Curtis White
Author of The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think for Themselves
About the Author
Curtis White is the author of the novels Memories of My Father Watching TV and Requiem. A widely acclaimed essayist, his work appears regularly in Context, The Village Voice, In These Times, and Harper's. He is the current president of the Center for Book Culture/Dalkey Archive Press
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Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1950
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- USA
- Places of residence
- Normal, Illinois, USA
- Education
- University of San Francisco (BA)
University of Iowa (MFA) - Occupations
- Professor of English, Illinois State University
- Short biography
- novelist and culture critic. Among his works of fiction are Memories of My Father Watching TV and Requiem. His criticism includes The Middle Mind, The Spirit of Disobedience, and the forthcoming The Barbaric Heart: Faith, Money and the Crisis of Nature by Polipointpress.
http://www.h-e-r-a.org/Conferences/20...
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- Works
- 22
- Also by
- 3
- Members
- 770
- Popularity
- #33,051
- Rating
- 3.2
- Reviews
- 7
- ISBNs
- 49
- Languages
- 4
- Favorited
- 1
The art here is music, poetry, and painting in Europe: Wordsworth, Haydn, Van Gogh, Mahler. Art is similar to Buddhism in that they both work to help us transcend conventional perception, seeing things in conventional terms. This transcendent European art paved the way for the welcoming reception of Buddhism in Europe more recently.
White singles out Stephen Batchelor for some pointed criticism. White observes an inconsistency between the earlier Batchelor, e.g. The Awakening of the West, and the later, e.g. Buddhism Without Beliefs. I think White is on target with this. The whole idea of discarding karma is just absurd... well, for a Buddhist. White gets karma just right, I think. It's really just habit, at whatever scale. What's key is to explore the depth of our habitual patterns. Habits are impermanent, cultural patterns are impermanent... our modern way of life is impermanent.
Where White goes astray... well, perhaps there is an earlier and a later Karl Marx, too! To explore the dynamic arising of social and economic patterns, class structure etc., this could be the earlier Marx, and a cornerstone of social science. The later Marx would be the utopian Marx, proposing inevitable progress to some ideal pattern. White portrays the Buddhist sangha as some ideal social pattern, similar to a Marxist utopia. But that's not what the sangha is. For starters, the original sangha went out begging every day for their food. There was no notion of self-sufficiency. Maybe one could look at Tang dynasty Buddhism for a reformulated sangha where the monks were farming.
Anyway my quibble is rather minor. The issue is very deep - for sure we have monstrous problems of all sorts, but what is the vision that can guide us in responding?
OK, my favorite sentence in the book is the last sentence: "But as jazz Arkestra leader Sun Ra once said, 'Heaven is where you'll be when you are okay right where you are!'"… (more)