Category: death-and-dying

True Zen Man
Not Always So: Practicing the True Spirit of Zen by Shunryu Suzuki. Edited by Edward Espe Brown. Harper Collins. 162pp. $22.95. I think of Shunryu Suzuki as the quintessential Soto Zen Priest: modest, quiet, never drawing attention to himself, refusing to make great claims for practice or the results of practice, utterly devoted to zazen. Back ...
Read more
You Didn’t Know You Had It Until It Was Gone
Youth A Film by Paolo Sorrentino “Two seniors for youth.” It was a funny remark that I didn’t realize I was making until I said it. But then, apparently, it was adopted all the way down the ticket line. If that Saturday afternoon showing in Asheville was any indication, the people who are seeing this movie ...
Read more
When the Teacher Screws Up
Buddha Is the Center of Gravity: Teisho of Joshu Sasaki Roshi at Lama Foundation. Lama Foundation. 95 pp. 1974 (out of print) This is the book that gave Brad Warner the title for his most recent book. He has spoken highly of this volume at various times through the years, and when I’ve checked in the ...
Read more
Not all that Free
Freeheld A Film by Peter Sollett This is a leukemia movie. Also a gay and lesbian movie, and a film about social justice, but most basically, and most movingly, it is a film about someone who dies. That’s the emotional focus. As I walked out of the theater, I said to my wife, “Why didn’t they ...
Read more
Clark in the Dark
Waking up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age by Clark Strand. Spiegel & Grau. 140 pp. $26.00. I seem to be reading a lot of Clark Strand. One book has led to another. And though I’ve made light of his tendency to try every spiritual practice known to man, I’ve genuinely enjoyed his ...
Read more
No Shit, Sherlock
Mr. Holmes (2015) A film by Bill Condon It is the dream of every author to create a great iconic character, someone that people recognize just by the name. Cervantes, our first novelist, created two. In a way he was just writing about two aspects of the human mind, or the human personality. He could as ...
Read more
Tea & Pearls & the Flying Squirrel
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. A film by Alfonso Gomez Rejon. Some forty years ago, long before Netflix and movies on demand, I had a friend named Rob who was obsessed with movies in general and Robert DeNiro in particular. One evening we had Rob over with a married couple of our acquaintance, and ...
Read more
Beyond Story
The Unnamable from Three Novels by Samuel Beckett. Grove Press. 407 pp. $15.95. Much to my chagrin, The Unnamable was too much for me. I was doing well with Beckett, reveling in the sentences, not letting the strangeness of his Three Novels bother me. Molloy did seem to be about Everyman, the way all of our ...
Read more
How Can You Tell?
Malone Dies from Three Novels by Samuel Beckett. Grove Press. 407 pp. $15.95. I think that Malone Dies, the second novel in Beckett’s famous trilogy, concerns the creative process. At the beginning of the novel Malone (the name is arbitrary; it could just as easily be Molloy, or Moran) is in some kind of institution flat ...
Read more
I Believe the Word is Entropy
Molloy from Three Novels by Samuel Beckett. Grove Press. 407 pp. $15.95. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a stranger book than Molloy, the first novel in the famous trilogy that Samuel Beckett published in his early forties. It makes no sense whatsoever, especially in its first eighty-five pages. It concerns a man—the eponymous narrator—who has ...
Read more
Lost Souls
Home by Marilynne Robinson. Picador. 325pp. $14.00 I have now read all three novels of what I suppose might be called the Gilead trilogy, Gilead itself, Home, and Lila. I unfortunately read them out of order, Lila first. I also read them when I was moving out of a tiny apartment and back into our renovated ...
Read more
Gilead
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. Picador. 247 pp. $16.00 This novel has an almost irresistible premise for me: an older father writing to his son about the past life that he’ll never have a chance to discuss with him, since he expects to have died by the time then son gets interested. My own father died when ...
Read more
Portrait of the Artist as a Bulldog
Mr. Turner. A film by Mike Leigh. There’s a lot not to like in Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh’s biopic of the British artist J.M. W. Turner (Timothy Spall). The man is often gruff and uncommunicative. He is especially so with his housekeeper, Hannah Danby (Dorothy Atkinson), who obviously worships him and would do anything for him, ...
Read more