________________________________________________

Many a learned tome is now available in cheap paperback editions to unveil the awesome religious and philosophical traditions of those teeming nations of darkish folk East of Suez.  Here is summer reading (a bit late) for beginners at the game of multicultural understanding, in easy-to-read editions with great big black type and rudimentary vocabularies.

Secrets of Mohammedans, by Blaxplash al Flubbadub and Nascar Flattahr.  A breathless expose, mostly cribbed from stuff rejected by the Elders of Zion, making Islam sound like a stump-jumper’s conspiracy on the order of the Odd Fellows, Dianetics and/or the shooting script for a Mel Gibson movie.  By comparison, The Da Vinci Code seems the very height of rational discourse, subtle style and precision research.  Contains three-color maps and gnarly diagrams revealing the locations of lost treasures and miraculous relics, in case you have loads of time and a reliable metal detector. (Muckwort Press, 2006)

I Broke My Koan on a Hardened Stone, by Matchafatta S. Fatcharonni. Personal narrative of a former Zen master now reduced to teaching remedial math in a Bronx community tech college.  Follows his conversion to hard-core Buddhism in the seamy purlieus of Haight-Ashbury during the revolting ’60s to years of staggering monastic boredom to the moment when he was rescued by a crack deconversion squad from the Seventh Day Adventists.  Reveals the shocking and tawdry rituals of those addicted to koans, haiku, riddles, whimmydiddles, paradoxes, paradigms, engrams, anagrams, algorithms, logarithms and other mystical mind-bending practices.  With enormous glossary.  (Wun Poo Publishers, 2000)

Dervish Delights, by Lilly Bulero.  A free translation and interpretation for today’s reader of the ancient Kufic erotic manual L’Appl o Luff (ca. 902 CE).  Thoroughly illustrated with detailed (and close-up!) airbrush drawings and color photos, showing the many and exotic attitudes of love assumed by the wildly sensual desert ladies and gents who have learned to tie themselves in knots while having bizarrely conjoined sex. Full of tantalizing Tantric teasing.  Text gives step-by-step instructions to avoid serious dislocation, bruising or other minor injuries.  Theory of Kufic Orgasm fully revealed!  (T. Leery Press, 2007)

With One You Get Legless, by Shawn Gulper.  Wide study of Eastern potables, with emphasis on powerful liquors designed to obliterate any codes of abstemiousness that prophets or gods ever tried to introduce.  Challenges the common belief that Eastern people are sober and upright, when they are more often drunk and horizontal.  Hundreds of recipes for exotic cocktails and foodstuffs saturated with yummy booze, with many color plates showing the delicate tints of mouthwatering drinks.  Makes you thirsty just thinking about it!  (Whoopee Imprints, 2003)

Who Won the Damn Crusades, Anyhow?  by Sir Alfred Lumpley, Commander British Legion (rtd).  A detailed 3-volume study of anything ever called a “crusade,” with statistics and box scores, finally answering the titular query.  Even-handed historic evaluation finds that Islamic forces were whimpering sissies, while Crusaders were bully great wallopers who never showed the white flag or the white feather, no matter how many brown Saracen hordes over-ran them.  Battle maps with little arrows, squiggles and symbols too numerous to mention.  Lengthy appendix lists all known crusaders by name, rank and serial number. (War Kollege Kapers, 2001)

jptHOME Issue 4

Copyright 2007- WJ Schafer & WC Smith - All Rights Reserved

jptHome Issue 4

jptArchives

luminance

The Journal of Provincial Thought

By Branson Paradiddle

Observing that the livliest read of a people comes from their detractors or from obsessive connoisseurs of vice who have few conventional historical interests, reviewer Branson Paradiddle collects peculiar chronicles and vituperative revisionist treatises whose subjects would hardly recognize themselves therein. The authors of such obfuscation who dare to identify themselves tend to become unavailable for comment, whether withered by ridicule, felled by fatwa, or pursued for civil litigation by the aggrieved. --Jadsen Mullacog, jpt research consultant