Ah, summer is almost here. Which, if you work in an office like me, doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot.
Though we have the Internet and all sorts of other wonder time-killers that while away the time between burning our retinas with computer and flourescent lights, there is always that more rewarding source of chronic eye-strain: reading.
I’ve been toying with the idea of a book list for a while now, so it seemed appropriate to make some shambolic attempt to throw one together before the summer is actually here and I have to start actually reading them. Here it goes.
Carlos Castenada, “The teachings of Don Juan” and “A Separate Reality”
Though now widely known to be fabrications, Castenada’s books wherein he converses with and learns from Yaqui Indian shaman Don Juan Matus about the nature and meaning of reality. Though no conclusive evidence of Matus’s existence has ever been found, Castenada’s exploration of Nagual shamanism and the use of psychotropic plants and substances to explore the outer edges of consciousness have provided another view of the psychedelic era’s hallucinogen-fixation. All the more relevant since psychiatrists have started testing LSD on patients again, taking the drug back to its original purpose some 67 years after Albert Hofmann’s magnificent bike ride.
Robert Heinlein, “Future History” series
More so than majority of his fellow Golden Age of Sci Fi brethren, Heinlein projected a sense of libertarian individual outside of society in his novels. The “Future History” stories and novels, as the name implies, show a split reality begun in now-ancient 1939 with Heinlein’s veiled manifesto “For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs” and continuing to his final novel “To Sail Beyond the Sunset” in 1987. The cribbing of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” is ironic, as the poem was set in antiquarian Greece and the novel hops dimension three thousand years from our present.
Richard G. Mitchell, Jr. “Dancing at Armageddon” With the level of paranoia bandied about with our foreign wars and financial stress at home, the survivalist movement fascinates me to no end. My friend checked this book out from the library and showed it to me yesterday. Mitchell, a sociologist at Oregon State University, embeds himself in a movement that ranges from overweight oldsters to the militant Aryan Nations in Idaho, all of whom desire to break off from the societies that traumatize their populations and propagate wholesale destruction. Mitchell paints the movement from a rational perspective, taking away societal bias and showing the people involved for their relative merits.
Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass”
On its 1855 release the collection of free verse was called “a mass of stupid filth” and Whitman called a filthy free lover. 155 years later free love has become accepted and banality is celebrated in such astute takes as “Let’s Get Retarded” and “Party in the USA.” Whitman, with Allen Ginsberg, was our country’s poet. It’s no coincidence that the latter would pray to Whitman in “A Supermarket in California” as he tried to make sense of the decaying American society. From odes to Lincoln to exploration of self, “Leaves of Grass” broke free of academic ideas of poetry and gave our country a soul and voice.
But these are just my suggestions. Find your own voice and world, the summer awaits.
