Customer Reviews

Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Covering 225 pages, Some Of The Dead Are Still Breathing by Charles Bowden is a lose collection of stories about the trials and tribulations of life in America's modern society.

The author's life is certainly something that will quickly have you wondering about the tangible freedom's that we neglect in modern society. He frequently discusses adventures and his love of women. He weaves a tale not of physical prowess or aggressive love making but rather how the people he encounters live. Many stories come from a ranch just five miles from the Mexican border where the country is broad and hot. You will find yourself quickly immersed in another world through cleverly written prose that forces you to pause to consider the true meanings of these printed words.

I give the book five stars not for its strange cover or the concept but rather the author's introspective writing style that should be able to get you to think while reading. Charles shows us that there is more to life than the latest iPhone or television show by telling stories about the survival in the physical world.

There's a lot here that's provocative and interesting; a lot more that I don't know what to make of. It's a patchwork of half-remembered half-invented episodes and engaging reflections on what it all amounts to. I'll remember and be affected by elements of this book long after the more polished but drab and uninteresting prose of so much out there has faded into oblivion.

Bowden's montage of memories, visions, stupor, encounters, thoughts, works around the theme of our paradoxical fascination with both meaning and violence, fidelity and lust, truth and self-deception. Then there's the elephant. Its refusal to die, and capacity for murder. Moby Dick's whale. Beulah the serpent, who would curl up beneath his chair on the porch as he sat and drank whisky. The jealous turtle and the hummingbirds. An ambivalence about dogs. Something there in all of this, but I'm not sure what.

At its most lucid there are rich reflections here, as in "Serpent" on the question where the line lies between "us" and the animals. More often, perhaps, Bowden seems to have lost an internal censor. How many times must he remind us of how many times and how many women and in how many ways and of how little it all amounted to? Matter of fact as if nothing more than a good cup of coffee, he has this one or that one unzip his trousers or lift up her skirt. It's not prudishness in me that asks for greater consideration of content. Why so explicit about what transpires and evasive as to significance?

We live in a culture of death, of callous violence and disregard for others and for the other than human. What is to be done? Bowden tried his hand at protest and found it ineffective; he has opted for the role of wandering witness. But of what and to what end? Without judge, without jury. Just to say: I have seen this, I have been there, I have done that, here gives me pause. There may be something to that. My own jury is still out.

This is a serious book. It's also something of a train wreck.

Author Charles Bowden is a mix of Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, and Cormac McCarthy, with a touch of an amphetamine addled writing style, (whether on not he uses I don't know,) and a high-flying ego. Mr. Bowden's stylistic indulgences make for difficult, and not always interesting reading, but when he gets a grip he's both interesting, and compelling. To coin a phrase: when he's good he's very good, when he's bad he's awful.

The book bears the full title: Some of the Dead are Still Breathing: Living in the Future, but I think it would have done well without the colon and etc. Mr. Bowden gives us characters that are spiritually dead, highly symbolic animal life - cardinals, rattlers, elephants, and whales on the verge of extinction or coping in an unfriendly world- has his own brushes with crises of faith, and emerges battered, and not quite whole. Looking at the non-human world to see the state of things works very well; drawing any larger conclusions of humanity based on his fringe characters works less well; and using himself as both Virgil and Dante works even less well. The book functions as memoir, and writing of the past does not work as a look at the future, as much as a mirror to Mr. Bowden's present.

When he does "get a grip" on both style and story we get reportage from the dark night of the soul - his and his characters' - and the reportage is brilliant. His reflections and ruminations on the animal world can scare you into thinking we're witnessing the end of the line, (possibly the end of time) and his look at the humans in his orbit also make us wonder for the future of humanity - not humans, humanity - and it's depressing.

I'm giving it three stars, though it's a very uneven book that bumps down to two and up to four.

(Perhaps it slipped past me, but I missed the 'breathing dead' title's meaning;
maybe we're to subjectively intuit it; or maybe it's to be deduced. Good luck. )

This is a very good read. I read the first two stories/ruminations/observations/ whatever Bowden calls them, and almost tossed this dead-still-breathing book into my firestove. (I live surrounded by national forest, at 7500 feet. From Bowden's back-cover blurbs, I thought I could relate to this book from the description blurb, being concerned environmentally.)

Well, I can relate to his writing, but for unexpected reasons. Not any environmental concerns re our planet growing weary as I assumed, but for the elegance of his unassuming writing style, sharp, close observations and translations of what thangs mean, really, essentially, closely. Almost like Nicholson Baker, but grittier, looser,
less compulsive.

In every one of his - I'll call them 'segments' - he slips in surprising thoughts. Take `room', a present-tense (all this work is in present tense) visit to a morgue which launches a trip to far better places.

A few paragraphs in, a paragraph begins with a thought-provoking sentence: "There must be a way to say yes and yet not base this yes off a life of no." And said paragraph ends saying "Is this where I gather the strength for yes? Or is this the tomb where I wait for no?" Interesting phrases abound; I'm still thinking of these and others knowing there's something there.... But what?

The in-between will make the end somewhat understood; but CB seems to be adverse to explicitly. The back cover says it better, commenting on how he weaves together perspectives. (I read a readers' copy; I hope/expect those lines will stay; the seemed so provocative, profound. Are they?)

This book is pretty-much original and unexpected, you can feel it's authenticity while appreciating its frequent, soaring elegant phrases. I can see it being in Harper's. Or the New Yorker and the like. (An old saw says 'Elegance is just simplicity and uniqueness. Maybe so.)

One not-really-a-negative caveat: I wish I had started reading this with the third `segment, `serpent' first. `floating' and `red', the first two, seemed so different from the rest. To be sure, read them; but maybe last. (I thought CB was being experimental and poetic and obtuse. Could be me; do what you want.) But I recommend trying on this book if you have an eclectic bone in your body.

This book reads as a stream of consciousness about current crises with some parts engaging and wonderful and others very disturbing - as may well be the intention of the piece. It may very well be read multiple times to see how it affects the reader from reading to reading, much as music makes more sense on multiple readings. In that sense, a composer I would compare it to would be Shostakovich who on first listening when I was younger did not impress but now that I am older I feel a kinship and sense of understanding that makes the music beautiful.

There's not much here but some brooding sketches, some poorly written sex scenes (maybe those are sketches as well?), and self-promotion as a tough SOB that sounds like a fifteen year old's attempt at gangsta rap. This would be in zero star territory if not for occasional pieces of good writing that clearly show that Bowden could have done something decent with this book. Blending Moby Dick and the Greenpeace pursuit of the Japanese fishing fleet was compelling in the blending of the ocean and madness, but was let down by the author's need for impressive autobiography.

Although I was delighted to see this book offered for review, I was also surprised and a little leery of the results. Bowden's not a writer for the masses and I expect to see a lot of low ratings here from readers new to him and just trying it out--this book is explicit and about subjects most people don't want to hear or think about. You often hear a book described as a love it or hate it experience--with Bowden's writing, it's possible to love AND hate it.

I don't have any interest in most of his books which follow from his experience as a crime reporter in Tucson--drugs, murder, sex crimes--but some like this one have more of a focus on nature, a word he has no use for, and a broader view of this time in history. Who are the dead of the title? Take your pick--war veterans, dying individuals, doomed species, collapsing civilizations, the comfortably numb, the quietly desperate.

I wavered between 4 and 5 stars--there's a section which makes up 1/4 of the book which I found tedious and repetitive. To be fair, perhaps it's meant to be that way as it describes life on the road, hotel room after hotel room, an obsession with proving that a man was murdered, and a dark period in the author's life. And elephants.

So why 5 stars? Because this book is real and honest and self-examining and culture-examining to a degree you'll rarely find. Because along with the drugs and violence and sex and thoughts of homicide and suicide, it's about cardinals, and New Orleans, and death and birth, and the future which is now and the end which is here, and rattlesnakes, and alienation from a civilization which is about isolation from other species, and desire vs. reason, and Sea Shepherd (Chicken Bob and the Captain were among the founders of Greenpeace and its history is written about, but the events in the book are on a Sea Shepherd ship), and Melville, and drift nets, and too many people, and the acceptance which is not submission.

Because it is real and honest, it's not about economic systems or politicians or borders on a map (except for their consequences), or false illusions or denial or delusions that everything can be fixed, or future or past utopias, or editing out the rough edges of a book or a life so that everyone will approve. It's about life, the real one.

My copy's heavily marked and there's so much I'd like to quote here, but we're asked not to do that because the advance copy is not the final version and could change. I expect to buy the official book, because as he writes repeatedly, it's about yes. Yes, even to what isn't pretty or reassuring. If you're up to it, and don't mind a free flowing writing style which circles back to what came before, and care about these issues and know these feelings, read this book.