review Archives - Page 3 of 8 - Inside the Ordinary

Prozac or a Sixteen-Question Rx for Spiritual Health?

30 May 2014 By knowlengr

Spiritual Connection in Daily Life

Consider this fact: 70% of Americans are on at least one prescription drug, and more than half are on at least two prescription medications. Most common: antibiotics, antidepressants and painkillers. The need for medication isn’t likely to disappear anytime soon, but a skeptical look at this dependency – especially for antidepressants — should be undertaken with regularity. Should some of those patients take greater responsibility for their spiritual health? There’s little opposition to the opinion that physical exercise is essential for human health. But would more exercise alone help the depressed, disillusioned, despair-filled as well as the listless, moody or uninspired?

Most people are destined to spend some time wandering through spiritual deserts, whether through sadness, loss or chronic disaffection. Whether Prozac can be helpful in these situations is debatable (which is not to argue against a biochemical basis for severe depression), but a prescription alone is unlikely to weaken the hold of spiritual distress.

It’s a troubled landscape that Lynn Underwood’s book visits, wielding an experimentally investigated survey instrument, the Daily Spiritual Experience Scale (DSES). Using a combination of intuition, consultation with religious and spiritual leaders and personal experience, the DSES includes questions such as “I am spiritually touched by the beauty of creation,” “I experience a connection to all of life,” “How close to you feel to God / the divine” and “I feel a selfless caring for others.”

Image Credit: Helga Weber via Flickr

Most will find Underwood’s Spiritual Connection in Daily Life to be a trusted guide, offering a quiet thought or a gentle hand — acknowledging the many ways this journey can be taken. Instead of the light BizSpeak style of a Steven Covey Seven Habits text or Gary Chapman’s 5 Love Languages, Underwood tackles the double challenge of writing for a general audience while offering as many evidence-based suggestions as the research will allow. Unlike many texts in this genre, Spiritual Connection offers a substantial bibliography that’s fully linked to references in the text. To the extent that these publications aren’t behind paywalls – a lamentable obstacle – readers should accept the author’s invitation to at least read the abstracts.

What about the existing psychological research? Is it thorough enough? Does it adequately address the different channels, vectors, language, contexts on which human emotions can operate? Perhaps not, but the blame for this lies far beyond Ms. Underwood or the limitations of this book.

The U.S. is a pro forma religious society – in which many Americans declare themselves religious but are not deeply engaged with religious institutions. Secular concerns dominate, and that dominance is rarely contested. There’s plenty of room for practical spiritual advice to counter this, but those voices are less often heard, sometimes for good reason. The opinions can seem irrelevant, steeped in dogma or seeded with Pollyanna platitudes.

Spiritual Connection works hard to engage readers with a conversational style and frequent invitations to write out responses. Can this work? Or are readers too passive, too disengaged with their inner dialoguist?

A strength of the book is its diligent attempt to bridge the gap between atheists, agnostics, deists, believers from the Abrahamic religions, Buddhists – and more – by quoting from practitioners, specialists, monks and especially poets.

This latter emphasis on poetry is clear early in the text. She quotes Christian Wiman, editor at Poetry:

“It is as if each of us were always hearing some strange, complicated music in the background of our lives, music which, so long as it remains in the background, is not simply distracting but manifestly unpleasant, because it demands the attention we are giving to other things.”

Later, seeking to revive readers’ sense of the transcendent in the “beauty of creation,” she quotes Seamus Heaney in “Postscript”:

You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things
pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

When speaking of the longing for closeness, she quotes Stevie Smith:

There is a God in whom I do not believe
Yet to this God my love stretches.

To introduce a section on mercy, she quotes the Bard’s Merchant of Venice:

The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

When considering how to find a balance between acceptance and engagement, she reminds us of Wendell Berry’s “A Spiritual Journey,” “a journey of one inch / very arduous and humbling and joyful.”

Ms. Underwood shares experiences from her own life to strengthen the importance of these issues. She writes of meeting a Hindu physician, of a conference in Greece held to consider the nature of the human person, of memorable pop songs (Supertramp’s “Even in the Quietest Moments,” Nina Simone’s “In the Morning”), of her prior work as a cancer researcher, of her years in Belfast, and her feelings for her daughters. These anecdotes are minor asides modestly woven into the ideas of others. In one infrequent stretch, she writes: “In my own life I often block love coming in, restraining its power. One reason is that I don’t trust – other people, God. Another is that I do not want to see myself as needing this love.”

One hungers for even more of the personal from the author – that she had accepted the risk of an excessively idiosyncratic spirituality.

This book should not be read in a single sitting. To write on this topic, any writer encounters the Too Many Sweets problem. Just as with a diet of only sweet desserts, too much spiritual instruction can saturate the senses — a small problem easily remedied by a few minutes’ exposure to one of the omnipresent US crime dramas – real life or otherwise.

Return from a journey back to that grim storytelling genre. Read one of the many passages on attention in Spiritual Connection. Do it, for instance, by responding to what Underwood calls the “tradition of apophatic theology that urges that it is in knowing what God is not that we can best come close to God or in union with the divine.” Embrace secular instincts as clues of the transcendent life strewn about in the landscape. Consider them through the lens of sixteen questions.

“Return to the freshness of your experience,” she writes. Discover “generativity” in “the little bursts of brilliance in daily life.” This book holds many such little bursts.

Image credit: Giles Colborne via Flickr

Lynn Underwood is my cousin.

Mark Underwood writes about knowledge engineering, Big Data security and privacy as @knowlengr and about music and literature as @darkviolin. Also on LinkedIn.

Personalized Adware: Top-Tier Crime Drama set in Grippingly Realistic Cyber Future #poetry

29 May 2014 By knowlengr

Tomorrow and Tomorrow (Thomas Sweterlitsch, Berkeley 2014) explodes in a no-man’s land between technology’s shiny terrain and the unpredictable depth of desire.

I’m a dystopia skeptic. Not that terrible events aren’t in our future, not that we haven’t already spoiled this planet – perhaps irretrievably – and not that we aren’t moving ahead with blithe indifference. Rather it’s that the dystopias one encounters in fiction quickly veer wildly off from sensible trajectories in the direction of fantasy. The tide of implausibility (or simple disagreement about the forecasts) works against an author’s craft. One is asked to accept otherwise interesting characters in scenes painted with low budget Dunn-Edwards.

By contrast, the dystopia in Tomorrow and Tomorrow is well thought out. Walgreens is there selling THC cigarettes, the protagonist stays in a Bay area Econolodge and he attends a “PodCamp” session called “Generating a Realistic Income with WordPress and Affiliate Marketing.” Believability is enhanced by presenting a preponderance of the present along with the speculative. True, this is a dangerous game. Brands come and brands go, and non-U.S. readers may chafe at the references to unfamiliar names, but Sweterlitsch strikes a persuasive balance. His future technologies are commerce-ridden, under constant attack from malware, subject to bandwidth constraints and take into account where the increasingly wide Digital Divide will leave characters that inhabit less well-to-do urban areas. The heterogeneity of the imagined future is one of the novel’s strengths.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow’s tomorrow is not only about ecommerce superimposed on a Minority Report set with Facebook Likes, Twitter hash tags, Bit Torrent, alerts, “augs” (augmented reality apps), drones and omnipresent Big Data pushed into virtual reality scenes rendered by neurochemically connected devices. Its protagonist and several other characters have a literary or artistic inclination. Students of poetry will find references to William Blake, W.H. Auden, Sylvia Plath, Philip Larkin, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Wallace Stevens and of course chapbooks. Derrida and Camille Paglia are there, too, along with a Kahlo restaurant.

Antihero Dominic is a curious mix of humanities intellectual, obsessive-compulsive, detective and facile – if not insightful – user of the technology that enervates this drama. To some extent, it’s a crime drama with superficially clear lines of good and evil, though a closer reading blurs those lines. His story reveals a hormone-fed, misogynistic world where true crime pornography is ever-present and full-voiced — marginal but much less than today. Coexisting with it are the usual antidotes: literalist religion and histrionic promise of salvation.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow features detailed, affectionate descriptions of Pittsburgh landmarks — the 16th St Bridge, Liberty Tunnel, 376 overpass and CMU’s Porter Hall. Those who are familiar with the city may find passages in this book deeply disturbing. But these and other contemporary references are representative anchor points in this novel, which achieves more successfully than most in its genre an intentional blurring of real and cyber life. The cyber-fusion of remembered scenes (or just sounds, smells, the sensation of clothing) with scenes constructed from VR tech was a powerful technique used often in the novel, but it pushed hard for further suspension of belief.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow (cover)

Nonetheless, the novel keeps readers wondering what’s real, what’s remembered or imagined, what’s VR, and what’s VR that’s been tampered with. It not only asks readers to examine a corruptible, if not already corrupted part of themselves, but takes graphic sexual violence to the level of a cultural force beyond the frame of a crime drama. It’s almost too powerful, at times overshadowing the love story that occupies many more pages of the novel.

In the end, I’m unsure whether Blake’s “soul of sweet delight / can never pass away” (Visions of the Daughters of Albion). The journal-keeping, long-narrative, verse-quoting heroes of this dark imagining seem passively, if not happily, ensconced on the sidelines of a future. This is a future perhaps seen as “petty” in the largesse of poetry, but is on a horizon that is anything but slow-moving.

Every literary-minded technologist should read this. Both of you.

Advance copy provided by the publisher and Amazon Vine.

Mark Underwood writes about knowledge engineering, Big Data security and privacy as @knowlengr and about music and literature as @darkviolin. Also on LinkedIn.

David Orr on Collected Poems by Louis MacNeice

29 May 2014 By darkviolin

Louis MacNeice was an early 20th century poet who was well-known in his time but is lightly read today in the U.S. David Orr makes the case for an adaptation in this perception.

Review’s Review

Book Collected Poems by Louis MacNeice (Wake Forest Press, 2013)

Read the full New York Times Book Review here . . .

Mark Underwood writes about knowledge engineering, Big Data security and privacy as @knowlengr and about music and literature as @darkviolin. Also on LinkedIn.

A Time for Traveling, a Time for Seeing

11 April 2014 By knowlengr

Brashares, Ann. The Here and Now, Random House Delacorte Press, 2014.

No longer the huge fan of science fiction I once was – at least in its traditional forms – and completely uneducated about the “YA” genre, I worried about giving this book a fair treatment. Add to that, the Random House web site classifies this book as “Juvenile Fiction – Girls & Women.” Luckily, chick flicks generally appeal to me (e.g., “Paradise” or “Le Grand Chemin”), so I braved the waters. Easing this plunge was its setting in the NYC greater metro area, including scenes set at nearby Jones Beach and the Meadowbrook Parkway.

The Here and Now by Ann Brashares

The clever title embraces a common poetic trope (living in the moment, for you neophyte Buddhists), and happily, the plot of The Here and Now had enough momentum and who’s who mystery to keep my attention through the pothole-filled roadbed of teen dialog.

Here is the flavor of the latter. Preena is the book’s teen heroine:

His eyes are serious on mine. “Listen, Prenna. Do you know how long I’ve loved you? Being with you is not going to hurt me. I refuse to believe it.”

But what if –?”

“And you know what the truth is?”

“What?”

“If I could make love to you right now, I wouldn’t mind if I died.”

My eyes are teary, but I can’t help smiling. “Well, I would mind, I really would.”

But interspersed with this forgettable dialog, which usually stops just short of hackneyed, is this:

“They just scroll through these faces again and again. But most of us have a sense of the story behind each face. We understand, without saying so, the overrepresentation of the fragile, the wayward and the incompliant members of our community up there on that screen.”

The juvenile-in-transition narration, captured in passages like these, can be downright enlightened:

“I am amazed by the lushness, the generosity of it, all the things you can eat and plant and pick, the places you can swim. People here act like the great things have already been lost, but they are wrong. They have so much still to lose” (Ch. 3).

“So many mornings I’ve woken with the burden of reassimilating sadness and loss” (Ch 16).

“Lying here like this, I can imagine happiness. Not a kicky, bright kind, but a full almost aching kind, both dark and light. I can see the whole world in this way. I can imagine extending the feeling to other places and parts of the day. I can imagine holding it in my pocket like a liens, and bringing it out so that I can look through it and remember again and again the world that has this feeling in it” (Ch 14).

The Here and Now features a few packaged anomalies and anachronisms – most notably, letter-writing, which surely a more advanced society would have fully dispensed with by, say 2070 or so. The letters are accompanied by an easily anticipated Luddite commentary: “My father loved paper, even from before. . . A paper is an object. An actual thing. It can’t be modified, overwritten, updated, refreshed, hacked or anything else. It is fragile but it’s a snapshot of history . . .”

Prenna and Ethan, the two lead characters, straightforwardly appeal to readers’ weakness for the underdog and the outsider. Both characters are strange, slightly antisocial, but not so strange as to stray far from the small universe of high school; we are not spared decisions about makeup, and the appeal of Tic Tacs and bacon cheeseburgers.

The book’s time travel premise calls for a modest splashing of futurism. Accordingly, it includes “gismos” like iMemory (a record-all device) and the usual dystopian complement of viruses, rising sea levels and food shortages. These are also delivered in predictable, but not terribly heavy-handed fashion. (The novel’s blood plague of 2087 dovetailed nicely with this review’s contemporaneous New York Times story about a virus thawed from the Siberian permafrost.)

The novel’s pleasures come as the time-twisted plot line is unwound, but also as Preena’s narrator-voice rises above the ordinary.

“I look up at the glorious pink moon gazing at herself in the dark water. It makes my heart stir again. It’s not a moon to take aim at; it’s a generous moon with light enough to bathe in.”

“No matter how our hearts break, we bend toward life, don’t we? We bend toward hope” (Ch 26).

“But the thing is, no one really believes in the future. Do they? It’s like believing in your own death. You can’t do it. Nobody can. Not even us, who have seen it all with our eyes” (Ch. 17).

As Preena notes, even a broken clock is right twice a day. So it is with The Here and Now. The discordant language and predictable scenes are present, but the novelist finds a way – here and now – to get it right. What’s right is not where the characters have traveled. It’s what they can see.

Advance complimentary copy provided by the publisher via NetGalley.

Mark Underwood writes about knowledge engineering, Big Data security and privacy as @knowlengr and about music and literature as @darkviolin. Also on LinkedIn.

Two Cultures, Version 1.1

14 December 2013 By knowlengr

The Posthuman by Rosi Braidotti

The theme introduced in C.P. Snow’s prescient The Two Cultures (Canto Classics) was a powerful one that continues to the day. The expectation that The Posthuman would reflect this ongoing process was confirmed.

As Braidotti says early in The Posthuman:

“The crisis of the human and its posthuman fallout has dire consequences for the academic field most closely associated with it — the Humanities. In the neo-liberal social climate of most advanced democracies today, Humanistic studies have been downgraded beyond the `soft’ sciences level, to something like a finishing school for the leisurely classes. Considered more of a personal hobby than a professional research field, I believe that the Humanities are in serious danger of disappearing from the twenty-first century European university curriculum (p. 10).”

This complaint, which is largely apt in this reviewer’s judgment, is repeated often. It appears again in a largely appropriate rant against the current state of university humanities curricula:

“As the professoriate and students’ representative bodies lost their powers of governance to neo-liberal economic logic, the Humanities dispersed their foundational value to become a sort of luxury intellectual consumer good (p. 178).”

The complaint is not overstated, despite the rhetorical tone Braidotti adopts here and elsewhere. The Humanities, especially as reflected in academia, have retreated inward. That retreat sometimes plays out as Luddism, sometimes as indifference to events in the broader technology- and globalization-driven culture, and sometimes as helpless bewilderment – typically manifested as a covert replay of some historical anachronism.

Braidotti is right about this, but, despite presenting scenario after scenario of how the humanities have been marginalized, especially in academia, she comes to an optimistic conclusion that some refocusing of the university community (as Clark Kerr’s “multi-versity”) will save the day (p.184-185). How did she arrive at that conclusion in the era of professional schools, credentials-driven lifelong learning and MOOCs?

As some reviewers have mentioned, the book takes a very different direction from Ray Kurzweil’s rosy view of a science- and technology-enriched future. That by itself is not troubling, though it would been interesting to know her take on Kurzweil’s optimisim — which tries to co-opt or transform humanism into something of his own making.

More problematic is that she doesn’t mention Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point or Vermadsly’s noosphere, even though she introduces the concept of “techno-transcendence” (p. 113) and tries to investigate more contemporary interpretations of subjectivity. Indeed, much of The Posthuman deals with varying threads in the subjectivity ball of yarn — but most of these are themselves “humanistic.” Perhaps Braidotti would have been inspired to kick it up a notch by listening to a few episodes of WNYC’s Radiolab Radiolab: not because there’s great depth there, but because some Radiolab expose fault lines in contemporary views of the biology of consciousness, updated views of memory, the implications of genomic knowledge — and so on.

Braidotti responded to what she has experienced with analysis well worth reading, but one wishes that her experiences had been deeper and more varied — before she began the analysis.

Her reportage on what she calls the “posthuman digital universe” contains occasional references that are difficult to integrate with her version. When she mentions artist Laurie Anderson’s work in the 80’s as identifying itself as “content-providing” rather than art or intellectualism, it’s unclear that Anderson’s work achieved any kind of synthesis (p. 181-182). In other words, Anderson may have been trying to align herself with a different, new persona, but since her work — arguably — did not achieve that synthesis, Braidotti’s point is obscured.

Happily there are 15 pages of references, but, as one often finds in this sort of traditional large form essay writing, many if not most references are to books — which makes it impossible in today’s online world to rapidly check at least more recent primary sources. Readers interested in pursuing this topic in depth could have been aided by hyperlinks and more periodical references. (In searching for additional web resources, it was learned that Wiley is distributing this Polity Press book, but their web site doesn’t offer much more than the usual summary of the book.)

Despite these — Oversights? Blind spots? Irreconcilable perspectives? — the essay did not disappoint, and it belongs in every collection which has a Two Cultures shelf. (That shelf should also contain Huxley’s Literature and Science and F.S.C. Northrop’s Meeting of East and West: An Inquiry Concerning World Understanding.)

Review written for Amazon Vine. Thanks to Amazon and the publisher for an advance copy.

Mark Underwood writes about knowledge engineering, Big Data security and privacy as @knowlengr and about music and literature as @darkviolin. Also on LinkedIn.

Too Strange for Fiction: 1840’s Manhattan Overshadows Poe Romance

15 September 2013 By knowlengr

I am naturally attracted to historical fiction, though only an occasional reader of it. In my late 20’s an enormous appetite for science fiction declined. It was replaced, in part, by a greater appetite for nonfiction, but historical fiction received attention, too. Despite that earlier contempt for “what is” and “what has been,” the frameworks provided by properly selected slices of history can be excellent platforms for fiction. A.S. Byatt’s Possession was exemplary in this subgenre.

When an author accepts such a framework, there are many challenges. Which details should be thoroughly researched so that creativity isn’t mistaken for inaccuracy? Which details should be included and which omitted? How much reader knowledge of time and place should be assumed? What is the current state of scholarship in the era, and what disputes — petty or otherwise — might interfere with the fiction?

There many other issues not listed here — enough to make the assignment, as another reviewer has written, “daunting.” On the other hand, choosing a cast of characters topped by Edgar Allen Poe, wife Virginia and Frances Osgood and an easily recognized theme — love triangle, of course –would arouse curiosity in ways that an entirely originally plot could not. This was the temptation to which author Lynn Cullen yielded in her novel, Mrs. Poe.

The historical backdrop for Mrs. Poe is deep and recurring, especially in the early chapters. In addition to Edgar and Virginia Poe, readers working out the plot and characters must confront what they already know about John Russell Bartlett, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, Samuel Morse, Walter Whitman [sic], Herman Melville, T. Roosevelt, Ralph W. Emerson, Sylvester Graham (of “Graham” Cracker fame), Horace Greeley — and more. The novel’s Afterword cites Gotham by Burrows and Wallace (Oxford University, 2000) and The Poe Log by Thomas and Jackson (G,K, Hall, 1987) as inspirational. A serious literary critic of Mrs. Poe would do well to have read both before beginning the novel — simply to avoid the inevitable distractions. It was all I could do to restrain my Wikipedia temptations through the first 14 chapters.

Cullen’s writing is readable and workmanlike. She relies heavily upon dialog passages such as this.

“Perhaps, Mr. Poe,” said Mr. Bartlett, “you should ask her husband.”

My flesh prickled with offensive. “He need not ask Samuel. Samuel would not care.”

Mr. Poe put down the kitten. “I was under the impression that Mrs. Osgood makes her own decisions.”

Mr. Bartlett’s golden brow knotted in disagreement. “I would hope that she would consult her husband on business as well as personal matters. She is a married woman, you know.”

“And as such,” I said, my voice becoming strained,” do my wishes no longer matter?”

“It is the law, Mrs. Osgood,” said Mr. Bartlett.

When the triangle theme became clear early into the novel, I began working on alternate symbols for the title. Beyond the obvious substitution of Frances for Virginia, which Cullen delivers in what was, for me, all-too-literal fashion in Chapter 29, was Mrs. Poe a symbol of a future feminist literati for awkwardly lodged in mid 19th century America? Or was the “Mrs.” in “Mrs. Poe” an ironic counterpoint to the less-than-rigid take on marriage and paternalism voiced by a few of the characters in the novel? It remains an open question at the end.

It is a story about a forbidden love between two — perhaps three — poets. The poetry should carry some of the weight. Alas, my ear for poetry is perhaps too well-tuned to a contemporary American style, and the verse provided by Osgood and the Poes failed to contribute more than a considerable authenticity. Lines like Osgood’s “Thank God for that moment of sweet recognition / That over my heart like the morning light shone!” or Mr. Poe’s “We both have found a life-long love / Wherein our weary souls may rest” are now heard as too earnest.

Cullen has a capable imagination, but the form on this occasion undermined her effort. To be successful would have required much more elevated descriptive writing, less casual dialog and — despite the Poe stereotype — more darkness. The darkness that “made Poe the sexual catnip to the ladies of his time” (from the author’s Afterword) is, to invoke the overused bromide, told not shown. This was not helped by repeated scenes that included Poe’s rescuing a kitten and stroking another while delivering somewhat droll but uninspired lines.

To present a deadlier, more macabre Poe would have been, some would say, inaccurate, oversimplified or both, but it would have been a better read. Cullen may have felt that such a depiction would have been a betrayal of sorts, and the choice of villain in her plot seems to reflect that worry. Yet it remains that a more mysterious, darkly magnetic Mr. Poe — gifted with greater conversational wit than he probably could have mustered given the struggles a real life, doomed Poe faced — would have made Mrs. Poe less realistic and more compelling.

This review first posted on Amazon. Book provided via Amazon Vine.

Mark Underwood writes about knowledge engineering, Big Data security and privacy as @knowlengr and about music and literature as @darkviolin. Also on LinkedIn.

Prozac or a Sixteen-Question Rx for Spiritual Health?

Personalized Adware: Top-Tier Crime Drama set in Grippingly Realistic Cyber Future #poetry

David Orr on Collected Poems by Louis MacNeice

Review’s Review

A Time for Traveling, a Time for Seeing

Two Cultures, Version 1.1

Too Strange for Fiction: 1840’s Manhattan Overshadows Poe Romance

Starwhisperer

Image Credit

PoetryAndScience.com