17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Saying Yes to Whatever May Come, May 15, 2009
This review is from: Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future (Hardcover)
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Certainly this is a sort of desperate elegy by Bowden, a vastly talented writer.
"We can't wrap our minds around the vast dying now taking place, the exit of plants and animals without even a goodbye note as they leave us behind...it is the silence of life fleeing this place of life. ...People, we can't talk about people, people everywhere, crowding the beaches, jamming their lives into the canyons, smearing the plains with their houses and ribbons and bows, terracing hillsides with shacks that barely get them through the lonely nights. We cannot say this thing about people, that there are too many of us and not enough of everything else." (p. 7)
"We are many in number and the ground under our feet neither grows nor shrinks. We are in a land of dread and we know this and ignore this. We use words that are dead-- global economy, resources, the environment, progress, freedom, capitalism, socialism, revolution. What we truly have are more mouths and dwindling food, more hungers and declining reserves of everything. And none of this can forestall the future. Something is ending, something is beginning, and this present cannot continue.
This is at least a beginning.
I've read that Beethoven ground precisely sixty beans of coffee each morning for one cup.
That is what I mean by yes.
I will walk in the valley of death and feel no fear.
Yes, I will.
Because of that one word.
Yes." (p. 194)
He goes forward and back in time, weaving like a bird forming its nest, like snake entrancing the bird, both at once snake and bird. In his writing, despair and hope wrestle like the Oak King and the Holly King.
"I have never wanted to be someone else, I have always wanted to be something else. My life has been spent in the cage of my DNA. There is another country where blood wills out, sounds are louder, scent drenches the air, thought flows like a river, flows so calmly that it is not perceived as thought." (p. 43)
Self-indulgent? Perhaps. But at the same time, somebody else is feeling the way I do, and I cannot put this rage-sorrow-loss-sickness into words, and they can, so they do it for me, and maybe that isn't enough, but it has to be enough for now, until I can thaw my frozen thoughts in the heat of this immediacy.
This is not a book to be read by those who are seeking the linear and the structured. The solutions. The "how to be greener and buy no-detergent laundry soaps and drive an electric car" crowd.
"We want a clean thing, we want rules - ten commandments, a list of solid answers, a form we can fill out and then we're done with the mysteries, perhaps, a chant we can murmur in the dark hours" (p. 7)
"There can't be a summing up, a set of commandments, a safe and sacred way. That is the path to ruin. There is appetite, there is the shift of things, the change in weather, the melting of the ice, the new rivers gouged, and the songs we make up to keep us going." (p. 218).
Ah, the songs we make up to keep us going, one foot in front of the other. Not the consumerist stuff shoveled and packaged to meld one's mind into the driving status quo. Instead the rhymes of childhood's momentarily-made song that is not for anyone else to hear, or a wordless vocalizing keeping the blood in the veins like a horse. To enable one to open and "yes" again in whispering song.
"You enter the country of the dead. At first, you protect yourself by saying the dead are _them_ and separate from the vital thing called _us_. Then this boundary erodes and this happens so softly -- the sound of a brush kissing a brass cymbal -- you seem unaware of the change. Until you sense it, snap alert, look all around and find you are in the country of the dead, that everyone around you is dead only some of the dead are still breathing." (p. 31).
I had a dream years ago, of a ceremony called "Soothing the Dead." And now cradling them and brushing their skulls tender as an infant, in whispering song like a horse, I begin to understand.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Really Compelling, April 10, 2009
This review is from: Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I would call Charles Bowden a Gonzo journalist based on what I read in this book. He's more of a prose-poet than Hunter Thompson but I was often reminded of HST while reading "Some of the Dead are Still Breathing." There's the faintest hint of epic drug use, a smattering of very well-written sex, and of course the Gonzo ethic of total immersion in the story. The journalist's primary subject is himself.
What is the book about? That's hard to say, since it flows in an almost stream-of-consciousness manner through cascades of visual images. Everything is present tense, everything is happening now with the immediacy of memory and experience. The overall theme, as explained by the author in his afterword, is the question of how one can live a moral life in a culture of death. The phrase "culture of death" is not a metaphor. Western culture literally thrives on the death of other species, of other cultures, of the earth itself. We are wreaking our own destruction, and hey, maybe that's what is supposed to happen. The chapters spin pictures of Charles Bowden's own thoughts and experiences, and each chapter's imagery swarms around particular themes like bees around a hive:
1: a memory of childhood in a farmhouse. a timeless place. between World Wars.
2: wandering a dead city. Bali, New Orleans, Rio de Janiero all blend together. birds and their habits
3: snakes. the desire to be something other than human, and the human inability to do so.
4: a room in a seedy motel. crime. murder. repetition. sex. elephants, particularly elephants that snap and go on rampages. obsession. futility. madness.
5: sailing in the Pacific with Greenpeace, attacking a Japanese drag-net fishing fleet. Herman Melville's life. Moby Dick.
6: a continuation of 5. tying back in of themes from 2, 3, and 4.
7: summertime. childhood memories, echoes of 1. gardening. a place frozen in time. the passage of time. folk songs.
The book has a hypnotic quality that is truly spellbinding through the first four chapters. At first I thought it was a collection of unrelated essays until I got to chapter 6, "red," which ties everything together. Chapter four, "room," seems to lose power towards the end, and it doesn't pick up again until well into chapter 5, "ocean," which has more of a traditional narrative structure than the rest of the book. The whole thing seems to be very thoughtfully and deliberately structured.
The cover price seems a bit extravagant, but reading this book is such an experience it's almost worth it.
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13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Bowden is a charming, and somewhat self-indulgent, tour guide to today's complex world, March 22, 2009
This review is from: Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future (Hardcover)
Some of the Dead are Still Breathing is a collection of journalistic musings about the troubled state of the world and humanity's (mainly negative) impact on it. Bowden is a study in contraries. He lives in the world of drugs, whores, crime, and seedy motel rooms, but at the same time, he carefully observes the habits of a pair of cardinals living in his yard and worries about elephants in captivity. Bowden is an ecologically sensitive Hunter S. Thompson with a poetic bent:
I am part of a species where many find it forbidden to cross religious lines. Or race lines. I want to cross blood lines. I was to risk my life for another organism, I want to shed my culture and join another culture, to meld with the beasts, to destroy the notion of parks and zoos and reserves and flow in a river of blood off some Niagara and be pounded into another life in the red pool below, the pool that churns and roars with spray and licks one's being with an overwhelming undertow.
Readers who like structured essays or stories will be frustrated by Bowden's free-flowing, and sometimes self-indulgent, style. Those who embrace free association and haphazard thought experiments are likely to find Bowden to be a charming, if eclectic, tour guide to today's complex world.
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