Simcha Jacobovici | Lost Tomb of Jesus
June 27, 2008 | Leave a Comment
It was a great honor to feature Simcha Jacobovici on the show today! A journalist with many awards to his name, and great controversy, we get to the bottom of things in this special long interview… Simcha is an award-winning, controversial documentary film director and producer. His numerous awards include a Gold Medal from the International Documentary Festival of Nyon, a certificate of Special Merit from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles, a Genie Award, three U.S. Cable Ace Awards, two Gemini Awards, an Alfred I. Dupont-Columbia University Award, a British Broadcast Award, a Royal Television Society Award and the Edward R. Murrow Award. Jacobovici has also won the Emmy for “Outstanding Investigative Journalism” an unprecedented three times (1996, 1997 and 2007). http://www.simc
Don Saliers | Music & the Church
April 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Don Saliers, father of Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls, spoke with us today about his book with his daughter, and about his long career in music and the church. Listen in to hear about a father and daughter’s relationship through music, politics and all the rest.More about Don from the Indigo Girls website:
“I found warmth, wisdom, and love to be present on every page of this book. Emily and her father, Don, have found a way to have a deeply meaningful conversation about their life experiences and share it with the reader. The result is this beautiful expression of music as many things–healer, gift, symbol of freedom and community, and agent of change.”—Mary Chapin Carpenter
“Don and Emily Saliers trace the songlines of two very different lives through this thought-provoking book. It is full of stories, quotations from songs old and new, and even their personal discussions as they explore the boundaries between their worlds. Their words plumb the depths of human and musical differences: the way song can divide as well, bring us together and its power to bring us ‘back to life’ from grief or pain or spiritual anguish. May we all be able to find songlines as rich as those uniting this intelligent, affectionate, and musical father and daughter.”—Alice Parker, author, Yes, We’ll Gather!, Creative Hymn Singing, and Melodious Accord
“In this sweetheart of a book, Don and Emily Saliers do far more than write convincingly about the healing power of music. They show us how it works by letting their own love of ‘deep song’ lead them across generational, aesthetic, and religious differences into a place of such holy listening to one another that even the angels lay down their tambourines.”—Barbara Brown Taylor, author, Bread of Angels, Home by Another Way, Gospel Medicine, The Preaching Life, God in Pain, and Speaking of Sin
“Emily and her dad have created a beautiful celebration of how music and spirit connect us all.”—Bonnie Raitt
Marie Howe Transcript
April 5, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Dr. Kent Gustavson: Welcome to Sound Authors. Today is the 4th of April. On this day in 1968, 40 years ago, Martin Luther King was shot and killed. It’s a sad memory, but it’s been a long 40 years since then. Now we have a black candidate running for president and many things have happened since.Today on the show we’ve got four guests. At the end of the show, Jeff Beal, the famous composer of “Pollock” and “Rome” and some other wonderful music, and three authors, Susan Hetrick talking about families, Gary Freiman with some unique political opinions, and it’s my special honor to welcome Marie Howe. She’s a wonderful poet from New York. Welcome to the show.
Marie Howe: Thank you very much. It’s an honor to be here.
Kent: You have quite a record. You’ve gotten a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Nation Endowment of the Arts Fellowship. Tell me a little about your background.
Marie: Oh, gosh. I grew up in Rochester, New York, as one of nine children and I didn’t start writing poetry in any serious way until I was about 29 years old. I was teaching high school before that.
Kent: What did you teach in high school?
Marie: I loved reading but I had no idea you could be a living person and write poetry.
Kent: What did you teach?
Marie: I taught English to the kids in high school who could hardly make it to school.
Kent: Your work is stunning. You have a new book that is just coming out.
Marie: Yeah.
Kent: What’s the release day?
Marie: Actually it just officially came out about two week ago. I never quite notice. It’s called “The Kingdom of Ordinary Time.”
Kent: There’s some really beautiful poetry, especially striking to me in looking through. The very first poem in the book confronts where we are right now after 9/11. Would you mind reading that?
Marie: I would love to read it. This is completely ridiculous, but I realize I’m standing here with my phone and my book is across the room. I’m on a phone that can’t reach, so I’m just going to reach over here.
Kent: I’ll do a little filler time here.
Marie: Do a little and I’ll be right there.
Kent: In 1987, she put out “The Good Thief.” In 1995, “In The Company of My Solitude: American Writings from the AIDS Pandemic.” In 1998, “What the Living Do.” Her new book is called “The Kingdom of Ordinary Time.”
Marie: And here I am.
Kent: OK.
Marie: Thank you so much.
Kent: Yeah.
Marie: I want to say something about Dr. King. I’m so moved to hear this information and to know this, and to be talking with you on the very day when he was killed, and to think of him as I’m about to read this. Would that he were here, and thank goodness Barack Obama is.It’s called “Prologue.” “Ordinary Time,” just for you listeners, I originally came to this term when I was growing up. The liturgical calendar, there was always this thing, we always stand there with the missals and there’s a period of time that’s called Ordinary Time, which is the period of time between the High Holy seasons. Not the Christmas season, not the Pentecost season, not Lenten season. It’s pretty much the rest of the year where nothing apparently miraculous happens.”Prologue.The rules, once again applied.One loaf equaled one loaf. One fish equaled one fish.The so-called kings were dead.And the woman who had been healed grew tired of telling her story,And sometimes asked her daughter to tell it.People generally worshiped where their parents had worshiped,And the men who’d hijacked the airplane prayed where the dead pilots had been sitting, and the passengers prayed from their seats–So many songs went up and out and into the thinning air.People, listening and watching, nodded and wept,And, leaving the theater, one turned to the other and said,What do you want to do now?And the other one said, I don’t know. What do you want to do?It was the Coming of Ordinary Time. First Sunday, second Sunday.And then (for who knows how long) it was here.”
Kent: What a stunning poem.
Marie: Thank you. That was so strange because the so-called kings were dead, right? I wasn’t even thinking of Martin Luther King, but of course he was one.
Kent: Of course it matches wonderfully. You talk so much about politics in your work. How does politics mix with this Ordinary Time and everyday life patterns?
Marie: It’s a time right now, as you know, as we all know, when holy wars are raging and there are people who, including our administration, are willing to kill for what they believe. There are people who are willing to die and blow themselves up for what they believe, and there are so many of use who don’t know what we believe.It’s such a strange time to be alive, especially given the last five years. I really hope that things will change with a new administration because of the way things have polarized so terribly. But also, there’s the sense of Ordinary Time where it seems as if the sacredness of any religion, as acted out in the war and the war zones, is being overshadowed by a kind of dogma, and the truly miraculous of course still keeps happening. [laughs] But I think in this country in particular it’s such an important and crucial moment in our history, given all the rights we’ve lost and the direction in which the empire is going to move next.
Kent: You’re a teacher. You teach in New York City. You said you taught English at a high school?
Marie: Yeah, that was a long time ago. That was almost 30 years ago now. I’ve been teaching in college and universities since then.
Kent: I’m curious about what the difference is from when you first began teaching to when you teach poetry now. What’s the difference for you?
Marie: Oh, gosh. There’s a lot to say. When I first started writing in 1980, people were just beginning to write from the margins, if you will. When I was in graduate school, we were taught maybe two or three women writers, and I don’t think any writers of color, and within the last 28 years.And really, it was beginning right then. Everybody has come into the writing world. Women, of course, people of color, people with different sexual identities, people from different countries, out loud, on the page, wrapped. Everything just poured into the world of what we used to call poetry. It’s really, really thrilling that so many people are writing now and many more people, I think, are reading poems that are written and spoken by lots of different kinds of voices.
Kent: I would love to listen to another poem. I’m going to put you on the spot here. Do you have another favorite in the book?
Marie: Sure, let me see. It’s funny, Jesus shows up in this book a lot. I’m not a practicing Christian but I grew up with those stories, and I just love the guy. There’s a little poem here called “The Star Market” that I’d love to read. A lot of what is throughout this book is that Jesus said “the kingdom of heaven is within you,” and I’ve been thinking about that for a long time.What does that mean, the kingdom of heaven is within each of us? So there’s a couple of questions in that case. I’ve been thinking about the problems in the world’s politics, and if the kingdom of heaven is within us, who governs there? Really? How do we govern ourselves? That’s another poem called “Government,” but maybe I’ll just read this little poem called “The Star Market.”"The people Jesus loved were shopping at The Star Market yesterday.An old lead-colored man standing next to me at the checkout.Breathed so heavily I had to step back a few steps.Even after his bags were packed he still stood,Breathing hard and hawking into his hand.The feeble, the lame, I could hardly look at them,Shuffling through the aisles, they smelled of decay,As if The Star Market had declared a day off for the able-bodied,And I had wandered in with the rest of them, sour milk, bad meat, looking for cereal and spring water.Jesus must have been a saint, I said to myself,Looking for my lost car in the parking lot later,Stumbling among the people.Who would have been lowered into rooms by ropes,Who would have crept out of caves,Or crawled from the corners of public baths.On their hands and knees begging for mercy.If I touch only the hem of his garment,One woman thought, could I bear the look on his face.When he wheels around?”
Kent: It’s fascinating how you can weave this biblical narrative into poetry. When did you start thinking about doing that?
Marie: I didn’t really think about. The stories are really real to me. I love how my daughter sits in the bathtub and says, “Tell me another story about Moses!” [laughs] It’s her fairy tale. I just love these stories, the Old Testament and the New Testament. So it’s not something I consciously do, it’s just something I do as I walk around.
Kent: Tell us about your daughter.
Marie: My daughter is adopted from China. To anybody who’s listening, I went to China, I began the adoption process when I was 50 years old. I had just gotten divorced. So if there’s any woman who’s thinking, “Oh, I’m just too old to go and adopt a kid, I say go do it.I went to China when I was 52, came home with a three-year-old who is just an extraordinary person. I can’t tell you. She’s amazing. She’s like a joyful Buddha. It just changed my life. Her name’s Anon. She’s a wonderful person. She just turned eight. So there’s that. I’m exhausted and happy.
Kent: And how does looking at her life, when she’s going to be a grown-up, how do you think this country and the world will change between now and then?
Marie: Oh, good lord, don’t we all wonder this? I don’t know if this is opinion radio, but I really do hope Obama becomes president. I feel like we have to realize that we’re a failing empire, and that China and these other countries are economically so much stronger. We have to put down our guns and begin to live as one world.It’s so strange, the Internet already lives like this. It’s almost like the world’s consciousness. The Internet already knows that we’re one world. We have to get politicians to understand that. We have to get them to begin to talk with each other and mediate our difference because this old “shoot ‘em up” thing is over.
Kent: [laughs] We’ll all work towards that. Can your read us one more poem from your book?
Marie: Sure. Another one of the major characters in this book is Mary, who is the Mother of Jesus. It’s not the Virgin Mary and not Mary as she’s been depicted, but Mary as the human being. I think I’ll just end with this little poem of Mary’s at the very end of the book. It partly comes from a sense of being exhausted as a new mother at my age with a little kid, not having any time to write.It’s also, of course, the illuminations that come with that presence in your life. It’s called “Mary, A Reprise” and it’s at the very end. It refers to all the paintings of Mary. She’s always sitting there in the Italian and Dutch paintings with a book in her hand and the book is half-closed. I’ve always been very interested in that.”What is that book, we always see, in the paintings? In her lap?Her finger keeping the place of who she was when she looked up.When I look up, my mother is dead,And my own daughter is calling from the bathtub.’Mom, come in and watch me. Come in here right now.’No Going Back might be the name of that angel.’No more reverie. Let this be done to me,’ Mary finally said.And that was the last time, for a long time,That she spoke about the past.”
Kent: What a wonderful poem. That’s from “The Kingdom of Ordinary Time,” just released by Norton, and Marie Howe’s been our guest. It’s been a real pleasure. You’re actually headlining the White Pine Festival in Stillwater, Minnesota, this summer.
Marie: Yeah, I am.
Kent: My mother’s going to be a solo poet with you, Cynthia Gustavson.
Marie: I am so delighted to hear this. And may I tell you, sir, it’s been a great joy talking with you today.
Kent: It has been a pleasure. Have a wonderful day. My next guest is going to be Gary Freiman. He certainly has a different opinion about politics, and we’ll chat with him. Thank you so much for being on the show, Marie Howe.
Marie Howe | Kingdom & Poetry
April 4, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Today we spoke with poet Marie Howe. Marie Howe’s poems have appeared in the Atlantic, The NewYorker, Agni, Harvard Review, and New England Review, among others. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. More about Marie Howe and her new book from her publisher’s website:
Marie Howe is the author of two volumes of poetry, The Good Thief(1998), and What the Living Do (1997), and the co-editor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1994). Her third volume of poetry, Kingdom Of Ordinary Time is forthcoming. Stanley Kunitz selected Howe for a Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets. She has, in addition, been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughsahres, Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review, among others. Currently, Howe teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia, and New York University.
Marie Howe wowed readers and critics alike with her first book of poems, The Good Thief. Selected by Margaret Atwood as the 1989 winner of the National Poetry Series, the book explored the themes of relationship, attachment, and loss in a uniquely personal search for transcendence. Said Atwood, “Marie Howe’s poetry doesn’t fool around . . . these poems are intensely felt, sparely expressed, and difficult to forget; poems of obsession that transcend their own dark roots.” Howe sees her work as an act of confession, or of conversation. She says simply,” Poetry is telling something to someone.” The Boston Globe calls her work, “a poetry of intimacy, witness, honesty, and relation.”
Howe’s equally acclaimed second book, What the Living Do, addressed the grief of losing a loved one. “The tentative transformation of agonizing, slow-motion loss into redemption is Howe’s signal achievement in this wrenching second collection,” said Publisher’s Weekly, in choosing it as one of the five best volumes of poetry published that year. Part of the urgency and importance of Howe’s poetry stems from its rootedness in real life—just ten minutes into her 1987 residence at the MacDowell Colony, Howe received a call from her brother John telling her that her mother had had a heart attack. Two years later, John died of AIDS, and her book What the Living Do is in large part an elegy to him. Howe’s poetry is intensely intimate, and her bravery in laying bare the music of her own pain- but never the pain alone—is part of its resonance. Inside each poem there is also a joy, a new breath of life, some kind of redemption. “Each of them seems a love poem to me,” says Howe.
ABOUT THE KINGDOM OF ORDINARY TIMEAn anticipated new volume from Marie Howe. Hurrying through errands, attending a dying mother, helping her own child down the playground slide, the speaker in these poems wonders what is the difference between the self and the soul? The secular and the sacred? Where is the kingdom of heaven? And how does one live in Ordinary Time—during those periods that are not apparently miraculous? These are astonishing poems by a poet known as “a truth-teller of the first order.”
Saul Silas Fathi Transcript (2)
March 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Dr. Kent Gustavson: Welcome back to Sound Authors. We have been speaking with Saul Silas Fathi, and his book is called “Full Circle: Escape from Baghdad and the Return”. I guess what I am interested in chatting about now is, I guess, the future and where we sit right now.The Middle East is such a mess right now, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the Iraq conflict, clearly Iran is a mess. Tell me a little bit about your take on all of this.
Saul Silas Fathi: Well, I supported Bush in trying to get rid of Saddam Hussein. Because he felt that the Iraqi people deserved better. But, I was totally opposed to invading Iraq, especially the way we did it. I felt we went to destroy a regime. We ended up destroying a 6,000 year old civilization. So in that it was very sad to see what happened to the Iraqi people. In five years, according to some reports, 800,000 Iraqi people, including 50,000 children, died.The very premise of bringing democracy to an Arab country was completely based on falsehood and ignorance. There are 22 Arab countries, none of them are democratic. And none of them were elected by the people and probably never will. Among our biggest allies are some of those dictatorships and so forth. So this was totally uncalled for.But, at the same time it is realistic to know that we cannot leave Iraq before we’ve fixed it, before we’ve built its power again. Because we dismissed the army of 300,000, sent them home, created 50% unemployment and terrible destitution. For the first time in the 6,000 year history the Iraqi people have no drinking water to drink, and 60% of the people have no electricity.And unemployment is still, in certain places, over 60%. And this is what causes the most misery in Iraq. It is not any loyalty to Saddam. These people are just trying to feed their families, and that is why they were in the armed forces but they were punished collectively. I think that was the most colossal mistake that we made is dismissing the army.If we did not dismiss the army, but purged it. With maybe 15 or 20,000 people we would have been left with enough power, enough organization to govern and police the country and supplement it by just a few of our forces.But, now that we are in there our long-term interest is intertwined with the future of Iraq. If we move out prematurely there is absolutely no question in my mind that the Iranians will take over de facto of Iraq, and that is the dream that they have been dreaming for thousands of years of doing.The idea that the Sunnis and the Shiite were fighting between them for thousands of years is a total falsehood, total misrepresentation of real history. For 1400 years after Mohammed’s death there were no conflicts, no killing and absolutely no bombing or burning of any of the opposition’s mosques for 1400 years.Everything was settled during the first hundred years after Mohammed’s death, and the Shiite moved from Arabia to Iraq and built two magnificent little cities, called Najaf and Karbala. This is where the leadership got assassinated eventually, Ali and Hasan. And they became like a Mecca to the Shiite people. So there were approximately 100,000 pilgrims coming through Iran every year into Iraq to worship and to pray and so forth and so on.The notion that was perpetuated here that these people have been fighting and we came in to make peace between them, all of that is a total, total falsehood. I lecture on that extensively, by the way. I am a scholar in Islam, and I lecture about the history of Islam and the Middle East.
Kent: Such a tragedy when you say 800,000 people, and I have heard similar figures from the Citizens for Social Responsibility. We hear about it so seldom in the media, and I find that a very painful reality.
Saul: That is a point of contention that I have all the time with the media especially CNN. Nobody wants to hear it. Nobody wants to know the facts, and they often time are just ignorant. They are not misleading on purpose; they are just ignorant of the facts. They send reporters and the reporters end up in the Green Zone. How can you report about a country with a 6,000 year civilization by staying in the Green Zone?I have not seen one Iraqi family at dinner sitting with a reporter and having dinner with the children and asking some nice questions. I have not seen one that shows the two great rivers of Iraq and with the boats going through it and with all of the millions and millions of palm trees lined up in the streets and on the beaches and so forth. All you see is killing and murder and bloodshed. This is not Iraq; it never was.Unfortunately, I can tell you - some people think I have a bleak outlook - I think it will never settle and it will never go back to normal until another one just like Saddam emerges.
Kent: Wow. This is a fascinating discussion, and surely I could listen to you for hours about Iraq. I would like to ask also about Israel and Palestine. This situation never seems to end. It started in ‘48. It has been going on for a hundred plus years, you know.There was that rush to see who could get more people in there to see who would claim statehood back in the ’40s. Tell me what you think. Where does this history resolve? Is its ever going to happen?
Saul: It definitely is not going to happen on Bush’s clock. As he intended for this year. He said he will go back in six months and have peace between the two factions and that the Palestinians have their own country. As long as the Palestinians are in the grip of Hamas and people like Hamas and Hezbollah and such, and supported by states like Iran and so forth, I don’t believe it will ever happen.I don’t believe that there will be peace or that a country, a Palestinian country will be established. When two countries want to live together and two people want to live together, they have to make peace and they have to, in their heart, allow for the existence of the other. That has not happened, because they are taught hatred in their schools and Madrasas around the world.If I may say so as well, when Bush spoke about the “axis of evil,” he left out the two most important members of that axis and that is Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. They are the ones who finance all the terrorism in the world. They are the ones, more than Iran, more than Iraq ever did and certainly more than North Korea ever did. They should have been included in that speech.
Kent: So your book is called “Full Circle: Escape from Baghdad and the Return.” How much do you get into where we are today?
Saul: I don’t really do that except for the first 10 chapters, where I speak about Iraq and everything. But then later on, I concentrate strictly on my life and where it took me on my search, which seems to be a lifetime search for meaning and my position in the world.
Kent: And your lif…
Saul: There’s a lot of reflection back and forth and there’s fond memories that are brought up at many different junctures. I lived in Brazil as well and then I served in the US army and I ended up in Korea with the first calv. So I paid my price several times over.
Kent: You talk about in your book, in that crucial chapter when you escape from Baghdad and earlier you talk about having witnessed to hanging as a small boy. It seems that your very interesting views about war in the world and things that I’ve not heard before. How did it shape you to witness that event?
Saul: It absolutely shaped my life and there were several such occurrences that are depicted in the book, especially the escape and what happened to one of the babies escaping with us. My father, when I was nine years old and he was in hiding… No, he was not in hiding yet, but he was expecting for several months for his name to be on a black list in the newspapers.He continued to work and so forth, but he was so afraid things will start happening. What they were trying to do to appease the high level military, who threatened to do a coup, which they attempted many, many times, especially in 1941. To appease them and to appease the guy on the street, the ignorant, uneducated people. They decided to blame everything on the Jews and on Zionism.So they began making lists of prominent Jews, some of the wealthiest and some of the most important in government. And either arrest them, torture them or hand them publicly. So, there came a point when I was nine years old, where a friend of the family who was a distant relative, was accused of being a communist and a Zionist.Which is the way they always accused the Jews because that would get the most mileage out of the Arabs, being anti-communist and anti-Zionism. They hanged them. My father decided to take me to view the hanging in public. My mother protested very much, but she had no power. He convinced her that I have to grow up quickly, not to lead a normal child’s life. This will do it.So, on the way there, he told me not to show any emotion and not to cry, just watch and leave all the emotions and the burst when we get home. This was a very terrible experience for me. Before they hanged him, they told him to recant and that his life would be spared if he admits to the charges of being a Zionist and a communist.And being young guy, 23 years old, he was really falling apart. They were holding him to support him. He agreed and he said, OK, I confess. They went ahead and they hanged him anyway.
Kent: Oh, my.
Saul: The public threw tomatoes and eggs on him and so forth while he was hanging. And he was left hanging for two days in a public place before them. So that the thousands of throngs of people would have a chance to witness it.
Kent: What a horrible experience for a child.
Saul: Yes, this was terrible.
Kent: This has been a fascinating discussion. I could talk to you for hours. The book is called “Full Circle: Escape from Baghdad and the Return.” We’re definitely thinking about the Middle East right now. This is a wonderful introduction to the true reality of Iraq, before all this happened. And also of Israel and at the beginnings of Israel.Thank you so much for being on the show.
Saul: Thank you, Dr. Kent. And may I please tell the audience where they could find the story on the Internet?
Kent: Absolutely.
Saul: www and my name saulsilasfathi.com.
Kent: And that’s spelled S-A-U-L, Saul, Silas, S-I-L-A-S, and Fathi, F-A-T-H-I dot com.
Saul: Correct. And the escape story is there, which they can read or download or print or whatever.
Kent: And the book is available through stores as well?
Saul: Yes, yes.
Kent: ”Full Circle: Escape from Baghdad and the Return.” Saul Silas Fathi, thank you so much for being on the show.
Saul: Thank you, Dr. Kent.
Kent: My next guest is Jessica Kizorek. We’ll be back in a second.
Saul Silas Fathi | Refugee Child from Baghdad
March 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment
This is the second part of an interview with Saul Silas Fathi, who emigrated to Israel in 1948 after an escape from Baghdad Iraq. For more about Saul Silas Fathi and his extraordinary tale, go to his website: www.saulsilasfathi.comMore about Saul Silas Fathi from his website:
Saul Silas Fathi was born to a prominent Jewish family in Baghdad, Iraq, on May 8, 1938. At age 10, he and his younger brother were smuggled out of Baghdad through Iran and eventually reached the newly formed state of Israel. He began writing a diary at age 11 and had several stories published in Israeli youth magazines.Saul enrolled at the Israel Airforce Academy of Aeronautics, a 4-year program, where he earned his high-school diploma and became certified in electrical engineering. In 1958, he worked his way to Brazil where he nearly starved. Through perseverance and luck, he started his own electrical business and earned a patent for climate-controlled windows used in the building of Brasilia, Brazil.In 1960, he came to the U.S. on a student exchange visa, studying sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and American history and public speaking at the New School of Social Studies. After 8 months, Saul volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army for three years, having been promised a college education and U.S. citizenship at the conclusion of his duties. After Basic Training in Fort Benning, Georgia, he was sent to helicopter school at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and there enrolled at the University Of Virginia. Within a few months, Saul was shipped to South Korea where he served as Chief Electrical Technician with the 1st Cavalry Division, 15th Aviation Company, the famed helicopter division in the Vietnam War.Back in the U.S., Saul battled the immigration department while studying at the University of Virginia, finally earning a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering. This launched an impressive career as a high-level executive with several Fortune-500 companies. Later, he founded and managed three high-tech companies of his own over a 20-year period.Saul retired in 2003 and began writing his memoirs, Full Circle: Escape from Baghdad and the Return. Today, he lives in Long Island, New York, with his wife Rachelle and has three U.S.-born daughters and two grandchildren. He is also a certified linguist, fluent in English, Hebrew, Arabic, and Portuguese.
Gary Gach Transcript
March 8, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Announcer: Welcome, and thanks for tuning in to Sound Authors with host, Dr. Kent. Get set for candid conversations about everything from cuisine to culture, and from nature to nurture. Now here’s your host, Dr. Kent.
Kent Gustavson: Welcome to Sound Authors. Today is March 7th. We are just about hitting Spring here in New York, one day is hot, one day is cold. I think the world’s about ready to turn it over.Today on the show we’ve got four great guests. At the very end of the show we’ll have Lucy Koplanski on, she’s an incredibly folk singer from New York City. The other three guests are all authors. The first author will be Gary Gach, the second will be Leigh Le Creux, with her children’s book “Astro Socks”, and the third guest will be Lisa Genova with her novel “Still Atlas” about Alzheimer’s.But my first guest, his name is Gary Gach. He has written a guide, “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Buddhism”, and is also well known for his book “What Book? Buddha Poems from Beat to Hip-Hop”. Welcome to the show.
Gary Gach: Thank you for having me, Dr. Kent.
Kent: Tell me a little bit about your- which one of those two books is newest? I know this is the second edition of “The Complete Idiot’s Guide”.
Gary: Yes, that’s the newer book. Actually, ‘What Book? Buddha Poems from Beat to Hip-Hop” is something I edited. I didn’t write. It went through three or four editions, and now you can actually, if you go tobooks.google.com, you can find most of it for free.
Kent: Wonderful. We’ll go check that out. Now, understanding Buddhism. Lets get to the meat of this. Most Americans don’t know too much about Buddhism. We know that its quite a movement happening though in this country; of people wanting to know more and getting into certain aspects of it. Is there a mainstream and then kind of people that just dabble in it?
Gary: Well, that’s a good question. A recent poll found that one in eight people have some kind of influence, in some way, shape or form. They may not practice, but they may know the word “karma” and believe in that. You know, that our actions effect what we do. Or just the idea of emotional intelligence. Its become very pervasive in many ways into mainstream culture. It’ll never be a mainstream practice itself, but you don’t have to necessarily practice Buddhism to enjoy any of the teachings.
Kent: Now does it stand at odds with the Judeo-Christian religions?
Gary: It isn’t really at odds with any religion. It actually isn’t a religion itself. You don’t have to give anything up to enjoy it. It adds wings to your practice and roots to your traditions if you already have them. Some people don’t have any and they just become Buddhists, so they go the Buddhism. But I’m Jewish, for example, so you can call me an American Jewish Buddhist, if you’d like.
Kent: Why is Buddhism not a religion, what is it all about?
Gary: Well religion, there’s no creator deity in Buddhism. Its not about a creator deity, or a first cause of the universe, or any intercessor to the divine. Its not about that one way or the other. You can be an atheist or you can believe in God, it doesn’t matter one way or the other. The primary teaching of Buddhism is about the nature of suffering and the nature of liberation from human suffering.
Kent: How did you get into writing about Buddhism? How did you write “An Idiot’s Guide”?
Gary: Well, I’m a writer. I’ve done nine books so far. I thought that it would be a good way to present the teachings to people who might not ordinarily have an opportunity to pick it up through this branded series. You know, like the “Dummies”, or those books that are yellow and black. The “Complete Idiot’s” is a similar series, they were both started when computer technology started to become pervasive and it made dummies of us all.Because the manuals were written by very bright people who couldn’t write, and so we’d have to buy a book. Then they got into “How-To” books, so there’s a “Complete Idiot’s Guide” and a “Dummies” book for just about anything, but there hadn’t been one for Buddhism. Being a Buddhist and seeing that it was a topic that could use some new reportage, I went for it. It took about two years to get a deal, and just to dot the I, if I may?
Kent: Yes?
Gary: One thing that I was able to do with this book that I haven’t seen any other book do is I was able to talk about all the different schools of practice. To go back to an earlier question that you asked, there’s Zen and there’s Insight, there’s Tibetan Buddhism. There’s also a school called Pure Land Buddhism, its the first school practiced in America and is still one of the largest, but many people don’t know about it.There’s different schools depending on the countries of origin from Asia. Usually, the author, he will talk from their point of view. The Dalai Lama doesn’t talk about Zen, a Zen Buddhist doesn’t talk about Tibetan Buddhism. But the “Complete Idiot’s” guides are very comprehensive, so I was able to cover a lot of territory.
Kent: Is Buddhism able to fit well into an American lifestyle, especially now there’s all this economic downturn? Is it something that people have to spend a whole bunch of time to practice?
Gary: Well, that’s two good questions. You can practice just by being aware of being in the present moment. It doesn’t require going anywhere beyond where you already are. If the universe is always in a state of perfection, it doesn’t mean that we’re necessarily enjoying that. The difference is having that awareness and the practice is sort of a like a way of reporting and recording that. Seeing it for ourself. Answering whether we can do this as Americans, this is the interesting kind of question.We’re finding that it is so. It’s been something that every world culture has embraced in its own way and made it it’s own. When it came to China, China was a very developed country. In other countries it provided the kind of, what they called “nation building”, when the countries were formative. For our country, it seems to do pretty well. We’ve got a teacher whose this kind of “can do” guy, who says “Go out and see for yourself, I did it, you can do what I did.” That’s what the Buddha said, and that’s, I think, a very American attitude.
Kent: So Buddha was an entrepreneur of sorts?
Gary: [laughs] An entrepreneur of sorts. Yes. He was an entrepreneur of the greatest good, not the greatest goods.
Kent: The greatest good and not the greatest goods. A good while back, I read “Siddharta”, by Herman Hess.
Gary: Oh, yeah. Buddhism as written by a Swiss Protestant.
Kent: [laughs] Talk about that for a second.
Gary: Many people bring their own point of view to it. The “Old Path White Clouds” is a very large version, but its the one I like the best by Thich Nhat Hahn, because it goes to all the sources. Its very close to the sources, and I like his tone of voice. I like the way he writes. Hess is a beautiful writer, I’ve read many of his books. Its a wonderful story, as to how much of it is Buddhism and how much of it is translation remains to be seen. I think there’s a certain amount of interpretation that he’s doing that you can go around and get to the source from other versions of the life of the Buddha. But its certainly a very important book and worth reading.
Kent: So one of the common views of Buddhism is that the Dalai Lama sits at the center?
Gary: Oh, yeah. A lot of people think that he’s like the Pope, or something. There is no central Buddhist anything. There’s no central Buddhist teacher or Buddhist church or anything like that, but his holiness the Dalai Lama has sort of become the de facto world ambassador of Buddhism, as it were. He goes around the country so much, he’s such a dynamic speaker, he has a cause that he pleads for and so forth.
Kent: Part of the fascinating thing about the Dalai Lama is that he’s been in exile for most of his life. Can you talk about Tibet and Tibet’s relationship to Buddhism?
Gary: The Tibetan people are very active, vigorous, and were very militant people. During our war in Afghanistan for example, they were some of the front line soldiers, the Avant Garde soldiers. But they largely became a pacifist nation when the country heard the teachings of the Buddha, decided this was for them. They became a Buddhist country. They actually developed their writing system in order to spread the teachings of the Buddha, they didn’t have a formal writing system until then. Buddhism adapted to the philosophies and practices of a country which then was called Bun; the Bun religion.So you have the particular Bun aspects to Buddhism. Its also like Hinduism. In Tibet, its the only country that gets the teachings from India, straight-up from India, rather than being filtered through East Asia the way China and Japan and Korea, or even Southeast Asia was. There’s a lot of Hindu aspects to it. And of course there’s this political struggle, because on the one hand China says that Tibet is part of their country, and the Tibetans say “We never really have been.” Now China’s asserting itself by choosing the latest Panchen Lama.Up until now the Tibetan religion has always done it themselves. So China is doing what happened in the French Revolution, where the French Revolution said that state and religion are one. I don’t think it’s a very controversial topic.
Kent: Now I’m curious about how you got into Buddhism in the first place. You said you’re Jewish, you were born in Los Angeles, how did you get into this?
Gary: I would say in the summer I’m a nudist, in the winter I’m a Buddhist. Buddhism is sort of a made-up word for the West. In Asia, where people have been practicing this since the time of the Buddha, people just say “You study the teachings of the Buddha in your daily life? Do you follow the path of the Buddha?” I first read about it when I was 13 or so, but I already had…. I hate to say it, but it was a mystical vision.We’re on talk radio, so OK, I can tell you. I had a mystic vision when I was around six. I kept it at the bottom of my coin pocket like it was gold. I didn’t forget it, it stayed in my very bones. At first I thought it was like a vision of God because I didn’t know what to call it, but when I read “The Way of Zen” by Alan Watts when I was 13, I said “Well this is very exactly identical to what I experienced.” More than what Judaism or God-based teaching would describe.So that’s the point at which I kind of formally saw that here’s this body of teachings that very much had to do with the way I seemed to vibrate in relation to the universe most happily, and have ever since found myself a follower of the way. Many people come to it through a divorce, or death, or many of the sorrows in life. For me, it wasn’t a matter of disappointment at all. It was just something that I feel most akin to.