Spinning Karma by Joshua Samuel Brown

Meditating While Checking Your Feed

YOUR CATFISH FRIEND BOOK REVIEWS #2

Holes In the Wall

I was living in Madrid recently and, missing the usually pleasant U.S.-style customer service, decided to read a funny novel by an American author. At the time, Starbucks and the new Costco were the only places where I wouldn’t get pointed directions from an employee, or get pointed directions within the mind-numbingly slow Spanish bureaucracy (which I lovingly document here). But since the Starbucks and Costco were exactly the same as back home, I couldn’t go all that often. Dying of boredom in another country wasn’t how I wanted to go out.

So the book? Spinning Karma by Joshua Samuel Brown is a seemingly light and flow-y look at Buddhist meditation, Taoist and Confucian influences, our divided U.S. and global political situation and our skewed media landscape, where opinions are becoming more important than facts. I turned the pages, laughing and wincing in equal measure.

It’s sort of a good hole-in-the-wall restaurant in the form of a book, this instead of the Mickey Ds (or Starbucks) version of the world. It’s a unique, out of the way place you go to eat authentic food. Domino’s Pizza vs. a sign-less, back alley Italian joint. Walmart vs. fruit stand.

Through Brown’s book, I appreciated feeling a bit of what it’s like to be in Taiwan, of knowing that grace and order permeate a country squeezed between two hot-headed superpowers. Traveling and travel writing are the antidote to the incessant drama-creation that our news media thinks is the only way to sell ads. More on that later.

Older Dude In a Track Suit

I won’t divulge much about Spinning Karma, but here’s a bare-bones scoop on the plot — an American named Rinpoche Edward Schwartz, leader of Mind of Pure Enlightenment (MOPE), a New Age group that has seen better days, goes from MOPE’s headquarters in Colorado to Taiwan to shoot a ‘training’ video that people end up thinking is a real conflict. It goes viral and quickly spreads the flames of deep international suspicions between China and the U.S.

Rinpoche, an older dude in a track suit, is one of those leaders who talks a good game, but is greatly tested by life like the rest of us. I was amused by the fact that after the controversial video goes viral, people call the besieged Buddhist center in Colorado with angry, stereotypical and generally off-the-mark opinions about China (instead of actually asking for information or an interview). I laughed out loud when our protagonist’s son goes on a 10-day meditation retreat, only to come back to his house and quickly (and very uncalmly) lose his equanimity from what his father has done.

As a novel, Brown’s Spinning Karma is incredibly thoughtful within a fairly concise drama. It feels meditative and calming between the lines… then there’s the release from laughing.

Da Balm

This farce of a book is, in fact, an anti-war message that humanizes the other side. It’s a story that doesn’t believe every idea large organizations market. As big governments crack down on dissent, shift blame and try to minimize the steady stream of honest angst pointed at giant corporations and bureaucracies, Brown’s book smiles and shakes its head at a system where real people get squished from above by giant pyramid schemes.

We get some welcome and hilarious reminders (in this time of post-Covid) that the news is not all it’s cracked up to be, that the facades of the major news networks keep growing higher and higher. Even our nerdy, beloved National Public Radio is run amok with corporate commercials. If we had all been asleep for ten years and woke up to the now-frequent corporate ads, there would be an immediate and widespread condemnation.

Instead, the ultimate balm that Spinning Karma pays tribute to is travel itself. It’s one of the best ways to open your mind and heart. I was a foreign exchange student in Ecuador decades ago, yet some of the experiences feel like they were yesterday. I remember the rejections of our canned food-based culture, questions about why the U.S. has such a fixation with ‘fucking money’, as one Ecuadorian surprisingly but honestly put it. You realize through travel that Americans have less to take for granted, and, instead, more intergenerational assumptions to examine. “Why do you call your baseball championships the World Series when there are great players all over the world?”, someone in Japan asked me. When I was living in Guatemala, I pondered why United Statesians are so obsessed with being on time and staying busy. All the checklists, the constant stress… When do we stop feeling like there could always be something better we should be doing? When do our lives truly become our own? I might not have had as much wherewithal to ponder these deeper issues had I not been thousands of miles from home.

Summary-Viva The Funny

Some of the best kinds of fun and self-reflection come from wandering or traveling around, getting into very different places and examining more of our own deeply-held truths. I’d recommend Joshua Samuel Brown’s novel for many of the same reasons I’d recommend Don Quixote, one of the world’s most famous farces. Spinning Karma made me laugh, which made me relax and pause, taking a little more time to see the open doors around me… like travel and hole-in-the-wall restaurants. Bravo to Brown in twenty different languages.

The introduction to the “Your Catfish Friend” book reviews is here, while you can dive right in with a review of Murakami’s short stories here or read the new Spain travelogue review of my favorite book of all time.

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