Endless Knots

"The world's worst Buddhist" might be the best

Andrea Miller's Shambala Sun interview with Mary Pipher (famous to this mother of girls for her groundbreaking book, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls), "Is this the worst Buddhist in the world?," caused me to google a bit, bringing me to Brian Lehrer's WNYC radio interview with her in 2009. The occasion for the interviews: Pipher's new book, Seeking Peace: Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World, where instead of writing insightfully about others, she writes about herself. Haven't read the book but, if you want a self-reflective laugh, i.e. I could identify embarrassingly, go to about minute 6 in the youtube video... and here's an excerpt from the magazine interview that reddens the face as well:

Why do you call yourself “the worst Buddhist in the world?”

 

It came from a remark my husband made to me. One day, after meditating for forty-five minutes, I started listening to NPR. I was also dialing United Airlines to make some changes to an itinerary and stir-frying some onions for a stew and, at the same time, while I was on hold, I asked my husband if he’d done the two or three things I’d asked him to do that day. He was reading the paper, trying to relax, and he said, “You’re the world’s worst Buddhist.”

 

 

Solstice Summer Reading Program

Posting the latest from Solstice, a great line-up of writer/readers, as always:

(Chestnut Hill, MA, June 2010):  The Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program of Pine Manor College announces its July Reading Series. All readings begin at 7:30 p.m. and are held in the Founder’s Room of Pine Manor College located at 400 Heath Street in Chestnut Hill. Copies of the authors’ books will be available for sale after all readings, and there is plenty of free parking!

Friday, July 9 at 7:30 p.m.: Poet and creative nonfiction writer Anne-Marie Oomen (An American Map: Essays and Un-coded Woman), & multi-genre writer Jaime Manrique (Our Lives Are the Rivers and Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, & Me)

Saturday, July 10 at 7:30 p.m.: Poet Kathleen Aguero (Investigations: The Mystery of the Girl Sleuth and Daughter Of); author and illustrator Grace Lin (Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and The Year of the Rat); & fiction and nonfiction writer Randall Kenan (Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Century and Let the Dead Bury Their Dead).

Sunday, July 11 at 7:30 p.m.: YA novelist Laura Williams McCaffrey (Alia Waking and the forthcoming Lyla’s Flight); Special guest Patrick Donnelly (The Charge and the forthcoming Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin); & fiction and nonfiction writer M. Evelina Galang (Her Wild American Self and One Tribe).

Tuesday, July 13 at 7:30 p.m.: Solstice Assistant Director and fiction writer Tanya Whiton (published in Crazyhorse and Northwest Review); multi-genre writer Laban Carrick Hill (America Dreaming: How Youth Changed America in the 60s and Casa Azul); & poet and fiction writer Steven Huff (A Pig In Paris and The Water We Came From).

Wednesday, July 14 at 7:30 p.m.: creative nonfiction writer Michael Steinberg (editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction and author of Still Pitching); Special guest Lesléa Newman (Nobody’s Mother and The Reluctant Daughter); and poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar (A New Hunger and The Hour Between Dog & Wolf).

Thursday, July 15 at 7:30 p.m.: Special guest Kevin McLellan (Round Trip); YA writer David Yoo (Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One Before and the forthcoming The Choke Artist); & Program Director Meg Kearney (Home By Now and the forthcoming Trouper the Three-Legged Dog).

Friday, July 16 at 7:30 p.m.: Novelist Sterling Watson (The Calling and Sweet Dream Baby); fiction writer Helen Elaine Lee (Water Marked and The Serpent’s Gift); & Dennis Lehane (The Given Day, Mystic River, and Shutter Island).

Directions to Pine Manor College, complete bios of our authors, and more information about the Solstice MFA Program can be found at www.pmc.edu/mfa.

Wiley: books, royalties, dust-ups, etc...from a Wiley author

There's a bit of a row going on at the moment of the arcane variety that only authors (and their publishers) can truly appreciate. Not necessarily understand - that might take some accountants, but it's the kind of thing that happens/is happening in publishing that drives everyone involved a bit mad.

Facts: In March, 2010, Wiley and Bloomberg announced a new line, "Bloomberg Press, a Wiley imprint," naming Wiley as the new global publisher and distributor of Bloomberg's books.

We've been Wiley authors for 15 years so have some appreciation for the power of the brand (disclosure: we know and respect a lot of people at Wiley, some of whom are very old friends). Of course, like all authors, we've had our share of complaints but what author can really gripe about receiving regular royalties on a book with multiple translations that came out ten years ago (Virtual Teams)?  Wiley is a very reputable house that's managed to weather the downturn in publishing better than most if not all. Search the stock price and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Now for the dust-up. Some weeks ago Wiley sent a letter to Bloomberg authors explaining the way in which royalty calculations would be done going forward, a change for about 20% of the authors, according to Wiley's press release issued after The Authors Guild took issue with the new arrangement.

To excavate the depth of the disagreement, please read the material from both sides. In brief, there are two principal ways in which royalties, the money paid out to authors, are calculated: 1. on the basis of list price (the price that you see discounted at say, Amazon - here's ours for Virtual Teams (a 35% discount off list); and 2. on the basis of "net proceeds," meaning whatever the publisher receives after everyone in the supply chain takes their cuts. Royalty percentages vary depending on which method is used to calculate royalties -- lower for list (because it's a larger amount); higher for net proceeds (because it's smaller). We have a net proceeds agreement for Virtual Teams and a list price agreement for The TeamNet Factor. Apparently, all Bloomberg authors are being shifted to the net proceeds agreement.

Or, I should say, we would have that agreement if our books were still in regular distribution, which brings us to the next thing that The Authors Guild has pointed out. Like so many other authors whose books still sell in sufficient quantities for publishers to want to keep them on their lists, both of these books of ours are only available now as print-on-demand, POD in the lingo, meaning the publisher doesn't maintain inventory but prints individual copies as they're ordered, likely a somewhat expensive process for the publisher (I don't know the figures at all), which drives the price up (Virtual Teams listed at $29.95 when it first came out in regular distribution; POD lists for $52.50).

Royalty agreements for POD are quite low, which means although the list price is much higher, the percentage for each book sold is low. For the author, this means that fewer books are sold (because market resistance is greater at higher prices) and those that are sold generate a smaller payout. In our case, we're just lucky that Virtual Teams is still in demand. Not true for most authors.

In the case of the Bloomberg authors that The Authors Guild is concerned about, a number (I don't have a precise figure but maybe Authors Guild does and certainly Wiley knows) DID NOT HAVE POD AGREEMENTS in their original contracts. Thus, ex post facto, Wiley is adding contract terms without negotiation. While Wiley may be absolutely right that this will in most cases generate better payouts to authors, the process seems less than ideal.

Blockbuster author Scott Turow is concerned enough that he issued a very quotable statement ("Wiley should knock it off and do the right thing") and I've received a number of emails about this from author organizations that I belong to and from other friends.

I encourage my friends at Wiley to work this through as quickly as possible, sitting down (virtually of course) with each of the affected authors, then making as transparent a statement as possible to the public. The number of authors impacted is very small but the effect on Wiley's reputation could be outsized in proportion.

The Persuasion 75

Yet after I hung up, I thought and thought and thought and, by the time Tonin came back that night, something had clicked. Then when we talked about it together, something clicked for both of us.

“World Game. Think about it,” Tonin said. “That it’s a game makes people want to play. It’s straightaway brilliant.”

In my case, I was more intrigued with Fuller’s story—an architect without credentials who wrote poetry and built bubbles of love so big we could see them from the sky.

We’d been searching for several years now for something that made sense, at least had some of the compulsion of the anti-war movement. We weren’t certain that we wanted to pick up overnight and speed back to New York but we were sufficiently infected with Teddy’s enthusiasm to want to learn more.

Already a Fuller fan, Tonin was more than happy to update his knowledge. And so the following week, we hopped into the fire engine and drove the fifty miles to the cavernous public library in Knoxville where we found a mountain of material about Buckminster Fuller. It appeared that his adherents were widely distributed.

We discovered that Fuller had written more than a dozen books; countless pictures had been taken of him and his zany inventions; for the past 15 years, he’d self-published bulletins of the World Design Science Institute, also his creation, and the Knoxville Public Library had copies of them all. Just the "chronofile" of his life was fifty pages long.

—“The Persuasion,” p. 75

The Persuasion 74

“We’re playing a game to redistribute the world’s resources so that everyone has enough.”

He took a breath and I saw the small door to gaining some context.

“I don’t get how it’s a game. Is there a board with players or what?”

Teddy laughed. The “board,” such as it was, comprised a huge floor map of the world the size of a basketball court. “It’s the Fuller Projection,” Teddy said, “not the stupid Mercator Projection, which really distorts the land mass relative to the size of the ocean.” I’d never thought whether those great big maps of the world with their bumpy mountains that hung on our elementary classroom walls were stupid, distorted or otherwise.

“OK.” Fuller had his own projection. “So what about the players?”

Teddy didn’t seem to hear my skepticism, going on with more detail than I could absorb: Players took on the roles of governments, corporations, NGOs, and religions; they assumed their proper places on the map, equipped with the resources they had. Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and South America had most of the people and most of the natural resources. “We’re playing World Game all the time,” Teddy said, “whether we know it or not.” He said that everyone had common responsibility for the whole thing and that when you played it, you got to see what was involved “in making the world work, all of it. It’s really intense.”

He was very intense, very emphatic, far more certain than Teddy had ever sounded before and I was absolutely certain that I couldn’t comprehend much of what Teddy was talking about.

—“The Persuasion,” p. 74

The Persuasion 73

“Call Teddy,” said the note in Tonin’s handwriting taped to our front door.

Yelling for him (I thought he might be out back in the garden) and getting no reply, I scooped up a handful of coins that we kept in a mason jar on the bureau for just this purpose and headed to the payphone outside the dining hall. I dialed Teddy’s number, which I’d known by heart since I was old enough to use a phone. His exuberant hello was clue that something very exciting was happening in New York, the very city we’d left two years earlier because nothing was going on.

“We have the capacity to provide for the material needs of everyone on the planet by 1980,” Teddy squealed into the phone.

He’d just finished his first week in a month-long seminar with “Bucky, you know, Bucky.” Right, I said, Fuller, the one with the domes.

He was talking so fast that he sounded like he was calling a horse race: He was attending Fuller’s World Game seminar in New York, which he’d heard about in advance from Marvin Gable, another friend, who was studying with Fuller at Southern Illinois University where he’d finally gotten an institute devoted to his work in Carbondale. I was losing track of which who “he” referred to but that hardly mattered as Teddy quickly change the topic to ask if it were true that I was with “that guy Tonin,” whom he’d met during those first few weeks at Columbia and did I remember that Tonin had met Marvin in 1968 when the latter was traveling through Paris, and, naturally, I, Mariana, knew Marvin because of course I remembered that Red Bird had met him in London and when Teddy said he wanted to attend the seminar, Marvin suggested that Teddy write directly to Fuller, who answered back immediately, inviting him to join the crew producing the event, which Teddy was now doing as floor-manager for the group of thirty invited to spend the month with Fuller.

—“The Persuasion,” p. 73

The Persuasion 72

Three days later, we had moved into a two-room shack with a wood stove and an outhouse on a farm with a hundred and fifty other people in the Smoky Mountains. It was Mendocino without the weed and with a purpose, in this case, a little Utopia for its inhabitants. Buckets full of brown rice replaced politics, thanks to Red Bird, who'd also fled the west coast after Ernest's suicide.

By the time we arrived, she’d already affiliated with David, the farmer whom the community had bought its land from, and, who, most astonishingly, was unmarried, not even divorced. “I think he might be the last one,” she said by way of introduction. “You’ve gotta tell me honestly what you think.” 

As fussy as Red Bird was about where she bought her clothes and which brand of marinated artichoke hearts was acceptable, she could be startlingly easy-going when it came to her day-to-day activities. She found it satisfying to plant and pick and cook. Tonin and I meanwhile scavenged everyone’s bookshelves for something more substantial to read than Mother Planet News and early drafts of Spiritual Adulting. Our communards in Tennessee were equally concerned about the appalling state of global affairs but their approach was considerably grainier than ours.

Respite came a month later with a call from my grammar school friend, Teddy. I’d just come back from a day at the local newspaper in town near where I had a part-time job, wedging fillers into lines of lead that the typesetter missed.

—“The Persuasion,” p. 72

The Persuasion 71

It was a day like any other, up early to weed and pick, breakfast at nine, back to the fields, lunch at one, a drive into town for supplies, dinner at seven, and while we were cleaning up, the phone rang.

Red Bird, screaming words I couldn’t make sense of. I heard “Ernest” and “draft board” and “rifle.” “Birdie, calm down, slower, honey, calm down.” It took several sobs before we could understand that she’d had a call from Ernest’s mother. After years of haggling with Selective Service, Ernest had learned that they finally denied his conscientious-objector status. He’d received notice that morning to report the following week for active duty in Vietnam. He’d shot himself in the head at noon with his father’s hunting rifle.

When I look back today on those hours and days after Ernest’s death, I wonder that Tonin and I didn’t split right then, that he didn’t take his life, too. We wept, walked in the woods, wrote long letters to Ernest. We screamed at each other and at ourselves, hurling horrid insults that only the torment of sudden needless death begets.

“You never do anything for anyone,” I bellowed at my generous husband, who replied with the sound of a wounded animal.

“Ungrateful bitch,” he lobbed back at me, his agony searing my gaping wound.

We accused each other of not paying enough attention to Ernest after moving up north, of not doing anything after noticing that he was unstable, and when enough strikes had been met with counterstrikes, we wept together, Tonin berating himself for not using his money to hire Ernest an even better lawyer, me for not forcing him.

Most disabling was the guilt we shared with our peers: We hadn’t ended the war or reformed the system that caused brilliant, sweet, young frail men like Ernest to put bullets through their beautiful brains.

We did nothing on the farm and everyone respected our withdrawal. If I needed to account for how long it took us to resurface as functioning people, I couldn’t. Ernest’s death buried many details, including eventually our talking about it. Perhaps it was a month, maybe two, but one day Tonin said, “If we don’t get out of here, you’re never getting a decent byline and I’m never building anything.”

—“The Persuasion,” p. 71

The Persuasion 70 (Margaret speaks)

Margaret Intercession 1

I am growing impatient, waiting for Mariana’s soul to mature suitably to take upon this duty. She has, so far as I can discern from this remove, solved the problem of Love, having experimented with different numerators and denominators. She has found early what I could not, an opposite who holds her attention fast, whose mind is large enough to keep hers intrigued, and of greater import, a being with whom electric current runs left and right so as to produce a They and a She and a He, each full, whole, beyond its capacity a moment before. Would that she knew it!

This is what I agonized so to express and still now, a century and a half later, they banish me to the prison, yes, it feels such, the confines of Feminism. Of course! What Woman is not a Feminist! “I love most to be a woman,” I wrote, and meant.

Now I reside in a greater prison still, on the reverse of life, where I can identify the quotidien, examine the Progression of Existence, what you name life, see the patches sewn to style this Mariana, this young woman whom I’ve chosen as my pen yet I am unable to bathe with her in books, thought, and imaginations. The Twenty-First Century is nigh and what I scribed in 1845 must for the sake of Humankind’s Future, receive renovation, rejuvenation.

Beyond the body, my boundaries are without limit and with great boundary. If only I could dial Mariana on her telephonic device—how I love that simple contraption, recalculating the physics of communication!—and discuss, as she does at extensive length with her soul mate Red Bird, this endeavor in specific.

Instead, I dwell on the far side of earthly movement and endure the inching of time as Mariana becomes accustomed to her adult self, assembles her life community, commits her heart to what evidently is a Great Love, until she finally dons the cloak in which she will convey Woman in the 21st Century.

Would that I knew how to hold the wand to anoint her! Would that this greatest undertaking find its womb! Would that It be born!

—“The Persuasion,” p. 70

The Persuasion 69

The next morning, we loaded Tonin’s drafting table and my big desk, which we’d dismantled and brought with us from New York, into the fire engine with him managing the placement of each item in relationship to all the rest.

Packing a vehicle was, for Tonin, a lengthy process I’d first observed at Pale Brook that required my saying very little, preferably nothing. After many hours and when the fire engine’s interior looked like it had been assembled from a fine blueprint, Tonin hopped into the driver’s seat and we headed north to Sonoma County.

There we moved in with Treasure, my roommate at Barnard who’d changed her name from Donna after our sophomore year. Treasure was a founding member of a commune that raised organic garlic.

Everyone was focused on the land, even those who hadn’t put a coherent sentence together in several years, people like Jimbo, whose vocabulary was limited to a few phrases, like, “Far out, man,” and “I’m stoked,” which may have explained his problems with clear articulation. Life revolved around the earth's needs: planting, watering, harvesting, weeding. We rotated the chores from cleaning the bathrooms to turning the compost to cooking the meals. Naturally, we had the dish washing slacker, who managed to finish the dishes but avoid the greasy pan, and the laughable grocery shopper, who skipped a third of the list with excuses—“Hey, sorry, man, I didn’t know that baking soda was different from baking powder—they’re both for baking, right?”

Even while some people acted more like householders than others, overall we lived in the kind of peace typically reserved for our dreams, where conflicts fly by on bananas or get pulverized in a blender.

--“The Persuasion,” p. 69