As more of our staff at Lemuria reads Woodsburner, the more well-loved this novel becomes. An eclectic and eccentric bunch, Zita, Pat, Nan and Ellis have all found Woodsburner to be an impressive debut for novelist John Pipkin. Don’t forget Mr. Pipkin will be here on Tuesday, May 12th for a signing and reading at 5:00 p.m.! (Click here for my blog and here for Ellis’ entry on Woodsburner.)

I still am so intrigued by the life of Henry David Thoreau as a result of reading Woodsburner that I have picked up a new book about Thoreau and his times. The Thoreau You Don’t Know by Robert Sullivan encourages readers to take another look at a man who has been traditionally considered a loner, to be one disconnected with the society and commerce of the world. Sullivan reveals a Henry David who was a flute player at parties, a teacher, a pencil-maker, a man known for his wise-cracks. He also asserts that when Thoreau spoke of “Nature” he spoke of the nature around us, even if it is not a nature calendar: “For a person living in a big city, it’s the ratty-and-partially-green-potpourri-of-life-around-you version of nature . . . and you have to bond with it, even when it is less than extraordinary” (Sullivan 68).

Sullivan explains that there was also an increasing amount of labor unrest in Concord, Massachusetts. Further coloring Thoreau’s world was the Panic of 1837, “a result of speculation and the government’s fiscal policy: after a large expansion of credit and loans and an expansion of the money supply . . . the wheat bubble popped” (61). Many citizens gathered outside Independence Hall in anger and protest against “the banking system, which, many critics felt, allowed the speculating of those with money to the detriment of those who did not have a lot” (61). Gosh, does that sound familiar? Thoreau worried and scribbled budgeting notes just as many of us are doing today with the current economic failure.

One reason I was compelled to read The Thoreau You Don’t Know was because in the Table of Contents there was a chapter entitled: “When the Woods Burned.” However, I was so disappointed when there was not even a mention of the fire until the last paragraph of the chapter. The only mention of the fire related to the fact that Thoreau’s reputation was rather tarnished after the fire, with the locals hissing “woods burner!” However, I am still not finished reading the entire book . . .

I am just haunted by Thoreau’s entry in his own journal in which he describes the occurrence of the fire and his response and rationalization, his description of the fire as a “great spectacle.” And then I ran across an article by Woodsburner author John Pipkin in which he explains how this “great spectacle” of a fire likely influenced Thoreau’s decision to begin his Walden experiment.

After you read Woodsburner, I encourage you to read this article from the online version of The Boston Globe and to read Thoreau’s journal entry on the fire.

After reading Woodsburner, I began to relax and realize that I should not be so serious when reading Thoreau. And when Thoreau was being so serious, I could smile at and find inspiration in his earnestness.

While The Thoreau You Don’t Know is very enlightening, it is surely written for the non-scholar in a conversational style. I find Woodsburner to be a masterfully-inspired novel. Pipkin gives us an “uninterrupted horizon,” a new set of eyes through which to see an iconic man just as Thoreau describes the ability to see life anew, “an uniterrupted horizon,” in “A Walk to Wachusett”:

And now that we have returned to the desultory life of the plain, let us endeavor to import a little of that mountain grandeur in it. We will remember within what walls we lie, and understand that this level life too has its summit, and why from the mountain top the deepest valleys have a tinge of blue; that there is elevation in every hour, as no part of the earth is so low that the heaven may not be seen from it, and we have only to stand on the summit of our hour to command an uninterrupted horizon. (Excerpted from “A Walk to Wachusett”)

My discovery from Best Buddhist Writing: 2008 (see this blog entry) was Ridgzin Shikpo (Michael Hookham) who began his practice in the 1950s.

In 1965, Shikpo met his principle teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche, and received detailed instruction from him on the preliminary and main practice of the Dzogchen tradition. Shikpo’s emphasis is on presenting Dzogchen’s teaching in English using methods and language appropriate to Western students.

Never Turn Away is a practical book that I had to read slowly almost like a book of essays. Shikpo’s words ring with authenticity as he emphasizes the practice of openness and awareness to see the significance of our ordinary experiences. Even if we don’t know what to do or how to handle the situation, Shikpo advises us to simply turn toward the situation. The teachings of this book have a strong emphasis on working with direct experience.

Never Turn Away is divided into four sections:

1. Understanding openness through meditation and the truth of suffering

2. Mandala principles and the cause of suffering

3. Collapse of confusion and the cessation of suffering

4. Pursuit of truth and the truth of the path

All four sections are broken down and fit together with superb editing. These sections are full of techniques to help us understand out practice. Also, I found Shikpo’s full account of basic formless meditation to be most helpfully presented.

Never Turn Away does not feel contrived; It is genuine and open as Shikpo gives us his clues for facing the present.

This past December a gentleman came in the store looking for a book he’d heard about on the radio. It was an atlas that was organized by particular data sets, and the maps were distorted in accordance with that particular set. After some searching, we figured out that it was called The Atlas of the Real World, and that it was due out soon. Well, it was delayed for a while, and I (and the gentleman) forgot about it. It finally arrived a few weeks ago, and it’s so much better than I expected. I was envisioning a dry, academic tome decipherable only by professional cartographers — instead I was greeted with a colorful cover, short and easy-to-understand explanations, and a unique and insightful way of looking at the world.

What sets this book aside from typical atlases is the way the maps are created. For each map, a particular data set or data point is selected, and then the landmasses are distorted in size to reflect that piece of data. On page 292 the map is labeled “Malaria Cases”, and Africa expands to fill the entire middle third of the map, while the Americas, Europe, and Asia shrink to almost nothing.

Maps are paired up so that you can compare corresponding statistics — for instance, on pages 144 and 145, the left hand map shows Car Exports and the right hand map shows Car Imports. Germany and Japan dominate the car export side, while the United States dwarfs the rest of the world on the car import map.

I think this would make a fantastically unique coffee table book — it might actually give you something to think about rather than just page after page of pretty photos.

Start popping the corn,

I’m about halfway through the novel Sunnyside by Glen David Gold and let me just say it’s the best book I’ve read in a while.  Among the many fictional and historical characters, the novel elliptically revolves around Charlie Chaplin.  I don’t know much about Chaplin, and I’d never seen more than snippets of his films, so I’ve been youtubing like crazy after reading about him brainstorming the film A Dog’s Life (he wanted to make a film that was “as good as he was”) and then getting to “witness” its premier just as America was becoming involved in “the war to end all wars.”

I’ll write more later; for now, grab your popcorn, sit back and enjoy the film (this is part one of four, for the rest see the comments), and then go here to get your autographed copy of Sunnyside.

“You’re a genius, which means you’re going to be put under glass.  People will still go to your pictures, and because you’re good, they’ll still laugh, but there will always be a windowpane between you and them, because even the most ignorant foreigner will know you’re supposed to be a genius.  And even if you stop making movies that are funny, but engage all the known emotions from A to Z, even if you create new emotions that people have never felt, and play them like a harpsichord, you’ll be playing on the other side of a wall that no one will ever climb.”

– Frances Marion to Charlie Chaplin in Sunnyside

In my last blog I made the controversial statement that boys and girls learn differently – there was no comment so I am assuming that everyone agrees. A couple of days after my post I stumbled accross a great example. Harper has always loved books, and it’s not that D doesn’t, but he mainly just wants to turn the pages. Well, we were looking at a book that Harper has always loved, Can You Find Me, it’s a seek and find book – full of jumbled up pictures where you find the three dogs or the 5 cookies etc. Harper has always liked it and we’ve given it to several little people but I can’t remember if I’d ever looked at it with D – well, the second page has barnyard animals, but it also has tractors – D freaked out – he found all of the tractors on the page. Funny thing is he shows no interest in the pages with toys or food, but the pages with trucks, planes, and motorcycles – wow, he freaks – we’ve looked at the book for hours in the last two weeks. So, i’ve been on a mission to find him boy specific books – he may never care about Good Night Moon (although I bet he will) but if he likes trucks – well of course I’ll do anything to get him to look at a book.