Earlier this week I finally had the chance to see Crazy Wisdom, Johanna Demetrakas' long-awaited documentary about Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, attending a screening at the Rubin Museum followed by a Q&A with Robert Thurman.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should acknowledge having made a couple of small financial contributions to this project while the filmmakers were trying to get it off the ground. And having spent a fair amount of time in and around the Shambhala community, I can hardly claim to be an impartial reviewer. Like countless other people, I have been captivated by the depth and profundity of Trungpa Rinpoche's teaching. That said, I have never felt obliged to tow any particular party line about some of the more controversial aspects of his legacy: the prodigious drinking, sexual escapades and the sometimes cult-like atmosphere that sprang up around him. And so I have often found myself wrestling with this film's central question: How could an ostensibly enlightened being act this way?

Alas, anyone approaching this film hoping to form some kind of solid judgment about Trungpa Rinpoche will likely come away disappointed. And I suspect that's more-or-less what Demetrakas intended. While the film certainly veers towards presenting Trungpa Rinpoche in a favorable light - I think the Times was probably right to opine that it "loves its subject too well" - it never descends into outright hagiography. And I was glad to see the film doesn't shy away from addressing some of the troubling aspects of his life, although it does perhaps skate past a few of the more shocking episodes (the Great Naropa Poetry Wars come to mind). Then again, it probably would have been easy enough to gather several films' worth of outlandish stories about Trungpa Rinpoche, without ever getting to the point of explaining why he really mattered: namely, his teaching.

The film does a wonderful job of capturing Trungpa Rinpoche at his luminous best in some of his early lectures; I only wish we had seen more of him in the act of teaching. Instead, the film leans heavily on the present-day recollections of his close students, who of course tend to remember him fondly; it certainly would have been interesting to hear at least a couple of dissenting views. For the most part, however, Demetrakas manages to steer clear of the pat explanations that one sometimes hears around the Shambhala community: that every single thing he did was enlightened activity, that such a realized master cannot be judged in terms of conventional morality, or that he somehow took on the neuroses of his students. While there might well be some truth to those perspectives, they also strike me as suspiciously lazy arguments.

I prefer to think of Trungpa Rinpoche's life as a kind of koan, one that doesn't lend itself to easy answers or fixed views. So I was glad to hear Pema Chodron and Diana Mukpo's frank admissions that they found him inspiring and, at times, baffling. This is more-or-less how I feel about him myself. And while I felt the film could have struck a more even-handed note, nonetheless I admired the way it managed to leave his legacy open to contemplation rather than trying to solidify around a particular interpretation.

In the follow-on Q&A session, Robert Thurman rose to a daunting occasion, expressing his admiration for Trungpa's gifts in no uncertain terms - singling out Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism in particular - while declining to offer any particular excuses for his behavior. Thurman mentioned that he had originally been assigned to be Trungpa Rinpoche's English tutor in India in the early 1960s before unexpected circumstances intervened, and they would not meet in person until many years later in the 1970s; I couldn't help but wonder whether things might have played out differently for either man if they had they managed to forge a connection earlier in their lives.

In response to a question about whether Trungpa Rinpoche may have fallen victim to "self-deception" in his relation to alcohol, Thurman met the elephant in the room head-on, saying that he felt Trungpa Rinpoche may indeed have deluded himself about his alcohol use. He also suggested that some of his students may have borne some responsibility as enablers, arguing that students sometimes have an obligation to "go beyond" the guru yoga practice of viewing the teacher as an enlightened being to recognize the earthly needs of a fellow human being in danger (in fairness, the film did point out that a few of his closest students pleaded with him repeatedly to curtail his drinking). He likened the situation to letting the Dalai Lama get behind the wheel of a car: the student would be foolish to assume that his teacher's bad driving amounted to enlightened activity, and in fact a truly devoted student would probably have an obligation to intercede.

There was an interesting back-and-forth with one of Trungpa Rinpoche's former students in the audience, who asked whether it was perhaps necessary for him to die young (like his close friend Suzuki-roshi) in order for the teachings to fully blossom in the West. Thurman acknowledged that possibility, but also likened that argument to the rationale you sometimes hear that the Chinese did the world a favor by invading Tibet, because it triggered the spread of Tibetan Buddhism to the West; he challenged that perspective, suggesting that Tibetan Buddhism might well have found other routes to the West without Tibetans having to pay such an excruciating price.

Another questioner asked whether Trungpa's drinking could be seen as a lesson in accepting and even embracing one's own human frailties. While acknowledging the Buddhist point of view that we are all in some sense already enlightened, Thurman took exception to the "I'm OK/You're OK" interpretation of Buddhism, claiming for a moment to speak on behalf of Trungpa Rinpoche when he told the student (and I'm paraphrasing here): "Yes, you're perfect, and you could also use a little improvement."

Amen to that, sir.

This was my first time here, so I felt particularly fortunate that my introduction should come by way of the Norman Mailer Writers' Colony, where I've spent the past week participating in a workshop on historical narrative with the brilliant and gregarious Charles Strozier.

Having admired Mailer (warts and all) for many years, I enjoyed spending a week in his old living room in the company of other writers, working out our various kinks while sitting caddycorner from the bar where he used to drink his single-malt scotch looking out over the panoramic views of the bay.

In the workshop we explored how to weave historical context into a story, with Mailer himself providing the context for the week (grounding our discussion in Armies of the Night).

It's been four years since Mailer passed away, but the man's presence felt as pervasive as the sea air drifting in through the windows. Mailer's biographer Mike Lennon joined us on the first afternoon to share stories of his 40 year friendship with Mailer, walking us around the house where his books were still on the shelves, his paintings on the walls, and his piles of notes sitting on his desk just as he left them.

Mailer distrusted technology, and his attic study reflects that conviction: with no sign of a computer or even a typewriter (though he did have a perfunctory fax machine in the back of the room). Nor did he allow himself an air conditioner even in the sweltering summer heat (Lennon explained that Mailer disliked air conditioners as much as he disliked word processors, preferring to "sweat it out" while he wrote everything out in longhand).

On the last night we gathered for a cocktail party on the deck overlooking the bay, followed by a late dinner at Shay's, one of Mailer's longtime haunts. Over beer and lobster we had the good fortune of meeting a server who had waited on Mailer's table for some two decades. She shared her recollections of the man, who in his later years apparently developed a rabid fondness for oysters, as a tonic for the once-Priapic novelist's shrinking member. She told us how Mailer and his wife Norris would pore over the oyster shells after they ate them, as though reading tea leaves, looking for the likeness of faces in the shells. When they found an auspicious shell, they would take them home and collect them in a glass vase back at the house, where they sit to this day.

The waitress also told us how Mailer got crankier as the years went by, in the way that old men do. One had the sense of someone describing a beloved but cantankerous old uncle: a man she clearly admired and yet often found exasperating. Which, come to think of it, is about how I feel about Mailer too. The man was a near-genius capable of prophetic revelation. Yet, like Henry Miller, he was also capable of incredibly bad writing and susceptible to moral lapses. His greatest successes were often followed by painful personal failures. As Lennon put it, he lived in close contact with his contradictions, always in touch with what he called "the minority within."

Perhaps this why I have always felt so drawn to Mailer. For me, he provides the context of a writer who embraced his imperfections, sometimes transcending them, sometimes flaming out in spectacular fashion, but always persevering, sweating it out to the end.

Given the widespread popular interest in Buddhism in recent years, I was surprised to learn that fewer than 5% of classical Tibetan Buddhist texts have ever been translated into English. With the continuing decline of classical Tibetan in the wake of the post-1959 Tibetan diaspora, there is a real risk that some of these powerful teachings may be lost to posterity unless we act quickly to preserve them.

This project stemmed from an international translators' conference, convened in 2009 by Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche. Since then, an extended team of teachers, translators and scholars have been working hard to get the effort off the ground. The current Web site is just the first step in a more ambitious untertaking to build an online "reading room" that will allow Web visitors to peruse the collection of translated texts as they become available over the next few years.

There's much more to be done, but thanks to my fellow volunteers (with a special shout-out to the folks from Milton Glaser's office and Hot Studio), I'm happy to report that the project Web site is now up and running:

84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha

]]> tag:www.alexwright.org,2011://1.18 2011-01-09T20:15:23Z 2011-01-09T21:00:53Z

For the past four days, I have been sitting in the presence of the delightfully wrathful Robert McKee, the legendary writing teacher perhaps best-known as the inspiration for Charlie Kauffman's caricature in Adaptation.

In person, McKee seems to get a kick out of playing off his curmudgeonly reputation. A self-described "Stalinist" lecturer, he fines anyone $10 per cell phone ring or texting incident (he recently expelled the CEO of Icelandic TV from one of his seminars for texting in class once too often), chastising students who interrupt him, and peppering about every third sentence with a heartfelt profanity ("and if that offends you," he advises at the outset, "there's the fucking door").

Lesser teachers could never get away with this stuff, but for McKee all this bluster merely has the effect of focusing your attention as he delivers his lectures over four marathon 10-hour days, standing on stage against a black backdrop, no Powerpoint, barely any notes, just a microphone and a plastic coffee mug that he perpetually refills from a black plastic thermos.

It all makes for a hell of a performance. He's been teaching the same course for almost three decades now, and has clearly memorized just about every line. But his delivery never feels rote or formulaic - rather, it all feels like a perfectly rehearsed soliloquy.

His subject matter has been well-chronicled elsewhere, most fully in his 2000 book Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting. The class itself amounts to a step-by-step recapitulation of his book, laying out his well-developed theory of what makes for effective story-telling: the calculus of beats, scenes, sequences, and acts that make for compelling narrative. I won't attempt to summarize 30 hours worth of lectures here, but I will say that the popular image of McKee as a salesman for formulaic story-telling is entirely unfounded. He is an advocate of form, yes, but not formula. For a sense of the subject matter you can peruse the course outline here.

He makes his case with copious examples drawn primarily from twentieth century films. There must have been more than 100 different references, but here I will share just the ones that are making it into my Netflix cue: Tender Mercies, The Bostonians, Quartet, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, John and Mary, Mrs Soffel, Ordinary People, In the Realm of the Senses, The In-Laws, The Lavender Hill Mob, Grand Illusion and Y Tu Mama Tambien.

The hands-down highlight of the class came on day four, when McKee took the class through a six hour, scene-by-scene screening of Casablanca, which he considers the apogee of cinematic story-telling. He knows every scene in minute detail, explicating the six interwoven sub-plots, the interlocking visual language systems, and the mythological themes that propel the story forward. In the end, he tied it all together with a piercing and moving final analysis that left half the audience in tears and everyone rising to give him a well-deserved standing ovation.

Here's looking at you, Bob.]]> tag:www.alexwright.org,2010://1.13 2010-09-25T13:27:06Z 2010-09-25T14:16:12Z

Alex Wright: In your book, you argue that the Internet has lured many of us into a state of constant distraction that is degrading our capacity for deep thinking and reflection. Do you see "switching off" as the only practical antidote, or can you envision a role for technology in trying to ameliorate these effects?

Nicholas Carr: I think that new information technologies could, in theory, help to promote attentiveness and deep thinking, countering the effects of the networked computer as it's currently designed and used. But I doubt that will happen. There are already a lot of PC applications designed to promote focus by disabling multitasking or networking--like Freedom for the Mac--but very few people use them, so far as I can tell. A long time ago, we made a decision that we wanted our computers to be multitasking, message-streaming, multimedia interruption machines, and I don't see any indication that we're going to reverse that decision. Indeed, if you look at the direction of personal computing, particularly the recent rise of social networking services like Facebook and Twitter, you see a strong bias toward providing ever more interruptions and distributing information in ever smaller chunks. People seem to be willing, even eager, to sacrifice the depth of their thinking in return for a greater sense of connectedness. Chatter seems to be valued more highly than contemplation or reflection, sadly. Technologies tend to do what they're uniquely good at, and computers are good at processing lots of bits of information very quickly. I don't think they're going to slow down, and I don't think they're going to slow us down.

Alex: Many of our readers are designers and researchers involved in creating interactive systems. How could a better understanding of brain plasticity help design teams improve the lives of people who rely on Internet-based software and services?

Nicholas: The most important lesson is simply that decisions about the design of information and communication systems have enormous ramifications--they can literally change the way our brain cells connect and our minds function. And, as many recent studies of neuroplasticity reveal, those cellular and functional changes don't go away when you turn off your computer or close out of an application. Our brains are very good at strengthening the mental functions we exercise and pruning away those we don't. So there's a deep ethical dimension to software design, and it's a dimension that, unfortunately, has rarely received much notice. When we program computers, we're also, in a very real sense, programming the minds of the users of the computers. The ethical dimension is particularly salient when it comes to designing educational applications and services, particularly those geared for use in elementary or middle schools. The brains of younger kids are particularly malleable. There's been a lot of research into how interruptions, multitasking, and even hypertext can hinder comprehension and learning, mainly by overloading people's short-term working memory, and I really think programmers and Web designers would be wise to familiarize themselves with that research--and maybe even take it into account in their work.

Alex: On several occasions, you cite the work of the late linguist Walter J. Ong. I was surprised that you didn't give more consideration to his notion of "secondary orality": that is, the evident similarity between certain forms of electronic media and ancient patterns of spoken-word communication. From your research, do you see any fundamental differences in the way we process "oral" electronic text versus more traditionally literate forms of online writing?

Nicholas: You're right; Ong pointed out certain similarities between modes of communication in preliterate, oral cultures and those promoted by modern media, from telephones to computers. Both put an emphasis on communal conversations and on immediacy. But he also pointed out how our new "secondary orality" differs from primary orality in fundamental ways. Communication in true oral cultures is always embodied in a whole person--it comes through direct, face-to-face contact--whereas conversation today is increasingly disembodied, mediated by machines and networks. One thing that shift suggests is that we're moving away from thinking of ourselves as members of local, physical neighborhoods and toward a sense of ourselves as participating in abstract communities, groups of disembodied avatars. The emphasis on immediacy is also growing ever stronger, I think--as we see Internet companies increasingly stress "real time" messaging. You could argue the constant flow of real-time information replicates the conversational communications of oral societies. But what's missing is the longer, more narrative, more immersive forms of communication that in the past characterized both oral and literary cultures. The Net provides no space for Homeric discourse and no incentive for the kind of deep attentiveness that such discourse demands.

Alex: Umberto Eco once drew a distinction between "books to be read" (like novels and poetry) and "books to be consulted" (like dictionaries and encyclopedias), arguing the latter will inevitably be subsumed into the Net, while the former may persist in printed form for a long time to come. What is your take on this argument: Do you believe all books are destined to "go digital," or do you see a continuing place in print for long-form narrative?

Nicholas: I don't think printed books, or even printed newspapers and magazines, are going to disappear anytime soon. New media displace old media, but they rarely destroy them immediately. Because the old media have certain attractive properties that the new media lack (not to mention sentimental attachments), they tend to live on for a long time, sometimes indefinitely. So while we tend to focus today on whether the Web will kill the newspaper or the e-book will kill the book, I think the most profound changes are taking place at a deeper level. Our reliance on computers and the Net is training us to take in information in a certain way--fast, distracted, in small bits--and that training will, in time, alter our general reading and thinking habits. In my own life, I've found that, as I come to use the Net more, it becomes harder and harder to sit down and immerse myself in a book or, for that matter, to engage in any prolonged act of concentration. There are two huge intellectual and cultural implications to that kind of mental reengineering. First, while the form of the book will live on, the printed page will increasingly be pushed from the center of our cultural life, where it has stood for some 500 years, to the periphery. That process is already well under way, I would argue. Second, writers will change the way they write in order to accommodate the new reading habits promoted by the Web, so even the content of books will come to resemble the content of the Web. The line between "books to be read" and "books to be consulted" will blur, with the latter becoming ever more dominant.

Alex: During the course of writing your book, you recount the experience of "unplugging" for long periods of time to concentrate on your work. Yet eventually you seem to resign yourself to a return to the networked world. What advice would you offer to readers trying to moderate the influence of "always on" networks in their own intellectual lives?

Nicholas: Popular technologies tend to become deeply embedded in social processes. Look at the automobile, for instance. For many people today, the networked computer is so thoroughly entwined with their work and social lives that "unplugging" is not a practical option--and, in fact, is not even an idea that they'd consider. So, being something of a fatalist, I don't think the intellectual trends I describe in The Shallows are going to be reversed. That said, each of us still has a choice. Each of us controls how we focus, or fail to focus, our attention. That control over our mind, you could argue, is one of the things that makes us human. If you cherish the more contemplative, reflective, quiet modes of thought, which I personally believe are essential to a rich intellectual life, you have to begin to disconnect. That's very hard, but I see no other option.

It's been an interesting process so far, as the students have been exploring the intersection of research and design by way of a set of team projects that have been running in parallel between my class and another class in design prototyping taught by Robert Fabricant and his colleagues at frog design.As the semester draws to a close, the students are getting ready to show the fruits of their labors at a semi-public presentation next Thursday 4/29 (see flyer below for details). Anyone who's interested is welcome to attend; we ask only that you RSVP to interactiondesign@sva.edu Hope to see you there.


]]> tag:www.alexwright.org,2010://1.8 2010-02-10T01:03:17Z 2010-02-10T01:18:23Z

Three dollars gets you into the "museum" - a charitable designation for the cold basement of a souvenir shop hawking t-shirts and shot glasses - which presumably constitutes a more profitable enterprise than curating an important but largely forgotten piece of America's literary legacy.

An affable old timer - sporting overalls and a Kris Kringle beard - greets you at the cash register, takes your money and points you to the basement door, then you're on your own.

Down in the cold brick cellar sits a dusty mausoleum to the early days of American newspapers, in the proto-industrial age before telegraphs and linotype machines. In the center of the room stands a big 1850s-era Hoe press, a cylindrical contraption that ran on steam power by way of a turbine fueled by a large high-pressure water pipe suspended overhead. The water turbine powered the printing machines below by way of several long leather straps hanging from the ceiling. Letterboxes line the walls, where printers' devils (more politely known as typesetters) would pull the type and set it on composing sticks, then putting the report together, letter by letter, in a wooden frame or "chase" laid out on a big slab of marble.

In the corner of the room sits an old wooden desk where "that beef-eating, bleary-eyed, hollow headed, slab-sided ignoramous -- that pilfering reporter, Mark Twain" (as a rival reporter once described him) first adopted his nom de plume (dropping the earlier, rather less catchy pseudonym "Josh") and started turning out the newspaper stories that launched his literary career.

Most of the original copies have long since disappeared, but they formed the basis for a few chapters in Roughing It.

Today, the Enterprise stands as a forgotten memorial to another literary age - when Twain and his now-mostly-forgotten colleagues (like William Wright, aka Dan De Quille) turned out stories that often had little or no basis in traditional, er, reporting: tall tales like The Petrified Man and The Traveling Stones of Pahranagat Valley first appeared in The Enterprise. It was the kind of paper where, to paraphrase Twain, they never let the facts never stand in the way of a good story.

Finally, it seems appropriate to share a parting new year's wish from Mark Twain, taken from The Territorial Enterprise, January 1, 1863:

Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. To-day, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient short comings considerably shorter than ever. We shall also reflect pleasantly upon how we did the same old thing last year about this time. However, go in, community. New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions, and we wish you to enjoy it with a looseness suited to the greatness of the occasion.