Reminders of Books

artisticNature

Posted by ArtisticNature in FB.

So many photos, pieces of art, make me think of books. Here I have Robinson CrusoeTreasure IslandMutiny On The Bounty… But not Moby Dick. No, not that. The ship’s too small, the sea too calm. And there’s no dark November in my soul.

Zen & Tolle

tole

From the book of Eckhart Tolle

published on BODAISHIN page
The only thing that is ultimately real about your journey  
is the step that you are taking at this moment.  That’s all there ever is. -Eckhart Tolle

And so it is, so simple, so complete, yet eluding the mind that grasps for it, even into the wonder of the Universe.

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Books and Books and Books

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And this glorious assortment has created a dilemma: How shall I then proceed? Which of these is to be the first? The general approach so far has been to work my way through by starting all of them to see which will endure. Poetic, yes? Sometimes it’s difficult to tell poetic from silly. In this case—as in many— it doesn’t matter. 

It’s hardly believable. In the Kline Weihnachten tradition—Little Christmas, the feast of the Epiphany or feast of The Three Kings—there was yet more to celebrate. Firstly, my daughter arrived so we could feast together. And we did. There were more packages than there should have been but is that not always the truth? The greatest of all was the plethora of books. Unbelievable! Especially in addition to the four of Christmas Eve.

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“Hillbilly Elegy”

fullsizeoutput_76dAt last I finished the “Hillbilly” book. Reading it was a very slow process for me. And it wasn’t because I was savoring it. The book is a mixture of memoir and sociological study. The prose is nothing exceptional though in fairness it wasn’t promoted as such. It is readable enough, yet I found myself arguing with him throughout. My annotations run along the lines of, so this makes you a hillbilly?

“Chip was kind of a hillbilly himself: He loved cheap beer, country music, and catfish fishing…” Huh. Is it the country music that does it? Much of what he describes belongs to a lower-class strata or even lower-middle. Much also could belong to many Black neighborhoods. Vance himself says, “That it resonated so personally is odd, however, because he wasn’t writing about the hillbilly transplants from Appalachia—he was writing about black people in inner cities.” He goes on to comment the same on similar books. About the only thing that makes Vance a hillbilly is that he comes from a hollow that they pronounce “holler” and that he calls his grandmother “maw-maw.” But he believes himself to be one so that works.

Too often, especially in the beginning of the book, he tells of an occurrence in his life but only in general terms because he “can’t remember the details,” or what caused it. Yet some of the developed anecdotes are interesting and many are entertaining although I’m not sure he meant them that way. The comments about the government involvement and criticisms of it are, once again, not specific to a hillbilly culture. Towards the end of the book the sociological comments and data are staggering. That aspect of the book is eye opening.

“It’s not just fighting. By almost any measure, American working-class families experience a level of instability unseen elsewhere in the world. Consider, for instance, Mom’s revolving door of father figures. No other country experiences anything like this. In France, the percentage of children exposed to three or more maternal partners is 0.5 percent—about one in two hundred. The second highest share is 2.6 percent, in Sweden, or about one in forty. In the United States, the figure is a shocking 8.2 percent—about one in twelve—and the figure is even higher in the working class.” It is shocking. And he goes on to quote other statistics.

It is made clear the U.S. is hardly the best country in the world if you struggle. If your home environment is tough or abusive. If you’re not in the middle to upper middle and above classes. Maybe not even then. But it ain’t only the hillbilly culture in crisis.

I’m not sure why the book is called an elegy. I don’t think that Vance means the sadness or even the death of the culture is to be mourned. That the family and culture are in crisis is absolutely true. True also is that that small slice of the U.S. is no longer small, and it is growing much larger.

By my reckoning the book is a C, even though there are redeeming factors. It’s not difficult to read and it’s not the sort of book you have to walk away from. But if you want to learn about hillbilly culture this isn’t the book. It’s Vance’s culture.

 

 

Christmas Splendor

Or rather, Christmas Eve Splendor. Taking a page from the Icelandic book of Christmas Eve, the night is made for the giving & getting of books, and an evening of reading. In such good company keeping, I opened the package that looked like books from the packages that arrived from my daughter. In all honesty, I promised to keep the packages wrapped until we could celebrate our Christmas together. And I cheated with just the right package and struck gold! One each for the four sign posts on one of the reading roads of the mind. So here we see the fiction area represented by the novel, then by the graphic novel. Next we see the powers of the mind, and then lastly, the mind of genius. Ah, sweet travels. Reports to follow at some point. For now, looking at them is enough.