Whitewater at the Top of the World: Craig Childs presents the story of the first ever passage of Tibet’s Salween River

Craig Childs is an extreme traveler, NPR commentator, winner of the Galen Rowell Art of Adventure Award, and author of House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest and The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild. In September 2007, Childs joined a 16-person expedition for the first ever descent of the upper Salween River in Tibet. At the time, the Salween was one of the world’s longest, highest, and most remote unexplored rivers, and it promised world class whitewater. After many months of preparation and travel, the expedition arrived in Tibet during record rainfalls, and the Salween was dangerously flooded. Since the river is remote and winds through unknown canyons, embarking was an irrevocable decision to face unknown perils. Childs, a famously compelling speaker, tells the thrilling tale of the Salween expedition with breathtaking images and exclusive video footage.

Fans of Into Thin Air, Touching the Void, and other tales of first-person adventure will want to meet the man of whom the New York Times says, “Childs’s feats of asceticism are nothing if not awe inspiring: he’s a modern-day desert father.”

Thursday, October 15th, 7:00 p.m. at KoKo Cocktails, 1060 Geary Street (at Van Ness), San Francisco

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So I was shopping at Wal-Mart the other day, with that sinking feeling I get whenever I betray humanity, when the words of writer, farmer and secular saint Wendell Berry came to mind. One of his themes is the human cost of loss of community and one compelling example he cites is insurance. Berry points out that citizens in an average small town—say, for example, my beloved Paonia—annually pay out far more in health, home and car insurance than it would actually cost to care for our own sick, repair our own cars, rebuild our own homes and pass the hat as needed. In other words, a community made up of people willing to help each other would wind up expending far less time, energy and money than is now required to pay for our various insurances. In other other words, because we don’t work together we all pay the middleman, and the middleman grows fat on our dollars.

But who is the middleman? Typically it’s a corporation preying on many communities, collecting dollars and grudgingly dispensing a bare minimum of mediocre service in return.

we all pay the middleman, and the middleman grows fat on our dollars

I don’t have a solution for this, but it’s worth pointing out that in this area and in many others, corporations and communities are necessarily opposed; corporations thrive when communities are made up of scared, paranoid, alienated individuals, and communities thrive when they are composed of trusting, generous, openhearted humans. So corporations are, by their nature, always and inevitably engaged in a sort of clandestine propaganda war against community. Using the TV stations, radio and other media they own outright, and also using the governments they control indirectly, corporations present the world as dangerous, and portray our fellow humans as greedy, deceitful and violent. In fact, the opposite is far more true: this planet we live on is astonishingly abundant, and humans are generally, in my experience anyway, generous, brave and kind. It’s corporations that can be described as dangerous, deceitful, greedy and violent – not always, of course, but that’s certainly the way to bet. As Wendell Berry says, “Rats and roaches [and I would add corporations to this list] live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.”

Berry has also said that “To be sane in a mad time is bad for the body and worse for the soul.” and the word on the street is that we do live in mad times. But we are not doomed to live in a world governed by corporate fascists. Solutions are close at hand everywhere, in your own neighborhood and hometown. Support your neighbors, your community radio, your local art center, the library and all the other blessings to be found in a healthy community. Be generous and trusting. Not only will you instantly improve your own life and the life of your region, you’ll also be starving the corporations into submission and irritating the Walton family.

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Remember, Be Here Now, by Ram Dass

Even on the increasingly rare occasions that Timothy Leary’s LSD-popularizing antics are really discussed, the man known then as Richard Alpert appears as little more than a sidekick—Robin, to Leary’s Dark Knight—and his book, Be Here Now, a mere punch line to a forgotten 60s joke. But in the decades since, with Leary’s needle stuck at ‘groovy’ right up until his relatively early death, Alpert’s fully disclosed spiritual struggles, his open record of extreme growth and change, and of course his transformation into America’s own guru, Ram Dass, have left him, perhaps, the greater figure. By any reckoning, he is a scarred and worthy chronicler of a numinous time, and an interesting living experiment that still unfolds.

I had the good fortune to be handed Be Here Now in the midst of one of my very first acid trips, when I was still convinced that there was meaning beneath all the fireworks. I puzzled over it quite happily for hours, imprinted on it, and it has affected my subsequent spiritual life as surely as childhood religious instruction; and like childhood religious instruction, the influence has not always been positive and shaped me by my resistance at least as much as by my acquiescence. For example I, for far too many years, accorded Hindu-flavored spirituality far more respect than I now feel it deserves.

It is a concise classic of drug writing, a genre that deserves more respect than it gets

Be Here Now is actually three books in one. The introduction is Alpert’s tale of the years with Leary, his travels in India, and the encounters with the fabulous guru, Neem Karoli Baba, that remade Alpert as Ram Dass. It is a concise classic of drug writing, a genre that deserves more respect than it gets. The middle, longest, section is a hand lettered and illuminated attempt to convey, experientially, certain verities of the psychedelic experience. It is strange, strangely powerful, and I am not able to capture it in a net of mere words—take strong hallucinogens (or, if you prefer, entheogens) and read it for yourself. And finally, the book concludes with an adequate primer of the aforementioned Hindu-flavored spirituality—meditation, yoga, veganism, etc.—the efficacy of which is demonstrated by the easy competence with which India governs herself and cares for her people. Am I too cynical? Very well, paw through this section yourself and carry away the bits you find shiny… that’s certainly what I did, and I can’t say I regret it.

Separately, none of these parts is indispensable, but like the disparate, ridiculous books of the Bible (have you ever read the Book of Jonah?) when gathered together (along with an excellent bibliography) they amount to scripture. And, like scripture, they can remake your world to the extent you let them.

Alpert/Dass is, it must be said, a substantial spiritual fuck up, but I will always love him for this book, and for the way he once compared the way he figuratively fell on his face over and over to a man making his way to a holy city by means of continual prostrations—it was too apt a description of my own life to ever forget.

Promethea, by Alan Moore

Alan Moore is a literary titan whose medium happens to be comic books: deal with it. The fact is, Moore is positively Joycean in the way he packs layers of meaning into words and, unlike Joyce—or Pynchon, or Wallace—he has the whole playground of image to play with as well.

The substantial success Moore attained with his scripts for Watchmen, From Hell, V for Vendetta, and other titles—and the substantial disappointments he suffered as those graphic masterpieces were translated to the screen—both allowed him and drove him to focus on more insular, idiosyncratic work… one can almost hear him muttering, ‘make a movie of this you effing bastards,’ as he completed his pornographic masterwork Lost Girls, or the swirl of Cabala, sex magick, metaphysics, and superhero mythology comprising the work I extol here, Promethea.

Available in five volumes that collect the original comics, the spine of Promethea is conventional for the costumed vigilante genre: a young lady, Sophia Bangs (pay attention to those names, reader) finds herself blessed/cursed with the ability to transform herself into the curvaceous superheroine Promethea, who is able to fly, shoot beams of force from her caduceus, and so forth. In coming to terms with her new powers, she meets and beats assorted villains, and ushers in the end of the world.

Wait; what was that last part? End of the world? It’s hardly a spoiler to tell you so—from early on in Book One it’s clear that Promethea’s world faces the end of history.

But not by nuclear annihilation, as in Watchmen, but by Armageddon, Kali Yuga, Ragnarök, or some other name drawn from the end time theologies so often found in human spiritual systems. In her quest to understand her role as Destroyer, Sophie/Promethea thoroughly explores the Western esoteric tradition.

In his personal life, Moore is an accomplished ceremonial magickian and here, like Philip Pullman in His Dark Materials, he uses an exciting, bawdy, page-turning tale to sugarcoat serious philosophical instruction. The attentive reader will come away from Promethea with a useful grounding in tarot, cabala and the tree of life, Crowleyan ritual, and will even get an intriguing and accurate glimpse of Goetic demonology.

More importantly, by reading this book and letting it’s glorious graphics seduce you, you will imbibe a certain mindset and realize at gut level that what we are pleased to call reality is merely an insubstantial scrim imperfectly concealing the actual nature of existence. And as Sophie—and her entire world—are forced to acknowledge, confronting an unveiled all-that-is is both terrifying… and thrilling.

Travels, by Michael Crichton

I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but the fact is, I like Michael Crichton’s novels and have read most of them. And of course, I’m not alone in that—Crichton’s books have sold 150 million copies worldwide. But relatively few have read Travels, which makes sense because it’s pretty much the opposite of a ‘Crichton book’. It’s short not long, it’s a memoir not thriller fiction, and it’s written in a graceful, unaffected voice, not the thudding, heart-pounding! thriller prose that Crichton mastered long before writers like Dan Brown or David Baldacci began to hammer readers over the head with it. I think he missed his audience with this one; Travels is not for the average thriller reader.

As you might guess from the title, Crichton is here writing a travel memoir but, crucially, he includes inner journeys as well. Beginning with his experiences as a 6’9” medical student who put himself through medical school writing potboilers—and the The Andromeda Strain—and continuing with multiple world trips, and his experiences meditating, directing movies, learning to see auras, tripping intensely, bending spoons, diving with sharks, etc. etc. His clear exposition of the events experienced and of his own mental state while they unfolded is what makes Travels remarkable. Also, his motivation for writing Travels is unimpeachable; he certainly didn’t need the money, and must have known that this book wouldn’t make him much anyway. Nor would it exactly burnish his reputation… the questing, skeptical-but-believing Michael Crichton on display in Travels is not the Michael Crichton he would want Hollywood agents to negotiate with.

So ultimately, Travels is immensely credible. Crichton tells me that he learned to bend spoons one evening, and I believe him. He tells me that a weekend workshop gave him the gift of seeing auras, and I start looking for such a workshop to attend myself…

And thus is reality undermined.

His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman

Just to get it out of the way, yes, these are Young Adult novels. And they’re based on Milton’s Paradise Lost… or so I’m told. But so what?—we must take wisdom where we find it, and in the three books of His Dark Materials—The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass—Pullman is not only wise, but brave, taking on, as he does, conventional religious thinking in general and the Catholic Church in particular. Most reviews of His Dark Materials focus on daemons, the animal-guised, familiar-like soul analogues that Pullman brilliantly fishes up from exceedingly deep archetypal waters and, yes, daemons are cool but for my money even more attention should be paid to his frankly anti-church agenda; read at the cusp of adolescence, these books will effectively immunize against excessive religiosity. I read them when I was struggling with my own religious addictions—I’m a recovering fundamentalist—and they were the kick in the ass I needed to actually change.

None of this would matter if Pullman was preachy or didactic, but fortunately—and unlike myself—he is neither. Instead, he couches his serious life lessons in a compulsively readable coming-of-age tale, set against a backdrop of witches, armored bears, dirigibles, and passages between worlds. As you are pulled from page to page, you will also be reordering your views on spiritual expression… so read with care.

My Life With the Spirits, by Lon Milo Duquette

Though I have cast spells, performed sex magick rituals, and worshipped my patron goddess Ostara under a full moon at Summer Solstice, the fact is I am a dilettante, not a practicing magickian. But even an armchair magickian must read astonishing quantities of written material, for surely it is the wordiest of hobbies, with tome after tome devoted to the arcana of divination, cabala, Crowleyan ritual, chaos magick, Enochian scrying, and so forth and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. And in all this vast, mostly fascinating, swamp of literature there is one writer, Lon Milo Duquette, who stands apart because he sees himself with without illusion, and because he writes with exceptional clarity, self-deprecation, and humor.

His Chicken Qabalah is a useful and lucid explication of how and why a non-Jew might explore Cabala for spiritual purposes, Angels, Demons & Gods of the New Millennium is a perfectly acceptable primer for those interested in Western ceremonial magick, and should you decide to flirt with high strangeness and engage the Beast directly, you can have no better Virgil than Duquette in his books, Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot, The Magick of Aleister Crowley: A Handbook of the Rituals of Thelema, and Aleister Crowley’s Illustrated Goetia: Sexual Evocation.

But before you read any of these (and even if you have no intention to read these, or any, books on magick) read My Life With The Spirits: The Adventures of a Modern Magician. Like three other books on this list, it is a memoir of alternative spirituality. Conventionally autobiographical, My Life With The Spirits follows Duquette from early childhood through delightfully rock-and-roll-and-magick infused hippie years, and into an adulthood as a sober and respected bishop of the Ordo Templi Orientis. Like all my favorite people, Duquette has a zest for direct experience and he exuberantly dives into yoga, communal life, magickal ritual, and whatever else captures his interest. And he writes up his experiences with the brio and humility that I associate with truth telling. His tales of Goetic evocation, for example, are masterpieces of immersion journalism: accurate, frightening, and funny.

Duquette’s writings undermine my grasp on conventional reality because they have the ring of truth. Based on my own (relatively trivial) magickal experimentation and his clear reporting, I am forced to accept that demons (and angels) are real and can act on our plane, that Enochian calls effectively summon visions of another world, and that a dead kitten can, under the influence of the right prana master, be restored to life.

Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of Duquette’s oeuvre is his attitude of, if you will, ‘dogmatic agnosticism’. He doesn’t insist that you believe him, doesn’t attempt to convert, and freely concedes that everything unusual that he experiences may well be ‘all in his head’. “But,” he continues (a little dogmatically), “you have no idea how big your head is!”

Living With Joy, by Sanaya Roman

I didn’t set out to become a fan of channeled material, and I can’t tell you how I came across Living with Joy: Keys to Personal Power and Spiritual Transformation, but in the six or so years that have passed since I abandoned fundamentalist Christianity no genre of literature has affected me more profoundly. Seth, I confess, is too intellectual for me, but Abraham and sometimes Kryon move me profoundly. And though he has a relatively small following—bad PR?—the entity who styles himself Oren, channeled by Sanaya Roman, has gradually and completely upended my world view, and Living with Joy is my bedside scripture.

There may be more to this world view than I am able to express, or I may be distorting it—I’ve been forced to admit in recent years that I am able to grasp only a small fraction of the data presented to me—but here is some of what I have gleaned:

• The all-that-is actively engages with individuals, reshaping itself to conform to an individual’s basic beliefs and expectations about reality. The all-that-is is like a nervous new lover, eager to conform to the beloved’s illusions.

• Our basic beliefs and expectations about reality are entirely within our control. Which is to say, the suite of beliefs we use to order and understand the all-that-is are choices, not understandings or deductions or inevitabilities. Likewise, we are free to expect whatever we like. Note: this is not to say that we control the all-that-is. It is more as if the all-that-is is an agreeable maestro, presenting itself in a way that is consonant with the observer’s disposition. But even so, certain verities persist, which is why day-to-day reality does not shift instantly to accommodate our fancies, as in a lucid dream.

• This being the case, it makes sense to deliberately choose our beliefs and shape our expectations so that we gradually create the most enjoyable life possible. We can also, incidentally, change our pasts by deliberately reinterpreting our memories.

• There are myriad techniques that accomplish this restructuring: prayer, spells, visualizations, drugs, ritual, are just a few effective examples. Different entities tend to focus on different techniques.

• You can start now.

By dipping into Living with Joy regularly, my thinking has gradually taken on this world view. I now pay attention to the tenor of my thoughts, state my goals in positive language, assume responsibility for my circumstances, etc., etc. And consequently, reality is now different for me. Delightful synchronicities abound, I live in freedom, experience joy, and no longer feel that I am a victim in a hostile environment. My fundamental belief about the way the world works is that the all-that-is is a wish granting machine, and that it dances with me every day.

Cosmic Trigger, Robert Anton Wilson

I didn’t realize until compiling this list that I have read a lot of spiritual memoirs, and have been largely remade in their image. None have affected me more profoundly than Robert Anton Wilson’s (PBUH) Cosmic Trigger I : Final Secret of the Illuminati, the essential first volume of his three volume autobiography.

For me it has always been books, not teachers, that appeared when I was ready, and Cosmic Trigger showed up when I first decided in my heart—where it mattered—that I could no longer abide the fundamentalist Christian cult I had faithfully espoused for the first 17 years of my adult life. I knew others who had left what I was then pleased to call, “The Truth.” Some were always sad or bitter, some fairly groveled in their efforts to reinstate themselves, some gave themselves over to unattractive dissipation, and at least one—a smart fellow, like me—was dead of suicide. I didn’t know of any, at the time, who had made a success of their heresy and infidelity, none who had attained the happy, creative heathenism that I so craved.

Cosmic Trigger broke me open like a thunderbolt, like the divine bolt of lightning that is seen in the tarot’s Tower card, redefining an individual existence. It was Wilson’s contention that we all live in “reality tunnels,” self-manufactured existences made up of our beliefs, hopes, and fears about the way things ‘really’ are. Had he said only this, it would have been enough, for just the phrase and his explication gave me a way to understand and work with the morbid eschatology I had lived within for so long.

But Wilson went further, describing his experiments with “rapid brain change.” In his efforts to overcome a “normal” Catholic upbringing (and parenthetically, I have always found it fascinating that so many interesting writers have Catholic school in their past—might the need to assert themselves early against an ancient propaganda set them on the road to literature?) Wilson deliberately made use of the brutal shocks to consciousness available via psychedelic drugs, taboo violation, ceremonial (especially Crowleyan) magick, the books of James Joyce, Sufi exercises, and the like. And by writing constantly and surrounding himself with a good wife and good friends, he managed to integrate the inrush of change that resulted and ended up—at least by his own estimation—a happier and saner man.

I copied him. I ingested LSD and psilocybin and salvia divinorum and lots of pot, I donned ceremonial garb and performed pagan rites, and I attended Sufi dances. And I found my own way, as well; since the cult to which I had formerly been faithful especially reviled tobacco and tarot, I bought myself some fine cigars and learned to smoke them while laying out a Celtic cross, and since I had so repetitiously heard that the Boss of all-that-is hates extramarital sex I made sure to have some ASAP. And I’ve done other things, too, meditations and visualizations, group sex and odd sex, sought out strange places and strange companions, and through it all I wrote constantly and surrounded myself with good friends… the wives came and went. And of course I had the guidance of Wilson himself, via his many books, and I have to say that at the end of it all I am—by my own estimation—a happier and saner man.

Cosmic Trigger is, of course, more than an extreme self help program. Wilson’s thoughts on personas, for example, are revelatory and his insights into the writer’s life remain a guide for me. Most of all, he tells his tales of an interesting life and philosophy in the whiskey-warmed, unpretentious voice of an ideal barstool companion.

Buy it, read it, live it. You have nothing to lose but all your illusions.

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About two years ago I recorded an interview with writer and extreme traveler (and personal friend) Craig Childs that focused on his recently released book, The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild. The interview first played on KVNF in Colorado, and was subsequently picked up and played on PRX. I was very happy with the way it came out, and if you like you can listen to it here.

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Do I banish? Do I invoke? Do I evoke spirits? Yes

For those who don’t recognize the name, Lon Milo Duquette is among the most visible and eminent modern ceremonial magicians. He’s an authority on Aleister Crowley and his magical systems, a high ranking member of the Ordo Templi Orientis, and a prolific and exceptionally talented author who has published some of the very best and most accessible modern expositions of ancient magical systems such as Enochian and Goetic magick. His writing is marked by grace, humility, and humor, and authority based on extensive research and experience. That he is a member of the Illuminati seems obvious, though he has yet to admit as much in public.

The interview below contains a scoop—the subject and proposed name of Lon’s next book. Enjoy.

• What’s a typical day like for one of the world’s most visible magicians? Do you have a daily magickal practice?

Since I left my 9 to 5 job to become a full-time Lon back in 2003 there hasn’t been a typical day. One thing hasn’t changed, however, and that’s my daily preoccupation with affecting the magical miracle of keeping a roof over our heads and the medical insurance paid.

I travel a lot giving workshops, lectures all over the country and world. I am probably most magically disciplined when I’m on the road. I take full meditative advantage of the hours of unbroken silence as I stand in airport security lines and sit quietly at the gate area. My hotel room becomes my hermit’s cell, where the meager equipment necessary to maintain my life and comfort is neatly bundled into one bag.

Do I banish? Do I invoke? Do I evoke spirits? Yes. Even on the road I do these things, But after decades of performing pentagram and hexagram rituals, Star Rubies, Star Sapphires, etc. my personal banishings, invocations, and evocations have taken on extremely personal dimensions and might not (indeed, SHOULD not) be recognizable or understood by others.

At home a typical day starts between 3:00 and 3:30 AM. Before I get out of bed I do a general ‘getting-off-on-the-right-foot-personal banishing/invocation’ that would take me all day to describe …so I won’t. I then grab a cold bottle of mineral water from the refrigerator and shut myself in my office and start writing. I’m usually working on the next book, but I also have two or three other smaller projects –usually introductions or forewords to other people’s books, or lecture/workshop material that need attention. I’ll work on two or three chapters at the same time. I’ve found that when I get burned out on one train of thought I need only change the subject to feel completely refreshed and energized.

I try to write until around 8:00 AM. By then Constance has been up for awhile and brings me a cup of tea. I continue pecking on the book, but I also start checking my email and getting myself enmeshed in the objective reality of the day. I’ll take a walk around the neighborhood or the nearby parks before coming home to breakfast on the backyard patio. Constance has our tiny backyard garden teeming with flowers (and a few squash, green beans and tomatoes). The roses are insane! So are the humming birds.

We say ‘will’ (a Thelemic affirmation) before all our meals. We also try to recite ‘Resh’ in the morning, noon, sunset, and before retiring.

I stay in the office for most of the day. I get some serious work done, but I have to confess I spend far too much time farting around with my email….LIKE I’M DOING NOW! and working on scheduling my talks, etc. I have my guitar on a stand right behind my chair and I play it to unwind. I probably now play my guitar 2-3 hours a day… more when I have a gig that evening.

I try to catch a nap in the afternoon. Then I get up and take another walk before dinner (or, on nights I have a singing gig, a little snack). I try to get to bed around 11:00PM. Then the whole thing starts over again. Aren’t you sorry you asked?

• Is it reasonable to consider magick done to elevate or refine the self as being different from magick done to ‘get things’—that is, to get a better job, or a place to live, or a creative opportunity? If so, how do you strike a balance between the two?

“Elevating and refining the self” is the reason you do magick “to get things done”.

• Should have asked this first, probably, but: do you prefer ‘magick’ or ‘magic’?

I don’t care anymore. I use “Magick” when the audience as an understanding and appreciation of term, and “Magic” when the audience is so green that the “k” would be just one more bit of confusion, i.e., I title one book “The Magick of Aleister Crowley” and other, “The Key to Solomon’s Key – Secrets of Magic and Masonry”. I don’t however use the word “Magickal.” I don’t know why. It just bugs me.

• In My Life With The Spirits: The Adventures of a Modern Magician you discuss delightful adventures with the Goetia and with Enochian magick; what have been your ongoing experiences with these branches of magick?

Glad you asked! I’ll write a lot more on both those subjects in my new book (should be out in 2010). It’s called (if the publisher allows) “Low Magick”. Until then, I’ll have to ask you to wait.

• How important a figure has Aleister Crowley been in your life?

Very important.

• I noticed you were on the faculty of Maybe Logic Academy: what do you teach, and were you close to Robert Anton Wilson?

I knew Bob, but I can’t honestly say we were real close. Our lodge presented him with our ‘annual’ Illuminati Award. Every year for a few years running the organizers of Pantheacon booked us to share the same hotel room. That was a kick.

So far I’ve taught four classes at Maybe Logic Academy – two each of “Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot” and “Initiation – The Western Magical Tradition”. I’m about to give new class on “Enochian Vision Magick.” Stay tuned!

• If an intelligent young person, interested in magick, asked you for three books to read, what would you suggest?

I have to be shameless and suggest three pairs of books:

Crowley’s Magick: Book 4, Liber Aba and my The Magick of Aleister Crowley: A Handbook of the Rituals of Thelema.

Crowley’s The Book of Thoth and my Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot.

[Belief Systems & Other BS note: You'll also want the Aleister Crowley Thoth Tarot Deck discussed in the above two volumes]

Crowley’s The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King (Clavicula Salomonis Regis) and my The Key to Solomon’s Key: Secrets of Magic and Masonry.

• Thank you very much.

You’re welcome.

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to Sandy it was like working in his own projected brain

Pedro Guerrero, better known as the chief chronicler of Frank Lloyd Wright’s life and work, had a similar long term relationship with another eccentric, creative titan, the altogether more lovable Alexander Calder. This beautifully produced book, full of simply stunning photographs of Calder in his various homes and workshops, is not a conventional study of Calder’s oeuvre (there are dozens of these), but rather a very intimate look at how Calder lived, and how his eccentric, joyful environment was part and parcel of his unique and astoundingly prolific (more than 16,000 pieces are catalogued) artistic output. The pictures of Louisa Calder’s kitchen, with barely a spoon not crafted by Calder himself, are worth the price of the book. From the text,

“Believing it almost a sin to buy something he could make himself, Sandy would drop anything he was involved in, no matter how important, and beat out a roasting pan for Louisa or fashion a large-capacity serving ladle or a sieve. This do-it-yourself dictum was undoubtedly a carryover from their earlier, leaner days, but it had become an obsession with Sandy.”

A creative artist of any kind—writer, painter, musician—needs two conditions met in his outer life to be productive for the long haul: a physical space in which to work that he doesn’t have to think about, that is as natural for him to get to and be in as a kitchen table, and, just as important, people around him who are dedicated to smoothing his way, who will see to it that the washing is done, that visitors are handled deftly. Calder had both of these, for nearly his entire career. His homes, in Roxbury, Connecticut and in Saché, France, had multiple workshops and each shop had multiple stations where dozens (and ultimately thousands) of works—mobiles, stabiles, gouaches, jewelry, kitchen goods—lay scattered about, with their attendant tools, waiting for their creator’s hand to turn to them again. To the outsider it looked like a sparkling chaos, but to Sandy it was like working in his own projected brain, with nearly finished thoughts readily at hand. And for smoothing his way, Calder had Louisa.

Louisa Calder, nee James (the grandniece of Henry and William James) met Sandy on an ocean liner in 1929, and less than two years later they were married. It must have seemed a quixotic choice to Louisa’s family. Calder’s signature creations, the mobiles and stabiles, were a few years off, and financial success would not come for a couple of decades. Up until that time he had worked at no particular job, and had exhibited only a few wire sculptures, conventional wooden sculpture and his—eventually—famous circus, a combination of kinetic and performance art to which he would charge admission. But there was something about him…

Louisa lived on for 20 years after Sandy’s death, during which time she published a book, stiffed President Gerald Ford – she didn’t like his politics – and was named Woman of the Year by the United Nations. But during her marriage to Sandy, virtually all of her formidable energies and abilities were bent to the task of keeping him happy and productive. She cooked, cajoled, cleaned, inspired and in general took care of every household detail so that Sandy could spend most of every day in his workshops, doing his godlike puttering. In nearly all of the pictures of the Calder homes, the floors are generously lined with rugs, dozens of them, made of his designs. Louisa hooked them all.

Calder at Home: The Joyous Environment of Alexander Calder captures all these domestic arrangements beautifully and intimately. The shots of Sandy’s workshops are so crowded with detail that I find myself poring over them for minutes at a time, like my 7 year old son trying to find Waldo. Guererro visited the Calder’s perhaps a dozen times, over a space of several years and it’s possible to see the evolution of some of the objects from scraps of wire to finished work, floating high and soft in one of the Calder’s lofty-ceilinged living rooms.

Though not primarily a writer, Guererro’s text does capture beautifully the texture of the Calder’s life – together with the photos, this is the best book available for getting a feel for what they were like as people, far better than a conventional biography. Guererro, using plain words, describes many of the subtleties of what they were as people. Here, for example, is Guererro relating one incident from his friendship with Sandy:

“When we came to visit him in Saché that fall of 1963, Sandy met my wife, Barbara, and me at the train station. I was dressed like all my fellow commuters in the Connecticut suburbs—in the typical uniform of gray flannel suit and wing-tipped Cordovan shoes worn by one and all streaming into New York City. My French getup also included a very unbohemian velour hat with a tiny feather in the band. I thought I looked pretty spiffy. Sandy shook my hand and gave me an enormous bear hug. That done, he snatched the hat from my head and flung it as far as he could. Calder disdained pretense and couldn’t abide anything he considered sham. Neither of us ever acknowledged the incident, and I never missed the hat… My days of dressing like a banker ended that afternoon.”

Calder at Home does several things well. It is a decent biography of Calder, though it tends to stick to the high points. And it is a reasonable portfolio of Calder’s art, especially the more casual pieces such as toys for his grandchildren, furniture for home use – there is a homemade toilet training chair which his children must have found a little daunting – and the aforementioned kitchen implements. But in the end, the reason to own this book is the excellent documentation of Calder’s home and work life. I know of no other book that captures a major artist’s work environment so thoroughly or so well. Dozens of photographs document the fascinating complexity of a working sculptor’s studio so thoroughly that they can be pored over for hours.

And ultimately, this is a very inspiring book. After reading it, I tried my own hand at making mobiles, materially assisted by tips I gleaned from the studio photos. One of them hangs above my head as I write, like a stray thought or a cheerful daydream.

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I think religion is a misfire. If you look at the principles behind religions, they seem to be mutual and they do make sense: forgiveness, nonattachment, nonjudgment, love your enemy, et cetera

I guess my point is that the argument about God vs. No God is irrelevant when you consider the notion that the God the theists are arguing for is a complete misinterpretation anyway. The church made God into some sort of gigantic, meddlesome person in order to exert power over large groups of people. This cartoonish abomination is what most Christians seem to believe in, but I doubt it’s what, say, Jesus had in mind.

There is, unquestionably, a wise and intelligent line of thought at the heart of all the major religions, but to detect it you have to recognize the vast amounts of manipulation and distortion they’ve suffered from political sources, along with our own human weakness for needing to know things we don’t really know.

Thanks David!

Captain Clark welcomes you aboard

Robert Anton Wilson is dead, again, and I’m not feeling so good myself. Wilson— or let’s call him ‘Bob’, as he would have preferred— was first reported dead on February 22nd, 1994. But the reports of his death turned out to be greatly exaggerated: fittingly, Bob had fallen prey to one of the first great Internet hoaxes. However, his second death, on January 11th, 2007, was all too real. Bob died at home, at 4:50 a.m., from complications due to post-polio syndrome.

Bob was, among other things, one of the last great ‘60s figures. He was a friend and collaborator of Timothy Leary, William Burroughs, and Buckminster Fuller, had a bit part in the JFK assassination, was a founding pope of Discordianism and the Church of the Sub Genius, coauthored the The Illuminatus! Trilogy and, in his autobiography Cosmic Trigger, anticipated the sex, drugs and magick movements that started in the ‘60s and continue to this day. That he was also an editor at Playboy Magazine for several years is a characteristic, but minor, footnote to his colorful life.

Bob was first, last and always a writer and his books, for the most part, remain in print. He wrote prolifically for his cult following and is probably best known for the The Illuminatus! Trilogy, the book that made the Illuminati a feature of mass consciousness. But those of us who are, you know, in the cult are probably most affected by the first volume of his autobiography, Cosmic Trigger I : Final Secret of the Illuminati.

In Cosmic Trigger, Bob describes several decades of his experiments in what he called, “self-induced rapid brain change”—that is, experiments with drugs, Sufism, ritual magick, yoga, meditation, tantra, quantum physics and anything else he could find that undermined that peculiar phantom known as, “the self”. The results were intense: Bob experienced psychic flashes, the manifestation of a 6 foot tall white rabbit and the peyote spirit, Illuminati contacts, guidance from the planet Sirius and all the other features of a well-lived psychedelic life. But he also raised a family, was happily married, made a good living writing, and stayed out of jail, mostly—in other words, he was at least as sane as you and me. Actually, what am I saying… Bob was considerably saner than me.

Cosmic Trigger arrived in my life with perfect timing; I was negotiating my exit from a fundamentalist Christian cult, and his teachings helped me to do so with flair, not with the moping, clingy reluctance that I often observed in my fellow religious refugees. That I repeated many of the experiments described by Bob must go without saying, or at least without detail, but I will say that I am richer for them.

So thank you Bob, for gracing the world with your wit and wisdom these many years, for so fearlessly living a free life in a rigid society, and for setting an example of humor in the face of oppression that inspired many, and certainly changed my life for the better. Captain Clark welcomes you aboard.

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Peters went further by claiming that the Mercator Projection was inherently racist

The ‘Peters Projection’ was announced by historian Arno Peters in a 1973 speech to the United Nations—the grandiose setting must have seemed a little over the top to serious workers in the rarefied world of cartographic projection. Nevertheless, Peters struck a nerve, and his self-titled projection became very popular indeed—many groups actively lobbied for its use in schools and it was quickly adopted by several U.N agencies and the National Council of Churches for all uses. In 1983 the N.C.C. even published Peters’ book, The New Cartography: A New View of the World. Peters’ map remains in vogue today, being prominently featured, for example, in an episode of television’s The West Wing.

Why all the fuss? What was it about this projection that made it so popular? Well, Peters (who died in 2002) was a master at combining indisputably true points with a few that were disputable. He maintained that the Mercator Projection, then commonly used for wall maps, badly distorted the relative areas of world land masses so that, for instance, Europe looks much bigger than it really is and Greenland appears to be roughly the same size as Africa… when in fact Africa is about 14 times larger. So far, so good, but Peters went further by claiming that the Mercator Projection was inherently racist, and unfit for any use. He based this on the positional and spatial prominence of developed countries as shown on the Mercator Projection. He apparently believed that only ‘his’ map, which accurately showed land mass areas, should be used.

Actual cartographers rolled their eyes at this. To begin with, the Mercator’s problems as a wall map were well known, but to say it had no use at all was crazy talk—it is still indispensable to navigators because straight lines drawn on the Mercator Projection are ‘loxodromes’, lines that show true compass bearing between two locations. In fact, it is axiomatic among cartographers that no projection is suited for all uses—they all have their strengths and weaknesses.

Moreover, Peters was attacking a straw man. Long before 1973 the Mercator’s weaknesses as a wall map were well known and it was gradually being replaced by several projections, notably the 1963 Robinson Projection, the invention of Arthur Robinson, probably the most eminent modern cartographer.

But most damning was Peters’ claim to have invented the ‘Peters’ Projection. Cartographers recognized it as being, in fact, a special instance of the Gall Projection, published in 1885 by Scottish astronomer James Gall. At best, Peters may have independently re-invented it, and the projection is now more properly known as the Gall-Peters Projection.

Buckminster Fuller also gave it a try

For all these reasons, Arno Peters was never going to be popular with cartographers, but aside from that tempest in a teapot, the Gall-Peters Projection still has problems judged strictly on its merits. Though it does allot area accurately, it does so at the expense of shape. Toward the poles, land masses are distorted East-West but near the equator they are distorted North-South; in Robinson’s scathing phase, the resulting maps look like, “… wet, ragged long winter underwear hung out to dry on the Arctic Circle.” Furthermore, other equal-area projections, such as the Albers Conic or the Lambert Azimuthal, have long been available and do a better job of managing unavoidable distortions.

There is no doubt that Arno Peters was a sincere, idealistic man devoted to the cause of fairness and equality. His other major work, the Synchronoptic History of the World, was an attempt to tell the story of all the world’s peoples, giving equal weight to each and avoiding Eurocentrism. He was also keenly aware of the power of ideas and well-versed in the techniques of getting those ideas across—in fact, his 1945 Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Berlin was titled, The Use of Film as a Propaganda Medium. But he wasn’t a cartographer and it may be that his genuine sense of mission and flair for promotion ended up obscuring better approaches to the worthy goal of fairly and accurately representing the world in two dimensions. Nevertheless, he deserves credit for popularizing the issue and for educating the public about the problems of conventional mapping in general and the Mercator Projection in particular.

Arno Peters wasn’t the only 20th century non-cartographer visionary who ended up inventing and popularizing his own map projection—Buckminster Fuller also gave it a try. Fuller (1895-1983) patented his Dymaxion Projection in 1946, based on the simple, brilliant idea of projecting the surface of the globe onto a regular solid. The 1946 version used a cuboctahedron (8 triangular faces, 6 square faces), but by 1954 Fuller was using a slightly modified icosahedron (20 triangular faces) so that the resulting Dymaxion Map could present all the Earth’s land masses without breaking them up. ‘Dymaxion’, incidentally, is a contraction of DYnamic MAXimum tensION and is little more than ‘genius style’ marketing language—Fuller applied the term to cars, houses and even to his preferred sleeping pattern.

As a mathematical feat, the Dymaxion Projection is considerably more sophisticated than the Gall-Peters Projection and consequently has a number of technical advantages. To begin with, distortion of shape and area is minimal and, more importantly, the distortion is evenly distributed. This compares favorably to most projections, which generally distort quite a bit in some parts of the globe but relatively little elsewhere. The Gall-Peters Projection is one of the worst at this since it—somewhat ironically—distorts the shape of developed countries very little but badly deforms the undeveloped countries that Peters was trying to represent more fairly!

The Dymaxion Projection can also be unfolded in different ways for different purposes—that is, the icosahedron can be laid flat with different countries at the center. This avoids much of the almost automatic emphasis that most maps give to Europe and North America, and also avoids the tendency to think of North as ‘up’, thus avoiding a great deal of unconscious cultural bias. In Fuller’s view it was better to think in terms of ‘in’—toward the center of the Earth—and ‘out’—toward the stars.

The most common method of laying out the Dymaxion Map is with the North Pole more or less at the center, and seeing the Earth this way is a revelation. The separate continents appear to be not separate at all! Rather, they look like more like one large island, somewhat fragmented by water but still essentially one mass surrounded by ocean. It’s a compelling view of the world and a startling contrast to any rectangular wall map.

Like Peters, Fuller was a tireless promoter of his many ideas and the Dymaxion Map held a special place because of its role in what he called the ‘World Game’. The game was (and is) played with the aid of a large map that dynamically displays multiple world variables. Fuller’s hope was that the game would evolve into a method for global citizens to directly make responsible decisions about allocation of global resources. To that end, he even produced a basketball court sized version of the Dymaxion Map, dubbed the ‘Big Map’, and presented it to Congress! Though still widely played, the World Game has, alas, so far failed to replace current methods of governance.

Presently, Buckminster Fuller tends to be remembered for his invention of the geodetic dome and little else. One gets the impression that he was simply too prolific to be taken seriously—his ideas and philosophies are so numerous and so far outside the mainstream that it may take the rest of us a generation or two to catch up. But it’s a shame that his unique map is not better known, and almost a crime that the relatively clumsy Gall-Peters Projection seems to have displaced it as an educational tool and wall map. All of Peters’ stated goals—fairness, equality, non-bias—are better achieved by Fuller’s simple, elegant and brilliant creation.

There are several Internet sources for information on the above topics: bfi.org is the address of the Buckminster Fuller Institute and a good start for those interested in Fuller’s life and work, and odt.org sells Peters Projection maps and also has a good biography of Arno Peters.

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It covered my entire buttock region, as Day-glo-colored as a baboon’s…

Though Nicholson Baker is not exactly obscure—his novel Vox may have been the world’s most famous book for a couple of days during the Lewinsky scandal—his book U and I: A True Story qualifies: out of print in hardcover (and teetering in paperback), sent forth virtually stillborn by its publisher (Random House), not widely reviewed, now hard to find, and with a sales trajectory not merely dropped, but thrown down a well, U and I must have seemed a ghastly mistake, at least to those trying to make money off it. Yet I say you should read it. I believe it to be Baker’s best work.

Baker, early in his career, was seized with the idea that he should write about Updike while he was still alive, while “people could still conceivably sneer at him” and, under the influence of this seizure, pitched the idea to an Atlantic editor and when it was accepted felt very much like a dog who has unexpectedly caught a car: now what?

Twitching and squirming (and precisely recording each twitch and squirm) Baker made the brilliant (if lazily self-serving) decision to prepare by not rereading any of Updike’s books—not even to verify quotes! He half-seriously dubbed this technique “deprived recall analysis”, reasoning that what he really wants to write about is Updike’s influence on him as a writer, and he is unpleasantly honest enough to admit that said influence boils down to a stew of misremembered phrases, covetous admiration, and jealousy. However, acknowledging the need to quote accurately in this litigious age, Baker does review the quotes he’s cited, after he has finished the essay. The resulting comments, presented throughout in brackets, are an amusing and occasionally profound gloss on the text, a crackpot Talmudic commentary. “What is wrong with me?” he wails, after correcting one particularly appalling misquote.

What results from this is a personal essay on steroids, sort of an unauthorized autobiography. Not incidentally, it may also be the best intercranial view of the writing process yet published… but see also John Jerome’s The Writing Trade: A Year in the Life, if you like this sort of thing.

There are two things I love about Baker’s writing: his “Bakeresque precision” (Updike’s phrase!) and his ability to obsessively capture the streams-of-thought/motivation/memory that pass through him. No one has ever done this better, and Baker has never done it better than he has in U and I. It is fascinating, funny, and almost scary to read, for example, “I was of course very hurt that out of all the youngish writers living in the Boston area, Updike had chosen Tim O’Brien and not me as his golfing partner. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t written a book that had won a National Book Award, hadn’t written a book of any kind, and didn’t know how to golf: still, I felt strongly that Updike should have asked me and not Tim O’Brien,” and I find myself writhing a bit reading Baker’s moral dilemmas when he writes—for three pages—about the flip flops of intent he experiences when trying to write a simple letter of condolence after the death of Donald Barthelme; he wants to be sincere, but he also wants to be quotable. Who else has so minutely described the base motivations that gust through all of us, even when we are trying to do the right thing?

A caveat: U and I is not comfortable reading, and if you have the feeling after a dozen or so pages that it’s not for you, you’re probably right. Baker is self absorbed—”On the first of November I wrote at length about my ingrown toenail. But it just wasn’t enough.”—and his subject matter can be repulsive, as when he discusses his psoriatic symptoms (“It covered my entire buttock region, as Day-glo-colored as a baboon’s… I had bloody skin under my fingernails from compulsive scratching that I cleaned out as I read…) and his envy of Updike’s more advanced case (“I put off the trip to the dermatologist that I knew was imminent, though, because I wanted to see whether my disease had it in itself to be worse, more consuming, than Updike’s disease… ” [italics mine]); psoriasis, in fact, is a major theme of this odd book. But even if you find yourself repulsed, consider sticking it out. At 179 lean pages, U and I will convince you of two things: that you are not the only one who obsesses unhealthily about minutiae, and that you are very likely better off in this regard than Nicholson Baker.