P'u Sung-Ling: Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio

 As entertaining and informative as this book was, with especially effective editing and translation by H.A. Giles, I don't know that I have much insight to offer into it.  The natural approach is to hold it alongside folk tales from other cultures, especially those compiled by Italo Calvino, and see what the overlay reveals.

Doing so, it immediately becomes clear just how universal the human approach to the supernatural is.  Among the themes and plots that recur with startling frequency in both volumes:

The young man of poor means but natural talent and good intention, who is treated unjustly but ultimately receives his due with a little help from the other world.

The girl who is treated badly by a mother figure to whom she has no blood ties, but endures out of an abundance of filial piety, and ultimately receives her due with a little help from the other world.

The lover who is not what they seem, but is all the more devoted and loving for it (although one interesting divergence is how often these figures were male in Calvino's stories, and how often female in P'u's).

In fact, dressed in different clothes, any story from the one set would be right at home in the other.  The virtues rewarded are the same: fidelity, industry, honesty, patience; as are the vices: greed, bad faith, impiety. I'm sure a better and more comprehensive comparison than I am equipped to perform exists, and draws conclusions from its findings.  As for me, I am in the mood to take a significantly less temporal approach, and go out into the woods to find a fox spirit or fairy of my own to ask.

American Grafitti

 What I experienced watching this movie can best be described as nostalgia for nostalgia.  As I sang along with the soundtrack, smirked at the cultural references and period-specific design choices, it was as though I was returning to my youth.  Except it wasn't my youth.  It was my father's youth.  It was his youth that formed the basis of my own youth, as though  he were reliving it vicariously through me, attempting a redo at whatever he felt went wrong.

And of course that's not too far off from what George Lucas was trying to do with the film.  Even though the film has the tone of a period piece, a scarce decade separates the setting from the filming.  Lucas does not seem to have been trying to recapture 1962; he was trying to remember it.  Lucas was reliving that period through me as the viewer, much as my father did throughout my youth. 

Which makes it nearly comical that Ron Howard went on from this sincere, if edited, version of the past to an altogether more disingenuous one in Happy Days--which one might also call nostalgia for nostalgia.  The people who watched that show were not entirely those who lived through its setting.  Many of them were, like me, those who had only heard the legends and claimed them as part of our own identity.

Raymond Buckland: Complete Book of Witchcraft

 When I say that this book confirmed me in my belief that Wicca is a bona fide religion, I do not mean that as a compliment.  This book served its purpose of giving me some insight into the gears and knobs that make it work for some people, but throughout I found the very same pedantry and dilution that makes other religions so unpalatable to me personally.  

To be fair, this was exactly Buckland's stated purpose in writing this book.  He is an advocate for mainstream acceptance of Wicca, and goes out of his way to draw attention to the harmlessness and relative banality of the practice.  In doing so, however, he reveals that Wicca is well on its way to falling into the trap that has befallen every religion before it, that which William James so insightfully identifies as the transition away from authentic religious experience into systematized bureaucracy.

Mercifully, there is one trap into which it has not yet fallen, although based on Buckland's descriptions and warnings, it is not far off.  The most deadly trap of religion, the litmus test by which I gauge whether a given thinker, community, or doctrine is worth considering, is to think that one is right.  The divine is not a puzzle that has been solved, and to think otherwise is delusion and laziness.  At the point of Buckland's writing, at least, Wicca was still able to claim "and it harm none, do what thou wilt."

Kate Grenville: The Secret River

 At a certain level, the question of literature ceases to be one of quality.  Once a book has survived hundreds of years of scrutiny with its reputation intact, made it onto "greatest books" lists, or, as in this case, been shortlisted for the Man Booker, it's a pretty safe bet that it will be good.  It will be well-written, even engaging and enjoyable.  

At that point, I don't ask myself whether the book will be good.  I ask myself, "Do I want to hear what this person has to say?  Do I want to hear this story?"  In this case, the answer should have been "No."  

It was a good book!  Beautiful, engaging, riveting at points, with a nice--if predictable--flow.  If you want to hear a white colonizer talk about how hard it is to be a white colonizer, then this is by all means the book for you.  If you, on the other hand, don't feel inclined to hear about how unfortunate it is that all those indigenous people had to be slaughtered, perhaps this one is best avoided.

This might even serve as a framework for answering the increasingly relevant question of how to separate the artist from their work in other areas.  Is R. Kelly's music good?  Is Louis C.K.'s comedy good?  Are Woody Allen's movie's good?  Of course they are.  Well, some of them.  It's not a question of whether the work in question is good.  It's a question of whether I want to give that person my time, attention, and space in my brain.