Irregular Books

In 1953, the Garrard Publishing Company released a book entitled Far East Stories For Pleasure Reading, written by Edward Dolch, Marguerite Dolch and Beulah Jackson. In this book, a chapter called The Maker of Puppets features a tale that is remarkably like Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle.

The main character of the story, Ali ben Yunes, has a nag of a wife. He wanders off into the woods, just like Rip Van Winkle. Instead of coming across the ghost of Henry Hudson, Ali ben Yunes happens upon a pair of people playing a game with “puppets” on a board, which looks a lot like chess, in a deep woodland clearing. Like Rip Van Winkle, Ali ben Yunes comes back to his town to find it radically changed, with years gone by.

The similarities seem too strong to dismiss, but which story came first? Did this book of Asian tales intentionally bring the story of Rip Van Winkle into an Indonesian context, or did Washington Irving update an Indonesian folktale to American revolutionary times?

Irregular Parents who want to go beyond the Sandra Boynton realm of books every kid gets from Barnes and Noble can seek out a used copy of The Earth Is Good, ISBN 0590350102, written by Michael Demunn, who works with the Finger Lakes Land Trust, and Illustrated by Jim McMullan.

This is one book that’s not likely to be made into a movie with a goofy expanded plotline and massive associated merchandising. It’s simple. It’s short. That’s especially needed in a time when so many books for kids have buttons and zooming accessory features.

The Earth is good - and we’re good when we’re with the Earth, instead of being trapped inside the little caves of our homes and offices.

The watercolor illustrations show a boy and a dog, and the landscape they live in, which often blends right through the characters, as if they are blending into the Earth around them.

No fast pacing. No long-winded sentences. Calming. Reassuring. Perfect for bedtime.

The Earth Is Good is good.

The defining line from How To Be A Bad Birdwatcher, by Simon Barnes: “Looking at birds is a key: it opens doors, and if you choose to go through them you find you enjoy life more and understand life better.”

As I read it, How To Be A Bad Birdwatcher isn’t really about birdwatching particularly, but about the practice of watching in general, as considered through the specific case of people who enjoy watching birds. It’s a meditation on the philosophy of knowledge - not the end of having it so much as the process of gathering it.

Another reflection of the idea is that the word auspicious, which is now generally meant to refer to something suggesting positive or remarkable fortune, originally comes from the Latin term for divination through the observation of birds. That’s something that’s done worldwide - by the native people’s of Alaska, who watch Raven for signals of secret knowledge.

Not knowing is as great as mastery, in the open attitude exhibited by Barnes. Fanatical birdwatchers will try to prove their worth by their exhaustive knowledge of birds, but Barnes is as eager in excitement at seeing a bird previously unknown.

In the birds themselves, but even more in our posture of watching them, we come to understand ourselves. That makes How To Be A Bad Birdwatcher worth reading even for people who couldn’t care less about birds.

In this video, author Max Blumenthal, who covers the Religious Right, discusses a fundamental resource for thoughtful progressives: The True Believer by Eric Hoffer.

Another discussion of The True Believer:

If you’re looking for something truly irregular to read, let me suggest the Ozark Howler comic book. A surfer from Santa Barbara gets sent off to the Ozark Mountains, which seems like a curse enough. Then, however, he discovers that he’s inherited a curse from his father. He begins to transform into a shape-shifting creature called the ozark howler.

Teenager discovers that he is going to become a shape-shifting monster like his father. How very psychological. I think it’s safe to say that this is one plot you have not read before - except for maybe The Graduate.

A couple years ago, I found the web site of the Progressive Book Club, only to find that the PBC wasn’t actually up and running. It was only in the planning stages. I signed up to get updates by email, but I never got any email announcing the beginning of the book club’s business, so I assumed it never became operational.

I was wrong. It took me a while to check for sure, but when I did today, I saw that the Progressive Book Club is fully online… and not just at the Progressive Book Club web site. They’re on YouTube as well, where they offer interviews with politically progressive authors such as the following one with Antonia Juhasz, author of The Tyranny of Oil:

In January of 2009, religious author Clemens Sedmak will have a new book released for sale. It’s called “Religious Intelligence: Developing Religious Literacy in a Secular World”. Introducing the concept of the book, publicity materials state,

“This book offers an exploration of religious intelligence in an era where public and personal belief has become inseparable. Since the events of 9/11 it has become increasingly evident that it is impossible to regard religion as a matter of personal belief alone and ban it from the public sphere. Current debates about veils and headscarfs in Germany, France and England, caricatures of the prophet Mohamed in Denmark, and the public reaction to Pope Benedict’s Regensburg lecture on 9/12/2006 clearly show the need for better concepts of dealing with religiously sensitive issues, and people.”

This paragraph in itself reveals a slippery grasp on the concept of intelligence.

How have public and personal belief become inseparable? Huge numbers of people separate them quite effectively, and many more people choose not to engage in religious belief at all, without any harm to themselves.

What evidence is there that it is impossible to regard religion as a matter of personal belief alone? Plenty of people regard religion as a merely personal matter. Does the author suggest that government mandates on religious practice are inevitable?

How do the religious controversies cited indicate that there is a need for improvement in dealing with “sensitive” religious issues? Couldn’t it be that the problem is the sensitivity itself, and not the lack of coddling for it? The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were religiously inspired, as were the other controversies cited. The common crisis in these controversies comes from individuals trying to impose their personal beliefs in the public sphere. So, Sedmak’s solution seems to be part of the genesis of the problem.

Sedmak seeks to convince people that there is an innate “religious intelligence” in the human brain that needs to be understood. In making this argument, however, Sedmak fails to understand the concept of intelligence itself, by mixing it up in belief. It’s ironic that Sedmak should choose to cite the Regensburg lecture by Pope Benedict, given that a significant purpose of that lecture was to blast the separation of church and state in secular societies, and attack academics for attempting to preserve the separation of intellectual thought from religious faith. Benedict announced that the Catholic Church seeks to “overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable”.

To mix reason with the empirically unverifiable is to make it unreasonable. Likewise, to propose that faith is a form of intelligence is to suggest that authority and tradition are comparable to skeptical inquiry. We might as well talk about scientific religion as to discuss religious intelligence.

Religious authorities have tried for generations now to co-opt the power of secular society for their own uses, inventing unintelligent chimaeras such as Creationism, Intelligent Design, and faith-based initiatives in an attempt to grab once more the worldly power that they lost long ago due to their incompetence and barbarity. The intelligent choice is to leave religious concepts in the realm of private, personal belief, and preserve the public square as a place where reasoned, truly intelligent arguments based on empirically verifiable reality are required to set common policies for the government of the whole.

In the waning days of summer, as the weight of September comes near, my mind turns to the weird of the world. Here’s a summertime wish list of weird books:

- Exploring the Supernatural: the weird in Canadian Folklore

- Weird Tales from Northern Seas

- The Book of Weird

- Wyllard’s Weird

- Asian Horror Encyclopedia

The Conservatives Have No Clothes, by Greg Anrig, offers a positive view of politics in America. In this vision, right wing ideology has failed, and will inevitably continue to fail. The main purpose of the book is to explain “Why conservatives can’ t govern – and why conservative ideas will continue to flop”.

That’s sweet and rosy and all, but how is it that “conservative” ideas are flopping? Right wing ideology is expanding, not contracting. Even Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee for President, is promoting many right wing ideas: “Faith-based” religious programs paid for by the government, offshore drilling, the death penalty and warrantless wiretapping of Americans, for example.

The following video offers a rather simplistic approach, claiming that progressive ideas are based on real experiences, whereas “conservative” ideas are based on clever distortion of reality. It’s essentially an argument that reality should defeat marketing every time. The weakness of that idea is in itself proof enough that marketing matters.

Anrig works for a prominent think tank. That sounds like an asset, but it turns into a burden when Anrig cannot break away from logical arguments about what ideas people should support. If only Anrig could embrace the power of persuasion, he’d be a lot closer to providing a useful plan for progressive regrouping. In politics, being correct matters much less than being perceived as correct.

I wanted to enjoy The Conservatives Have No Clothes, but instead I found it to be detached and unconvincing, offering a cold and clumsy approach to politics rather than a plan for grabbing people’s attention. I can’t recommend it.

It’s a sad economy for almost everyone - including writers. Sales are down, of books, magazines and newspapers. Reading is now regarded as something to do with discretionary income.

Doing some old-fashioned web surfing this evening, I came across a site called Get A Freelancer, where writers can bid for the privilege of working on freelance projects. My eye was immediately caught by the extremely low rate of pay that these writers are competing for.

One bid offered “10 articles, 500 words each” - for just fifty dollars. That’s five dollars for a 500-word article.

For writers looking to sustain themselves, there has to be a better way. Don’t stop writing that book.