Book Review – Page 14

Review of "Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

Dr. Sue Johnson’s book Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love is a couples focused, practically-oriented example of emotionally focused therapy. The “emotional focus” stems from the fact that unlike other forms of couples therapy it does not view the romantic relationship as a form of rational calculus designed in order to achieve the greatest amount of happiness but the formation of dependency upon a partner to fulfill emotional needs. By working towards strengthening the bonds between partners that identify and transform the foundational moments that contribute to a loving adult relationship the couple is able to become more open and responsive to their each other’s needs. This focus is summarized by Dr. Johnson early on when she states that we need to “forget about learning how to argue better, analyzing your early childhood, making grand emotional gestures or experimenting with new sexual positions. Instead recognize and admit that you are emotionally attached to and dependent upon your partner in much the same way that a child is on a parent for nurturing, soothing and protection” (7).

One of the hallmarks of EFT, indeed all therapeutic interactions, is a willingness to commit to alteration of behavioral and conceptual habits. If one partner expresses an unwillingness to commit to them, or expresses such a desire but does not follow through, than EFT as well as any other form of connecting practices are impossible. Operating upon such a presumption, Johnson then outlines her theory of love, which is an inter-personal theory of romantic attachment. The cases studies which she uses to build up her definition of attachment is varied, but rather than this being a failure to operationalize her terminology I see this broad, positivistic term more reflective of the variety of human experiences. Attachment, like love, changes over time – a fact reflected by the increasing gray divorce rate – and also is understood differently by people based upon their upbringing and value system. That potential criticism dealt with, love is largely viewed within the framework of the classic romantic sense. Its attributes and operation are linked to physical attraction and basic human needs for security, safety, connection. With these we feel generally empowered, more confident, positive and peaceful. Lacking this sense of attachment not only damages our love life, but can have a huge impact on our health. Citing psychological research literature, she points out that hostile criticism from and conflict with loved ones increases our subjective self-doubts, creates a sense of helplessness, mars one’s self-image and leads to a tenfold likeliness for depression. When a relationship is good, however, loving contact and interaction with a partner acts as buffer against shock, pain and stress due to the hormones and chemicals released by this interaction.

Dr. Johnson follows this explanation of biochemical regulation related to attachment by illustrating how it is that couple can fall into a spiral of insecurity. When one partner becomes emotionally unavailable, unresponsive or even sadistic we feel that that once robust connection is at risk and this pushed the other partner into a primal panic. Whatever possibility at effective emerging from this dynamic is destroyed as a spiral of insecurity develops due to the lack of safety. Power struggles begin and making demands rather than requests is just one example of how once loving expressions become tainted, decreasingly responsive and alienating for both.

The seven conversations that follow all build upon the above theoretical framework and scaffolds on each other in a way that leads to a process of reconnection so as to create greater intimacy, security and compassion between the couple. By focusing on the emotions that are evoked in situation rather than the situation itself the negative habits of blame and the flight-or-fight response are circumvented and it becomes easier for new patterns of loving, connected action to emerge. While the book is directed to couples on the metaphorical rocks, the questions and experiential practices presented are good for any couple seeking to gain a better understanding of their partner and obtain a deeper their connection to them.

Review of "Trances People Live: Healing Approaches in Quantum Psychology"

According to Dr. Stephen Wolinsky’s book Trances People Live, you are in a trance right now. How do I know this? Because your attention is focused on the text as you are reading this. You are internalizing the symbols of these words and converting them to sound in order to understand what I am trying to convey. For the most part you are likely wholly unconcerned with the ambient sounds or space around you, and while this “absorption of knowledge” trance could be broken by, say, a loud sound it would not necessarily make you trance free, but instead send you into a “be on the alert” trance. While this example makes trances appear innocuous, at a more fundamental level they play a powerful role in our daily lives and are primary determinants as to whether or not we experience the sensory world in a present or hallucinatory manner.

Trance states are the patterns of thinking which hold us together in the present moment. They are not necessarily singular and topical, as in the above illustration, but are also amalgamations of strongly held values clustered under the general header of Deep Trance Phenomenon. These are the associations and responses that we literally embody, that is to say somatically, on a daily basis which we consider to be “us”. At one level “I” am the experience of these various clusters in a world that subverts, is neutral to and assists the manifestation of said trances. From another vantage point, the “I” is a completely fictional construct able to be manipulated to a new form by our will if we so desire. The problem is, however, that quite often our responses to large or small traumatic events are so ingrained or occur within conscious evaluation that we forget the resources we once knew and become stuck in patterns that inhibit our maximal agency. Put another way, our psychosomatic symptoms are caused by the non-utilization of unconscious resources. When something is overwhelming us, affecting us in a way that is purportedly beyond our control it is because we are preventing our deeper knowledge of the self from surfacing and steering our consciousness.

Using hypnosis to interrupt, shift or alter these Deep Trance Phenomenon allows the practitioner to both access these resources and circumvent the content issues that in other forms of talk therapy. This form of de-symptomization is called brief therapy and was pioneered by, amongst others, Milton Erickson who Wolinsky openly models himself upon and theoretically adapts. Avoiding the stories that are falsely perceived as causative of the symptoms may seem counter-intuitive, but upon a closer examination it becomes more apparent why this is preferable at times.

Instead of spending an extended period of time locating traumatic moments the precede and inform that maladaptive psychosomatic symptoms which first brought the client there, as Wolinsky demonstrates that such a narrative is only related to the patient’s present circumstances as firmly as they desire it to be, it’s better to simply shake up those help the patient realize their authorship and control of the situation through various practices of creating context. Once we have come to recognize that we are more than or larger than the source of distress with which we most often identify our entire experience of life shifts. This is not to say that such derivational searches into one’s past are wholly specious – just that we should not fetishize the Freudian talk-therapy model that would have us spend countless hours rehashing details of traumatic events that we’d like to move beyond. Additionally worth mentioning is how Wolinsky repeatedly states that if regression work is done it’s of the utmost importance to have the client acknowledge that the response to a traumatic situation was the best possible choice at the time. But now that time has passed and conditions are no longer the same, he argues, it’s imperative to shift it to a state of greater presence so that a more appropriate perspective can be embodied.

Dr. Wolinsky then proceeds to delineate the qualities of various trance states that cause detrimental effects on the psyche. Based upon the entrenched patterns of the states he places them within an oppositional dichotomy so that therapists can process them via negation. Doing this helps patients realize their control over their internal dialogue and psychosomatic symptoms. As the list is not long I will include it here so that the reader can get a hint at some of the specific Deep Trance Phenomenon that lead to unnecessary anxiety and stress: The opposite of age regression is a pseudo-orientation in time; the opposite of hypermnesia is amnesia; the opposite of sensory distorition is analgesia; the opposite of over-identification is dissociation or hypnotic dreaming; the opposite of positive hallucination is negative hallucinations. Unfortunately the descriptions of these are and I doubt anyone will be able to read it and not be able to recall their having been trapped by one of these perspectives. Another aspects of this section that I found personally moving was reading Dr. Wolinsky’s narrative of how he had come to embody the state of hypermnesia as I had similar early life conditions which lead me to the same vigilant trance state.

This particular book has been one of my favorites amongst the assigned FICAM reading and I look forward to reading more of Dr. Wolinsky’s work. Not only is his exegesis of concepts clear and the contextualization of his use of them insightful, but the processes he outlines for working with patients based upon his experience makes the knowledge the book provides eminently operable.

Review of "The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture"

Brink Lindesy’s book The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture is an excellent narrative of the some of the cycles of American thought and politics and masterfully shows how it is that quantitative shifts in general material well-being can create significant qualitative shifts in thought. Brink writes through a lens that applies several of Karl Marx’s materialist and historical categories, but does so in the vein of Max Weber. While this does at times preclude consideration of the economic factors that inform the development of various personal and social agency, I did not find it to be something that was generally overly problematic. I say this as Lindsay writes from the position of an expositor rather than an academic demagogue – something that’d I’d first been concerned about given his relationship to the Cato Institute. The clear breadth of his research into the subject, the warm, friendly tone of his commentary and the analysis which never falls too long into excessive details and the framing of his tale into a form matching Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy makes the book for a compelling read on how it is that America’s transition from a fundamentalist, frontier, material culture to an affluent, post-materialist one. For Lindsay, these reactions presage and inform all of our contemporary Culture Wars and furthermore hint at the possibility for a greater reconciliation based upon the libertarian aspirations engendered by a post-scarcity context of material abundance.

Scarcity, technological crudity and cultural under-development was a defining feature of 19th and early 20th century America. As America shifted from a society whose production still predominantly consisted of craftsmanship to industrial production there were many significant cultural, social, and economic changes. Agriculture was the primary avocation of many American up until the beginning of the second world war, the number of American’s graduating from high school, going on vacation, with an income that they could dispose on novel consumer goods was all quite small. Prior to World War II, America was still, in phrasing that we would use today, largely a second world country. World War II changed all of that and created such great reserves of wealth among the elite and militancy amongst the workers demanding a portion of it that the government could not overly resist their demands and it was shared. As I hinted at in the above, Lindsay sees the two major responses to such wealth to be Dionysian and an Apollonian, or as he puts it in his words libertarian and conservative. Increased purchasing power and advances in technology, be it in the realm of transportation or in family planning, radically shifted the realm of potential social forms. It became easier than ever for children to leave their homes and the support structures which once kept them in check. The symbolic possibilities for self and group identification multiplied exponentially which, combined with the real threat of potential nuclear annihilation helped engender new forms of “counter culture”.

These counter cultures were in many ways a conscious refutation of the staid, puritanical bourgeoisie order that had previously encouraged thriftiness, delayed gratification, industriousness, etc. Now that people no longer had to annually carry tons of wood to light their homes but could simply turn on a switch, now that people could go to a doctor instead of pray to get better, now that people were increasingly literature and could take part in the cultural wealth made available to them by previous generations captains of industry and robber-barons who sought to immortalize themselves through public arts bequests the shift of American’s concern was not on the immediate needs to replicate life but on more abstract notions like happiness and self-actualization. These were not the sole preoccupations of Americans, many still sought to accumulate wealth and status and found the disruptive activities of the counter-cultures to be upsetting. Affluence was thus not a balm upon the soul of Americans but a new battleground manifested by all the varieties of life-styles that it enabled. It is as a response to this outgrowth of New Age morality predicated on epicureanism, sensualism and a resistance to engage in banal forms of labor that Lindsey sees the development of the evangelist movement in the United States. While pulling intellectually from the fundamentalist tradition, a term now unfashionable and thus in need of re-branding, it sought to provide an avenue to channel the anxieties created by such worldly affluence. These fears over the new parent-child, racial, gender, labor-management and religious relations helped engender a politically conservative backlash that divided states into reds and blues. Funding for minor arts programs became hot-button issues and as the ownership class increasingly supported the leaders of these religious revivalist movements. Additionally, with the increased awareness of political issues and disposable money able to support NGOs, a new era in political consciousness and activism emerged.

Such a wholly antagonistic relationship was bound not to last, Lindsey points out, as there is an essential difference between the Christian gospel which seeks to ameliorate the sufferings of poor and deny the exploitative rich man into heaven with the capitalist one that seeks to personally benefit from others labor as cheaply as possible. Additionally, the failed New Left movement of the 60 has increasingly sought accommodation with the state rather than a total overthrow of all hierarchies. Because of these two developments Lindsay points out how currently there is an increasing convergence of the values advocated by modern politicos. The liberal and conservative positions have merged in many ways and this, he states, has opened up the field for increasingly libertarian policy promotion. While the form of the community may not have been settled, mutual recognition and respect of a yearning for it has been. The recognition that workers immiseration is something to be resisted has not been completely reconciled but is no longer solely recognized as the cause of individual failings except by the most intractable ideologues. Increasingly the command and control regulatory structures designed to promote economic growth was dismantled and reformulated way due the realization that it promoted inefficiencies and engendered perverse incentives. These re-regulations have not always been perfect and are still a battlefield, however many of the core values informing debate on them are agreed upon if not the form they take in operationalization. This along with the increasing fractionalization of group identities had made it more difficult for one cultural group to excerpt hegemonic control over another – though recent data on public policy suggests that this is not true and that the economic elites actually do – and that the time of polarization is mostly over due to the realization that compromise is necessary. I greatly enjoyed this book and would assign it for freshman survey courses in American history.

Review of "The Untethered Soul"

Michael Singer’s book The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself is basically old wine in a new skin. It offers up various aspects of Vedic philosophies without the terminology so that this old knowledge on how to live a life liberated from needless suffering can be easily digested and propagated for a new generation. These relatively simple answers on how to live a better life by gaining increased control over your thoughts, releasing the identities that have latched onto you and were mistaken for immutable truths and gives practical advice on how to achieve such freedom. Singer uses metaphors that are often quite compelling and while at times redundant, this does the effect of really driving the material home to the reader.

Singer first encourages us to examine our the manner in which our thoughts and emotions affect the structure of our inner energy. The are in a near constant state of vacillation, moving around from one thing to another depending upon what it is that we decide to lay our attention on at that moment. Some of the effects of this lack of disciplined thinking include fear, jealousy, insecurity, anxiety, and a sense of disconnection from one’s self and one’s environment. By putting faith into the illusion that we can have control over the events of our lives, we become disillusioned with the world.

One of the practices that Singer promotes is the immediate release of any sort of energy caused that may be evoked by other people’s words or actions. Such energy patterns, which might also be called reactive emotional states, which fail to process themselves within and stay rather than flowing through will create inner conflict. An analogy of the denial of it’s flowing through via resistance can be found in the plugging of a dam. The force continues to push, leading to increased stress upon the structure, which will cause it to eventually burst. Instead, after recognizing the energy that is created, one should immediately let it go through and if there are still traces of resistance return to the position of Watcher. Once there these impressions, called Samskara in the Vedic tradition, will dissipate. If we are able to choose and successfully practice staying always open to our experiences then we will, in essence, never be closed off from a limitless source of enthusiasm and high energy. No longer having to maintain the extreme physical and psychic state of judgment and fear of a situation, out happiness, joy and presence increases markedly.

As simple as this practice sounds, the ego has devised many a complex means of avoiding just such a practice. Instead of removing the source of their pain, people will often instead struggle to be the same. They don’t want to change, the just want the discomfort associated with their actions to be nullified. This can become quite a problem as the denial and avoidance of these samskaras will often lead you to use people as, places and things as protective shields from your awareness of this issue. Thus what was claimed to be done in order to avoid certain patterns of thoughts and behavior actually results in one devoting a constant aspect of their life to it. By letting our awareness alight onto something we find disquieting and then simply let it go back to whence it came we find a true freedom. Doing otherwise merely puts a veneer on our consciousness which hides the true inside that’s been made more fetid and abominable due to our false claims that these issues have been genuinely dealt with.

While I’m supportive of a majority of the analysis and proscriptions which Singer lays out in order to obtain increased peace of mind and spiritual wellbeing, I do find his chapter 15 and 16 to be problematic for reasons that I’ve written about in my response to Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth. While it is eminently practicable to generally withhold from making judgements based upon preferences lest they upset your internal bearings on an individual level of abstraction and to refrain from resisting certain experiences outside of one’s control, on the societal level I find such a position to be criminally permissive. In quasi-democratic societies that allot for a certain amount of citizen’s input to social, economic and political policy proscriptions, such detachment from the political process disempowers the individual while claiming it to be a “higher” form of spiritual empowerment. A simple rejoinder to such a criticism that could have been pre-empted would have been that one can engage in action designed to fix perceived injustices as long as it does not upset one personally, however this seems to go against the spirit of Singer’s previous exposition that all non-currently existent in the world social relations that are held up as a source for comparison should be ejected from consciousness. Reality to Singer is just something that “is” and we should “Learn to stop resisting reality, and what used to look like stressful problems will begin to look like the stepping stones of your spiritual journey.” I say reality “to Singer” as, like Tolle in A New Earth, the book is seriously lacking any interlocution with materialist considerations and as he ends up conflating the Tao Te Ching, the Christian Bible, Freud, various Buddhist texts and Ramana Maharshi. This misprision of these texts ends up providing a false conception of those work and indeed of “reality”. Despite what Singer wants to convey, reality doesn’t go away because you stop believing in it and even the most cursory examinations of the Tao, the text which he grants the authority to close the book, shows that such the notions of categorical disconnection of individual action from the world is neither implicit or explicit within the text.

Review of "The Kingdom of this World"

The pacing of Alejo Carpentier’s novel The Kingdom of This World
means that the life of Ti Noel, the main character, goes by in a swift 180 pages. The novel also includes the perspectives of Pauline Bonaparte and Lenormand de Mezy, a French planter, that flee Haiti to Cuba following the outbreak of the revolution. This lack of focus on the main actors of the slave revolt, such as Toussaint Louverture, as well as it’s change of setting to Cuba helps contextualize these events as not being cordoned off within what came to be Haiti but as an event of Caribbean and indeed World History and additionally seeks to hint at the means in which other “ordinary” people played in it. This subaltern perspective additionally hints at some of the later conflicts that would develop in Carpentier’s home country, Cuba, and also gives him the capacity to allude to similar developments that would happen far after the events of the revolution. Most specifically, the French planters violent enforcement of productive relations unperturbed by the moral and legal rights emanating from the “mother country” has clear overtones to the American/Cuban financial interests that perpetuated terrible conditions for agricultural laborers.

Though one of the main ur-texts of magical realism, a style Carpentier called “lo real maravilloso”, the book is also the product of deep historical research. Carpentier extensively read up on the Haitian revolution. One such example of this is the novel’s early narrative of Macandal, a mentor to Ti-Noel, a historical figure that was a charismatic leader of Maroon bands that lead raid and killed slave-owners through armed violence and poison. As it relates to this particular historical figure, the magical aspects of the novel describe his ability to transform into various animals and insects in order to escape detection by the slave-owners. This is especially significant as it explains how he was able to travel to foment rebellion amongst the slaves in an area that as a black person would have meant capture, imprisonment or, as was to later happen, death. Additionally the attribution of such potential for magical transformation allows Carpentier to highlight the oppression felt by the Haitian slaves. Non-human creatures, lacking owners, are potential sources for the spread of insurrectionary sentiment. A bird, a fly, a horse – all are Macandal because all are free. This is not, however the only way that news of Macandal’s

One of the dominant themes of the book is the conflict which exists between the Christian and Voodoo religions as well as the practices of African and European soveirgnty. As Ti-Noel relates it to the latter, the Europeans are an effeminate, weak people and are only powerful because of their increased capacity to use weapons that are in comparison to their own much technologically advanced. From Macandal’s teaching, Ti-Noel comes to remember the wisdom of his homeland and view it as superior to that of Europe. A good example that directly tackles this conflict is found in the narrator’s description of Ti-Noel’s thoughts: “In Africa the king was warrior, judge and prier; his precious seed distended hundreds of bellies with a mighty strain of heroes. In France, in Spain, the king sent his generals to fight in his stead; he was incompetent to decide legal problems; he allowed himself to be scolded by an trumpery friar.” The scorn shown by him towards the French is serious, but also a point of mockery due to the naming of the French king as Dauphin, or dolphin. On the issue of religions, the slaves see the Christian God as the God that is impelling the French to make the slaves suffer while their gods demand vengeance and the destruction of the white God that is attempting to kill them. The slave-owners come to understand this, recognize and thus attempt to regulate some of their use of fetishes. Their ability to do so is shown as being weak, understandably so given the difficulty in truly deracinating such beliefs, and they fear drums. Drums are no longer just a means for the slaves to occupy themselves following their labor in the field but are also a socializing point where songs can be sung about those fighting the slave-owners and also for communicating with distant farms so that military actions can be accomplished on a co-ordinated basis.

Judicial execution, murder and a scene presaging rape are all part of the text but Carpentier’s focus is not so much on the actual battles but the changes to Ti-Noel’s daily life following the transition to a new order. The new regime in power, one made primarily of mulattos, has certain conditions that it must require in order to sustain itself and so replicates some of the same or worse practices of the previous labor regime. Ti-Noel’s forced ejection from the ruins of his master’s house and the “rebirth of shackles” is setting for how the novel ends. Ti-Noel reflects upon these circumstances, leading him to come to believe that “Man’s greatness consists in the very fact of wanting to be better than he is. In laying duties upon himself.” From this gains the power to change into animals that Macandal once had, declares war upon the class of rulers, shifts out of human form and is never seen again.

Review of "The Mandarins"

After writing and publishing The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir won the Prix de Goncourt for her work. It is a not so subtle look at many of the people within Parisian intellectual society following the Second World War. Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Arthur Koestler are just some of the luminaries whose names have been changed for the sake of fiction. Through their conversations amongst each other and the dalliances they have we obtain an interesting insight into some of the more brilliant minds of the time as they try to sustain a certain level of authenticity and integrity as they wrestle with the circumstances in which they find themselves.

That said I was, however, generally disappointed with the book. The fault is not, however, with the writing itself but the story. The problem with the story, however, is not the fault of the author but of the historical situation in which the book is set. Following the Second World War, an exhausted France is trying to come to terms with it’s now apparent global insignificance, recover from the destruction wrought by the German army as well as those that had collaborated with them during the occupation. The streets of Paris are anything but gay and several of scenes of reverie which de Beauvoir writes about has an air of escapism to them. Understandably so, the only people with enough money for such distractions are either foreigners or those that are quite well to do.

While lacking the historical distance to be able to foretell where the then current trends in international geo-politics would go, many of the significant divergences between the socialist and communist parties and a more general humanitarian movement are brought to the light through the interpersonal conflict and conversations. While not always going into great depth, it does hint at the different values operant with the groups. As a reader familiar with the ideologies as well as the historical situations I didn’t find myself swimming in confusion, but I think that someone without this base would find this to be alienating. Perhaps, however, this is de Beauvoir’s point, however. That rather than being able to come together in a meaningful manner small variations keep these people together from uniting to become a significant political force. This infighting amongst strong egos for leadership of “the people” thus becomes one of the reasons that the right is able to come to power.

Besides these overtly political considerations, de Beauvoir also reflects on the nature of the intellectual, writing life, the nature and form of reconciliation following a war that had many collaborators, friendship, death and to a lesser extent sex. While filled with many pithy, quotable statements, I also think that at times she can overly swarm the reader with non-essential information. Sometimes it is of the sort outlined above, which I enjoy reading for it’s edifying nature, but sometimes I knew in advance that it had little to do with much else. Simone de Beauvoir’s side story of her dalliance with American writer Nelson Algren, for instance, while highlighting Sartre’s lack of possessiveness and her alienation and desire for excitement also seems to drag on at times. The little mind games that they play with each other appear spurious. While highlighting the desire for love even in a country turned upside down by war, it is perhaps longer than necessary.

Review of "And Every Day Was Overcast: An Illustrated Novel "

Uncanny is the first word that comes to mind after reading the self-described novel And Every Day Was Overcast: An Illustrated Novel by Paul Kwiatkowski. Reading perhaps isn’t an appropriate term given the abundant number of images in it. And calling it a novel is perhaps inappropriate too, as it’s length is more that of a novella or short story collection. Uncanny is spot on, however, as having grown up a few miles and three years behind Kwiatkowski many of the situations and people that he describes are those that I too experienced and met while growing up.

Upon viewing photos in the book I was immediately reminded of the cardboard box full of photos I have that were taken from cheap disposable cameras that my friends and I used to document our lives prior to the digital revolution. I was taken aback by them as his friends at the time look so similar to people I was friends with at the time. Furthermore, when I examine the photos of bedrooms I am taken aback as I see so many of the same band posters that used to adorn my own room. Marilyn Manson, Genitorturers, Jack Off Jill, Dead Kennedys, Rollins Band. While the latter two are nationally recognized acts the first three were – until Manson’s success – local acts with a strong local following by those growing up in South Florida at the time that did not identify with the pop, grunge and alt rock trends. Seeing this makes me wonder if Brian and I ever attended any of the same Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids concerts at the Button South or other shows.

Some details were different – the Miami exurbs have much more people than Jupiter – yet reading his book I learned that many of our experiences overlapped. We both lived on the underdeveloped edges of the urban core. South Florida’s organization around the automobile means that cultural paucity due to dispersion and segregation, the high rate of immigration into the state and within the state, the variety of social mores that could be confusing to navigate, especially when one is “coming of age” was the same there as it was further north.

These are just some of the factors leading many within the area to a general anomie that many within South Florida feel. It is a home in the sense that people live here, but their connection to it is almost inevitably very weak.

I recall at 16 the kids that would have their parents drive them 45 minutes to the nearest movie theatre to drop them off. I, who walked 45 minutes to get there but knew the area, would meet all of these kids that too felt so strange and out of place in what was presumably our “home town”. Strange, temporary friendships would form out of what could be called a strange desperation and we, like the people in Paul’s book, would try to score alcohol and go to secluded church or an underground parking lot that was partially flooded with water in once corner and the other with graffiti, broken beer bottles and junk food rappers and two mattresses that used to make me wonder how messed up someone had to be in order to sleep on it.

Back to the book – I decided to pick it up after coming across a wonderful review written by by Ira Glass. When I discovered that the author grew up relatively close to me and, after reading an except published online that made me feel that Paul Kwiatkowski was writing about something similar to what I am working on in Unraveling (a conclusion that upon reading it I’ve since revised) I decided to purchase it.

I checked Black Balloon Publishing’s and Paul Kwiatkowski’s website every few weeks to see when it would be available. When it was finally available for pre-sale, I ordered it immediately. When I first got in in the mail my excitement was short lived. After opening the package and flipping through the book I noticed that the book was primarily photographs. This disappointment, however, was short lived. It quickly transformed into disappointment that the book wasn’t longer as the writing was just so damn good. There is a visceral nature to the writing that brings a saccharine feel to the somewhat tragic accounts of teenage life in the morass that is South Florida. As a writer, reading this I found many instance where I found myself getting jealous. The turns of phrase and the descriptions are sticky and ought to be highly resonant with someone even if they didn’t grow up in the region. The photos, as I alluded to in the above, are not only compelling snapshots of what growing up in the alt-Miami scene in the 1990s was like but upon reading I found fits almost perfectly with the storytelling. Even if not directly related to the anecdotes or ex-post facto reflections they provide an accent that made me more drawn into the world that Paul formed via the book.

In my other reviews of books I find myself discussing plot points and character’s dilemmas and what not. While I could do that here as well I think I’m less interested in trying to categorize this as something within a school of literature or trying to unpack the themes than I am in just appreciating it as art. Though the thrust of the book is bored kids searching for fun in the places that adults don’t want them to look in and growing up via unexpected/undesired events isn’t particularly new, the format is. The interspersed pictures of notes, the short text-message length texts, the photos make it almost a collage/yearbook of times best not forgotten. Through prose that is intensely lyrical, the squalor, the perversity, and generally disassociating atmosphere for adolescents in South Florida is put on display. The frame, however, is not moralistic but, for the most part, descriptive. The abundance of aberration depicted takes on an almost irresistible quality.

As lately I’ve been surveying a number of books that could be described as “poetics of childhood trauma” – a strange turn of phrase as what childhood is not traumatic in some way – I found this a worthy addition to that cannon as well as a number of others (i.e. photojournalism, memoir, etc.). Thankfully here the troubling forays that can lead to some sort of immutable truth, depending on whether or not they repress or incorporate it into their consciousness, end for the most part ambiguously but in a manner that is also aesthetically satisfying. In this way, and because I so appreciate the photos and writing, I find this quasi-bildungsroman to be highly compelling literature and hope this is not the last I’ll read or see of Paul Kwiatkowski’s work.

I highly recommend those reading this to pick up his book and check out his other projects Eat-Pray-Drug and SummerChills as well.

Review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

My first year of graduate school at NYU I saw a number of people in Washington Square Park and the coffee shops around campus reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. Reading an average of four books a week for class and research related to my thesis, I didn’t even consider picking it up. When my friend Mary, a literature professor at FAU, suggested it to me following a meeting of our writing group as I’d been complaining that I’m disconnected from modern trends in literature as I focus a lot on older and niche works, I decided to purchase it.

How much did I like it? Well, I ended up reading it in three or four sittings. Lest this seem a review of unadulterated praise let me open with the admission that
I have a certain amount of mixed feelings for the book. While I love the manner in which Diaz brings the historical into the narrative such that the reader gets a short history of the Dominican Republic and I find it stylistically compelling, I don’t particularly connect with Oscar in the manner in which the narrator seems to expect me to. Lest this seem a petty criticism, dear reader, let me develop it and then gush on what I do like just so that I can end on a positive note as I do like the book very much.

Oscar’s character, the quintessential overweigh, ugly science fiction reading, Dungeons & Dragons playing, comic-book reading nerd that repeatedly finds himself unable to catch or keep the attention of the women for whom he falls for is – well – kinda gross. Lest I be accused of being unfair, let me convey this small section so that it be understood that this is also the perspective of the eponymous character of the novel we are talking about. In the opening of the book the following exchange happens between him and his sister.

“Oscar, Lola warned repeatedly, you’re going to die a virgin unless you start changing.
Don’t you think I know that? Another five years of this and I’ll be you somebody tried to name a church after me.
Cut the hair, lose the glasses, exercise. And get rid of those porn magazines. They’re disgusting, they bother Mami, and they’ll never get you a date.
Sound counsel that in the end he did not adopt. He tried a couple of times to exercise, leg lifts, sit-ups, walks around the block in the early morning, that sort of thing, but he would notice how everybody else had a girl but him and would despair, plunging right back into eating, Penthouses, designing dungeons, and self-pity.”

Now, this may seem trite, but from this perspective I believe that Oscar Wao’s brief and wondrous life and his eventual death come to take on a different perspective from the one that Junior, the narrator, seems to give it. More specifically, during part of the plot referred to as The Final Voyage I found Wao’s behavior to be creepily reminiscent of the obsessive gamers that harass women. In the greater framework of the novel, i.e. the incidents the happen before it and the aesthetic organization of feeling that it imbues, this is supposed to be seen as romantic. Revolutionary even, for Wao stand’s up to a policeman of a nation that we are repeatedly reminded was once a predatory sex playground for the dictator Trujillo.

Lest I seem to be imposing my own values onto the narrative and denigrating it because of that let me clarify that I think stylistically it is wonderful, fabulous, magnifico, muy bueno. Unlike Diaz’s writings in Drown and This is How You Lose Her – the inclusion of Spanish and Spanglish works. I’ve read a few reviews that say that it doesn’t add much to it but I disagree. It’s not just this that I like, however, it’s the pacing of the lines. The jump cuts to different scenes. The crass street-talk with the same rhythmic patterns of boricuas that I’ve dated. The incredible number of pup culture, science fiction, and historical references – the last of which I will talk about later. All of this combines to form an incredibly compelling medium that even though I’m somewhat alienated from Oscar pulled me in and would not let me put it down. After reading this I understand why Diaz won a genius grant. It’s fucking brilliant. I don’t think this material would be as compelling by itself, which brings me to my next point.

One of the components of the book that I also admired is what I alluded to earlier – the inclusion of the Historical Real into the novel. I capitalize this as such as the historical events described in the book have a real effect on the characters in it and as it allows for the reader to get insight into another epoch and culture when they might not otherwise have the interest to. While I would say that the emphasis on this in Wao is not as central as In The Time of the Butterfly’s by Julia Alvarez or The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende, I still appreciate it as it was these works along with One Hundred Years of Solitude that first garnered my interest in Latin American/Caribbean history and literature. In Oscar’s world the family, indeed the whole culture, is infected with the historical traumas of U.S. supported anti-communist strong men that, whether they recognize it or not, affects them all in a number of ways. Not to say that there is an excessive fixation about limning this, but that it is ever in the background is something that I appreciated. All that said, as you can tell, I greatly enjoyedThe Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and look forward to reading Diaz’s other works.

Review of "Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief"

So several months ago I watched this interview of Lawrence Wright by Steven Colbert and became interested in reading Wright’s book Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief. After a initial anecdote of the Church practices meant to illustrate them as psychologically manipulative but also helpful for people wishing to overcome a specific problem in their life, Wright opens by deconstructing much of the Church’s official biography of LRH’s early life. The truthfulness of his purportedly self-healed injuries are subjected to criticism as are his credentials as an atomic physicist and war hero. What is instead presented is someone who is deeply concerned with winning accolades for bravery, becoming distinguished as a leader, writer and thinker, someone that is extremely anxious over his many relationships with women and is constantly moving across the country. LRH is depicted as a caddish lothario that cuckold’s several prominent personages of the time, included fellow science fiction writer Robert Heinlein. The tensions displayed in LRH’s notebooks and actions is familiar to anyone who has great energy, insight and capacity but has yet to find the correct form in which to put it.

One of the more interesting aspects of these first section is his contextualization of LRH within the social/religious milieu of the time. He does this by providing accounts of LRH’s many influences, Sigmund Freud, Aleister Crowley, Alfred Korzybski, and illustrating the post-war American longing for new a religious feeling that would bring people closer together following the dissemination of the news that humans now had the power to destroy the world many times over with the atomic bomb. With the threat of annihilation real, with a greater affluence that allowed for disposable income to go to self-improvement courses – be it Transcendental Meditation, Jungian Therapy or Dianetics Auditing – he clearly shows that the drive for greater human perfectibility becomes a more significant factor in American social relations. This new religious impulse and LRH’s capacity to synthesize concepts from his vast reading in spiritual works and formulate his findings into psychological maxims in simple, positivistic terms informs Dianetics initial success as a popular form of self-therapy.

While some of his claims on the abilities and transformations that could be achieved by someone whole wholly devoted themselves to this may have been overblown, and while LRH’s background LRH is likely exaggerated claims, Wright admits that there were many cases of positive development by those that joined what evolved into the Church of Scientology. Using the initial success of and interest in Dianetics, LRH expanded, refined, codified and created the organizational structure which would then became the Church. Wright recounts many disturbing and fascinating narratives when LRH’s was Commodore of the SeaOrg and touches upon intriguing situations worthy of books themselves – such as Operation Snow White, the Church’s battle with the IRS, their attempts to take over the Psychiatic Congress, etc. The unrelenting and ruthless attacks against the Church’s enemies are both frightening and impressive – such as the Church’s bankrupting of the Cult Awareness Network (CAN) via lawsuits, their purchasing of the organization’s name through an intermediary and subsequent distribution of CAN literature that states Scientology is not a cult.

Wright shows how the manner in which LRH lived and his level of productivity on certain issues clearly indicate that though he was making his living off the church it was in no means simply so that he could live an opulent lifestyle. One simply, paraphrasing Wright, does not put as much of his life energy into such a project as LRH did just to bamboozle people. This archetypal role of false leader is assigned to David Miscavige. Miscavige is the Stalinistic figure, though instead of gaining control of the PolitBureau he uses his powers and capability for intrigue to gain control of the Church. As should be apparent, I found Wright’s journalistic prowess to be very impressive. What I wished would be delved into more, however, was more extended analysis of the dynamic components of the religion itself. Wright does touch upon them in the chapter The Faith Factory. He exposits on the late 1950’s era psychological concepts of ideological totalism, self-referential paradigmatic thinking that “blinds” one to “facts” and it’s relation to social groups, and throughout the book intersperses similarly oriented comments. AS his concern is more with the ascent of Miscavige, the rationale and effort to focus upon celebrities and the willful self-imprisonment of Scientologists it’s understandable that he doesn’t delve to deep into this. That said he does quote from a longer, comparative religion work that delves into some of these issues elsewhere and provides information for supplementary reading. Wright’s clearly critical of the religion, but finds many other admirable aspects within it. He is even able to state that “Hubbard’s throughout could be compared with that of other moral philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant and Soren Kirkegaard, although no one has ever approached the sweep of Hubbard’s work,” and finds that “like every new religion, Scientology is handicapped by the frailties of its founder and the absence of venerable traditions that enshrine it in the culture”. Put simply, people fear or are averse to what they don’t understand and a basic knowledge of the “tech” is worthwhile.

Some of the things most interesting to me personally was the discovery that some of the things that my father would do when I’d been hurt or was having trouble with school would be considered Scientology tech. I vividly remember contact assists, repeatedly placing an injured part of my body against the thing that injured it until the fear/energy was dissipated, and being assisted in visualization and materialization exercises to increase my recall and comprehension of material that I’d studied, a practice that I continue to this day. From reading I also learned of other overlaps between Scientology and my more recent studies in psychotherapy. For instance while LRH was later to categorize hypnotherapy as a degraded form of moving forward on the bridge to freedom, he was clearly influenced by it as evidenced in his early notebooks and recordings. Wright’s assessment and my own research into this particular aspect of therapy suggests that LRH’s later disavowal of it can be see a misprision in order to greater distinguish his tech from that of other similarly minded practitioners.

Review of "Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S."

The presence of fresh water, be it in excess or in scarcity, and the politics connected to it is the primary concern of Cynthia Barnett’s book Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S.. By presenting an account of problems faced by Florida in a comparative setting, she helps highlight the unique factors that inform the particular regulatory assemblage the helps compose resource management policy. Barnett first illustrates how the general, national trend is towards large water projects. Massive federally funded public works programs create construction sector employment so as to reapportion material to fit the immediate logic of capital, be it intensive agriculture, dams to power industry, etc. Following the creation of irrigation and drainage canals, farming commences in regions that previously would have been considered inappropriate for such an activity.

While the consequence of this are new sources of economic production, it also creates conflict over access, especially during times of drought, potentially devastating economic conditions and landowners that seek to externalize costs by exploiting public coffer money to ensure the continuous running of their enterprises. Conflict forms not just between preservationists and capitalists but among industries as well, with housing, ecotourism, manufacturing and extractive industries each struggling for access or control of the water. From this framework, Barnett is able to then highlight the political hypocrisy in government administrators seeking to preserve a quantitatively diminishing resource that is simultaneously deteriorating in quality due to agricultural and industrial adulterants all while simultaneously promoting economic growth through market-planned housing development. While she does address the fact that the state is able to control the market at time, as a whole she shows how it is predominantly collusive and rarely if ever punitive. The county, state and Federal system foot costs created by housing developers’ limited scope of planning. The irony embedded in this situation, that as more people move to Florida for a specific form of life the less that this habitat exists, isn’t something lost on Barnett. She states it plainly and even provides a short psycho-geographical and environmental exegesis of the fluctuating relationship between place and personality.

In close, I would think it would have been productive for Barnett to compare not just the judicial form of rights, conflict resolution and management issues related to water permitting and allocation across the US. but to delve into development planning in non-Federal regions or those where civil government has a longer tradition of bureaucratic excellence rather than base economic subservience. Barnett hints at something akin to this when she points out how Miami Lakes was “well planned,” and contrasts this by stating that the restrictions enacted by Florida legislature placed upon large scale planning projects were circumvented by patchworks of smaller size housing developments but does not pursue it. This is particularly puzzling as she clearly sees the ease at which large industries are able to circumvent local prohibitions through appeal to higher positions in the bureaucracy. Lacking the legal capacity such that ALL Florida regions disallow the continuation of low-density, suburban development and have genuine local control over use means that private property developers will continue to burden the public sector’s resources. To coin a turn of phrase, density informs destiny, and the over-reliance on state-assisted capitalist development in the region has created redundancies, reduced efficiencies, and encouraged a fragmented and individualist patchwork of communities not truly tied together. All this at a time when a greater sense of civic virtue is direly needed to address serious problems that Barnett has lain out.