Stone Cold Pimpin'

Vintage, 1953
About as long as a good-sized New Yorker essay, Eugen Herrigel's book about his many years as a German studying Japanese archery (kyudo) and Zen comes recommended by a struggling Zen friend as a good primer (along with the longer and unread "Three Pillars of Zen" by Phillip Kapleau Roshi). And in a Zen-like moment, I found it exactly when I wasn't looking for it in Book Den used books (or was that a Tao moment?).
Zen is the most mindbending of philosophies, and Herrigel's struggle to master his chosen art is full of, well, such moments. His sensei, Kenzo Awa, offers little explanation, but guides his students through a series of failures and frustrations, so that the proper way of doing anything comes as a much larger enlightenment. When, after many years (years!) Herrigel starts to hit the target, Sensei chides him for any satisfaction: "What are you thinking of? You know already that you should not grieve over bad shots; learn now not to rejoice over the good ones. You must free yourself from the buffetings of pleasure and pain, and learn to rise above them in easy equanimity, to rejoice as though not you but another had shot well."
The importance of meditation, and of ceremony, of what sports-type secular people call being in the zone, before engaging on a work of art, is part of the Zen experience too. It is the most purpose-filled arts (swordsmanship, painting, archery) that Zen requires to be approached with purposelessness. It's very difficult to comprehend, but Herrigel does his best.
Herrigel's wife, too, spends her five years learning the art of Japanese flower arranging, and goes on to master Zen in her own way. Herrigel doesn't say much about her, which says something about the times and his attitudes. These days, the book would have to be about both husband and wife, I suppose.
Over at Amazon, the book gets good ratings, apart from some kyudo expert called Earl Hartman, who feels the whole book is a sham.

To put it bluntly, Herrigel got everything, and I mean everything, wrong. He himself only practiced kyudo for three years, if his translator Sozo Komachiya is to be believed (he started in 1926 and returned to Germany in 1929). He spoke no Japanese. He was himself a mystic (or he wanted to be one, anyway) intent on understanding Zen, not archery, and he had very definite pre-formed ideas about what he was looking for and what he believed Zen, and, by extension kyudo, to be. Given such a situation, the impending disaster was a forgone conclusion. Even with the best instruction he would not have understood kyudo.

His book is very seductive, filled as it is with tantalizing mystical stories about a seeker on the road to "enlightenment". So, it will appeal to romantics who have no experience in either Zen or kyudo, and it has been my experience that the book indeed appeals primarily to such people. It is instructive to note that those people who have experience in either discipline are quick to point out how thoroughly Herrigel bollixed it up.

Gosh. Well, that's that then.

Posted by Ted Mills at 11:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Penguin, 1982
I found the Tao of Poo at our library's used book corner for 50 cents. I've been interested in Benjamin Hoff's thesis since reading the Pooh books in '99--that the ineffable Pooh-bear embodies Taoist principles. Pooh just "is", and hence lives life peacefully unlike negative Eeyore, busybody Rabbit, or overly intellectual Owl.
This would have made a good little book, or a comic. But Hoff pushes the similarities to their limits, and finding them wanting fills the book with stories from Lao Tzu and other philosophers and his own diatribes against modern society. Pooh gets a bit diminished throughout, and by including large chunks of Milne's text, it plainly shows up Hoff's own writing as plain. He's not that good, either, at mimicking Milne's voice, so his conversations with Pooh ring a bit false. Probably better than the Disney atrocity, but still not quite there.
However, the first chapter helped me understand the difference between Buddhism, Confusianism, and Taoism. In it, Hoff relates the story of the Vinegar Tasters, a scroll painting. One man tastes the vinegar and has a bitter look on his face, another has a sour look, and the third has a smile. The first man, Hoff says, represents Buddhism, who sees life as suffering and bitter. The second represents Confucius, who sees life as sour, not like it was in the old days, and sees that living life according to the old ways will help it return. The third man, the Taoist, sees the vinegar as vinegar and appreciates that it tastes just as it does. He sees life as trying to understand and appreciate the essence of all things.
Well, that's my version of Hoff's version, written from memory, but nothing else that follows in the Tao of Pooh had quite that effect. By the third chapter I began to feel dissent from his lecturing. Of course we can't all be like Pooh--he lives in the 100 Acre Wood, and is not subject to the forces of capitalism. He always has a steady supply of honey, pays no rent, and...well, you see how it doesn't exactly fit. If I kept turning up at people's homes looking for "a little smackerel of something," then I'd be called a freeloader.
Chapters are loosely based around a character from the books and how they stand for fallible human traits and in opposition to Pooh. Hoff especially has it in for Rabbit, but then Rabbit is the meanest character in the Pooh stories, always trying to evict newcomers to the forest.
Anyway, a quick read and not a totally enjoyable one. I don't feel much of a Taoist afterwards, but I do feel an urge to go back to the Pooh books.

Posted by Ted Mills at 01:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dell Rey, 1971 edition
When my family first moved to England, we stayed in the village my dad and mom grew up in. (No, this story is not about how I met Cthulu.) I went to that village's library only once I believe. It was about the size of a closet. The book I checked out was an H.P. Lovecraft collection. Only upon getting it home did I read the fine print and found that it was a selection of his unfinished tales, posthumously completed by various (lesser) writers. Feeling gypped, I didn't make it past the first couple of pages. (I probably also found it boring).
I was a horror fan when I was a teenager, so it's surprising that I never got around to Lovecraft until now, especially since I was going beyond Stephen King and reading things like Ramsey Campbell and Clive Barker (when he only had Books of Blood to his name).
Lovecraft has always felt to me like the fine single malt whiskey of horror writers. There's no detours into humor, nothing playful, no experiments in style. Just madness and horror. (Much like Glenlivet). And indeed that's how it should be. I takes a few stories to get into his prose and his rhythms, but once inside you begin to appreciate the fine detail and the slow pace. You want to roll the paragraphs around on your tongue and savor it.
Maybe it was my associations with that early library book, but I for a long time thought that HPL was British. I guess I was confusing him with M.R. James (who I still haven't read--these two authors are high on the list of Mark E. Smith of the Fall, so from him my Lovecraft interest was piqued).
What I didn't expect was how so many of the tales in this collection come from an anxiety over evolution and miscegenation. Apart from Chthulu and creatures that live in another dimension ("Beyond the Wall of Sleep", "The White Ship", "From Beyond"), the monsters that stalk these tales are often the result of some long past intermingling of man and beast. More often than not, they come to resemble our evolutionary relatives, the monkey ("The Lurking Fear," "Arthur Jermyn") and the fish "The Shadow over Innsmouth", "Dagon"). Both narrators in "The Lurking Fear" and "Innsmouth" fear and are repulsed by the inhabitants of the out-of-the-way villages they stay in--who are initially presented as sloping-foreheaded inbred yokels (the phrase "white trash" pops up twice here, and HPL was writing in 1920-1930 or so) until the true magnitude of their breeding is revealed.
But the true horror that Lovecraft finishes on is not death, but the realization of the narrators that they too are somehow linked to this nefarious family tree. Arthur Jermyn sets himself on fire when he realizes that his grandmother was some sort of albino ape-thing; the narrator of "Innsmouth", after escaping the fish-people in the town, slowly comes to realize that he is part of them, and his fate comes as a degenerative or evolutionary illness. We have found the monster and he is us.
After reading these dozen tales, it's easy to see why filmmakers have found Lovecraft so hard to adapt. The narrators are usually solitary souls, and the action is usually of the slow, creeping kind. The "monster," if there is one, only shows up on the last page, if at all, and by this time the narrator is usually at a loss to describe the indescribable. Plus there's no guns or boobs. However, Lovecraft would work well as radio monologues--radio being the perfect format for "the unnamable" (and I'm not talking about Rick Dees). I wonder if that's ever been done?
For a good website about the man and his works check out the H.P. Lovecraft Archive.

Posted by Ted Mills at 01:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Collier, 1986
Ernest Hemingway's last posthumous novel, this one apparently got worked on in spurts from 1946 to his suicide in 1961. Perhaps it was the sexuality, perhaps its the deep psychological depths he explores, but something made him ambivalent about finishing the book. This is reportedly an edited version of the remaining scraps of a manuscript, but I feel it holds up pretty well.
The story centers on American writer David Bourne and the extended honeymoon he has with his new wife Catherine on the Cote d'Azur in France during the '20s. Their life is sunbathing, swimming, cafes, and humping like, well, like newlyweds. But a second woman comes into the picture, Marita, an attractive Italian girl they nickname "Heiress." A very strange, bitter love triangle begins. Lesbianism is the selling point, but there's nothing in the writing to get hot and bothered about--to its credit.
At first the novel seems to be exploring sexual ambivalence and David's problems with it. Catherine cuts her hair till it matches David's. They both become very, very tan. They trade sexual dominance, when, on every other night, it is suggested that she is buggering him (how is not made explicit). Obviously, David is a bit confused by all this.
If this is the Garden of Eden, then the apple contains the knowledge of sexual orientation. Catherine believes exploring all sides of her blossoming sexuality will bring her and David even closer. She believes that by becoming like him that they can share a lover.
It doesn't happen that way. As the honeymoon wears on, David wants to get back to writing, which brings out Catherine's jealousy and indifference. Slowly, Catherine's language--what we take at first to be the idealism of the young and in love--begins to hint at a truly unstable mind.
Marita becomes the girl caught in the middle, then evolves into a saner, more open version of Catherine. It's a very complex set of relationships, and Hemingway's spare and elliptical dialog and scenes means that its often hard to notice when the knives are truly out until disaster strikes.
Another narrative enters the book after Marita arrives, that of David's short story, an autobiographical tale of him and his father hunting an elephant in Africa. He desperately needs to understand what happened to him and this epiphinal moment with his father--as if an answer can help him solve the problem of Catherine (or why he attracts similar women) instead of just escaping from it.
I fully appreciated Hemingway when spending a two-hour creative writing class in UCSB (all those years ago) dissecting "Hills Like White Elephants." The economy and wealth within inspired us all to go out and write wretched approximations of his style (crossed with Raymond Carver). But when I look back I realize that we (or maybe just I) had understood the style, but not the substance. Hemingway's characters come out of great pain that I as a 21-year-old thankfully didn't know. Relationships that devolve into vicious battles disguised as mundane conversation--that was all on the horizon. Yikes.
For an incomplete novel, it has symbolic depth to spare. The autobiographical flashbacks complement the story, as the elephant they kill has--briefly alluded to--something like homosexual tendencies. While being hunted the elephant visits the corpse of his friend (and something like a lover) to mourn before moving on. The removing of the tusks can be seen as a sort of brutal emasculation. But the ivory also pops up later to describe Catherine's hair.
There's a great purging near the end, of David's work and of his "women problems". It's not explicit whether David had truly solved his problems or just delayed them for a different, future cast of characters. But David has at least passed his trial.
Some of the passages where Hemingway describes David's writing methods feel like a glimpse at the author's own craft, especially those intangible moments in between synapse and pen:

Thank God he was breaking through on the stories now. What had made the last book good was the people who were in it and the accuracy of the detail which made it believable. He had, really, only to remember accurately and the form came by what he would choose to leave out. Then, of course, he could close it like the diaphragm of a camera and intensify it so it could be concentrated to the point where the heat shone bright and the smoke began to rise. He knew that he was getting this now.

A Boozy Sidebar (wait..did you say bar? Mine's a whiskey and soda.)

Being a Hemingway novel, a lot of drinking goes on in "Garden of Eden," a hell of a lot. And a great variety of things get drunk. Yet, nobody gets drunk. Catherine had mood swings like that of a drunk, but she's touched in the head, so it doesn't count. It's intimated that David's father was a drunk (which makes him one), but we never really see David on a bender, and he seems to not drink before (or during) writing. It's his reward afterward, though.
Hemingway introduces us to many of (I assume) his favorite drinks and the drinks of France. And he will often just use the brand name when describing a drink, so much looking up was done after finishing the novel.

Here are the main categories:

Wines: Lanson Brut, Manzanilla, Perrier-Jouet, Tavel, Tio Pepe, and Valdepeñas. Sometimes Hemingway just writes "wine," or sometimes "white wine" or "cool wine." Some of the above wines come in red or white, but red wines never get described, so I would assume (because it's set mostly in the south of France in the summer) it's white.

Beer: Only one beer gets name checked: Tuborg. Sometimes, just described as a "cool beer." Say, are you getting thirsty?

Hard liquor: Whiskey and soda, baby. This is David's drink of choice by the end. He first starts drinking it in Chapter Nine, and, as his relationship with Catherine gets worse, he drinks more. It should come as no surprise that, in flashback, we learn that David's dad preferred whiskey and soda. For soda, Perrier is named most of the time.
Hemingway also names Haig Pinch and Perrier as David's popular drink, and because Haig Pinch is a Scotch, possibly these are one and the same.
I don't know if you count vermouth as a hard liquor, but a vermouth and soda is had once.
For the real hard stuff, absinth is drunk three times early on in the novel. A drink called Pastis is mentioned once. This is "a very particular mixture based on star anise, liquorice, and various aromatic plants" with a 70% alcohol content and a milky, orange-yellow color. In an early scene the absinthe is poured into this slowly for a heady mix. Cripes. I'm surprised the characters made it to Chapter Four.

Mixed drinks: Martinis are had often, and mixed in a tall pitcher with ice. It's only near the end that we discover the recipe: Gordon's Gin mixed with Noilly Prat. On the rocks.
Tom Collins: drunk twice.
The most interesting drink mentioned is a Chambery Cassis, which is a French Vermouth mixed with Cassis, a blood-red, sweet, black currant-flavored liqueur. Sounds good.

Liqueurs: Armanac (a kind of brandy) and Perrier. "Fine a l’eau" (cognac and water). Marismeño (a brand of sherry).

And if you don't like booze there's: Tea (once). Cafe au lait (once). Cafe creme (once). Borrring!

Statistically, the whisky and Perrier is the most popular drink (16 mentions), with martinis in second (over 10 mentions), and tied in third place, Tavel and beer (5 mentions).

Posted by Ted Mills at 03:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"On The Road" Manuscript. 120 feet long. Single-spaced, typewritten manuscript held together with tape. Written in three weeks while on a coffee and Benzedrine high. Sold for a record $2.43 million at Christie's. Purchased by Indianapolis Colts' owner, James Irsay.
Blimey.
KEROUAC MANUSCRIPT

Posted by Ted Mills at 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)