BOOK REVIEW: Darryl Openworld by Rémi Guérin

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Darryl OpenworldDarryl Openworld by Oliver Peru
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Amazon.in Page

Out: July 26, 2022

This fantasy comic book is set in a multiverse where journalists are rock stars, and none more so than the protagonist, Darryl Openworld. It combines high and low fantasy (moving between created / fantastical worlds and our own world – the latter being called the gray world.) It’s Darryl’s quest to solve the mystery of a series of improbable events so that he can get his story, doing so with an entourage of living and dead, human and fairy, and a magician and a magic bird.

At the broad-brush level, the story is interesting and coherent. It’s got the makings of a fine quest adventure with a love triangle on the side. However, when it came to the story details, it was clunky. The biggest problem was a lack of emotional resonance tied to a lack of pacing, a lack of ebb and flow. I found myself on several occasions thinking, “Why is this person being so emotional right now?” I think the author was trying to establish every moment as fraught to the max by showing the characters as being emotional, and because no story can sustain every moment being at max stakes, it just feels like overacting (or that the characters have low emotional IQ, which doesn’t jibe with what we’re told about them – especially not our iron-willed protagonist.)

The art is beautiful and creates a distinct otherworldliness of the other worlds. The one criticism I would present is that many characters had a similar androgenous appearance (including some of the main characters) and it wasn’t always instantly clear who was who.

The book has some unique features going for it. It’s nice to imagine a world in which journalism hasn’t crashed and burned, and where it’s still a respectable profession. But in the end, it wasn’t my cup of tea. Your results might vary. While there were a few small story problems, the bulk of what felt off about it boiled down to feeling like they were trying to keep the emotion dialed to eleven, but that just compressed the emotional arc of the book.


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DAILY PHOTO: Ruins of Ratnagiri [Diamond Triangle]

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Taken in December of 2021 in Ratnagiri, Odisha

Cyclone in a Cup [Free Verse]

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coffee flecks swirl
in a steaming cup

cyclonic do-si-dos,
swinging and folding,
merging into clusters

between the cyclones
there are highspeed byways
cutting across the surface

a jitter of the table
seems to stop the dance,
but then it resumes

entropy falls to 
eventually follow its imperative --

entropy rising:
using order
to turn all that energy
into a lukewarm 
cup of joe

this same fluid clockwork
played out in 
primordial soup
to begin the dance of life

DAILY PHOTO: Sunset at Windmill Viewpoint, Southern Phuket

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Taken on Phuket in December of 2014

The Crossing [Free Verse]

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A ship
crosses the ocean,

in the darkness:
darkness, black & endless

no moon,
no stars,
just clouds -- thick & low
clouds that can't be seen

The ship has lights,
but those lights know
an event horizon

Lights sometime 
glint against the waves,
those roiling & undulating
waves,

and the lights bounce off
the ship's hull

But no one can see them,
because if anyone could see them,
the seers would be seen--
unless theirs is a ghost ship,
piloted by literal ghosts,
or some other agent of observation

Maybe there is fog --
not enveloping the ship,
(such mist would be felt
on the skin of those on deck)
but, rather, a fog between 
where the ship is,
and where is should be

For it is surely off course,
listlessly drifting,
all hope arrayed against edges:

edges of ice
&
edges of the world

Not that the world is flat,
but, perhaps, it's not fully sculpted:
maybe nothing lies outside
the range of the seen:
outside the bounds of experience

It sounds crazy, 
but all kinds of crazy
form in a mind
submerged in darkness

No Egret [Haiku]

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the egret walks
away from a lone cow that's
too still to stir bugs

Digesting Empire [Haiku]

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carcass of Empire
is overwhelmed by nature;
rewilded in time

BOOK REVIEW: God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut

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God Bless You, Mr. RosewaterGod Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Amazon.in Page

This novel presents a satire of American socio-economic existence. It spends much of its time poking fun at old money folk (trust fund kids, as they’d be called today,) but the book has plenty of barbs to go around. The story centers on Eliot Rosewater, the head of the Rosewater Foundation, the charitable arm of an old money robber-baron kind of family corporation. Eliot is cut from different cloth, however. He’s in love with the work-a-day blue collar American, and does everything in his power to eliminate his separation from such people, including obsessively working with volunteer fire departments, setting up his foundation in his hometown (Rosewater, Indiana,) and making the Foundation an extremely personal organization that gives what would today be called micro-grants to ordinary citizens for ordinary uses.

Opposing Eliot Rosewater is a lawyer named Norman Mushari who’s made it his mission in life to have Eliot proven insane so that he can have the Rosewater Foundation fortune shifted to Fred Rosewater (of the middle-class Rhode Island Rosewaters.) The challenge is knowing whether Eliot is truly insane or not, even Eliot, himself, doesn’t always seem clear on the matter. For many, such as Mushari, just the fact that Eliot is acting in opposition to the societal norm (e.g. setting up in Rosewater, Indiana v. New York or Chicago and not making big grants to corporations and colossal NGO’s but rather giving a few hundred dollars at a time to residents of Rosewater) is proof enough. And, if Eliot is crazy, is it because there’s something wrong with him, or that there’s something wrong with the world.

This book is hilarious, and the last chapter leaves the reader with a great deal to mull over. I’d highly recommend this book for all fiction readers.


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DAILY PHOTO: Calcutta Chinatown

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Taken in December of 2021 in Kolkata (Calcutta)

BOOK REVIEW: Dropping Ashes on the Buddha by Seung Sahn

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Dropping Ashes on the Buddha: The Teachings of Zen Master Seung SahnDropping Ashes on the Buddha: The Teachings of Zen Master Seung Sahn by Seung Sahn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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This book’s one-hundred brief chapters mostly consist of interactions between the Korean Zen Buddhist teacher, Seung Sahn, and students of his. However, there are also some old Zen stories, and a few odds and ends: such as the transcript of a completely unproductive “dialogue” between Seung Sahn and a Hindu yogi. Some of the student-teacher interactions are epistolary, but others are face-to-face “dharma combat” or Q&A sessions (which also, ultimately, became dharma combat — given Seung Sahn’s teaching methods.) Dharma combat is a dialogue that resembles Socratic dialogue except that the goal isn’t to use logic and sound reasoning to persuade another, but rather to demonstrate a lack of attachment and proclivity to overintellectualize. It involves a lot of seemingly nonsensical answers and occasional shouting and slapping / hitting. It sounds unproductive, but the objective is to break established cognitive modes and to induce epiphany, rather than to build a rational argument.

It’s a thought provoking and informative book, if a bit repetitive. Most of the conversation revolves around less than a dozen ko-an [kong-an in Korean,] which are questions or statements that’re intended to provoke a kind of realization rather than to produce a straightforward / rational answer. It’s not a problem that there’s repetition, as these aren’t straightforward ways of thinking, and oftentimes it takes many varied looks at a ko-an to grasp what’s being conveyed. That said, I felt this book could’ve used some editing to streamline the dialogue a bit to make it feel a bit less punitively redundant.

If you’re interested in ko-an and dharma combat, this is a great book to look into. However, if you’re familiar with many of the popular ko-an and Zen stories, it may feel a bit redundant.


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