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Thrills, Imagined and Otherwise May 2009

Private Midnight by Kris Saknussemm (Overlook) James Ellroy meets David Lynch in this addictive mix of noir and supernatural horror from Saknussemm (Zanesville). Det. Birch Ritter investigates the suspected suicide of California real estate magnate Deems Whitney, who apparently doused his Mercedes with gasoline and died in the resultant explosion a day after changing his will to benefit his trophy wife and disinherit his grown children. Before the cop can interview Whitney's widow, Ritter receives a cryptic message from his ex-partner that steers him to the enigmatic Genevieve Wyvern. Wyvern, who disconcerts Ritter with how well she knows his past, plunges him into a surreal world of bondage, domination and mind games. Despite being humiliated by Wyvern, Ritter finds himself unable to stay away from her lair. An unexpected and bizarre twist well into the novel jolts the fairly standard plot off the rails, but the powerful narrative voice will compel most readers to follow.

Told in the voice of the crime noir classics, with intense erotica and unsettling psychological horror in abundance, Detective Birch Ritter's story is one I can guarantee you've never heard. Over the course of his unhappy and unfaithful life, he has seen much of the surface darkness of humanity--the crimes we commit against each other, the lies we sell--but with the introduction to what he at first assumes to be a high class hooker, he is exposed to an inner darkness that even he could never have imagined. A darkness that both seduces and repels, and in the end--reveals and transforms.

There is so much to see in this book, so much to hear and feel, and so much to learn. It is an assault on the senses, a stinging whip and a tickling feather, and a lesson in division that vividly illustrates the tenuous nature of borders. Good or evil, torment or salvation, pleasure or pain, fear or hope, submission or dominance...male or female--where do the distinctions lie?

Others may say Private Midnight is not for the squeamish, but I say it is exactly what the squeamish need--to shake 'em up and wake 'em up.


By the author of Zanesville, See Second Look,  a seductive story of grit, gunplay, vampirism, and a bit of bondage.

Detective Birch Ritter is a man on the edge-of himself. His past is filled with secrets, shadows, guilt, and ghosts. Then a dubious police buddy he hasn't seen in a year introduces him to a mysterious woman who says her business is shadows. What she knows about what lies between the darkness and the light inside men is more than Ritter may want to find out, and much more than he can resist learning. It's said that to try to forget is to try to conceal, and concealing evidence is a crime. But maybe revelation is another kind of crime-against nature.

Kris Saknussemm, the widely acclaimed author of the sci-fi smash Zanesville, now delves into another genre, and another world-a world where even the sunlight is shadowy and where deviancy is the norm. Private Midnight is a journey into the seedy, sexy, underbelly of life-crime noir for a new generation.

Kris Saknussemmis, a writer, painter, and sculptor, has been a resident at the MacDowell Colony and is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He now divides his time between a rural property in the old goldfields region outside Melbourne, Australia and the West Coast of the US.
The Primal Force in Symbol: Understanding the Language of Higher Consciousness by René Alleau (Inner Traditions) “Alleau’s quest for the true nature of symbol is an exhilarating one, confirming what ancient and ethnic peoples well knew: that humans have an innate sense of the symbolic, and that once unblocked, it makes us aware of the existence of order in the universe.”  --Joscelyn Godwin, author of The Golden Thread: The Ageless Wisdom of the Western Mystery Traditions and Harmonies of Heaven and Earth: Mysticism in Music from Antiquity to the Avant-Garde

If a person does not learn the grammar of a language, the best dictionary in the world cannot help him truly understand that language, much less speak it. This book explores the grammar as well as the principles and structures of symbology, the science of symbols. In distinction to symbolism, which explores the use of symbols, symbology examines the primal force that creates symbols that are able to act on multiple levels of our experience. Symbols not only link separate parts into a coherent whole but also link those who understand them in a sacred alliance.

René Alleau investigates diverse aspects of symbols in Eastern and Western philosophies as well as in African, Native American, and Australian Aboriginal cultures, both in ancient and modern times. Myth, he reveals, has been mistakenly identified by modern culture as fiction, when its true strength lies in the logic of analogy. The author then shows that nothing is closer to the language of symbols than music and that to enter the world of symbols is the attempt to grasp harmonic vibrations and learn the music of the universe. Just as there is a musical ear, there is also one sensitive to the primal force transmitted by symbol.

RENÉ ALLEAU is a philosopher and historian who has written extensively on alchemy, the occult sciences, and secret societies. The author of History of Occult Sciences and Aspects de l’alchimie traditionelle, he lives in France.

The Experimental Origins of the Analogical Process

A fable, in the proper sense of this word, is “something that is said, something that is told,” according to Littré, who mentions other meanings: “imaginary tale, i.e., from the imagination,” “short tale concealing a moral under the veil of fiction, in which animals are characters,” and “a lie, something made up.” Littré also distinguishes the fable from the apologue and the parable, in the following terms: “The fable is the most general term; it is anything one says, anything one tells. The apologue is always based on an allegory that has been applied to man. The parable is an apologue contained in holy Scripture.”1

The Parable and the Teachings of the Gospel

Every parable is a comparison, in the Greek sense: para-ballein. This word means literally “to throw or cast aside,” hence paraballein tophtalmo, for Plato, “to cast one’s eyes aside,” meaning precisely “to look around oneself,” the original meaning of this expression, which, by extension, can mean “to place by the side of,” or “to connect,” hence the notion of “comparing.” When one connects two things via an analogy founded upon their mutual relationship, one does not unite them or assemble them; one merely places them in parallel, by reason of their similitude. Hence the difference between parable and symbol. The former connects, while the latter assembles in the sense of sum-ballein. A parable, in a way, is a figure having the property of reflecting, in parallel meanings, the signification of a luminous truth or a distinct metaphysical principle situated at its center. By contrast, the symbol tends to make the meanings converge in the direction of this truth, orienting them and “focusing” them by this principle. The symbol, so to speak, “focuses” and “concentrates” the meanings in itself, while the parable “diffuses,” “extends,” and “propagates” them in parallel.
     Jesus did not speak symbolically but in parallel, just as light reflected in a “parabolic” mirror is only perceived in the form of parallel rays after first being concentrated at a luminous center. Consequently, the parables in the gospels have meaning only because they are like radiations from the center of Revelation.
     Additionally, both parables and apologues have been “reformulated,”“re-created,” in such a way that one can no longer totally understand them on the basis of the former ones, further reflection is necessary. For example, the fig tree parable is used by Jesus in a very complex sense, despite appearances: “Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When her branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is near: So ye in like manner, when ye shall see these things come to pass, know that it is nigh, even at the doors. Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done. Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away” (Mark 13:28–31).
     The fig tree was venerated in Antiquity as being “anthropogonic,” the archetypal generator and nourisher. The famous ficus ruminalis of Rome protected the wolf nursing Romulus and Remus; and Tacitus, in his Annals (XIII, 58), wrote of the sacred fig tree. The fig was the first cultivated fruit to be eaten by humans, and Adam, of course, hid behind a fig tree after having eaten the forbidden fruit. In the mystic container of the Dionysian rites, there were, among other objects, fig branches (kradai). The archetypal Indian sacred tree is the açvattha or pippala, that is, either ficus religiosa or ficus indica. Ficus indica, also known as vata or nyagrodha, “is reborn from its own branches,” or “from its trunk.”
     “The eternal açvattha has its roots above, its branches below,” the Kathaka Upanishad tells us, “it is called the seed, Brahman, ambrosia; all the worlds rest upon him; above him, nothing exists.” The açvattha is used to produce fire, a symbol of generation. The sacrificial vessel destined to receive the soma, the divine drink, must be made of açvattha wood.
     It is also the sacred tree of Buddhism, the Bodhipâdapa, the tree beneath which the Buddha achieved “the end of suffering.” It is described in texts as “sacrificial,” “wise,” “deserving worship,” and the “tree without suffering.”
     These connections are enough, it seems to me, to establish that the fig tree corresponds to the archetypal tree of generation, that is, the tree of successive lives, from the Indian perspective, as well as in the teaching of the ancient mysteries. When Jesus uses the fig tree parable in this passage from St. Mark, one should not forget that earlier, Jesus told the apostles privately, when “they that were about him with the twelve asked of him the parable”: “Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them” (Mark 4:10–12).
     These words show quite obviously that those “that are without”are the “profane,” in the literal sense of this word, pro and fanum, or “outside,” in opposition to those to whom “the mysteries have been given,” that is, the “initiated,” those to whom Jesus was speaking privately of the “kingdom of God.”1 Under these conditions, claiming that the Gospels have no esoteric or initiatory meaning as distinct from their exoteric meaning, in that the symbol is different from the parable, is to refuse to listen to these teachings. The Gospel of St. Mark returns many times to this separation between the two teachings, the one public and open, the other “private” and closed: “With many such parables spake he the word unto them, as they were able to hear it. But without a parable spake he not unto them: and when they were alone, he expounded all things to his disciples” (Mark 4:33–34).

Sufi Rapper: The Spiritual Journey of Abd al Malik by Abd al Malik (Inner Traditions) French rap star recounts his journey from the ghettos of Paris through radical Islam to the Sufi message of universal love
Explains how the luminous message of love in Sufism now animates Malik’s music
Offers an intimate look at life in the ghettos and madrassas of the poorest neighborhoods in Europe

As a poor black resident in one of the notorious French banlieues (the ghettos surrounding French cities), Abd al Malik had every chance of meeting the same fate as many of his peers: drug addiction, prison, and/or an early grave. Despite his early involvement in the endemic crime that was routine in his neighborhood, his keen intelligence won him admission to some of the most prestigious schools in Strasbourg. His dual life as honor student/pickpocket ended when he converted to Islam, where again his intellect and sensitivity prevented him from entering the hate-filled spiral promoted by the fundamentalists. His distaste for the hatred they preached in the madrassas and his love of music led him to Moroccan Sufi master Sidi Hamza al-Qadiri al-Butchichi, whose message of universal love and joy now animates the rap songs of this prize-winning composer and performer.

As the singer says in his Ode to Love:
“Love the other whatever the cost and direct the struggle against yourself
The treasure of the just is buried within my chest
If there is enough for one, let’s share it, there is enough for all.”

“In our Western world where ‘street culture’ has become a religion unto itself, Abd al Malik’s journey from ghetto gangster seduced by fundamentalist Islam to happily married Sufi poet resonates like a vibrant call, shattering our clichés and prejudices. Social divides are but a hallucination. Everything can be reconciled and reconnected. This Sufi rapper may not be a wise man or a saint--just a punk whose soul cracked open, like most of the great masters--but his voice is a wake-up call reminding us that the path starts anywhere and always ends up in the same place: in Love.”
--Marianne Costa, coauthor with Alejandro Jodorowsky of The Way of Tarot

As a poor black resident in one of the notorious French banlieues (the ghettos surrounding French cities), Abd al Malik had every chance of meeting the same fate as many of his peers: drug addiction, prison, and/or an early grave. Despite his initial youthful involvement in the endemic crime that was routine in his neighborhood, his keen intelligence won him admission to some of the most prestigious schools in Strasbourg. His dual life as honor student/pickpocket ended when he converted to Islam, where again his intellect and sensitivity prevented him from entering the hate-filled spiral promoted by the fundamentalists. His distaste for the hatred they preached in the madrassas and his love of music led him to Moroccan Sufi master Sidi Hamza al Qadiri al Butchichi, whose message of universal love and joy now animates the rap songs of this prizewinning composer and performer.

As the singer says in his Ode to Love:
“To love the other whatever the cost and lead the battle against yourself 
In my chest the treasure of the just is buried 
If there is enough for one let’s share it, there is enough for all.”

Born Régis Fayette-Mikano in 1975, ABD AL MALIK formed the rap group New African Poets in the early 1990s. Following his successful career with them, he released two solo recordings, the most recent of which, Gibraltar, has garnered a number of awards, including the Prix Constantin. He is the recipient of the prestigious Victoire de la Musique award for the best male artist of the year and the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres award. He also appears on Moby’s 2008 album, Last Night. Abd al Malik lives in France with his wife, the R&B singer Wallen, and their son.

About the Author
Born Régis Fayette-Mikano in 1975, Abd al Malik formed the rap group New African Poets in the early 1990s. Following his successful career with them, he released two solo recordings, the most recent of which, Gibraltar, has garnered a number of awards, including the Prix Constantin. He is the recipient of the prestigious Victoire de la Musique award for the best male artist of the year and the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres award. He also appears on Moby’s 2008 album, Last Night. Abd al Malik lives in France with his wife, the R&B singer Wallen, and their son.

Excerpt. THE MUSTARD SEED

I had been particularly brilliant this final trimester of eighth grade. It should be noted that the stakes involved were quite high: my success would not only give me access to high school but also to the essential grant that would allow my mother to cover the costs of my continued education. I was planning, once I had put middle school behind me, to enroll in Notre Dame des Mineurs, a private Catholic school that was one of the best secondary schools of Strasbourg.
    I had plunged into my studies with renewed enthusiasm. My new playmates were named Seneca, [Albert] Camus, Epicetes, [George] Orwell, [Aimé] Césaire, Thucydidus, [Frantz] Fanon, Saint Augustine, [René] Barjavel, [Aldous] Huxley, and Cheikh Anta Diop. These heroic figures fascinated me; their entire beings were engaged in a struggle that awoke a profound echo in me. They became the tutelary figures of my life, giving it meaning and carrying me toward a new horizon. And as I conversed with them I had the impression of expanding into an entirely new dimension because I suddenly found myself filled with the irrepressible desire to leave my world, to go beyond my own forces.


But it was Malcolm X, the American Black Muslim leader who was a pacifist but who challenged nonviolence, who made the deepest impression on me. At the university library where I had gotten into the habit of studying, I made the acquaintance of Thierry, a large blond with an Alsatian accent who was studying anthropology and whose mind was completely fixed on Africa--something I could not help but find comic. He pulled off the feat of procuring for me a photocopy of the entire Autobiography of Malcolm X as well as several of the final speeches he gave during the year of his death in 1965. I learned that my hero was born in 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska, of a pastor father who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan and a mother who was psychologically destroyed (and who had to be institutionalized) after this tragic event. Malcolm X lived in Boston then New York, cities in which he was a burglar and a dealer in turn. He spent seven years in prison for these various crimes and became a “Black Muslim,” which is to say a member of the Nation of Islam, a Black separatist movement founded and directed by Elijah Muhammed, who was freely inspired by the Muslim faith. Once released from prison, Malcolm X rapidly imposed himself as the charismatic figure of this movement and gave it a national scope. By centering the activity of the Nation of Islam on the struggle for civil rights, he also made himself the champion of the underprivileged Blacks of the United States. Following several journeys through Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, but especially after his conversion to orthodox Islam, he broke relations once and for all with the Nation of Islam and the racist rhetoric it carried. From Saudi Arabia, where he was then making a pilgrimage to Mecca, he wrote an unforgettable letter to his family and friends, who hastened to distribute it to the media. I read and reread this letter at least a hundred times, my entire being throbbed with exaltation when I discovered it. It represented such a turning point in my directionless adolescence that I want to give a sample of its tone here:

Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and the overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as is practiced by people of all colors and races here in this Ancient Holy Land, the home of Abraham, Muhammad, and all the other prophets of the Holy Scriptures. For the past week, I have been utterly
speechless and spellbound by the graciousness I see displayed all around me by people of all colors.
    America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem. [ . . . ] You may be shocked by these words coming from me. But on this pilgrimage, what I have seen and experienced has forced me to re-arrange much of my thought patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions. [ . . . ]

And he signed his letter with his Muslim name: El Hadj Malik el-Shabazz.

On his return to the United States, he proposed to register a formal complaint at the United Nations against America for its racist, violent, and segregationist policies. He also proposed joining with Martin Luther King and all the leaders of good will, Blacks and Whites, who wished to fight together for equal rights. But on Sunday, February 21, 1965, he was struck down by sixteen bullets from a revolver, during a meeting in Harlem. He was then thirty-nine years old. 
    I was fascinated by this destiny and steeped myself in the final message of a man who had succeeded in surpassing the stage of  resentment to attain one of universal struggle. With these photocopies, I was plunged into a veritable voluntary exile of reading and introspection. I began to assess the weight of my actions. For me, the distinction between good and evil was very fuzzy, it was a question of  knowing rather “what did one good” in the egotistical sense of the term, or what did not. This subtle distinction is an important one, the entire mentality of my neighborhood was built around it. But with the specter of drugs, which lurked all around me with the deaths they had claimed, and with the image of that woman knocked down to the ground still pursuing me, the street no longer shone for me as it once did. I was still living on it, of course, but it no longer had the same attraction for me. My heart was no longer in it, and I felt like a prisoner there. My heart had thrilled to the call of Malcolm X--and now needed something different.

 

How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror by Reza Aslan (Random House) Kindle Edition (Kindle Book) Audio CD (Audiobook, Unabridged) A cosmic war is a religious war. It is a battle not between armies or nations, but between the forces of good and evil, a war in which God is believed to be directly engaged on behalf of one side against the other.

The hijackers who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, thought they were fighting a cosmic war. According to award-winning writer and scholar of religions Reza Aslan, by infusing the United States War on Terror with the same kind of religiously polarizing rhetoric and Manichean worldview, is also fighting a cosmic war–a war that can’t be won.

How to Win a Cosmic War is both an in-depth study of the ideology fueling al-Qa‘ida, the Taliban, and like-minded militants throughout the Muslim world, and an exploration of religious violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Surveying the global scene from Israel to Iraq and from New York to the Netherlands, Aslan argues that religion is a stronger force today than it has been in a century. At a time when religion and politics are increasingly sharing the same vocabulary and functioning in the same sphere, Aslan writes that we must strip the conflicts of our world–in particular, the War on Terror–of their religious connotations and address the earthly grievances that always lie behind the cosmic impulse.

How do you win a cosmic war? By refusing to fight in one.

About the Author
Reza Aslan is assistant professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, and Senior Fellow at the Orfalae Center for Global and International Studies at U.C. Santa Barbara. His first book, No god but God, has been translated into thirteen languages and was short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Ben-Gurion International Airport is a brash, beautiful, strikingly confident construction that, like much of Tel Aviv, looks as though it might have sprouted fully formed from the desert sands of the old Arab port city of Jaffa. Named after the surly general and chief architect of the state, the airport is a testament to Israel’s self-ascribed position as a bastion of social and technological advancement amid a sea of inchoate enemies. In fact, Ben-Gurion’s primary function seems to be to filter out those very enemies by tightly controlling access to the state. This is true of all international airports, I suppose, as anyone who has undergone the humiliation of being scanned, fingerprinted, and photographed to be allowed entry into the United States post-9/11 can attest. In the modern world, airports have become a kind of identity directory: the place where we are most determinately defined, registered, and catalogued before being apportioned into separate queues, each according to nationality.

Still, Israel has, for obvious reasons, taken this process to new and unprecedented heights. I am not two steps off the plane when I am immediately tagged and separated from the rush of passengers by a pimpled immigration officer in a knitted yarmulke.

“Passport, please,” he barks. “Why are you here?”

I cannot tell him the truth: I want to sneak into Gaza, which has been sealed off for months. In 2006, when Palestinians were offered their first taste of a free and fair election, they voted overwhelmingly for the religious nationalists of Hamas over the more secular yet seemingly inept politicians of Fatah, the party founded by Yasir Arafat in 1958. Despite having promised to allow the Palestinians self-determination, Israel, the United States, and the European powers quickly decided that Hamas, whose founding charter refuses to recognize the state of Israel and whose militant wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, has been responsible for countless Israeli military and civilian deaths, would not be allowed to govern. Gaza, the sliver of fallow land that has become Hamas’s de facto stronghold, was cut off from the outside world. International aid dried up and a plan was put in place to, as The New York Times put it, “starve the Palestinian Authority of money and international connections” to the point where new elections would have to be held. This resulted in a violent rift between Hamas and Fatah that split the Occupied Territories in two: the West Bank, governed by Fatah with the aid of Israel and the Western powers; and Gaza, ruled by Hamas and isolated from the rest of the world, a prison with one and a half million hungry, fuming inmates.

I wanted to visit the ruined village of Um al-Nasr, in northern Gaza, some miles away from lush Tel Aviv. A few months earlier, a number of villagers, including two toddlers, had drowned in what the press was calling a “sewage tsunami.” The deluge had been triggered by the collapse of a treatment facility just above the village that had been slowly and steadily leaking sewage. For months the villagers of Um al-Nasr had pleaded with Israeli authorities to allow the importation of the pumps, pipes, and filters necessary to stem the flow. But Israel, rattled by a ceaseless barrage of crudely constructed rockets launched daily from Gaza, some of which were—in the sort of grim irony that can exist only in such a place—constructed from old sewage pipes, refused. The villagers built an earthen embankment around what was fast becoming a giant lake of human waste. But the embankment would not hold. On the morning of March 27, 2007, while most of the villagers of Um al-Nasr slept, the embankment gave way. The village was inundated.

This is what we talk about when we talk about Gaza: that human beings—men, women, children—could literally drown in shit.

“Why are you here?”

“To visit the sites,” I say.

It is not a satisfactory answer, and I am taken into a windowless room, where the question is repeated, this time by a slightly older officer. An hour passes, and a third officer walks in with the same question. “Why are you here?”

Thereafter, the question is repeated—in the sterile immigration office; in a smaller, even more sterile office inside the first office; in an even smaller office inside that office; and later, at the immigration queue, at the baggage claim, at customs—until I come to think of “Why are you here?” as a form of greeting.

All of this is understandable. I resent none of it. Though I am a citizen of the United States, I was born in Iran and have spent a great deal of time in countries that do not even recognize Israel’s right to exist—countries that, were I to have an Israeli stamp on my passport, would not allow me to enter their borders, would maybe even cart me off to jail. Israel has every reason to be cautious, considering the battering it as has received at the hands of people who look just like me.

The problem is not with Israel. The problem is with me, with the sum of my identities. My citizenship is American; my nationality, Iranian; my ethnicity, Persian; my culture, Middle Eastern; my religion, Muslim; my gender, male. All the multiple signifiers of my identity—the things that make me who I am—are in one way or another viewed as a threat to the endless procession of perfectly pleasant, perfectly reasonable immigration officers whose task it is to maintain a safe distance between people like them and people like me.

Even so, throughout the entire exercise, I could not help but think of the famed French theorist Ernest Renan, who once defined the nation as “a group of people united in a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors.” Nowhere is that sentiment borne out more fully or with more force than among the nations scattered along the broad horizon of the Middle East. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that the region in which nationalism arose so late, and so often through the will of others, is the region in which it is now being most unmistakably subsumed by the tide of globalization.



Globalization means many things to many people. Though the term itself is new, having entered our vocabulary only in the 1980s, the systemic social, economic, and cultural changes that the word conjures have been taking place for centuries. There is a compelling case to be made for considering the process of globalization to have begun when the first humans footslogged out of Africa in search of game and refuge and more temperate climates. The age of empires was in some ways the height of globalization; the Romans, Byzantines, Persians, and Mongols were able to cross-pollinate their trade, communication, and cultures across vast distances with fluidity and ease. The same could be said of the age of colonialism, in which the old imperial model of commercial relations among neighboring kingdoms was transformed into the more manageable, if less ethical, model of total economic domination of indigenous populations. And certainly no single force can be said to have had a greater impact on propelling globalization forward than religion, which has always sought to spread its message across the boundaries of borders, clans, and ethnicities. Simply put, globalization is not a new phenomenon.

In its contemporary usage, however, the term “globalization” refers to modern trends such as the expansion of international financial systems, the interconnectedness of national interests, the rise of global media and communication technologies like the Internet, the mass migration of peoples—all taking place across the boundaries of sovereign nation-states. The simplest definition of modern globalization belongs to the Danish political philosophers Hans-Henrik Holm and Georg Sørensen: “The intensification of economic, political, social and cultural relations across borders.” But I prefer the sociologist Roland Robertson’s view of globalization as “a concept that refers both to the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole” (italics mine).

Globalization, in other words, is not just about technological advancement and transnational relations. It is about one’s sense of self in a world that is increasingly being viewed as a single space. The world has not changed as much as we have. Our idea of the self has expanded. How we identify ourselves as part of a social collective, how we conceive of our public spaces, how we interact with like-minded individuals, how we determine our religious and political leaders, even how we think about categories of religion and politics—everything about how we define ourselves both as individuals and as members of a larger society is transformed in a globalized world because our sense of self is not constrained by territorial boundaries. And since the self is composed of multiple markers of identity—nationality, class, gender, religion, ethnicity, and so on—if one of those starts to give way (say, nationality), it is only natural that another (religion, ethnicity) would come to fill the vacuum.

For most of the last century, secular nationalism—the political philosophy that places the nation-state at the center of collective identity—has been the dominant marker of identity in much of the world, even in the developing world, whose leaders tend to view the creation of a sturdy national identity as the first step in its economic and political advancement. Nationalism begins, of course, with the idea of the nation, but the nation is not always so easy to define.

The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet: A Novel by Reif Larsen (Penguin Press) A brilliant, boundary-leaping debut novel tracing twelve-year-old genius map maker T.S.Spivet’s attempts to understand the ways of the world.

When twelve-year-old genius cartographer T.S. Spivet receives an unexpected phone call from the Smithsonian announcing he has won the prestigious Baird Award, life as normal—if you consider mapping family dinner table conversation normal—is interrupted and a wild cross-country adventure begins, taking T.S. from his family ranch just north of Divide, Montana, to the museum’s hallowed halls.

T.S. sets out alone, leaving before dawn with a plan to hop a freight train and hobo east. Once aboard, his adventures step into high gear and he meticulously maps, charts, and illustrates his exploits, documenting mythical wormholes in the Midwest, the urban phenomenon of “rims,” and the pleasures of McDonald’s, among other things. We come to see the world through T.S.’s eyes and in his thorough investigation of the outside world he also reveals himself.

As he travels away from the ranch and his family we learn how the journey also brings him closer to home. A secret family history found within his luggage tells the story of T.S.’s ancestors and their long-ago passage west, offering profound insight into the family he left behind and his role within it. As T.S. reads he discovers the sometimes shadowy boundary between fact and fiction and realizes that, for all his analytical rigor, the world around him is a mystery.

All that he has learned is tested when he arrives at the capital to claim his prize and is welcomed into science’s inner circle. For all its shine, fame seems more highly valued than ideas in this new world and friends are hard to find.

T.S.’s trip begins at the Copper Top Ranch and the last known place he stands is Washington, D.C., but his journey’s movement is far harder to track: How do you map the delicate lessons learned about family and self? How do you depict how it feels to first venture out on your own? Is there a definitive way to communicate the ebbs and tides of heartbreak, loss, loneliness, love? These are the questions that strike at the core of this very special debut.

Tecumseh (family name adopted four generations earlier by his Finnish immigrant ancestor) Sparrow (named for the sparrow that crashed into the window of his birthing room) is a 12-year-old boy born on a Montana ranch to his gruff cowboy father and scientist mother in search of a phantom beetle. T. S. is a normal boy--except he always calls his mother Dr. Clair, he hardly ever talks to his father (well, strike that, that could be considered normal 12-year-old-boy-behavior)-and he is an accomplished and published technical artist and cartographer. When he receives a call from the Smithsonian Institute announcing he has won a prestigious fellowship and is expected in Washington to give a speech at a fancy banquet in his honor, the reader expects a mad cap cross-country adventure.

And indeed, T. S. does set off across country, alone, without telling his parents, with a suitcase full of a few clothes and many drawing implements--and a notebook he stole from Dr. Clair's desk during his pre-dawn escape. But along the way, in the first-person narrative and the marginal notes, maps, and drawings that T. S. provides, we learn that just a few months before, his younger brother Layton was killed in an accidental shooting while he and T. S. were conducting an experiment so that T. S. could map the sounds of different kinds of rifles. This first admission is so matter of fact that it takes a while for the reader to realize the depths of pain and loss T. S. is hiding in his maps. It is from this loneliness and lingering guilt that the story draws its heart and becomes more than an adventure story.

"The Selected Works" is not perfect. The "story within the story" extended family history that T. S. reads in the stolen notebook along the way, while important to the story, is too long and drags down the midsection of the book. T. S.'s narrative is sometimes too-knowing and mature for a 12-year-old, even a precociously-talented one, to have written; I could sometimes feel the pen of Larson, a 28-year-old MFA graduate from Columbia and documentary filmmaker, poking through the back-stage curtain.

But the story is fresh, T. S. is usually just a kid, and as he unpacks his feelings for Layton and his family the further east he treks from Montana, we come to like and enjoy his company and want him to succeed. Particularly well-done is the progression from "Dr. Clair", never "Mother" at home, to the occasional "Mother" on the trek east, to finally a heartfelt longing for "Mom" and finally even a camaraderie with the Father he always respects but struggles to know and understand, and dare we say, love. As a son and now a father of three children ages 18 to 23, I recognize the stages and the struggle, and realize that T. S.'s love and skill at mapping are his way of mapping "alone".

T. S. finally admits to himself : "When you drew a map of something this something then became true, at least in the world of the map. But wasn't the world of the map never the world of the world?"

It is this heartbreaking discovery that marks our transition from adolescence to adulthood, and helps T. S. end his journey and turn back toward home.

Zanesville by Kris Saknussemm (Villard) Futuristic bioweapon or good old-fashioned messiah? Reincarnated ex-porn star or mutant information-age revolutionary? The man who awakens in New York City’s Central Park with no memory of his identity and the enigmatic message FATHER FORGIVE THEM F carved into the flesh of his back may be all of these things and more.

Taken in (and then expelled) by a group of freedom fighters battling the soul-deadening Vitessa Cultporation, Clearfather is a stranger in an even stranger land. Following tantalizing clues that point to the gnomic Stinky Wiggler, and pursued by murderous Vitessa agents, Clearfather embarks on a surreal odyssey of self-discovery across an America that resembles a vast amusement park designed by some unholy trinity of Walt Disney, Hunter S. Thompson, and Hieronymus Bosch.

Accompanying Clearfather is an unforgettable cast of characters–including Aretha Nightingale, an ex-football-playing drag queen; Dooley Duck and Ubba Dubba, hologram cartoon characters sprung outrageously to life; and the ethereally beautiful Kokomo, whose past is as much a mystery as Clearfather’s own.

By turns hilarious and deeply moving, a savage, fiercely intelligent satire that is also a page-turning adventure and a transcendent love story, Zanesville marks the arrival of a brilliant new voice in fiction.

Kris Saknussemm's Zanesville is a satire of the not too distant future, a dystopia where most people are addicted to drugs, California has fallen into the ocean, and crime and murder are commonplace. Bioengineering has its day, with altered creatures of all kinds, part machine and part animal. And alternate food sources are abundant (beef doesn't seem to be on the menu any more!)

It is Post-Bigfoot (the earthquake known to all as THE BIG ONE) and the world is run by a Cultporation called Vitessa, which is close to the Big Brother that Orwell predicted. A man with no identity (named ClearFather by one of his rescuers) seeks a clue to who he is and how he got where he landed in New York City's Central Park. ClearFather arrived via a tornado, and that is all he can remember. His past has been wiped out, and the world in which he finds himself is frightening and bizarre. On his journey to discover who he is, ClearFather meets various people including: Aretha Nightingale, a black drag queen; Kokomo, the beautiful woman/child who does not speak; and others who befriend him along the way or pass him on the road to a newfound identity.

The reader sees the world through ClearFather's bewildered eyes - his knowledge seems to have come from a time long ago. Two unusual personalities who brought a smile to my face are Dooley Duck and Ubba Dubba, comic-like characters akin to Disney's creations. They tour the country as some sort of live advertising. The similarity to Disney stops when Dooley the Duck has a sudden awareness that he is without sex and demands a penis, causing riots across the country and anger from the religious right. The duo bring a comic thread to the story, as they appear throughout, interspersed with ClearFather's adventure.

The book comes across as a mix of Wizard of Oz and Alice In Wonderland meets Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. A mix of satire and comedy, it is a wonderfully dark novel filled with strange mystical creatures and references to 20th century pop culture, with many witty satirical remarks thrown in. Controversial characters and themes abound, and it's not for the squeamish or prudish. References to Bush, the Middle East, and various cultural icons and themes of today's world are thrown into the mix. One gets a sense of noise when reading. There is a lot going on, and it is easy for someone to miss the gist of what the author is trying to say.

It is hard to do the book justice in a review. While I found the first few chapters confusing, once the story was set up, it was funny and witty and I was laughing throughout ClearFather's adventures in this scary future America.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. He crashed back into himself and felt the Easter evening damp. Dolls and chains hung in ritual fashion from the branches surrounding him, and through the knife-hacked oak trees he could make out great luminous spires and domes, and older, grim, but luxuriant blocks of apartments sealed with steel-plate louvers as if against attack. Beside these rose skeletal scaffoldings on which, judging from the hives of lights, whole families perched on open-air platforms while resourceful or desperate individuals dangled in slings and sacks suspended from guy wires. Across the sky, as though projected from behind the sulfur-tinged clouds, flashed pictograms and iridescent banks of hypertext. The word vitessawas repeated often . . . and slogans like efram-zev . . . the right mood at the right time.He felt hypnotized by the messages, information raining down like some new kind of radiation. Then there were streams of news images and giant flickering headlines . . . al-waqi‘a still a threat . . . voyancy links now halfprice. . . He’d been standing there for a long time, he thought, having woken suddenly by the fountain, amazed to find that his hair was long and so blond it almost seemed to glow in the dark.

It reminded him of a childhood story but he couldn’t pin it down. Then he realized that of much greater concern was that he couldn’t remember where he was. It was a park of some kind, a vast shadowy garden in some siren-filled city. But which one? He heard a voice . . . garbled and yet unnaturally clear, seeming to come from inside his head. I’ll take Manhattan. It was a man’s voice, both far away and far too close. What did that mean . . . to takeManhattan? He tried to shake himself out of his haze. Something terrible had happened. Drugs, head injury. “I don’t remember my name!” he said aloud, and felt his heart pound at the implication. Even his clothes seemed strange . . . navy cotton drawstring pants, Guatemalan slip-ons, a T-shirt that said i’ve been to wall drug, and a cream-colored windbreaker with a logo on the chest that showed a wheelbarrow with flames rising out of it.

Judging from the grime and odor he might have been sleeping in the bushes for several nights. But Manhattan meant New York, that much he did think was right. Was that where he was? All he could bring to mind was waking with a start with some intuition of danger. Then he heard what he couldn’t decide was the same voice or another and glanced around frantically. It said, For I came down from heaven, not to do mine will, but the will of him who sent me. Shit, he thought. I’m hallucinating. Then a sudden deep sense of alarm brought his whole being alive. There was another sound in the outer darkness. Someone or something was approaching. Seeking him out. Clip clopcame the echoes that his hyperanxious ears filtered out . . . from the tunnel. He hid behind the bushes behind the fountain. His vision seemed to blur and his head filled with static. He waited, muscles cramping. Out of the black maw they emerged at last, one on a large chestnut horse, the other on a bay. The horses were shielded with synthetic face and chestplates, while the riders wore old-fashioned NYPD uniforms. When the figures stopped, he could see that they didn’t have faces. Just flat sheets with scanner slits. Up close, in the sodium lights, the scan masks were scraped and cloudy.

From the south came bursts of gunfire and thudding low-frequency music, but here it was quiet enough to hear their echolocation sonar. His heart bounced as he smelled the tense, strangely sweet animal scent of the horses. At last a flare of static passed between the two mounted shapes. Then, just as they’d appeared, they moved on, the horses’ hooves striking the asphalt with a timeless Roman rhythm, their imposing silhouettes fading into the trees. The moment they were past, from behind one of the spraypainted boulders, a figure wrapped in matte-black cable tape wearing an NV helmet leapt out. “Yer ass is lucky,” the shadow said, grabbing one of his hands in a neoprene fighting glove—weaving through a labyrinth of stripped cars and barbed-wire effigies. They looked like origami contrasted with the turrets rising above the park, armorguard facets gleaming like reptilian crystals. “Hurry,” his guide called out. “Meter says you gonna have a meltdown.” The darkness became a membrane of endlessly falling slowmotion snow, only the flakes were like glass faces, painfully intricate but beautiful to behold. “This way!” the figure called, and it was like stepping through a wall of cool white light.

Suddenly, all around were people. He felt a dart of warmth hit his arm. Then he fell, and he seemed to keep falling, or rising, as if he’d been taken up inside a whirlwind, faces and disintegrated memories orbiting around him. A whirlwind,he remembered. I came here by whirlwind. When at last the spinning stopped, the bodies and the faces had stabilized, and standing over him was a large black woman who, as his eyes began to focus, he came to see was in fact a man, wearing makeup, an aqua wig, and a long African-style robe over sheepskin boots from which a Beretta Cheetah was just visible. “We’ve given you some ZENO,” the vision informed him. “Try not to move fast.”

He was lying in a tent on an old cot. Candles glowed. Through a gelpane window he could see people passing between radomes and tepees. He heard an accordion and smelled marsala. Sparks rose from oil drums.
“Yo,” a voice behind him said, and he saw it was the tape-mailed figure who’d found him minus the night-vision helmet—a Puerto Rican girl of about sixteen with a pigskin face graft that suggested a dark market burn ward.
“Who are you?” the large black woman/man asked.

He tried to focus. He couldn’t get over his long blond hair. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him and yet for all the hardness of muscle, his skin was smooth. Except for the terrible burning he felt now on his back. That’s what made me black out, he realized. Pain. Pain from the skin of my back. There was something there but he couldn’t bring himself to think of it. Voices rustled in his brain . . . Last hope . . . Psyche War. . . beneath the sadness of a blues guitar drifting in on the night wind from somewhere far away—or deeper inside himself.

“Do you know who you are?” the large black woman/man repeated, but he couldn’t answer.

Who were these people and what did they want? Where had he been going when he fell out of the whirlwind? To meet someone, he thought. To find someone. There’s somewhere I have to be. There’s someone I have to be.

“That’s all right,” the dark-skinned giant said.
“Let’s start with where you are. You’re in New York City. In a part of Central Park that no one but us knows exists. We call it Fort Thoreau. It’s a kind of sanctuary. We refer to ourselves as the Satyagrahi, and I’m Aretha Nightingale.”

So saying, the speaker brought over a psykter of purified water and poured a cup for him, carefully considering the man’s whiteblond hair and tomorrow-staring eyes. There was something intriguingly familiar and at the same time deeply foreign about this night visitor. He was of average height and certainly less than average weight, but he radiated a presence that filled the tent.

The man drank some water and said, “You’re a—”
“A drag queen? That’s right, honey, I am!”
In fact the speaker looked like a former linebacker trying very hard to imitate some forgotten disco singer like Donna Summer.
“Used to be a lawyer. Lead counsel for the largest insurance company in the world. Lived a few blocks away. Of course I had to keep my private life secret. Then one day I saw I had to get out of the limo and back behind the mule. But that’s another story. That’s my story. Tinkerbell says the Securitors let you skiddo.”
“Who’s Tinkerbell?’
“Me.”
The PR girl winked, laser-edging a frozen-forged Gerber blade.
“Is someone after you?” Aretha asked, noticing again how long and blond the odd man’s hair was, how outwardly strained and yet internally resilient he appeared. “
I don’t know . . . I can’t . . .” Aretha picked up a detector and ran it over him. The device recorded an electromagnetic disturbance of an unknown kind.
“So do you have any idea who you are?”
“N-no. I . . . don’t . . . ,” the man said, staring around at the walls of the tent, which he saw through the gloom were decorated with chintzy Chinese fans, kimonos, and ostrich feathers.
“And you don’t know how you got here?” Aretha prodded. The blond man thought for a minute. Beyond the crazy idea of falling out of a whirlwind all he remembered was staring at the syringes in the fountain and then being seized with a scorching pain across his back.
“No,” he said finally. “I only remember the things on horses.”
“We’re going to give you a bioscan,” Aretha announced. “The psychometer that Tink had shorted out on you. You had a brainwave reading that we’ve never seen before. Makes Saint Anthony’s Syndrome and Pandora withdrawal look like an attack of the jitters. Is there anything else that comes to mind . . . right this minute?”