Fancy import

In the last couple of days a pretty good article has come out on Unherd regarding the Dalai Lama, and the hot water he's landed in recently. I don't agree with Giles Fraser on everything, but he's thoughtful.

If the Dalai Lama is suspected of being a pedophile, I don't buy it. Whatever the incident from a few days ago was, it was unguarded. If you have something to hide as far as children are concerned, you're more careful to hide it. Jimmy Savile was a rare exception and again, not one that I think is being repeated here.

But as far as being "along with Bill Gates and Bono, the first person of the Davos Holy Trinity," that's in a way more damning. Davos is where people with obscene amounts of money and power go to plan out how to inflict their will on the vast majority of the world's population. If you're a holy man among them, they should find your presence troubling.

And I'd say there's a definite tendency among Western Buddhists to take the wrong things from the practice. If they're looking for it, it gives them permission to act selfishly while maintaining a pose of righteousness, or to go along with things they should be fighting. Something has gone wrong in the translation.

Rah-rah Ramune

Today I was just off Thayer St. A street which, incidentally or not, has had a small Japanese market for the last couple of years. There I found a glass soda bottle. While there was some English text on the label, the brand name was in Japanese. It tapered inwards at the bottom of the neck. And most unusual of all, a marble rolled around just above that tapered point.

It turns out this is a well-known Japanese soda brand called Ramune. The marble forms a seal with the glass bottle to keep it fizzy. Pretty cool process. So while littering isn't great, I was glad of the educational opportunity.

Digging

Okay, having finished the book, I can quit being coy and tell you that what I was actually reading was Deadstick, the 1991 debut novel by Terence Faherty. And my verdict is that it's quite good, especially for a an author's first time out.

The lead character, Owen Keane, is a former seminarian who didn't make it into the priesthood. In this book he's working as a researcher for his friend's law firm. The friend, Harry, assigns him the project of investigating a fatal plane crash from forty years earlier, at the behest of one victim's very wealthy recluse of a brother. 

I've read enough detective novels to know that there are cliches, tropes, call them what you will. Things that make storytelling easier and which the audience doesn't mind, might even prefer. Faherty is good enough to avoid a lot of them and to play with them when he does use them. 

For example, I was expecting there to be at least one scene where someone tries to scare Keane off by shooting at him or at least beating him up. (It's established that he's not really a fighter.) The greatest physical threat, though, comes when a Pine Barrens storyteller he's looking to for answers takes him out to the middle of the woods and just...leaves him there. Their scene together just before this may be the height of the novel.

There are a bunch more books in the series, last one so far being published in 2013. It seems to have been mostly overlooked. Faherty has won the Shamus Award but for a book in his other series, about former actor Scott Elliott. The Keane books seem ripe to be discovered, though.

Culture clash

English princes should not take American brides. The experiment has been tried twice now and the results are in:  the princes become whiny and petulant, while the brides become arrogant and shrill. Since the Duke of Windsor and the Duke of Sussex had very little in common before their respective marriages, and their duchesses had even less, I don’t think the problem is one of personalities.  Rather, it’s a matter of the way that divergent national characters collide with the peculiar psychological impacts of royal status.

That's from John Michael Greer's latest essay. It is in fact the sum total of what he says in it about the Sussexes, directly or indirectly. Pretty insightful, though. Greer has an engaging view of history, or histories perhaps histories plural*, and has an eye out for contemporary events as well. The meat is about René Guénon, a French intellectual with whom I was not previously familiar. Of course my pet French philosopher is Henri Bergson, but I'm not sure "intellectual" is the best word to describe him.

*Not naming any names, but I had an English professor back in college who asked why we're always talking about "history" and we don't call it "herstory." He said this repeatedly. I'm not in the habit of using the pejorative "midwit" but I suspect it was coined to describe him.

Meet the author

There's a book I'm reading now, a detective novel. I'm enjoying it, but I'm still a little less than halfway through it, so I can't really give much of a verdict on it, which is also why I haven't named it yet. May do both later.

I can comment on the author photo, though. It shows the author with a voluminous yet trim mustache, wearing a very vintage suit. It's probably an attempt to look like William Faulkner, but also makes me think of Jay Gatsby if he were played by a young Dennis Farina. Interesting and different, then.

Out of context

Is there a word or term for a word or term that is reasonable or even euphemistic in some circumstances, but gets pulled into contexts where it's hyperbolic? Because that's one of the key issues with safetyism.

Say you hear someone who works in an office say, "Massive chunks of masonry are falling near my desk, so I don't feel safe." Well, obviously. It sounds like the whole building needs to be evacuated.

So then there's, "I don't feel safe because there aren't enough lights in the parking lot." Less of an immediate threat but yes, there is a threat. 

Okay, so how about this? "I don't feel safe because I was in the parking lot and saw a bumper sticker that said 'I support my local police.' As someone with friends and family in several marginalized communities..." No. Your just looking for excuses now.

And you see a lot of that. Raising safety to a supreme deity, one that can never be satisfied.

Funny lot, innit

A number of years ago, when Doctor Who was first being revived, there were some stories that ran in the American press describing the basic concept and the latest iteration.  One aspect that made a few stories was the fact that the Doctor was now a Cockney.

Except that of course he wasn't. The Doctor at that point was played by Christopher Eccleston using something approaching his natural accent. Eccleston is from Manchester, in the Northwest of England. "Cockney" is a dialect used in part of London, which is in the country's South.

The source of the confusion is the shaky conception Americans tend to have about British English. The presumption is that British/English people will be highly educated and upper class, or at least sound like they are. Needless to say this has little to do with either reality or with Britons' conception of themselves. And it leaves you short when you hear a British person who's clearly working class but doesn't fit the narrow definition you have of a working class Brit.