Dinty W. MooreBesprekingen

'Packing a blessedly down-to-earth sense of humor; Dinty Moore is te perfect scout for the new frontiers of American Buddhism.'-Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Jew in the Lotus

Buddhism is on America's mind. TV commercials embrace it: Michael Jordan runs to the top of a Tibetan mountain to find the true meaning of sports drinks. A hillside of Buddhist monks meditates on hard drives. The famous (like Richard Gere and Tiger Woods) fight stress with it. From coaches to cops, from stockbrokers to schoolchildren, Americans are learning to love the lotus position.

But many of us are more curious than we are committed. Dinty Moore was, too. So he decided to find out what exactly was going on. Are we becoming Buddhists behind our on backs? Why is this ancient, Asian religion suddenly such a big part of American pop culture?

Moore set out to see Buddhism for himself by attending Buddhist retreats, meeting the monks face to face. Before long he was hooked on breathing. And what the Buddhist monks were telling him was starting to make good sense.

With humor and humility, Moore takes us into the physical and spiritual geography of Buddhism American-style: from Change Your Mind Day (a sort of annual Buddhist Woodstock in Central Park), to a weekend at a mountain retreat for corporate executives learning effective ways to cope with stress, to a visit with a Zen teacher holding clases in an old Quaker farmhouse, to a meeting with a Catholic priest who's also a Zen master.

Too timid to dip you own toe into the still waters of Zen? Dinty Moore does it for you in The Accidental Buddhist, an utterly engaging book by a writer who started out wanting to chart cultural change and ended up changing his own life.

Dinty W. Moore has worked as a documentary filmmaker, professional modern dancer, wire-service journalist, and college creative writing professor. He has published fiction and poetry in numerous national literary magazines and is the author of another book of nonfication, The Emperor's Virtual Clothes: The Naked Truth About Internet Culture. He lives with his wife and daughter in State College, Pennsylvania.

'I am an accidental Buddhist. I never intended to find a new religion, I was just passing curious, I started to notice Buddhism everywhere. Business Week was writing long articles about meditation sessions in major corporations and on Wall Street. School-children and cops on the beat were being encouraged to breathe as a way to fight stress. Buddhist monasteries and retreat centers were flourishing in out-of-the-way places, and Newsweek declared that 'America may be on the verge of Buddhadharma.'I wanted to know what was going on, so I went on retreats myself and interviewed the key players. Before long, I, too, was hooked. I hadn't counted on actually liking it.'-Dinty W. Moore

Contents

Acknowledgments
Prelude
Part 1: Zen mind, muddled mind
1 Buddha 101: Stumbling up monkey mind mountain
2 One bright idea: My American Buddhism project
3 Just sitting: I obsess a lot, and then I get distracted
4 Zen gardening: Me and my green-thumbed monkey
5 Why do Tibetans have such trouble with their vacuum cleaners? They lack attachments
Part 2: Practice makes perfect
6 Catholic boy Zen: Was Jesus a Bodhisattva?
7 You can change your mind: And your karma, too
8 The work Koan: Life without a cushion
9 The plain-spoken Theravadan: A high view from a low seat
10 Buddha bug, Buddha being: You are what you eat
Part 3: Real Buddhists don't take notes
11 Destroy your neighbor, destroy yourself: The Dalai Lama and the action hero
12 Trying to hit the ball: Fruitless searching on the fruited plain
13 Eat your rice, wash your bowl, and just sit: Studying with the seven-year-old master
14 What kind of Buddhist am I? A lousy one, thank you
Basic Buddhist terms
Suggested further reading (bibliography)

A compilation of flash nonfiction drawn form the online journal Brevity, uneven as compilations often are, some masterpieces, some amateurish piffle—but taken together these pieces suggest a sketch of a complex world of human pain, love, wonder and awe seen from a thousand vantage points at once.

The account of Dinty W. Moore's 1995 "dharma road trip" around America to visit Buddhist meditation centers, retreats and happenings in search of the heart of Buddhism in America is an honest, funny and self-deprecating (he calls himself "the doofus of dokuson") memoir. What is the sound of one toe dipping into enlightenment?

Introduces the various types of personal essays, and I appreciated the writing exercises which created a lot of content for me to start working from. The publishing part of the book only spanned maybe two chapters. I'd recommend this guide to students and those who are still exploring the medium, but not to those who are already in the game and already publishing.

Must buy own copy.

A collection of humorous essays focusing on the finer points of essay writing. While author Dinty Moore covers a variety of different aspects of the craft involved in writing memoirs and essays (Grammar, Form, Finding Topics, Creative Non-Fiction, etc...), I wouldn't say that Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy is useful as an instructional book as much as it is a collection of humorous essays on a specific topic that may or may not be more interesting to those interested in writing essays. Informative and entertaining, but possibly more entertaining than informative. Which might not be a bad thing. Or maybe it is.

So far so good. I chose this book because I felt the need to clean up my blog work. Also, I write short stories that serve as character studies for my novels and I wanted to explore other ways to approach them. I think a personal essay written from their POV could work for me.

A nice little collection of quotations and commentary on writing. Plenty of gems; good variety.

I am relatively new to creative nonfiction, so this book was a fantastic overview of the major sub-genres of creative nonfiction that I hope to play with a lot more in the future. The essays in the anthology were interesting reads as well.

This is an excellent guide for creative nonfiction writers. Many of the sections contained valuable advice that I used in writing my thesis for my creative writing MFA. This guide is great for flash nonfiction, but everything applies to longer essays as well. I will continue to refer back to this book whenever I'm feeling stuck or need some inspiration.

Memoirs put to work.

The angle of this smoothly humorous, wisecracking collection of short memoir essays is the author receiving questions from other authors. He answers them with a note that bounces off the question (usually sarcastically), and an essay, drawn from his own endlessly amusing life. The questions tend toward the sardonic and the too clever, and the essays are standalone works often reminiscent of early Benchley and later Perelman. Not bad company to be in, and Moore fits well in that space. He has a mild case of dementia praecox, which is not so much curable as enviable.

Moore enlivens things with his layouts. Some of his essays are numbered sentences, very biblical. One is a Google map, with text balloons. One is a single column. One is a chart. And one is inevitably, a series of facebook comments that show how sharp and clever he and his friends can be when they’re on. Everything is a straightline, and writers are waiting in the weeds to pounce. It’s good old one-upmanship. The Algonquin Roundtable online. Oddly, there is an index, in case you need to look up on what page he referred to buckets of minnows (137).

The one memoir Moore doesn’t give us why parents named Moore insist on calling their sons Dinty. Inquiring minds want to know.

David Wineberg

This is not a book about how to be a Buddhist. Instead, this is a man's journey to discover what it means to be Buddhist in America. I liked it. It follows Dinty from his first Buddhist Encounter, to trying to find a way to practice it in America.

I think this will be a good introduction to those who want to know a bit more about Buddhism, without all the deep religion stuff. The story is simply written biography. Its easy to follow, and covers a few ways of Buddhists practice in the United States.½

Crafting the Personal Essay is a very readable and motivating book on writing the personal essay. Moore covers the nuts and bolts of writing the humorous, nature, travel, lyric, spiritual and food essay, providing numerous examples and tips. This is the first time I have heard essay writing defined as chasing "mental rabbits' but that is exactly what it is for me: a "hunt, a chase, a ramble through thickets of thought, in pursuit of some brief glimmer of fuzzy truth" describes my essay-writing process of working through ideas and feelings and nailing them to paper.
There are plenty of exercises to get the writer's pen to paper and build a fund of ideas and starters. Highly recommended!

I was disappointed to see this book when it arrived for me at the library. Awful cover. Looked like my fifth grade niece did the artwork. I’d read Moore’s piece, Son of Mr. Green Jeans, for a class this summer and loved it. Raved about it. Masterful. This was the first selection in the book. Oh dear. Is Moore a one-hit wonder?No. Happily I can say no. Ignore the cover. Moore can write, at least about the sadnesses of his life. It’s a lovely book. Funny. Clever. Glad I read it.

I loved Sarah McDonald's Holy Cow and wanted to find something similar that introduced the various approaches to Buddhism. The Accidental Buddhist did that in part. The author, hoping to discover the many faces of American Buddhism, chronicles his time at retreats ranging from Zen Mountain Monastery in the Catskills to a Tibetan community outside Atlanta and a Theravada community in West Virginia. Along the way he discusses theology with a Jesuit Buddhist, attends the third annual Change Your Mind day in Central Park, visits with a Buddhist meditation cushion maker who runs Carolina Mornings Designs from her rural farm, takes a road trip to hear the Dali Lama speak and drops in on meditation groups in suburban Chicago and Iowa City.

Over the course of his "American Buddhism Project," the author shares his struggles with monkey mind and stiffness from long stretches of meditation. He continually assesses aspects of Buddhism in terms of his Roman Catholic upbringing and aspects of his life (such as releasing ladybugs to control aphids in his garden) in terms of Buddhist tenets. The book focuses perhaps a bit too much on the author's self-chiding and failure to find the big answers, but for someone who doesn't know much about Buddhism as it's practiced in America today, it's an easy-to-read and enjoyable introduction.

Interesting exploration of Buddhism in America. The author describes his experiences in many very different settings. It's hard to be Buddhist in the US.

An interesting look about how Buddhism is finding it's way into American society.