Belief's in a bag of chips, or an ashtray: not-so-new in bookstores

Finding the sacred in the unlikeliest places: Jesus in an ashtray, from "Look! It's Jesus!" It's a joke, right? What else are we supposed to think when someone claims to see an image of Jesus on a tortilla or the Virgin Mary on a piece of toast or the Buddha in a cluster of beehives?

I had picked up the book "Look! It's Jesus! Amazing Holy Visions in Everyday Life" (Chronicle Books) as an amusement, and over the past couple of years I've hung onto it for more important reasons. Whenever I've sorted through my shelves to decide what to keep and what to give to our local library, this one has always been in the "keep" category.

We're all seekers of truth. Everyone looks for meaning in the least expected places. That's what this book by Harry and Sandra Choron tells me.

It seemed only appropriate to take out the book, dust it off, and share it becauselook its jesus cover we're at a time of the year that's special for Christians. 'Tis the season of glad tidings and all that. And with Pope Benedict getting all sorts of attention now for debunking the legends of Jesus' birth, it also seemed fitting to share some unusual appearances by Jesus & Company in the modern world.

The book may offer ammunition to non-believers (look, they'll say, at the ridiculous extremes that some people reach), but I find this book far more important and consoling. You don't need to drive to a church or temple or mosque to find God: the spiritual world surrounds us, it's everywhere and in everything.

Like a bag of Cheetos. Take the following image, for example. Do you see it? There's Jesus, in profile, in an attitude of prayer:

cheetoh-jesus

This unusual holy "relic" was discovered by Steve Cragg of Texas. The Chorons nickname the image "Cheesus."

Mother Teresa of Calcutta was found in this cinnamon bun ordered in a Tennessee cafe. The Chorons refer to it as "the nun bun."

Delicious snack or image of Mother Teresa of Calcutta? Or both?

The next one is one of my favorites in this book. Though the selections gathered by the compilers are mainly Christian --others include the Virgin Mother in a lava lamp and a grilled cheese sandwich -- some "sightings" refer to other world traditions.

In a Cambodian Buddhist Temple located in Minnesota, for instance, the Buddhist monks heard the hum of bees in the temple's eaves and looked up. What they saw was the divine Siddhartha, sitting in a meditative pose:

A beehive shaped like a seated, meditating Buddha.

The Chorons quote the reaction of that Buddhist community's elder, and it's a lovely comment for this time of year:

"Everywhere in this world, we humans need to follow in the bees' path to make peace and serenity."

Amen to that. A perfect sentiment for the Christmas season.  Shantih. Shantih. Shantih.

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Chwast hits a Homer: new in bookstores

A gift horse: from "Homer: The Odyssey" adapted by Seymour Chwast (Bloomsbury) Can you handle epic poetry only in small doses?

Recent books by renowned graphic designer and illustrator Seymour Chwast may be your answer. In his latest, "Homer: The Odyssey" (Bloomsbury), Chwast has given us a visual sibling to that famous series of classic condensations, "Cliffs Notes."

Ok, that's a bit too reductive and unfair: Chwast does far more here -- he truly achieves an original interpretation of an ancient tale.

On the other hand, he does perform a wonderful service for a great work of epic poetry that's long on praise and short on readers who aren't in 12th -grade English class. He strips away the intimidation factor while preserving the original work's integrity.

chwast-odyssey-cover"Listen, Calypso, you've held me prisoner here too long," says Odysseus, laying on a lounge chair beside the temptress, sipping a cocktail as though they were on the Riviera. At another point -- which I have to highlight, for an obvious reason (see, uh, the name of this blog and the Waterhouse painting in the banner) -- Odysseus stands atop a "Flash Gordon" rocket ship and explains, "I wanted to hear the Siren's song. The crew lashed me to the ship so I could hear it but not go mad." That image also adorns the cover of the book.

Chwast has a deft ability for touching on the key points of the action and the key monologues -- a skill he demonstrates in two previous adaptations of classic epic poetry, Dante's Divine Comedy and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

I've seen other illustrated versions of this story -- you may have, too -- but most seem so static, so flat.  They try to give us a realistic representation of what Odysseus must have looked like, but so much vitality and life drains from the story in the process.

But Chwast follows the lead of other revolutionary versions of this eternal story (James Joyce's "Ulysses," for instance, and the Coen Brother's movie "O Brother, Where Art Thou?") to create his energized interpretation.

In Chwast's adaptation, you witness a cast of thousands, like you'd find in a Cecil B. DeMille epic. His black-and-white sketches are clean, bold reinventions of a story first sung by the blind poet of Chios.

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How do you blurb this?

QuestionMarkWoman1922I don't envy the book publicist who's trying to pull blurbs from the "Books of the Year" list in the latest edition of the Times Literary Supplement. There are plenty of raves among the 47 writers and critics listed there -- one of them, in fact, is my favorite Tolkien critic, Tom Shippey, on Nancy Brown's "Song of the Vikings" (what a great early Christmas present for her!) -- but there are also plenty of tricky, backhanded ones. Here are a few of my favorite, slightly unfriendly comments about books from the list of 47 critics, along with my suggestions to that fictional publicist who's struggling to find something blurb-worthy for promotion.

**

Keith Miller writes, "Jonathan Meades writes with his mouth full, so to speak, and he looms out of the TV like a bailiff; but I loved his Museum Without Walls (Unbound)..."

Verdict: Easy. Cut the first half about his mouth being full! Use the second half about loving this book!

**

Jonathan Benthall writes, "Less suitable as a Christmas present is Disquieting Gifts: Humanitarianism in New Delhi (Stanford University Press) by the American social anthrolopologist Erica Bornstein."

Verdict: No idea. Skip it. Unblurbable. Would you want to pick up a book that announces, on its cover, "less suitable as a Christmas present"?

**

Helen Simpson writes,  in reference to the performance of a play, "Caryl Churchill's Love and Information (Nick Hern) at the Royal Court was a brilliant scattershot fusillade of fifty-plus fragmentary scenes which whistled past at such speed that I had to read the play as well as see it..."

Verdict: It must have been exhilarating to watch this play. That's the sense I get. But that word "scattershot" sounds disorganized and messy. That can be a good thing in a work of art, and thank goodness there's the word "brilliant" to rescue it. I don't know: I'd let the publicist flip a coin on whether to use that quote or not.

**

Hilary Mantel writes, "[Edna O'Brien's] Country Girl is not a great book or even a good one, but it has exerted this year a loathly grip on me."

Verdict: Only a mighty Man Booker winner can dole out this kind of backhanded compliment. How do you blurb this? You can't. It is utterly, completely blurb-proof. And scathingly funny, too. My favorite out of all of them.

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Etc.: Tolkien's names, Pullman's grimly good

Tolkien's monogram, and Tolkien Estate trademark WHAT'S IN A NAME: Just some trivia for the end of the weekend about J.R.R. Tolkien's interest in the late, great storyteller Snorri Sturluson.

Nancy Marie Brown's new book on the Viking chronicler (featured in a previous post at Call of the Siren) who gave us stories of Odin, Thor & Company also recalled her shock as she flipped through the pages of Snorri's Prose Edda.

Brown couldn't believe her eyes: There, on the page, was a listing of the names of Gandalf as well as that courageous, merry band of dwarves that traveled far and wide in order to battle the dragon Smaug. The list was written more than seven centuries before Tolkien penned "The Hobbit."

Here's that passage from Snorri:

Then all the powerful gods went

to their thrones of fate,

the most sacred gods, and

decided among themselves

that a troop of dwarves

should be created...

Nyi, Nidi,

Nordri, Sudri,

Austri, Vestri,

Althjolf, Dvalin,

Nar, Nain,

Niping, Dain,

Bifur, Bafur,

Bombor, Nori,

Ori, Onar,

Oin, Modvitnir,

Vig and Gandalf,

Vindalf, Thorin,

Fili, Kili....

(taken from Penguin Classics' edition of the Prose Edda, translated by Jesse Byock)

So, the great Tolkien wasn't smart enough to invent names on his own?

If you've read any of the great Tolkien scholars, like Tom Shippey, you know the answer: The great inventor of Middle Earth (Midgard, in Snorri's epic) wanted to root his saga in older Western traditions. It increased his cycle's mythic reality. Instead of being an isolated, separate invention, his tales would belong to the great web of historical legend ... and live forever. He wasn't unoriginal -- he was aiming for immortality.

GRIMLY GOOD: Philip Pullman, the epic storyteller behind "The Golden Compass" and the rest of the "His Dark Materials" stories, has retold the stories of the Brothers Grimm in a new edition. A friend, Mindy Farabee, has written a review of the book for the Los Angeles Times that's definitely worth checking out.

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The 13th century's Stieg Larsson: new in bookstores

My geography is a bit off -- Stieg Larsson, the late author of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," was from Sweden; the early epic chronicler Snorri Sturluson, who wrote in the 13th century, hailed from Iceland.

Still, I think the comparison works. Both authors have created enormous public curiosity about the way people live in the windswept, icy lands of Scandinavia.

Larsson gave us the incredible, unforgettable heroine Lisbeth Salander; Sturluson gave us her fierce, warhammer-wielding ancestors (that must be where Lisbeth gets her skills with a broken chair leg -see Book #2).

In "Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths" (Palgrave Macmillan), Nancy Marie Brown chronicles his life and times, along with our continuing infatuation (and Brown's) of all things Norse. This is perfect reading for anytime of year, but especially now, on one of our (rare) chilly days in Southern California.

An open bottle of stout by your side, cigar smoldering in a dish ... you are ready.

Brown gives us Snorri's life -- the best that we can know it -- and it was an extraordinary one. He was a chieftain and a "lawspeaker," a rich man with a taste for beautiful women, as well as a poet who pieced together stories of his people's gods into a brilliant mosaic. He picked up a raven-feather quill and wrote down what he knew -- and added a few stories of his own invention. Even though Thor was popular in the Norse pantheon, for instance, Brown says Snorri was more interested in one-eyed Odin, and devoted much of his attention to him.

Brown's book is fascinating, especially as it shows how the "odd love lives and dysfunctional families" of the 13th century world were reflected in The Prose Edda, which is Snorri's synthesis of Norse myth. Loki's mischief, broken oaths, secret alliances, greed and lust -- it's all there, in the Icelandic world, and Snorri was brought down by it, too. Assassinated in 1241, Snorri was not only an important epic chronicler: His life could have belonged to the epic, too.

Brown describes the almost-magical influence of Snorri's work on many artists -- like William Morris and J.R.R. Tolkien -- and, in the process, I found an answer (at least one answer) for why the Scandinavian world interests so many of us and leads to the enormous bestselling success of authors like Stieg Larsson.

What is it?

Our concerns sometimes seem so ridiculous and unreasonable: We gripe about traffic congestion or a long line in the grocery store. The people of that region  had far more important things to worry about:

"Earth fire--lava--was just something Icelanders lived with," Brown writes, "like the glacial rivers that burst in raging floods, the sea ice that clogged the island's shores, the constant whining wind, and the winter's darkness."

The Norse were (are) an elemental people. And Snorri captured their essence, thank goodness, with ink and a raven-feather quill.

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