Battle of the Buddhas: new in bookstores

Standing in a retail line on this infamous day, Black Friday, I heard someone (couldn't help hearing) on their cellphone behind me.

"It's crazy, but I'm good. I've done a lot of shopping," the person said. "I'm just trying to be Zen about it."

That's a great goal for dealing with the shopping madness, but what does it mean to be Zen?

Ask Donald S. Lopez Jr., and he'll probably tell you that most of us really have no idea what it means.

His new book, "The Scientific Buddha: His Short and Happy Life" (Yale University Press), is all about how a scientific version of the Buddha has belly-bumped the authentic, ancient one into a corner.

"The Scientific Buddha is a pale reflection of the Buddha born in Asia," the author writes as he explores the Buddha's original teachings and how they've been misunderstood in the West. The real Buddha, he adds, "entered our world in order to destroy it."

Instead, he's the one who's getting destroyed:

  • by the self-help movement
  • by the gospel of mindfulness - a term found on the tips of tongues everywhere
  • by discussions of mindful eating, mindful children, mindful coffee breaks .... on and on.

The tone of Lopez' book isn't judgmental -- with his academic bonafides, he certainly could preach if he wanted to -- it's measured and careful. A chapter on Buddhist meditation is stunning: Lopez guides us through the meanings of bhavana, a word usually translated as "meditation" that Lopez says means so much more: "cultivating, producing, manifesting, imagining, suffusing, and reflecting."All of this, he points out, gets lost in translation.

That's Lopez' argument, and we should all listen to him because he's a big deal in the world of Buddhism scholarship. His book (very brief: about 130 pages) is fascinating, powerful, enlightening, necessary ... and a little irritating.

Fine, the person behind me in line may not know anything about why Siddhartha Gautama sat down under the bodhi tree -- or maybe he does, how can I assume? -- but the important thing is that he was trying to stay calm and civilized while I was impatiently biting on my fingernails. I admire that.

Can't simple steps lead to deeper insights? Anyone trying to "be Zen" in the checkout line at the department store may one day get much closer to understanding the insights in Lopez' excellent book.

For now, at least, they're coping with Black Friday much better than I did.

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Making Dante go Bang: new in bookstores

Does Dante Alighieri look  mad in this picture?  Well, if he is, it's not because he just finished reading a new "translation" of "Inferno" (Graywolf Press) by poet Mary Jo Bang. On the other hand, it wouldn't surprise me if that was the reason behind his surly expression.

Bang's new translation of "Inferno" either impresses or irritates -- there is nothing in between. No Limbo. No Purgatory. You have no choice: It's either Heaven or Hell.

Bang has turned the Florentine maestro's epic into a poem for our time, replete with cultural references to our world, notes and news headlines. It's an exhilarating tour de force that takes the reader by surprise. The opening lines, for instance, in which Bang gives us her own version of Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura are:

Stopped mid-motion in the middle

of what we call our life, I looked up and saw no sky--

That opening seems fairly tame. The reader -- this reader, I mean -- easily assumes that Bang's translation will be mostly an interesting exercise in basic modernizing of an old story.

Soon enough, the reader realizes it is hardly that. Bang is up to far more than providing a translation to join those by Sinclair, Singleton, Mandelbaum, Musa, the Hollanders, etc.

In the eighth circle, for instance, where the sin of fraud is punished, Bang's Dante-pilgrim encounters ... get ready for this .... Colonel Qaddafi as well as a former U.S. Secretary of Defense referred to as "Crazy Rummy":

I knew all their names by now,

Having heard them once when they were selected

And again on the ridge when they called to each other.

***

"Work those talons, Crazy Rummy,"

The whole disgusting group was cheering.

"Rip every last ounce of flesh off his back!"

***

Does this poem succeed?  Mark Ford doesn't think so, in the pages of BookForum. Its success, I think, all depends on expectation and point of view.   The main issue I have is with the title on the cover of the book -- there's the word "translation."   Why call it that when "An Interpretation" or "After Dante" would more accurately describe what Bang does?    If you're going to give an old poem a fresh new update, you're not exactly translating anymore, are you?  That's no criticism against the author: This book shows Bang at her most provocative and startling. But if you're expecting to find Dante, you should really look elsewhere.
 

Ancient H2O: new in bookstores

Realms like Westeros, in George R.R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire," or Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast are imaginary landscapes -- places that exist only in the reader's mind. Until about 80 or 90 years ago, you could have added my Southern California to the list of imaginary topographies.  More than 22 million people consider my region their home today, but that number would have stunned scientists in the early 20th century. This land lacked a single element to support such an enormous population: Water.

But sunny SoCal is hardly the first region to ever grapple with natural resources: Steven Mithen's "Thirst: Water and Power in the Ancient World" (Harvard University Press) supplies a marvelous tour of long ago civilizations whose fates rested on water and making it available to their populations.Request Feedback

That marvelous face on the cover says it all, doesn't it?

Sumerians, Nabataeans ("masters of the desert," says Mithen), Minoans, Mayans, the Hohokam--Mithen's book is a fascinating survey of the many civilizations affected by a resource that we take for granted.

Find a comfortable chair, pour yourself a tall glass of water if you're thirsty, and spend a few hours reading about ancient efforts at hydraulics and irrigation described with evocative, often personalized prose. Then, once you're finished, take a sip and remember how lucky you are.

 

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Val - thank you, rest in peace

Muse, benefactor, saint -- the poetry world lost Valerie Eliot this week, and it is a big loss.

A lovely piece by David Morley in the Guardian lays it all out: how "Val" proved to be the ideal spouse for T.S. Eliot, how she was enthusiastically engaged with the poetry world and an important supporter of many writers.

She was Eliot's safe haven, emotionally and psychically.  Without her, Old Possum's last eight years would have been bleak.

Without her, he'd have been stuck in a gray landscape, realm of the martyrs. He'd have been stuck, writing about broken stones and old women in vacant lots.  Or muttering to himself, as he does in "East Coker":

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you

Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,

The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed

With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness...

This moment, like so many in the "Quartets," is stunning. Powerful.  I'm just so glad that the poet didn't have to live there, in the dark, for the rest of his life. It's not worth it, even if it produces great art.

I'm glad he found a little light with his Val.

 

Relic, relique, reliquus: Part I

Recently, two unusual objects entered my life: an icon, and an old newspaper article.

The icon, of St. Nicholas  (good name), was made in Minsk -- the gift of a Belarus friend. The saint's holy image is painted on a thin slip of parchment that's been pasted to the smooth side of a piece of birch. There's still bark on the rough side, and when I close my eyes, I almost can see the forest in which that tree once stood.

The other item is a 50-year-old newspaper article showing a Pennsylvania church committee. There's my father, slim, trim and bow-tied, standing in the back row. I once stuck that article in a book to protect it and ensure that it wouldn't get lost -- and then I nearly lost it. I'm so glad I didn't.

It's not hard to understand why these two objects are important relics to me. The personal and religious meaning are pretty accessible.

Not all artifacts, however, yield their meanings so easily -- and a writer like Umberto Eco has spent his career examining, often excavating, the meanings in cultural objects past and present. In his latest book, "Inventing the Enemy: Essays" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Eco takes readers on another of his pleasing travels in the worlds of arcana. Is "The Name of the Rose" on your list of essential novels? If it is, then you're going to love this book.

What's one of the natural enemies of an old relic? Eco tells us.

It's science. An aura clings to old objects: when I place a lit votive candle in front of St. Nicholas, the icon glows. Too much analysis dispels the light, blows out the candle. As Eco says, in the essay "Treasure Hunting," "we should not approach...reliquaries with a scientific mind; otherwise there's a risk of losing faith..."

"As I child," Eco says in another essay, "Imaginary Astronomies," "I dreamed over atlases. I imagined journeys and adventures in exotic lands..."

That essay goes on to examine versions of our imagined orld in the work of many thinkers--among them Dante, Cosmas Indicopleustes (say it three times fast), Copernicus. It is a spectacular survey from Eco, our foremost explorer of terra incognita.

This essay collection demonstrates why Eco is among the best practitioners of nonfiction today. I wish I could say the same about his fiction. Once, he was a sublime craftsman of fiction and nonfiction: His novels struck a marvelous balance between plot and antique morsels about the way the world used to be (or never was).  That balance has tipped in recent years. Though I admired the 2011 novel "The Prague Cemetery" (despite its repulsive narrator) in the pages of the Los Angeles Times, I was more interested in the research than the story. That's where Eco's passion seemed to be in that novel, too.

Which is why "Inventing the Enemy: Essays" is such a welcome book: Here you'll get the writer's engaged, inspired considerations in the raw -- all free from any plodding novelistic apparatus.

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