Book #25 of 2020: Mindfulness in Action by Chogyam Trungpa

I've been struggling to get back to meditating daily since we moved to Panama and became expats two years ago. I gave away my zafu and zabuton before we moved, and never found a replacement spot to do 12 minutes of silent time at a pop. Tried prone meditation or sitting in a chair, but never really got it down as a regular practice. Tai Chi is of course a form of mindfulness, but it isn't the same as doing that cushion work each day, so while I continued the Tai Chi I still ached to sit still and observe my foolish mind spinning ego-justifying tales as restless thoughts and emotions unspooled themselves.

So I broke down and ordered a new DharmaCrafts Classic Zafu and Zabuton Set and had them shipped here, and used this practical little guide to restarting my daily practice. It's not really a book by Chogyam Trungpa--it's been cobbled together from lectures and old manuscripts. But it's nonetheless very useful and contains valuable insights into starting and maintaining a practice. I've probably read two dozen useful little guides to starting and maintaining a regular meditation practice, and this one has the best advice and the most down-to-earth and relatable analogies and examples. Though a Tibetan expat, Tungpa had a gift for finding creative (and often hilarious) ways to communicate complex Buddhist ideas into Western suburbanite language.

Highly recommended.

Book #24 of 2020: Cold Hand in Mine by Robert Aickman

I enjoyed this second foray into the works of Robert Aickman as much as my first. These half-dozen or so carefully crafted novellas are exquisitely wrought masterpieces. Included herein is perhaps the best vampire story I've read, about a young English girl who goes down for the Count (see what I did there?). Also, there is a murderous Siren mermaid thing with an unsmiling red gash of a mouth filled with teeth. A cheap attic flat in London becomes a prison for a pornographer when a new tenant moves in below and brings a haunting along.

The characters and settings are vivid and drawn with a master's brush. The pristine realism of the stories is only quietly disrupted in the most unsettling and nigh unnoticeable ways.

If you like quiet creepy and cerebral spook stories, try Aickman. You shan't be disappointed!

Any one of these stories would make an excellent creepy film. Perhaps someone will pick these up and script them for Netflix or Amazon, much in the way Amazon made Philip K. Dick stories into the excellent series Electric Dreams.

Book #23 of 2020: Death Sentences by Toby Olson

A few years ago Toby Olson released a beautiful memoir of his wife and her prolonged deterioration via Alzheimer's. Now he has written a vivid and potent examination of her absence from his life. Death Sentences is a series of poems about what is left to him since her death. Reminiscences blend with current settings, Miriam physically present in past tense and solely in memory now. These are evocative and powerful short musings on loss and grief and aging alone. As with his earlier work, jazz standards often serve as thematic backdrop. Toby's imagination and gifts remain in full flourish, and I feel the hurt in this volume but at the same time note its pristine elegance and beauty.

Book #22 of 2020: The Eternal Drama by Edward F. Edinger

Edinger has marinated himself in Jung's works and has added many worthy volumes to the Jungian literature. I've read a few over the past half-decade and would recommend all of them. This short volume is no exception. Its utility as a reference for psychoanalysis I'm sure is obvious, but it serves multiple other purposes for the Humanities freak: a quick refresher of salient myths and bios of Gods and Goddesses, a useful primer on the recurrence of mythic themes and symbols in dreams and current events for analysis of literature or the news, a valuable resource for Tarot readers who need to deepen their card and client reading skills...

Edinger's loose and comfortable familiarity with Jung's oeuvre and his experience distilling down works like Mysterium Conjunctionis for average human intellects makes his writing rigorous and compelling, but non-threatening and accessible. There is some Jung jargon, but if you are familiar with the basics (Archetypes and their roles, the structure of the Self/Psyche, synchronicity and dream and symbol analysis, perhaps some basic awareness of Freud and Adler) you will be able to more than stay afloat here. I particularly enjoyed the Jungian analysis of the Perseus myth and had not considered how the feminine is repressed and eventually undoes that hero. The readings of the Iliad and Odyssey are also top-notch, with asides about the sorts of people and stages of life bits and pieces of the epics are bound to speak to (or manifest via).

Highly recommended.

Book #21 of 2020: The Discovery of France by Graham Robb

We think of France and we think of an established, wealthy nation with a long history, not all of it worth celebrating. We think of philosophy, art, and literature. We think of landmarks, wine, and renowned cuisine. We think of the Enlightenment and wars of religion and Crusades both interior and exterior to the country.

But until very recently France was a nothing more than a loose association of tribes, and the spectacular natural beauty of the country was largely undiscovered by residents, let alone tourists. Robb's book shows how "France" was forced upon most of its residents, who often did not speak or read its language into the 20th century. A cartographer on a Royal mission is assassinated by suspicious locals. Beaches are regarded as unhealthy and residents avoid them at all costs. Cats and tripe are common fare in restaurants. Locals don't drink the local wine, which they regard with contempt. Soldiers conscripted into the army at the advent of WW1 have never heard of France and speak only local dialect. Much of France's tourist industry and many of its sports came from English adventure seekers trodding all over mountains and discovering things. It's a very interesting take on nation-building, and very eye-opening. At a time when France had enduring imperial experiments in Asia and Africa, the government had yet to colonize much of its own territory.

The book is full of delightful anecdotes told with humor, deep insight, and warmth. I highly recommend it. There might be lessons here for the current situation in the United States.

Quarantine Dreams: Only the Shadow Knows

I work in some nondescript agency or business, and have something to do with finance or cash office procedures as my primary function. Each day I ride a taxi as part of my duties. For some reason the underside of the backseat of this taxi is where cash is kept, where the profits of the business are held. I do not know this until one day I reach down under the seat and find a few hundred dollars in 20 dollar bills. Then, over several trips, I realize that there are thousands of dollars, and I am able to take money by reaching a bit into a tear in the fabric under the seat. I take some each day, and end up with about $7000 which I promptly put into my bank account.

Somehow, I am found out. The boss meets with me about it, and I assure him I will return the money. I do so immediately, transferring it from my account to the agency's account. But despite this, and despite feeling there was a gentlmen's agreement that I would be fired but not charged, I am arrested.

I am taken to jail. I am confounded at the idea that I am being arrested for this. And yet, I think "I knew what I was doing was wrong. I must pay this debt, it's ridiculous to think I don't deserve it." The jail is clean and modern and I am taken to a common area to wait for a cell assignment. There are many tough and unsavory characters around. One diminutive and demonic looking fellow with a pointy beard and mustache approaches and becomes friendly with me. Apparently I must fight to be accepted here, but he says he will do it for me. Having no expertise at prison fights, I allow him to stand in my place against a somewhat larger opponent. The opponent attacks first and my defender accepts his attack and then returns with vicious and quick stabbing finger-nail motions to the face that quickly disable him. The fight is over and my demonic fellow is victorious.

The dream ends and I wake.

Context

During the dream I kept associating the money stolen with guilt about receiving a Coronavirus stimulus payment from the US government when I was still employed and so many else weren't. My wife and I had been talking about donating it or maybe saving it for a family member or a friend who might need it.

Quarantine Dreams

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The first couple of weeks of lock down, when I first started teaching online from home, all my dreams were work anxiety dreams of the typical sort, like those I have at the beginning of every school year. Those were often variations of dreams I had when I was a school student.

The last 9 weeks of lock down have been different. My dreams are complex, thick, dark, mysterious. They seem pregnant with meaning, almost prophetic. I've read some articles online that this is a growing phenomenon.

Here's an example from early this morning:

I am out in downtown somewhere, perhaps traveling, perhaps in my home city, but I can't tell. I'm trying to get back to some place which is either a travel agent's or a shop of some sort. I know the proprietor is a woman and in the dream I knew her name but I can't remember it now.

As I'm walking home the roads are dark and decrepit, almost as if there were a fire, earthquake, or maybe a war. Walls are down, streets are busted up, pipes hang out. The streets are narrow and there are small row homes around me. Then I'm slowly driven to the left and off my intended path by rising flood waters. I have to carefully step from block to block and crumbling walls sticking above the flood to avoid getting swept away as the current gets faster. I end up at a highway and the northbound lanes heading my way are flooded and cars are swirling in the water, but I manage somehow to get across to the southbound lanes. I am moving between the cars which are moving slowly and are packed in. Somehow I get a taxi, the driver of which rather painfully finds a way to back and forth his vehicle into the other direction when I tell him where I'm going.

We are driving around the neighborhood I'd just been walking in before the flood. There is rain, water, dripping, sloshing and splashing all about. I'm confounded that the driver does not know where he's taking me, as the destination is well-known and famous. Curiously, the anger I feel is not internal to me but is being shouted by Tom Cruise's voice outside of the vehicle behind my left ear. He is screaming about how it's unbelievable nobody can ever find this place because (woman's name) and her business are well-known.

Suddenly we are in the parking lot of a strip-mall, but the parking lot BEHIND the strip mall, not the front lot where the entrances are. This is my destination, but the taxi took me to the rear. The driver turns to me and says "If you knock on the door, she will let you in." I nod and while gathering my belongings to get out of the taxi some drunk young men are climbing in. They are stepping on my belongings which have spilled out in the taxi and onto the pavement, and include shoes and bags. I'm trying to pull everything out without conflict but I think I might have to fight these men. I think there were three or four but it's hard to remember. Then I wake.

Context

I'd been reading a psychoanalytic manual about the ongoing psychological primacy of Greek myths, heroes, and gods yesterday, and in particular about the Anima and challenges faced by Perseus with the feminine, and how the feminine eventually derails Perseus because of a lack of caution and what that story portends for those who encounter the Anima unprepared. I woke at 2 am, and unable to sleep started listening to a YouTube recording of a lecture about neoPlatonist philosophy and its mandates for developing self-control and the true purpose of religion. I recall the line "at a certain point of life the soul requires one to stop seeking things that are harmful to Self and others, and one must learn to sit quietly and develop self-control in order to..." After about an hour of this lecture I drifted into sleep, but the earbuds were still in my ears and the lecture was still playing. Later the earbuds fell out and I was awakened by a large insect buzzing by me and banging into a wall in the darkness,  and then I fell asleep again before having the above dream, which was dripping with Anima and religious and Quest symbolism.

Just moments ago my wife saw the insect fly out from behind the TV--it is a huge fly of some sort, perhaps 2 inches long. I was unable to catch it and it disappeared.

Book #20 of 2020: The Unsettled Dust by Robert Aickman

How have I not read Mr. Aickman before? Perhaps I have, when I used to chug down enormous volumes of collected ghost or horror fiction anthologies as a teen. He must have been in one of those omnibus volumes featuring Machen, Poe, Lord Dunsany, and M.R. James...

The quality of the writing is superb. The characters are deftly and subtly realized, and the settings painted with an astute attention to detail. Aickman understood that horror and occult fiction work best when everything is as real and regular and normal as possible, until that moment when it isn't. He also understood that the moment when things go askew should be quiet and unsettling in startlingly insignificant ways. The creep of his fictions develops slowly over a few dozen pages until an absolutely delicious effect is achieved. Often the climax is as much a puzzle as a fright, a bewildering haunt or murky resolution. Where Lovecraft would have the narrator swoon into forgetfulness upon witnessing some cosmic monster, Aickman has the narrator return unsettled to the office on the morning train.

These tales rank with the best--and by the best of course I mean M.R. James and Henry James, whose ghost fictions are of an undeniable literary craftsmanship. I'd throw Shirley Jackson in there as well, but her stories build subtly and then tend toward a garish or nightmarish or wickedly funny reveal. Aickman and the two Jameses are more subtle. Aickmans's narrators are reminiscent of M.R. James' artsy intellectuals and his settings are the same country villages and dark moors, but with modern John Cheever twists and turns. I loved this volume, and will read more!

Book #19 of 2020: Labyrinth by Kate Mosse

I was on a reading roll all year. What else is there to do as a global pandemic shuts everything and forces one to work from home and to stay at home 99% of the time?

On the internets I encountered a list of "Top 10 Novels Recommended by Medievalists." I'd read a few historical fictions of high quality so far in 2020, so I took the plunge with the Number 1-Rated book on the list, Labyrinth. It sounded fine, having Chartres and Languedoc as settings, and concerning in some ways the secret of the Cathars. Why not, I thought? It was recommended for its scholarship and intricate plotting, after all.

This book is a giant turd. It is the worst trash I've read since that dreadful The Girl Who Did A Bunch of Ludicrous and Impossible Stuff series. Every character is knocked unconscious at the end of a chapter and wakes up befuddled at the beginning of the next. Every character is replicated by a doppleganger who lives in a different century.  The concurrent story lines in the 13th and 21st centuries are both thin and uninteresting. The secret of the Cathars is dull and silly tripe stolen third hand from Holy Blood, Holy Grail and thence via that garbage churner Dan Brown.

There are highlights in this novel. The sex scenes are quite amusing, with "she could feel his desire for her pressing firmly against her back," or "she moaned as he slid deeply into her." A woman with a PhD goes to a public library for research about a particular labyrinth and types the imaginative keyword 'labyrinth' into Google, then prints 72 pages of crap that you could find in a child's book, marveling at her discoveries. All of the much-lauded "scholarship" in the book is delivered by one character to another in a tedious summary of Crusader history that Wikipedia would pull down in a day.

I honestly don't know why I finished it. It took 2 weeks to read.

Avoid at all costs, unless you like Dan Brown, which billions of people did. I will studiously avoid the rest of the Languedoc Trilogy and its secrets of the Cathars. Re-read Nancy Drew novels instead, which have stronger characterization, better plotting, and less pretense. This is like a long episode of Magnum, P.I. where Higgins dreamed the entire thing after digging up the Tiki doll from The Brady Bunch.

Book #18: The Wise Friend by Ramsey Campbell

Ramsey Campbell has settled into a nice groove of late. Sure, there's a formula at work here, but I'll take Campbell doing variations on a theme any time.

Patrick was a fan of his aunt's slightly surreal and peculiarly spiritual art, despite the protestations of his own parents who found her worldview and paintings more than a bit off. Years after his aunt's death in a tragic fall, Patrick's son becomes obsessed with her work, largely through the influence of his new girlfriend.

Over time, Patrick comes to believe there's an old power waking in the woods. It can take human form but can't assume its full magical potential until certain rituals involving the earth from burial sites of various occultists are brought together. Unfortunately, he comes to believe his son's girlfriend is assisting an ancient evil trying to re-emerge. Questioning his own sanity, he desperately tries to stop what is imminent but at the potential cost of alienating his son forever.

Typically well-written with Campbell's hallucinogenic prose and paranoid descriptive style. A breezy summer read for quarantine.

Book #17 of 2020: All Souls' Rising by Madison Smartt Bell

Historical fiction does not get better than this. An enormous cast of characters and a dense web of events with global repercussions, all unspooling outward from Haiti at the end of the 18th century. I was flabbergasted by this novel. Each character is painted with master strokes, and each point of view is captured believably and situated within the complex political, economic, racial, religious, intellectual, and revolutionary realities of the era.

There are two more in the trilogy--but I shan't dive right in. This book was far too harrowing. Its literary merits are obvious and the scholarship and research in its formulation daunting. But there are extended passages of the most DeSadean brutality--nothing ahistorical, mind you--but this was a time of casual and elegantly contrived brutality. And Bell's prose scintillates when bringing the most exquisitely awful scenarios to vivid life. I need a break before part 2!