When I first opened up Comfortable with Uncertainty, I was a bit surprised to discover that its contents were culled from four previous books by Pema When I first opened up Comfortable with Uncertainty, I was a bit surprised to discover that its contents were culled from four previous books by Pema Chödrön, and I was even more surprised to learn that they were the exact four books of hers I'd already read: Start Where You Are, When Things Fall Apart, The Places That Scare You, and The Wisdom of No Escape. Still, I wasn't particularly bothered. Let's be honest, Chödrön's books all say essentially the same things anyway; it's the review, the reminder, the reinforcement of these concepts that keeps me coming back. And I must say, whoever edited this collection did a fantastic job pulling it together; every short chapter was packed with wisdom that I was constantly underlining. Combine that with Chödrön's lively writing and you have a book I'd be happy to recommend to anyone....more
For some reason I recently got it into my head that I should read The Dharma Bums in the near future, so when I spotted a pristine copy on my library'For some reason I recently got it into my head that I should read The Dharma Bums in the near future, so when I spotted a pristine copy on my library's "New Arrivals" shelf it seemed like fate. Now that I've read it, I'm bewildered. What is this book? Are we meant to take it seriously? I was alternately amused, annoyed, disturbed, and edified by it, and there was no overlap in these feelings. I never felt amused AND annoyed; never felt disturbed AND edified. Only one thing at a time. And so I will take these feelings one by one.
I was amused!
Most of The Dharma Bums is written in a casual style and is simply about "Ray Smith" (Jack Kerouac) and his friends "Alvah Goldberg" (Allen Ginsberg), "Japhy Ryder" (Gary Snyder), and other lesser Beats hanging out together. This casual, conversational style had the effect of making me feel like I was there with them. Pretending I was in the room with these obnoxious party people who are somehow some of the most revered writers of the 20th century was fun! I imagined how I would laugh at the way they drunkenly ran their mouths off, so in love with their own brilliance. I pictured myself rolling my eyes when they suggested I participate in "yabyum." I thought about what it would be like to laze around Berkeley and Oakland, bumming rides off people, drinking jugs of port (did people do this a lot back then? There seemed to be jugs of port everywhere), and crashing on other people's floors. It was like a vacation to a world I never knew I wanted to visit.
I was annoyed!
Except for an amusing episode when Kerouac and his friends decide to climb Matterhorn Peak, The Dharma Bums had no narrative momentum whatsoever. Despite the book's appealing elements, it was easy to put down and easy not to pick up again. It was self-indulgent to an absurd degree. And it was pretty sexist and occasionally racist. I was expecting that so it wasn't a dealbreaker for me, but that doesn't mean it wasn't unpleasant. Kerouac and his friends are all about personal freedom, but only when it comes to young white dudes like themselves.
I was disturbed!
Jack Kerouac depicts himself as an obvious alcoholic, yet it somehow doesn't seem obvious to him. He's unable to do anything without the ubiquitous jugs of port, and when his friends and family call him on it, he's dismissive. The poet Gary Snyder is both his best friend and his biggest challenger in this regard, asking him how he expects to be mindful when he's in a near-constant state of intoxication, often wondering why he spends so much time lying around drinking instead of doing things. Kerouac just brushes it off. At one point while hiking with Snyder, Kerouac idly wonders which of them will die first. As of this writing, Gary Snyder is still alive. As of this writing, Kerouac has been dead for nearly 50 years, succumbing to alcohol-related ailments 12 years after the events of this book, at the age of 47. Knowing this cast a shadow over the book that was impossible to ignore.
I was enlightened!
I said "edified" above, because this book doesn't literally cause enlightenment. It is, however, a fascinating document of the way people try to live out their Buddhist ideals. Kerouac often depicts himself meditating and trying to be at one with the natural world, but he's also willing to admit that he's sometimes depressed on his solitary travels and has to take a few moments to cry. The arguments he has with Snyder and Ginsberg about the various tenets of Buddhism and how they should play out in their lives were fascinating, real, and unlike anything I've read before. And Kerouac's compassion for people in general comes through all the time. He laments the way people seem mesmerized by TV ("everybody's thinking the same thing") but also has faith in their ability to be better; while hitchhiking he talks about meditation with a random stranger who picks him up, and isn't surprised with the stranger admits that he's always wanted to try it himself. "Everybody knows everything," Kerouac says approvingly, and as a reader you can really believe it, that everyone is trying to be better, that everyone has the answers deep inside of them if only they can get in touch with them. But it's a process that's full of contradictions. Kerouac spends a couple of months on fire lookout high in the mountains of Washington State, where there's a daily battle between his awed appreciation of the natural world, and his complete isolation. He has moments of sadness and depression but then is shocked awake by beauty: "Okay world," he says, "I'll love ya." These contradictions and battles are at the heart of Kerouac's entire personality, his entire view of the world and his place in it. At one point, Kerouac marvels at a sunset high in the mountains, the light seeming to illuminate a hope that's "brilliant and bleak beyond words." He could just as easily have been describing himself....more
The documentary The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill was released in 2003 and proceeded to migrate on and off my Netflix queue for more than a decade beThe documentary The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill was released in 2003 and proceeded to migrate on and off my Netflix queue for more than a decade before I finally watched it this spring. I have absolutely no idea why it took me so long—the film contains all my favorite things! By which I mean birds, the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, and lovable misfits. When I saw it back in April I immediately became a bit obsessed, and procuring and reading this book, written by the "bird man" himself, became job one on my to-do list.
I had high expectations for this book; I wasn't looking for just some cheesy movie tie-in. The fact is, Mark Bittner spent decades living close to the bone precisely because he wanted to be able to devote his life to creativity and contemplation. I hoped that would translate into a decent first literary outing for him, and fortunately it did. Like the movie, this is an absolutely charming story. After devoting some chapters to his early years on the streets of North Beach (fascinating stuff), Bittner effectively depicts the searching and despair that caused him to start paying attention to the wild parrots of San Francisco. Apparently up until then no experts had wanted to study the birds because they weren't native to the area (!), so eventually Bittner was able to carve out a niche as the go-to wild-parrot person in the city, which brought the film crew calling and changed his life completely. It's all in the book, which is structured bird by bird, with Bittner managing to chart his own life and growth via the stories of the individual wild parrots that most captured his imagination.
I'm a little sad that I waited so long to see this documentary and read this book. The fact is that it's now been about 20 years since Bittner could really be called the "bird man"—he's moved on, emotionally if not geographically, and the whole thing is now an episode of recent history. But I think the fact that I'm now around the same age as Bittner was when the movie was filmed made me understand and relate to him a bit more. Who knows if I would've been as touched by the whole thing if I'd experienced it when I was much younger?
A quick internet search reveals that Bittner is currently working on another memoir, one that delves more deeply into the many years he spent living on the streets (or nearly so) in North Beach. I find this prospect insanely exciting. This is the aspect of his life that I'm most curious about, and The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill makes it clear he's got the writing skills to do it justice. Hurry up and finish your new book, Mark Bittner! Just because it took me over a decade to read your last one is no reason to keep me waiting now....more
Alison Bechdel is a national treasure as far as I'm concerned; yet, I was reluctant to pick up the long-awaited The Secret to Superhuman Strength, becAlison Bechdel is a national treasure as far as I'm concerned; yet, I was reluctant to pick up the long-awaited The Secret to Superhuman Strength, because I thought it was a book about physical fitness, and... zzzzzz. Fortunately, my GR friend David's review convinced me to pick this up anyway, and I'm so glad. I should have known Bechdel wouldn't deliver anything less than stellar.
Bechdel is a devoted fitness buff, and this hefty graphic memoir does detail her various exercise regimes over the years, but in pursuit of much larger themes: the connection between mind and body, the connections between individuals, and most especially what it takes to become a better and more actualized person. As in Are You My Mother?, Bechdel employs other thinkers and writers in her explorations, in this case some of my own favorites: the Romantic poets, the American Transcendentalists, and the Beats of The Dharma Bums. As it happens, the fire lookout scenes, which I found the most affecting in The Dharma Bums, are also some of Bechdel's favorites, and her explication of them here was all that I could ask for in a book, and so beautifully illustrated.
Oh, that's the other thing about this book: perhaps not surprisingly, the illustrations are absolutely beautiful. And it's her first-ever book done in color (the coloring, in fact, was done by Bechdel's partner, Holly Rae Taylor), and some of the results are simply stunning. It's hard to believe Bechdel could top her earlier work, but I think she has. The Secret to Superhuman Strength was satisfying in just about every way....more
I saw this last month in a bookstore in the SF airport and really wanted to get it then, but my luggage was already crammed so full of books that I liI saw this last month in a bookstore in the SF airport and really wanted to get it then, but my luggage was already crammed so full of books that I literally didn't have room for one more (not that I'm complaining). Anyway, now that I have procured and read this, I am happy to say it was worthy of my temporarily thwarted acquisitiveness. The art was lovely and most (not quite all) of the quotes were well chosen--beautiful and wise. This is the sort of book that makes you feel like you can do just about anything, and its format makes it easy to dip back in when you need to be inspired again....more
I was going to write something about how this book wasn't particularly well-written and therefore was very slow going for me, but that it might be helI was going to write something about how this book wasn't particularly well-written and therefore was very slow going for me, but that it might be helpful to people who are new to mindfulness and looking for ways to better integrate their introversion with the lives they lead. But what I'm feeling is actually more complicated than that. I'll try to explain.
A book like this is full of exercises for the reader to do; some of them are written exercises, some of them involve observing your thoughts in different scenarios, and some of them involve particular types of guided meditation. All of them are extremely detailed and, in the case of the meditations in particular, tell you exactly how the meditation is supposed to go and what you're supposed to get from it. This results-oriented view of Buddhist concepts just doesn't sit well with me, and I worry a lot that if people start doing all these exercises and don't see precisely the results they're expecting, they will abandon practice altogether. I think if we do Buddhist practice, we should do it because we feel it's a good thing to be doing, something that makes sense for us. But, to paraphrase the writer Claire Dederer, we shouldn't go to mindfulness practice with our plates held out, asking for more of the same stuff we've always asked for. We need to be open to what might actually happen.
I know this sounds preachy, and I'm sure there are people who can be helped by regimens like this, or corporate mindfulness workshops and the like. But my own experience has taught me that there are just no shortcuts here, and I've apparently come to feel this quite passionately, which is something of a surprise to me. But I believe the time we spend reading writers who are busy trying to explain Buddhism might be better spent reading writers who are busy being the Buddha, if that makes sense. Less doing, more being.
I won this book in a giveaway here on Goodreads. ...more
I am not normally one for dating books, and I thankfully have friends and family members who actually like and respect me and would never dream of telI am not normally one for dating books, and I thankfully have friends and family members who actually like and respect me and would never dream of telling me what I'm "doing wrong" (actually, I had one "friend" who did that, and for that reason and a number of others, he's no longer a friend). But I became intrigued by this book after Meghan Daum recommended it in her feature here on Goodreads. I decided to pick it up, and I'm glad I did. I think many people, single or no, would benefit from reading this. Eckel calmly, efficiently, and humorously lays waste to about 100 stupid myths and about 1000 stupid magazine articles. A welcome dose of sanity....more
I was the ideal audience for this, given my twin passions for Buddhist books and graphic novels, but I was skeptical at first. Sure, Shambhala has putI was the ideal audience for this, given my twin passions for Buddhist books and graphic novels, but I was skeptical at first. Sure, Shambhala has put out a lot of wonderful books, many of which I own or covet, but could they do a decent graphic novel? Turns out they can. I enjoyed this. The art was nice and sometimes had a manga feel, which was a cool touch. I appreciated learning about the Cold Mountain poet, I liked most of the poetry, and I was happy to learn more about zen, which I'm not too familiar with yet. My only complaint is that this book was too short. Is it short because not much is known about the Cold Mountain poet? Or was the shortness part of the zen of it all? Either way, I could've read much more along these lines. But I guess wanting more is better than wanting less.
I received this book via a First Reads giveaway here on Goodreads....more
I first read this book about six years ago, and I remember very little about that reading experience except that I loved it. This time around, I wasn'I first read this book about six years ago, and I remember very little about that reading experience except that I loved it. This time around, I wasn't feeling it at first--the memoir parts seemed corny, and they didn't sit well next to all the research the author kept bringing in. But things improved as the book went on and I think I ended up loving it just as much this time, except possibly for different reasons. There's definitely a lot of wisdom in this book, never more so than when Oxenhandler--who's an excellent writer--forgets about what the "experts" have to say and speaks from the heart. I think this is another of those books that you'll get something new from every time you return to it....more
Warning: I have a cold and a case of medicine head at the moment, so this might not be the most coherent review I've ever written.
I wouldn't want to dWarning: I have a cold and a case of medicine head at the moment, so this might not be the most coherent review I've ever written.
I wouldn't want to discourage anyone from reading this book. It definitely contains a lot of interesting ideas, and if you're new to Buddhism this is as good a place as any to learn a few things. In particular, I liked the cognitive-behavioral aspect of it: In layman's terms, the way we tend to think conditions our brains to default to those patterns of thinking, and the only way to change that is to actively work on changing our thinking. Very persuasive. One other insight has been exceedingly useful to me--the idea that if we are creating a lot of urgency and pressure around a situation that doesn't really require it, that's a sign that we should actually slow down and take more time to figure out what's going on. That's really true! Try it sometime.
Unfortunately, there was a lot about this book that didn't work for me. First and foremost: the writing. It was definitely competent, but... zzzzz. Some Buddhist thinkers have a real gift and flair for engaging writing, but unfortunately Ron Alexander is not one of them--which is the main reason this book took me almost a year to finish.
Then there's the fact that Alexander makes part of his living by going into corporate workplaces and teaching those folks how to incorporate his ideas into their office culture. Perfectly admirable, but Alexander always feels the need to mention that a lot of his clients are major Hollywood types making tons of money off superstar recording artists, etc. This, I felt, had the effect of shutting out the ordinary reader. Honestly, getting all impressed by these exterior measures of success is counter to what Buddhism should be about, at least in my opinion. So I wasn't crazy about that.
I also didn't like the highly detailed guided meditations he offered, many of which explained to you exactly what you were supposed to be feeling at any given moment. You're supposed to force yourself to feel these things? In my experience, meditation just doesn't work like that, and I don't like the idea that someone new to meditation might have a hard time with his suggestions and thus abandon practice altogether. That aspect of the book was a little weird, to be honest.
But what made me most uncomfortable was all the results he promised. If you take up Buddhist practice, according to Alexander, your life is just going to keep getting more and more awesome. He practically guarantees it! I'm not saying that wouldn't happen, just that it's not a good idea to be quite so results-oriented. I took up meditation to help me deal with some anxiety issues I was having, but paradoxically, I found that it didn't really work until I genuinely let go of the idea of getting any kind of result whatsoever. I just accepted that meditation and mindfulness were good things to be doing all on their own and stopped expecting anything else. If I had continued expecting all kinds of amazing things, I think my practice would have been crushed under the weight of those expectations and I would have given up long ago.
So I guess I take back what I said about this book being good for people who are new to Buddhist ideas. I don't know who it's good for. It's not a terrible book, but there are so many better ones on these topics that I can't really recommend this to anyone....more
I’m still pretty new to the whole Buddhism thing, and for a long time I was intimidated by zen: I held the common, but mistaken, belief that it was hiI’m still pretty new to the whole Buddhism thing, and for a long time I was intimidated by zen: I held the common, but mistaken, belief that it was highly ascetic and all about denying human emotions and desires. It took some time for me to be able to read a book like Everyday Zen and really understand what it’s saying. In fact, zen does not ask you to deny your emotions. It asks you to feel them, really feel them, without obsessing on them or rationalizing them, reacting to them prematurely or injudiciously, clinging to them, or pushing them away. When we allow ourselves to really experience our feelings, we can get used to their ebb and flow and get on with our lives without being in constant, unproductive dialogue with ourselves.
This is the theme of Everyday Zen, and Charlotte Joko Beck proves to be an amazing teacher. I’m the first to admit that there are many Buddhist thinkers who just don’t have a gift for writing, but I put Beck up there with Pema Chodron among those who really do have a gift. Her writing is simple but engaging, compassionate yet uncompromising, and filled with humor.
More so than with any other Buddhist book I’ve read, I’ve found myself repeating ideas from this one as I go about my daily life. All there is to do is what’s in front of us. There is no good or bad; things are always just the way they are. We are always right here, right where we are in this moment. No problem....more
I'm very grateful I read this at this particular moment. So, so helpful. Would give it ten stars if I could.I'm very grateful I read this at this particular moment. So, so helpful. Would give it ten stars if I could....more
While I would be more inclined to recommend When Things Fall Apart to someone who's completely new to these concepts, this was of course still extremeWhile I would be more inclined to recommend When Things Fall Apart to someone who's completely new to these concepts, this was of course still extremely valuable, and funnier than the others of hers I've read....more
Loading...
