Literary ordeals: thoughts on finishing James Joyce's Ulysses

Irish author James Joyce, 1882-1941

Sometimes I enjoy a challenge, like setting a goal and working through it. The goal might be something physical, like a marathon or trail run, or something like trying to learn a language or a musical instrument (one of each in my case).

Some of these challenges are literary, like reading War and Peace and such. Lately I completed a literary endurance run, to wit James Joyce's long, rambling, stream-of-consciousness rewrite of the Odyssey, titled Ulysses. 

(I think the unreadable French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss was right in this at least: a myth includes all its variants, as in Freud's ideas are as much a part of the Oedipus myth as Sophocles' tragedy. Ditto Joyce and Homer.)

I thought about it for a long time, but every time a picked up a copy and flipped through it my head began to swim. I also wasn't a big fan of his earlier work, Portrait of the Artist as a Young  Man, which introduces the aspiring author Stephen Daedalus, who is also a kind of self portrait of the author. 

To be honest, when I read that early book, I sometimes wanted to reach out and shake the narrator, especially the parts where he was too precious to attend Easter mass with his mother. I mean, would that have killed him?

Daedalus shows up in Ulysses as a stand in for Odysseus' son Telemachus. The main protagonist of Odysseus of the story is Leopold Bloom, a non-practicing Jewish resident of Dublin who sells newspaper advertising for the living. He's a married to Molly, from whom he has been physically estranged for ten years since the death of their infant son. She's the unfaithful counterpart to Odysseus' steadfast wife Penelope, although the ten year thing might have something to do with that. The whole action of the book takes place in one day and night in 1904, with most of the Dublin action reflecting some episode of the Odyssey.

It was pretty exhausting, all in all. I don't think I would have made it through by reading it, but was fortunately (maybe) able to listen to all 30+ hours of it on my smart phone thanks to the local library. I'm also glad that I'm fairly up on literature, philosophy, mythology and such, since the book is ate up with all the above. Otherwise I would have been totally lost. I still relied on a commentary to get through it.

My final verdict (not that I'm a judge): it really was quite an achievement, packing all the references and ideas he did into an imagined 24 hour period. His stream of consciousness style of writing does a pretty good job of capturing what Buddhists call our "monkey mind," which skips from object to object like the critter moving from branch to branch.

The term "stream of consciousness" can be traced back to William James, the great American philosopher and psychologist, who wrote about "the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life." His style influenced many later writers from William Faulkner to Jack Kerouac.

So there's that, anyway. As the saying goes, it was real and it was fun, but I can't say it was real fun.

I guess I'm glad I did it. It was kind of like completing a difficult and long trail run in the summer: I enjoy having done it more than the actual process of doing it.

But next time I revisit the Odyssey story, it'll probably be Homer's original.

Stephen King land

El Cabrero has been a terribly irregular blogger lately, but at least I have a story about why. It goes something like this...

Once upon a time last Thursday, I went on a work trip to a certain northern WV town that's about four hours away on a good day. And this wasn't a good day.  Then, it was like the books of a certain author on which I have been binging lately seemed to come alive.

First, let me say that in general I'm a literary snob. If you don't believe it, search the archives of this blog. You'll find ancient Greeks, Chinese philosophers, Shakespeare, Melville, Dante, Homer, Emerson, Thoreau, etc.

But sometimes you gotta eat some popcorn, right? My popcorn stash consists of listening to an unabridged Stephen King book. I can go for years without indulging but his books always seem to eventually wind up on the menu. I've done three in the last month or so.

Now you know, all kinds of weird stuff happens in Stephen King books. Vampires, plagues, a cell phone pulse that wipes out civilization, haunted places, etc. Oh yeah, and evil cars.

It so happened on that on what turned out to be a road trip from hell, my car went Stephen King when I was driving back through darkness, ice, snow, high winds and freezing temperature.

The car, whose make will remain nameless except to say it starts with the third letter of the alphabet and ends with the twentieth, would randomly flash a "reduced engine power" message and stop going without warning. Oh and the lights would go out too. The only thing to do was restart the engine and hope it wouldn't do it again, which of course it did.

 Some places where it performed this endearing trick were busy two lane dark roads with no shoulder and with traffic right behind me. Others were interstates where getting to the side was a feat and getting back on the road on the ices was iffy as well. In general, it did this when there was no place to safely get off the road and seek shelter from the storm.

For the record, I'm no stranger to car trouble. But this was the first and only time (so far) when I felt like my car was consciously trying to kill me or someone else.

In a word, I got stranded. Miraculously, the car didn't succeed in causing a major accident, although it didn't seem to be for lack of trying. I eventually made it home in a rental but have to go back and retrieve said vehicle soon.

I just hope it has outgrown its homicidal phase.

IS INEQUALITY ON THE AGENDA? Maybe. Too bad this didn't happen a long time ago.

SPEAKING OF WHICH,  here's a look at the real redistribution of wealth (sneak preview: it's direction is upward).

A BETTER IDEA. The state of WV has been flirting lately with private prisons. Here's a better alternative.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Creative reading

The theme at Goat Rope these days is Ralph Waldo Emerson's influential essay on The American Scholar. In that lecture, delivered to distinguished Harvard alumni, he disparaged book learning separated from life. And, although I am a reader's reader, this is one time when he makes pretty good sense to me. They go better together.

Some of the best reading I've done has happened when I've been immersed in some struggle or other that called into play everything I had. For example, reading about the history of the civil rights movement or reading the works of social thinkers like the great Jewish sage Martin Buber or Protestant theologians Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich  was much more nourishing and real when I was in the midst of a fight for racial justice or workers' rights and grappling with questions of means and ends. Likewise, reading Hobbes was more alive when I was working to reduce youth violence, just as modern philosophers like Habermas or Rawls were when I was trying to deal with and figure out different systems of domination.

Here's Emerson making what I think is the same point:

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant; and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. 

Sometimes I've returned to the same books that once burned on the page at a later date and a calmer time and found, with Hamlet, just words, words, words.

WILL HE OR WON'T HE? Here's the Washington Post interviewing WV's Senator Jay Rockefeller about the future of health care reform, including the question of whether WV's Governor Earl Ray Tomblin will expand Medicaid.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Bibliomancy...

...is the word used for the practice of divination with books. One who engages in bibliomancy will randomly pick out a passage in a book and seeking profound meaning from what one finds. Over the centuries, several books have served, including the works of Homer, Virgil, the I Ching, and, of course, the Bible.

I have a problem, however, with using the Bible for this purpose, particularly in traditional book form. Anyone who knows anything about the Bible can pretty much pick what kind of passage he or she is likely to find just by deciding which part of the book to open.

In general I'm not sold on the whole thing or at least wasn't up till now.

This morning, however, my first significant act of the day was opening my beat up copy of Moby-Dick and coming upon this sentence:

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.

Now I'm sold on bibliomancy. I'm all about careful disorderliness. And somehow, for all my readings of that book, this is the first time that passage has really struck me. I now declare myself officially vindicated.

Thanks, Ishmael!  You too, Herman.

STILL WRONG. Here's Dean Baker taking another swipe at deficit hawks.

CATCH THIS WAVE if you dare.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: LET ME CHECK A BOOK

Marginalia

I know that there are some people out there who are outraged when someone writes in a book or underlines passages. I do not subscribe to this viewpoint, which is just as well since I am one of those people who does that kind of thing. To me it's more like adding value. When I read library or otherwise used books, I'm always interested in what others have written in the margins and give underlined or highlighted passages a closer look.

Those markings can come in really handy in books you read more than once. I was delighted a few days ago to find my old beat up and marked up copy of Moby-Dick in my daughter's house. I'd been making do with another one, but this one had most the coolest passages underlined and bookmarked. Sure, it's in pretty bad shape and the binding has started to come apart, but I'd prefer it to a new one any day.

For that matter, aside from rare editions and precious manuscripts, I think books are meant to be consumed and used. If I was a real writer, I'd be more honored if my books were read, re-read, marked on, underlined, lived with and used up than if they sat in pristine condition unused on a shelf.

Speaking of Moby-Dick, I feel a long literary jag coming on.

NO LINKS today.

Post bad book victory lap

It seemed to take forever plowing, through hundreds of pages of small print and bad prose, but I finally made it through Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.

The main reason I decided to read it was that it seemed more sportsmanlike for me to take whacks at her ideology if I read some of her major works. It didn't take me too long to discover that my time would have been just as well spent taking whacks at her literary style.

What to say about it? Uhhh, it was about an architect or something.

The characters were pretty cardboard. It was a kind of morality plan pitting the Heroic Individual against the Conniving Collectivists. The relationships were really weird, including the "love"/hate connection between the architect Roark and his eventual wife Dominique. The man crush between Roark and the news magnate Wynand was even weirder, not that there was anything wrong with that.

I'm still not clear how other people messing with one's design justifies dynamiting a building that didn't belong to the dynamiter in question. And I get the feeling that the whole purpose of the book was to set up Roark's lengthy courtroom speech at the end. The character of Roark was pretty interesting when he was just an architect who wanted to do his own thing but toward the end he just became the author's mouthpiece.

I guess this was supposed to be Rand's answer to John Steinbeck. I prefer the Joads.

UPPER BIG BRANCH. Here's a Washington Post editorial on mine safety.

TAXES AND DEFICITS. If hedge fund managers paid more of the former, we'd have less of the latter.

FOR MICE AND MEN AND WOMEN TOO, here's some research about why exercise makes us feel better.

URGENT CHIMPANZEE AND DOLPHIN UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The Goat Rope book shelf: random items

I'm winding up Slacker Week by looking back at the year in reading. Here are some that I found to be diverting this year...

The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson based on research by John Sergeant. I liked the movie, but the book was way more diverting--and weirder, especially since it's a work of nonfiction.

I also did some interesting reading about disasters and how people respond to them, including Amanda Ripley's The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes--and Why and Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster.

On a social science note, I enjoyed Len Fisher's Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life, a book which I borrowed from a friend and probably haven't returned. Also enlightening was The Invisible Gorilla: and Other Ways our Intuitions Deceive Us by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons.

I could go on, but if I do, my employers will realize what I slacker I am all year round. Good reading in 2011!

The Goat Rope books shelf: religion and philosophy

During Slacker Week, i.e. those days between Christmas and New Year's Day, El Cabrero is doing as little as possible other than looking back at the year in reading. I was not particularly in a religious mode this year, if you don't count karate (which actually works pretty well as one), but I did read a bit about religion.

I don't always enjoy Karen Armstrong's books on religion, although I always seem to read them. I did enjoy one of her more recent books, The Case for God: What Religion Really Means.

I'm always a sucker for a good book on Buddhism, and Perry Garfinkel's Buddha or Bust: In Search of Truth, Meaning, Happiness and the Man Who Found Them All fit the bill.

I paid another visit to Aristotle this year, re-reading The Nichomachean Ethics and The Politics, along with Hegel's Introduction to the Philosophy of History. On the down side, I crawled through Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and still don't know what all the shouting was about. It goes without saying that I revisited my old pal Nietzsche

The Goat Rope book shelf: history and biography

El Cabrero is slacking this week, which means no links or comments about current events. Rather, I'm taking a look back at the year in reading. Today, the topic is history.

By far the most engrossing book of this kind for me this year was Arthur Herman's Gandhi and Churchill, an account of the decades long rivalry between two worthy opponents. People of different political tendencies idolize one or the other of these men (usually not both, however). I'll pass. Both had their moments, but both also were capable of incredible blunders, callousness, and bull headedness. If I had to choose between one or the other, I'd pick FDR or Walter Reuther.

I've always been interested in the Pacific Theater of WWII, where my father and two uncles served, but my interest was piqued after my trip to Okinawa, where I toured the Peace Memorial and two museums that had exhibits related to the terrible battle that raged there. I really learned a lot from Max Hastings' Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-1945. The Nazis had no monopoly on atrocities.

Finally, what is it about Western powers that makes them want to make ill-advised forays into the Middle East, anyway? They've been doing it since the Trojan War and it never seems to work out very well. Juan Cole's Napoleon's Egypt provided another case in point. It's amazing that he got to be emperor after leading that monumental goat rope.

The Goat Rope book shelf: fiction

I'll wait for the movie on this one.

I like to think of the week between Christmas and New Year's Day as Slacker Week--and I plan to live up to it. There will be no links this week but rather a look back at the year in reading.

I make it a point never to divulge the number of books I get through in a year lest my employer realize that I'm pretty good at slacking the rest of the year too. I did get a bit less read this year, probably due to spending more time in physical training to prepare for karate my trip to Okinawa and to try to keep the edge.

While I didn't read a huge amount of fiction this year, here are some notable books:

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. I think I've read most if not all this writer (of Appalachian origins, let it be noted) has produced. Some of her fiction can be a bit preachy but her latest offering really hit the spot. It's the story of a young man who winds up hanging out with the likes of Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky and then gets chewed up by the post WWII Red Scare. I think one reason I enjoyed it so much was due to our recent trip to Mexico where we hung out in the same places.

The Fall by Albert Camus. It's been decades since I read this one (The Plague being my favorite of his) and I was curious to give it another look. It has been interpreted as the author's own confession of his shortcomings and failure.

The Kiss and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov. I've read a lot of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy but not so much of Chekhov. The Good Doctor had a great eye for human actions and emotions and life's little situations. I plan on heading back for more.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. I don't read a lot of contemporary fiction but La Cabra recommended this post-modern novel of separate but related stories across time.

Finally, I hit the children's section to take another look at Alice in Wonderland, an adult book thinly disguised as a children's classic. Also, I've never read any of Madeline L'Engle, but was inspired to try A Wrinkle in Time after seeing my nephew devour it.

In praise of literary crack

I usually fill in the blogging days between Christmas and New Year by going over the highs and lows of the year in reading. I'm jumping the gun a little bit now to say a few words in favor of literary crack.

Ordinarily, I have about five books going at any given time, often of a fairly solemn nature. I try to turn the page of each twice daily. At the moment, my pile includes Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (I'm up to Justinian), the Bhagavad Gita, Beowulf, Collapse by Jared Diamond, and a book on Tolkien.

But sometimes you've just got to blow it all out with some fun stuff. This week that meant listening to an unabridged audio of volume 2 of Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan's vampire trilogy The Fall. I mentioned volume 1, The Strain, here a while back.

These are not wimpy, sparkly, sexy or existential vampires. These are gross nasty viral parasites with bloodworms that do all kinds of nasty things, of which blood sucking is way down the list.

Reading something like this is kind of like gorging on burgers from White Castle or Five Guys. Not something to do every day but damn good every now and then.

I can't wait for volume 3.

END OF AN ERA. Here's an item on the departure of Don Blankenship from Massey Energy. The link includes video as well as text.

DENY THIS. Here's a profile of a pioneering climate change scientist and his work.

THE NEXT BAD DEAL? Dean Baker predicts a looming fight over the future of Social Security.

IN LIEU OF BARBIES, girl chimpanzees may play with sticks as if they were dolls.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Of reading, classics, vampires and such

I usually keep a pile of several books going at any given time and try to turn a page or two of each per day. Usually these are pretty dense and a page or two is plenty.

At the moment, my pile consists of some stories by Chekhov, The Fall by Camus, Vol. II of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Aristotle's Politics and Eaarth, Bill McKibben's new book about climate change (which is a real downer, by the way). Oh yeah, and Thoreau's Walden.

I don't always see eye to eye with Henry, but I share his fondness for old classics:

Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length give way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader far more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem.

Still and all, sometimes you need to clear the palate and there's nothing to do just that like a vampire novel. For fun, I've been listening to Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan's The Strain. These vampires aren't sexy or teenybopper heart throbs or tragic existentialists. They are totally repulsive viral parasites with totally gross appendages. Listening to it made mowing the lawn a bit more entertaining.

I have a feeling Thoreau wouldn't have been a big fan of vampire novels.

PLAYING WITH FIRE. As I've been ranting for the last week or so, deficit mania could make the recession worse. And Krugman thinks so too.

WHATEVER. This is disappointing.

THIS COULD EXPLAIN A LOT. Research on voting behavior suggests that such decisions are often made on the basis of non-verbal and superficial factors.

A LITTLE GOOD NEWS. Blenko Glass, a WV company that specializes in handmade glassware has fought its way back from the brink after nearly closing for good last year.

MONKEYS like TV too.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Brother, can you spare a book?

I don't usually complain about this, but I'm about to have too much time to read. I'm talking air travel, including two 14 hour flights. Usually I have a pile of books going at any given time, but it's not really practical given limited luggage weight and limited space.

This has created an interesting dilemma...what to take?

Here's what I've come up with so far:

1. It's about time to read Don Quixote again, especially since I'm going on a Quixotic trip. It really is a hilarious book. There's an old story that King Philip III of Spain once saw a man reading a book and laughing until he cried. The King said something like, "Either that man is crazy or he's reading Don Quixote."

2. Since I'm headed there, I'm going to try Dancing with the Dead: Memory, Performance, and Everyday Life in Postwar Okinawa, a gift from the in laws.

3. A friend loaned me a copy of Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. Or maybe Jared Diamond's Collapse. I listened to it before but it deserves a real read. The jury's still out between those two.

4. We get The New Yorker at Goat Rope Farm. Man, do those things pile up. I never seem to get around to reading them, although the Spousal Unit manages to. I'm thinking about rounding up all the old ones I can find and taking them along. I can scatter them as offerings to other travelers as I go.

That's the plan anyhow.

WHAT HE SAID. NY Times columnist Bob Herbert talks sense about job creation here.

ALL DONE. The "final" piece of health care reform legislation, which also overhauled student loans, was signed yesterday.

BANKING ON REFORM. Here's TARP oversight committee chairperson Elizabeth Warren on the need for financial reform.

URGENT BAT UPDATE here.

CUTE LITTLE ROAD-RUNNER DINOSAUR UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The lost cause

The theme at Goat Rope lately has been books, specifically the 10 books that had the biggest impact on me growing up.

(Note: this series has appeared while I'm on furlough and was written in advance, hence no links or comments about current events. Regular publication will resume Monday.)

Here's the lineup so far 1. The Bible 2. Book of Common Prayer 3. Poe's stories and poems 4. Lord of the Rings 5. Tao Te Ching 6. Karate-Do Kyohan 7. Freud/Jung tie 8. Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra 9. Camus' The Plague.

Now that I'm down to #10, I'm having a hard time picking the last one. I think I'll go with Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. I read it around age 20 at about the same time I started thinking about things like politics and social justice.

I haven't revisited the book since then but this story of an American volunteer fighting against the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War in a hopeless struggle left a pretty big impact.

All of these books hit me hard by the time I was 20 years old or so. Since then, I've gotten more from different authors but early influences run deep. And I still like most of them.

How about you?

Pestilences and victims

El Cabrero is laid off this week so this post was prepared in advance. Regular publication with links and comments about current events will resume Monday August 24. In the meantime, I've been blogging about the 10 books that have had the biggest impact on me growing up. I'd be interested in finding out what would be on your list...

Today we reach #9, but let's review the earlier ones: 1. The Bible 2. The Book of Common Prayer 3. Poe's stories and poems 4. Lord of the Rings 5. Tao Te Ching 6. Karate-Do Kyohan 7. a tie between Freud and Jung 8. Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra and...

9. The Plague by Albert Camus. I don't know about the Gentle Reader, but I went through a tragic existentialist phase from which I may never have completely recovered. Camus was someone who, like karate master Gichin Funakoshi (see #6), has been a kind of moral compass for me.

He grew up poor in what was then French Algeria. He became a Communist briefly as a young man but soon broke with the Stalinists. He called em like he saw em, alienating both the left and right when they needed it. My favorite book of his was the novel The Plague (which admittedly was kind of a downer). Good though.

It's the story of an outbreak of plague in the Algerian city of Oran and how people dealt with it. The plague, of course, was a metaphor for some of the worst social ills of the 20th century, which are still with us.

Here's my favorite quote from it, which serves pretty well as a political platform:

"All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it's up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. That may sound simple to the point of childishness; I can't judge if it's simple, but I know it's true."

Man is a bridge

El Cabrero is on furlough until the beginning of next week, so the posts lately don't have any links or comments about current events. Regular posts will resume on Monday, August 24.

In the meantime, these have been prepared in advance. The theme is books, specifically the 10 that had the biggest impact on me growing up. What would make it to your list?

Recap: 1. Bible 2. Book of Common Prayer 3. Poe's stories and poems 4. Lord of the Rings 5. Tao Te Ching 6. Karate-Do Kyohan 7. a tie between Freud and Jung, which led me to #8....

Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra. I ran into this one sometime around age 18 and was totally blown away. It left a permanent scar, one of the good kind. I still love Nietzsche, even though I freely admit he was a little bit whacked. From Zarathustra, I've ranged over much of his work again and again over the years.

The part that hit me hardest at the time was the early part of the book, where Zarathustra returns to the world after 10 years on a solitary mountaintop. He gave a great speech about how we shouldn't be content with ourselves as we are now but should strive to give birth to something better.

Sample quote (from memory) "One must have chaos in one's soul to give birth to a dancing star."

I've got that one covered anyhow.



(Note: regular posts will resume August 24.)

A little fudging

The posts this week were prepared in advance and don't have any links or comments about current events as El Cabrero is on furlough.

The theme is books, and specifically the top 10 that had the biggest impact on me growing up (i.e. not necessarily the ones I enjoyed the most or agreed with).

Recap: 1. Bible 2. Book of Common Prayer 3. Poe's stories and poems 4. Lord of the Rings 5. Tao Te Ching 6. Karate-Do Kyohan and...

7. A tie between Freud and Jung. Sometime late in high school and I discovered the ideas of Freud and Jung. And it stoned me. I think I first found Man and His Symbols by Jung and co. (although I don't think he really wrote much of it) and was totally engrossed. It had all kinds of cool illustrations and rambled over history, mythology, dreams, art and the kitchen sink. I outgrew Jung before too long but it was a nice stage.

My love for Freud was to be more enduring. I hit his books shortly after Jung's and was particularly blown away by The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which covered slips of the tongue, mistaken actions and all the other ways the unconscious pops out at inconvenient moments. I'm not an orthodox Freudian, but have a permanent soft spot for the old man.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar...but sometimes it's not.

The master text

I'm running down my chronological list of the 10 books that have had the biggest impact on me growing up. What are yours?

Brief recap: early childhood, The Bible, The Book of Common Prayer, The Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Junior high: The Lord of the Rings. High School: The Tao Te Ching and...

#6 Karate-Do Kyohan by Gichin Funakoshi. I've often discussed my lifelong love of the martial arts here. Funakoshi (1868-1957) was a sickly child who took up karate for his health on his native island of Okinawa and played a lead role in introducing the art to the Japanese main islands and ultimately the world.

This book by Funakoshi is considered to be the Bible of Shotokan Karate and related styles. If you're not into this kind of thing, it's not a page turner. Most of it is devoted to an explanation of techniques and the demonstration of the main katas or formal exercises of the style.

It is also full of Funakoshi's maxims on ethics and the relationship of karate to daily life. He was and remains one of my main ethical beacons. Sample quote:

True Karate-do is this: that in daily life, one's mind and body be trained and developed in a spirit of humility; and that in critical times, one be devoted utterly to the cause of justice.

The water way

The theme at Goat Rope lately is books, specifically the 10 books that had the biggest impact on me at different points in my life (whether I liked them at the time or not), starting from the beginning.

Here's the rundown so far: 1. The Bible; 2. The Book of Common Prayer; 3. Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe; 4. The Lord of the Rings. Next up is...

5. The Tao Te Ching. I come by an interest in things Chinese honestly. My grandfather lived there for years and my father was born there. I grew up around artifacts of that visit, including a bronze Buddha still in my possession.

My fascination only increased when I became interested in martial arts as a kid but we were pretty poor. That mean we couldn't afford pricey tae kwon do schools that charged an arm and a leg and taught impractical techniques. I guess poverty has its good points.

It was a few years before we found a traditional Japanese style dojo, but in the meantime I read everything I could get my hands on about it, including the religions and philosophies that influenced the arts, which is where I first learned about Taoism.

I can't remember how old I was when I got my first copy of the Tao Te Ching, a classic attributed to Lao Tzu a few centuries before Christ but that one stuck. I've written about it often here (search box in upper left corner for more) and can't say enough. It is by far the wisest and most practical book I've ever read and one that I wish everyone interested in making the world a little less nasty would check out.

Thanks for the orcs

El Cabrero is serving a two week stint in the reserve army of the unemployed. Blog posts during this period were prepared in advance and won't have links or comments about current events.

The theme for this period is my top 10 countdown of books that hit me hardest growing up, in chronological order. So far Book #1 was the Bible; Book #2 was The Book of Common Prayer; Book #3 was The Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Book #4 is....

The Lord of the Rings (and I guess The Hobbit too). I fessed up a while back to being an occasional Tolkien dork. I stumbled onto these books when I was in junior high and visiting my brother at Christmas when he lived in Florida. One of his roommates had these odd looking paperbacks on a shelf and I was intrigued. I figured out which one was first and then it was down the rabbit hole.

When I finally finished the series some weeks later, I was depressed, believing that I'd never read anything that good again. What can I say? I was in eighth grade.

That didn't turn out to be true but the times I've been that absorbed in any book have been few and far between.

Ironically, it was only as an adult--and after trying to keep this or that Dark Lord wannabe from gaining total power--that I came to see it as a work of realism.