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Lectures, in published form, on the meta of fiction, involvement of the reader, etc, etc, by Umberto Eco.
I would probably have preferred to sit in on the lectures, interesting, engaging, fortunately slim (which is why I picked it to read first).
I enjoyed, many wouldn't.
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The is, in essence, every New-Age help-yourself philosophy ever, contemporized for 1954.
"Change yourself and you change the world, discipline your thought, go-get-it man, where's your get up and go? You can do it, there's always a way, visualize, telepathy? Why Not?" The Jargon, phrasing, right out of some bad 50's movie about beatniks, but it hits all the bases - healing, self healing, body a reflection of mind, visualize it and it will come, it has to, ridiculous examples of dialogue and "case histories", all circa 1954, examples of recreated self-defeating dialogue, all this, the oldest of truths paraphrased and new to every generation, but the medium in a fashion is the message, we relate to people best in the language of our day.
That said, the message, the oldest one in the world, really, merely contemporized for the American Beat Crowd. I was amused.
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And these two books, found at the thrift shop:
So you can see that my reading is taking me off in all sorts of fascinating directions.
The first book I only managed to skim, used it as a prop to stare down Baristas and the Taco waiter and have them deliver my coffee/tacos unbidden, holding the book up, fingers to my temple, nothing in it that I hadn't read a hundred times before, and so dropping it off with some customers at the restaurant so they could "beam" me their orders, well, it's disappeared. Somebody is taking it all a little too seriously...
So on to TNT, which is much the same as everything else in the genre...
It's good, in that you can actually read up on the authors now, this, in the age of the internet, and see how closely their lives paralleled their teachings, I'm forever thinking of a certain notorious diet author of the 70's who wrote countless books on the topic and then died at a desk filled with snickers bars of a massive coronary...
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Now, having finished this, an amusing read, pop-psychology-new-age-jibber-jabber, the Bible contemporized, "Secret Esoteric Teachings" done in the Vernacular; "The Secret", which, of course, is no secret at all, it has been written about for thousands of years - change yourself, change your thinking, and you will change the world...
The entertaining part of this is the authors' "Mental Imagery", or provided "Psycho-Pictographs", stories that he tells, contemporary, that illuminate or illustrate his point.
Now I'm somewhat struck by the fact that he's simply recycling and updating the Bible, the Psalms and Gospels actually illustrate the same points, only they are in need of some contemporizing; few people can nowadays relate to the imagery of a shepherd and their flock.
But an introduction to more obtuse authors along the same theme, for example Richard Maurice Bucke, author of "Cosmic Consciousness", others who I will have to look up later, a curious read, and as I've the idea already, the plot, the theme from a hundred, thousand other authors I'll soon have to find the time to apply all of these abundant teachings...
Now, herein lies a problem, that most of what I'm reading in one way or the other reinforces my thinking, and I'm in need of something that rather challenges it...
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Started in on Stanley "Out of Darkest Africa", a heavy, thick Volume that is largely concerned with the various English Military campaigns in the Soudan and the Belgian Campaigns in the Congo.
Imperialism at it's finest. But not a book I can carry around, and so I set it aside in favor of this other book I picked up in Creston, which is proving surprisingly good reading and parallels a lot of other "New Thought" or "New Age" books I've come across...
Plus the cover is a hoot:
