Silence in the Age of Noise

Silence in the Age of Noise, by Erling Kagge, is  about what the title suggests.  Kagge is something of a renaissance man, an author, explorer, businessman, a father of three teenage daughters. For fifty days he traveled alone to the South Pole.  He now works in an office. So he has had just about the most varied experience of environments as possible. The doctrine of silence, of simply shutting up and shutting off, in our overheated, connected world, he claims, is vital.

Kagge takes us on a gentle investigation of the benefits of silence, and even boredom.  By going inside ourselves, we find out that is all we need; monks go to mountains to learn this, sailors find out on long sea voyages.  It doesn’t matter where you are or even what you are doing.  Cultivating silence within is key.

At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, etc., etc.,

At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others, by Sarah Bakewell, does an admirable job of explaining existentialism and its practitioners.  There is much to be admired in phenomenology and its offshoot, existentialism, and Bakewell provides us with a readable account of the major players.

I remember taking Krzysztof Michalski's class at Boston University on Heidegger’s Being and Time (and although he passed away six ago, BU still has a ghost link that makes him look very much alive) he kept giving us a variation of the same tag line answer as we questioned phenomenology.  

I remember coming away from the class with a lack of satisfaction; as if  the traditional philosophical questions were not being answered, but just shifted away.  But this professor was the head of an institute in Vienna, and he held the power to send graduate students to Austria as he saw fit.  So, no one questioned too closely.

But we should!  The post-war existentialism here detailed feels tired, long passed its expiration date; who cares if we live in bad faith?  Who yearns for authenticity?  Is sitting in a cafe in any way transgressive?   Post-war questions and their existentialist answers stayed in the post-war for the most part, while we have moved on.

The Gates of Prayer: Twelve Talks on Davvenology

The Gates of Prayer: Twelve Talks on Davvenology by Zalman Schachter-Shalomi is a difficult book to dislike.  Listening to Reb Zalman speak, with his gentle tone and easy going dispensation of knowledge and wisdom, is like sitting down at a your grandfather’s table and listening to stories of family history. It is a heimish.

These talks came late in his life, and you can tell that he is uncomfortable with the amount of non-Jewish material that has made it into Jewish Renewal.  This is particularly the case with mediation.  There is a Jewish mediation, he tells us; we don’t need to use other traditions.

True, but the magic of Judaism is that it has, again and again, taken customs and traditions and made them Jewish.  Just as Israeli Hebrew takes English words and places Hebrew endings and makes them Hebrew, so too Judaism with other religious practices.  It is Jewish as soon as Jews perform it; as long as the core values of Judaism are not breached (like G-d Oneness) there is room for play.

The Disorganized Serial Killer

Paul Begg's Jack the Ripper: The Facts, is certainly the book it proclaims to be; this is an exhaustively researched work about the White Chapel murders in 1888.  It does not broker in myth or legend or even moderate speculation.

Jack the Ripper was the first modern serial killer.  No doubt serial killers existed before, but elements came together to make him the most famous of all serial killers. In 1888, papers had mass circulation, and most of the population of England was at least semi-literate. Stories of the Ripper were popular, and increased circulation.  

The White Chapel murders were also perched at the very beginning of what would eventually be called forensic science.  Photographs were used in this case (but only one crime scene was photographed).  Organized investigations of crime scenes were in their infancy, but would evolve quickly after White Chapel.

Begg thinks Jack the Ripper was a White Chapel resident.  He knew the streets well, did not stand out, and the prostitutes who went with him saw no reason to fear him as they led him to secluded streets or in one case a small room.

Jack the Ripper was a disorganized serial killer:

“Disorganized serial crimes… are not planned and the criminals typically leave evidence such as fingerprints or blood at the scene of the murder. There is often no attempt to move or otherwise conceal the corpse after the murder. Disorganized criminals may be young, under the influence of alcohol or drugs, or mentally ill. They often have deficient communication and social skills and may be below average in intelligence. The disorganized offender is likely to come from an unstable or dysfunctional family.

Disorganized offenders often have been abused physically or sexually by relatives. They are often sexually inhibited, sexually uninformed and may have sexual aversions or other pathologies. They are more likely than organized criminals to be compulsive masturbators. They are often isolated from others, live alone and are frightened or confused during the commission of their murders. They often do not have reliable transportation, so they kill their victims closer to home than do organized offenders.

Significantly, disorganized killers will often “blitz” their victims—that is, use sudden and overwhelming force to assault them. The victim’s body is usually left where the attack took place and the killer makes no attempt to hide it. Jack the Ripper is a classic example of the disorganized serial killer.”

The White Chapel murderer left few clues that could be used at the time. Today, the scenes would be loaded with DNA, blood, and fiber evidence - probably enough evidence to catch him.

The Book I Avoided

I stayed away from Legends of the Chinese Jews of Kaifeng by Xu Xin, despite my abiding interest in the Jewish community in Kaifeng, China.  Some of my wariness was correct, but overall, if you let go of assumptions of historical accuracy, this is an enjoyable book.

The author cites sources for many of these tales stories from interviews of Kaifeng descendants. He obviously uses historical sources as well, and in many places (he tells us this in the intro) engages in a bit of fiction writing.  This would have been a better book had he made very slight notations of source materials. 

If this is actually a book of legends from the community, it would be great to know where legend ends and history or /or fiction begins.

It is about drugs?

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, is fascinating, atmospheric, and has long been used as an early modern story testing the hypothesis of scientific psychology and its categories of split personalities.

But it seems this book could also be about drug use.  Jekyll turns to Hyde after using a drug, and craves it repeatedly.  Eventually, it kills him. Is this an early tale of how addicted people are fundamentally different on drugs, how their lives are all about the drug, and nothing else?

The Giver gives, but not at the end, where it takes

Sure, The Giver is a masterpiece.  The pacing is perfect, the narrative drive forward is tantalizing, the characters finely drawn, and a perfect pitch tone.

But I must admit, the end disappoints ; in book marked by incredible precision and detail, Lowry drops us off into a world of cold and fog.  Why? It is like a promise has been broken.

What should she have done at the end?  I don’t know.  I just sense the conclusion does not justify the brilliant work that comes before it.

The Long Road Home: A Story of War and Family, by Martha Raddatz

The Long Road Home: A Story of War and Family, by Martha Raddatz, brings back those queasy days when the war in Iraq started to go south (2004) and troika of Bush, Chaney, and Rumsfeld emerged with pie on their respective faces.

It would be funny, if the cost was not so high.  All three sent our men and woman into a war which they were not prepared, and are responsible for their deaths and injuries.

Raddaz writes compellingly of the cost of this kind of disaster from the ground.  In many ways, her book is not unlike the events of the Battle of Mogadishu chronicled in Black Hawk Down: our troops did not have enough equipment, the right equipment, spotty air support and bad and misleading intelligence.

And because of this, a lot of people died

MaddAddam, a novel by Margaret Atwood

MaddAddam, the last novel in a trilogy of dystopian novels by Margaret Atwood of the same name falls flat on its face

It took me three books to reach this conclusion, and I will give a quick summary of why I think so:

Atwood is not creative enough in forwarding her world.  She is tied to notions like “chat rooms” when they no longer exist in our world in the way she uses them.  She should have exercised her creative muscles and crafted new technological concepts and names.

She fails to provide a compelling sense of character.  She hits the right note on some, but she is so fixated on creating a trilogy, that character development is seldom carried over from one book to another.  Jimmy, for example, is dropped after the first book.  This  makes for two dimensional characters.

For dystopian books, there is little action.  Most of the problem are two “Pain-ballers” a cringe worth neologism, who run amok but are relatively easy to dispatch.

She replaces narrative for long, long dialogues. They are tedious to read.  This further drags down a slow, slow work. 

The Torah Sutras

I am very pleased that my book, The Torah Sutras, has been published by Albion-Andalus Books and is available for purchase through AMAZON.

Here is a description of the work:

Offering an inspired mix of non-fiction, fiction, and poetry, The Torah Sutras presents Judaism through a distinctly Chinese spiritual lens. Any actual writings of early Jewish communities in China have been lost, so this book fills in that space by imagining an account of Chinese "lost books" of the Torah. Structured as an English translation of these fictional Chinese writings, the Torah Sutras tells the story of the Exodus from Egypt with a Chinese voice, from the points of view of Moses, Aaron and Miriam. The book threads a careful line that reformulates some of Judaism’s primary assumptions by recasting them into Daoist, Buddhist, and Confucian forms. This is a book for those who wish to stretch their spiritual muscles— to move beyond what they think they know of God and the Jewish religion and tradition, and move into new and unexpected territory