My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A fascinating analysis of the seven “most common causes of disaster in chess”, Grandmaster Jonathan Rowson’s book, “The Seven Deadly Chess Sins” provides virtually inexhaustible material to provoke thought and study for the serious player.

As a beginner/improver whose ratings bumble around the 1000 mark and who rarely has the patience to play through worked examples, 50% of this book was beyond me. However, it will be returned to over and again in the future and there is enough to fascinate and provoke at any level. Rowson analyses both the psychological and practical outworking of each of the “sins”.

The book is divided into seven sections dealing with problems that are loosely tied to the traditional “Seven Deadly Sins” (Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Greed, and Sloth).

Thinking – sometimes there is too much of this.

Blinking – lapses of attention that cost too dearly.

Wanting – being too focused on the result.

Materialism – thinking too much in terms of material.

Egoism – missing your opponent’s point of view.

Perfectionism – taking too much time.

Looseness – failing to maintain a grip on the game in front of you.

Each chapter begins with a discussion of the more conceptual and psychological aspects of the game. How does your personality affect your play? What do you see when you look at the board? Is it possible to be objective? How does the Chess Mind work? Are you too attached to certain lines? What is really going on? The discussion is delightfully buoyed up by quotes from Grandmasters and diverse sources such as Kierkegaard, Sartre, De Bono, and the I-Ching. There is a wonderful sense here that Chess is about life and who you are that has much wider implications. This is what really excites me about the game and it blew my mind open to new possibilities and taught me a lot about myself.

The second part of each chapter is given to the worked examples drawn from historic and lesser known matches of over 60 different players. Here Rowson’s encyclopedic breadth of detail guides the reader through the trips and turns that demonstrate each “sin” on the board.

Every chapter is worthy of at least a year’s study and application and it is small wonder it took me a few months to plough through it all. The reader never feels patronised or dictated to as the author has a way of presenting ideas in a way that encourages them to mature and stand on their own feet; to explore and develop through shedding the kind of formulaic mantras that all of us tend to have absorbed. It’s like coming under the tutelage of a Zen master.

This book will remain close to hand, a challenging resource for a lifetime of learning.

View all my reviews

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What would happen if one day a genuine magician with real magic came to a city of illusionists who live entirely in a world of artifice and sleight of hand?

This is one of the very few books that I have read more than once. It left a very deep impression on me the first time round, aged 13 or so, and not just because I got some sort of fictional-character-crush on the girl in the story. It was my first exposure to Paul Gallico’s profound gift for the allegorical and, with hindsight, I have to acknowledge that it must have shaped my impressionable mind in a very significant way.

The fact that first I read this book at a fairly young age demonstrates the universal appeal and accessibility of the writing, but having the opportunity to re-read it nearly 20 years later I found still more delight and depth in the telling of the tale although it was very much shorter than I remember it being. For a book that looms so large in my memory and imagination, I was surprised to re-read it in a single evening.

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is well on its way to being a classic and an essential rite of passage for anyone who wants to write for pleasure or professionally.

Julia Cameron has set herself the mission of debunking the myth of “writers” being some special class of human being who must starve in a garret for the sake of their craft and uses her words to gently liberate and nurture the essential writer that she believes lies in every person.

The accumulated wisdom of her years as a working writer and a creative writing teacher is presented in a series of short essays (each just a few pages long) that finish with a practical “initiation tool” to bring the reader to the page with pen in hand.

This book can be approached either as a “writing course” to be worked through over a couple of months, but I suspect it will be of more value as something to dip into as an “unblocking tool” or when inspiration is flagging. If read from cover to cover, like a normal book, the author’s tendency to repeat the same themes tends to lessen their impact and there is no detectable unfolding of a journey that links the chapters; they stand alone. So, it is best considered a collection of essays that meditate upon Julia’s core convictions that the act of writing is for everyone to enjoy and it doesn’t need to be a chore.

Some of the essays really clicked with me, others didn’t seem to meet a felt need directly but may well do for another season. On this reading, I particularly enjoyed Julia’s affirmation of the writer as an observer of things that seem to enter the imagination from another source: the Divine, the Universe, something beyond ourselves. This certainly describes a dimension of my own experience.

Julia’s style is richly evocative of the senses. She always describes where she is as she is writing. She then seems to weave her message from her current experience or whatever is turning over in her mind at the time. Some of her lines have the potential to become proverbs and I found myself copying out numerous quotes into my journal. I did not attempt all of her initiation tools in any sort of disciplined way but used several over the last year and will return to them repeatedly.

The Right to Write has been a good companion over the last year and will bear returning to again, especially on those days when I feel that perhaps I should give up and get a proper job.

View all my reviews

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Some of the things I note about this friend:

• He treated me as an adult, in spite of my tender age. As far as I can remember, he gave me my first ukulele but as soon as I outgrew it we made an adult arrangement by which I was to pay for a better instrument. The deal was not done through my parents but was contracted between us. He referred to it as doing business, and we even shook hands on it.
• He took a wider interest in my life. It wasn’t just all about the ukulele, but also about flying kites and climbing trees.
• He let me teach him. Quite early on I tried finger-picking on the uke. When I showed this to him he showed enthusiasm and let me teach him what I had figured out. He let me know when things I was into (like Jelly Roll Morton’s music) had fired his interest, too. He didn’t have to be the expert on things, just a fellow explorer.
• He let me initiate. He had an openness that made me feel comfortable about initiating. We corresponded; I didn’t get letters asking “how’s the playing coming on”, but when I wrote asking for more chords or advice, he took the trouble to write back. I had to ask. Often in a teacher-pupil or mentoring relationship, the teacher is expected to be proactive and dictate what the student needs. In this relationship, I had to want the learning enough to ask for it.
• He made music fun. When I saw him playing the recorder, for instance, I started to change my mind about the bad impression I had of the instrument from an earlier age.

Without being the recipient of this kind of openhanded willingness to encourage a young person, I doubt that music would have taken up such an important place in my life.

I progressed from the ukulele to the Tenor Banjo, I became obsessed with Jazz, I took clarinet lessons when I went to senior school and spent most of my break-times teaching myself the piano. At this stage, I was very much alone, trying to work stuff out by ear and reading all the books I could. However, I am quite convinced that if someone else had come into my life at that point, to act as a mentor in the same way and take me forward as a Jazz musician, life would have been very different once again. I can’t indulge in regrets, but I do often wonder what would have happened with a little more relational encouragement at this point.

Is there someone you know who needs a little bit of your unobtrusive and generous encouragement at a key moment in their creative growth?

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"try to see beyond my ugliness"

Root Man was found in the bottom of a flowerpot that I was emptying into the compost. To be honest, he gave me a bit of a fright when I first saw his grotesque figure. He put me in mind of the legendary mandrake root that is supposed to look too human for comfort and is alleged to scream when you pull it out of the ground. But, Root Man is a miracle of natural anthropomorphism and also reminds me of our tendency to see ourselves reflected in nature, and our constant search for our own likeness in others.

Well, when I let Root Man speak for himself he told me some crazy stuff. He said that our time on this earth is like his life in the soil but that that is not the whole story.

He told me that, as far as moles or earthworms are concerned, a dandelion looks like its roots, they don’t see the flower. We recognise a plant by its leaves, fruit and flowers but the subterranean world distinguishes between the mysterious characteristics of roots.

If you showed an earthworm a daffodil, it would be blinded by the magnificent colour and shape but it would say to you, “that’s not a daffodil, a daffodil is brown and bulbous with stringy tendrils coming off it”. Likewise, we have no idea how angels (for instance) see us on the other side, because all we see of ourselves and others is the root part.

“So…” concluded Root Man, “when you look at people around you, try to see beyond the muddiness and twistyness. This is not what I am. I am actually a red geranium!”

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As Long as Life Beats

My arms clutch emptiness
If I wake without the guardians
Of friendship and daylight so I see
I am alone and you have gone

And I take to the streets
To look for you in the places
I'd be comfortable to find you
Speaking vainly to those who should know you 

You may tell me another enigma
You have hidden in your heart
Then walk away into the night
But I'll follow you for an answer

And when you turn your face away
I'll choose the better part
Leaving my place in the firelight
So I can be under your gaze

Eyes without expectation
Eyes that are not disappointed
Those are the eyes I will die for
As many times as leaves have fallen 

Arms that rest in completion
Hands that tell me it has all been done
Those are the arms and the hands I will die in
As many times as day has run

(March 2001)

If you are in the mood for more poetry then I recommend you check out Barbara Lane’s Blog, “this | liminality”, where she is posting some of her dad’s poetry.

… and there’s more of my stuff here.

Other flowers:

• A Poem: Waking Journey (seymourjacklin.co.uk)
• Thursday Poem (3quarksdaily.com)
• The Moth – the poem (currentlocationwonderland.wordpress.com)
• Poem: Spinning (postgradpanopticon.wordpress.com)

Lord Of Light by Roger Zelazny

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a difficult book to start and to get into and I would not have persevered with it except that it was highly recommended by its Hugo Award and by a friend whose taste is unerring. It turned out to be well worth the effort, a powerful adventure in the imagination, highly unusual and, perhaps, irreverent. This was clearly the fruit of the author’s thorough assimilation of Hindu mythology and I think I would have got even more out of it if I had been better versed in Hinduism myself. It also inspired me to read the Upanishads, which is a whole other trip!

Collected Short Stories by E.M. Forster

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This wonderful collection of stories really helped me to “get” E.M. Forster in a way that I was not able to access through his more famous longer works, and sealed him to me as a kindred spirit. This is a very coherent collection where we see Forster worrying away at the same bones he digs up in Howards End, A Room With a View andA Passage to India. He was essentially a romantic with a prophetic view of where the Victorian obsession with progress, novelty and mechanisation were leading. In most of these stories it is nature and the spirits who animate her who triumph. Especially notable is “The Machine Stops”, a visionary piece of early science fiction in which he seems to foresee the deprivations of the Internet Age with disturbing accuracy. These tales are melancholic and magical and strangely accessible, a real delight.

Rama Revealed by Arthur C. Clarke

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I had to read this book to satisfy the curiosity for answers that the first three “Rama” books set up although I suspected that finding the answer to the mystery of Rama was bound to be an anticlimax of sorts … and it was. However, the story was saved by the grandiose imagery and complex characterisation that marks Arthur C. Clarke’s work. I enjoy his portrayal of the relationships between his characters as they struggle to resolve the agonies imposed on them by every turn of the plot. Of all the books in the Rama series, none have quite come close to the mind-blowing sci-fi scenery of the first volume, but the political intrigue and machinations of the characters become more developed. This closing story aims to tie up the grand picture and to say something about God, Humanity and the Universe in the process – ultimately it doesn’t quite satisfy (and it is hard to imagine how it ever could nail this), but it’s a good read nevertheless.

Shane by Jack Schaefer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A classic, and my first introduction to the “Westerns” genre. I had never quite understood the appeal of this genre until a friend recommended and lent me this book. What stands out for me is the perfect pacing of the novel, it moves slowly (but not too slowly) and menacingly towards the climax and then punches in with a dizzying burst of adrenaline, which is completely satisfying. I read it in one go, and it left me with a whole bunch of unprocessed emotions, a sense that my compass had been jarred. Shane still haunts me. Apparently the place to go after this is Chandler’s The Big Sleep.

Placówka [The Outpost.] by Bolesław Prus

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One of my best discoveries of 2011, tucked away in a collection of Polish stories that I bought on a whim many years ago. The Outpost is a very funny and somewhat tragic portrayal of the “peasant mentality” that takes the reader back to rural Poland in the 1800s. The stubborn main character, Ślimak, resists the colonisation of his locality by the forward thinking and economically shrewd Germans who are buying land and building a railway nearby. The plot is populated with affectionately and humorously painted village characters: the local aristocrat, the inn keeper, the Jewish peddlar, the nagging wife, the alcoholic old lady and the slow-witted farmhand. This book is not only a fascinating piece of social history but a warmly told story and I’ll jump at the chance to read some more from Boleslaw Prus.

One Soldier’s War by Arkady Babchenko

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a hell of book, a first hand account of an 18 year old conscript in the Chechen war of 1996, torn from his mother’s apron strings and brutalised beyond belief by both the training and the fighting. The most telling effect of the horror is that Babchenko chooses to return to the battlefield as a contract soldier to fight in the second conflict, not because he believes in the war but because it has become part of him and he cannot stay away. Later, still, he goes back as a journalist and still fails to make any sense of it. “Maybe war is the strongest narcotic in the world.” (I reviewed this book more substantially in this post)

Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals by Robert M. Pirsig

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a sequel to the cult classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values, and Pirsig, by his own admission, anticipated that it would stand the test of time even better than his first work. Philosophically it is more conclusive and I found it more satisfying than ZAMM. The “enquiry into morals” seems to actually lead to some more concretely applicable conclusions than the previous “enquiry into values”. We journey with the same character, Phaedrus, several years after the motorcycle trip with his son. He seems to have mellowed but is still obsessively seeking a grand unifying theory of some sort. He begins with anthropology (my home territory) and the Native American Indians, arguing that the “cowboy” philosophy and hence “white” American mores owe more to the Native Americans than they are given credit for. By degrees, Pirsig goes on to describe “dynamic” and “static” moralities and the progressive evolution of morality by means of these two types of force. Phaedrus takes a passenger on his yacht (Lila) who he is quite sure is a woman he remembers from his past. She becomes a sort of “case-study” for his enquiry. As in the previous work, not a lot actually happens in the story, but everything is dissected until the kernel of a resolution is uncovered.

Twenty-one Stories by Graham Greene

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book was my first exposure to Graham Greene. I very quickly found myself reading (and more or less enjoying) these perfectly crafted stories as items of social history and examples of wonderfully understated prose in which no word is wasted. (Click here for my fuller review)

View all my reviews

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The word is ...

The emptied cover of a book has been brought in on the tide and left on the beach. This is all that is left after the ocean has digested it, page by page.

As I look at this, I realise that there is really only one right way to read a book and that is to devour it as thoroughly as the sea has done this one – to assimilate the ink and paper into the salt of experience and the spume of memory … until I own its words, dispersed in every corner of myself, and it is no longer possible to say, “this is ‘I’ and that is ‘Book’”.

If only we could take each book we read, and leave it like this when we are done with it, then we’d be wiser than the magi. What if we were to tear out each page as we read, confident that the words on it had done all they needed to do and had become part of us? There would be no need to hoard it on the shelf. I don’t say we have to agree with everything we read or to adopt it as truth; but every line can be digested, questioned, and allowed to work. It is too easy to hold ideas in the abstract, to “like” the thoughts of an author without being changed by them. Books on shelves are like un-lived ideas. Empty covers on a beach are the dried pod of a seed that has been planted inside the reader.

It also has not escaped me that this looks suspiciously like the cover of a Gideon’s edition of The New Testament and Psalms, very much like the one I was given at school when I was 11 years old. On the first page, it said something like “this is yours to keep, we only ask that you read a portion of it every day”. Well … I did, and I have done (nearly) every day for the last 24 years; but that’s another story …

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Jetsam

Blame three things for this post and all that follow it in a similar vein.

Firstly, I have been following a series of posts on this | liminality where Barbara has been meditating on 26 seashells given to her by a friend and posting on each of them in turn; weaving something of her present state of mind and sense of place with the thoughts suggested to her by each seashell. The idea behind this project has not only intrigued but haunted me in an unexpected way. The sense that objects can prompt insights and fire the imagination resonates with my own quest to find the supernatural dimension in the everyday and commonplace.

The ability to anchor our inner self to the outer world through the power of symbolism is a huge part of what it means to be human.

Secondly, several months ago I went to a local bead shop to purchase an array of beads for our youth group to use in making their own “prayer bracelets”. I wanted them to explore the things they had learned on a weekend away, to find beads to symbolise those things and literally bind them on their wrists. When I told the sales-person of this she became very interested and very helpful in choosing beads. But, she also showed me a bracelet that she was wearing that was made purely from items that she had found. It is amazing what gets left lying around. Every component of the bracelet, therefore, had a mysterious history and was also associated with a time and a place and a moment in her life.

It was not long after this that I developed my own string of beads as a visual reminder of my values and priorities.

Thirdly and finally, David from “My Seed of Truth” contacted me recently about writing a piece of short fiction to string together some of the themes from his life that have lead to the “My Seed of Truth” project. It was while turning over a few ideas for a story last night that I hit upon an idea for another sequence of blog posts … the wisdom of Things Found.

I’m not alone in being a hoarder of Objets Trouves, from curiously shaped or coloured pebbles and bits of glass to twigs and pine cones and broken jewelry. My plan is to bring some of these found things to light and to see what they might have to say. Sometimes God speaks unexpectedly through the things we see, sometimes they prove to be the key that unlocks an insight that has waited for the right moment … who knows what might be discovered through the Wisdom of Things Found?

Links:

Verbatim – a blog of found poetry

this | liminality – Seashells, poetry and other good stuff

My Seed of Truth

Great Soul

I’m currently working my way through Louis Fischer’s “Life of Mahatma Gandhi”. I say “working my way through” because it is impossible to simply read about such a life without being forced to look long and hard at one’s own. One of the many things that strikes me about Gandhi’s life is his unending experimentation.

Many of his contemporaries found this a very frustrating aspect of their Mahatma. As much as they loved him, it was difficult to keep up with his ever evolving attitudes and approaches. Just when people thought he had nailed something down, he would move on, backtrack, repent, try something else. This champion of non-violence and enemy of the British System, nevertheless supported the British war effort by recruiting and serving in an ambulance corps. During his lifetime, Gandhi completely reversed his opinion on inter-caste marriages within Hinduism – from complete disapproval to virtually insisting on it. And he never stopped radically changing his dietary habits in line with his evolving view of human health and ethical vegetarianism.

He was a slippery fish – you never quite knew how he was going to respond to something, but he was always ready with a reasoned answer to his surprised and exasperated followers. This apparent inconsistency was not a weakness but appears to spring from a humble openness to change and learn, make mistakes and experiment.

In spite of all this it appears that three things remained fixed, two of which were phenomenally practical. He maintained a lifelong commitment to Khadi (homespun cloth), he never gave up his focus on integrating the “untouchables” in society (he renamed them “Harijans” – children of God), and he was unashamedly religious. Khadi, Harijans, and God – these were the forces he believed in for the transformation of India.

I admire the clarity with which he was able to pick the issues he would die for (as he nearly did on a couple of occasions due to self-imposed fasts). But, I am also determined to learn from the humility with which he was able to try new ways of aligning his convictions with his actions, and to say, “I got that wrong” and move on to try another approach.

Gandhi’s own body and soul, his surroundings and his sphere of influence were a laboratory in which he was prepared to constantly refine and improve his methods in search of the truth. He reminds me that our goal in life is not to become an increasing point of stability and so-called “reliability” but to be dynamic beings, adept swimmers in a sea of change, lifelong experimenters and unashamed modifiers of our selves.

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