for all of us to commit suicide, and the Jonestown "solution" is utterly unacceptable to me!

This is an attempt to popularize an aspect of Buddhism by linking it with a very successful movie franchise. Dharma or Dhamma has no simple or direct translation into English, but can be thought of as the natural order of things. This isn't to be thought of in any pejorative way or as some idiotic Victorian idea of superiority or one class or race over another. It's focused on the way nature works and how humans can try to live their lives in harmony with this natural system just as we used to when we were apes. If you think of all of nature as a team, then Dharma is about how we can become the best team player we can be.

In that light, the problems with approaching this topic by linking it to Star Wars are manifold. Star Wars wasn't about the natural order of things. It was about might makes right and about how the underdogs could destroy that might. You can argue that this was really more about the Jedi way of life, but the Jedi were not really a part of the natural order of things. They were a gifted and superior 'race' who far from fitting in with the natural order sought to dominate and control that order for their own ends, no matter how benign some of those ends might have been.

In this way, the Jedi vis-à-vis the galaxy were no different than humans have been vis-à-vis planet Earth. As the Jedi sought to put in place a certain order of things, so humans have done the same on Earth. Given what we 'superior' humans have done with our power, I'm far from convinced that this is really the best way we have to look at how we live our lives!

I should probably say at this point that I do not believe in any gods. There is no good or useful evidence for any, nor is there any evidence that we live more than one life or are reincarnated or are in some sort of endless loop through which we will continue moving, like a pet rat on a treadmill, until we break the cycle and move on to the next level. None of it makes any sense, and for those who believe it does, I invite then to consider how all of this works given what we now know of the appearance of life on Earth and its evolution.

Humans have no always been here. At one point, and for massively overwhelming majority of the time that life has been extant upon Earth, there was nothing human here, but about six million years ago, a species started moving towards what we have now become. For all those who believe in reincarnation, I invite them to consider what the real evidence for this is, and to explain to themselves when this all began. Was it with the first cell that arose out of the chemistry of Earth? Was it when mammals evolved? Was it when primates evolved? Was it when Australopithecus evolved? If so, which species? Was it when Homo neanderthalensis evolved? When and why did this system come into being? No one has even tried to explain this, much less explained it with supportive evidence and made sense of it! That's why I don't buy into this juvenile concept of a cycle of death and rebirth.

In short, the Buddhist claims are nonsensical and have no evidence. That doesn't mean that living decent life, or that practices like meditation and yoga are of no value. It means that we shouldn't blindly invest them with meaning and value to which they have no right, and it especially means that eastern religions do not get a bye simply because they're new-agey, and exotic, and perhaps don't even posit any gods, like the three big monotheistic ones do, or like Hinduism does.

This book begins by recalling the beginning of the Star Wars saga (episode one, The Phantom Menace), where Qui-Gon Jinn reminds Obi-Wan Kenobi to keep his mind focused on the here and now, and not some speculative future course of events. In their circumstances, this was appropriate, but in life in general, it's important to both keep your mind on the here and now, and to plan for the future. Anyone with Jedi skills ought to be able to do both! Any human who fails to do this is inevitably going to run into trouble.

We jump from this to episode 4 A New Hope and are reminded that Luke only succeeded in destroying the Death Star when he abandoned the technology at his disposal and relied purely on instinct. In real life this is nonsensical. It's like disabling the brakes on your car and relying on your natural instinct to start slowing down in good time. We know how well that works by counting the skid marks on the highway, and the bumper scrapes on the concrete walls of on and off ramps! We have brakes and air-bags for a very good reason. Technology works. Humans often don't. Anyone who disagrees is invited to compare death and injury rates from accidents prior to seat belts and air bags with the same thing now.

Yes, you can argue that if we were more mindful when driving we would have far fewer scrapes and close calls, and this is true, but to make a blanket claim that we can all rely on instinct and our inner pilot to get through life is to assume that everyone has already achieved enlightenment, and no that one is mentally ill, not in any way at all. This is nonsensical and dangerous.

The Nazis were following their inner guide when they determined that all handicapped people, homosexuals, Jews, Roma, and other 'undesirables' should be exterminated or at least neutered. They were following their inner pilot when they pursued their belief that the "Aryan" race was superior. In the same way, organized religious groups have followed their instinct when they have tried to exterminate members of competing religions, such as when the Catholics tried to purge everyone they deemed to be a witch, and later those who were Protestant, or when they tried to force "heathens" to submit. Islam is all about submission. Judaism is only for the house of Israel.

Everyone today who isn't blind knows that these people were delusional, no matter how much they acted on their instincts and inner pilot. Your inner pilot isn't always reliable, no matter how much we may fantasize that it is. If it were otherwise, we wouldn't need laws to protect people from those who act on instinct and who give no thought for the future or for others.

We're reminded of Luke on Dagobah, where Yoda loses patience with him because his mind is all over the place and we're expected to believe that Luke was a poor student when the truth is that Yoda was a really poor teacher, as was Obi-Wan Kenobi. They had years in which they could have trained Luke yet neither lifted a finger. This was precisely because they were focused on the here and now - on their own survival - instead of planning for the future! Their incompetence nearly cost them everything. A little planning for the future would have made a huge difference, but each of them was so obsessed with the here and now that they took no thought for tomorrow. The founder of Christianity advised the same short-sighted tack.

Qui-Gon Jinn wanted to train Anakin and he was refused because despite the extreme youth of the boy and despite his qualifications (as judged by his midi-chlorian levels), it was already deemed too late in his life to teach him. The fact that he was taught so late was the reason he was so easily won over to the dark side, we're given to believe. Yet not a one of them questions the teaching of Luke who is considerably older than Anakin when he starts and far less qualified midi-chlorian-wise. yet no one questions this wisdom of this move!

Yes, Luke could have applied himself better, but so could Ben and Yoda - they could also have begun his teaching a hell of a lot earlier. Yes, this is fiction, but it wasn't me who decided to use Star Wars as a teaching tool for the Dao of Buddhism!

When Qui-Gon fights with Darth Maul, we're told that he is smart enough to center himself when the doors close between them, so he's ready to fight when they open, but this is a classic example of his failing to properly plan for the future. If he'd waited just a minute or two for Ben to catch up with him, there would have been two of them to take on Maul, and Qui-Gon might well not have been killed. By taking no thought for tomorrow, and getting himself killed Qui-Gon failed Anakin. Planning for the future is important. Focusing on the now is good, but it's not all there is, as Qui-Gon himself actually realized. He was planning for the future in an unfortunately limited way when he took the time to center himself.

An example is made of Anakin's anger over his mother's death, and his slaughter of the Tusken people, but this doesn't work either, because the root of this anger is that he was taken from his mom at an early age. No attempt was made to allow him to reconnect or to bring his mom to join him, or at least bring her to safety. that would have been planning for the future, so it's forbidden, You must focus on the here and now! Immediate gratification is demanded again Obviously this preyed on Anakin's mind, and his behavior was perfectly understandable. Some thought and planning here would have made a huge difference. Clearly neither Yoda nor Qui-Gon, nor Obi-Wan meditated on this!

What this book doesn't tell us, when it discusses suffering, is how selfish and callous the Buddha himself, Siddharta Gautama, truly was. He was a married man with a child. His wife was Yaśodharā, and his son was Rāhula. He was also a wealthy ruler of a people, yet he abandoned all of that and took off on his own selfish path. He never invited his wife and child to join him and share his journey, much less the people for whom he was responsible. He purportedly rejected wealth yet there is nothing to indicate that he redistributed what he had amongst his people. How much suffering did he put them through? His actions were not admirable. They were very selfish. Abandoning a wife and child is inexcusable. Women and particularly men are rightly pilloried in this day and age for this, yet we're expected to admire and emulate a man who did exactly that when there was no reason whatsoever for him to act as he did?

We're told that before we can improve a situation we must accept it for what it is, but this is wrong. We are forced to live with it, but acceptance of it means we're not likely to be looking at how it came to be or how it can be remedied. Women would never be able to vote now if they had accepted that they were unjustly excluded from voting and took no thought for the future. It's understanding, not acceptance, that we need, because only understanding will convey to us the power to change injustice, and to prevent it happening again. I think this book represents blinkered advice - or very poorly written guidance at best.

We're told that being mindful of our daily life allows us to see suffering as it manifests, but being mindful of what is likely to happen in the future means we can take steps to avoid that suffering manifesting in the first place. This is yet another example of how focusing on the current and the state we're in to the exclusion of all else isn't the best plan at all. There's nothing wrong with acknowledging the state we're in and understanding it, because this may offer ways out or at least insights into avoiding getting into this mess again, but to sit around wallowing in it, or meditating on it isn't going to get anything done in and of itself. Ultimately it's action which changes things, even if that action must be preceded by thought.

I think the dharma of Laurel and Hardy might have been a better comparison than this one with Star Wars. They never had a problem acknowledging that this is another fine mess you've gotten me into. Their intentions were always the best, and they had no problem working diligently to fix troubles rather than simply of sitting around meditating on them. I can't recommend this book. I see little real point in it and no value to it.

The short conclusion is that this book offered me nothing that any other decent religion offers - or that abandoning religions altogether and simply being a society of good and thoughtful people would deliver. I didn't see what this had to offer and I thought it was a poor approach to teaching this topic.


Friday, May 22, 2015

Braden's Story by Mason Dodd


Title: Braden's Story
Author: Mason Dodd
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WORTHY!

Braden is thirteen and being hit with the growing realization that he's gay. His family, highly religious and very fundamentalist, isn't going to like this one bit. This story details how Braden comes to terms with his true nature and his feelings, and how he copes or fails to do so, with the reactions of others. I started out liking the story, but quickly grew tired of the writing style and the endless grammatical and spelling errors, some of which I list on my blog. No matter how much I might want to support books like this one, I cannot in good faith recommend this particular story.

The errors, in what is a story badly in need of an editor, were numerous. In addition, there were other issues, such as the fact that these are very religious folk, yet the language the younger ones employ seems highly unlikely at best, and their disrespect for adults isn't believable given their background. Just be warned that if you're tempted to pick this up thinking it's a religious or spiritual book, it's really not!

Some of these problems with this book could have been caught with a good spell-checker while others, such as the use of 'alter' in place of 'altar', and 'apart' in place of 'a part', can only be caught by a good editor or better beta readers.

Errata:
"...But is there someone your are interested in, or...?
"...felt that I was apart of something important" should be "...felt that I was a part of something important"
"... wedding alter..." should be "... wedding altar..." or preferably just "altar".
"... get those handless stuck on..." should be "... get those handles stuck on..."
"But is there someone your are interested in, or." Should be " But is there someone you are interested in, or.". I didn't get the hanging 'or' at the end, but after reading this form of speech used frequently, I decided that this was simply a figure of speech.
"Okay, you weren't listing in Mr. Miller's class at all." should be "Okay, you weren't listening in Mr. Miller's class at all."
"...to discuss the situation with Tom and is acceptance of gays..."
"...Mum was cooking in the kitchen when I got home..." Unintentionally humorous - Braden's family are cannibals - and incestuous ones, too!
"...how does that fit inline with..." should be "...how does that fit in line with..." (the lack of a space in "inline" changes the meaning)

Here's one example of the inconsistent use of bad language:

His goddamn smile, it was so cute and had this effect on me. I know, I know, it was only a goshdang smile...

This was a thought expressed by the narrator, who has been raised in a highly religious family, so it's hardly likely he would say "goddamn" and just plain weird that he says that and immediately follows it with "goshdang" so it didn't sound authentic to me at all. I know that even religious people cuss, and this isn't confined to adults, but the language felt unnatural for the context, and it was way overdone, as though the author was using it purely for its shock value rather than because it was the natural argot of these characters.

I don't care if people cuss in stories, because they cuss in real life, so in general terms it's inauthentic not to have them use bad language from time to time, but it needs to be authentic to the situation in which it's used, or to the people into whose mouths these words are placed.

There really are people who come down hard on gays and gay marriage, acting under the religious delusion that being gay is a sinful choice which calls for a cure. They're morons. Throughout history, human attempts at "curing" nature have been consistently disastrous, and this one will be too. People who delight in having anal sex with their wife or girlfriend irrationally think there is something wrong with two guys enjoying the same thing with each other. People who preach 'love thy neighbor' out of one side of their mouth have no problem stirring up resentment and hatred against people who only want to be allowed to love and marry one another. It's not only hypocritical, it's sick.

The problem for the big three monotheistic religions in accommodating this however, lies in the ignorant words of old men who specifically prohibited homosexual relations in the Old (men) Testament - only between men, however! The OT has nothing to say about lesbianism! People mistakenly think that Queen Victoria did not believe that lesbianism existed, which is why it never was made illegal in England, but this belief is a myth. It was never mentioned in Victorian statutes for the same reason it was never mentioned in the OT. Old white men couldn't have cared tuppence about women's sexuality. It wasn't even considered that they had any. Only male homosexuality threatened these geezers, and why on Earth would women be attracted to each other when there were so many manly men around?!

So the problem for those who adhere to these religions is that the Bible does expressly prohibit it. This means they either have to dispense with the blind edicts of ignorant old men, or they have to dispense with homosexuals, and they're far too cowardly and insecure to do the former, so it's gays who suffer.

Some of the other things which these young teens were depicted as saying were bizarre too. At one point for example, Mia, who is Braden's best friend, says to him "Gimme a break, Bray Bray" which sounded so babyish that it brought me right out of suspension of disbelief. These teens are also using bad language in church when they're sitting close-by grown-ups, which struck me as stupid and unrealistic.

I didn't have a problem with the religious people cussing, but for kids to use such bad language within earshot of their parents and family friends struck me as very unrealistic and spoke poorly of the kids' judgment. This was a bad impression to give because it fuels an argument that Braden's sexuality was also an example of poor judgment rather than his nature, which is nonsensical, but it's a serious mistake to write in a way which puts ammunition into the hands of your detractors, even if that ammo is a pile of duds.

There was a lot of texting described, too which felt way overdone to me. Invariably, depicting texts fails in YA stories. It seems like the writer is trying far too hard to be hip and 'authentically teen', and it just makes me want to skip it, especially since the bulk of it really conveys nothing of value and does little to move the story. A simple brief sentence describing the text is far more effective than a whole paragraph of text-onics.

There was a certain naiveté to this story. It felt a bit like reading fan fiction, or reading a first draft by a young author, and usually this will turn me off a story. In the case, the simplistic tone actually tended to lend it some authenticity. First person PoV stories are usually appallingly unrealistic. I am not remotely a first person fan. Far from rendering the story more immediate and accessible, it typically makes it seem irritatingly false and self-centered to me. This one wasn't, but the value of this was lost amidst all the other issues.

The novel was pretty much completely lacking in any really descriptive prose. It was mostly about movement between one place and another, and the conversations which took place between the teens - chats which were in serious danger of losing the reader because very few of the speeches were ascribed to a specific speaker. It was mostly a list of spoken text with insufficient attribution to give the reader a decent idea of who was saying what. There was almost nothing to set atmosphere or to describe the surroundings, not even sketchily. It made the story seem rootless in many ways, like it wasn't actually happening in real life but in some ghostly existence divorced from the real world, which is also a mistake for a novel of this type, which really begs to be solidly grounded in reality.

In the final analysis, I can't recommend this, but if you happen to like it, there is a companion novel titled Aaron's story. I can't say if these two are tied together in any way.


Saturday, March 28, 2015

The Egg by Andy Weir


Title: The Egg
Author: Andy Weir
Publisher: Audible Studios
Rating: WORTHY!

This is a really short story available free on-line, and also in audio form. I recommend it. It's rather hard to review though, without telling the whole story, because it is so short.

I'm not even remotely religious, so I have no skin in the game of who has the best religion; they're all clueless, and that's the joy of this story because it makes more sense than any of the other religions out there! Not that that makes it true. It's fiction after all.

The basic plot is that a guy dies and meets god, and gets an education as to how life and death really works! Of course, ultimately the story still makes no sense, but it's original and fun, and it's a quick easy read, so what's not to like?

I think those who reviewed this negatively either have a religious axe to grind or they're taking fiction way too seriously! It's just a story and a short one at that. I recommend it. Even if you hate it, you've lost only five minutes of your life and you have something new to think about to boot. If you don't like it, go ahead and write a parody of it and have some fun!


Thursday, March 19, 2015

The Story of Buddha by Hisashi Ōta


Title: The Story of Buddha
Author: Hisashi Ōta (no website found)
Publisher: Ichimannendo Publishing
Rating: WORTHY!

Translated (and I have no idea whatsoever how accurately!) by Juliet Winters Carpenter.

This book was pretty cool. It was interesting, informative, very cleanly and competently drawn in gray scale line drawings and delivered the facts as they’re known.

I’m an atheist, and while I don’t care what people choose to believe for themselves ( it’s their business after all), I am not a fan of organized religion, and I’m an implacable foe of religions trying to dictate to the rest of us how we should live our lives.

Even a religion as ostensibly benign and pacifistic as Buddhism hasn’t won me over, because for me, at its roots, it has no more to offer than does any other religion, so I’m a woodist! Religions are all uniformly making claims they cannot support and claiming knowledge they do not have. None of them is standing on any sort of realistically supported foundation. I don’t trust a one of them because they’re inherently flawed in that they offer power to those who are willing to believe (or fake a belief in) things for which there is neither rationale, nor scientific evidence.

Setting up any organization, and particularly one which can grow to be powerful, based on blind belief is a recipe for disaster and abuse, and we’ve seen how this works out. We’ve seen it repeatedly throughout history and not one of today’s religions has learned a thing from the glaring flaws of past incarnations or versions of these vacuous cults.

None of these faiths can claim any handle on real or useful knowledge of gods, or of any after-life, or any of the stuff they claim to have any insight into. They cannot offer any individual anything more than can simple rational thought. The story of Buddha, though, is interesting, and not of the usual kind. Usually prophets, avatars and messiahs come from lowly backgrounds and can rise from there to positions of power and fame. The Buddha traveled in the opposite direction, starting out as a prince, and descending to a lowly position.

This story is so old now that it’s impossible to know how much of it, if any, is true, but it is related faithfully and accessibly here for anyone interested. My favorable rating is not to be construed as acceptance of any of this story, but of how well it’s told and how interesting it is (for me!).

It seems to be accepted that Gautama Buddha, aka Siddhartha Gautama, aka Shakyamuni (‘shake yer money’ is a great name for most religious leaders isn’t it?!) actually lived. When he lived is debatable. It seems to have been either around 400BC, or around 560BC give or take a decade or two. He’s considered to be nearly contemporary with the founding of Jainism.

Just as with the founder of Christianity, there are no contemporary written records of his existence – we learn of him through records dating after his death, and it’s on these legends and stories that this modern retelling is based. While I recommend this as a great way to get a quick and easy introduction to his life, please understand that this is not the same a recommending Buddhism as a realistic approach to living one’s life – a recommendation which I don’t make.

My problems with Buddha’s view of life is that it’s so negative. He’s obsessed with aging and suffering, and with disease and dying, and in his obsession, he misses all that life has to offer. Buddha was a deadbeat dad; he abandoned his wife and child, which is an appalling thing to do, and almost as badly, he abandons his position. Normally I would not support royalty, which is largely an unjustifiable parasite on any society which tolerates them, but in this case, he seemed (from the stories) to be enlightened even before he became ‘enlightened’.

If he had stayed in his position and became king, then how much good could he have done for everyone? The very suffering and disease which ironically took over his own life could have been at the very least ameliorated if he had used his position of power to help people. He could have done this and also sought enlightenment, yet he chose – if this story is to be believed – to run from it in a most cowardly fashion, and make it all about him instead of about others. That is the biggest indictment against him and makes him decidedly unworthy of founding a religion, doesn’t it?

That said, I do recommend this if you’re interested in learning a bit about other religions. That’s definitely a body of knowledge of which the USA population could certainly avail itself to its betterment, and this does it without getting into any boring detail!


Friday, November 21, 2014

The Wicked + The Divine by Kieron Gillen


Title: The Wicked + The Divine
Author: Kieron Gillen
Publisher: Tim Nolen
Rating: WARTY!


DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

Artwork by Jamie McKelvie (website worth a visit - I love the opening page (as of today's date the girl on the telephone pole)
Coloring by Matthew Wilson
Lettering by Clayton Cowles (another amusing website - as of today's date, Empire fighter craft versus a witch on a broom?)

This is an amazingly original story about gods and humans. Note that this is a compendium volume featuring the first five issues. I love that it was subtitled "The Faust Act"! Anyway, these gods are reincarnated in young human bodies every ninety years, but they only live for two years before the human body dies and they go dark again. They don’t know when they will be reincarnated because not all of them are incarnate at once. The gods are treated like celebrities - music and movie stars. They hold concerts and the younger generation flocks to see them

I love that Luci (guess what that's short for!) was female. She was by far the most complex and intriguing character, especially when she was arrested for exploding the heads of two people who were firing automatic rifles into her apartment - the problem is that during her trial, the judge's head also explodes in a similar fashion, and she's immediately imprisoned.

A girl whom Luci earlier befriended now takes up her cause, and seems to be the only person interested in doing so. None of the other gods seem to care. The conversations between these two, and between Luci and a blogger-journalist are fascinating. The fun really ramps up though, when Luci loses patience and breaks out of jail.

One problem I had with this graphic novel was that on some pages, the text was rendered in such a tiny font that it was really hard to read, even in a full-screen Adobe Digital Editions reader ebook. Fortunately it wasn't that many pages, so it wasn't a huge issue. Other than that, the artwork, coloring, and lettering were exemplary: beautiful, bright, brilliantly colorful, clean and sharp - and really eye-catching. It was a joy to see as well as to read. I was spoiled for choice in trying to narrow it down to my usual two or three samples that I post on my blog, so I tried somehtign brand new (for me!) this time and put all my faovrites into a GIF. This is the first time I tried this, so I hope it works OK.

I read some other reviews after I wrote mine, and I noticed that some people were confused by this graphic novel. It really isn’t confusing at all, but I grant that it does take a while to get into it. Other reviewers bemoaned the fact that they didn’t have enough background on the gods: why do they come, why do they have to die? The god who started it all, Ananke made it quite clear why they come and what they want: they want to be adored, but these reviewers were right in one regard: it didn’t explain why the visit was confined to only two years. Maybe it’s explained later in the series (this compendium covered only the first five volumes and had a great "ending"). I'm guessing it’s because they don’t want to devalue the currency! Or maybe the presence of a god in a mortal body burns it up really fast. A better question is why they need the physical body.

I recommend this for a really good read, and for an original story, and for something which was truly creative, imaginative, and inventive. This is everything a really great comic should be.


Friday, November 14, 2014

Henni by Miss Lasko-Gross


Title: Henni
Author: Miss Lasko-Gross
Publisher: Z2 Comics
Rating: WORTHY!


DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often reward aplenty!

For reasons which really rather escape me, I fell in love with Henni Hogarthe from the first few panels, where we find her chasing a dragonfly and excitedly calling her father over to share in her discoveries and excitement. Henni is a cat-person - not a cat lover, but a person who is a cat - or at least very cat-like! She lives on another world where religion is insane and cruelly dominant - not very different from Earth when you get right down to it.

The artwork in this graphic novel is simplistic, but I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. The coloring is also simple, but it’s perfect. The drawings are clean and focused, and overall the effect is really pleasing, very artistic, and they're another reason why I quickly warmed to this story.

Told in several episodes, the story hits us almost immediately with the injustice perpetrated upon a society where one small group of privileged individuals gets to dictate what reality is and how people should behave. Her first experience is her father being hauled away as a heretic, and her mother doesn't even shed a tear for this despicable unbeliever she has found in her home.

Henni's next revelation about religion is that the priesthood lies and is corrupt. No surprises there! Periodically, food has to be taken as to the church as an offering, and Henni discovers that these treats are nothing more than disguises to hide bribes which in turn sway the priesthood into acting favorably towards marriage proposals for those who submit sufficient cash. Even Henni's own mother sends bribes.

Henni is eventually kicked out of her village for trespassing on a holy site which has an unearned reputation, and she has to find a life elsewhere. Branded (quite literally) and with no possessions other than the fur on her back, she discovers that her new home is hardly an improvement. People think she's primitive because she wears no clothes. She ends up in trouble there, too, but she's smarter and more cunning now, and she talks her way out of a death sentence, getting herself banished from this village as well. Where will she end up? I’d really like to find out in the next volume because this one ends in a most stirring and intriguing way.

I loved this intelligent and engrossing story, and its fearlessness in exposing ignorance and bigotry championed as religion and faith. The main character is one which really spoke to me - again for reasons I can’t reliably articulate. I felt sorry for her, yes, but I also admired her resilience and persistence. It’s really nice to find stories with truly strong female character, and Henni is one if I ever saw one. Bring on volume two!


Saturday, August 23, 2014

Florence of Arabia by Christopher Buckley


Title: Florence of Arabia
Author: Christopher Buckley
Publisher: Random House
Rating: WARTY!

Buckley wrote the novel which gave rise to the movie of the same name Thank You For Smoking which starred Aaron Eckhart and which I found amusing. It was one more reason to pick up this novel, the first being: how can you not like one with a title like this? Well it turns out that this novel failed to keep its promise which is no doubt why it's likely to be made into a movie.

Florence's real name is Firenze Farfaletti, an American of Italian descent who started using the Anglicized version of her name after too much teasing at school. In later years, she married a minor royal figure of the ruling family of Wasabia (yes, some of the names and other items are quite amusing). Florence discovered what a huge mistake that was, and she literally escaped his clutches to move back to the US, where she eventually wound-up working for the State Department.

After a traumatic encounter with an old friend, another bride of a prince, who she couldn't help and who was subsequently beheaded, Florence comes up with an outrageous scheme to liberate Islamic womanhood, and gets unexpected government backing in the form of a guy she thinks works for the CIA.

She refers to him as Uncle Sam, and he loads her up with massive volumes of cash. She uses this to fund her scheme, beginning with the recruitment of her team: a gay friend from the State Department, a James Bond style ex-marine, and a PR guy who has the morals of an alligator, and who took his tutelage from Nick Naylor, the morally-challenged protagonist of Thank You For Smoking.

Florence sweet-talks the Emir of Matar (which borders Wasabia) into allowing her to approach his wife on the topic of setting up a TV station, and she also then sweet-talks Laila, the wife of the Emir (and first lady), into running the TV station. They start transmitting rather slapstick and demeaning shows across the Middle East. In reality, no Arab nation would even allow this kind of condescending nonsense, yet here we're expected to accept that it causes a sensation and starts making money for the Emir from advertising. While i could see where Buckley was going here, I found this portion truly amateurish.

The Sheika is thrilled because it gives her a chance to get back at her husband who is constantly running off to his harem and he's thrilled because he's becoming ever more rich, yet things start going badly very quickly, and given the content it's hardly surprising. The neighboring nation denounces the TV transmissions. The news reader, a young woman, is stoned to death one day, and the Emir is killed in a coup.

This problem arises when the Emir's brother, who has been nothing but a playboy, is talked (by the French, who supply him with his Formula One race cars) into making a power-play for the throne. Civil disorder starts to brew, the marine ends up shooting someone in self-defense, a bomb explodes downtown, and the mullahs are stirred up by more French moolah into becoming vocal about the Emir's lifestyle. Oh and the ayatollah of the neighboring fundamentalist nation of Wasabia issues a fatwa on the westerners involved in producing the TV show.

The Emir's bother comes to power, yet despite all we've been told about his newly-found religious fanaticism, he fails to dispatch Florence despite having her in one of his jails for some time. Instead, she's inexplicably freed.

There were some real moments of laugh-out-loud humor in this novel, but for the most part it was plodding, juvenile, amateur, and worse: not very funny or very entertaining. I just kept reading wanting it to be over so I could go read something more interesting. When I put it down I didn't want to pick it up again and I found no reason for the story to drag on as long as it did.

Most of the humor simply wasn't that great, and this conceited fiction of having, once again, the white American come in and save the wee cute colored people (substitute which particular skin shade/ethnic region you wish here) from themselves simply wasn't funny at all. I can't recommend this one at all.


Friday, August 22, 2014

Waking Up by Sam Harris


Title: Waking Up
Author: Sam Harris
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Rating: WORTHY!

I'm a huge fan of Sam Harris's writing, but I was not impressed by this effort when I first began reading it. He is the author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, and Lying, all of which I've read and enjoyed, but this one initially imbued me with the feeling that I wasn't going to end up with a worthwhile take-home message. Having finished it, I still feel like that, but I was impressed by the chapters that came after chapter one. I found them fascinating, and this is why I think this is a worthy read.

This is subtitled "A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion" yet there are critics who quite evidently have paid no attention to Harris's explanation of what he means by that. His basic thesis is that spirituality has nothing to do with religion and we can lead spiritual - useful, content, fulfilling lives imbued with a sense of joy and wonder at the universe - without having to delude ourselves that there's a magic giant in the sky who, despite being the creator of literally everything (so welre expected to believe), has consistently shown himself incapable of subduing evil!

I agree with Harris's thesis, but I'd take issue with the wisdom of his decision to employ the term 'spirituality', which has evidently confused way too many people because of the baggage with which it comes so effectively larded. I don't know: maybe Harris is trying to reclaim it for secularism? Good luck with that!

Harris meditates, and offers some guidelines to how to do it in this book and on his website. He doesn't do it to link to 'the godhood' or some numinous higher consciousness. He simply does it to center himself and bring a balance to his thoughts and actions, and there's no better reason.

I'm not a meditater myself. I believe you can get to precisely the same place by employing any number of more mundane methods: listening to your favorite music, occupying yourself with your favorite craft or hobby, watching a good movie, taking a stroll in the countryside, reading a loved book, pursuing your favorite sport, enjoying an art gallery, cooking your favorite meal or treat, playing with your kids or your pets, conversation with someone you care for, any any other number of pursuits many of which l'm sure I haven't even considered, but Harris offers evidence for his perspective, so maybe this is another option.

The advantage of meditation of course, is that you can pretty much do it anywhere. It's rather harder to read a book when you're at work (that's an advantage of working in a bookstore - which are sadly in decline), or watch a movie (again, with the decline of video rental stores it's a lot harder to work in a place that lets you play movies isn't it?!).

Harris tells an interesting tale, but for me he spoiled the purity of his message with too many asides. That's what most annoyed me in chapter one. The book reads more like a scientific paper than a guide to secular spirituality, and this detracted too much from his message for me. I also think he did the scientific theory of evolution a disservice, not because he doesn't accept it - he does - but because the terms he employs when talking about it are so easily distorted by its ignorant detractors.

Given the number of times people of scientific backgrounds have been abused by the profound dishonesty of religious nut-jobs in taking the words of scientists and thoroughly warping and distorting them (when they're not outright and knowingly misquoting them), I find myself in askance that so many people of science still speak so loosely.

Harris, for example says, "25 percent of Americans believe in evolution (while 68 percent believe in the literal existence of satan)." thereby equating the fairy tale of religion with the fact of evolution! Evolution isn't a belief, it's an honest acceptance that the fact of common descent cannot be denied by any honest, rational person. It's not a belief. It's not dependent upon faith. Claiming that 'Satan' is real is a pure faith assertion because there's no more evidence for a satan than there is for a god. To equate those desperate delusions with a scientifically established fact by using the word 'believe' is a serious mistake. Shame on Harris for making it.

The discussion of what is self and what is consciousness in the chapters succeeding chapter one were what really changed my mind about this book because to me they were fascinating and in some instances revelatory, particularly the discussion of how each of us is, in a very real way, a split-personality by dint of the fact that we have a split brain. This book is worth reading for that discussion alone. I recommend it.