Fortunately, you can't kill a vegetarian vampire bunny by pounding a sharp sirloin steak over his heart.
Quotes:
I come to writing purely by chance. My full-time occupation is dog. (Harold X.)
27 June 2010
A People's History of Christianity: The other side of the story (Diana Butler Bass)
The name of this book may be a little misleading. Unlike Howard Zinn with his People's Story of the USA, Diana Butler Bass doesn't provide a history of Christianity from the point of view of the oppressed (or suppressed). This is much more like a primer to Church history in the form of a series of vignettes -- blog entries, really -- on the lives of the saints.
"This history is less a magisterial narrative and more like a collection of campfire tales--discrete stories that embody Christian character, virtue, suffering and commitment as people 'go and do likewise.' Friends swapping stories."
The goal of the book is not to establish an alternative history, but to fight what she sees as historical amnesia in modern Christians, which leads to a truncated pseudo-history of triumphalim: the Big Cs - Christ, Constantine, Christendom, Calvin, and Christian America. More often than not, it succeeds.
If you are having trouble seeing the good in the Christian community and its history, this book will help you, and perhaps will point you in the direction of hope.
Quotes:
"Jesus?" she questioned. I don't have any trouble with Jesus. It's all the stuff that happened after Jesus that makes me mad."
[This] should give progressive Christians pause, always remembering progress is a journey, not a destination.
Hospitality is the practice that keeps the church from becoming a club, a members-only society.
To Bushnell, right harmony--not right opinion--sounded God's truth.
"When someone asks me what kind of Christian I am, I say I'm a bad one. I've got the belief part down pretty well, I think. It's in the practice of my belief in everyday life where I often miss the mark. I see myself as a pilgrim--traveling the faith path to the destination of being a good Christian--and into the eternal presence of God." Brent Bill, Quaker writer.
A.A. teaches addicts to "fake it until you make it." Translating this insigth into Christian spirituality, if you act like a Christian, you might just become one.
Justice is not a metaphor.
"Three days ago your country bombed our hospital. But we will take care of you. Tell the world what happened in Rutba." (Iraqui doctor in the town of Rutba, to injured American "Christian Peacemaker" team)
Thus Christianity becomes a story of accumulated human experience of God that reveals a certain kind of wisdom in the world: To love God and love one's neighbor constitutes the good life.
A People's History of Christianity is ultimately a history of hope--that regular people often "get it" better than the rich, the famous, and the powerful. We can practice God's love and universal hospitality in a world of strangers. That is the tradition of the church--faith, hope, and love entwined, and the greatest of these is love.
Attila The Pun (Daniel Pinkwater)
The second book in the Magic Moscow trilogy (which also includes The Slaves of Spiegel).
This book brings some real magic to the Magic Moscow, Hoboken's favorite combination health food, junk food and ice cream restaurant. In the form of the ghost of an almost-famous person from long ago (guess who...). Anyway, this is probably the weakest of the Magic Moscow books, only because the other two are so good. Still a fun read.
Quotes:
"What has only one horn and gives milk? Give up? A milk truck!" Attilla the Pun
The audience loved him. It turned out that fifth-century Hun humour really goes over well in Hoboken.
21 June 2010
The Prince of the Marshes (Rory Stewart)
This book has been in my to-read list for years, since i first saw it in Anderson's Bookshop in Naperville. I've since read The Places In Between and loved it, so it's now time to give The Prince of the Marshes a spin.
Stewart does a great job of showing chronicling the surreal world of the aftermath of the USA x Iraq war, the high hopes and almost farcical reality of the occupation government. Each chapter opens with a quotation from Machiavelli or Don Quixote. Thus alternating between the paranoid and the delusional, the quotes set the tone but really can't compete with the surreality of the occupation, the Coalition Provisional Authority and a mad and dangerous world turned upside down. The story occupation of Iraq balances between the Machiavellic and the Quixotic.
Quotes:
("What is religion?") "You don't know?" he asked with great surprise. "Religion is about the respect for the other human being. Each of us is created by one God. Each of us is respected. This is religion. Even the Jewish religion. But these men do not respect one another. Things are very bad now."
"Our traditional work as Christian people, you know, was selling alcohol," he said. "There was no problem under Saddam."
[Iranian cinema shown in provincial towns] tended to kung fu movies with Israeli villains and Iranian heroes.
What would be the point of implying that our new police chief was nepotistic, biased, violent, and semi-criminal?
I sent a deputation to Baghdad, paid for ministry officials to sit in the substations in Nasiriyah and Amara, bought them satellite telephones, and told them to report whenever the power dropped below sixty megawatts. Within four days we had a steady supply for twelve rather than four hours a day. But not everything could be solved so easily.
It was only the next morning that word began to spread that what they had seen, highlighted in the green glow of their night-image goggles, was men gathering for gay sex.
"Welcome to your new democracy," said the democracy expert. "I have met you before. I have met you in Cambodia. I have met you in Russia. I have met you in Nigeria." At the mention of Nigeria, two of the sheikhs walked out.
I wanted to build a gate for the souk as a permanent gift from the CPA to Amara, so that there would be at least one enduring trace of our presence. We discussed this with the governor, showed him photographs of traditional souk gates from Egypt to Kuwait, and suggested a competition for the design. The governor returned the next day with a design for a concrete arch, to be faced with bright modern bathroom tiles and fairy lights. Again we had to choose whether to empower the governor. We overruled him. The gate was never built.
"This is Iraq, not Britain," replied Riyadh. "They do not understand about peaceful demonstrations-you must clear them away."
20 June 2010
Slaves of Spiegel (Daniel Pinkwater)
Mixing the story lines of The Magic Moscow and Fat Men From Space (both of which are masterpieces on their own), this is great Pinkwater craziness. Space pirates, fast food, and a contest where first place may not be what you want.
Of course, the three greatest junk food cooks in the universe all look alike. Of course, all of the space pirates from Spiegel look just like Daniel Pinkwater.
I don't believe there is a better writer than Daniel Pinkwater out there. I wish at least some of his stuff were available on the Kindle, especially the excellent Hoboken Fish and Chicago Whistle.
15 June 2010
Speaker for the Dead (Orson Scott Card)
The Ender books are finally available on Kindle, and i have now finally read Ender book #2, Speaker for the Dead. I was surprised to find a lot of Brazilian Portuguese (my native language) in the story, but I realize that the author's experiences as a missionary for the Mormons in Brazil must have informed much of Ender's experiences as a "Speaker for the Dead," basically a representative of a secular religion of truth-speaking in a Catholic planet hostile to missionaries.
O. S. Card says this is really the book he wanted to write, when he wrote the novel version of Ender's Game - the first book was written to fill in the back-history for Speaker for the Dead. After reading both books, it's easy to agree with him.
Quotes:
I grew dissatisfied with the way that we use our funerals to revise the life of the dead, to give the dead a story so different from their actual life that, in effect, we kill them all over again. No, that is too strong. Let me just say that we erase them, we edit them, we make them into a person much easier to live with than the person who actually lived.
To understand who a person really was, what his or her life really meant, the speaker for the dead would have to explain their self-story, what they meant to do, what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in. That's the story that we never know, the story that we never can know and yet, at the time of death, it's the only story truly worth telling.
Only when the loneliness becomes unbearable do adolescents root themselves, or try to root themselves.
Many fail at adulthood and constantly reach backward for the freedom and passion of adolescence. But those who achieve it are the ones who create civilization.
In the pages of this book, you and I will meet one-on-one, my mind and yours, and you will enter a world of my making and dwell there, not as a character that I control, but as a person with a mind of your own. You will make of my story what you need it to be, if you can. I hope my tale is true enough and flexible enough.
"The Nordic language recognizes four orders of foreignness. The first is the otherlander, or utlänning, the stranger that we recognize as being a human of our world, but of another city or country. The second is the främling - Demosthenes merely drops the accent from the Nordic framling. This is the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another world. The third is the raman, the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another species. The fourth is the true alien, the varelse, which includes all the animals, for with them no conversation is possible. They live, but we cannot guess what purposes or causes make them act. They might be intelligent, they might be self-aware, but we cannot know it."
She suspected that in fact there was no meaning, that by telling his stories when he Spoke people's lives, he was actually creating order where there had been none before. But it didn't matter if it was fabrication; it became true when he Spoke it, and in the process he ordered the universe for her as well.
Telling the story of who she was, and then realizing that she was no longer the same person. That she had made a mistake, and the mistake had changed her, and now she would not make the mistake again because she had become someone else, someone less afraid, someone more compassionate.
You're so busy pretending to believe them, there isn't a chance in the world you could learn anything from them.
As long as you keep getting born, it's ok to die sometimes.
Also noteworthy: the story of the three rabbis, in chapter 16 (The Fence).
14 June 2010
The Slippery Slope (Lemony Snicket)
In the tenth book of A Series of Unfortunate Events, the Baudelaire orphans decide to check and contain the moral ambiguity that has plagued their actions since at least book 8 (The Vile Village). In a decisive moment, Violet realizes that if everyone fought fire with fire, the entire world would go up in smoke. Fighting fire with fire, incidentally, is the motto and the chosen method of their enemies (the villains), and in this book, the orphans start calling themselves volunteers, aligning with the good side of VFD. At the end of the book, they are not victims anymore, but fighters.
Quotes:
For Beatrice --
When we met, you were pretty, and I was lonely.
Now, I am pretty lonely.
Having an aura of menace is like having a pet weasel, because you rarely meet someone who has one, and when you do it makes you want to hide under the coffee table.
"Busheney," Sunny said, which meant something along the lines of, "You're an evil man with no concern whatsoever for other people."
The world is quiet here. (Volunteers' motto)
We'll fight fire with fire! (Villains motto)
If everyone fought fire with fire, the entire world would go up in smoke. (Violet)
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. (Klaus, quoting a book by a famous philosopher he read (Nietzsche)).
"The Itsy Bitsy Spider" [...] is one of the saddest songs ever composed. It tells the story of a small spider who is trying to climb up a water spout, but every time its climb is half over, there is a great burst of water, either due to rain or somebody turning the spout on, and at the end of the song, the spider has decided to try one more time, and will likely be washed away once again.
10 June 2010
Tove Jansson - Moomin books
Something to read after Lemony Snicket.
From Helen Roche:
From Helen Roche:
The Moomins? Yay, totally! I adored them when I was a kid, and still do. My favourites are Comet in Moominland, Finn Family Moomintroll, Moominsummer Madness, and Moominland Midwinter.
The quote above from Coraline made me think of them right away, it's a very Tove Janssonesque line. She also wrote for adults - my favourite by far is The Summer Book, about a grandmother and a grand-daughter spending the summer on an island.
You might at first glance think that the Moomin stories are for younger children, but they have quite a lot of depth and complexity that makes them fun at any age, plus a slightly dark undertow to make them interesting, and a nice rebellious spirit.
08 June 2010
Coraline (Neil Gaiman)
Creepy! I started reading this to find out if i want to read it with my daughter. Right now i'm not sure. The story is great, but the thing about the souls in captivity will be a little hard to explain.
It seems i've been reading Neil Gaiman stuff for ever, in a random way. back in Brazil i read the Sandman and Black Orchid "graphic novels" (expensive comic books for adults). In the USA, I read "Don't Panic" (The Official Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy Companion). I read Good Omens. And more recently, i read The Graveyard Book. But i hadn't read Coraline before.
It's a story about courage to face our worst fears, but also about embracing the world we live in, with all its imperfections. Of grace found in unexpected places and help received from inadequate persons.
Quotes:
And then she turned around. Her eyes were big black buttons.
Nobody sensible believes in ghosts anyway -- that's because they're all such liars.
Mirrors are never to be trusted.
Coraline sighed. "You really don't understand, do you?" She said "I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted? Just like that, and it didn't mean anything,. What then?"
She thought she could hear sweet music on the night air: the kind of music that can only be played on the tiniest silver trombones and trumpets and bassoons, on piccolos and tubas so delicate and small that their keys could only be pressed by the tiny pink fingers of white mice.
It was a story, I learned when people started to read it, that children experienced as an adventure, but which gave adults nightmares. It's the strangest book I've written, it took the longest time to write, and it's the book I'm proudest of.
The Napoleon of Notting Hill (G. K. Chesterton)
Just finished reading:
Strange and intriguing book. It has much in common with "The Man Who Was Thursday" (one of my favorites). It has the same feeling of being in a feverish dream.
I thought of reading this because on the same week i saw a quote from it in a Neil Gaiman book, and also read somewhere it being used as a critique of G W Bush's government.
I don't think it applies readily to modern American politics. I'm not really sure what it applies to, but it's fascinating. Written at the start of the 20th century, the book imagines London at the start of the 21st century, as a world where people don't believe in revolution, only evolution, and most political problems have been solved by slow, gradual, rational improvements - evolution. Into this unsuspecting world, burst a comedian and a madman, bent on restoring the old ways of chivalry, heraldry and holy war. Emotion versus reason, revolution versus evolution.
The comedian and the madman are the yin and yang of humanity, or perhaps they stand for God and man.
Good, crazy read. I read the whole thing in one day - couldn't put it down.
Quotes:
It is too often forgotten that just as a bad man is nevertheless a man, so a bad poet is nevertheless a poet.
I have never been to S. John's Wood. I dare not. I should be afraid of the innumerable night of fir trees, afraid to come upon a blood-red cup and the beating of the wings of the Eagle.
In the beginning of the twentieth century you could not see the ground for clever men. They were so common that a stupid man was quite exceptional, and when they found him, they followed him in crowds down the street and treasured him up and gave him some high post in the State.
Strange and intriguing book. It has much in common with "The Man Who Was Thursday" (one of my favorites). It has the same feeling of being in a feverish dream.
I thought of reading this because on the same week i saw a quote from it in a Neil Gaiman book, and also read somewhere it being used as a critique of G W Bush's government.
I don't think it applies readily to modern American politics. I'm not really sure what it applies to, but it's fascinating. Written at the start of the 20th century, the book imagines London at the start of the 21st century, as a world where people don't believe in revolution, only evolution, and most political problems have been solved by slow, gradual, rational improvements - evolution. Into this unsuspecting world, burst a comedian and a madman, bent on restoring the old ways of chivalry, heraldry and holy war. Emotion versus reason, revolution versus evolution.
The comedian and the madman are the yin and yang of humanity, or perhaps they stand for God and man.
Good, crazy read. I read the whole thing in one day - couldn't put it down.
Quotes:
It is too often forgotten that just as a bad man is nevertheless a man, so a bad poet is nevertheless a poet.
I have never been to S. John's Wood. I dare not. I should be afraid of the innumerable night of fir trees, afraid to come upon a blood-red cup and the beating of the wings of the Eagle.
In the beginning of the twentieth century you could not see the ground for clever men. They were so common that a stupid man was quite exceptional, and when they found him, they followed him in crowds down the street and treasured him up and gave him some high post in the State.
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