And for my Good Readers, here’s the new reviews and articles for this month. The ARJ2 ones are new additions to the top of A Reader’s Journal, Volume 2, Chronological List, and the ART ones to A Reader’s Treasury.
1.) ARJ2: 
Ignorance by Milan Kundera
After reading Mary McCarthy's Ideas and the Novel, it was interesting that the next novel I read was all about an idea, the idea of "ignorance." There is one form of ignorance that everyone is subject to -- it falls under the heading of Frost's "the path not taken." What would have happened to us if we had arrived at a major decision point in our lives and had taken the path we didn't take? This is a question that is particularly poignant to emigrants who left a Communist country twenty years earlier and now are faced with returning to their country to face those family members and friends who remained behind while they fled. They will each confront in their own way, the myth of the "Great Return" as Kundera calls it. This is the story of some of those emigrants. Will they remain in their adopted country or return to their homeland?
You can read the rest of the review at:
http://www.doyletics.com/arj/ignoranc.htm
2.) ARJ2: 
The Spoils of Poynton by Henry James
There seems to be a rule that in gothic stories that when a large house plays a key role, as in
Rebecca, or Jane Eyre, that the house must burn to the ground at the end of the story. In Rebecca,
the house was Mandalay, and the ghost was the former wife who died on the premises -- Rebecca
ghost doesn't appear per se, but her things, her spoils, fill Mandalay, and her former personal maid
is possessed by a tangible presence of Rebecca so much that she goes up in the final conflagration.
In Jane Eyre, the ghost is the deranged woman that Mr. Rochester was married to, whose madness
was hidden from him, and who now haunts the hallways of the mansion, finally burning it to
ground with her inside. In James's story, the ghost was the entire contents of the house, and one is
left to wonder what will happen to the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Owen Gareth when the ghost has
been finally exorcized by the purifying blaze which extirpated the spoils of Poynton.
You can read the rest of the review at:
http://www.doyletics.com/arj/thespoil.htm
3.) ART: 
A Course in Miracles
by Foundation for Inner Peace
Lesson 11 of the Workbook says, "My meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world."
This is the concept for which I penned an acronym to help me remember to apply it to
every aspect of my world some five yeas before I read the Course in Miracles: EAT-O-TWIST, which stands for Everything Allways Turns Out The Way It's Supposed To. If
you are supposing something that is basically meaningless, then the world will turn out to
seem meaningless to you. But it is not the function of the world to be meaningless, only
your supposing that creates that in you. The Course in Miracles, rightly understood, is
devoted to helping one change one's habitual method of supposing and thereby reversing
one's way of thinking of the world. Therein lies the miracle. Below is the first paragraph
of Lesson 11:
[page 18] This is the first idea we have had that is related to a major
phase of the correction process; the reversal of the thinking of the
world. It seems as if the world determines what you perceive. Today's
idea introduces the concept that your thoughts determine the world
you see. Be glad indeed to practice the idea in its initial form, for in
this idea is your release made sure. The key to forgiveness lies in it.
Your thoughts now will determine whether or not you only read the review linked below or read and do the exercises in the entire Workbook:
http://www.doyletics.com/art/
course2.htm
4.) ART: 
The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events
by Jane Roberts
I recently encountered this passage in Joubert's Notebooks, "All cries and all
complaints exhale a vapor, and from this vapor a cloud is formed, and from these heaped-up
clouds come thunder, storms, the inclemencies that destroy everything." He wrote this about
200 years ago. Seth tells us that the invisible patterns that underlie the “cries and complaints” are vigorous mental patterns and:
[page 41] Each person's thoughts flow into that formation, forming part
of the earth's psychic atmosphere. From that atmosphere flows the
natural earthly patterns from which your seasons emerge with all their
variety and effects. You are never victims of natural disasters, though it
may seem that you are, for you have your hand in forming them. You are
creatively involved in the earth's cycles. No one can be born for you, or
die for you, yet no birth or death is really an isolated event, but one in
which the entire planet participates. In personal terms, again, each
species is concerned not only with survival but with the quality of its life
and experience.
In those terms, natural disasters ultimately end up righting a condition
that earlier blighted the desired quality of life, so that adjustments were
made.
http://www.doyletics.com/art/
masseven.htm
5.) ART: 
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert
by Joseph Joubert
This is an amazing book of quotations taken from Joseph Joubert’s notebooks. He was born in 1754 and died in 1824 without ever writing or publishing anything. He was always preparing to write and found the trip more satisfying than the destination so he kept on traveling without a thought to arriving. He was a friend of many writers who later became famous and he thought a lot about the task, the chore, but mainly the joys of writing. He was deeply spiritual and his insights into the powers of the imagination and the soul startle us with their brilliance. He sees logic and reason as useful as the tail-chasing of a dog and says so in many ways. “What we write with difficulty is written with more care, engraves itself more deeply,” he wrote in 1803.
Another example that illuminates the purpose of his writing: to observe himself and his experiences.
[page 92, 93] Lightning flashes that cross the mind and illuminate so quickly they are hardly noticed. In such cases, more is seen than retained. Thus, whoever does not observe himself carries within him some experience he does not know about.
For more quotes from Joubert’s Notebooks, read the review at:
http://www.doyletics.com/art/
notebook.htm
6.) ART: 
Science and Sanity by Alfred O. Korzybski
Korzybski’s work created the field of General Semantics, which became
known as a science and was taught in colleges and universities. Somehow I
had missed it, up until then. I was determined to work my way through this
book to make up for lost time and work I did: it took me an entire year of
study to get through this dense book — dense in the compression of ideas in
it. So dense that many days I was only able to read three or four pages and
then had to stop because my brain was so full of ideas that I had to pause for
24 hours for them to be assimilated fully before I could proceed. And each
day I applied those ideas and processes to as many situations as came up in
my life during that day. It was, rightly understood, a year long seminar in
General Semantics for me. In this review I hope to give you, my dear Readers,
a taste of that seminar so that the flavor of this important science can remain
with you and bring some sanity into the science that abounds all around and
inside of you from now on.
Details in the review at:
http://www.doyletics.com/art/
sciencea.htm
7.) ART: 
How To Develop Your Thinking Ability
by Kenneth S. Keyes, Jr.
In closing this fine book, Keyes sums it all up with this concise statement, “This world needs thinkers — not parrots.” I can think of no better way to close this review but to give you a glimpse at the author’s conclusions. Again, I must remind you that, as much as this seems topical and taken from today’s headlines, it was written over fifty years ago.
[page 238] Civilization is just a slow process of learning how to be kind. We must remember with Voltaire that “men will continue to commit atrocities as long as they continue to believe absurdities.” And they will continue to believe absurdities until they are taught HOW TO THINK — and not just pumped full of the local ideas of WHAT TO THINK.
Teaching children to think straight is not the complete answer to the world’s ills, but it is an indispensable starting point. As long as we pipe into the heads of children WHAT TO THINK and fail to train them HOW TO THINK, that long will we have various brands of hell on earth. This is the challenge of today. Can we meet it? It is up to us. It is up to YOU and it is up to ME.
To fully appreciate the review, one should read it on-line so that one might view the fine cartoons of Ted Key which are linked at appropriate places. The review is on-line at:
http://www.doyletics.com/art/
thinkabi.htm
First, we added a webpage of memories of Buster and Annette Matherne, an oral history project that I worked on with my mom and dad. You can read it all, see the photos, and enjoy the poem, “
It was a chilly, misty day, due to the Pineapple Express as the weatherman called it, a cold subtropical jetstream from Hawaii, and the only good thing to say about it was that it made for terrific photographs. It was like being a Hollywood director and having a fog machine running over the entire city — just enough to make the foreground colors stand out. I took photographs of nearly every Rex float — one for each of the 17 states that comprised the original Louisiana Territory exactly 200 years ago. One can only imagine that if Louisiana had selfishly kept all its territory as one state, as California and Texas have done, this country would be short about 30 Senators in the Congress. Here’s a couple of Rex floats that stood out.
“Ben Hur” — I’ve seen this one many times before, but this time I had it on a side tv while I watched I, Claudius on DVD so I could easily pause at the moments I wanted to re-watch. I saw the first time when Juda ben Hur encounters Jesus. It was during his enslavement and chained trip to the galley where he is supposed to die. Forbidden by the guard to be given water, Jesus leaves his carpentry work to take him some water to revive and refresh Juda ben Hur. The Roman guard notices that his ban on water is being violated and comes over to stop Jesus, but when he looks into Jesus’s eyes, the guard’s face changes from anger to trepidation and he stops, is speechless, and he retreats. The guard’s ability to see into his own karmic destiny is unveiled in that moment by the Lord of Karma and he is troubled by what he sees is in store for him as a result of his actions in this lifetime. Juda ben Hur, on the other hand, is heartened by what he sees when he looks at Jesus, he is revived by what he sees, and stands up, taller than before, his “I” brought visibly into action again. Seeing in his own life how he will fulfil his karmic destiny brings him strength and courage once more to face whatever trials lie ahead of him. One man, Jesus, and he evokes two distinctly different reactions in two men. How is that possible unless the reaction is directly personal and therefore karmically connected.
“Swordfish” was meant to be tasty, but it was overripe and stunk. Super-hacker helps save world by killing people for big bucks. Lucky for John Travolta and us they didn’t try to make a musical out of this turkey as they did to “Chicago”.
