Singing to the Plants by Stephan Beyer-

This is an absolutely brilliant cross- disciplinary study of Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon, by a scholar of ayahuasca, hallucinogens, religion , psychology and Buddhism who at various stages of his career has also practiced as an international trial lawyer and written two tomes on Buddhist practices.

This book(published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2009 and now available in paperback) discusses alternate states of conscious ness, discarnate entities, endogenous chemicals and sigma 1 receptors, the difference ( a la James Hillman ) between spirit and soul,hallucinations,schizophrenia the work of C.G. Jung and a host of other interwoven issues with a passion, scholarship and readability that is excelled by none in this field.
Here is a review in poetic form( to the tune of Singing in the Rain)


Singin’to the Plants-Copyright E Kabak 2010

I’m singing to the plants
Just singing to the plants
My stomach has emptied
In a marvelous trance

The sky’s a blue cup
But before you may sup
Go down to the soul’s murk and then you go up

In a deep dive you’ll delve
And see those small machine elves
They’re nothing but just
All your multiple selves

The spirits you’ll find
Whether fearful or kind
Will dazzle your senses
Which before had been blind

And go ahead and engage
With some gnome who’s a sage
Your active imagining is soon all the rage

So go take a chance
Let your DNA dance
While singing
Just singing to the plants…

New titles-The Lost Art of Reading- Nomad Codes- Castro on Obama

Just finished The Lost Art of Reading, a terrific essay on Why Books Matter in Distracted Time by David Ulin, book critic for the Los Angeles Times.It's a brilliant take on how language collapses the distancebetween us and the author and brings us into the thoughts and perception of the writers and lets us see the world through his/her eyes.And how the high speed world of the internet,e-mails and text messages interferes with focussed reading and creates new brain activity,also intellectual but of a different duration and pattern.
It's a take on how reading helps empathy and a coherent view of life,how the reader becomes the book and how linked software and other creative use of a technology that's here to stay may also improve the reading experience and not lose its empathic, communicative aspects.
But it's also a cri de coeur about the slower and deeper experiential aspects of the reading process and how important it is to preserve them as they restore time to us.The distracted, continually addictive and interrupted experience of bouncing between multiplatforms acts to prevent empathy and deeper understanding, says Ulin. A wonderful and encyclopedic piece of work-highly recommended.
Published by Sasquatch Books, Seattle.


Erik Davis, chronicler of Burning Man and author of the classic and brilliant Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information, a book which treats a subject similar to that of The Secret Life of Puppets, by Victoria Nelson, has a new collection of short pieces out, entitled Nomad Codes, published by Yeti Books. This is an eye-opening and provocative assemblage of pieces on everything from Lovecraft to Goa and Transvestite Spirit mediums in Myanmar,tantric psychedelia, the late Terence McKenna,heir to the Tim Leary role of chief guru of advanced plant consciousness in the US,Jack Spicer, Burning Man, and Avatar. Good stuff, some pieces better than others but well worth the trip.


Ocean Books, a small left-wing Australian publisher, now gives us Obama and the Empire by-- yes it's he- Fidel Castro, a series a of articles written by Castro, dated from May 2008 through June 2010 and published prior hereto perhaps only in Cuba.

Castro is obviously of two minds about Obama, acknowledging on the one hand his brilliance and powers of expression opening to a woder world, but also , as he puts it, his role as the head of an imperial empire seeking to stay afloat, while at the same time beingopposed by what he deems extreme right- wing forces.
Some interesting stuff here, particularly the sharpness of Castro's brain, whether or not one agrees with his political point of view.
Fidel may have suffered some major physical setbacks, but they haven't affected his rhetoric or his edginess.

Finnegans Wake New edition released;Slavery is back in Style

The first revised/ corrected edition of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, the Ur book for this reviewer, has been released in Ireland by Houyhnhnm Press in an expensive(US $400) edition and even more expensive limited edition, edited by Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon, preceding its release next year ina regular trade edition by Penguin. A launch party was held earlier this week at the American Irish Historical Society in New York,accompanied by liltingly beautiful harp music, a speech by Danis Rose, who worked on the editing for 30 years(he also released a major edited version of Ulysses in 1997), and readings by many others, including Christopher Ricks and Denis Donoghue. It was quite an event and I will let my colleague and member of the NY Finnegan's Wake reading group Judd Staley summarize this exquisite evening:

Rose's talk was fascinating. He spoke for a while about the history of the project, which he and John O'Hanlon have been working on for 30 years. Apparently it all began with the question "Is FW coherent?" A close examination of one of the questions from I.vi (I think he said the Shem question, but that can't be right: that one's only two lines) led him to believe that there were textual problems, and so he embarked on a study of the manuscripts. He described Joyce's writing process as "like a mason building a wall": "not creating, but composing." The Wake is basically other people's words, taken from Joyce's reading and collected in the notebooks, layered together in order to create a beautiful "fairy tale."

He demonstrated the evolution of the text with a look at the first half-sentence, showing how it grew from the first manuscript (which began "brings us to Howth Castle & Environs! Sir Tristam...") through the first fair copy (adding "back"), through 8 (!) type-script revisions to give us the 1939 text. The new edition has a few variations even here: the spelling of "commodius" changes to "commodious," and the final "and" becomes an ampersand. Those are the ones I noticed.

Probably the most exciting thing about this whole project is that all of the synoptic text, reflecting all of Joyce's stages of revision, is in a hypretext format and will hopefully be available online eventually.

He then spoke about the last half-sentence. This was the best part of the talk. First of all, there are two new words in the new edition: "a lost"; so the sentence now reads "A way a lone a lost a last a loved a long the". He also said that the placement on the page is very important, to demonstrate the link back to the first page, as well as the link to "Paris, 1922-1939" (which, of course, combines with the last sentence to give us "A-L-P," the river of the first word). The new sentence now has 13 words, 7 of which are articles; both are significant numbers for Joyce. But the earlier drafts end differently: the original last sentence was "A bit beside the bush and then a walk a long the" (I think that's what he said; maybe somebody else heard it differently?) Rose spoke quite eloquently about the evolution of the tone of ALP's final soliloquy, as it grew darker when Joyce decided to "kill ALP." Rose suggested that the last words are not ALP speaking, but rather a "narrator." ALP's last words (according to Rose) are "The keys to. Given.", mirroring the last words of Christ dying in despair, before redemption. Then the narrator comes in, with the rhythm of ocean waves, laughingly delivering "the letter," which is of course to carry us back to where we started. He cited the "recirculation" of the opening as an allusion to the Roman ceremony of "recirculatio," a rededication of the city to the gods. It was really quite an explication.



Here's a poem/song we wrote called Slavery is back in Style--



Slavery is Back in Style
C 2010 by E Kabak


There is trafficking in humans,
And child labor as well
There are millions upon millions
Who are living in hell

There are workers in debt bondage
From the Danube to the Nile
Knavery’s omnipresent, and slavery’s in style

Slavery is back in style, slavery is de rigeur
From the laborer who’s mixing bricks
To the one who just now slaps manure
From the largest multinationals
To the government of Sudan
Everyone is playing at enslaving fellow man

Slavery is back in style
Our companies did it for a while
Working 14 hour shifts when you’re 14---
Just to make kids’clothes—it’s a little obscene--
And every night we go to bed
some worker’s dying in our stead
Prison labor here at home for victimless crimes
Toiling in the hole to eke out a few dimes
While you drive your SUV
Profit’s driving slavery
Trafficking in sex, she’ll smile:
"Slavery is back in style"

Right here in the USA
Many sweat for puny pay
The CFO’s soft whisper-The fourth quarter hurts-ow!
The CEO says “No sweat, we’ll just fire ten thou”
And though you may be very smart
You work now at the supermart
No benefits-you’re temps on trial
So you better hold your bile

Chain gangs walk in single file
People live in slum shitpiles
Tea Party folks may shout”Sieg Heil”
Slavery is back
Like a sneak attack
Slavery is back in style.

Sympathy for the Devil

"I was there when B& N closed its store on the West Side
Made damn sure that Amazon never shed a tear or cried
Pleased to meet you let me work the spindle
But what's troubling you is demonizing Kindle

I was there when they just ended the Sunday book review
when chick lit trash and vampire cash made good authors kind of blue
sent the bookstore rents so high that they caused literary woes
caused the indies to shut down and replaced by all those Trader Joes...

Pleased to meet you-but I take no blame
for the CFO's who started up this game...."

Saul Alinsky, Martha Nussbaum, Martin Amis etal

Saul Alinsky was the great community organizer whose several volumes including Rules for Radicals were the inspiration for Barack Obama's community organizer mentors in Chicago, and thus provided the base learning for the bottom-up social media campaign Obama waged in 2008.Alinsky, who died in 1969, is now the subject of a new anecdotal biography by Nicholas von Hoffman,entitled"Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky" and published by Nation Books.
Alinsky was also, curiously the subject of a major paper written at Wellesley by Hillary Clinton; his texts are now being studied and applied by the tea Partiers as well.

Von Hoffman, who served as a top community organizer for Alinsky,is a journalist whose early work included the wonderfully titled late 60's book-"We are the People Our Parents warned Us Against."
This is a warm and revealing biography with a plethora of juicy anecdotes. In addition to speaking of Alinsky's service with John L Lewis and the CIO,and his pioneering of successful community organizing in Chicago and across the country for blacks and latinos( he was the mentor for Cesar Chavez, among others),von Hoffman repeats the heart (or perhaps another organ)warming story of how Alinsky was asked to help integrate black people into the labor force in Rochester NY at a time when Kodak and Xerox were virtually all white communities of employees. In a story, whose precept is that the threat of action is often more successful than the implementation thereof, the author tells us that Alinsky immediately spotted the vulnerability of Rochesterians in their frequent attendance of Philharmonic concerts. He advised the parties with whom he would do battle that his virtually all black clients had purchased a block of seats and would attend the next major weekend recital after eating an all baked beans dinner shortly before the music played.
The implicit threat of a "fart-in" was all he needed to begin the negotiation process.
Alinsky was a genius at practical, no nonsense organizing who could turn on a dime and who was not above making alliances with the liberal antifacsists in the pre 1940's Catholic Church in Chicago who were dedicated to the improvement of society through charity to advance his goals.
A wonderful read and most entertaining as well.



Martha Nussbaum, distinguished professor of law and Ethics at the Univ of Chicago Law School and the author of numerous important books, has just had published by Princeton University Press a critically important thin volume-"Not for Profit":Why Democracy Needs the Humanities". The thesis in a nutshell is that the shortsighted focus on profit and utilitarianism,without the liberal arts ,and particularly the Socratic method of engaging the mind to understand the complexities of the world and see the other side of lives on the planet in a sympathetic light, diminishes our ability to criticize leadership and damages our ability to resolve complex global problems.
I amtold that right before the 2008 market crash 75 %or so of the graduating class of Yale headed for investment banking as did many lawyers seeking to max out on money.

And this in a country that had such a fine tradition of forward-looking education influenced by John Dewey and others,like Nobel prize winning polymath Rabindranath Tagore, who believed that we make progress as a society and advance only by cultivating a more inclusive sympathy and understanding of others.In addition, that this capacity can only be brought forward by education that empahsizes global learning, the arts and Socratic self- criticism.

It reminds me of an essay by the childrens' and adult storyteller Russell Hoban,from a collection entitled "The Moment Under the Moment", in which, discussing the house that childhood builds in the mind,he says:
"[Such a house in the mind]is a safe house, a learning place where we test words and images and ideas to find out what rings true.It's like a safe house in a spy story-in it the secret agent that is the child's mind can stay hidden until ready to venture into the hostile city ...But it isn't the world that beckons that is hostile- "
"it's the grey city of the failed children of the world, the dry thinkers, the juiceless minds, the poison skulls that dream in numbers and megadeaths.They run the world, these failed children;they speak in all languages and in all languages their speech is vile. In bemedalled uniforms, in costly business suits and ties they mouth pompous words printed out by grey machines. Each one thinks the other is the enemy while the enemy, the monster they have called up together, sings to itself outside the window.The grey city is why the safe house of childhood is needed , and long after the child is grown this safe house is still needed in the shadows and the narrow alleys by the waterfront in the grey city of terror.

Barnes & Noble Toys, A Tribute to Tuli, and Steve Stern

Barnes & Noble, once the target of enmity from independent booksellers when it was achieving a strong market position in the bookselling arena at their expense, is now suffering and arousing the sympathies of many of the same audience which had previously turned up its collective nose at them.
This is because,perhaps, the unsuccessful venture with the B&N e-book, the Nook, and the competition for bestsellers from the Wal-Marts and Costcos of the world, which are underselling everyon,including B&N.
Now B&N,in an attempt to improve its margins, has started substituting toys for book space in and about he childrens' section of the store.
This is a truly sad day for book lovers.

Steve Stern, who writes in what Harold Bloom calls the "Yiddish sublime" and has been called the heir to Isaac Singer, has two new books out- Frozen Rabbi,just published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, and The North of God, a fable on the train to an extermination camp.

Suffice it to say that, for someone who spends a great deal of his time reading Joyce,Borges and Calvino and experimental fiction, (but who also appreciates fine traditional writing and finely etched characters,plot development et al), Stern's books are a revelation.
There is in "Frozen Rabbi" a love scene taking place in an immigrant's New York at the beginning of the 20th century between two Jewish immigrants (not sure in one case of the sexuality of one of the characters)that almost seemed to partake of the divine, it was so powerfully and brilliantly rendered.Stern has a mystical joie de vivre that permeates and radiates through his writing like no other English language writer I know.More on these two books later.

Tuli Kupferberg, of the Fugs, the great 60's poets' rock band,died last week. Ed Sanders, the other lead poet who occupied a place in the 60's as owner of the Peace Eye Bookshop in the East Village as well as a chronicler of the Beats and Hippies and continues to write and publish his glorious poetry,eulogized Tuli at a memorial service at St Mark's Church in th East Village on Saturday July 17. One song Sanders and the group sang was "Nothing",Tuli's Buddhist chant.
Here is my Nothing 2, which brings the piece up to date-dedicated to Tuli.


Nothing 2-
C 2010 by E.M.Kabak

TV news nothing
Docudramas nothing
Sitcoms/reality nothing
Rachel Maddow leaves nothing but a shadow
Nothing nothing nothing

Fox News nothing, NPR nothing
CNN and NBC nothing
Beck and Scar- borough
Are just a large Zero
Nothing nothing nothing

Conservatives nothing, liberals nothing
Teaparties and radicals nothing
Right left or any wing
Or Ism is a big NO-thing
Nothing nothing nothing

Faith based nothing, atheists nothing
Praying is saying nothing
The world’s great religions
Are naught but a smidgeon
Of nothing nothing nothing

Money nothing, honey nothing
Iron chefs are all bereft nothing
Prix fixe deals and meals on wheels
All food is rude and nothing

Hollywood nothing,Broadway nothing
Telluride’s a void inside nothing
Festivals at Cannes are one big NON-
Event nothing nothing nothing

Civil law nothing, crimes galore nothing
All courts and judges now nothing
Everyone’s a lifer
Running up a cipher
Nothing nothing nothing

Stocks and bonds nothing, credit swaps nothing
All bank accounts margin amounts nothing
Private equity bought
Adds up up to one big nought
Nothing nothing nothing

Knives and guns nothing
Automatics nothing
IED PTSD nothing
Bombs and shock and awe
Dropped by the drones of war
Why bother they’re nada, just nothing

Mercury Venus Earth and Mars Jupiter Saturn(are they cars)
Alternate worlds are nothing
All of the universe
Is just a multiverse
Of Nothing nothing nothing

Book Expo- continued

Among the many intriguing titles from Knopf this fall are V.S. Naipaul's "Masque of Africa' where he mostlikely, (as he did in "Among the Believers" and his volumes on India,)will savage the belief in animism, Christianity, Islam, the cult of leadership and mythology. His "travel" tomes are every bit as, if not more engaging than his brilliant fictional portraits, and leave an indelible imprint in the minds of even the most cynical as well as thoughtful observers of the interplay between local culture and the global mise en scene.
Then there is another novel from Tom McCarthy, following his "Remainder" as well as Thomas Power's "The Killimg of Crazy Horse" We hope to read and review at length the three of these soon.

Notwithstanding the conglomeratization of publishing, it is plain that Random House continues, through its various imprints, including Doubleday, Crown, and Pantheon, to bring out high quality product. The fact that an author as talented as David Mitchell (his The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet comes out next month)continues to publish with RH is itself a shot in the arm for sustained literary success in American trade book publishing.