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May 23, 2020May 23, 2020

5 star review | After Series | book reviews | special

Great new review of FALLEN!!

review of FALLEN

FALLEN and the entire AFTER TRILOGY will be re-released this fall with new covers, to coincide with the release of FAR SHORE, the 3rd book.

Meantime, MYBOOKADDICTIONREVIEWS posted a RAVE REVIEW of FALLEN. It’s such a pleasure to read praise like this: “Love this book, love these characters, love the plot, the action, the conflict, love… well just about everything about this story. The dynamics between Arthur and Emma are fantastic.” Makes my day as an author!!

Movie Review: Hieronymus Bosch: Touched By The Devil

Hieronymus Bosch: Touched By The Devil pleased me enormously. I love Bosch’s work, and there were several moments during this documentary when the camera lingered adoringly over his paintings.

The film tells the story of gathering Bosch’s paintings for a 500th anniversary show in Den Bosch. A group of museum guys—archivists, restorers, historians—track down the works, and then have to wheel-and-deal with assorted other museum types in order to borrow the paintings. The Venetian museum director said, “These paintings cannot leave the Galleria L’Academia unless they are restored.” That was a thinly veiled shake-down—the Dutch team had to pay for the restoration. Leave it to the Italians.

The Prado bureaucrats were hilarious. A lot of delicate negotiation happened off-screen, but was implied. I chortled a few times.

A painting and a drawing were newly attributed to Hieronymus, and one painting was de-attributed. There was a scene when the team was asking, “Who will call Ghent to tell them?” Meaning, what poor sap would have the misfortune of telling the museum in Ghent that their Hieronymus Bosch wasn’t painted by Hieronymus Bosch? The team leader, they decided.

Meantime, a painting in a Kansas City museum was newly confirmed as a Bosch. That was fun. It makes me imagine finding a dusty, cracked old painting in the attic…and having it attributed to a great master. I could write a novel about that. Maybe I will.

It is, ultimately, Bosch’s imagery that is the star of this film. I was delighted to realize that not all the fantastic figures hail from the astral plane. Many do, of course; you can see the same demons there, if you alter your consciousness so as to perceive the astral plane. However, several figures are actually from the Devic Kingdom. I exclaimed out loud, right there in the Film Forum theater, when I realized that. How cool! The Devic Kingdom represented in a painting from 500 years ago!

The Garden of Earthly Delights ranks among my top 10 favorite paintings, it’s just ravishingly beautiful, a feast for the senses. I get lost in it.

If you like Bosch or love art, then go see Hieronymus Bosch: Touched By The Devil. It won’t disappoint.

excellence

I joined the Fans of Sully Sullenberger Facebook Group

Sully Sullenberger

I joined the Fans of Sully Sullenberger Facebook Group

I was outside on Broadway yesterday afternoon when the icy Hudson River embraced a visitor. I was pushing a stroller which held a chattering 4-year-old, maybe a mile and a half from where a catastrophe was unfolding. Nothing in the frigid white-blue light hinted that something dreadful was happening. My husband called. “Hey, sweetie, did you hear that a plane went down in the Hudson?”

My heart constricted: Oh no, what about the passengers? The children? The mothers waiting at home for news of their adult sons and daughters? As soon as I got home, I bolted for the TV and CNN. There were those early pix of people standing on the wing, and the first captions that all passengers seemed to have been rescued.

The Governor spoke well: this was a true miracle. For once, in a world of war and terrorism and accidents and earthquakes and plunging stock markets, life and joy were seized out of the very teeth of calamity. I emailed my friend Geoffrey, who has been a pilot for almost 30 years.

He wrote back, “Next time I fly down the Hudson I’ll probably be looking for airliners descending through my altitude. Seriously though, the fact that there was no loss of life and not even serious injuries means kudos to the pilots and very fast acting rescuers.”

So, yes, I joined the Facebook group. Kudos to Pilot Sullenberger and co-pilot Jeff Skiles. You’re heroes!

art | excellence | kindness | literature | novels

IMMORTAL in Brazil

IMMORTAL in Brazil

The good folks at Bertrand Brasil sent me the cover to their forthcoming edition of IMMORTAL. “It was based on a painting of Leonardo da Vinci called ‘The Savior.’ We wait for your appreciation,” wrote the Brazilian editor.

I do appreciate! This cover is gorgeous, and I am grateful. IMMORTAL has been blessed with beautiful covers all over the world, starting with the US cover. My appreciation overflows!

The Power by Rhonda Byrne

The Power by Rhonda Byrne

Rhonda Byrne, author of The Secret and now The Power, is close to people who are close to my husband, so I had the good fortune to meet her. She was lovely, with the contained grace that I associate with people who live from a strong sense of purpose.

Byrne advised me to read The Kybalion by the Three Initiates and The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly Hall. With my insatiable reading lust, I acquired the books immediately. I devoured them promptly. I’m glad I did; the old Hermetic teachings have a lot to offer. The sense of paired, complementary qualities reminded me of the Kabbalistic Sephiroth winding along the Tree of Life. I love these ancient, eternal paradigms of thought!

So, being favorably impressed with Byrne, and wanting to support her because she’s friendly with some of my husband’s favorite people, I ran out and purchased two copies of The Power. One for me, and one for my husband, who refuses to share both food and books. The first bit of territorial prerogative always surprises me. I had my oldest daughter twenty years ago and I haven’t eaten an entire plate of food by myself since 1990. Someone is always sticking a fork in and grabbing a bite. Lunch is my happy time, when I’m alone in the apartment. I can eat standing up and walking around, which I prefer, and enjoy my tuna and peanut butter sandwich in peace, with no grimy fingers trying to steal some.

But I understand why Sabin won’t share a book with me. I use them up. I ravish them. Books are comestibles and I scribble in the margins, apply post-its, and turn down corners. Once I’m done with a book, it wants to take a shower and a nap.

The Power is no exception. It’s juicy and interesting, ripe for plundering. There’s a lot here, most of it good stuff. Opening the mind and heart to love can only benefit people. Thinking in positive ways about what you want is wholesome. When you ride a horse, you have to look where you want to go, and that is subtly communicated to the animal, who then goes there. It’s the same way with your mind and your life. Your mind has to focus on what you want and love, and then the great beast of your life can trot in that direction.

In general, I like this “New Age” the Secret and positive vibrational stuff. It’s got flaws, like everything else in this marvelous, imperfect, blissful, agonizing world. Gossip claims that one of the guys from the original movie of The Secret is in jail. And there’s sometimes a lack of groundedness in these teachings; elements of fantasy creep in. “Blame the victim” arises.

My most serious qualm with this school of thought has to do with karma. As I currently understand it, Karma is a complex law with a long, long arc. I’m not so certain that it works so simply as “Do good and think nice, and because you’re sending good and nice vibrations out into the universe, good and nice will come back to you.” I think that sometimes what you did twenty-five years ago, or twenty-five centuries ago as a temple dancer in Egypt, can come back to bite you in the tushie. Sometimes we reap the fruit of a seed we planted eons ago.

Then there’s the relational dynamic. We have karma not just as individuals, but as members of our family, our generation, our country, our religion. We also have dyad karma. I am stretching the meaning of karma here to apply to the invisible field of thought and feeling, emotion and expectation and communication within which two members of a couple live. Eg, if you’re married to someone who thinks badly of you, or who is convinced that you embody a certain negative trait (which is probably their shadow anyway), it’s hard to overcome the stickiness of that. It’s easy to get trapped like a butterfly in a spider web. It can be just as toxic within a family or any other community, like a school. Structures of thought and connection arise, and they can be cages.

Still, The Power is full of truth and light. It is passionate in its desire to give to the reader and to improve the reader’s lot. I’m writing my personal reservations in the margins, but it’s worth reading. It’s always helpful to return to the fundamental touchstone of life: am I acting out of love or out of fear? That’s the choice. Love or fear. I like to read these kinds of books at night, so I’m uplifted in the hypnogogic state. I like to think that the positive impact on me will be more profound, if words about love and joy and peaceful abundance are sailing through my dreams.

I also recommend Mary T. Browne’s The Five Rules of Thought and Geshe Michael Roach’s The Diamond Cutter. Like Byrne’s book, they give to the reader. What all three books share, though The Diamond Cutter approaches it differently, is the need to discipline the thoughts. We spend decades learning how to read, write, and cipher, but we have to seek out the knowledge of how to use our own minds constructively. The Power can help with that.