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Monday

Apr052010

In Which We're Going To Shanghai

Monday, April 5, 2010 at 4:30PM

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Shanghai in Cell Phone Photos

by OWEN ROBERTS

In the Toronto Airport I paid five bucks to use the Internet for an hour. I wrote a weird sort of gchat message to my sister, who wasn't responding, since it was seven in the morning. I wrote, "hey u there?" and she didn't respond, so I kept writing, "sorry i didn't call last night, i was busy..." leaving a message somewhere between e-mail and voicemail.

On the first night I was able to go into the city, I ended up in what is Shanghai's version of Times Square. I was told to be aware of scammers, girls who would pretend to want to hang out or whatever, and then take you to a bar or restaurant and order fancy drinks in Chinese and stick you with the bill. So when women approached me I avoided eye contact. Then a cute girl insisted on taking a photo with me. We started talking and I thought for a moment that she really just wanted to be friends until another girl appeared out of nowhere, she was much more physically attentive, and it creeped me out. They asked if I had a girlfriend and I said yes, and then they asked where she was and I tried to tell them I was meeting her down the street, but I hesitated too long. "You are Shanghai single." Embarrassed, I made it very clear that I was not interested. Their smiles faded and they started talking to each other in Chinese, not even bothering to walk away. No more, "Your eyes are beautiful," and "You have nice long legs."

zhang daliI had seen an ad for a gallery opening in an old hotel on 'The Bund', the row of buildings on the west side of the Huangpu river, famous for their colonial architecture, where the decadent balls of the 1920s and 1930s were held. Zhang Dali is famous for being the only Chinese graffiti artist of the 1990s. There was no one at the opening. It was on the fifth floor of a bizarre fancy mall built into one of the old government buildings, most of the floor belonged to a cheesy bar/lounge thing.

Looking upward in Shanghai is completely disorienting, unlike New York. In New York when you look up you see buildings in a row, planes defined by building faces, angles and perspective. In Shanghai it is as if the buildings are all floating in space, ready to collapse in on you. They all face different directions, the architecture of each belonging to a different city and time, and often I had no idea how I would get to any one of them by road. Many of the skyscrapers disappear into the pervasive fog of pollution.

My aunt's family lives in a suburban neighborhood built for expats called Willow Brook. Like Jersey or Connecticut, you can take a train into the urban center of the city in about twenty minutes. Unlike Jersey or Connecticut, you'll find poverty, neighborhoods of shacks and crumbling concrete, on the other side of a wall just beyond the neighborhood, people fishing in a black, polluted canal.

To prove that the pashmina that cost fifty yuan was better quality than the other pashmina, the woman at the pashmina booth on the third floor of the fabric market borrowed a lighter from a man in the booth and lit the ends of both scarves, showing us the difference between the smell and texture after burning. So we got the fifty yuan pashmina, about $6.50 USD, having looked through about ten other identical booths in the giant warehouse filled with a small variety of identical booths.

The British first established a colonial municipality, the "British Concession," in 1843, and Shanghai became the most important Chinese port city. The British made opium, which had previously only been enjoyed by the aristocratic class, available for common people, and soon millions of Chinese were hooked. American and French concessions were established. Even today you can tell when you walk into the old French concession, now the neighborhood called Luwan. On the Bund, many of the old buildings are empty, their entrances and windows boarded up, neglected during the cultural revolution and left to decay.

Somehow, I found myself in front of the Shanghai Library , without even meaning to. I guess I spend so much time in libraries I've developed a sixth sense that pulls me to them unconsciously.

In high school I discovered in the University of Richmond library, while I was supposed to be researching a paper on either J.D. Salinger or Samuel Beckett, a book called The Carnal Prayer Mat, which is an ancient, erotic Chinese novel, and was obsessed with it. That was a long time ago but I thought about it today while I was in the ancient books room in the library, where the signs in front of the display books were marked only in Chinese, not in both Chinese and English like most things around Shanghai, so it's possible, although maybe unlikely, I was looking at original copies of The Carnal Prayer Mat.

In the car on the way to Mogonshan Lu, where rezoned industrial lofts house art galleries, Hilary said that she was good at bargaining with the Chinese merchants. She doesn't like bargaining, but she's good at it because she doesn't actually want anything, so if she doesn't get her price she just walks. The other expat women she knows just buy tons of crap.

Taikang Lu, a famous block with tons of galleries as well as tiny coffee shops and little shops, reminds me of my problem with art, that I can't keep any of this stuff, that its physical existence for me is so ephemeral. That I'll barely even remember it, except when I maybe attempt to recall an event sometime later.

Like the fabric market, it feels like there are a million of these little galleries, too many to process, so the experience becomes one of saturation, like surfing the Internet in real life. It's impossible to know if the art in any given gallery will be schlock made for tourists or "high art." The distinction loses meaning.

A gallery in Luwan, freestanding and more Western in design than the galleries at Taikang Lu or Moganshan Lu, and curated by a European woman, featured art addressing the upcoming World Expo, which is in Shanghai this year. They are completely remaking parts of the city in order to prepare for it. It comes up again and again in my reading and conversation, the Chinese disregard for history and the constant rebuilding and refurbishing of their cities. The Expo represents another redecoration of the city of Shanghai; the slogan: "Better City, Better Life."

bamboo raftingsBefore leaving for China I read in an Eliot Weinberger essay that the Chinese government does not censor artists the way it does writers and intellectuals, because no one cares about art. Mogonshan Lu is more deceptive in its presentation of art as "high art."

At another gallery I ran across walking between Luwan and a DVD store where I had read you could find old vinyl records in the back (this turned out to be untrue) I saw some video art. One of the pieces looked really cool, and when I put on the headphones to hear the soundtrack I realized that it had been shown at a Performa '09 event in New York, which I had been working at. It was a piano piece that accompanied the video. In the screening at the Anthology Film Archives in November there had been live keyboard accompaniment, and I had set up the keyboard with the PA in the theatre.

pearl tower I dreamed that my friends were making fun of me for liking narrative.

I saw maybe fifty galleries in Shanghai, but one stuck out, because the digital and interactive art reminded me of my own. I talked to the curator's assistant, a French guy probably my age. He came to study Chinese for six months, but dropped out of his program and started working for the gallery. "Shanghai is like a trap," he said, "It's like Hell." He said he has no intention to go back to Paris.

At first I didn't realize that Liu Dao, the name on all of the art that I like, and most of the art in the gallery, is the name of a collective of artists, mostly Chinese and some European, and not one Chinese guy, as I had been imagining. The work is a lot like digital and interactive art that I've seen before, but it's cleaner and more complete. It seems like art and not like a technological experiment, the way the work I did in college was. My favorite piece is called "Birds on a Wire." In a frame about two feet wide and three feet tall, two birds animated by red, orange and green LEDs move subtly behind a translucent yellow screen of paper filled with Chinese text.

Some of the more sexual and violent art made my aunt uncomfortable, and I felt a bit embarrassed. We both reserved comment in front of the more graphic pieces, except occasionally she'd say something like "I don't get all this violent imagery." Later, Hilary said something to the effect of "I don't really understand art," or "I'm not an artsy person," which is something that I often hear from older people like my parents. It seems to be an expression of feeling unfamiliar and slightly out of place in a hip art gallery, but Hilary is comfortable navigating her away around Shanghai, bartering in Chinese with aggressive merchants and vendors. I don't imagine most middle aged expat house wives have can say they have the same relationship with the city.

The Urban Planning exhibition was housed in one of the futuristic spaceship buildings near People's Square. The displays inside were new and shiny but poorly made. On the second floor I found facsimiles of old maps in a bizarre display device, a wooden box with frames that slide out of the sides. On the third floor a World Expo display featured scale models of different buildings, many of which didn't exist yet. On the fourth floor there was a massive scale model of the entire city of Shanghai.

After the Urban Planning Exhibition I met up with my roommate's cousin Lara, the only person my age I had contacted when I arrived in Shanghai. She and her boyfriend Trip walked with me along Foushou Lu toward the river. After graduating college and having difficulty finding work in the US, they came to Shanghai, where Trip had studied during a semester abroad, to teach English and live cheaply. When I met them they were frazzled by their work situation. They have been in Shanghai since October, but they had learned recently that the company employing them to teach English had forged some of their qualifications in order to get them work visas. "They think lying is just being crafty, or clever," Trip said, reminding me of my aunt's description of merchants in the fake market. Still, they were positive about living in Shanghai. They said they had planned to stay for only a year but were now thinking of staying longer.

On Friday I picked up my cousins Michael and Jack from school and took them to Kung Fu class. Then we ordered pizza and watched cartoons. I slept in my aunt's bed, reading to the kids from a book of Peanuts I brought Michael before putting them to bed. After they were asleep I watched a Chinese bootleg copy of Avatar for an hour and got bored. Michael jumped into the bed the next morning at exactly seven. "I've been waiting for an hour," he told me. "I think I have hair growing on my elbow." "What are you talking about, Michael?" I said, sitting up in bed, trying to focus. "I think you need to turn on the light to see it," he said. I turned on the light and realized it had been a trick to wake me up faster. We went downstairs to play Wii. I had to convince them to eat breakfast so I could make myself coffee.

At the airport I had Korean fast food. I read the book by Eileen Chang ("We call her Chang Eileen") I got at the foreign book store. I had been to Shanghai and in a few hours I would be somewhere else.

Owen Roberts is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find more of his work here.

"A Son's Cycle" - RJD2 ft. the Catalyst, Illogical & NP (mp3)

"Tin Flower" - RJD2 ft. Heather Fortune (mp3)

"Small Plans" - RJD2 (mp3)

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Sunday

Feb142010

AMERICA

In Which We Were Stuck In The Rain

Sunday, February 14, 2010 at 11:33AM

The Worst of It

by OWEN ROBERTS

I actually don't remember if Kelly or Taylor had been in the passenger seat at the time. One of them, probably Kelly, would have been in the front with me, the other in the middle seat. We were stuck on a small section of Thompson, right near the highway, between Grace and Monument. The cars stopped moving around three in the afternoon, we were literally about fifty feet away from the intersection. If we had left only a few minutes earlier for my parent's house, we would have missed it.

As it happened, we got home past eight, and the electricity was out, my sister and mother were walking around with candles and getting ready to play boardgames. Then, the rain stopped, and I was able to drive Kelly back home around midnight. A few days later I went back to Connecticut to start my sophomore year in college.

I hadn't wanted to go back to college after that summer. I talked about dropping out, though I didn't somehow screw up the paperwork that would have been required, part of me knew it wasn't actually going to happen. I met Kelly through a friend at the ice cream store, and asked her out a couple of nights later. On our first date we went to Bottom's Up, the pizza place where my friends in high school had gone every Sunday night to see jazz music. On our second date we walked around Church Hill, ending up on the roof of the old VCU art building, from where you could see the whole city, even Dogwood Dell on the South Side.

We sat at the edge of the building, whatever the material was rubbing off black on our hands, silently. On our third date we went to Emilio's, a bar on Meadow, where my old drum teacher's band played every Tuesday night, and I, thinking I was the hippest seventeen-year-old in Richmond, had been allowed in.

Being nineteen and relatively oblivious of the world outside of my friends and my girlfriend and the books I was reading, I had no idea the hurricane (officially a Tropical Storm) was coming. We were racing down Main Street when the rain started.

Shockoe Bottom was the neighborhood hit worst by the flood. It's just below east of downtown Richmond (downtown being where the few big buildings live, the banks and the governor's mansion and the other government buildings), and is the city's oldest neighborhood. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Richmond was the South's biggest source of enslaved Africans, which came into the slave docks, which you can still visit in Shockoe Bottom. There are talks of building a slavery museum in the Bottom.

After importing captured Africans into the US was outlawed in 1807, the function of the slave docks changed. Instead of being a hub for ships coming up the James River, it became a port for slaves to be sold from Virginia to new plantations in the deep south. Following the invention of the cotton gin and the Louisiana Purchase, selling slaves became lucrative business, and Virginian plantation owners began breeding slaves for sale.

Lumpkin's Jail for slaves, recently rediscovered, was just near the Main Street Station. The 17th street farmer's market was once the site of the town whipping post. The VCU parking lot where my parents park their cars everyday was once the town gallows, where the slave rebellion leader Gabriel was executed in 1800.

Direct predecessors of Richmond largest newspaper, The Richmond Times Dispatch, announced auctions and published flyers for runaway slaves. It is estimated that 350,000 Africans were sold in Richmond during the next sixty years, the descendants of whom are now spread all over the country.

The city's plan to build a baseball stadium in Shockoe Bottom (for the purpose of reviving the economy in downtown Richmond - the current stadium is on the North Side, about two miles away) has been opposed from the beginning, because of all the history it would be built on top of. Some people want to turn it into a historic site.

My family moved to Richmond in August of 1993, when I was eight. Soon after moving in, my dad and I went down to Belle Isle, an island in the James River that sits just south of downtown, connected to the city by a long footbridge that hangs from the highway. We walked over to the island to walk around the paths and swim in the rapids. As we approached we saw men in the field where the footbridge connected wearing grey and blue uniforms and shooting guns at one another. We walked past the field, and my dad explained to me the Civil War which of course lead to his explanation of slavery. I was very confused.

Richmond has seen a few destructive floods. The 1870 flood was the worst since the 1771 flood; the Mayo bridge was destroyed, 20 homes were swept away. The Mayo bridge went down again in 1882. The flood in 1985 inspired the building of the flood wall.

It seems like nothing really happened in Shockoe Bottom for a little more than a century, until in 1995 they built the flood wall, to protect the area from the river water rising. After that the area grew quickly, businesses appeared and it became sort of the center for night clubs and fancy restaurants and stuff, at least downtown. Ironically, part of the flood of 2004 was caused by the flood wall keeping Gaston's rain water in the Bottom.

Nine people died in the flood that I experienced. The rain started as we drove down Main Street. Then we turned onto Thompson and saw all the cars were stopped. For hours we sat in the car, the rain getting heavier, waiting for something to happen. The sun set while we were stuck. We could barely see the cars right next to mine. I don't remember what we talked about. The water reached something like fifteen or sixteen feet in Shockoe Bottom. All of the restaurants and stores, anything on the first floor of any building, was destroyed. All of the places I had hung out down there in high school were gone, and wouldn't be rebuilt for a couple of years at least. Because I left a few days later, I didn't see any of the damage.

The flood wall itself is kind of cool. It's massive, and there's a walkway on the top, where people jog. It's a great view of the river and downtown Richmond, as well as the South Side. If you walk the whole way across you end up on Hull Street, which is known as the murder street in Richmond. When I first started driving, at sixteen, I was told that if I ever found myself on Hull Street, to get off of it as soon as possible. On Christmas Eve day my family took a walk across the flood wall and ended up on Hull Street, and walked through a park. It was virtually deserted.

My first two years of college were weird because I still thought of myself as living in Richmond, and I spent as much time there as I could. Then I spent a summer in Brooklyn and Richmond became more and more of a memory. This past Christmas I was home for almost a week and a bunch of my friends from high school were around, and we went out to Bottoms Up for the first time in years.

Needless to say, the vibe was quite different. To our surprise, the Butterbean Quartet was playing that night, and two of the original member, brothers who play drums and trumpet, were there. One of them had a baby and both were much rounder than they had been when we were in high school.

The new design of Bottoms Up made it feel more like a chain pizza place in the West End (it turns out that there is now a West End location) than a cool downtown jazz bar. Smoking in public had finally been banned in Richmond only a few weeks before, so the bar was clean and nice from the host stand to booth we sat in. The pizza tasted pretty much the same.

My friends and I all went to different colleges and live in different cities now. We were all really into jazz in high school, but some of us are less so now. We all developed pretty different tastes while we were in college. Watching Butterbean six years later couldn't have been a more palpable metaphor of our deflated jazz egos.

Cafe Gutenberg was one of the hangouts I went to when I had my first real girlfriend. I was a sophomore in high school. The cafe was modeled after the Parisian cafes of the mid 20th century, with coffee and wine and rare books to peruse. To a fifteen year old it definitely felt like the most intellectual place to be hanging out. In the flood they lost most of their library, hundreds of first editions and otherwise cool books destroyed.

They reopened with a more modest library, and were eventually taken over by new managers who turned the focus to fine dining instead of cafe food. The food is definitely good, but the vibe isn't the same. Their new website doesn't acknowledge the flood or the books.

My favorite place in high school was the 17.5 cafe. It was a bizarre place around the corner from Cafe Gutenberg, with an iron "17.5" logo hanging on the outside, which I thought was really cool. It was a pretty normal hole in the wall coffee shop, but it looked like the kind of thing people would hang out at in an arty movie or something, there was exposed brick and weird furniture and book shelves, and lots of coolsters. It was only open erratically.

They had music there, and a band called The Pers Trio played a bunch of shows. The bass player had gone to our high school, but was at Berklee and would bring his band down for shows. They played aggressive, noisy jazz, and were really good at it, I still listen to their recordings. They would be tucked into the front corner bay window, and there was only room for maybe twenty people to sit and watch them. Sometimes they would have experimental music or weird folk shows on the second floor of the cafe, which was sort of a reading room.

17.5 doesn't exist at all anymore. This is it on Google Maps, it's apparently been replaced by some other coffee shop that went out of business.

Owen Roberts is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Brooklyn. He last wrote in these pages about Eckhart Tolle.

"Lines Written In Winter" - Fionn Regan (mp3)

"House Detective" - Fionn Regan (mp3)

"The End of History" - Fionn Regan (mp3)

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Tuesday

Jan122010

BOOKS

In Which You Have The Power

Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 10:23AM

Eckhart's Reduction

by OWEN ROBERTS

When I was a kid I had this idea that my dad was a Marxist, before I had any idea what Marxism was. My dad is sort of a self-proclaimed Marxist, though he isn't particularly vocal about it, but it manifests in his general attitude toward religion and politics, which is that he tends to be incredibly cynical and doesn't seem to "believe" in anything, other than economic forces maybe. So there was this unspoken dialectic in my house between my atheist dad (he probably wouldn't admit to that, might describe himself as agnostic) and my mom, who is Irish Catholic, and believes that people have souls and stuff. My mom went to church and unconvincingly tried to make me believe in God and think about religion, and is generally more comfortable with feelings and beliefs than my dad or me. Anyway, this possibly overly revealing introduction is just to set up the fact of my complete shock when I found out my dad was reading The Power of Now. I had heard of it but I didn't know much about it. It's a wildly successful self-help book. You can read a lot of it on Google Books.

The Power of Now actually came out first in 1999, but it started getting really popular in 2008 when Oprah made it a book of the month, which means a ton of people will read it just because she said they should (don't interpret this as disparaging of Oprah, I may not like her taste in books always, but I like her).

I was really weirded out to find my dad reading the book, because, first, he doesn't have time to read a lot (I think he read a lot of things when he was younger but his default response to questions like, "Hey, dad, did you ever read this copy of Sentimental Education I found in the bookshelf?" is "I don't think I really understood it"), and second, he's an incredible cynic with not a spiritual bone in his body. So this led me to pick up the book and start reading a little bit, because, though I'm used to feeling alienated by the popularity of certain books and media, my dad's interest in anything "soft" piqued my own interest.

I find the book impossible to read. But there's clearly something successful about it if has become so meaningful to so many people. I've met people my age with, like, regular interests and normal personalities, who say this book changed their life. I have a tendency to assume shit like this is totally exploitative and soft. But if it helps people who am I to say that it's bullshit?

There isn't even much criticism (not even on the Internet) of the book or its author, Eckhart Tolle, which seems bizarre. It's difficult to back up this claim with research, but this comment on the one blog post I found criticizing Tolle (in like twenty-five pages of Google results) corroborates the claim: "Incidentally, the phrase “i hate eckhart tolle” only gets about half a dozen hits. Likewise, “eckhart tolle sucks” just gets one. It seems to me that the dearth of criticism for something so well read and practically unintelligible is a little concerning. Is there something in the water?" Maybe critics have better things to do.

I think it's fair to say that people often enjoy books who have a character or protagonist with which the reader can identify.

Jk. This is probably more accurate.

Which sort of means is that people like reading about themselves, or at least thinking about themselves while reading, or picturing themselves in a story. That's maybe why there are archetypes, and Peter Parker is like a completely generic looking dude and people talk about whether or not they're Slytherins or Gryffindors or whatever. So it follows that The Power of Now might owe its popularity in part to the fact that each individual can easily imagine themselves as the protagonist.

You don't escape into a cool fantasy world when reading The Power of Now, you escape into a fantasy of self improvement.

A gross simplification of the point of The Power of Now: Thinking is bad. Okay, to be honest, I think there is some merit to Tolle's central concept of being present in your life; it's the kind of thing that is absurdly obvious, but might require someone else telling you not to be constantly freaking out about the past and future for you to realize that you were doing it in the first place. But Tolle seems to take this mantra to its most extreme conclusion. Now, this is clearly reductive, but given the repetitive and generally ambiguous nature of Tolle's prose, I don't feel like a close reading is really needed.

A representative sentence:

Instead of "watching the thinker," you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do.

I think that's called telling, not showing. Tolle's read on why people are unhappy seems to be that everyone is just super anxious and thinking too much about things, and the way to combat this compulsive thinking is to not think at all, or to think intensely about things that are relatively meaningless. He doesn't offer much in the way of reasonable alternative other than meditating.

Tolle's own life makes this whole philosophy suspect. Basically he was a bum. He was depressed and suicidal and turned to spirituality. He sort of implies that he was homeless for like two years. When he had the idea to write a book and eventually make a million dollars, he doesn't mention. It doesn't help that he looks like a total creepy weirdo.

Dude is too busy not thinking to shave.

I'm all for relaxing and chilling out and stuff, but I don't think that's what makes people happy. I think not being really bored is what makes people happy, among other things. And, like, success. And probably a lot of other things. Tolle has been accused of trying to be God, which is far fetched, but he's certainly filling the role of some sort of prophet or something. What kind of a prophet is a weird question though. You have to wonder what Eckhart Tolle wants people to do with his book. He wants to help people help themselves, but why?

The back of The Power of Now labels it as Personal Growth/Spirituality, which means self-help. I looked into the history of the self-help industry a bit, to see where the whole thing got kicked off, and where Tolle fits into it. The first bestselling self-help book was How to Make Friends and Influence People, written by Dale Carnegie, which was published in 1936 and has since sold more than fifteen million copies. Coincidentally, Carnegie's life long dream was to be a Chautauqua lecturer (only a coincidence because I wrote about Chautauqua on this blog), a dream which he never realized. According to his Wikipedia page, one of his most successful business moves was changing his name from Carnagey to Carnegie, in order to associate himself with Andrew Carnegie, and even "was able to rent Carnegie Hall itself for a lecture to a packed house," which seems silly. His middle name is Breckenridge, which I think is a great name, and is also a kind of flower.

How to Make Friends and Influence People was only a year old when people started making fun of it, namely, Irving Dart Tressler, who wrote How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (not to confused with Toby Young or a movie that was apparently made based on that book), which Time magazine thought was funny.

I picked this up at The Strand after seeing it in this movie.

How to Win Friends and Influence People is written more like a manual for businessmen, Carnegie's industry, employing anecdotal stories to prove points about human behavior and how to exploit it basically. The self-help precedent for The Power of Now is more likely The Power of Positive Thinking, by Norman Vincent Peale (not just because they both have "power" in the titles, there are a lot of self-help books that reference "power" both in their titles and otherwise). Like Tolle, Peale emphasizes conquering anxiety and finding peace of mind, with similar language (though Carnegie resembles Tolle in that both were failures in previous efforts before becoming successful as self-help authors). In his time, Peale was controversial for mixing religion and psychology, and was attacked by mental health experts who called him a fraud and a con man.

The thing about the word "power" that bothers me is that it doesn't seem to make much sense in the context of self-help. My conception of power is, loosely, one person's ability to control other people, or other abstractions of this idea. The goal of The Power of Now is to help the reader gain power over themselves, which seems to imply that most people exist in a sort of schizophrenic state. I'm sure you can make an argument for this idea, but I find it bothersome nonetheless. Because there is a market for these books, you have to assume that there are people getting something out of them, but I remain skeptical of the ideas that Tolle and other self-help authors offer. I'm not alone either, there are numerous parodies and critics of self-help (though apparently not of Tolle), including George Carlin.

I think this image sort of sums up my frustration with Tolle. This symbol appears every few pages in The Power of Now, and is intended to signal the reader to pause and think about what they have just read. Ignoring the fact that this is an obvious gimmick to increase the length of the text (only two hundred wide margin pages), it's an incredibly patronizing little symbol to appear every few pages. It only makes me further question the motivation behind the book which is suspect to begin with. But even if I ignore the ambiguous origination of the book, it's still pretty silly.

It's possible that I'm judging The Power of Now from an unfair and overly literary perspective. My dad's interest in the book caused me to wonder about its influence and appeal for people is because it is so alien to me, but dissecting the book is also patronizing to the fans of the book, in the sense that while Tolle is telling people how they should think, I'm telling people that they're stupid for buying it.

Owen Roberts is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find his most recent work here.